My Friend,
I received an e-mail letter from the leader of a pacifistic American Jewish organization following the latest massacre in the commuter bus in Jerusalem. The arguments presented in that letter truly upset me. Since I heard similar ideas from other liberal Jewish friends, I decided to respond to these notions generically, as they may be typical for a significant segment of American Jewry. Even you, my friend, could have been exposed to some of these ideas. This is the reason for writing this letter to you.
In his e-mail letter, this well-meaning, compassionate Jew condemns the bombing of the bus, but he emphasizes that it was on route from the occupied territory of Gilo into Jerusalem. It goes on stating that this act of violence was a perfect gift to the “fascistic” Israeli government to use it as an excuse to grab more Palestinian territory. The letter calls for the end the occupation and for providing reparations for the Palestinian people. The letter states that the Palestinian Arabs are penalized for acts of terror they neither authorized nor support, and that “the crazy logic” of Ariel Sharon dictates the punishment of a whole people for transgressions of the few, making those Arabs feel that their only recourse is violence. Arab violence, according to the writer, is an expected response to the violence of the Occupation itself.
The statements in that letter repeat almost verbatim the standard claims of Arab spokesmen on TV talk-shows. However, the writer is not an Arab but a compassionate American Jew like you and me. We all are cognizant of the desperate economic situation of the Arab population on the West Bank and in Gaza, but the writer of that letter fails to recognize the true cause of that suffering. What is worse, by specifying that the victims of the recent mass murder of Jews by Arafat’s gang of terrorists were “settlers” commuting from an “occupied territory” he implicitly justified that atrocity. It made no difference to him that Gilo was built on land acquired by Jews before 1948, even before the establishment of the State of Israel – if Arafat declared Gilo to be an “occupied territory” he must be correct. I wonder whether this passionate Jew also believes in Arafat’s assertion (at Camp David in 2000) that the 1000 years of existence of the Temple on Mount Moriah is a sheer Zionist myth.
Our compassionate liberal writer concludes that the Israeli people will never be safe until the Occupation ends. Moreover, he expects the Israelis to atone for the pain inflicted on the Palestinian Arabs by that occupation and pay reparations to the Arab refugees. This peace-loving Jew implies that the murder of hundreds of Jewish civilians, young and old, women and children, is somehow justified, and its continuance should be accepted as a punishment for Israeli misbehavior. According to this compassionate Jew, the Israeli Jewish victims must be at fault, and they must atone for the pain they afflicted (in the process of their self-defense) on their murderers and the people associated with them.
Essentially the arguments of these liberal compassionate Jews focus on three issues: The “illegal occupation” the “illegal settlements” and the Arab refugees, implying the “right of return” and “reparations.” Since they accuse the Israelis of all these illegalities, they legitimize the brutal terror of the Arabs, making the victims the guilty party that deserves mortal punishment. The philosophy of our esteemed Jewish self-proclaimed political leader follows surprisingly closely the ideology of Yasser Arafat. To realize the fallacy in these arguments and their implications one must view the situation from a historical perspective, which I will try to do this in this letter. You, my friend, may know most of these historical facts, but probably from a different viewpoint.
The War of Survival of 1948 (Israel’s “War of Independence”), was conducted by a coalition of seven Arab states without any Israeli “occupation” or “illegal” settlements. The declared goal of the Arabs in 1948 was to eliminate ALL Jewish settlements and eradicate their inhabitants, period. Those settlements included Tel Aviv, Rehovoth, Netanya, and Hedera, among many, many other Jewish towns and villages. Israel won that war, but had to settle for a demarcation line determined by the positions of the invading and defending forces when a ceasefire was declared. This line is the “green line,” or the “1967 Border,” that was about to be breeched by the renewed Arab attack in 1967.
The war of 1948 has been named in Israel the “War of Independence”. This name may be misleading. Although at the end of that war the State of Israel remained an independent nation, but it was independent also before that war began. Israel was never under Arab rule and the British mandate has expired by then. In its victory over the coalition of Arab states Israel did not gain its independence, unlike the United States in their War of Independence. In its “War of Independence” Israel just maintained its independence, i.e., its very existence. The war of 1948 was actually a war of survival and it should be remembered as such. From the Arab viewpoint it was a war of extermination. Had the Israelis lost the war of 1948, they would not have been politically subjugated; they would have been brutally massacred (remember Hebron in 1929) or, at best, expelled from their homeland forever. Some compassionate liberal Jews fail to remember this most important fact.
