One needs only consider the huge number of Holocaust survivors who did not want to emigrate to Israel after World War II, the largely negative attitude of Western Jewry, which - though faced with the loss of its Jewish identity through assimilation and intermarriage - offered Zionism only limited political and economic support, and more than a million Israelis who refused to shoulder the responsibilities of citizenship and left their country for seemingly greener pastures though Israel desperately needs more Jews to avert demographic doom.
In 1921, Achad Ha'am, just prior to his departure for Palestine, wrote a letter of historic importance to his friend, the ardent Jewish nationalist Joseph Klausner, who was already living in Jerusalem. Ahad Ha'am expressed his fear that the Jewish people would fail to lay claim to the Land of Israel and that the country would slip through their fingers due to Western mendacity, Arab hostility and, above all, the indifference of much of the Jewish world. Until his death in 1927, he remained unconvinced that the Jews were sufficiently committed to national revival and Jewish continuity. Without such a commitment, he reasoned, even an unambiguous British declaration in favor of Zionism could not secure Jewish claims. He never ceased to believe that the Jewish people had to rule all of Palestine if they were to survive. And he saw the need to reconstruct the cultural underpinnings of Jewish life - an astute comment on his people's shortcomings.
Today, the idea of an Arab "Palestinian" state has been accepted by most of the world - even by most Jews. Its proponents fail to realize that there is simply no room for two viable states between the Jordan River rift and the Mediterranean Sea. The area is barely large enough to support one viable state. So the proposition is a recipe for war.
The Arabs presently have 22 independent states and control some 5 million square miles of territory - from the Atlantic Ocean to Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula. Today, Zionism lays claim to less than 11,000 square miles of land - less than 3% of the area of Egypt alone. Anyone genuinely concerned with the continuation of Israel's existence should give this claim urgent and serious consideration. First and foremost, it is high time World Jewry accepted it and demanded its realization.
David Ben-Gurion, the George Washington of modern Israel and the most important leader in the history of the Israel Labor Party, gave the following message to the 1937 Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland:
"No Jew has the right to yield the rights of the Jewish people in Israel. No Jew has the authority to do so. No Jewish body has the authority to do so. Not even the entire Jewish people alive today has the right to yield any part of Israel. It is the right of the Jewish people over the generations, a right that under no conditions can be cancelled. Even if Jews during a specific period proclaim they are relinquishing this right, they have neither the power nor the authority to deny it to future generations. No concession of this type is binding or obligates the Jewish people. Our right to the country - the entire country - exists as an eternal right, and we shall not yield this historic right until its full and complete redemption is realized."
Just two days after Yasser Arafat's handshake with the late Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin on the White House lawn that ushered in the infamous Oslo Accords, Arafat declared on Jordanian Television (in Arabic):
"Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do in stages. We take any and every territory we can in Palestine, establish our sovereignty there and use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel."
Even if the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean were big enough to accommodate both Jews and Arabs, the latter have forfeited their claim to share the area by instigating a century of bloodshed and fanatical hatred. British duplicity shares the responsibility for this. The original area promised in the 1917 Balfour Declaration for Jewish settlement and a Jewish national home included Transjordan as well as the Golan Heights and Southern Lebanon to the Awali River, but the two last-mentioned areas had already been ceded by the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 to the French protectorates of Syria and Lebanon. At the time, they were still under Turkish rule, which was rapidly disintegrating.
Not content with this, in 1922 Britain unilaterally detached Transjordan, which constituted 77% of the original Jewish national home, in order to create a Kingdom for the Hashemites. Jews were forbidden to settle in Transjordan, while Arabs from neighboring Arab states were encouraged to move to Palestine. The Jews should have insisted that this was the last acceptable partition of their national home, but didn't. They lacked the necessary degree of national unity and resolve. They also failed to understand that the policies of the powers are governed by their perceived interests, which can be influenced by violence but not by entreaties, however justified.
