Why Israel Is the
Victim
Israel, the only democracy and tolerant society in the Middle
East, is surrounded by Muslim states that have sworn to destroy it and have
conducted a genocidal propaganda campaign against the Jews, promising to
“finish the job that Hitler started.” A global wave of Jew-hatred, fomented by
Muslim propaganda and left-wing anti-Semitism, has spread through Europe and
the United Nations and made Israel
a pariah nation. The classic Why Israel Is the Victim now updated in
the pamphlet below sets the record straight about the Middle
East conflict. In addition to restoring the historical record — a
chronicle of obsessive aggressions first by Arab nationalists and then by
Muslim jihadists, this pamphlet brings the story up to date by showing the
systematic way in which the fanatical Islamic parties, Hamas and Hezbollah,
sponsored by Iran, have subverted peace in the Middle East.
As stated in “tells us why we should reject the ‘Blame Israel
First’ narrative that has so thoroughly saturated the mainstream media… It
confronts the myth of Arab Palestinian victimhood… and it delivers a rousing
restatement of the true history of the hate that led us to all this.” America needs to be Israel ’s
protector, for as George Gilder has observed, “If the United States cannot defend Israel , it
cannot defend itself.” Instead, under the leadership of Barack Obama, it has
become Israel ’s
prosecutor with ominous portents for the future.
Foreword
In “Why Israel is the Victim” tells the ugly tale of the war
against Israel ,
laying bare the sordid hypocrisies and deceits behind its campaign of violence.
No volume can contain the full story of Islamic terrorism or the courageous
ways in which the ordinary Israeli confronts it in the streets of his cities.
What this essay does tell is the story of the lies behind that terror.
Propaganda precedes war; it digs the graves and waits for them to
be filled. The war against the Jews has never been limited to bullets and
swords; it has always, first and foremost, been a war of words. When bombs
explode on buses and rockets rain down on Israel
homes, when mobs chant “Death to the Jews” and Iran races toward the construction
of its genocidal bomb; the propaganda lies to cover up these crimes must be
bold enough to contain not only the murders of individuals, but the prospective
massacre of millions.
The lie big enough to fill a million graves is that Israel has no
right to exist, that the Jewish State is an illegitimate entity, an occupier, a
warmonger and a conqueror. The big lie is that Israel has sought out the wars that
have given it no peace and that the outcomes of those wars make the atrocities
of its enemies understandable and even justifiable. That is the big lie that the
author confronts in “Why Israel is the Victim”.
From the latest outburst of violence to its earliest antecedents
under the Palestine Mandate, “Why Israel is the Victim” exposes the true nature
of the war and wipes away the lies used by the killers and their collaborators
to lend moral authority to their crimes. It shows not only why Israel must
exist, but also why its existence has been besieged by war and terror.
“Why Israel
is the Victim” tells us why we should reject the “Blame Israel First” narrative
that has so thoroughly saturated the mainstream media. It challenges the false
hope of the Two State Solution in sections such as “Self-Determination Is Not
the Agenda” and “Refugees: Jewish and Arab”. It confronts the myth of Arab Palestinian
victimhood in “The Policy of Resentment and Hate” and delivers a rousing
restatement of the true history of the hate that led us to all this in “The
Jewish Problem and Its ‘Solution’”.
Recent history shows us that it was not an Israeli refusal to
grant the Palestinian Arabs the right of self-determination that led to their campaigns
of terror, but that Arab Palestinian self-determination empowered a people
steeped in the hatred of Jews to engage in terrorism.
With the peace process each new level of Arab Palestinian
self-determination led to an intensified wave of terror against Israel , as
chronicled in this pamphlet. In 2006 when the Palestinian Arabs were able to
vote in a legislative election for the first time in ten years, they chose
Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization that drew its popularity from its
unwillingness to even entertain the thought of peace with the Jewish State.
The 2006 election showed once again that the root cause of
terrorism lay in a culture where political popularity came from killing Jews,
not from bringing peace.
Hamas’ ability to carry out more spectacular terrorist attacks,
employing motivated Islamist suicide bombers, gave it the inside track in the
election. Where Western political parties might compete for popularity by
offering voters peace and prosperity, Arab Palestinian factions competed over
who could kill more Jews. And Hamas won based on its killing sprees and its
unwillingness to water down its platform of destroying Israel .
Hamas’ victory cannot
be viewed as an isolated response to Israeli actions. Hamas leaders have stated that they were the
vanguard of the Arab Spring, and the 2006 elections foreshadowed the regional
downfall of Arab Socialists and the rise of the Islamists. The outcome of the
elections in Egypt could
have been foreseen from across the border in Gaza .
The defining test of any political philosophy in the Middle East is its ability to defeat foreign powers and
drive out foreign influences. Israel
has been the target of repeated efforts by both Arab Socialists and Islamists
to destroy it because it is the nearest non-Arab and non-Muslim country in the
region, but the regional ascendance of Islamists in the Arab Spring forces us
to recognize that this phenomenon is not limited to Israel .
War is the force that gives Islamists meaning. During the last Gaza conflict, Hamas’ Al
Aqsa TV broadcast the message, “Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to
Allah.” Palestinian Arabs, who define themselves through conflict, constructing
a conflict-based national identity, were destined to become the vanguard of
regional Islamization.
The ascendance of Hamas has made it clearer than ever that Arab Palestinian
terrorism is not the resistance of helpless people who only want autonomy and
territory, but the calculated choice of determined aggressors.
If occupation were the issue, then the less territory Israel
“occupied”, the more peace there would be. But the real world results of the
peace experiment have led to the exact opposite outcome.