The Arab refugees of the 1948 Israel’s War of Survival (about 470 thousand Arabs, according to official UN figures) were victims of flagrant Arab aggression that dictated survival or death for the Israeli Jews. Even after their humiliating defeat by the fledgling State of Israel (with a population of less than half a million Jews), the Arab states did not recognize the right of Israel to exist, keeping the Arab refugees confined in camps (at the expense of the UN!), to be used militarily or politically in the next lethal attack on the hated Jewish state. Notwithstanding the tenuous peace with Egypt, which tacitly continues to support Arab terrorism against Israel, and the recent questionable, potentially deadly, political maneuver of the Saudis, this situation has changed very little in the last 54 years.
If someone has to pay reparations to those refugees, or to their descendents, it must be the Arab states, including rich Saudi Arabia, that staged that war of aggression and caused the refugee problem in the first place. Since when does a victim of aggression compensate the aggressor for damages caused by the latter? In any case, Arabs who lived in mandatory Palestine were not a nation or a state involved in the 1948 war. A Palestinian Arab state never existed. Therefore, they are not in position to negotiate with Israel about any compensation for damages incurred as the result of external Arab aggression. Nevertheless, as a token of good will, Israel and the USA showed readiness to help in the rehabilitation of civilian Arab victims of the 1948 war, just as the US rebuilt Germany and Japan after World War II. But this happened only after the despotic regimes of those aggressive nations were completely replaced by pacifistic democracies. President Bush has suggested this solution to the Arabs on the West Bank and Gaza, and only time will tell if such a radical political change might be implemented. This resolution cannot be applied as yet to Arabs under a despotic regime who currently launch a daily war of terror against Israeli civilians.
The Arab war of extermination of 1948 was a continuation of Middle Eastern Arab policy that started with the defeat and dissemination of the Muslim Ottoman Empire in World War I. The goal of that policy has been to rid the region from any Western “colonialists” and from Western culture that must not be tolerated in the Arab region of the world. This policy has been manifested in perpetual violence against Jews in the Land of Israel throughout the period of the British Mandate, e.g., the massacre of Jews in Jaffa (1921) and Hebron (1929) and the murder of hundreds of Jewish civilians in the “Arab Revolt” (1935-39). This terrorist violence of Arabs against Jews continued practically uninterrupted until the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948, and from then on up to date. “Itbakh al Yahud,” i.e., “butcher the Jews”, was not invented in 2000 when Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount, it has been the battle cry of the Arabs since European Jews settled in the Land of Israel one hundred and twenty years earlier. The Arab religious-nationalistic ideology has defined as “occupation” any presence of “Zionists”, i.e., Jews who insist on the intrinsic historical right of the Jewish people to the land of their ancestors. This definition of “occupation,” which has been taught in Arab schools for decades all over the Arab world, has not changed in almost one hundred years. An “end to occupation,” so passionately advocated by some liberal Jews, including the writer of that letter I received, means therefore an end to the presence of Israelis in the Middle East.
Arafat has declared that since the Arabs failed to eradicate Israel by a decisive military campaign, they may chew it up slice after slice (Arafat’s Salami doctrine), pausing with empty promises in-between; the end goal will remain the same – eradication of the despised Zionist Jews, at least from the Middle-East. The behavior of the Arabs in the last fifty years (including the ten years after the Oslo Accords were signed!) fully corroborates this intent. The Arabs often draw an analogy with the history of the wars between them and the Crusaders a thousand years ago, when they eventually achieved their goal. They fail to recognize that the German, French and English Crusaders did not defend their sole ancestral homeland. For them the war with the Arabs was not a war of survival.
In 1954 Egypt started a terror campaign of indiscriminate killing of Jewish civilians by infiltrating terrorists (the Fadayoon), using the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip as their base of operations. (Up to date, Egypt is actively supporting Palestinian terror. Just two weeks ago another arms smuggling tunnel was discovered under the International Israeli-Egyptian border in Rafah. Last week a notorious PLO terrorist, who was smuggled across the Egyptian border by Arafat himself at the driver’s seat, was killed in Gaza.) Again there were no Israeli “occupation” and no “illegal settlements” to provoke Egypt in 1954. That war of attrition by Egyptian terrorists resulted in Israel’s joining the British-French Suez campaign in 1956.