The Arabs who now call themselves "Palestinians" refused to do so until the early 1960s - and with good reason, since - according to the well-researched book by Joan Peters From Time Immemorial - some 90% of the 1948 Arab population of Palestine came to the country from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and other Arab states after Zionist immigrants created work opportunities there during the first half of the 20th century. During the period of the British Mandate, Arabs had word "Arab" stamped on their passports, while Jews had the word "Palestinian" stamped on theirs. During World War II, the Palestine Brigade of the British Army fought in Europe. It was composed exclusively of Jewish volunteers. Meanwhile, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el Husseini, actively helped Hitler. Nevertheless, Britain persisted with the policy laid down in the May 1939 White Paper, which drastically restricted Jewish immigration and during World War II actually contacted the Nazis requesting them to prevent Jews from leaving continental Europe.
A flood of misinformation about the Arab-Israel conflict is bandied about by respected journalists, academics and politicians who support the Arab cause for reasons ranging from economic gain through political expediency to anti-Semitism. These people have succeeded in preventing the general public from understanding the basic fact that throughout the Jews were ready to accept painful internationally sponsored compromises in the hope of achieving a peaceful solution, whereas the Arabs rejected them all and responded with violence. Violence always paid off handsomely. In 1937, the British Peel Commission recommended the re-partitioning of Western Palestine, allocating 80% of it to the Arabs and only 20% to the Jews. Yet the Jews accepted the "compromise", while the Arabs rejected it and continued rioting until the British firmly suppressed them after the outbreak of World War II.
The ensuing Jewish violence also paid political dividends. Infuriated by the abrogation of the Balfour Declaration, the White Paper and Britain's increasingly obvious intention to remain in Palestine until they could turn it over to the Arabs, Menahem Begin's Irgun Tsvai Leumi (National Military Organization) started to attack the Mandatory infrastructure and British military targets, usually issuing warnings to reduce casualties. Later, some of these attacks (including the blowing up of a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem) were carried out by a joint command including representatives of the mainstream Mapai party. This anti-British campaign achieved its main political objective - British readiness to evacuate the country.
In November 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Western Palestine - this time allocating 60% of it to the Jews and 40% to the Arabs, though the Negev desert constituted most of the Jewish area, which was broken up into three almost unconnected cantons and virtually indefensible. The Jews again accepted the partition. The Arabs reacted by mobilizing the armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq with contingents from two other states and attacked nascent Israel from three directions when the British finally left on May 14th, 1948. With the help of arms from Czechoslovakia, supplied through the good offices of a Czech Jew who changed his name to Robert Maxwell, Israel's army withstood and broke these attacks. Determination to survive was now fierce. Isolated settlements defended themselves with whatever arms they had - successfully in most cases. Only the Jordanians were able to advance, occupying what they later called "the West Bank" together with some Arab quarters of Jerusalem and the Old City. The other Arab armies were defeated. Thus some 80% of Western Palestine was officially recognized, after armistice negotiations mediated by the United Nations, as the State of Israel.
Before and during the 1948 war, about 720,000 Arab refugees left the areas that became Israel. The wealthy Arabs, who knew fighting was imminent, were the first to remove themselves and their families out of harm's way. Many others fled during the fighting. But the majority - probably 400,000 - left because Arab leaders urged them to do so, telling them to return after Israel's defeat. The Prime Minister of Syria in 1948/49, Khaled Al-Azm, admitted this. In his memoirs, he wrote:
"Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return."
The Arabs invented the term "West Bank" in 1949. For some three thousand years prior to this date, the area was known by its biblical names of Judea and Samaria. Indeed, there was never a sovereign entity called Palestine. The Romans gave this name to the country after crushing the last Judean revolt in 135 CE. While under Turkish rule for over 400 years, it was regarded as Southern Syria - one of reasons why today Syria still lays claim to Lebanon, Jordan and Israel. Gamal Abdul Nasser invented the concept of a "Palestinian" nationality laying claim to this area when he created the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964. Yet his forces continued to occupy the Gaza strip. Throughout the 19 years that Egypt ruled the Gaza strip and Jordan occupied Judea and Samaria, not a word was spoken about creating an independent Arab Palestine. In the Gaza strip, the "Palestinians" were kept under conditions approximating those of a penal colony.
