Reversing the Reversal

David Isaac

Politicians as a breed are prone to an inability to recognize unpleasant present facts and they often suffer from an unwillingness to face up to them. They are equally prone to prettifying facts of history…Perhaps this is indeed what distinguishes the politician from the rarer breed of statesmen. (“Tweedledum ‘n Tweedledee”, The Jerusalem Post, Feb. 5, 1982). Shmuel’s words fit former President Bill Clinton. Speaking before a group of Egyptian businessmen in Cairo, he made the astonishing claim that solving the Israel-Palestinian conflict “will take about half the impetus in the whole world – not just the region, the whole world – for terror away.” Clinton predicted it would have a “knock on effect” that could result in Syria ending its support for the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Iran turning back its controversial nuclear program.

Even as a typical specimen of the breed Shmuel describes, Clinton, better than other politicians, could have been expected to know that the Palestinians have no intention of “solving” the conflict. As JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which immediately jumped on Clinton’s comments, points out, Clinton presided over the last ditch effort to negotiate a final settlement in 2000 – Arafat walked out on Ehud Barak’s offer of 95 percent of the disputed territory plus political concessions in Jerusalem and American funding for resettlement of Arab “refugees”.

As for the notion that Syria would end its designs on Lebanon, Iran abandon its nuclear bombs and terror worldwide fade away, this is, of course, balderdash. As journalist Khaled Abu Toameh recently noted, Europeans and Americans are targeted “for being ‘infidels’ and enemies of Islam and for the Western values they represent. They are being targeted because of their failure to transform into Islamic countries. Those who think that solving the Israeli-Arab conflict will undermine Al-Qaeda and its allies do not know what they are talking about.”

Nonetheless, Clinton’s comments are no aberration. They reflect the thinking of Western leaders like former-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who said in 2003, “[Middle Eastern] terrorism will not be defeated without peace in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine.”

Clinton is also echoing the views of the current administration. As Mitchell Bard notes in his new book The Arab Lobby, from White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on down, “Administration officials argued that the only way they could get Arab states to cooperate in the effort to stop the Iranian program was to solve the Palestinian issue.”

Even Anti-Defamation League head Abe Foxman came out of a March 2009 meeting with Rahm Emanuel shaking his head over the administration’s belief “that if you resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the messiah will come and the lions will lie down with the lambs.”

This truly nutty idea – that all the problems in the region can be traced to the Israel-Arab conflict, and will dissipate once that problem is solved – is not new. Shmuel was writing about it three decades ago.

In “Deaf Ears in Jerusalem” (The Jerusalem Post, Aug. 17, 1979), he wrote:

This is an expression of the hoax the Arabs have perpetuated, with much success, throughout the world: that the dispute is a clash between a strong Israel and a small, poor Palestinian people, and that the heart of the troubles in the Middle East is the “Palestinian problem.”

The lie is easily put to the claim. It takes work not to trip over conflicts in the Middle East that have nothing whatsoever to do with Israel, but everything to do with Moslem intolerance. In “Making War, Not Peace” (The Jerusalem Post, April 17, 1981), Shmuel wrote not about Israel, but Christians in Lebanon – civilians – who were under a “murderous artillery onslaught” by a so-called Syrian “peace-keeping force”.

Here, indeed, has been the sin of the Western powers and – in the circumstances, most culpably – of the United States. They have kept their eyes closed to the real roots of the “dispute.” Why, after all, has the war in Lebanon been continuing, in its various configurations, for six years? Why did prosperous, comparatively peaceful little Lebanon have to be ruined?

Here is no routine quarrel, to be solved by a formula or a peace-keeping force. The Lebanese tragedy is an expression of the refusal of the Arab-Moslem “world” to tolerate within its bounds the existence of any non-Arab, non-Moslem sovereignty. Even the partial sovereignty of the Christians in Lebanon is intolerable.

When speaking of the Middle East, liberal elites in the West like to speak of “root causes.” There is nothing wrong with that, except that the root causes they seize upon are a product of Arab propaganda – a fact of which people like Clinton, Blair and Obama are probably not even aware.

Where this propaganda has achieved its greatest success is in the reversal of the “root cause” of the conflict: instead of an Israeli David beset by vast, oil-rich Arab potentates, the narrative is now of an Israeli Goliath oppressing a tiny, embattled, never-before-heard-of “Palestinian people”.

What is needed is a public education campaign to reverse the Arab reversal and set things in their proper light. It was once readily apparent that the reason for the Arab-Israel conflict was Arab intransigence; the Moslem world’s backward belief that the entire Middle East somehow belongs to them and that non-Moslems have no right to be there, except as second-class citizens willing to submit to the Islamic boot.

Shmuel spelled out the real root cause in his monograph “No Solution to the Arab-Palestinian Problem” (Dawn Publishing Co., 1985):

The correct definition of the root of the conflict over the Land of Israel or, in current phraseology, the “heart of the problem” is the determination of the entire Arab nation, under the inspiration of Islam, to rule over the whole area from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean and from the southern border of Turkey to the southern border of the Sudan. This was why they launched a war against the embryonic state, dispatching a vanguard of forces to abort its birth. The Arab states were going to wreak death and destruction in Palestine as the Mongols had in the 13th century, as Azzam Pasha, the secretary of the Arab League, declared at the time.

The perfectly simple fact — though its ramifications are hard and bitter — is that the failure of the attempt to strangle the nascent state did not weaken by one iota the Arabs’ liquidationist design. That design is rooted in Arab history and woven into the very fabric of the Islamic faith. The contemporary Arab objective is not the result of twentieth-century covetousness alone. The Arabs’ feeling of lordship over all these vast domains derives from memories of the past or, more precisely, from an imaginary notion of past glory, and it is fed by a desire for vengeance against the Western world. In the Arabs’ view, they were humiliated for hundreds of years, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, by the Western Christian powers — even though they, as Muslims, are the bearers of a superior religion.

When the Muslims dominated immense stretches of the world, the Jews and the Christians under their rule had a debased and inferior status: they were second-class citizens. By the grace of the Muslim ruler they were granted the status of dhimmis, or a subject minority, of protege citizens whom the ruler protected at will — and they paid special taxes.

The Arabs have been enormously successful in determining how people in the West, particularly Western elites, perceive the Israel-Palestine issue. The formidable challenge is to make them jettison this fictional view in which they have become so heavily invested, and once more adopt a view that sees things as they truly are.