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Jewish World Review July 7, 2003 / 7 Tamuz, 5763 NOT JUST TERROR By Yaffa Ganz
What many still don't grasp about the Middle East
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Israel and the Arab nations are no longer at war. The latest catch phrase in the media and international parlance for the past fifty-five years of battle in the Middle East is "Terror and Violence". Terror is usually what the Arabs inflict; continued violence is the Jewish response. Two equally ugly sides of one faulty coin.
But the conflict in the Middle East is not about terror or violence. That is the unhappy outcome, not the cause. And Israel is not "fighting terror." She is fighting for her life and for her right to exist, as a Jewish State, in her ancient, historical, universally recognized, never abandoned, homeland.
The currently favored remedy in our eternal march towards "Peace" is the Road Map, the latest in a long line of plans to divide, weaken, dismember or otherwise incapacitate the Jewish State.
Since the Balfour Declaration in 1917, we have seen a constant parade of proposals and activities — partition plans, borders drawn and redrawn, military clashes, full fledged wars, cease fires, armistice lines, resolutions, unending conferences and now the "hudna" (we'll see how long that lasts...). All were contrived to reach the ultimate Middle East Peace. There was the pre-state Peel Commission; the U.N. partition plans; Resolutions 181, 194 and 242; the Rogers Plan; the Geneva and Madrid conferences and the touted Oslo accords. Shaaram El Sheik, Wye, Camp David, Taaba have all hosted peace and problem solving assemblies. Kissinger, Reagen, Shultz, Baker, Ross, Clinton, Tenet, Zinni, the Saudis, and now President Bush have all contributed their combined wisdom, alas, to no avail.
The one thing in common with each and every one of these plans, suggestions, partitions and agreements is that each and every one necessitated additional Israeli withdrawals, restrictions and capitulation, compensated, of course, by inviolable international guarantees and promises of future support. The Arabs accepted or signed a good many of these agreements and then promptly proceeded to violate, break, trample upon and make a mockery of every single one.
As in the present hudna, Arab agreements with the enemy are a temporary, tactical ploy. Talk of a "two-state solution" is a step towards a Judenrein Middle East.Their war against the Jews is not a political situation capable of compromise and solution; it is a war of victory or death, an honorable and historical Arab way of life.
When Jewish settlement to Palestine began to increase 200 years before the establishment of the Jewish State, when Palestine was a far-flung province of the Ottoman Empire and the Arab population of Palestine (which then included Transjordan) was very small and scattered, the Arabs still attacked, waged war, terrorized, slaughtered, stole and did their utmost to destroy any sign of new Jewish settlement. Yet this settlement is what transformed a poverty stricken, forlorn, empty area into a land of flowing milk and honey.
By the outbreak of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill described a process of massive Arab immigration to Palestine.
Where did they come from — all of these immigrants, and why did they suddenly appear? They came from surrounding countries because the Jewish settlement in Palestine had created a new and vibrant economic environment.
At the same time, the more the new Arab immigrants arrived, the more they protested the Jewish presence. Their unending warfare was called "attacks" or "pogroms" in those pre-state, "pre-terror" (!) days and their wanton killing and destruction has continued uninterruptedly — except when we interrupted them — ever since. They killed and destroyed before Jewish independence, before there was a "refugee problem", before the extended 1967 borders, before the unification of Jerusalem and before there were any settlements or outposts dotting the empty, windblown landscape in Judea and Samaria.
The Arabs, by the way, are the only people in the world whose "refugee problem" has persisted for fifty-five years, over three or four generations. They are the world's only refugees who never die, are never removed from the U.N. refugee lists, and the only ones who have not been absorbed in other countries despite the existence of a vast "motherland" of Arabia with its twenty-two states, three hundred million people (almost all of whom share the same culture, language, religion), unending stretches of vacant land and untold wealth and resources. On UNRWA posters the Arab "refugees" were depicted as "Survivors". Indeed they are.
Israel is not dealing with just a group — or groups — of isolated terrorists. It is dealing with an entire culture of violence, hatred, blood feuds, thievery and evasion of all responsibility, all of which are endemic in Moslem lands and culture. Even more "modern" Arab states such as Egypt or Jordan are in constant danger of backsliding into social chaos and the bloody mindset of Islamic warfare. It was, and still is, brutal.
The Arabs went to war against the Jews before there was any thought of an Arab Palestinian nation or state. The Palestinians were the Jews of Palestine; the Arabs were simply Arabs — part of the great Arab pan-Arabia — one big, contiguous Arab nation stretching across the Middle East and encompassing the entire, highly homogeneous Arab lands and peoples. And although small numbers of Jews and Christilans might live on Arab soil in a state of dhimmitude (a state of semi-servitude as proscribed in the Koran for non- Moslems), on the whole, infidels (i.e. all non-Moslems) were unwelcome. In their holy war against the Jews, the Arabs recognize no innocents, no non-combatants, no women, no children. All are the Enemy; all of Palestine is holy, "Arab" soil, and this soil must be Judenrein.