Israel’s withdrawals from Gaza and Lebanon did not lead to peace,
they led to greater instability as Hamas and Hezbollah exploited the power
vacuum to take over Gaza and Lebanon, and used that newfound power to escalate
the conflict with Israel. The less territory Israel has occupied, the more
violence there has been directed against her.
The goal of the terrorists has never been an Israeli withdrawal
and a separate peace, but the perpetuation of the conflict, and the elimination
of the Jewish state.
Half a year after Israel
withdrew from Gaza ,
Hamas swept the Palestinian legislative elections. Another half a year after
that, a Hamas raid netted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit as a hostage. Barely a
year after Israel had
withdrawn from Gaza ; Hamas had found a way to
bring Israeli soldiers back into Gaza
for a renewal of the conflict.
Cut off from attacking Israel directly by a blockade,
Hamas deepened its investment in long-range weapons systems, even while
complaining that its people were going hungry. After its takeover of Gaza , it significantly
improved its weapons capabilities. In 2004, it had achieved its first Kassam
fatality killing a 4-year-old boy on his way to a Sderot nursery school, but by
2006, its capabilities had so dramatically improved that it was able to launch
its first Katyusha rocket at Ashkelon, the third largest city in Israel’s south
with a population of over 100,000.
As the volume and range of Hamas’ rockets increased, Israel was
forced to take action. In 2004, Israel
suffered 281 rocket attacks. By 2006, that number had increased to over 1,700.
In 2008, the number of rocket and mortar attacks approached 4,000 triggering
Operation Cast Lead, also known as the Gaza War.
Operation Cast Lead destroyed enough of Hamas’ stockpiles and
capabilities to reduce rocket attacks down to the 2004 and 2005 levels, but
another dramatic increase in attacks in 2012, with over 2,000 rockets fired
into Israel, combined with the smuggling of Fajr 5 rockets capable of reaching
Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, forced Israel to carry out a series of strikes against
Hamas in Operation Pillar of Defense.
Both times Israel
did not choose a conflict of opportunity, but reacted to a disturbing level of
Hamas violence, and had nothing to gain from the conflict except for a
temporary reduction of violence.
War is a choice. Hamas has chosen war over and over again and the Palestinian
Arabs have chosen Hamas. After six years of fighting, in a recent poll 9 out of
10 Palestinian Arabs agreed with the tactics of Hamas proving that their
violence is not a reflexive response to occupation, but a choice. The violence
does not spring from the occupation. The occupation springs from their
violence.
By choosing Hamas in 2006 and today, the Palestinian Arabs were
not rejecting peace, for they had never chosen peace. The difference between
Hamas and Arafat’s Fatah lay not in a choice between war and peace, but between
overt war and covert war. Both Hamas and Fatah had dedicated themselves to the
destruction of the Jewish State. The practical difference between them is that
Hamas refuses to even pretend to recognize Israel ’s right to exist for the
sake of extracting strategic territory through negotiations.
By choosing Hamas, the Palestinian Arabs were sending the message
that they felt confident enough to be able to dispense with Fatah’s dissembling
and strong enough to no longer need to lie to Israel
and America
about wanting peace.
The ascendance of Hamas is the logical progression of the entire
history of the conflict that you will read about in this pamphlet. It is the
inevitable outcome of a war of destruction based on race and religion. It
contains within it the inescapable truth that peace is farthest away when the
terrorist groups who would destroy Israel are strongest.
Looking down on the earth from space, Israel
appears as only a tiny strip of land wedged at an angle between Africa, Europe
and the Middle East against the Mediterranean Sea .
From up here there is little to distinguish the otherwise indistinct land and
no way to conceive of the terrible life and death struggle taking place in the
hills, deserts and cities below.
The Jewish State, like the Jewish People, is small in size but
great in presence. The scattered people that half the world has tried to
destroy have formed into a nation that half the world is trying to destroy
again. Only four years separated the Nazi gas chambers of 1944 from the
invading Arab armies of 1948, who, along with the Nazi-funded Muslim
Brotherhood, were bent on wiping out the indigenous Jewish population along
with the Holocaust survivors who had made their way to the ports and shoals of
the rebuilt Jewish State.
Before 1948, the Jews of Israel lived in a state of constant
victimization at the hands of Islamic leaders such as Haj Amin al-Husseini,
Hitler’s Mufti, and Izz ad-Din al-Qassam of The Black Hand gang, after whom
Hamas’ Qassam rockets are named. After 1948 they were forced to live in a state
of constant vigilance against the invasions of armies and the bombs, bullets
and shells of terrorists. The Arab nations have expelled close to a million
Jews and confiscated their homes and properties.
Once Israel
had won its independence hardly a single decade passed without another war of
aggression against her. From 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 to 1982, the coming of each
new decade meant a new war. Nor was there peace between these wars. When Gaza and the West Bank were in Egyptian and Jordanian
hands, Fedayeen terrorists used them as bases to invade Israel and
carry out attacks within the 1948 borders. When Israel turned these territories
over to the Arab Palestinian Authority, they once again became bases of terror.
At no point in time, regardless of the date, the prime minister or
the policy, did Israel
enjoy peace. Whether Israel
was led by the right or by the left, whether it made war or peace, the violence
of its enemies remained unchanged. No matter how often Israel changed
how it was transformed by waves of immigration, by political and religious
movements, by peace programs and technological booms, its enemies remained
unwaveringly bent on its destruction.
