A Little History Lesson on Israel's Legitimacy

Jerusalem has been a Jewish capital and spiritual center for 3000 years. Arabs have no claim to it and a much shorter history of living there. It has never been the capital of an Arab state. The claim that Jews have taken the land of Palestinians is a myth created for propaganda purposes. Israel was created out of the remnants of the Turkish Empire and over 80% of Palestine was given to the Arabs, with the Jews gaining only a sliver of their ancestral homeland. Despite these concessions, Arab hatred of Israel has been continuous, irrational and merciless.

David Horowitz and Jacob Laskin give a concise summary of the history of Arab attempts to usurp Jewish land and exterminate the Jews in this article "Obama and the War Against Israel." Here is a brief excerpt:

The Arab canard that Israel is Europe’s attempt to unload its problem onto the backs of the Arabs ignores — as did Obama — the fact that Jerusalem has been the spiritual capital of the Jewish people for nearly 3,000 years and that Jews have lived in their historic homeland continuously for all that time. Jerusalem is at the center of the Jewish spiritual tradition, and Jews have been its largest religious community since 1864. Prime Minister Netanyahu was historically accurate when he admonished Obama, saying that “the Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3,000 years ago, and the Jewish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital.”

In his Cairo speech, Obama also showed little appreciation of the modern history of Israel, a nation that was not built on Arab — let alone “Palestinian” — land. The state of Israel was created out of the ruins of the Turkish empire.

In 1922, Great Britain created the state of Jordan out of 80 percent of the Palestine Mandate — a geographical, not an ethnic, designation. The territory in the Mandate had been part of the Turkish (not Arab) empire for the previous four hundred years. Then in 1948, a U.N. “partition plan” provided equal parts of the remaining Turkish land to Arabs and to Jews living on the banks of the Jordan River. In this plan, the Jews were assigned 10 percent of the original Palestine Mandate, while the Arabs received 90 percent. None of this land had belonged to a “Palestinian” nation or a Palestinian entity. In the previous 400 years there had never been a province of the Turkish empire called “Palestine.” The entire region out of which Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank were created was known as “Ottoman Syria.”

In what would prove to be a continuing pattern, the Jews accepted the partition’s grossly unequal terms; their portion consisted of three unconnected slivers of land, of which 60 percent was arid desert. The Arabs, who had already received 80 percent of the Mandate land, rejected their additional portion, as they would continue to reject any arrangement that would allow for a Jewish state.

Immediately, five Arab nations launched a war against the Jews, who repelled the Arab attacks and established a Jewish state. When the fighting ended, the parts of the partitioned land that had been earmarked for the Arabs — namely, the West Bank and Gaza — were annexed by Jordan and Egypt, respectively, and disappeared from the map. There was no protest from the Arab world at the disappearance of “Palestine” into Jordan and Egypt, no Palestine Liberation Organization, no complaint to the U.N. The reason for the silence was that there was no Palestinian identity at the time, no movement for “self-determination,” no “Palestinian” people to make a claim. There were Arabs who lived in the region of the Jordan. But they considered themselves inhabitants of Jordan or of the Syrian province of the former Ottoman Empire. The disappearance of the West Bank and Gaza was an annexation of Arab land by Arab states.

Arab and Western revisionists have turned this history on its head to portray the Jewish war of survival as a racist, imperialist plot to expel “Palestinians” from “Palestine.” This is an utter distortion of the historical record. The term “Palestine Mandate” is a European reference to a geographical section of the defeated Turkish empire. The claim that there was a Palestinian nation from which ethnic Palestinians were expelled and which Israel now “occupies” illegally is a political lie.

The Arabs should go back to Jordon and leave Israel alone. If they attack again and Israel gains more territory the UN should declare in advance that all all territories acquired by Israel in a defensive war should henceforth belong to Israel forever. But instead of logic, the UN chooses to be complicit in Jew hatred by the Muslim states of the world. But Muslim Jew-hatred is no better than German Jew-hatred.

The world is believing a propaganda lie because it wants to do so. What is the logical explanation for such gullibility?