Israel’s Right to Exist-Part I

1-10-09

Israel seems to always get criticism constantly for efforts to defend its own people by the Jew-haters of this world. In 1914 Pancho Villa crossed the Mexico-Texas border, robbed banks in Brownsville and killed American citizens. General Pershing was sent with an American force in search of Villa and stayed there for a considerable period of time. Again no society can tolerate it s borders being violated and its citizens being killed and maimed.

Whether one agrees on the legitimacy of Israel or not, one must understand that they have been a sovereign and democratic nation for a great many years. In fact, they have been a nation state much longer than a majority of the UN members today. They have stood the test of time, 1,000,000 Moslem Arabs along with other minorities live in peace in Israel. They have the rights of citizenship, travel, work, education, and can socialize with whom they wish. They have extra special rights because they do not have to serve in the military and it seems on the surface that they would prefer an Israeli government that guarantees all these rights, along with prosperity over the chaos that inhabits most of the Arab-Moslem World.

The story of internecine Arab-Moslem strife is unending. The 80 -year history of Iraq is rife with that reality. They were a violent society for decades, only interrupted by period of forced order by dictators. Syria, Yemen, Sudan and Libya, have been dictatorships forever. Egypt and the Saudis are basically run by oligarchies. Mubarak is a quasi-dictator and Iran, which is not an Arab state, is becoming a feudal basket state and a threat to their region and the rest of the world. Sudan is starving millions of its own citizens, but the issue of the Palestinians remains foremost in the minds of many Arabs and Muslims. Is not Jordan a Palestinian Muslim state? Did they not have control over the so-called West Bank from 1948 thru 1967? Why didn't they absorb that area and its people, or make it independent? They didn't want to! They kept it alive to keep it as a problem, because they knew that the creation of a West Bank Palestinian state would have led to the de facto recognition of Israel. The so-called Palestinian refugee camps around the Arab World are the only refugee camps that still exist from that era. All the other camps that were created by the wars and genocidal conduct in the 20th Century were dispersed as their populations were assimilated into other nation states. Only where Muslim and non-Muslim exist as neighbors is there ongoing strife; Kashmir, the Philippines, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. What is the reason?

Is Israel or World Jewry unaware of that reality? Israel has been feeling the sting of Fedeyeen terrorism and intrusions for sixty years. Hundreds, if not thousands, of their people have been murdered and maimed. Currently the Arab-Muslim world is in chaos once again. Whose fault is that? Is that the fault of Israel? Is the poverty and religious strife with the Moslem world the fault of Israel? Is Osama Bin Ladin and his opposition to the Saudi princes the fault of Israel? Are the Taliban religious madmen the fault of Israel? Was the Shah the fault of Israel? Are the Mullahs in Teheran the fault of Israel? Was the Syrian political assassinations and terrorism in Lebanon the fault of Israel? Is and was the corruption of Arafat and his brigands the fault of Israel? Were the devastating Iranian-Iraqi Wars over Israel? Was the invasion of Kuwait because of Israel?

If Israel did not exist all of these same things would have happened or be happening. If oil did not exist in the Middle East no one would care one iota about fratricidal conduct amongst Arabs and Muslims. Therefore without oil, the west would support democratic Israel without question! In other words, concern for Gaza and the Gazans may be genuinely emotional and humane. But what have they done to change their attitudes and therefore their future. In the wake of the destruction of Fascism and Communism, those states and their peoples looked for change. They trashed their history and they went from bitterness to self-examination. They brought success out of the ruins. They evolved from dictatorship and totalitarianism to democracy. When will the Arab-Muslim world learn their lesson and end the bitterness that pervades between Shiite and Sunni? When will they stop worrying about Jews?

It is funny that 1 million Arab Muslims can live in peace in Israel. It is funny that Jews from all over the Arab World, and from multiple cultures and races can live in peace and basic harmony in Israel. It is funny that thousands of Christians, both Arab and non-Arab can live in peace in Israel, but 100 Jews cannot live in peace in Hebron. Why do a billion Muslims and 100 million Arabs worry about a few million Jews? Are they so insecure?

