Yes, this is an excellent article, thanks for posting it.
Why Israel Is The Victim And The Arabs Are The
Indefensible Aggressors In the Middle East
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 11, 2002
1. 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 like Patrick Buchanan 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.
Here is what happened instead.
www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=4454
2. The Beginnings
In the 1920s, among their final acts as victors in
World War I, the British and French created the states
that now define the Middle East out of the ashes of the
empire of their defeated Turkish adversary. In a region
that the Ottoman Turks had controlled for hundreds of
years, Britain and France drew the boundaries of the
new states, Syria Lebanon and Iraq. Previously, the
British had promised the Jewish Zionists that they
could establish a "national home" in a portion of what
remained of the area, which was
known as the Palestine Mandate. But in 1921 the British
separated 80 percent of the Mandate, east of the
Jordan, and created the Arab kingdom of "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 AD 70. Arabs became the dominant
local population for the first time in the 7th Century
AD as a result of the Muslim invasions. The 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 Palestinian state west or east of the
Jordan and none was ever established.
In 1948, at the request of the Jews who were living in
Palestine, the United Nations voted to partition the
remaining quarter of the original Mandate 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. The
Jews were allotted three slivers of disconnected land
along the Mediterranean and the Sinai desert. They were
also given access to their holy city of Jerusalem, but
as an island 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. Out of these unpromising parts, the Jews
created a new state, Israel, in 1948. At this time, the
idea of a Palestinian nation, or a movement to create
one did not even exist.
At the moment of Israel’s birth, Palestinian Arabs
lived on roughly 90 percent 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 1.2 million
Jews. 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 the slivers called 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 percent 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 this was not to be.
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 to escape the dangers. They planned on
returning after an Arab victory and the destruction of
the Jewish state.
But the Jews -- many of them recent Holocaust survivors
-- refused to be defeated. Instead, the five Arab
armies that had invaded their slivers 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.
3. 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 from the Arab
countries.
At the same time, the Jews resumed their work of
creating a new nation in what was now a single sliver
of land. Israel, had annexed a small amount of
territory to make their state defensible, including a
land bridge that included 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 living under
Yasser Arafat’s corrupt dictatorship, the Palestine
Authority, which today administers the West Bank and
the Gaza strip, and whose Arab subjects have no human
rights. In 1997, in a fit of pique against the Oslo
Accords, Palestinian spokesman Edward Said himself
blurted this out, calling Arafat "our Papa Doc" – after
the sadistic dictator of Haiti – and complaining that
there was "a total absence of law or the rule of law in
the Palestinian autonomy areas."
The present Middle East conflict is said to be about
the "occupied territories" – the West Bank of the
Jordan and the Gaza strip – and about Israel’s refusal
to "give them up." But during the first twenty years of
the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israel did not control the
West Bank. In 1950, when Jordan annexed the West Bank,
there was no Arab outrage. Nor did the Middle East
conflict with the Jews subside.
The reason there was no Arab outrage over the
annexation of the West Bank was because Jordan is a
state whose ethnic majority is Palestinian Arabs. On
the other hand, the Palestinians of Jordan are
disenfranchised by the ruling Hashemite minority.
Despite this fact, in the years following the
annexation the Palestinians displayed no interest in
achieving "self-determination" in Hashemite Jordan. It
is only the presence of Jews, apparently, that incites
this claim. The idea that the current conflict is about
"occupied territories" is only one of the many large
Arab deceits -- now widely accepted -- that have
distorted the history of the Middle East wars.
4. The Arab Wars Against Israel
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 had every right to annex
these territories captured from the aggressors – 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 with Israel, a threat no
Israeli government could afford to ignore. By this
time, Israel was a country of 2 or 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.
The Middle East conflict is not about Israel’s
occupation of the territories; it is about the refusal
of the Arabs to make peace with Israel, which is an
inevitable by-product of their desire to destroy it.
5. Self-Determination Is Not The Agenda
The Palestinians and their supporters also claim that
the Middle East conflict is about the 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 Palestinians could achieve self-determination
in Jordan, which at the time comprised 90 percent 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 charter 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 Palestine." In short, "liberation"
required the destruction of the Jewish state. The PLO
was not even created by Palestinians but by the Arab
League -- the corrupt dictators who ruled the Middle
East and who had attempted to destroy Israel by
military force in 1948, in 1967 and again in 1973.
For thirty years, the PLO charter 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 removed the clause while assuring his followers
that its removal was a necessary compromise that did
not alter the movement’s goals. He did this explicitly
and also by citing a historical precedent in which the
Prophet Muhammad insincerely agreed to a peace with his
enemies in order to gain time to mass the forces with
which he intended to destroy them.
6. The Struggle to Destroy Israel
The Middle East struggle is not about right against
right. It is about a fifty-year effort by the Arabs to
destroy the Jewish state, and the refusal of the Arab
states in general and the Palestinian Arabs in
particular to accept Israel’s existence. If the Arabs
were willing to do this, there would be no occupied
territories and there would be a Palestinian state.
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
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.
In addition to its absurdity, this new demand has
several aspects that reveal the 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 Palestinian "diaspora" (although the Palestinians
have cynically appropriated the very term to describe
their self-inflicted quandary). The fact that many
Arabs, including the 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 percent of the 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 Palestinian
refugees and refusal for half a 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 from Arab states, and building a thriving
industrial democracy in its allotted sliver, the Arabs
were busy making sure that their refugees remained in
squalid refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, where
they were powerless, right-less, and economically
destitute.
