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On Monday,
January 13th at the Universal Amphitheater at
Universal studios, Dr. Henry Kissinger and Shimon
Peres participated in a discussion on the war on
terrorism and the crisis in Israel.
Shimon Peres, who
described himself as “Henry’s student” and
repeatedly spoke of his admiration for Kissinger,
re-affirmed his optimistic faith in the
possibility of a peaceful co-existence between
Israelis and Palestinians. Appearing tired and
worn, Peres wearily repeated the importance of
having respect for the Palestinian people and not
treating them as “inferiors.” Watching this
formidable figure on stage, one could not help but
wonder if, in light of the most recent murders of
Israeli civilians by Arabs, the once glaring,
resounding optimism has been dulled to a meek
whisper struggling for its own life.
Kissinger,
although supporting the idea of an eventual
Palestinian state, declared that such an event can
only take place once all other matters are
settled. What in fact the audience of some six
thousand spectators were witnessing was a live
demonstration of the astounding diplomatic skill
which has made Kissinger one of the twentieth
centuries unparalleled political navigators. From
the last gasps of the Vietnam conflict to the
ending of the six day war over thirty years ago,
this brilliant political mind had not lost any of
its gleam. While acknowledging the wishes of his
friend and patriot, Kissinger at the same time
underlined the central issue at the heart of
Israel’s struggle in the Arab world since its very
inception.
In a word,
“hatred.” Untamed, seething, violent, and deaf to
pleas of mercy.
The dispute is
not of territories, concessions, citizenship
rights, or the conduct of the Israeli army.
Rather, it lies in the struggle of a country to
defend itself from those who wish it dead and
buried back under the desert sands from which it
rose forth to be a “light unto the world.” Thus,
until the matter of inbred anti-Semitism in the
Arab world is dealt with blatantly and without
compromise, the resounding clicks of passionate
tongues at the peace negotiating table will be
fiercely silenced with the clicks of wired
explosives beating over the long-silenced heart of
the next Palestinian “martyr.”
The second tenet
of Kissinger’s argument lay in his assessment of
the Arab world as a political demon that must, at
the very least, provide for its own sustenance
even as it lashes out its tail at the heart of
civilians. Thus, he predicted, the terrorist cells
which blacken the civilized world will be
destroyed by their own supporters. Kissinger’s
strategy: Attack from above. Cut off the
benefactors in the middle east, especially those
in Saudi Arabia, from their messenger-of death
disciples. Pressure them. Stop at nothing to
destroy their mammoth financial status. Then the
Arab world will turn into itself and realize that
the terrorist cells are threatening their own
economic survival, and this will be the cause of
their ultimate demise.
Both speakers,
perhaps in respect to the media representatives
seated before them, commented little on one of the
greatest causes of Israel’s war for existence and
America’s silence to its destruction: Arab
propaganda. From the ubiquitous miss-information
that every major newspaper in the US distributed
on the Israeli army’s move into Jenin (and several
months later recounted), to the use of the word
“retaliation” to describe Israel’s arresting of
the masterminds of devastating suicide bombings,
to arguably the most powerful strategy employed by
Arab rulers: Engraving in western consciousness
the birth of a new population of people known as
“Palestinians.” By doing so, Arab propaganda has
in essence forged a political sledgehammer. A
people, driven off their lands, oppressed by an
aggressive and intolerant regime. What better way
to open the sympathies of NATO and weeping hearts
the world over?
The reality, as
is always the case, has little to do with the
propaganda. Before Israel seized its right to
officially exist in 1948, there was no notion of
the “Palestinian people.” There were displaced
Arabs from Jordan and elsewhere living in
Palestine. The “Palestinian People” were born the
moment Israel was, in a bloody miscarriage aimed
to win the sympathy of NATO and Arab civilians and
to provide an artificial rational for the eventual
re-claiming of Israel, regardless of the cost of
innocent life.
It is this notion
of a “struggling Palestine” which has allowed the
larger Arab world to use these people as their
banner of “justice,” grandiose in its external
headlines but made up of the cloth of bitter
ant-Semitism, ant-Americanism, and
anti-humanitarianism. All that is required is a
finer look at the individual threads which slyly
circle each other to form their specious design to
understand the substance and depth of the Arab
propaganda empire and the millions of oil dollars
poured into the eventual destruction of Israel.
Let us not forget that the only monetary aid the
Arab world has officially offered its “Palestinian
brethren” is Saddam Hussein’s promise to
financially reward the families of those who
commit suicide bombings.
So let us then
take a closer look at the truth which the Arab
propaganda empire spews out its millions of oil
dollars in an attempt to cover, disguise, distort,
and erase from the memory of the world’s
conscience.
