Eight Points in Defense of Israel

In response to my article “You Don’t Have To Be Jewish To Love Israel,” a reader, Edmund Casey wrote the following:

Were a population that had been native to Palestine for over 1200 years denied their right to become a nation after the breakup of the Turkish Empire in 1918?

I am a firm supporter of Israel, but, this is the question all those who differ from me on the subject are asking, and they all answer “yes”. The question never appears in articles like this one.

What do people think?

I thank Edmund Casey for his question, which stirred me to a response.

Here’s what I think:

1. Judea and Samaria are more important in Jewish history than any other part of Israel save Jerusalem. Jews have lived continuously in Judea and Samaria for the past 3500 years, albeit in small numbers. The only time the area was without any Jews was between 1949 and 1967, when the Jordanians expelled all of its Jewish inhabitants.

2. If, in order to obtain that will-o’-the-wisp a “two-state solution,” Israel were to be squeezed back within the 1949 Armistice Lines (often called, meretriciously and inaccurately, the “1967 borders”) it would then be stripped of even the tiniest strategic depth, which it needs to buy time to call up its largely citizen army in case of Arab attack. Instead the Jewish state would be lefft hopelessly vulnerable, with a nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea. Israel could then be cut in half by an invader force from the east within a matter of hours, as the British military historian B. H. Liddell Hart long ago pointed out.

3. There may have been a handful of Muslims Arabs who arrived “1200 years” ago but there were also Jews, Turks, Christians, Samaritans, and others. In the nineteenth century fifty languages were spoken in the Land of Israel. The population of Muslim Arabs began to grow late in he 19th century, and the boost to that population came in the 20th century as a result of economic activity by the Zionist pioneers.

4. Much of the land in what became the Palestine Mandate was waste or state land (that is, was owned by the Ottomans). The Arabs were mostly peasants working lands owned by absentee landlords in Amman and Constantinople.

5. The League of Nations, formed by those nations that had defeated the Ottomans and caused the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, created various mandates to bring about the independence of states that had formerly been part of the Ottoman domains. The League created several mandates — Iraq, Lebanon/Syria — for the Arabs, and one mandate — the Mandate for Palestine — for the Jews. Originally that state was to include historic Palestine on both sides of the Jordan river. But The Zionists were betrayed by the British, who in 1921 at the Cairo Conference, decided to seal off all of eastern Palestine, constituting 78% of the original territory to be included in Mandatory Palestine, to Jewish immigration. The Jews who opposed this severing of so much territory from the Mandate were called the Revisionists, led by the remarkable writer, journalist, and orator Zev Jabotinsky (the Russian ambassador to Great Britain declared that Jabotinsky was the greatest orator he had ever heard).. The Revisionists tried to keep that territory in Mandatory Palestine, but their objections were dismissed. The British performed this ghastly surgery in order to turn all the land east of the Jordan into the Emirate of Transjordan, with the Hashemite King Abdullah as its ruler. This was done to prevent Abdullah from marching on Syria, to provide himself with the throne he thought he deserved. After all, his younger brother Feisal had been put by the British on the throne of Iraq, and Abdullah thought he deserved as much. Had he marched on Damascus, that would have caused problems for the British with the French, whose amed forces were present in Syria and about to take control of the Mandate for Syria and Lebanon.

6. The Palestinian Arabs are not a separate “people” but, rather, part of the much larger Arab people. Look, for example, at the records of what Arab diplomats said at the U.N. Until the late 1960s, they never referred to “Palestinians” but only to “Arab refugees.” The Lebanese-born Jamil Baroody, that long-winded and digressive speaker who, despite being a Melkite Greek Catholic, was Saudi Arabia’s ambassador at the U.N. from its very start in 1946 to 1979, when Baroody died, never once referred in his hundreds of speeches made before 1970 (when I stopped looking) to the “Palestinian people” When Nasser in May 1967 began o harangue Cairene crowds and tell them of the enormous victory that they would soon celebrate after the noble Egyptian army launched its attack on the Zionists, he did not mention the “Palestinian people.” They were not called the “Palestinians” by anyone until the mid-1960s, a renaming — or rebranding — that was made at the suggestion of the public relations experts in the KGB. The effect was to present the conflict to the gullible Western world as one “between two peoples” — the original inhabitants being the “Palestinian people” who were fighting to get back the land “that was stolen by the Zionists.”

7. In 1970 the Palestinian Arab Zuheir Mohsen, head of the terror group As Saiqa, told the journalist James Dorsey in an interview for the Dutch newspaper Trouw that “The Palestinian people does not exist. There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity, because it is in the interest of the Arabs to encourage a separate Palestinian identity in contrast to Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity is there only for tactical reasons. The establishment of a Palestinian state is a new expedient to continue the fight against Zionism and for Arab unity.”

8. There are already 22 Arab states in existence. The Arab people have been more richly endowed with states than any other people on earth, not to mention the unmerited trillions of dollars in oil wealth, the result of an accident of geology, that several of them possess. It does not seem to me acceptable that the one very tiny Jewish state should be forced to yield the most historic part of the Land of Israel and to endure a permanent condition of maximum peril in order to create a 23rd Arab state.