In the conflict between Arabs and Jews over the land of Israel, is it sometimes stated that ”the Arabs were there first.” This is not so. The truth is carved in Egyptian stone. According to a well-known hieroglyphic inscription, the tribes of Israel were a significant, established presence in Canaan no later than 1212 BCE. The Arab conquest did not occur until 638 CE (AD). An exercise in elementary arithmetic reveals that the Jewish people were there eighteen and one-half centuries before the arrival of the Arabs. Despite being conquered many times, the Jews have had a constant, uninterrupted presence in the Land of Israel for over thirty centuries. The Arabs have been there less than fourteen centuries.
In the wake of the defeat of Turkey in World War One, the League of Nations assumed the responsibility of determining the disposition of the lands within the decayed and crumbling Ottoman Empire. In mandating the establishment of a Jewish national home in what was then called “Palestine”, the League of Nations explicitly gave “recognition … to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country….” (Emphasis added.) Thus, the League of Nations was not inventing a new right for the Jewish people in the land of Israel. It was clearly recognizing a long-established right.
Israel’s ancient right to exist as a Jewish State was also recognized in the document which came to be known as the White Paper of 1922. In interpreting the meaning and intent of the Balfour Declaration and its responsibilities under the League of Nations Mandate, the Government of Great Britain stated:
[I]t is essential that [the Jewish Community] should know that it is in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance. That is the reason why it is necessary that the existence of a Jewish National Home in Palestine should be internationally guaranteed, and that it should be formally recognized to rest upon ancient historical connections.
After world War Two, the United Nations adopted the remaining responsibilities of the League of Nations, including the disposition of the Palestine Mandate. In 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution which called for the partition of what was left of the Palestine Mandate into Jewish and Arab states. The Jews of Palestine accepted the 1947 UN Partition Plan, but the entire Arab world rejected it, because they refused to recognize the right of a Jewish state to exist in the Middle East. On the very first day of its existence, May 14, 1948, the fledgling state of Israel was invaded by the combined armies of five surrounding Arab countries, whose explicitly and proudly declared intention was the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of Jews. Immediately after Israel won its War of Independence, the Arabs began launching terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. Ever since, Israel has had to endure extended Palestinian terrorist campaigns punctuated by brief but desperate wars of survival. Apparently concerned that mere random violence against unarmed civilians was insufficiently horrific, Palestinian terrorists have been targeting and murdering Israeli children for decades. Yasser Arafat’s personal involvement in the intentional targeting and murder of children began no later than May, 1974, when PLO terrorists took over a school in Ma’alot, Israel, and murdered 21 children.
Through all of this, the Israelis have maintained their desire for peace and their willingness to share the land. Shortly after its victory in the Six Day War of 1967 (before the UN Security council adopted of the “Land for Peace” formula of Resolution 242), Israel offered to return the West Bank and Gaza to Arab control in exchange for peaceful and normal relations with the Arab world. The Arab League convened immediately, and issued in response their famous three noes: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with [Israel]….”
The Arab world and the Palestinian nationalist movement still did not recognize Israel’s right to exist at the time of the Camp David Peace Conference of July, 2000, when then Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel made groundbreaking compromise offers in an effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. There was not a single aspect of Barak’s offer that Arafat found worthy of comment or counteroffer. His sole response, aided, abetted and encouraged by the entire Arab world, has been a terrorist war that has continued unabated for four years.
If the Arab world had chosen to accept Israel’s right to exist, in 1947, or 1967, or 2000, or at any time in the past half-century, by now Israel would have helped them to make their deserts bloom. Instead, the Arab world has chosen to fertilize the land with the blood of Israeli children. Could anything be more barbaric and depraved? Yes. In response to Ehud Barak’s offer at Camp David in July, 2000, the Palestinians chose to sacrifice the blood of their own children to satisfy their hatred of Israel. The more Israel has tried to defend itself, the further into the forefront the Palestinians have pushed their children. First, they gave their children stones to throw. Now the Palestinians wrap their children in dynamite and nails and send them to blow themselves up in Israeli restaurants and religious observances. Now Palestinians rejoice not only at the death of Israeli children, but of their own.
In an attempt to mitigate or explain away this barbaric depravity, the Palestinian nationalist movement and its apologists cite the “desperation” that Palestinians experience because of the Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza. However, Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza began in June, 1967. The first major terror bombing committed by Arabs against the Jewish state occurred more than nineteen years before the Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza. In fact, it occurred ten weeks before Israel became an independent state. On Sunday morning, February 22, 1948, in anticipation of Israel’s independence, a triple truck bomb was detonated by Arab terrorists on Ben Yehuda Street in what was then the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Fifty-four people were killed and hundreds were wounded. Thus, it is obvious that Arab terrorism is caused not by the “desperation” of “occupation”, but by the very thought of a Jewish state.
