The Conflict — Part 4

In 1947, the United Nations — which replaced the League of Nations after World War II — voted to partition between the Jews and the Arabs the 23 percent that remained of the once vast tract of land that comprised Palestine. Today, the world believes this remaining 23 percent to actually be the entire 100 percent of Palestine, but in fact, it is less than one-quarter of the land ¯ more than three-quarters was cut off and made into a sovereign Arab state in 1922 that was named Transjordan, which was later renamed The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, colloquially known as Jordan today. Seventy-four percent of Jordan’s inhabitants were Palestinian and the majority of Jordan’s inhabitants today remain Palestinian. Jordan was, in 1922, and still is today, a Palestinian state. Heated political talk about establishing a Palestinian state on the backs of Israelis is superfluous due to the fact that a true Palestinian state has been in existences for nigh on a century.

In November 1947 the UN voted to partition the remnant of Palestine into two states, a Jewish state and an Arabs state. The Arabs rejected it; they wanted the whole 23 percent. The Jews, however, were willing to settle for what had been allotted to them in the partition plan, which amounted to a mere 11 percent of what had once been allotted them by the Balfour Agreement and the League of Nations. Their desire was to again establish a sovereign Jewish state where Jews would be free from anti-Semitism. But due to the constant agitation of the British against the establishment of the Jewish National Home, the Arabs refused to accept the result of the United Nations partition vote. They demanded instead to have the whole of the remaining area to establish yet another Arab state, which would make it the 23rd Arab state within the borders of the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Britain was on the side of the Arabs ¯ training and arming them and preventing the Jews from returning to their land. Britain ruled with an iron-fist and with gallows in order to prevent the very thing it had been commissioned to effect. Thousands of Jews, however, escaped the British nets and slipped into Palestine. A violent guerrilla war broke out between the British forces and the somewhat motley band of Palestinian Jews. And, as in the days of the Roman yesteryear, the little band of Jews fought tenaciously ¯ humiliating the British imperial lion ¯ forcing it to give up its mandate and withdraw from Palestine to lick its wounds. It has never forgiven the Jews for seriously wounding British pride and many British decisions concerning Israel today are colored by intense anti-Israelism.

On May 14, 1948, one day before the final termination of Britain’s mandate and the withdrawal of the last British troops, the Jews of Palestine officially declared that their recreated homeland was to be called the State of Israel. The following day, the last day of the British presence, seven Arab armies, three of which were led by British officers, launched an all-out war to annihilate the new state. The end result of that aggressive action became for the Arab world, the Nakbar, the Catastrophe — “the greatest shame in modern Arab history” ¯ Israel won that war. And they won the next war. And the next. And the next.

Unable to defeat Israel militarily on physical battlefields, new strategies became necessary for the Arabs. A new battlefield was chosen, a new defense, a new weapon, and

new terms. In Hebrew its called hasbara ¯ propaganda. And the Arabs had oil ¯ petrodollars ¯with which to buy both the nations’ leaders and the world’s major news medias.

There was a great deal of support for the courageous Jews in 1948. The impossible odds of seven trained, fully equipped Arab armies against 18,000 Jewish fighters ¯ of whom thousands did not even have a gun ¯ found much of the world praying for Jewish success and cheering them on to victory. And facing annihilation from the Arab world again in 1967, Israel’s incredible, lightening victory left the world gasping and military academies entering new battle tactics into their journals of warfare. Then came Arab hasbara. Israel entered the new arena of warfare and even opened an official Department of Hasbara, but the Israelis were never successful on the new battlefield. Oil and anti-Semitism defeated them again and again.

Israel was savagely attacked again in October 1973 on Yom Kippur (The Day of Atonement), the holiest and most solemn day of the Jewish calendar. On this day the Jewish nation fasts and conducts five-hour synagogue services. Television and radio stations are off the air, newspapers are not printed, buses and cars do not run, and if a telephone rings, most people would not answer it. On this day the Arab armies invaded Israel, and many hundreds of Israelis were dead, dying, or injured before the country even knew itself to be at war.

It took Israel three days to fully mobilize its fighting forces, and 300,000 Israelis fought against more than 1.2 million Arabs. Some Israeli units literally fought to the last man, but in 10 days Israel had driven the Arabs out. Israeli tanks were only short distances from both Cairo and Damascus when it was forced by non-combatant nations to stop the war. The Yom Kippur War took the greatest toll of Israeli lives of all of the Arab-Israeli wars; there was terrible mourning throughout Israel. But at the war’s end, 61 nations broke diplomatic relations with Israel! Arab oil and hasbara had ‘proven’ to the world that the victim was in fact the aggressor.

Israel finally closed the Department of Hasbara in 1993 after having lost every round of every battle in the propaganda war. The Arabs’ vast, abundantly funded propaganda machine has convinced most of the world’s literate masses that the Jews poured into Palestine during the first half of this century and displaced millions of indigenous Arabs, who had been living there for thousands of years. And they have also convinced them that Israel is a wanton, brutal, heartless aggressor that has an insatiable lust for Arab lands. It is perhaps the greatest deception in the history of mankind.

To be continued

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