A look at Israel and the Palestinians

I recently read an article by Michael Brown on townhall.com, attempting to clarify the situation in the Middle East regarding Israel and Palestine. Considering how emotional this issue is, I think it's worthwhile to go through the five points he made.

1. There is no such thing as a historic “Palestinian people” living in the Middle East. It's true there have been Arabs living in the land of Palestine for centuries. But here's the key point--at no time before 1967 did these Arabs identify themselves as “Palestinians,” nor did they seek to achieve any kind of statehood there. So this is a made-up name for political purposes. In addition, before 1967, there was no such thing as Arab, Palestinian nationalism and no attempt to develop the territory as a homeland for the Arabs who lived there. The conclusion? The concept of a Palestinian people is a modern invention, and it is part of the anti-Israel propaganda machine without any basis in fact.

2. There were anti-Jewish intifadas in Palestine two decades before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. There is a fantasy being sold about the peaceful coexistence of Jews and Arabs before the state of Israel was formed. The reality is far different-- as Jews began to return to their one and only ancestral homeland in the late 19th century, hostilities began to rise among their Arab neighbors, despite the fact that there was more than enough room for both. By the way, the Jews paid for the land; they did not steal or wrench it away through warfare. By the 1920’s, radical Muslim leaders like Haj Amin Al-Husseini, who later backed Adolph Hitler, were organizing intifadas against the Jewish population, with many Jewish lives lost. And what helped fuel this hostility was the anti-Jewish sentiment found in the Koran and early Muslim traditions. Post-1948 Jew-hatred simply built on centuries of Islamic anti-Semitism.

3. Jewish refugees fleeing from Muslim and Arab countries were absorbed by Israel after 1948; Arab refugees fleeing from Israel after 1948 were not absorbed by Muslim and Arab countries. With their huge size, it would have been easy for Arab countries to absorb the approximately 600,000 Arab refugees who fled Israel in 1948 when war was declared on Israel by five neighboring Arab nations. To this day, these refugees are not welcomed by other Arab states. These states want this problem to stay on the front burner as a way to avoid fixing their own problems and showing what failures modern Arab states are. How did Israel do with this same refugee problem? The tiny nation absorbed roughly 800,000 Jewish refugees that had to flee from Muslim nations after 1948.

4. Only one side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is truly committed to peaceful co-existence. Michael Brown, the author of this article, says there is an common expression that sums this up: If the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be no more war, but if the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be no more Israel. He cautions the reader that we shouldn't believe all Palestinians are warmongers and all Israelis are doves. But "the vast majority of Israelis are not driven by a radical ideology that calls for the extermination of their Arab neighbors, nor are they teaching their children songs about the virtues of religious martyrdom." Good point.

5. The current uprisings throughout the Muslim and Arab world today remind us that Israel cannot fairly be blamed for all the tension and conflicts in the region. If Israel disappeared, the Arab world would not be a peaceful place. As an example, Brown cites the constant disputes between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. He notes that in 1980, Abd Alhalim Khaddam, then Syria’s Foreign Minister, admitted, “If we look at a map of the Arab Homeland, we can hardly find two countries without conflict. . . . We can hardly find two countries which are not either in a state of war or on the road to war.”

Let me close with a powerful quotation from the article: "Certainly, there are many obstacles that stand in the way of a true peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, and the road ahead is fraught with uncertainty, but it would be a good starting point if we replaced myths and emotional arguments with facts." Isn't that true of so much we argue about?