As a nation of wandering exiles, Jews had lived with the knowledge
that they had no rights that could not be taken away at a whim and no certainty
of safety that would endure beyond the next explosion of violence. That is
still how Israel
lives today, no longer as a wandering people, but as a nation alone.
The way that a majority treats a minority is a test of its
character. Nazi Germany showed what it intended for Europe
with its treatment of the Jews. As did the Soviet Union .
The Muslim world has likewise shown its intentions toward the rest of the world
with its treatment of Israel ;
the only non-Muslim country in the region.
Within the pages of this pamphlet you will find the story of this
new war against the Jews, as a people, and against Israel , as a Jewish State.
The old saying, “A lie will go round the world while truth is
pulling its boots on,” is truer than ever in the age of the Internet when the
speed of lies has become instantaneous. The pamphlet that you are about to read
represents an equally instantaneous response to those lies with the best
possible weapon; the truth.
Arm yourself with it.
As stated.
Why Israel is the
Victim
The Gaza Strip is a narrow corridor of land, 25 miles long and
about twice the area of Washington , D.C. situated between the State of Israel and the
Mediterranean Sea, and has a small southern border with Egypt . When the
U.N. created the State of Israel out of the ruins of the Turkish
Empire , in 1948, eight Arab countries launched an attack on the
infant regime with the stated goal of destroying it. The attackers included Egypt whose tanks invaded Israel through the Gaza land bridge. In its defensive war
against the invaders, Israel
emerged triumphant but did not occupy Gaza .
In 1949, Egypt
annexed the Strip. In 1967, the Egyptian dictator Gamel Abdel Nasser massed
hundreds of thousands of troops on the Israeli border with Gaza
and closed the Port of Eilat in an attempt to strangle the Israeli State .
Israel struck back and in a
“Six Day War” vanquished the Egyptian armies and drove them out of Gaza . After the war, Israel refused to withdraw its armies from Gaza and the West Bank because the Arab invaders, which
included Iraq , Jordan and
several other states, refused to negotiate a formal peace treaty. In the years
that followed, a few thousand Jews settled in Gaza .
By 2005 they numbered 8,500, a tiny community compared to the 1.4
million Palestinian Arabs. While they lived in Gaza ,
the lives of the Jewish settlers were in constant danger, particularly after
the formation in Gaza of one the world’s leading
terrorist organizations, Hamas, whose stated goal is the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic state
“from the [Jordan ]
River to the Sea.”
After the rejection of the Oslo Peace process in 2001 by Yassir
Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians launched four years of
unrelenting terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. The attacks were led by
Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an arm of
the Palestinian Authority. As a result of the Arab Palestinian rejection of the
peace process and the unrelenting terrorism, the Israeli government decided
that a secure peace could probably not be negotiated with its Arab Palestinian
antagonists. It therefore built a fence along its borders both on the West Bank
and Gaza to
prevent further infiltration by suicide bombers, a measure which dramatically
reduced the attacks. The Israeli government further decided to remove all Jews
living in the Gaza Strip and to withdraw the Israeli Defense Forces which
protected them. By September 2005, the Israeli government evacuated every Jew
who had been living in the Gaza Strip.
Forget for a moment all the strategic and geopolitical rationales
for the Gaza pullout and consider only the
reason that the Jewish settlements in Gaza were
an issue at all: Palestinian Arabs and indeed all the Arab states of the Middle East hate Jews and want to dismantle the Jewish
state. They hate Jews so ferociously that they cannot live alongside them.
There is not an Arab state or Arab controlled piece of territory in the Middle East that will allow one Jew to live in it. This
is why in 1948 the Arab states rejected the two- state solution that would have
created an Arab Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza alongside the State of Israel. They
wanted to destroy the Jewish state more than they wanted to create a
Palestinian one.
In contrast to the hostility of all Arab states to any Jew, Israel has
welcomed Palestinian Arabs to its communities. There are more than a million
Arabs living safely in Israel
where they enjoy more citizen rights than the Arabs living in any Arab country,
or for that matter the Muslims living in any Muslim country. If Arabs treated
Jews half as well, there would be no Middle East
“problem.”
But the ethnic cleansing of the Jews has always been the objective
of Arabs and Palestinians. The real goal of Arab nationalism has always been an
Islamic Arab Middle East with no competing nationalities or cultures.
Palestinians Arabs have shown twice in 1948 and again in 2001 that they want to
kill Jews more than they want an Arab Palestinian state.
The tiny Jewish population of Gaza created an agricultural industry in
fruits, vegetables and flowers. During their years in Gaza , they constructed greenhouses that
produced an abundance of vegetables. In just this industry alone, Jews,
representing less than one-hundredth of the Gaza population, produced nearly 20% of its
gross domestic product. Now, the entire gross domestic product of Gaza is only $770 million.1 If the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza weren’t consumed
with ethnic hate, they would have done everything in their power to import more
Jews rather than agitate to get rid of them. With 50,000 Jews – still a small
minority in a population of 1.4 million they could have doubled their economy.
When the Jews left, there remained the problem of what to do with
the existing greenhouses. A Jewish philanthropist in America stepped forward to solve
the problem. Mortimer Zuckerman, the publisher of U.S.
News and World Report,’ raised $14 million to buy the greenhouses
from their Jewish owners and give them to the Palestinians in Gaza . It was a gesture of peace, an effort to
encourage the Palestinians to look on the withdrawal from Gaza
as a step in the process of ending the fifty year war of the Arab states and
the Palestinian Arabs against Israel .
