| ISRAEL'S HISTORY AND RIGHT TO EXIST | |
| The State of Israel was created in a peaceful and legal process by the United Nations. It was not created out of Palestinian lands, but rather out of the Ottoman Empire, which had been ruled for 400 years by the Turks who lost it when they, fighting alongside Germany, were defeated in World War I. There were no “Palestinian” lands at the time because there were no people claiming to be Palestinians, but rather simply Arabs who lived in the region of Palestine. It was only after World War I that the present states of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq were also created – also out of the Turkish Empire by the British and French victors. Jordan was created on about 80 percent of the Palestine Mandate, which was originally designated by the League of Nations as part of the Jewish homeland. Since then, Jews have been prohibited from owning property there. In 1947, a UN partition plan mandated the creation of two states on the remaining 20 percent of the Palestine Mandate: the State of Israel for the Jews, and another state for the stateless Arabs. But the rulers of eight Arab states did not want a non-Arab state anywhere in the Middle East. Thus they rejected the UN arrangement and simultaneously launched a three-front war of annihilation against the newly created state of Israel -- on the very day of its creation in 1948. Israel begged for peace and offered friendship and cooperation to its neighbors. The Arab dictators rejected this offer and answered it with a war, which they ultimately lost. A state of war in the Middle East has continued uninterruptedly ever since, because most of the Arab states have refused to sign a peace treaty with Israel, and have refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state. To this day, the Arab states and the Palestinians refer to the failure of their effort to destroy Israel as Al-Nakba -- The Catastrophe. What for one people was a joyous founding, was seen by the other as a disaster. Had there been no invasion of Israel by Arab armies whose intent was overtly genocidal, there would have been a state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza since 1948. From 1949 to 1956, Egypt waged war against Israel, launching more than 9,000 attacks from terrorist cells set up in the refugee camps of the Gaza Strip. The 1956 “Sinai campaign” ended Egypt’s terror war, even though U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower forced Israeli Prime Minister Ben Gurion to return the Sinai to Egypt without a peace treaty. But the Arab war continued on other fronts. In 1964, Yasser Arafat began a campaign of terror whose avowed goal was the destruction of Israel and the genocide of its Jews. Sponsored first by Kuwait, and later by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran, Arafat declared unending war against Israel until all of “Palestine” would be liberated, redeemed in “fire and blood.” In 1967, Egypt, Syria and Jordan attacked Israel for a second time and were again defeated. It was in repelling these aggressors that Israel came to control the West Bank and the Gaza strip, as well as the oil-rich Sinai desert. Israel elected not to annex these territories it had captured from the aggressors, but neither did it withdraw its armies or relinquish its control over the region because the Arabs once again refused to make peace. In 1973 the Arab armies again attacked Israel. This invasion was led by Syria and Egypt, abetted by Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and five other countries that gave military support to the aggressors. Israel again defeated the Arab forces. Afterwards, Egypt -- and Egypt alone -- agreed to make a formal peace. In 1987 the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) initiated a violent, six-year Intifada (uprising) directed against Israeli soldiers and civilians alike, after false rumors of Israeli atrocities had circulated through Palestinian territories. During the first four years of the uprising, Palestinians carried out more than 3,600 Molotov cocktail attacks, 100 hand grenade attacks, and 600 assaults with guns or explosives. These actions resulted in the deaths of 16 Israeli civilians and 11 Israeli soldiers, in addition to the wounding of more than 1,400 Israeli civilians and 1,700 Israeli soldiers. In 1993 the Oslo peace process was initiated, based on the pledge that both parties would renounce violence as a means of settling their disputes. But the Palestinians never followed through on this pledge. During the so-called "peace process" -- between 1993 and 1999 -- they perpetrated more than 4,000 terrorist attacks that resulted in the deaths of more than 1,000 Israelis. During this same period, Israel gave the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza a self-governing authority, a 40,000-man armed "police force," and 95 percent of the territory their negotiators demanded. But Israel's efforts to achieve peace were in vain. In 2000, the Palestinians officially launched a new, second Intifada against Israel, effectively terminating the peace process. Adapted from: "Occupation and Settlement: The Myth and the Reality," by David Meir-Levi (June 5, 2005), and "Why Israel Is the Victim and the Arabs Are the Indefensible Aggressors in the Middle East," by David Horowitz (January 9, 2002). | |
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