Wednesday, February 08, 2006

History and Hatred of Israel

There is an astonishing amount of ignorance these days about how Israel go started, and the way that the antique media portrays current events doesn't help much, spinning things so that Israel is transformed into an occupier and oppressor of the poor Arabs around them.

Israel's Arab opponents have declared that it has no right to exist, and they have done nothing but attack Israel without letup from the day of its creation. It's either eternal war or extinction, so eternal war it is.

The State of Israel was created by an act of the United Nations mostly out of land that Jews already owned, having bought the land from the mostly Arab Palestinians over many years. By the time the State was created there were already more than a half million Jews living there on their own land. Great Britain, who controlled Palestine at the time, had been trying to keep Jews out of Palestine, sending them back to Europe when they attempted to leave to join the Jews in Palestine, or esle there would have been many more. Many of those turned back, of course, were subsequently slaughtered by the Nazis, and so Great Britain bears some of the responsiblity for those deaths, as do many nations that restricted Jewish attempts to leave anti-semetic Europe. So, it was partly out of a sense of redressing a great injustice that the United Nations created the State of Israel.

Arabs had been attacking the Jewish settlements in Palestine even before Israel was created. The Arab nations refused to accept Israel's creation and immediately attacked. From that day to this it has been war, and the myth of Israel as an occupier who ejected Palestinians from the land was born. Subsequent parcels of land like Gaza were those won from the enemy in various wars.

When a nation loses land in a war caused by their own aggression and hatred then they've got no right to complain and no one to blame but themselves.

Most of the land lost by Arabs was lost in the 6 days war of 1967.

In 1967, the President of Egypt, Nassar, declared that he intended to destroy Israel and that the Egyptian people wanted war. He ordered UN peacekeepers out of the Sinai, he remilitarized the Sinai and put 7 divisions of troops (100,000) and tanks (800) on the border with Israel. Egypt closed the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping, which in and of itself was an act of war. Jordan started massing troops (55,000), tanks (300), and planes at their border with Israel, and then Jordan and Egypt signed a mutual defense treaty in which Jordanian troops were put under the command of the Egyptian generals. Thus, Jordanian and Egyptian troops were poised to cut Israel in half in a matter of minutes.

And so Israel, after appealing to the UN and the international community for help in vain, rather than waiting to be destroyed, decided to seize the initiative and attack.

In the end the Arabs lost a lot of land and lives (21,000 dead) vs less than 1000 Israeli soldiers killed. Such are the fortures of war.

Egypt later got the Sinai back through peaceful negoiations with Israel, a development despised by the rest of the Arab world and that led to the assasination of the Egyptian President.

And from that point on Israel has been trying to get the Arabs to negotiate a peace and recognition of Israel by offering in various degrees to give land back to the Arabs and return to the 1967 borders. Events have shown that many Arabs have no interest in ever doing this, their only interest is in seeing Israel destroyed, and any concession is little more than a temporary truce in the ongoing war.

Since well before Israel was created both sides of the conflict, Arab and Israeli, have been using terroristic tactics, attacking the other side's civilian population whenever they found themselves in an assymetrical situation. But it is Israel that is the democratic state. It is Israel that has a viable justice system and whose strong men adhere to the rule of law, and it is Israel that has been a friend and ally of the US since the beginning.