The Palestinian answer to this peace offering was unambiguous and
swift. As soon as the Israeli troops left, Palestinians Arabs rushed in to loot
the greenhouses that had been given to them, stripping them of the pumps, hoses
and other equipment that had made them so productive.2
The withdrawal from Gaza is an
emblem of the entire Middle East conflict. It
is not a conflict of right versus right. It is a conflict inspired by ethnic
hate, by the unwillingness of the Arabs of the Middle East
to live as neighbors with a people that are democratic, non-Arab and
non-Muslim. The cause of the conflict is that the Arabs hate Jews more than
they love peace.
The Jewish Problem and
Its “Solution”
Zionism is a national liberation movement, identical in most ways
to other liberation movements that leftists and progressives the world over—and
in virtually every case but this one—fervently support. This exceptionalism is
also visible at the reverse end of the political spectrum: In every other
instance, right-wingers oppose national liberation movements that are under the
spell of Marxist delusions and committed to violent means. But they make an
exception for the one that Palestinians have aimed at the Jews. The unique
opposition to a Jewish homeland at both ends of the political spectrum
identifies the problem that Zionism was created to solve.
The “Jewish problem” is just another name for the fact that Jews
are the most universally hated and persecuted ethnic group in history. The
Zionist founders believed that hatred of Jews was a direct consequence of their
stateless condition. As long as Jews were aliens in every society they found
themselves in, they would always be seen as interlopers, their loyalties would
be suspect and persecution would follow. This was what happened to Captain
Alfred Dreyfus, whom French anti-Semites falsely accused of spying and who was
put on trial for treason by the French government in the 19th Century. Theodore
Herzl was an assimilated, westernized Jew, who witnessed the Dreyfus frame up
in Paris and
went on to lead the Zionist movement.
Herzl and other Zionist founders believed that if Jews had a
nation of their own, the very fact would “normalize” their condition in the
community of nations. Jews had been without a state since the beginning of the Diaspora,
when the Romans expelled them from Judea on the west bank of the Jordan River , some 2,000 years before. Once the Jews
obtained a homeland—Judea itself seemed a
logical site— and were again like other peoples, the Zionists believed
anti-Semitism would wither on its poisonous vine and the Jewish problem would
disappear.
As part of
the settlement in which the Arabs received most of the lands formerly under
Turkish sovereignty in the Middle East, the whole of Palestine ,
on both sides of the Jordan ,
was reserved exclusively for the Jewish people as their national home and
future independent state.
But in 1921, the British separated 80% of the land of Israel
and established “Transjordan .” It was created
for the Arabian monarch King Abdullah, who had been defeated in tribal warfare
in the Arabian Peninsula and lacked a seat of
power. Abudllah’s tribe was Hashemite, while the vast majority of Abdullah’s
subjects were Palestinian Arabs.
What was left of the original Palestine Mandate—between the west
bank of the Jordan and the Mediterranean sea —had been settled by Arabs and Jews.
Jews, in fact, had lived in the area continuously for 3,700 years, even after
the Romans destroyed their state in Judea in
70 AD. Arabs became the dominant local population
for the first time in the 7th Century
AD as a result of the Muslim invasions. These Arabs were largely nomads who had
no distinctive language or culture to separate them from other Arabs. In all
the time since, they had made no attempt to create an independent Arab Palestinian
state west or east of the Jordan River and
none was ever established.
The pressure for a Jewish homeland was dramatically increased, of
course, by the Nazi Holocaust which targeted the Jews for extermination and
succeeded in killing six million, in part because no country—not even England
or the United States— would open their borders and allow Jews fleeing death to
enter. In 1948, the United Nations voted to partition the remaining portion of
the original Mandate, which had not been given to Jordan , to make a Jewish homeland
possible.
Under the partition plan, the Arabs were given the Jews’ ancient
home in Judea and Samaria —now known as the West
Bank, and the “Gaza Strip” on the border with Egypt . The Jews were allotted three
slivers of disconnected land along the Mediterranean
and the Sinai desert. They were also cut off from the slivers, surrounded by
Arab land and under international control. Sixty percent of the land allotted
to the Jews was the Negev desert. The entire
portion represented only about 10% of the original Palestine Mandate. Out of
these unpromising parts, the Jews created a new state, Israel , in
1948. At this time, the idea of an Arab Palestinian nation, or a movement to
create one did not even exist.
Thus, at the moment of Israel ’s
birth, Palestinian Arabs lived on roughly 90% of the original Palestine
Mandate— in Transjordan and in the UN partition area, but also in the new state
of Israel
itself. There were 800,000 Arabs living in Israel
alongside 650,000 Jews (a figure that would increase rapidly as a result of the
influx of refugees from Europe and the Middle East ).
At the same time, Jews were legally barred from settling in the 35,000 square
miles of Palestinian Transjordan, which eventually was renamed simply “Jordan .”
The Arab population in Israel had actually more than
tripled since the Zionists first began settling the region in significant
numbers in the 1880s. The reason for this increase was that the Jewish settlers
had brought industrial and agricultural development with them, which attracted
Arab immigrants to what, had previously been a sparsely settled and
economically destitute area.
If the Palestinian Arabs had been willing to accept this
arrangement in which they received 90% of the land in the Palestine Mandate,
and under which they benefited from the industry, enterprise and political
democracy the Jews brought to the region, there would have been no Middle East conflict. But they were not.
Instead, the Arab League—representing five neighboring Arab
states— declared war on Israel
on the day of its creation, and five Arab armies invaded the slivers with the
aim of destroying the infant Jewish state. During the fighting, according to
the UN mediator on the scene, an estimated 472,000 Arabs fled their homes and
left the infant state. Some fled to escape the dangers; others were driven out
in the heat of war. They planned on returning after what they assumed would be
the inevitable Arab victory and the destruction of the infant Jewish state.