Ariel Sharon, the young commander of a parachute brigade, made history in that 1956 war by breaking down the Egyptian defense lines in the Sinai Peninsula. This maneuver, which has become part of military history taught at West Point, may have spared hundreds, if not thousands, of Israeli casualties. Since that time Sharon has become the Boogy Man of the Arabs – an Israeli commander who almost single-handedly defeated the “glorious” Egyptian army.
President Eisenhower’s intervention stopped the fighting and prevented a total defeat of Egypt in that war. Eisenhower also forced David Ben Gurion, Israel’s Prime Minister at that time, to return the Gaza strip to Egypt, which he reluctantly did. Egypt, which covered up its humiliating military defeat by claiming victory, waited for the next opportunity to attack and eradicate the State of Israel and its Jewish population.
In 1958 the PLO was founded in Egypt (this is not a coincidence – it was part of Egypt’s persistent anti-Israeli policy) with the declared objective of “liberating Palestine” from the Jews. Yasser Arafat, an Egyptian born Arab, established a year earlier the Al-Fatah organization in Algeria, with the same objective. This was during the height of the Algerian revolt against colonial France – fighting colonialism by unmitigated violence has thus become the ideological guideline of Arafat and his terrorist organization. The success of driving out the Frenchmen from Algeria in 1962 has become a model in Arafat’s mind when dealing with the Israelis; it explains his choosing a strategy of terror following his refusal to accept the ultra-generous Israeli offers at Camp David in 2000. Al-Fatah originally opposed the founding of the PLO, which it viewed as a political rival. However, Al-Fatah joined the PLO in 1967, took control of it in 1968, and Arafat has become its “Chairman,” i.e., unchallenged warlord, up to date. The stated start-up dates of Al-Fatah and PLO are somewhat earlier than those quoted in other sources (1964), which still precedes the 1967 war.
In 1967 Egypt, encouraged by Russia, led a military coalition, which included Syria and Jordan, in a second war of eradication, aimed at “rectifying” the military failure of 1948. This time Israel was much stronger and instead of being overrun by Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armor, it moved into enemy territory and conquered it, ultimately providing the State of Israel with potentially defensible boundaries. The Jordanians were driven out of the West Bank. The Old City of Jerusalem, the ancient capital of the Land of Israel and an essential part of Jewish culture, was finally liberated after nineteen hundred years of alien occupation. The Egyptians were driven out of the Gaza strip, which they controlled since 1948, and in addition they capitulated the Sinai Peninsula. The Syrians surrendered the Golan Heights, which threatened Israeli towns and villages in the Hullah valley below. At the end of that war there were no negotiations with Jordan, Syria or Egypt regarding a political settlement (that would have to include the right of the State of Israel to exist, since the denial of that right was the sole objective of the Arab offensive), as the latter was starting to plan the next military offensive against Israel.
The 1967 war resulted in recovery of territory occupied by Jordan and Egypt in the 1948 war. Unlike the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank and the Gaza strip were and are up to date, legally speaking, not Jordanian or Egyptian “occupied” territories, since the 1948/49 ceasefire line has never been demarcated as an international border between the State of Israel and Egypt or Jordan, respectively. It could not have become an international border simply because those belligerent Arab states did not recognize the State of Israel. Also, Egypt or Jordan could not donate territories captured by their armies in 1948 to another party (e.g., the PLO) after the Israeli forces recaptured those territories. It is remarkable that neither Jordan nor Egypt established a “Palestinian State” in those territories between 1948 and 1967 (this strongly suggests that the current Egyptian support for a Palestinian state is just a political ploy). In brief, those are not “occupied territories” in any legal sense. The UN resolutions, initiated by the Arab states after the 1967 war, tried to legitimize Arab claims to those territories without recognizing the existence of the State of Israel. Even the Saudis have recognized at last the legal flaw in the Arab arguments regarding the possession of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and are trying now to rectify it, but at the cost of the integrity and security of the State of Israel.
