July 24th, 2002
A series of suicide bombings in mid- June led Israeli to announce “a change in the way [it] responds to murderous acts of terror”. Within days seven of eight Palestinian towns and cities were under occupation, and 700,000 people under curfew. Israel has meanwhile continued its policy of assassinating militant leaders, and an estimated 40 civilians are reported to have died on the West Bank.
So not only the Palestinians have had extreme ways of getting their point across, Israelis have as well.
There have been two refugee populations created by the Arab-Israeli conflict, not one.
While world attention has been focused on the Palestinian refugees, the dilemma of Jews from Arab countries, hundreds of thousands of whom became refugees as well, has been largely ignored. Many experts believe that the size of the two groups was roughly the same. But there was one profound difference – Israel immediately absorbed the Jewish refugees, while the Palestinian refugees were placed in camps and deliberately kept there as a matter of Arab policy and with the complicity of the UN.
There is no comparable situation in the world today where a refugee population has been exploited in this way. Until now, only one Arab country – Jordan – has offered citizenship to the Palestinian refugees.
The other 21 Arab countries, with their large territory and common language, religion, and ethnic roots with the Palestinians, have refused to do so. Why? They appear to have little interest in alleviating the plight of refugees living in often filthy camps for two and three generations. Rather, they want to breed hatred of Israel and thus use the refugees as a key weapon in the ongoing struggle against Israel.
Israelis desperately want peace.
Israelis want to stop worrying about bombs on buses and in malls. They want to put an end to burying their children, victims of terror or military engagements. In short, they want to lead normal lives, and they have demonstrated their willingness time and again to endorse far-reaching, even potentially risky, compromises in the quest for peace.
Israelis, however, have learned the painful lessons of history. Peace without security can be tantamount to national suicide. And who knows better than the citizens of Israel, who include Holocaust survivors and refugees from Communist lands and from Arab extremism, how dangerous it can be to let one’s guard down too quickly, too easily?
Are Israelis simply to ignore Iran and Iraq’s calls for Israel’s annihilation? The insatiable appetite for acquiring weapons of mass destruction in Tehran and Baghdad, Syria’s hospitality to terrorist groups bent on Israel’s destruction, Hezbollah’s mass of short-range missiles capable of reaching the northern third of Israel, and the call for suicide attacks against Israel heard in Gaza and the West Bank?
Israel lives in a rough neighbourhood. To survive, it has had to be courageous both on the battlefield and at the peace table, passing both tests with flying colours. As Israel faces the unresolved challenges in its region, it deserves both understanding and support.
Part 2
This is explaining how Israel became entangled in the mess it is today.
No country’s historical record is perfect, and Israel, like other democratic nations, has made its share of mistakes.Israel has a proud record and the country’s friends shouldn’t hesitate to shout it from the rooftops. That record actually begins long before the establishment of the modern state in 1948.
The Jewish people’s link to the land of Israel is incontrovertible and unbroken.
It spans nearly four thousand years. Exhibit A for this connection is the Hebrew Bible. The Book of Genesis, the first of the five books of the Bible, recounts the story of Abraham, the covenantal relationship with One God, and the move from Ur (in present-day Iraq) to Canaan, the region corresponding roughly to Israel. Exhibit B is any Jewish prayer book in use anywhere in the world. The references in the liturgy to Zion, the land of Israel, are endless.
The same is true of the connection between the Jewish people and Jerusalem.
It dates back to the period of King David, who lived approximately 3,000 years ago, and who established Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Ever since, Jerusalem has represented not only the geographical epicentre of the Jewish people, but also the spiritual heart of their faith and identity. Indeed, the relationship between Jerusalem and the Jewish people is entirely unique in the annals of history.
Jerusalem was the site of the two Temples – the first built by King Solomon during the tenth century B.C.E. and destroyed in 586 B.C.E. during the Babylonian conquest, and the second rebuilt less than a century later, refurbished by King Herod, and destroyed in 70 C.E. by Roman forces.
Though in forced dispersion for nearly 1,900 years, Jews never stopped yearning for Zion and Jerusalem. In addition to expressing this through prayer, there were always Jews who lived in the land of Israel, and especially Jerusalem. Indeed, since the 19th century, Jews have constituted a majority of the city’s population. For example, according to the Political Dictionary of the State of Israel, Jews were 61.9 percent of Jerusalem’s population in 1892.
The historical and religious link to Jerusalem is especially important because some Arabs seek to rewrite history and assert that Jews are nothing more than “foreign occupiers” or “colonialists” with no actual tie to the land. Such attempts to deny Israel’s legitimacy are demonstrably false and need to be exposed for the lies they are. They also entirely ignore the “inconvenient” fact that when Jerusalem was under Muslim (i.e. Ottoman and, later, Jordanian) rule.
On May 15, 1948, the armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria attacked the fledgling Jewish state, seeking its destruction.
In the course of this war, launched by the Arab side, civilian populations were affected, just as in all wars. Controversies continue to this day about how many local Arabs fled Israel because Arab leaders called on them to do so or threatened them if they did not comply, how many left out of fear of the fighting, and how many were compelled to do so by Israeli forces. Importantly, hundreds of thousands of Arabs ended up staying in Israel and became citizens of the state.
But the central point must not be overlooked – Arab countries began this war aiming to wipe out the 650,000 Jews in the new state of Israel, and by doing so the Arabs defied the UN plan for the creation of both Arab and Jewish states.