But the Jews—many of them recent Holocaust survivors— refused to
be defeated. Instead, the five Arab armies that had invaded were repelled. Yet
there was no peace. Even though their armies were beaten, the Arab states were
determined to carry on their campaign of destruction and to remain formally at
war with the Israeli state. After the defeat of the Arab armies, the
Palestinians who lived in the Arab area of the UN partition did not attempt to
create a state of their own. Instead, in 1950, Jordan
annexed the entire West Bank and Egypt annexed the Gaza Strip. There
were no international protests.
Refugees: Jewish and
Arab
As a result of the annexation and the continuing state of war, the
Arab refugees who had fled the Israeli slivers did not return. There was a
refugee flow into Israel ,
but it was a flow of Jews who had been expelled from the Arab countries. All
over the Middle East , Jews were forced to
leave lands they had lived on for centuries. Although Israel was a
tiny geographical area and a fledgling state, its government welcomed and
resettled 600,000 Jewish refugees and made them citizens.
At the same time, the Jews resumed their work of creating a new
nation. Israel had annexed a
small amount of territory to make their state defensible, including a land
bridge that connected to Jerusalem .
In the years that followed, the Israelis made their desert bloom.
They built the only industrialized economy in the entire Middle
East . They built the only liberal democracy in the Middle East . They treated the Arabs who remained in Israel well. To
this day the very large Arab minority, which lives inside the state of Israel , has more rights and privileges than any
other Arab population in the entire Middle East .
This is especially true of the Arabs who lived under Yasser Arafat’s corrupt
dictatorship, and live presently under the Arab Palestine Authority, which
inherited his totalitarian rule and today administers the West
Bank .
The present Middle East conflict is said to be about the “occupied territories”—the West Bank of the
At the same time, Palestinian Arab fedayeen launched cross-border infiltrations and attacks on Israeli civilian centers and military outposts from
In July 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the
On October 29, 1956,
The Arab Wars Against Israel
In 1967, Egypt ,
Syria and Jordan —whose leaders had never ceased to call
for the destruction of Israel —massed
hundreds of thousands of troops on Israel ’s
borders and blockaded the Straits of Tiran, closing the Port
of Eilat ; Israel ’s only opening to the East.
This was an act of war. Because Israel
had no landmass to defend itself from being overrun, it struck the Arab armies
first and defeated them as it had in 1948. It was in repelling these armies
that Israel came to control
the West Bank and the Gaza
strip, as well as the oil rich Sinai desert. Israel
had every right to annex these territories captured from the aggressors, which
historically belonged to the Jews—a time honored ritual among nations and in
fact the precise way that Syria ,
Lebanon , Iraq and Jordan had come into existence
themselves. But Israel
did not do so. On the other hand, neither did it withdraw its armies or
relinquish its control.
The reason was that the Arab aggressors once again refused to make
peace. Instead, they declared themselves still at war, a threat no Israeli
government could afford to ignore. By this time, Israel was a country of 2 to 3
million surrounded by declared enemies whose combined populations numbered over
100 million. Geographically, Israel
was so small that at one point it was less than ten miles across. No
responsible Israeli government could relinquish a territorial buffer while its
hostile neighbors were still formally at war. This is the reality that frames
the Middle East conflict.
In 1973, six years after the second Arab war against the Jews, the
Arab armies again attacked Israel .
The attack was led by Syria
and Egypt , abetted by Iraq , Libya ,
Saudi Arabia , Kuwait and five
other countries who gave military support to the aggressors, including an Iraqi
division of 18,000 men. Israel
again defeated the Arab forces. Afterwards, Egypt —
and Egypt
alone—agreed to make a formal peace.
The peace was signed by Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, who was
subsequently assassinated by Islamic radicals, paying for his statesmanship
with his life. Sadat is one of three Arab leaders assassinated by other Arabs
for making peace with the Jews.
Under the Camp David accords that Sadat signed, Israel returned
the entire Sinai with all its oil riches. This act demonstrated once and for
all that the solution to the Middle East
conflict was ready at hand. It only required the willingness of the Arabs to
agree.
Even to this day, the Arabs claim that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are the obstacle to peace. But the Arab settlements
in Israel —they are actually
called “cities”—are not a problem for Israel so why should Jewish
settlements be a problem for the Arabs? The claim that Jewish settlements in
the West Bank are an obstacle to peace is based first of all on the assumption
that the Jews will never relinquish any of their settlements, which the Camp David accords proved false. It is really based,
however, on the assumption that Jewish settlements will not be allowed in an
Arab Palestinian state—which is an Arab decision and is the essence of the
entire problem: the unwillingness of the Arabs to live side by side with
“infidel” Jews.
The Middle East conflict is not about Israel ’s
reoccupation of its rightful territories; it is about the refusal of the Arabs
to make peace with Israel ,
which is an inevitable byproduct of their desire to destroy it. This desire is
encapsulated in the word all Palestinians Arabs – “moderates” and extremists –
use to describe the creation of Israel .
They call the birth of Israel
the “Nakhba,” the catastrophe.
Self Determination Is
Not The Agenda
The Palestinians Arabs and their supporters also claim that the
Middle East conflict is about the Arab Palestinians’ yearning for a state and
the refusal of Israel
to accept their aspiration. This claim is also false. The Palestine Liberation
Organization was created in 1964, sixteen years after the establishment of Israel and the
first anti-Israel war. The PLO was created at a time the West Bank was not
under Israeli control but was part of Jordan . The PLO, however, was not
created so that the Arab Palestinians could achieve self determination in Jordan , which
at the time comprised 90% of the original Palestine Mandate. The PLO’s express
purpose, in the words of its own leaders, was to “push the Jews into the sea.”