Indeed, much of the Middle East is already cleared of Jews. 850,000 left or were systematically forced out of Arab lands in 1948 and the rest immigrated soon after. In the place of large, thriving and ancient communities, only tiny remnants remain in a few countries like Morocco, Iran or Egypt (all of whom are nervous, compliant, careful and scared). What Hitler did not accomplish in Europe, Islam has accomplished in the Middle East.
Hitler had his Final Solution; Jihad will purify the lands of Islam from Southeast Asia, across the Fertile Crescent, Africa, up to the Straits of Gibraltar; from Egypt and Sinai in the south to Turkey, southern Russia and the Balkans in the north.
Sound crazy? Arab leaders of all stripes declare and declaim it daily on their radio, television, in their press, in their school books, in their speeches. They say it publicly, loud and clear, in all languages, but primarily in Arabic. Their English pronouncements are more muted, taking western sensibilities into acount. But read a few newspapers in Arabic; listen to a few sermons in the mosques across the world; sit in the madrassas now spread across the western world where millions of Arab children study Islam. Or — just spend a few weeks in Israel and count the mortar shells on quiet civilian centers, the shooting of unsuspecting innocents on the highways, and the suicide bombers wherever they can get in.
In a recent article in the Jerusalem Post (June 27, 2003), Ori Golan interviewed Anjem Choudary, the United Kingdom leader of Al Muhajiroun (an Isalmist group). Mr. Choudary publicly and unabashedly proclaimed:
In Israel there are no civilians. You have to remember that they are occupying Muslim land [ed: He is referring to the entire country of Israel, not just to lands occupied after 1967.]....
Including babies and old women??...Those people in the land are occupiers and aggresors and are part of the atrocities which, as far as we're concerned, are as bad, if not worse, as in Nazi Germany.....
Is Islam a peaceful religion? No, we can't say that because the roots of the word Islam is not peace but submission - to have complete submission to the Creator....
What about the Briton who carried out the suicide attack in Tel Aviv? One must be happy for fellow Muslims when they fulfill their obligations. It is a very noble thing....he will get to Paradise."
Although these things were said publicly in England, and published, the west still finds it difficult (if not impossible) to think in these terms. But if ever there was one, this is a Holy War. As such, it must be fought not only with steel, but with faith. The Arabs believe this. That's why their suicide bombers are anxious to blow themselves up. They are sure that Allah is waiting to greet them at the Gates to Paradise. And those who are not exploding are on the sidelines applauding. The rest of the world talks about fighting terrorism, promoting peace, drawing borders, signing agreements. The West tends to think that everything can be neatly controlled, fixed, and rationally put into place. But that is delusion. Force must be met with force; fire must be fought with fire, Evil confronted by Good, and warped, murderous faith must be met with Truth.
America woke up after 9-11 but proceeded to develop tunnel vision. Although finely sensitized to potential danger to American welfare, President Bush seems to think that dangers to Israel pose less of a problem.
Yet Israel's very existence is the reason and the excuse for Arab hatred and violence. Even the world's good and well meaning people will not long agree to living on constant alert and the brink of war because of one miniscule sliver of a country. There are so many rational, good reasons to abandon the Jewish State. The price for Israel's existance might be deemed too high. Nations will ask themselves — what is more important — placating three hundred million Moslems, or protecting three or four or five million Jews whose homeland happens to be in the wrong neighborhood? And the result will be to force the Jewish state to capitulate once again for the sake of "peace". Israel is, after all, the eternal sacrificial lamb. If the alternative is potential global war, a tiny Jewish State is expendable.
What, then, is to be done? Is there a solution to the unending Arab hatred and strife?
Yes. If this is Jihad — a Holy War — we must fight it with holy weapons. If the Jewish People return to their own basic truths, to their Torah and to their Land; if they understand who they are, why they are here, the significance of the Land of Israel; if they unite, come home and fulfill their historic role and mission, a basic shift will take place in the cosmic configuration and on the international political scene. There is a G-d, and He too has something to say about men's affairs. But He waits for Man to start the ball rolling.
Meanwhile, it is incumbent upon us all, and upon the Jewish People in particular, to raise the standard of truth and justice in a world rife with falsehood, and to do battle with Evil. Hitler was not a fairytale. The horror he engendered existed and had to be defeated.
Someday, our swords will indeed turn into ploughshares. War will cease and true peace — not the unjust, forced capitulation of an innocent nation — will reign supreme. Until then, we will keep trying — and praying.
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JWR contributor Yaffa Ganz is the award-winning author of more than forty Jewish juvenile titles including the two-volume teen history "Sand and Stars --- A Jewish Journey Through Time" and the popular Savta Simcha Series. You may contact her by clicking here.
A nation of schizophrenics?
© 2003, Yaffa Ganz
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