Originally Posted by Gannex
What is now called Israel was never Arab land. Until the First World War, it was part of the Ottoman Empire, and rich absentee landlords owned the land. The Ottomans sided with Germany during the Great War, lost, and in the process lost their Middle Eastern possessions as well. Present-day Israel, Syria and Jordan became British and French possessions, or "mandates", as they were called. Note that neither Jews nor Arabs owned the place, except insofar as individual Jews or Arabs had bought pieces of land. By 1948, the British had given all their land east of the Jordan river to the Hashemites, a favoured Arab elite, and the French gave Syria to Arabs as well. There was just a small piece of land left, and that, it was decided, would be mainly Arab, with a small part reserved for the Jews. Of all the land that the Great Powers turned over to local ethnic groups, more than 99% was given to Arabs, and less than 1% to Jews. But the Arabs could not accept Jews occupying even 1% of the land, and continued in their efforts, which had begun long before the creation of the State of Israel, to wipe the Jews out.
The spiritual and political leader of the Palestinian Arabs in the 1940's was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who, I believe, was an uncle of Yasser Arafat. The Grand Mufti went to Berlin in 1941 where he was received as an honoured guest by Adolf Hitler. He stayed in Berlin for several months as a guest of the German government, and he devoted his time there to trying to persuade the Fuhrer to extend his campaign into Palestine and extend the "final solution" beyond the borders of Europe, so that the Reich might kill all the Jews of the Middle East as well. Hitler couldn't see the point of it, and was unpersuaded, because he had more pressing problems, but the Grand Mufti stayed, begged, pleaded, and finally gave up.
He returned to his base in British Mandate Palestine and confessed to his colleagues that their dream of killing all the Jews of the region would have to be achieved by the efforts of the Arabs alone. They would get no help from Germany.
So they began their campaign and made the elimination of Jews their number one priority. Of course, the local Arabs had been killing Jews, wherever possible, since the Jews had started arriving in numbers in the 1880's, but by the 1940's the determination to exterminate them all had become much more intense. So the attacks intensified and the hostilities became red hot.
Then, the Arabs were awarded by the international community almost the entire region, with tiny slivers of non-contiguous land reserved for the Jews, and the Jews accepted the arrangement. The Arabs, of course, did not, because their entire reason for being, at that point, was the elimination of the Jews.
Thus began the 1948 War of Independence for the State of Israel, which of course the Arabs lost. But, unlike the Germans, who had lost their war three years earlier, the Arabs did not give up hope. They lost face, they lost self-respect, they lost whatever vestiges of fellow feeling they might have had for the Jews, but they did not lose hope that, if they pulled together, the Jews might yet be killed.
They taught their children that nothing mattered as much as the elimination of the Jews, that there was no point in educating themselves, no point in working the land, no point in even living, so long as Jews were among and near them. And that is how the generations of Palestinians have been raised, with hatred of Jews running through their veins from the time they have drawn their first breaths.
Who can blame these youths throwing stones and strapping bombs to themselves as part of the great struggle against the vermin living close by? If anyone on this board had been raised as those men have been raised, I believe they would likely do the same, or at least cheer those who did. But though I do not blame them, I certainly do not condone them, and I am surprised at civilised people who do. For the Arab determination to wipe Israel out has nothing to do with settlements, nothing to do with land, nothing to do with the existence of a Jewish state. It pre-dated all those things, for it is part of the culture, as dear to the Arab heart as Islam. Some cultures dream of artistic greatness and build monuments to that. The Middle Eastern Arab culture dreams of the greatness that comes from knowing that your thirst for genocide has been quenched, and the great task of a hundred years has finally been accomplished -- a Jew-free land.
This is why, in my opinion, the Jews will never be left in peace by the Arabs, no matter how far back they withdraw from their current borders, no matter how many settlements they dismantle, or how many peace overtures they make. The Arab desire to kill them all, begun in the halls of Hitler's palaces in the 1940's, and continuing seamlessly to the present, will always be with them, because every succeeding generation is being educated to love and nurture that goal. It is by now deep in their tradition, and aspirational traditions do not change with the stroke of a pen, or the re-drawing of a map. That is why the Jews, in my opinion, have no choice but to keep up their defenses, maintain their armaments, and hope for the best.