The official “covenant” of the new Palestine Liberation
Organization referred to the “Zionist invasion,” declared that Israel’s Jews
were “not an independent nationality,” described Zionism as “racist” and
“fascist,” called for “the liquidation of the Zionist presence,” and specified,
“armed struggle is the only way to liberate Jewish Palestine.” In short,
“liberation” required the destruction of the Jewish state.
For thirty years, the PLO covenant remained unchanged in its call
for Israel ’s
destruction. Then in the mid 1990s, under enormous international pressure
following the 1993 Oslo
accords, PLO leader Yasser Arafat agreed to revise the covenant. However, no
new covenant was drafted or ratified. Moreover, Arafat simultaneously assured Arab
Palestinians that the proposed revision was purely tactical and did not alter
the movement’s ultimate goals. He did this explicitly and in a speech given to
the Arab Palestine Legislative Council when he called on Arab Palestinians to
remember the Prophet Muhammad’s Treaty of Hudaybiyah. The Prophet Muhammad had
entered into a 10 year peace pact with the Koresh tribe back in the 7th
century, known as the Hudaybiyah Treaty. The treaty was born of necessity. Two
years later, when he had mustered enough military strength, Muhammad conquered
the Koresh who surrendered without a fight. Arafat was signaling that whatever
he might say, he intended to follow the example of the Prophet.
Even during the “Oslo” peace process—when the Palestine
Liberation Organization pretended to recognize the existence of Israel and the
Jews therefore allowed the creation of a “Palestine Authority”—it was clear that the
PLO’s goal was Israel’s destruction, and not just because its leader invoked
the Prophet Muhammad’s own deception. The Arab Palestinians’ determination to
destroy Israel is abundantly
clear in their newly created demand of a “right of return” to Israel for “5
million” Arabs. The figure of 5 million refugees who must be returned to Israel is more
than ten times the number of Arabs who actually left the Jewish slivers of the
British Mandate in 1948. Moreover, a poll of Arab Palestinian refugee families
in the West Bank conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey
Research in the spring of 2003 revealed that only 10% of those questioned said
they actually wanted to return.
In addition to its absurdity, this new demand has several aspects
that reveal the Arab Palestinians’ genocidal agenda for the Jews. The first is
that the “right of return” is itself a calculated mockery of the primary reason
for Israel ’s
existence—the fact that no country would provide a refuge for Jews fleeing
Hitler’s extermination program during World War II. It is only because the
world turned its back on the Jews when their survival was at stake that the
state of Israel
grants a “right of return” to every Jew who asks for it.
But there is no genocidal threat to Arabs, no lack of
international support militarily and economically, and no Arab Palestinian “Diaspora”
(although the Arab Palestinians have cynically appropriated the very term to
describe their self inflicted quandary). The fact that many Arabs, including
the Arab Palestinian spiritual leader—the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem— supported
Hitler’s “Final Solution” only serves to compound the insult. It is even
further compounded by the fact that more than 90% of the Arab Palestinians now
in the West Bank and Gaza have never lived a day of their lives in territorial
Israel. The claim of a “right of return” is thus little more than a brazen
expression of contempt for the Jews, and for their historic suffering.
More importantly, it is an expression of contempt for the very
idea of a Jewish state. The incorporation of five million Arabs into Israel would render the Jews a permanent
minority in their own country, and would thus spell the end of Israel . The
Arabs fully understand this, and that is why they have made it a fundamental
demand. It is just one more instance of the general bad faith the Arab side has
manifested through every chapter of these tragic events.
Possibly the most glaring expression of the Arabs’ bad faith is
their deplorable treatment of the Arab Palestinian refugees and refusal for over
a half century to relocate them, or to alleviate their condition, even during
the years they were under Jordanian rule. While Israel
was making the desert bloom and relocating 600,000 Jewish refugees expelled from
Arab states, and building a thriving industrial democracy, the Arabs were busy
making sure that their refugees remained in squalid refugee camps in the West
Bank and Gaza ,
where they were powerless, without rights, and economically destitute. Despite
economic aid from the UN and Israel itself,
despite the oil wealth of the Arab kingdoms, the Arab leaders have refused to
undertake the efforts that would liberate the refugees from their miserable
camps, or to make the economic investment that would alleviate their condition.
There are now 22 Arab states providing homes for the same ethnic population,
speaking a common Arabic language. But the only one that will allow Arab Palestinian
Arabs to become citizens is Jordan .
And the only state the Palestinians covet is Israel .
The Policy of
Resentment and Hate
The refusal to address the condition of the Arab Palestinian
refugee population is—and has always been—a calculated Arab policy, intended to
keep the Arab Palestinians in a state of desperation in order to incite their
hatred of Israel for the wars to come. Not to leave anything to chance, the
mosques and schools of the Arabs generally—and the Arab Palestinians in
particular—preach and teach Jew hatred every day. Elementary school children in
Palestinian Arab schools are even taught to chant “Death to the heathen Jews”
in their classrooms as they are learning to read. It should not be overlooked,
that these twin policies of deprivation (of the Palestinian Arabs) and hatred
(of the Jews) are carried out without any protest from any sector of Arab Palestinian
or Arab society. That in itself speaks volumes about the nature of the Middle East conflict.
