A Simple Way to Understand the Arab-Israeli conflict
I'm going to simplify the Arab-Israeli conflict for you. I know, I know, every pundit and editorial writer tells you that this conflict is the most complex issue in the whole world, requiring deep thought, creative solutions, and of course, first and foremost, major concessions on the part of Israel. None of these experts can even conceive of a start to any solution without requiring Israeli concessions. You know and I know that those concessions in the past haven't done a bit of good. On the contrary, they've made things worse. You'll soon understand why that's so.
The simple reasoning that explains the more than 60 years Arab-Israeli conflict is this; Arabs could not concede loss of a war to Jews. Lets be clear that we are dealing with a single ongoing war as far as the Arabs are concerned. The various outbreaks have merely been manifestations of continuing war. Palestinians and their supporting Arabs and non-Arab Muslims could not fathom the idea of Jewish military victory.
Didn't everyone know that Jews aren't fighters? For centuries Muslims knew exactly how to deal with Jews, and they also saw how other powers dealt with Jews. It was the same everywhere. They observed Jews "cowardly behaviour " again and again. For two thousand years Jews were tormented, murdered, and harassed, yet they did not take up arms and revolt. To Muslims they were infidils, that is something less than human, and yet Jews remained passive under the domain of the Sultan or other authorities in the Muslim world. How Jews handled this discrimination was to buy their way out of difficulties with the Muslim rulers and with their society.
You should understand that Jews were a wonderful source of money. They were a good business for both Christian and Muslim rulers. It was easy to fill the coffers of lords or kings or sultans, or what-have-you, when you had Jews in your realm and under your domination. To begin with, infidels had to pay higher taxes than Muslims. They explained this discrimination as generosity on the part of Muslim authorities to let Jews abide anywhere in their territory. But apparently both Christians and Jews were better than unbelievers who weren't even "people of the book" , thus they were allowed to stay as long as they paid up. Armenian Christians, on occasion, had challenged the condition of second class citizenship, but Jews never dared, or perhaps they knew they had no alternative but to manipulate and plead and buy their way out of trouble. It was a Jewish tradition, one might say.
So what is this upstart bunch of Jews doing, pretending that they are first class citizens with the will and the ability to defend themselves? When I say that the Arabs could not accept defeat at the hand of Jews, there's plenty of evidence that this is their reality.
Think back to 1947 when the UN voted to partition what was left of mandated Palestine after the British had truncated it by carving out the Kingdom of Transjordan from that allocated territory. As an aside, do you know why the British did this? No? Well, since they wanted to have access to the oil in Mesopotamia, they created a country called Iraq, giving one Hashemite brother its kingdom, and they therefore had to find another piece of land for the other brother. Why not carve out a piece from the territory that was designated earlier by the British as the home for the Jewish people, and so Transjordan -- later simplified to Jordan --was born. But back to the main subject!
What were all the Arab countries incensed about? The remaining parcel of land was divided according to its habitation, ie., Arabs for the part where Arabs lived, Jews for the part where Jews lived. The size of the Jews' land was not much bigger than the area that constitutes a big city, if you look at a map from that era. But no way would Arabs concede the right of Jews to live in the land that they considered Muslim territory. The fact that this land had originally been Jewish land was ignored or denied. That the Muslims had been occupiers of that land after more than one military conquest, this they also ignored. Seven Arab countries invaded the newly established Jewish state in 1948. Count them; Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Kuwait. They were at ease about that little war, or what they clearly expected to be a little war, because Jews weren't fighters. Or so they believed.
But when they actually were defeated and had to use the UN to bail them out and stop the war, that didn't mean they were content to make peace with this infant country. Not at all. The waiting game had just begun. The next round would be better, they were certain. They made all kinds of rationalizations for their defeat. Somehow the Jews had a powerful army that was secretive, because 'Jews were always secretive". Or maybe it wasn't Jews they were actually fighting. It was a conspiracy with the United States or Britain or maybe some other power. But it could not be the Jews who defeated all those combined Arab armies. As we know, no one came to the assistance of the Jews, and it was they alone who fought and salvaged the survival of this new, fragile, fledgling country.
There was some re-inforcement of that conspiracy theory when the British and French attacked Egypt in 1956 along with Israeli forces acting in concert, each with their own reason. The French and British were attempting to reverse Egypt's takeover of the Suez Canal, the Israeli were responding to Nasser's blocking of the Straits of Tiran, the narrow waterway that is Israel's outlet to the Red Sea.
Of course the Arabs weren't giving up. The Six Day War of 1967 was the next attempt. They lost again, but were they convinced that they should therefore sue for peace? On the contrary, that was when they issued the famous three no's of the Khartoum conference; no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.
Thus began their new war strategy, terrorism as war. Arafat was the master of their horrible murdering practices, by which it was deemed that there was no such being as an innocent Jew. Children in kindergarten, bus passengers, old folks homes, air travellers, Olympic athletes, the more vulnerable the better, all were subjects for this new form of carrying on the war against the Jews. And the techniques were ingenious, the most amazing being the willingness of countless numbers of Arabs to commit suicide by strapping explosive around their body, using their own bodies as the weapon of choice for killing Jews. It is hard to fathom the death cult of Muslim Arabs if one conceives of life as the ultimate value.
