ONE MORE WORD

Mr. Slavick, in his letter to your paper (The Last Word On Brudnoy, last week’s Portland Phoenix) has some interesting points regarding US failures in the world. But he is grossly misinformed about the history of the Middle-East conflict.

In 1948, the UN partitioned the British Protectorate of Palestine (which was a region on the maps, not a country) after 20 years of Arabs murdering their Jewish neighbors. There hasn’t been a sovereign Palestine EVER. The closest thing to it derived from a British White Paper during the Great War to End All Wars, in which Britain promised to help create a Jewish State in the barren wastes of Palestine (read Mark Twain’s description of the area). They later partially reneged by creating Jordan out of the majority of the Palestinian region. When the UN attempted to create a Jewish and an Arab state in 1948, five neighboring Arab states invaded, hoping to commit double infanticide. The 900,000 Jews, some natives of Palestine, some survivors of Europe and the death camps, barely managed to defend themselves at great cost against the forces fielded by their 100,000,000 Arab neighbors.

After their marginal victory, Israel had to absorb 800,000 Jews who fled threats of death in the Arab countries all around. The Arabs were more subtle, leaving their fellow refugees in camps, and for the following 20 years gave no thought to granting them the independent statehood that Mr. Slavick demands as justice. Why was that? Egypt controlled Gaza, Jordan controlled Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Yet we never heard any hint of a suggestion to permit the refugees to found an independent Palestinian State, despite the UN mandate to create one.

The Jewish refugees who arrived in Israel immediately after the War of Independence were Arabs, in the social sense of the word, yet they had no safety in any of their native Arab lands despite residence there going back thousands of years. These people were assisted by the new Jewish State to settle on lands belonging to the State. Those State Lands were granted to Israel (and presumably to the Arab State which was killed off by the neighboring Arab invaders) by the British who had inherited them from the Turks, who had ruled the region for centuries . . . all the way back to the Roman conquest which predated the start of Christianity. There hasn’t been a viable, independent country on that soil since the Jewish Kingdoms. The balance of land in foundling Israel was privately owned by Jews and Arabs who had passed their property down through the centuries of their residence in the Holy Land, or was purchased from absentee land-owners (often by groups fleeing persecution in Russia or Europe).

I can’t imagine where Mr. Slavick comes up with the idea that Israel just chose to attack her giant, powerful neighbors every few years. Those neighboring states were constantly attacking Israel in border raids. That produced the 1956 war. 1967 was even simpler. The Egyptians told the UN peacekeepers to leave, and they immediately complied, thus freeing the Egyptians to attack Israel. The Egyptians also blockaded Israel, and committed other acts of war.

Israel’s miraculous victory propelled her from sympathetic underdog to world tyrant. Israel’s failure to be crushed by a powerful and malevolent enemy has been a chronic source of angst among ill-informed do-gooders and irrational, self-hating Jews. As to what constitutes Israel’s boundaries, international law and various UN resolutions state that the final boundaries of the countries will be determined by negotiation between the confrontation states, despite a lot of drivel from media types who haven’t made the effort to find out the truth. Negotiations can’t succeed until the Arabs choose to accept Israel’s existence, and they have so far refused to do that, despite occasional English-language pronouncements intended to deceive the West.

As to the “occupation” — Arafat and his henchmen have been given huge sums of money for housing, schools, and general infrastructure to improve the lot of their subjects. That they chose to spend this money on weapons, Swiss bank accounts, and logistics to indoctrinate hatred among their population is not Israel’s fault. Such actions cause Israelis to die in large numbers and require protective action by the Israeli government. The Arabs have kept their brethren, 700,000 Palestinian Arabs and their descendants, miserable and in camps for 50 years, the only displaced persons in the world to have never been absorbed. Compare this to the total population displacements of the Twentieth Century, which are estimated to number 100,000,000, all of whom except for the Palestinian Arabs have been resettled and integrated into the societies in which they live. Our friends the Saudis pay billions every year, along with Europeans and other enlightened fund sources, to see that those displaced persons remain in camps and NEVER get to lead a normal life, to ensure that Arab hostility to Israel and to the West remains high and deadly active, and thus to guarantee that there will be lots more trouble throughout the Middle-East and the rest of the world. THAT is the source of the problem, not the fantasy Mr. Slavick has woven. While it is not politically correct to say so, the world is faced with a religious war of unprecedented proportions. Evidence is obvious and everywhere, for those willing to see it, from Indonesian mass killings, to India-Pakistan, to the Philippines, to the Sudan, Ethiopia, Algeria, Iran-Iraq, Afghanistan, and, yes, the Middle-East, not to ignore New York City, whether 1993 or 2001. So long as the teaching of hatred of dimmis (infidels) is the fare of nursery schools, television, and mosques throughout the Arab world, peace is not possible, no matter what happens in Palestine. Making up “facts” just distracts from this reality, and only further aggravates the problem.

Richard Collier
Eliot