I would love to see peace in the Middle East. I believe that it can come. But the “pipe dream” of a Palestinian dominated Israel will not come about. The Palestinians must come to the realization that they are their own worst enemy. They must understand that their destiny is tied to their own sense of worth. They must strive to end violence, accept the reality of Israel and form partnerships of hope and toleration that will eventually bring peace and prosperity.

The Jews of Israel have as much moral right to live there as any people, any where. The Europeans came to the New World in the 16th Century and took the land, plain and simple. The Jews lived in and around that area of the world for thousands of years longer. They went to Caanan and occupied it. They lived among different peoples for thousands of years until the Babylonian Captivity and the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 CE destroyed their country. If any one group, nation state, or people have an historical legacy to a land, it is the Jews in Israel. It was the converted Arabs under their Moslem leaders who came hundreds of years after the Jewish exile by Rome. Even up until there was renewed Jewish interest in Palestine by Theodore Herzl in the 1890's few people live in that area, but always there were Jews. When European Jews showed interest in that region and invested there, with permission and blessing of the Ottoman Turks, who controlled that region for hundreds of years, poor stateless Arabs moved in looking for work, and a better life and reproduced in greater numbers. They had never lived there before most were from the Hashemite Arabian peninsular. Since the 1920's, the Arabs benefited by Jewish investment and their successful efforts to cultivate the desert. What few Arabs lived there from the Napoleonic Era until the WWI did nothing to improve either the land or the region. After Jewish success in the 1920's the grand Mufti and his allies sought to destroy the Jewish settlements and take their work as their own. Were they any different in Gaza after the Israelis left? No!
Again, the bottom line again is that if there were not oil in the Mid East no one would give a fig about the Arabs, the so-called Palestinians, the Shiites, the Sunnis and the backwardness of their social setup. Modern secular Arabs and Moslems are kept hostage by the politics of the Mullahs and the oligarchs who use religion, myth and hatred to keep their women enslaved, their populations growing and their masses in ignorance. The Israelis opened their doors to 800,000 Jewish refugees from the Arab lands, and hundreds of thousands of persecuted Jews from both the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. These people were assimilated, resettled and main streamed. Operation Magic Carpet brought 10's of thousands of primitive non-white Yemeni Jews to Israel and they were re-settled. Are their problems of equality? Of course! But where in the world does even marginal equality exist? They had as much right to bring in these immigrants as the United States did in the 1840's and the period from 1880 through 1914.

Since the peace treaty with Egypt, land was returned, and hostilities were abated. The West Bank Arabs are used as a cynical tool to keep the pot of conflict boiling. The West Bank Arabs under the brigand Arafat were kept poor and desperate. If he had accepted the Barack Plan, brokered by Clinton in 2000, normalization would be well on its way. But he was not interested in peace or a reasonable settlement. He was interested in victory through terror. The answer to the problems of the Middle East lies with the triumph of the Arab moderates. Will it happen? They had better seek it before their oil runs dry or alternatives drive the price back to 1970 levels. They then can drink it! “No one is giving a fig” about Burma and their dictatorial rule, or Chad, Darfur and dozens of other hot spots of the world where innocent people are being abused and slaughtered. The world is interested in the Middle East because of oil! That is not my view but a historical reality. Any defense of Israel and their right to exist always is met with reverse racism charges. The thought that Israel is a “stolen” country, (from whom?) reflects the true essence of anti-Semitism. Palestine is the Roman name for the former Kingdom of Judea, ruled for hundreds of years by Jewish Kings. The name Palestine is the Roman name for the Philistines, and the Romans considered that name a gross insult and went ahead and changed every Hebrew/Aramaic name in that region that stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to all of what is considered today's Jordan. In 1947, the UN offered the Jewish population of the Mandate area about 17% of the land. They accepted that “unfair” partition. Jerusalem was to be internationalized and the Arabs were to retain all of Jordan, formerly Trans-Jordan, the West bank and most of the Palestinian Mandate of 1947. In fact, the term Palestinian, until 1948, was a term meaning the Jews of the Mandate. The Arabs only started to call themselves that in the late 1960's.

When the partition was legally approved by a vast majority of the member nations of the United Nations, aside from the Arab States, Israel was legally created. The Arabs refused the partition and declared war. By the way, the Thirteen Colonies offered the British crown a compromise in 1776, and they escalated the war into a full-fledged revolution. We won that war and thus the birth of the United States.