Israel exists not because of the UN, but because Jews built the infrastructure for independence. The Arab state was never established because Arabs focused on destroying Jewish independence.
Sometimes the difference between destruction and progress is a simple ‘yes’. Seventy years ago today, the UN voted to partition the remaining 22% of British Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. The Jews accepted to divide their ancestral homeland. This, as opposed to the Arab leadership who rejected the partition and launched a genocidal war against the reborn Jewish state.
Israel exists not because of the UN, but because the Jews built the infrastructure for independence. The Arab state was never established because the Arabs focused on destroying Jewish independence.
While much has changed since November 29 1947, the core of the Arab-Jewish conflict remains the same: a systematic Muslim-Arab rejection of a reestablished Jewish homeland within any borders.
What has changed dramatically, however, is the position of the Jewish people in the world. In 1947, the Jewish people was homeless and powerless – important factors behind the UN partition vote that took place merely two years after the Holocaust. In 2017, Jews are no longer homeless and Israel has transformed from a poor and fragile state into a technological and military powerhouse.
While Israel and the Jewish people have genuine friends worldwide, world opinion has shifted dramatically against the Jewish state. As far as much of the West is concerned, Jews are only worthy of sympathy if they are weak and homeless. Jews are no longer seen as victims and self-appointed “liberals” frequently demonize Israel as a “racist aggressor” and even a “Nazi state.”
By contrast, Arabs and Muslims are increasingly portrayed by Western “progressives” as the “new Jews”. However, Muslim Arabs are neither homeless nor powerless. There are 22 Arab states and 57 Muslim countries stretching from Morocco at the Atlantic Ocean to Indonesia in the Indian Ocean. While global Islamic terrorism and fundamentalism have increased anti-Muslim sentiments, Muslims are mainly victims of other Muslims.
Israel, which supports territorial compromise and Arab-Jewish coexistence, is blamed for the lack of peace. By contrast, Muslim Arabs are portrayed as “victims” despite the fact that several generations of Arab leaders have systematically rejected a peaceful two-state solution.
Neighbors frequently have disagreements and occasionally even go to war against each other. Sweden and Denmark fought over borders but did not oppose each other’s right to exist. The same thing applies to the US vs Mexico, Britain vs France or Russia vs Japan. The conflict between Muslim Arabs and Jews stands out as the only conflict in human history where one side (Arab) seeks the total destruction of the other side.
While most of the world continues to see the Arab-Israeli conflict in territorial terms, four elusive key words could have ended the conflict long ago: Yes to Jewish independence. However, genuine peace is beyond Israel’s control, as it requires Muslim-Arab recognition of the Jewish people’s right to national independence. Liberal Jews and non-Jews fail to recognize that Israel’s enemies do not merely oppose specific policies but reject the Jewish state’s very existence within any borders.
The two-state solution has become the civic religion in much of the West. Unlike genuine liberation movements, PLO was not established to champion freedom but to deny the national freedom of the Jewish people. It is easy to forget in the BDS era that the genocidal terrorist organization PLO was created in 1964, three years before the “occupation” and before a single Jew had returned to the ancestral Jewish territory of Judea and Samaria. The territory that PLO seeks to “liberate” is Tel Aviv and Haifa.
PLO and Hamas represent the two main ideologies that reject Jewish national independence in the Middle East within any borders: pan-Arabism and Islamism. Pan-Arabism reached its peak with the Egyptian despot Gamal Abdel Nasser but lost stream after Israel’s military victory in 1967. Islamic fundamentalists reject Jewish national independence regardless if it is in Tel Aviv or in Judea. According to the Islamic world-view, Jews are “sons of apes and pigs” that must be subjugated or destroyed.
Genuine peace is even more difficult to accomplish today than 70 years ago. In 1947, there were sizable ancient Jewish communities in the Muslim Arab world. In today’s Jew-free Arab world, very few Muslim Arabs have ever met a living Jew. At the same time, several generations of Arab masses have been brainwashed with a genocidal cocktail of indigenous Islamist Jew-hatred and imported Western anti-Semitic conspiracy fantasies like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is always much easier to brainwash uninformed masses to hate the unknown.
Nowhere else in the world is Hitler’s Mein Kampf more popular than in the Muslim and Arab world. Only the Muslim world has the power to dismantle the shameful settlements of genocidal Jew-hatred that is has built in the hearts and minds of much of the Muslim world. Muslim Arab Jew-hatred is a function of the wider Middle Eastern pathology: blaming non-Muslims for the self-inflicted problems of the Muslim world.
Tacit cooperation between some Arab regimes and Israel against Iran should not be confused with Arab recognition of Israel. True peace between Arabs and Jews will only arrive when the Arab world ends its genocidal Jew-hatred and genuinely recognizes the existence of a tiny resurrected Jewish homeland.
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Daniel Kryger is a writer and a political analyst. He lives in Israel.
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