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Why Israel Is the Victim <from David Horowitz>
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Introduction

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.
David Horowitz’s 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 Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield notes in his insightful Foreword,
this pamphlet “tells us why we should reject the ‘Blame Israel First’
narrative that has so thoroughly saturated the mainstream media… It
confronts the myth of 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” David Horowitz 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 David Horowitz 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 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 Palestinian self-determination
empowered a people steeped in the hatred of Jews to engage in
terrorism.

With the peace process each new level of 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, 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 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.

Israel’s attempt to make peace with the Palestinians has not ushered
in an era of peace; instead it has served as a microcosm of the first
fifty years of the conflict chronicled in “Why Israel is the Victim.”
A slow bloody recapitulation of the unfortunate truth that the Israeli-
Arab conflict is not a war of land, but a war of blood, that is not
being fought to settle the ownership of a few hills or a few miles,
but to exterminate the nearly 6 million Jews living among those miles
and hills.

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.

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 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.

Europe’s apathy toward Hitler’s depredations in the 1930s foreshadowed
its unwillingness to halt Nazi territorial expansionism. The apathy of
the international community toward the war against Israel warns us of
a similar apathy in a conflict that will extend as far beyond the
borders of the Jewish State, as Nazi atrocities extended beyond the
broken windows of the synagogues of Berlin.

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.

Daniel Greenfield, Shillman Fellow.

Why Israel is the Victim
by David Horowitz

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
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 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 a 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 have shown twice in 1948 and again in 2001 that
they want to kill Jews more than they want a 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 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 is 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.

But something altogether different happened instead.3 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% of the 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 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 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 a
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 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 who lived under Yasser Arafat’s
corrupt dictatorship, and live presently under the the 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 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 or
the Gaza Strip. When Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt annexed
the Gaza strip after the 1948 war, there was no Arab outrage. But the
war against Israel continued.

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—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 a 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 occupation of the
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 –
“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 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% 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 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
Palestinians that the proposed revision was purely tactical and did
not alter the movement’s utlimate goals. He did this explicitly and in
a speech given to the Palestine Legislative Council when he called on
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
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
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 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% 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, the Arabs
were busy making sure that their refugees remained in squalid refugee
camps in the West Bank and Gaza, where they were powerless, rightless,
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 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 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.

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.

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. 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 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 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% 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% 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 hardline opposition
leader Ariel Sharon’s highly publicized 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 followup 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-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 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 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 Palestinian desire for
peace with Israel, there are 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
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 Palestine liberation movement that
are morally repellent. The Palestinian cause is itself corrupt. The
“Palestinian problem” is a problem created by the Arabs themselves,
and can only be solved by them. The reason there are 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,
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 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 most vile antihuman terrorism the
world has ever seen: Suicide bombing of civilians.

If a nation state is all the 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 Palestinians want to destroy
Israel. This is morally hateful. It is the Nazi virus revived. Despite
this, 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.