There are plenty of individual Arab Palestinian victims, as there
are Jewish victims, familiar from the nightly news. But the collective Arab Palestinian
grievance is without justice. It is a self -inflicted wound, the product of the
Arabs’ xenophobia, bigotry, exploitation of their own people, and apparent
inability to be generous towards those who are not Arabs. While Israel is an
open, democratic, multi-ethnic, multicultural society that includes a large
enfranchised Arab minority, the Arab Palestine Authority is an intolerant,
undemocratic, monolithic police state with one dictatorial leader, whose
ruinous career has run now for 37 years.
As the repellent attitudes, criminal methods and dishonest goals
of the Palestine
liberation movement should make clear to any reasonable observer; its present
cause is based on Jew hatred, and on resentment of the modern, democratic West,
and little else. Since there was no Arab Palestinian nation before the creation
of Israel, and since Arab Palestinians regarded themselves simply as Arabs and
their land as part of Syria, it is not surprising that many of the chief
creators of the Palestine Liberation Organization did not even live in the
Palestine Mandate before the creation of Israel, let alone in the sliver of
mostly desert that was allotted to the Jews.
While the same Arab states that claim to be outraged by the Jews’
treatment of how Arab Palestinians treat their own Arab populations far worse
than Arabs are treated in Israel ,
they are also silent about the disenfranchised Arab Palestinian majority that
lives in Jordan .
In 1970, Jordan ’s
King Hussein massacred thousands of PLO militants. But the PLO does not call
for the overthrow of Hashemite rule in Jordan and does not hate the
Hashemite monarchy. Only Jews are hated.
It is hatred, moreover, that is increasingly lethal. During the
Second Intifada 70% of the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza approved the suicide bombing of women
and children if the targets were Jews. There is no Arab “Peace Now” movement,
not even a small one, whereas in Israel the movement demanding
concessions to Arabs in the name of peace is a formidable political force.
There is no Arab spokesman who will speak for the rights and sufferings of
Jews, but there are hundreds of thousands of Jews in Israel — and all over the world—who
will speak for “justice” for the Palestinians. How can the Jews expect fair
treatment from a people that collectively does not even recognize their
humanity?
A Phony Peace
The Oslo
peace process begun in 1993 was based on the pledge of both parties to renounce
violence as a means of settling their dispute. But the Arab Palestinians never
renounced violence and in the year 2000, they officially launched a new
Intifada against Israel ,
effectively terminating the peace process.
In fact, during the peace process—between 1993 and 1999—there were
over 4,000 terrorist incidents committed by Arab Palestinians against Israelis,
and more than 1,000 Israelis killed as a result of Arab Palestinian
attacks—more than had been killed in the previous 25 years. By contrast, during
the same period Israelis were so desperate for peace that they reciprocated
these acts of murder by giving the Arab Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza a self-governing
authority, a 40,000 man armed “police force,” and 95% of the territory their
negotiators demanded. This Israeli generosity was rewarded by a rejection of
peace, suicide bombings of crowded discos and shopping malls, an outpouring of
ethnic hatred and a renewed declaration of war.
In fact, the Arab Palestinians broke the Oslo Accords precisely
because of Israeli generosity, because the government of Ehud Barak offered to
meet 95% of their demands, including turning over parts of Jerusalem to their control—a possibility once
considered unthinkable. These concessions confronted Yassir Arafat with the one
outcome he did not want: Peace with Israel . Peace without the
destruction of the “Jewish Entity.”
Arafat rejected these Israeli concessions, accompanying his
rejection with a new explosion of anti-Jewish violence. He named this
violence—deviously— “The al-Aqsa Intifada,” after the mosque on the Temple
Mount, giving his new jihad the name of a Muslim shrine to create the illusion
that the Intifada was provoked not by his unilateral destruction of the Oslo peace
process, but by then hard-line opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s highly
publicized visit to the site. Months after the Intifada began; the Arab Palestine
Authority itself admitted this was just another Arafat lie.
In fact, the Intifada had been planned months before Sharon ’s visit as a follow-up
to the rejection of the Oslo Accords. In the words of Imad Faluji, the Arab Palestine
Authority’s communications minister, “[The uprising] had been planned since
Chairman Arafat’s return from Camp David, when he turned the tables on the
former U.S.
president [Clinton] and rejected the American conditions.” The same conclusion
was reached by the Mitchell Commission headed by former U.S. Senator George
Mitchell to investigate the events: “The Sharon
visit did not cause the al-Aqsa Intifada.”
In an interview he gave after the new Intifada began, Faisal
Husseini—a well-known “moderate” in the PLO leadership, compared the Oslo
“peace process” to a “Trojan horse” designed to fool the Israelis into letting
the Arab Palestinians arm themselves inside the Jewish citadel in order to
destroy it. “If you are asking me as a Pan-Arab nationalist what are the Arab Palestinian
borders according to the higher strategy, I will immediately reply: ‘From the
river to the sea’”— in other words, from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, with
not even the original slivers left for Israel. Note too, Husseini’s self
identification as a “Pan-Arab nationalist.” Just as there is no Arab Palestinian
desire for peace with Israel ,
there is no “Palestinian” Arabs.4
Moral Distinctions
In assessing the reasons for the Middle East
impasse one must also pay attention to the moral distinction between the two
combatants as revealed in their actions. When a deranged Jew goes into an Arab
mosque and kills the worshippers (which happened once) he is acting alone and
is universally condemned by the Israeli government and the Jews in Israel and
everywhere. But when an Arab suicide bomber wades into a crowd of families with
baby strollers leaving evening worship, or enters a disco filled with teenagers
or a shopping mall crowded with women and children and blows them up (which has
happened frequently), he is someone who has been trained and sent by a
component of the PLO or the Palestine Authority; has been told by his religious
leaders that his crime will get him into heaven where he will feast on 72
virgins; his praises will be officially sung throughout the Arab world; his
mother will be given money by the Arab Palestine Authority; and his Arab
neighbors will come to pay honor to the household for having produced a “martyr
for Allah.” The Palestinian liberation movement is the first such cause to
elevate the killing of children—both the enemy’s and its own—into a religious
calling. Even Hitler didn’t think of this.