If there are no “occupied” territories then there are no “illegitimate” Jewish settlements on them. Israel has the full right to set up towns and villages in those recaptured areas as long as it does not displace existing Arab towns and villages in the process. As a Western democracy Israel has avoided annexation of large Arab population centers into its boundaries. Those Arab population centers are expected in the future to be included in an independent democratic Arab state (or a confederation of two states in the West Bank and Gaza, respectively) that would not pose a military threat to the neighboring Jewish state. Notwithstanding the publicized polls, most of the Arabs on the West Bank and Gaza do not support Arafat’s policy of terrorism – they were never given a true chance to freely express their views. Establishment of a Palestinian Arab state can only happen if and when a genuine democratic regime will be established in the currently autonomous Arab territories. President Bush’s latest political plan is aimed at that. The establishment of permanent boundaries between Israel and the future Arab state (or states) will require inclusion of certain Jewish settlements within the boundaries of the new Arab state. The inclusion of Jewish citizens in the new democratic Arab state should not pose a problem, remembering that 20% of the citizens of the State of Israel are Arabs.
Let me go back to history. Egypt and Syria launched a devastating surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kipur in 1973. That War of Survival was the bloodiest attack Israel has ever faced. Ariel Sharon, who was called back to duty from retirement, managed to reverse an incipient defeat into an outstanding Israeli victory. Henry Kissinger used his best of wits to save Egypt from an utter military disaster avoiding Sharon’s armored column entering Cairo. Kissinger thus paved the way for the ultimate formal “peace” between Israel and Egypt. The hate and fear the Arabs felt for Sharon since that time are fully understandable – again he shattered their self-confidence and diminished their hope to drive the State of Israel out of existence. On this background one can understand Mubarak’s recent statement that as long as Sharon is Israel’s Prime Minister “there will be no peace”. What he meant was that under the leadership of Ariel Sharon, Israel will not surrender to Arab pressure leading to its eventual demise.
The humiliating Arab defeat in 1973 resulted in a change in their strategy. They shifted again (like after the 1948 war) from futile military confrontations to supporting guerilla warfare, knowing that the weak spot of the Israelis is a war of attrition, especially when it involves many civilian casualties. By that time Arafat and his well-trained terrorists were stationed in Lebanon, after being expelled from Jordan (Jordan has chosen neutrality and eventually peace with Israel after its military defeat in 1967). Arafat has now launched terrorist attacks on Israel from his bases in Southern Lebanon.
By then Ariel Sharon was Minister of Defense, who advocated the destruction of those bases and the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon by force. This resulted in the 1982 Israeli incursion into Lebanon and the eventual exile of Arafat to Tunisia. The Lebanon campaign achieved its immediate objective of stopping the PLO terror attacks, as Sharon predicted, but it did not result in a peace treaty with Lebanon, which was Sharon’s prime objective. It also resulted in the Syrian occupation of Lebanon and the buildup of the Iranian supported Hisballa terrorist organization.
I will skip the history of the Oslo accords and the duplicity of Arafat, manifested immediately thereafter, leading to the current renewed War of Survival. Brutal terrorism and hostile diplomacy laced with biased public opinion (e.g., the fictitious Jenin Massacre) have replaced armor and artillery, but the Arab goal has remained the same -- eradication of the “Zionists” and their state.
Unlike CNN or liberal Jewish advocates of peace at any cost, we should not use a snapshot of suffering Arab women and children in front of their destroyed home in an Arab refugee camp (no one will deny that they truly suffer) to understand and solve a long-standing political problem. What this picture does not reflect is the millions of dollars and tens of tons of arms flowing from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Iran and Syria into the “occupied territories,” trying to reach by unmitigated terror the objective that was not met in the Arab direct military offensives of 1948, 1967 and 1973. In view of this, it must be realized that resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict will not take place in Ramallah - it must first happen in Teheran, Riyadh, Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus.
I hope I clarified to you the main misconceptions of that well-meaning, passionate American Jew. We must learn our own history very carefully and not let others rewrite it for us. We are a small nation facing a giant enemy – the whole Arab world allied with Iranian Muslim fundamentalism. There are no known outspoken pacifists on the other side, but the Arabs effectively use Jewish pacifists as tools in their new war of extermination. The recent events in Europe show that the target of this war is not just the State of Israel but also the Jewish people as a whole. Let us remember this when some of us, well-meaning and compassionate Jews, fall victims to Arab propaganda.
I will end this letter quoting a recent statement of Professor Robert Friedmann of Atlanta: “If the Arabs and Muslims would lay down their arms, there will be no more violence. If Israel does so, there will be no more Israel. Therein lies the real balance of the forces and the intentions in the region.”
Sincerely,
Michael Anbar Ph.D.
Professor
School of Medicine,
University at Buffalo