Further, and even more significantly, throughout history there have been populations that have lived in desperation, and none of them have resorted to the intentional targeting and murder of children as an officially practiced and widely praised mode of achieving political ends. When extremist elements of otherwise legitimate liberation movements have committed such atrocities, their actions have been unconditionally condemned by the civilized world, and their political objectives have been discredited by their vile crimes. This is not so with the Palestinians. Once upon a time there was a special place in the lowest depths of hell for anyone who would intentionally murder a child. Now that place is in the pantheon of Palestinian heroes. Now, that behavior is legitimized as “armed struggle” against “occupation” by, among others, the United Nations General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Commission and the European Union.
However, once the intentional murder of innocent civilians is legitimized against Israel, it is legitimized everywhere, constrained by nothing more than the subjective belief of people who would wrap themselves in dynamite and nails for the purpose of killing children in the name of god. Because the Palestinians have been encouraged to believe that murdering innocent Israeli civilians is a legitimate tactic for advancing their cause, the world now suffers from a plague of terrorism, from Nairobi to New York, from Moscow to Madrid, from Bali to Beslan. In September of 2004, the world was shocked (SHOCKED) by the outrage that occurred in Beslan, Russia, when terrorists stormed a school, took hundreds of children hostage, abused and tortured them for days, and then murdered hundreds of them. However, the road to Beslan comes straight through Ma’alot. The baby butchers of Beslan were merely acting in accordance with the license granted to Yasser Arafat in 1974.
The Palestinians and the whole Arab world have made their intentions as clear as Mein Kampf. The terrorist enemies of Israel have declared themselves to be the mortal enemies of the United States also. Israel shares our values, and is the only stable democracy in the Middle East. For both strategic and moral reasons, the United States must support Israel’s right to defend itself in our common war against terrorism.
For a discussion of the Merneptah Stele, SEE, Shanks, Dever, Halpern and McCarter, The Rise of Ancient Israel, Biblical Archaeology Society (Washington, DC, 1992) pp. 17-19, 54-55. SEE ALSO, Aharoni, Yohanon, The Land of the Bible – A Historical Geography, Westminster Press (Philadelphia, 1979) pp. 183-84, 195; Ben Sasson, H. H., Ed., A History of the Jewish People, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA, 1976) pp. 42, 50-52; Finnegan, Jack, Archaeological History of the Middle East, Dorset Press (New York, 1979) pp. 312-313; Grant, Michael, The History of Ancient Israel, Charles Scribner’s Sons (New York, 1984) pp. 37; Halpern, Baruch, The Emergence of Israel in Canaan, Scholars Press (Chico, CA, 1983) pp. 93, 216.
In an effort to fabricate a more ancient connection, the Arab world has claimed that “Palestinian” Arabs are descended from the Philistines, from whom the name “Palestine” is derived. However, there is no connection whatever between the Philistines and the “Palestinian” Arabs. The Philistines were one of the “Sea Peoples”; they originated in Cyprus, Crete, or southwest Asia Minor. They spoke a proto-Greek language, and were related to the Phoenicians and Carthaginians. The “Palestinian” Arabs of today bear no cultural or ethnic relationship to the ancient Philistines, who were wiped out by the Assyrian and Babylonian Conquests (8th Century BCE and 6th Century BCE, respectively). SEE, e.g., Dothan, Trude & Dothan, Moshe, People of the Sea – The Search for the Philistines, MacMillan Publishing Company (New York, 1992), passim; Grant, Michael, The History of Ancient Israel, Charles Scribner’s Sons (New York, 1984), pp.67-68. It is critical to note that the Philistines are not mentioned in either Hitti, Philip K., History of the Arabs – 10th Ed., McMillan/St. Martin’s Press (London, 1970); OR Hourani, Albert, A History of the Arab Peoples, Belknap/Harvard (Cambridge, MA, 1991). If “Palestinian” Arabs were descended from or related to the Philistines, it surely would have been mentioned in at least one of these comprehensive histories of the Arabs. Since the myth of “Palestinian” descent from the Philistines has been debunked, the “Palestinians” have claimed that they are descended from the Canaanites. Recently, the Saudis have asserted that the Jebusites migrated to Jerusalem from the Arabian Peninsula in 3000 BCE. However, as with the claim of “Palestinian” descent from the Philistines, there is no historical or archaeological evidence to support these assertions. Neither of these theories is mentioned in Hitti, History of the Arabs, supra, or Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, supra.