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 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 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 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 Palestinian side in this conflict. 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.
Aviroce
2013-02-13 01:40:30 UTC
Permalink
I did not read all the trash you wrote. But I am answering your first
paragraph.
There is no nation on earth including the United States that likes
Jews. Jews are evil and Satan and Jews are one and the same.By
establishing the Israel colony in Palestine, Jews like their ancestors
have violated Palestinians to kill at least over a million
Palestinians. I cannot imagine a human being who learns that Jews
would open a woman's belly, get her fetus, chop the fetus over her
breasts, cut the woman's head off and parade it in Deir Yaseen. It
only takes a Jew to rejoice. Humanity has had it with savage
creatures. Imagine declaring a Safe Haven for Palestinian women and
children until the Safe Haven was full then bombing it Sea-Land-Air
with Napalm, Cluster Bombs and Depleted Uranium Bombs in Gaza as
recent as couple years ago. The list of savageries is almost
endless. Jews are born into shame and filth that they overcompensate
with their atrocious savagery against Palestinians. I wish someone
could annihilate the Jews to give the world peace and tranquility.
Frankly, the only good Jew is a dead Jew. May all Jews become good.
Post by DoD
Introduction
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.
David Horowitz’s 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 Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield notes in his insightful Foreword,
this pamphlet “tells us why we should reject the ‘Blame Israel First’
narrative that has so thoroughly saturated the mainstream media… It
confronts the myth of 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” David Horowitz 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 David Horowitz 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 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 Palestinian self-determination
empowered a people steeped in the hatred of Jews to engage in
terrorism.
With the peace process each new level of 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, 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 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.
Israel’s attempt to make peace with the Palestinians has not ushered
in an era of peace; instead it has served as a microcosm of the first
fifty years of the conflict chronicled in “Why Israel is the Victim.”
A slow bloody recapitulation of the unfortunate truth that the Israeli-
Arab conflict is not a war of land, but a war of blood, that is not
being fought to settle the ownership of a few hills or a few miles,
but to exterminate the nearly 6 million Jews living among those miles
and hills.
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.
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 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.
Europe’s apathy toward Hitler’s depredations in the 1930s foreshadowed
its unwillingness to halt Nazi territorial expansionism. The apathy of
the international community toward the war against Israel warns us of
a similar apathy in a conflict that will extend as far beyond the
borders of the Jewish State, as Nazi atrocities extended beyond the
broken windows of the synagogues of Berlin.
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.
Daniel Greenfield, Shillman Fellow.
 Why Israel is the Victim
 by David Horowitz
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
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 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 a 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 have shown twice in 1948 and again in 2001 that
they want to kill Jews more than they want a 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 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 is 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.
But something altogether different happened instead.3  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% of the 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 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 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 a
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 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 who lived under Yasser Arafat’s
corrupt dictatorship, and live presently under the the 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 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 or
the Gaza Strip. When Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt annexed
the Gaza strip  after the 1948 war, there was no Arab outrage. But the
war against Israel continued.
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—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 a 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 occupation of the
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 –
“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 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% 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 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
Palestinians that the proposed revision was purely tactical and did
not alter the movement’s utlimate goals. He did this explicitly and in
a speech given to the Palestine Legislative Council when he called on
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
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
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 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% 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, the Arabs
were busy making sure that their refugees remained in squalid refugee
camps in the West Bank and Gaza, where they were powerless, rightless,
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 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 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.
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.
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. 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 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 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% 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% 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 hardline opposition
leader Ariel Sharon’s highly publicized 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 followup 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-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 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 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 Palestinian desire for
peace with Israel, there are 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
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 Palestine liberation movement that
are morally repellent. The Palestinian cause is itself corrupt. The
“Palestinian problem” is a problem created by the Arabs themselves,
and can only be solved by them. The reason there are 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,
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 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 most vile antihuman terrorism the
world has ever seen: Suicide bombing of civilians.
If a nation state is all the 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 Palestinians want to destroy
Israel. This is morally hateful. It is the Nazi virus revived. Despite
this, 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.
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 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 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 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 Palestinian side in this conflict. 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.
DoD
2013-02-13 01:42:12 UTC
Permalink
Post by Aviroce
I did not read all the trash you wrote. But I am answering your first
paragraph.
Fuck off asslifter.
Topaz
2013-02-13 02:15:53 UTC
Permalink
Democracy is a cruel joke when the Jews control the media.

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation
with the average voter."
Winston Churchill

"Jewry rules from behind the mask of democracy. What one calls
democracy today is concealed Jewish domination. Jews determine what
happens in the democratic states"
Julius Streicher, Der Stürmer, #34/1939.

"A couple of weeks ago I quoted a few sentences from a book published
in 1928 titled Propaganda, by ... Edward Bernays. Today I'll read to
you an expanded set of excerpts from Bernays' book to give you a
little more of the gist of his message. I quote:

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits
and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic
society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society
constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of
our country.

"We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes are formed, our
ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. This is a
logical result of the way in which our democratic society is
organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner
if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. . . .

"Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it
remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in
the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our
ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of
persons . . . who understand the mental processes and social patterns
of the masses.
It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who
harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the
world. . .

"No serious sociologist believes any longer that the voice of the
people expresses any divine or especially wise and lofty idea. The
voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is
made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those
persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. . . .

"Whether in the problem of getting elected to office or in the problem
of interpreting and popularizing new issues, or in the problem of
making the day-to-day administration of public affairs a vital part of
the community life, the use of propaganda, carefully adjusted to the
mentality of the masses, is an essential adjunct of political life." -
end of quote -

I should mention that Bernays' book is not profound or especially
valuable in itself. It merely states a few self-evident facts about
the way in which a modern society works. For the person interested in
propaganda, far more useful books are available. The fact that Bernays
was a Jew is not even especially relevant here except to emphasize
that propaganda, the mass media, psychology, and the manipulation of
others always have been subjects of special interest to the Jews. It
is not for nothing that they are as thick in these fields today as
they were in the time of Bernays and Freud. The reason I chose
Bernays' book to quote is that it provides a more concise and clear
summary, in a few quotable paragraphs, of the role of propaganda in
modern life than most other
books on the subject.