On May 16th 1967, Nasser ordered the UN Expeditionary Force, stationed in Sinai since 1956, to leave. The UN Secretary-General complied. By May 18th, Egyptian forces were massing along the Israeli border, the Syrians in the Golan Heights were preparing for war and Egypt's Voice of the Arabs radio announced: "As of today, an international emergency force to protect Israel no longer exists… The sole method we shall use against Israel is total war, which will result in the extermination of the Zionist existence." On May 22nd, Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to all ships bound for Eilat, stopping the flow of oil from Israel's main supplier, Iran. On May 30th, King Hussein signed a defense pact with Egypt and Nasser announced: "The armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are poised on the borders of Israel... while standing behind us are the armies of Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan and the whole Arab nation. This act will astound the world… the critical hour has arrived."
On June 5th, Israel staged its preemptive strike and six days later was occupying Sinai, the Golan Heights, Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem. The Arab armies had been utterly destroyed. Eshkol then publicly offered to return all these areas to the Arabs in return for negotiated peace treaties with Israel. The Arab rulers, meeting in Khartoum, replied: "No recognition, no negotiations and no peace!"
Two peace treaties were signed with Arab states nevertheless. The first, Menahem Begin's treaty with Egypt, was a monumental mistake. The Egyptians got every inch of the Sinai, including oil Israel had discovered there - a huge economic bonanza. In addition, the Americans began to arm them hand over fist. Israel lost economically everything that Egypt gained and received a worthless piece of paper. All the provisions it regarded as crucial, such as normalization and stopping anti-Israel propaganda, were blatantly and contemptuously disregarded. Egyptians who support normalization tend to lose their jobs. The Egyptian press continues to depict the Jews as Nazis, snakes and monsters. The maps in Egyptian schoolbooks still don't show that Israel exists. President Mubarak boasts that he has never been to Israel. The peace treaty with Jordan was worthwhile because its Hashemite rulers have an interest in a strong Israel as insurance against possible attacks from their Arab neighbors - Syria and Iraq, though considerations of internal security require that it be kept under wraps.
The Egyptian experience should have been a warning that real lasting peace with the Arabs - and especially with the Palestinians - is impossible. However, Itzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres plunged into this reckless gamble in 1993. This time, there was not even the semblance of a quid pro quo for Israel in the pieces of paper they signed. Peres actually declared that Israel should only give and the Palestinians should take. They did. The accords provided for a 25,000-men armed police force (which Rabin and Peres hoped would deal with the Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and other extremist bodies without having to worry about the Geneva Convention.) Arafat created a police force of 50,000 and in addition the armed Tanzim militia. Both cooperated closely with Hamas and the rest. Whether the Labor Party leaders were so blinded by their dreams of eternal peace that they paid no attention, or whether all that interested them was to give away land so as to deprive the Israeli Right of its ideological platform does not really matter. What matters is that their behavior helped Arafat to create a powerful terrorist base in Israel's back yard.
At his Camp David "summit" with President Clinton and Arafat in July 2000, Ehud Barak, a Labor Party Prime Minister only a little less generous with Israeli territory than Rabin and Peres, offered the PLO Chairman some 90% of Judea-Samaria, plus the Arab quarters of East Jerusalem and even the Temple Mount, but insisted that this must be within the framework of an agreement which the PLO would formally accept as the end of the conflict. Arafat rejected the offer and in September 2000 began the Al-Aqsa intifada - an increasingly vicious series of terrorist attacks on Israeli towns and settlements culminating with suicide bombings supplemented by murderous drive-by shootings at Jewish cars. It has already killed more than 600 Jews, mainly civilians of both sexes and all ages, and wounded over 4,500. As the population of the United States is nearly 60 times bigger than the Jewish population of Israel, comparable US casualties would number 36,000 killed and 270,000 wounded in less than two years.