Once upon a time the world would have been appalled at such barbarism, but no, the Palestinians were now winning over Jew-haters of all stripes and varieties, leftist professors, of course Moslems who were delighted that they had found an effective way of killing Jewish men, women and children, committed antisemites, much of the media of Europe, less so in America but still significant, and so on.
But the terrorist message and methodology has come home to roost. Muslims now are killing Muslim by means of suicide bombers. The war between the Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq is essentially one relying on suicide techniques, either with an individual body, or a car bomb with humans inside, or some other forms of the same concept. Moreover, similar devices have been used to attack Morroco, Algeria, Indonesia, and other Moslem societies.
Once upon a time I wrote an article entitled "First the Jews, and then You". My point in that essay was that no one got excited when terrorist attacks were merely killing Jews, there was no moral outrage and outcry, and so the world became accustomed to this horrorible homicidal weaponry. Moral outrage at the onset of Arafat's methods might have worked to prevent the attacks in Bali, London, Madrid, and perhaps even 9/11 in the United States. Instead Arafat became a hero of the left, and Rabin helped make the big lie bigger, by endorsing an image of Arafat as a peace-maker instead of the true picture, that of mass murderer.
Now you might say that the peace agreements between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Jordan indicates that the Arab and Muslim world has come around to accepting the victory of Jews in this long war. It's true there's a written peace agreement between these two countries and Israel, but the people in these two countries are as hostile as ever. Jordan is still "yudenrein", with laws that prohibit Jews from settling and owning property in that country. Egypt has withdrawn its ambassador from Israel and Israelis are unwelcome in Egypt in any capacity that normal relations would require, such as professional interchange and courtesy. This isn't peace, it is a reality check, that for now Jordan and Egypt cannot take on Israel in conventional modes of warfare. Moreover, the voice of a non-Arab Muslim, the president of Iran, who has threatened to make of Israel another Holocaust, is applauded throughout the Arab world.
What is happening now as I write this article is the exhibition of the Palestinians willing to destroy themselves as long as they can continue to fight the Jews. For the first time in its history, Gaza is not dominated by another power, no British, no Egyptians, no Ottomans, no Israelis. Gaza is now in the sole hands of the Palestinians. So what is the first and only thing on the agenda for this freed territory by Palestinians? It is to build bunkers, tunnels for smuggling arms, and to bring in missiles to make war on Israel from Gaza. The businesses and the buildings that the Jews left in their withdrawal from Gaza have been raized. Palestinians are not about building an economy. They can continue to rely on handouts, and spend their energy and time on making war on the Jews. This is still the fundamental Arab mentality, that to make war on the Jews is an ongoing Muslim obligation, even if it involves self-destruction.
The simple reasoning that explains the more than 60 years Arab-Israeli conflict is this; Arabs could not concede loss of a war to Jews. Lets be clear that we are dealing with a single ongoing war as far as the Arabs are concerned. The various outbreaks have merely been manifestations of continuing war. Palestinians and their supporting Arabs and non-Arab Muslims could not fathom the idea of Jewish military victory.
Didn't everyone know that Jews aren't fighters? For centuries Muslims knew exactly how to deal with Jews, and they also saw how other powers dealt with Jews. It was the same everywhere. They observed Jews "cowardly behaviour " again and again. For two thousand years Jews were tormented, murdered, and harassed, yet they did not take up arms and revolt. To Muslims they were infidils, that is something less than human, and yet Jews remained passive under the domain of the Sultan or other authorities in the Muslim world. How Jews handled this discrimination was to buy their way out of difficulties with the Muslim rulers and with their society.
You should understand that Jews were a wonderful source of money. They were a good business for both Christian and Muslim rulers. It was easy to fill the coffers of lords or kings or sultans, or what-have-you, when you had Jews in your realm and under your domination. To begin with, infidels had to pay higher taxes than Muslims. They explained this discrimination as generosity on the part of Muslim authorities to let Jews abide anywhere in their territory. But apparently both Christians and Jews were better than unbelievers who weren't even "people of the book" , thus they were allowed to stay as long as they paid up. Armenian Christians, on occasion, had challenged the condition of second class citizenship, but Jews never dared, or perhaps they knew they had no alternative but to manipulate and plead and buy their way out of trouble. It was a Jewish tradition, one might say.
So what is this upstart bunch of Jews doing, pretending that they are first class citizens with the will and the ability to defend themselves? When I say that the Arabs could not accept defeat at the hand of Jews, there's plenty of evidence that this is their reality.
Think back to 1947 when the UN voted to partition what was left of mandated Palestine after the British had truncated it by carving out the Kingdom of Transjordan from that allocated territory. As an aside, do you know why the British did this? No? Well, since they wanted to have access to the oil in Mesopotamia, they created a country called Iraq, giving one Hashemite brother its kingdom, and they therefore had to find another piece of land for the other brother. Why not carve out a piece from the territory that was designated earlier by the British as the home for the Jewish people, and so Transjordan -- later simplified to Jordan --was born. But back to the main subject!