If I were you I wouldn't even waste time trying to hunt down a copy of
Bernays' book. All it does is state the obvious: namely, that the
whole concept of democracy is meaningless in an age where a few people
have in their hands the mechanism for controlling the attitudes and
opinions of a majority of the electorate. And Bernays also takes the
disingenuous position that not only is this control a fact of life,
but it is a good thing; it is necessary to control and regiment the
thinking of the public in order to avoid chaos, and it can only lead
us to greater progress and prosperity. He simply glosses over the
question of
who should exercise this control and what their motives should be.

If you really want to study the subject of propaganda, a good place to
start is with the 1962 book, also titled Propaganda, by the Frenchman
Jacques Ellul. That book is still in print and is available from the
sponsor of this program, National Vanguard Books. Professor Ellul
deals with the subject in much greater depth and with much greater
honesty than Bernays does, but he agrees with Bernays on the most
obvious and
fundamental conclusions: on the irrelevance of the idea of democracy,
for example. I quote from Professor Ellul's book:

"If I am in favor of democracy, I can only regret that propaganda
renders the true exercise of it almost impossible. But I think that it
would be even worse to entertain any illusions about a coexistence of
true democracy and propaganda." -- end of quote --

To me it is frustrating that a conclusion that seems so obvious is
nevertheless resisted by so many otherwise intelligent people.
Democracy has become almost a sacred concept to them, this idea that
the policies guiding our nation should be decided by counting the
votes of every featherless biped who has reached the age of 18. It's
like motherhood:
they're almost afraid to question it.

This seems to be as true of intellectuals in our society as it is of
Joe Sixpacks. The fact is that intellectuals are no more likely to be
independent-minded than people who work with their hands; most
intellectuals, just like most Joe Sixpacks, are lemmings. In fact, as
Ellul points out, it is precisely the intellectuals who are most
strongly controlled by propaganda, because they are more open to every
medium of propaganda.

And I must admit that it took me a long time to overcome the ideas
drummed into me when I was in school that under a democracy people are
more free than under any other political system, that under a
democracy we are all free to think and say whatever we want, and that
we have a greater responsibility as citizens of a democracy to make up
our own minds about things independently, and so on. Actually, we
still have some degree of individual freedom in the United States
today because more than 200 years ago men whose temperament was far
more aristocratic than democratic in the modern sense of the word were
willing to go to war against their legitimate government in order to
secure that freedom for us, and people with a truly democratic
temperament, who have been
gnawing away at that freedom ever since, haven't yet succeeded in
suppressing it completely.

Well, it should not be surprising to us that although books such as
Professor Ellul's Propaganda - and many others - are readily
available, almost no one has heard of them. Keeping the public
believing in the myth of democracy is an important element in
maintaining control over the thinking and behavior of the public. It
is simply immoral and
scandalous to question the reality of democracy. It's like questioning
the truth of the "Holocaust" story. And for that reason we're not
likely to be taught in our social studies classes in school or to read
in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal even the most obvious
and self-evident conclusions presented by Bernays or Ellul. We're
still
taught how democracy safeguards our freedom, even while those who
control the mechanism of propaganda in our democratic society are
working day and night to eliminate that freedom."



http://www.ihr.org/ http://heretical.com/ http://natvan.com/

http://national-socialist-worldview.blogspot.com
plainolamerican
2013-02-13 17:02:18 UTC
Permalink
Post by DoD
Introduction
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.
David Horowitz’s 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 Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield notes in his insightful Foreword,
this pamphlet “tells us why we should reject the ‘Blame Israel First’
narrative that has so thoroughly saturated the mainstream media… It
confronts the myth of 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” David Horowitz 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 David Horowitz 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 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 Palestinian self-determination
empowered a people steeped in the hatred of Jews to engage in
terrorism.
With the peace process each new level of 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, 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 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 ...
read more »
Why Israel Is the Victim
---
not an American concern.
Capt. Justice
2013-02-14 00:49:00 UTC
Permalink
They stole the land from the
Palestinian people, then committed
genocide against them driving
almost a million from their homes
and land out into refugee camps
in other nations and others into
refugee camps what's left of
the Palestinian Authority.

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