By now, the overwhelming proportion of Israeli Jews has realized that the conflict with the Arabs has nothing to do with Israel's readiness or lack of readiness to make territorial concessions. It is a conflict about the right of Israel to exist as an independent Jewish state in the Middle East. Even a large proportion of Left-wing voters who supported the Oslo agreements came round to this position, though most of their leaders still try to justify the agreements in order to prove that they were right to sign them. These leaders constitute a serious weakness only elections can eradicate.
As the only non-Moslem sovereign entity between Saudi Arabia and the Atlantic Ocean, Israel is an unforgivable violation of Dar-ul-Islam. Almost every major Arab statesman of the post-1948 period has at one time or another demanded, like Anwar Sadat, "the dislodging of the Zionist dagger from the heart of the Arab nation." For Sadat, peace was s strategy "to cut Israel down to size" and make it more vulnerable to attack. From the days of Mohammed the Prophet, Islam has been rewriting history to suit its requirements. It denies the historical connection of the Jews to the Land of Israel and to Jerusalem. It has invented an entirely mythical connection of Islam to Jerusalem, though the Koran does not mention it even once, whereas it is mentioned 700 times in the Bible. Indeed, Mohammed never set foot in Jerusalem or any part of Palestine and Moslems face towards Mecca when they pray. But long before Josef Göbbels, Islam discovered that the bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed.
This is why, the US and the European Community notwithstanding, any intelligent Israeli Jew should by now have understood that negotiating with Arabs in general and with the Palestinian Authority is very dangerous. Any agreements reached will be honored by the Arab side only as regards the concessions it gains. Anything pledged to Israel will be disregarded or abrogated at the first opportunity that presents itself, as it always has been in the past. And the so-called international community, which with few exceptions has stood firmly behind Arab claims for territory lost during wars set off by Arab aggression, may well be no help, though Islam regards the destruction of the "Little Satan" - Israel - as the first stage of its impending war with "the Great Satan" - the United States.
An important reason why Israel needs to act urgently is that its deterrence will be eroded when the Arabs and Iran acquire nuclear weapons in a few years' time. Meanwhile, a "political solution" means ceding strategically decisive territory to the enemy, while a military solution is hamstrung by the massive presence of Oslo-bound defeatists in Israel's Government.
The first prerequisite of escaping this quagmire is to lay claim to the whole of Western Palestine. The "Palestinians" have no valid claim to it. The PLO is a corrupt, terrorist body not fulfilling the most elementary requirements from a sovereign state. It never ruled any part of Palestine except for part of the Gaza strip and eight West Bank towns, transferred to it by Israel under the Oslo agreements that Israel has every right to abrogate because the PLO did not honor them. Similarly, the 1947 UN Partition Resolution has no validity because the Arab states rejected it and went to war with Israel. Jordan could not transfer its sovereign rights to the PLO because only Britain and Pakistan recognized them. On the other hand, Israel can claim Palestine on the basis of its recognition by the League of Nations as the site of the Jewish National Home, quite besides the Jewish historical and religious claims to the country.
The second step is no less essential and urgent. I believe that the only way of achieving anything like a lasting peace in the Middle East is to resettle the Moslem Arab population of Palestine outside the region. Ideally, this should be done with the cooperation of the Western powers. The conditions for executing this transfer are good, because most Palestinians are likely to be receptive to financially attractive proposals to resettle them elsewhere due to their economic plight caused by two years of intifada while Yasser Arafat and his cronies stole most of the funds transferred to the Palestinian Authority for their private use. Arafat's private wealth is now reliably reported to total $1.3 billion.