What were all the Arab countries incensed about? The remaining parcel of land was divided according to its habitation, ie., Arabs for the part where Arabs lived, Jews for the part where Jews lived. The size of the Jews' land was not much bigger than the area that constitutes a big city, if you look at a map from that era. But no way would Arabs concede the right of Jews to live in the land that they considered Muslim territory. The fact that this land had originally been Jewish land was ignored or denied. That the Muslims had been occupiers of that land after more than one military conquest, this they also ignored. Seven Arab countries invaded the newly established Jewish state in 1948. Count them; Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Kuwait. They were at ease about that little war, or what they clearly expected to be a little war, because Jews weren't fighters. Or so they believed.
But when they actually were defeated and had to use the UN to bail them out and stop the war, that didn't mean they were content to make peace with this infant country. Not at all. The waiting game had just begun. The next round would be better, they were certain. They made all kinds of rationalizations for their defeat. Somehow the Jews had a powerful army that was secretive, because 'Jews were always secretive". Or maybe it wasn't Jews they were actually fighting. It was a conspiracy with the United States or Britain or maybe some other power. But it could not be the Jews who defeated all those combined Arab armies. As we know, no one came to the assistance of the Jews, and it was they alone who fought and salvaged the survival of this new, fragile, fledgling country.
There was some re-inforcement of that conspiracy theory when the British and French attacked Egypt in 1956 along with Israeli forces acting in concert, each with their own reason. The French and British were attempting to reverse Egypt's takeover of the Suez Canal, the Israeli were responding to Nasser's blocking of the Straits of Tiran, the narrow waterway that is Israel's outlet to the Red Sea.
Of course the Arabs weren't giving up. The Six Day War of 1967 was the next attempt. They lost again, but were they convinced that they should therefore sue for peace? On the contrary, that was when they issued the famous three no's of the Khartoum conference; no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.
Thus began their new war strategy, terrorism as war. Arafat was the master of their horrible murdering practices, by which it was deemed that there was no such being as an innocent Jew. Children in kindergarten, bus passengers, old folks homes, air travellers, Olympic athletes, the more vulnerable the better, all were subjects for this new form of carrying on the war against the Jews. And the techniques were ingenious, the most amazing being the willingness of countless numbers of Arabs to commit suicide by strapping explosive around their body, using their own bodies as the weapon of choice for killing Jews. It is hard to fathom the death cult of Muslim Arabs if one conceives of life as the ultimate value.
Once upon a time the world would have been appalled at such barbarism, but no, the Palestinians were now winning over Jew-haters of all stripes and varieties, leftist professors, of course Moslems who were delighted that they had found an effective way of killing Jewish men, women and children, committed antisemites, much of the media of Europe, less so in America but still significant, and so on.
But the terrorist message and methodology has come home to roost. Muslims now are killing Muslim by means of suicide bombers. The war between the Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq is essentially one relying on suicide techniques, either with an individual body, or a car bomb with humans inside, or some other forms of the same concept. Moreover, similar devices have been used to attack Morroco, Algeria, Indonesia, and other Moslem societies.
Once upon a time I wrote an article entitled "First the Jews, and then You". My point in that essay was that no one got excited when terrorist attacks were merely killing Jews, there was no moral outrage and outcry, and so the world became accustomed to this horrorible homicidal weaponry. Moral outrage at the onset of Arafat's methods might have worked to prevent the attacks in Bali, London, Madrid, and perhaps even 9/11 in the United States. Instead Arafat became a hero of the left, and Rabin helped make the big lie bigger, by endorsing an image of Arafat as a peace-maker instead of the true picture, that of mass murderer.
Now you might say that the peace agreements between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Jordan indicates that the Arab and Muslim world has come around to accepting the victory of Jews in this long war. It's true there's a written peace agreement between these two countries and Israel, but the people in these two countries are as hostile as ever. Jordan is still "yudenrein", with laws that prohibit Jews from settling and owning property in that country. Egypt has withdrawn its ambassador from Israel and Israelis are unwelcome in Egypt in any capacity that normal relations would require, such as professional interchange and courtesy. This isn't peace, it is a reality check, that for now Jordan and Egypt cannot take on Israel in conventional modes of warfare. Moreover, the voice of a non-Arab Muslim, the president of Iran, who has threatened to make of Israel another Holocaust, is applauded throughout the Arab world.
What is happening now as I write this article is the exhibition of the Palestinians willing to destroy themselves as long as they can continue to fight the Jews. For the first time in its history, Gaza is not dominated by another power, no British, no Egyptians, no Ottomans, no Israelis. Gaza is now in the sole hands of the Palestinians. So what is the first and only thing on the agenda for this freed territory by Palestinians? It is to build bunkers, tunnels for smuggling arms, and to bring in missiles to make war on Israel from Gaza. The businesses and the buildings that the Jews left in their withdrawal from Gaza have been raized. Palestinians are not about building an economy. They can continue to rely on handouts, and spend their energy and time on making war on the Jews. This is still the fundamental Arab mentality, that to make war on the Jews is an ongoing Muslim obligation, even if it involves self-destruction.
posted by Professor Sal at 5:10 PM
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