ISRAEL WON SO GET OVER IT by MELANIE PHILLIPS.
The Middle East Forum held a meeting
in Jerusalem this week to discuss breaking the Arab-Israel impasse. Daniel
Pipes urges that the conflict should be reframed as a war which Israel has won
and the Arabs have lost rather than a never-ending impasse with demands upon
Israel for negotiations, peace processes and comprises.
This is a very
much-needed initiative. There is an urgent need to recalibrate the whole issue
of the Arab war against Israel; to recalibrate it as one of war and victory;
and to recalibrate it not just for the benefit of the Palestinians but also for
the west and also for Israel.
We have to ask ourselves, surely, why
do the Palestinians think the war is still on. Well, I think there are a number
of reasons for that. One reason is that, unfortunately, if you are a religious
Muslim you believe that any land conquered by Islam is then consecrated to
Islam and nobody else can ever have sovereignty over it. So from that point of
view there can be no victory over that kind of fanatical religious mindset.
But the main reason why the
Palestinians think the war is still on is because they are encouraged to think
that by the west. By Britain, by Europe and also by Israel’s great ally and
friend, America.
The Palestinian story has been
accepted by the west to the extent that the west believes there is a
Palestinian people which has a historic, national and legitimate claim to the
land. There never was a Palestinian people, there is not, and it does not now
have any legitimate claim to the land.
Even if it did have a claim to the
land it would be forfeit because of nearly a century of exterminatory
aggression. In every other conflict in the world, that sort of exterminatory
aggression means that the aggressors are treated as pariahs. Uniquely in this
conflict the aggressors have been treated over the best part of a century –
because of their aggression – as statesmen-in-waiting.
It’s not rocket science. If you treat
aggressors as statesmen-in-waiting, you do not get peace and harmony. You get
more aggression.
Now why has the west rewarded
aggression in this way – uniquely – in this region? Many reasons. One is
ignorance. One is malice. One is realpolitik – the desire to appease the Arabs
over the oil weapon. Another is simply that people in the west believe – and
I’ve heard this so many times – that there is no alternative.
But I would suggest there’s a deeper
problem here. The prevalent view in the west is that it no longer does war and
victory. This is seen as uncivilised. War is seen as brutal, uncivilised and
must never be undertaken. If the Palestinians or the Arabs or the developing
world are waging war, well we “expect that of them”, don’t we, because they are
basically “uncivilised” people. We in the west do not apparently expect them to
accord with our own values of respect for human life, democracy and all the
rest of it. In other words, the west has a deeply racist attitude towards the
developing world.
And it believes in itself that it
doesn’t do war any more because war is uncivilised. Instead of war it does
conflict resolution; it does law, not war.
And so as a result the war that’s
been taking place in this region by the Arabs against the Jewish homeland means
that the west thinks that a compromise is essential. You have a war of
extermination? Put the two sides in the same room, bang their heads together
until they reach a compromise. Because both sides, according to this view, have
a legitimate claim to the same piece of land.
In other words the west has, for
nearly a century, mistaken this whole conflict as a fight over land boundaries
whereas in fact it is a war of extermination. And where the west wants to press
Israel to make compromise, every compromise Israel has ever made is seen by the
Arabs as a sign of weakness and an incentive to further aggression.
In conclusion, I would say that the
west’s mistake – its conceptual, its fundamental mistake – perpetuates this
conflict; indeed it is a signal reason, possibly the main reason, why this
conflict got under way in the first place. in the 1930s, Britain responded to
the pogroms being committed by the Arabs of this land against the
returning Jews – and responded to the Arabs’ violence against the then-ruling
British under the Palestine Mandate – Britain responded to this aggression by
saying to the Arabs: “Have part of the land which we have undertaken by solemn
agreement under international treaty obligation to give to the Jews”.
In other words, the original
“two-state solution” was proposed in 1936 as a reward for exterminatory
aggression and terror; and that continues to be the case today.
My final point is that the west needs
to understand this – but, my goodness, Israel needs to understand that this
narrative has to change. Israel is most reluctant to say to the free world, to
the west, what it should be saying: “Are you crazy? Why do you treat this
conflict differently from all other conflicts?” And until the west and until
Israel actually understand that this conflict has to be reframed as one of war
and victory, we’re not going to get anywhere.
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