On the other hand, the establishing of an irredentist Arab state on land promised to the Jews can only be a permanent threat to peace and stability in Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. No sovereign state can be effectively prevented from buying arms or signing agreements - open or secret - with other states, so demilitarization is not realistic. A PLO state's agreements are likely to be with the states listed as "terrorist" by the US. And no Palestinian state, regardless of whether it is ruled by the PLO or not, can be trusted to honor agreements it signs with Israel.
Transfer is a radical method of solving intractable political problems, but is better and more humane than most. The Western Allies and the USSR used it to shift the German populations of East Prussia, the Sudetenland and the entire area East of the Oder-Neisse line into present-day Germany. Poles and Czechs were settled in their place. The logistical problems involved in moving some 20 million people were solved then, and moving four million Arabs now will be much easier. Population transfers in Thrace solved border problems between Greece and Turkey. The PLO's Charter advocated transferring Jews out of Palestine. So the PLO may not like being the object of transfer but can have no moral grounds for rejecting the idea when applied to its own people.
Transfer is not a new concept for bringing peace to the Middle East. Back in 1943, Herbert Hoover, the 31st President of the United States, advocated transferring the entire Arab population of Palestine to Iraq in a book entitled The Problems of Lasting Peace. A year earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made the following statement to his Jewish Secretary for the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr.: "I actually would put barbed wire around Palestine and I would move the Arabs out of Palestine. I would provide land for the Arabs in some other part of the Middle East." He reinforced this by a directive to his Under-Secretary of State, Edward R. Stettinius, to the effect that "Palestine should be for the Jews and no Arabs should be in it." The British Labor Party adopted a similar plank in 1944. But when it came to power and the rabidly anti-Semitic Ernest Bevin became Foreign Secretary, its policy towards the Jews turned around 180 degrees.
Today, Congressman Richard Armey, the House of Representatives Majority Leader, supports a transfer-based peace plan. However, only when the majority of Jews and their Christian friends realize that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people will Israel be able to maintain a peaceful and normal existence. This would be a fitting response to Arab savagery. Its most likely alternative is the destruction of Israel and a second Holocaust.
Since the Six-Day War, many Jews of Israel lost their Judaic/Zionist compass - and with it their political acumen. This was reflected by the foolhardy Camp David Accord with Egypt in 1978, which ushered in a period of insecurity and burgeoning Arab hatred. But nothing illustrates it more than the tragic Oslo Accords of 1993. The resulting weakening of Israel encouraged anti-Semitism the world over, thousands of Israeli Jews were killed or wounded and now there is a real threat of Israel's demise. The successes of the Moslems increased their arrogance, shattering the hopes of a more tranquil new world order when Arab terrorists attacked New York and Washington killing 2,800 Americans.
On the other hand, Arafat's intifada created rapidly growing support for transfer among Israeli Jews. More and more of them (in recent public opinion polls nearly 55%) believe it to be necessary and advisable. They understand that ridding Palestine of Moslem Arabs, including Israeli Arabs whom Oslo has turned into a dangerous Fifth Column, is more likely to bring peace and quiet than agreements that will not be honored. Transfer will also greatly strengthen Israel's deterrence to further aggression by the Arab states.
The concept of a "New Middle East" bandied about to justify the disastrous Oslo Accords by dreamy-eyed academics or venal politicians funded by West European money has been revealed as a dangerous grand illusion. But seemingly, no amount of murder by Palestinian terrorists will convince such politicians to stop conciliating them with concessions. Unfortunately, their removal from the political scene may prove a precondition for any settlement yielding Israel defensible borders and security, including transfer. We still do not know whether the doubts of Achad Ha'am about the capacity of the Jewish people to gain and retain Palestine will or will not be justified.
The present situation confronting the leaders and people of Israel reminds me of a quotation from Winston Churchill's book The Gathering Storm. In it, Churchill describes the consequences of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's decision at the fateful Munich Conference in October 1938: "Herr Hitler gave Mr. Chamberlain the choice between dishonorable surrender and war; he chose surrender and got war."
