let's face the facts: Mideast struggle is not about land

Mideast struggle was never about land

David Horowitz   Friday, April 26, 2002

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/0
4/26/ED219365.DTL

FROM HIS besieged Ramallah headquarters, Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat called for "millions of martyrs to
march to Jerusalem -- this is our destiny." Arafat's
agenda is a wave of suicide bombers to obliterate the
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"Zionist presence" in Islam. U.S. Secretary of State
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Colin Powell does not seem to understand this, nor do
most of the nation's press. But it is the meaning of
Palestinian deeds. It is what is intended by the
targeting of Jewish children and their mothers. It is
what is meant by Palestinian maps that omit the state
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of Israel.
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It is what was proclaimed in the rejection of a peace
plan that included the vast majority of Palestinian
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negotiating demands. It is what is openly stated in the
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Palestinian Liberation Organization's "covenant," which
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calls for the obliteration of the "Zionist entity." It
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is what Palestine's spiritual leaders, the Grand Muftis
of Jerusalem, preach. This is the Palestinian agenda:
the elimination of Jewry from the Middle East.
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The Middle East struggle has never been about a
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Palestinian state or land. The Palestinians were given
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both the West Bank and a state in 1947 -- and they
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rejected both, declaring a war on Israel that has
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lasted more than 50 years.

Israel occupies a minuscule 1 percent of the Arab
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Middle East and less than 10 percent of the entire area
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mandated as Palestine by the British, which was not
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even a political entity -- let alone a nation -- when
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the Jews were granted a sliver of land. It was just a
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"mandate" the British carved out of the former Turkish
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empire. Jordan -- a nation also created by Britain --
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occupies 80 percent of the original British Mandate.
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Nearly 70 percent of Jordan's inhabitants are
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Palestinian Arabs. Yet Jordan is not the target of a
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Palestine liberation movement. How is this possible? It
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is possible because the Hashemite minority that rules
Jordan is not Jewish. The Middle East War is not about
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land and not about injustice. It is a religious war
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against the Jews.
================

In 1949, Jordan annexed the entire West Bank and held
it for 18 years. The Arabs then made and lost a war
against Israel, and refused to make peace. The Jews
kept the West Bank to prevent the Arabs -- in the
absence of a peace -- from using it as a staging area
for a third war. Not once in these 18 years was there a
complaint from the Palestinians or the Arab states
about the injustice of Jordanian occupation of the West
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Bank. Not once was there an outcry that Jordan had
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annexed the Palestine "nation." That is because the
Palestinians consider themselves Arabs and Muslims
first and foremost, and because being "Palestinian" is
a remote afterthought.

Zionist settlers first began arriving in the already
existing Jewish communities of Palestine in the 1880s.
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They were hoping to end the persecution of the Jews,
which was a result of their stateless condition and
their expulsion 2000 years ago from Judea and Samaria,
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which is today known as the West Bank. At the time of
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the Zionists arrival, there was no Palestinian nation
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in the region.
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Today, more than half the land given to the Jews under
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the British Mandate was desert. But within a generation
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the Jews had made their desert bloom. Today, the
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boundary between Israel and Syria is still referred to
as the "green line," because the Israeli side has
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become fertile ground while the Arab side is still a
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desert. The Jews also built the only industrial and
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democratic nation in the entire Middle East. The only
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tolerant society in the heart of Islam. To this day,
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Israeli Arabs have more rights than the inhabitants of
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any other state in the Arab Middle East.
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What is the crime of the Jews -- a tolerant, democratic
people -- that they should not have been welcomed into
this desert from the beginning? Their crime is that
they are heathens in the empire of Islam. The
Palestinian terrorists and their sponsors, Arafat and
the Palestine Authority, orchestrate the genocidal
agenda. There will be no peace until they are defeated
or destroyed.

David Horowitz is president of the Los Angeles-based
Center of Popular Culture and the editor in chief of
www.frontpagemag.com