The country of
Israel came to recognition by the UN in 1948, but
Jews have made a home of the land since time
immemorial. Before the birth of the Muslim
religion, before the birth of Christianity, Jews
have been fighting with their lives for Israel. It
is only thousands of years after Jews began to
live in their homeland that territorial dispute
with Arabs even began to simmer before eventually
boiling in bloodshed.
Biblically, the
land was promised to Abraham, the first Jew. He,
in turn, bequeathed all his land to Isaac, the
second father in Jewish lineage. To his other son,
Ishmael, whom the Arabs claim to have descended
from, he bequeathed only gifts and no land. Jewish
reign in Israel reached its golden peak under King
David in 1003 BCE. In fact, the name “Palestine”
was given to the land by the Roman Caesar Hadrain,
but has always been known as Israel to its people.
Since the time of the great kings, Jews have not
been allowed to return to their homeland in peace
and have instead been scattered to the four
corners of the Earth, encountering persecution,
murder, intolerance, and seclusion in every land
which they dwelled.
Arab influx into
Israel reached a zenith in the reign of the
Ottoman Empire starting in the sixteenth century
and expanding into the twentieth. Although
spatterings of Jewish settlers continued to
desperately attempt to keep their tie to the
ancestral homeland, Arab settlements far
outnumbered Jews throughout these years. In 1882 a
small influx of religious Jews, estimated at about
30,000, settled in Israel. Between 1904 and 1917
another 35,000 joined. In 1917, it is estimated
that about 85,000 Jews lived in Israel vs. 600,000
Arabs. The difference in numbers grew largely out
of the Ottoman Empire’s restriction of Jews to the
region, restriction brought on by distrust,
ant-Semitism, and hatred, and the eternal Arab
resolution to never tolerate the notion of Israeli
land, much less the state of Israel.
All this changed
with the defeat of the Turks in World War 1 and
the consequent fall of the land to British rule.
Under the Balfour Declaration, a British mandate
stating the British government’s support for a
“national home” for Jews in the Middle East, an
enormous wave of Jewish settlers were able to
return to the promised land. With the extra fears
of rising Nazism and European anti-Semitism, an
additional 300,000 Jews fled to Israel before
1938. It is here important to note a salient
historical fact: The Jews that settled in Israel
during these years did not “rob” Arabs of their
land, as Arab propaganda has claimed, but
purchased the land for considerable sums of money
on a completely voluntary basis.
But as the Jewish
population began to increase in number beyond
expectation, the Arabs immediately began to react.
Not by negotiation, not by peaceful protest, but
by murder. On the first day of Passover in 1920,
Arabs attacked Jews in Jerusalem, and continued
attacks throughout the influx of Jewish settlers.
After the conclusion of the second World War and
the slaughter of six million European Jews,
Britain removed its troops from Israel and threw
the “Palestine question” at the feet of the
newly-formed United Nations. The UN, after much
debate, voted to partition the land between Jews
and Arabs. In essence, the law would have created
a state of Israel and a state of Arab-controlled
Palestine side by side. But alas, the Arab
community responded in the same way as when they
were offered a similar proposition by the Clinton
administration in the Camp David talks in 2000,
with a resounding “no.” The Arab community once
again refused to tolerate the notion of any
“Israel,” of any peace, and instead chose a state
of war characterized by the notorious remark from
an Arab military leader in 1948 that “we will
throw them (Jews) back into the sea.”
And try they did.
Twelve days following the UN vote in 1948, Arab
gangs killed 80 Jews, looting Jewish shops and
attacking civilian buses. On May 13th the Jewish
settlement of Kfar Etzion surrendered and white
flags were waved. All Jewish defenders were
assembled, photographed, and then killed. The
wounded were finished off with knives.
After David Ben
Gurion officially proclaimed the state of Israel,
Arab countries mobilized. The armies of Egypt,
Transjordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq crossed the
borders in an effort to finally crush the newborn
state. After countless skirmishes and bloody road
battles, “temporary” peace settlements were put in
place and negotiations yielded “temporary” land
divisions. Yet, as is all too clear, none of these
lasted long and Arab attacks of Jewish civilians,
women and children, continued afterwards,
escalating into the unprecedented bloody
“intifada” in 2000 and continuing mercilessly to
the present day.
Dr. Henry
Kissinger, like so many others, provided the
listeners a magnifying glass to discern this
tanglement of corroding deception. It is our duty
not to let it fall once again from our reluctant
and cautious politically correct hands into the
abyss of halcyon denial and sweetened
rationalization. As was done in the Holocaust. As
was done in Vietnam.
Because the truth
which strikes out at us is bitter, tragic, and
heart-wrenching, the inclination to cover its
harshness with blinds is strong, as strong as our
yearning for a peaceful world of love and
compassion. But if we allow the glass to fall into
an abyss of gentle, cradling oblivion, we are all
sure to follow into a realm where we are powerless
and desireless to face the atrocities burning
seconds away, even while the flames begin to
scorch our own hearts.
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