Today, fifty years after the first Arab war against
Israel, there are 59 such refugee camps and 3.7 million
"refugees" registered with the UN. 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 Palestinian Arabs to
become citizens is Jordan. And the only state the
Palestinians covet is Israel.
7. The Policy of Resentment and Hate
The refusal to address the condition of the Palestinian
refugee population is – and has always been -- a
calculated Arab policy, intended to keep the
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 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 Palestinian or Arab society. That in itself
speaks volumes about the nature of the Middle East conflict.
All wars -- especially wars that have gone on for fifty
years – produce victims with just grievances on both
sides. And that is true in this one. There are plenty
of individual Palestinian victims, as there are Jewish
victims, familiar from the nightly news. But the
collective 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 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 Palestinian nation before the creation of
Israel, and since 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. Edward Said, the leading
intellectual mouthpiece for the Palestinian cause grew
up in a family that chose to make its home in Egypt and
the United States. Yasser Arafat was born in Egypt.
While the same Arab states that claim to be outraged by
the Jews’ treatment of Palestinians treat their own
Arab populations far worse than Arabs are treated in
Israel, they are also silent about the disenfranchised
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 a hatred, moreover, that is increasingly lethal.
Today, 70 percent of the Arabs in the West Bank and
Gaza approve the suicide bombing of women and children
if the targets are 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?
8. 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 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 Palestinians against Israelis, and more
than 1,000 Israelis killed as a result of Palestinian
attacks – more than had been killed in the previous 25
years. By contrast, during the same period 1993-1999
Israelis were so desperate for peace that they
reciprocated these acts of murder by giving 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.
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 Palestinians broke the Oslo Accords
precisely because of Israeli generosity, because the
government of Ehud Barak offered to meet 95 percent of
their demands, including turning over parts of
Jerusalem to their control -- a possibility once
considered unthinkable. These concessions confronted
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-Aksa Intifada," after the mosque on the Temple
Mount. His new jihad was given 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 Ariel Sharon’s visit to the site.
Months after the Intifada began, the 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
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-Aksa Intifada."
9. Moral Distinctions
In assessing the Middle East impasse it is important to
pay attention to the moral distinction revealed in the
actions of the two combatants. 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, and he is punished to the full
extent of Israeli law. But when a young Arab enters a
disco filled with teenagers or a shopping mall or bus
crowded with women and children and blows himself and
innocent bystanders up (which happens frequently), he
is someone who has been trained and sent by a component
of the PLO or the Palestine Authority; he is officially
praised as a hero by Yasser Arafat; his mother is given
money by the Palestine Authority; and his Arab
neighbors come to pay honor to the household for having
produced a "martyr for Allah." The Palestinian
liberation movement is the first such movement to
elevate the killing of children – both the enemy’s and
its own – into a religious calling and a strategy of
the cause.
It is not only the methods of the Palestine liberation
movement that are morally repellent. The Palestinian
cause is itself corrupt. The "Palestinian problem" is
a problem created by the Arabs, and can only be solved
by them. In Jordan, 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
Palestinian "liberation" struggle? The only possible
answer is because it is not ruled by Jews.
There is a famous "green line" marking the boundary
between Israel and its Arab neighbors. That green line
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 most vile anti-human
terrorism the world has ever seen: Suicide bombing of
civilians. In fact, the Palestinians are a community of
suicide bombers: they want the destruction of Israel
more than they want a better life.
If a nation state is all the Palestinians desire,
Jordan would be the solution. (So would settling for 95
percent of one’s demands.) But the Palestinians also
want to destroy Israel. This is morally hateful. It is
the Nazi virus revived. Nonetheless, the 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 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.
10. The Jewish Problem Again
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 do
so Islamic moderates. 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 Ariel
Sharon who is the elected Prime Minister of a democracy
equated politically and morally with Yasser Arafat who
is a dictator, a terrorist and an enemy of the United
States. One can see the same equivalence drawn between
Israel’s democracy and the Palestine Authority, which
is a terrorist entity and an ally of America’s enemies
Al Qaeda and Iraq.
During the Gulf War, Israel was America’s staunch ally
while Arafat and the Palestinians openly supported the
aggressor, Saddam Hussein. Yet the next two U.S.
Governments – Republican and Democrat alike – strove
for even-handed "neutrality" in the conflict in the
Middle East, and pressured Israel into a suicidal
"peace process" with a foe dedicated to its
destruction. It is only since September 11 that the
United States has been willing to recognize Arafat as
an enemy of peace and not a viable negotiating partner.
The Zionists’ efforts created a thriving democracy for
the Jews of Israel (and also for the million Arabs who
live in Israel), but failed to normalize the Jewish
people or make them safe in a world that hates them.
From the point of view of the "Jewish problem," which
Herzl and the Zionist founders set out to solve, it is
better today to be a Jew in America than a Jew in
Israel.
This is one reason why I myself am not a Zionist but an
unambivalent, 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 is also why I am a fierce supporter of Israel’s
survival and have no sympathy for the Palestinian side
in the conflict in the Middle East. Nor will I have
such sympathy until the day comes when I can look into
the Palestinians’ eyes and see something other than
death desired for Jews like me.