It is not only the methods of the Arab Palestine liberation
movement that are morally repellent. The Arab Palestinian cause is itself
corrupt. The “Arab Palestinian problem” is a problem created by the Arabs
themselves, and can only be solved by them. The reason there are Arab Palestinian
“refugees” is because no Arab state— except Jordan —will allow them to become
citizens and the organs of the PLO and the Palestine Authority, despite
billions in revenues, have let them to stew in refugee camps for 50 years. (In
contrast, Israel
has been steadily absorbing and settling Jewish refugees over the same time
period). In Jordan ,
Arab Palestinians already have a state in which they are a majority but which
denies them self determination. Why is Jordan not the object of the Arab Palestinian
“liberation” struggle? The only possible answer is because it is not ruled by
the hated Jews.
The famous “green line” marking the boundary between Israel and its Arab neighbors is also the bottom
line for what is the real problem in the Middle East .
It is green because plants are growing in the desert on the Israeli side but
not on the Arab side. The Jews got a sliver of land without oil, and created
abundant wealth and life in all its rich and diverse forms. The Arabs got nine
times the acreage but all they have done with it is to sit on its aridity and
nurture the poverty, resentments and hatreds of its inhabitants. Out of these
dark elements they have created and perfected the vilest antihuman terrorism
the world has ever seen: Suicide bombing of civilians.
If a nation state is all the Arab Palestinians desire, Jordan would be
the solution. (So would settling for 95% of the land one is demanding—the Barak
offer rejected by Arafat.) But the Arab Palestinians want to destroy Israel . This is
morally hateful. It is the Nazi virus revived. Despite this, the Arab Palestinian
cause is generally supported by the international community with the singular
exception of the United States
(and to a lesser degree Great
Britain ). It is precisely because the Arab Palestinians
want to destroy a state that Jews have created—and because they are killing
Jews—that they enjoy international credibility and otherwise inexplicable
support.
The Jewish Problem
Once More
It is this international resistance to the cause of Jewish
survival, the persistence of global Jew-hatred that, in the end, refutes the
Zionist hope of a solution to the “Jewish problem.” The creation of Israel is an
awe-inspiring human success story. But the permanent war to destroy it undermines
the original Zionist idea.
More than fifty years after the creation of Israel , the
Jews are still the most hated ethnic group in the world. Islamic radicals want
to destroy Israel ,
but so do Islamic moderates. Hatred of Jews is taught in Islam’s mosques; in
Egypt and in other Arab countries Mein Kampf is a bestseller; the anti-Semitic
forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is
promoted by the government press throughout the Arab Middle East, and Jewish
conspiracy theories abound, as in the following statement from a sermon given
by the Mufti of Jerusalem, the spiritual leader of the Palestinian Arabs in the
al-Aqsa mosque on July 11, 1997: “Oh Allah, destroy America, for she is ruled
by Zionist Jews …”
For the Jews in the Middle East, the present conflict is a life
and death struggle, yet every government in the UN with the exception of the United States and sometimes Britain regularly votes against Israel in the
face of a terrorist enemy who has no respect for the rights or lives of Jews.
After the al-Qaeda attack on the World
Trade Center ,
the French ambassador to England
complained that the whole world was endangered because of “that shitty little
country,” Israel .
This caused a scandal in England ,
but nowhere else.
All that stands between the Jews of the Middle East and another
Holocaust is their own military prowess and the generous, humanitarian support
of the United States .
Even in the United States ,
however, one can now turn the TV to channels like MSNBC and CNN to see the
elected Prime Minister of a democracy equated politically and morally with
terrorists and enemies of the United
States such as the leaders of Hamas.
During the first Gulf War, Israel
was America ’s
firm ally while Arafat and the Arab Palestinians were Saddam Hussein’s
staunchest Arab supporters. Yet the next two U.S. administrations—Republican
and Democrat alike—strove for evenhanded “neutrality” in the conflict in the
Middle East, and pressured Israel into a suicidal “peace process” with a foe
dedicated to its destruction. Only after September 11 was the United States
willing to recognize Arafat as an enemy of peace and not a viable negotiating
partner. And now the pendulum has swung back with the ascension of Barack Obama
to the Presidency.
In terms of the “Jewish problem” that Herzl and the Zionist
founders set out to solve, it is safer today to be a Jew in America than a Jew in Israel . This is one reason why I, a
Jew, am an un-ambivalent, passionate American patriot. America is good
for the Jews as it is good for every other minority who embraces its social
contract. But this history of the attempt to establish a Jewish state in the
Middle East is also why I am a fierce supporter of Israel ’s survival and have no
sympathy for the Arab Palestinian side in this conflict. Nor will I have such
sympathy until the day comes when I can look into the Arab Palestinians’ eyes
and see something other than death desired for Jews like me.
Any sincere Muslim must recognize the Land they
call "Palestine "
as the Jewish Homeland, according to the book considered by Muslims to be the
most sacred word and Allah's ultimate revelation.
The Qur'an 17:104 - states the land belongs to the Jewish people.
The Qur'an 17:104 - states the land belongs to the Jewish people.
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