“Peace will come to the
Middle East when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us,”
then Foreign Minister Golda Meir said in 1957, during an address to the
National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Meir, one of the
signatories of Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948, made her
pronouncement long before the Six-Day War, when Israel was nearly
annihilated by a host of Arab armies, emerging victorious by the skin of
its teeth and the grace of God. This was the war that resulted in the
unification of Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty, and the repossession
of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), and the Gaza Strip.
Rather than simply
annexing the above territories — which were not only legitimate spoils
of war, but historically Jewish since time immemorial — Israel made what
would turn out to be a serious mistake. It administered, protected and
funded them, in the hope that the Arab population residing in them would
come to terms with their Jewish neighbors, eventually reaching an
agreement that would be satisfactory to all concerned.
This fact has been
obfuscated to the point of eradication since those days. Indeed, the
Arab world knew a good thing when it saw one. This “good thing” took the
form of a particularly effective propaganda campaign aimed at Western
liberal sensibilities on the one hand and at Arab vulnerability on the
other.
Creating an entity
called “the Palestinians” — those Arabs who had lived in east Jerusalem,
the West Bank, and Gaza before the war and those born after 1967 —
enabled them to play David to Israel’s Goliath. It was a brilliant
maneuver, since up until that point there was little doubt that Israel
was a tiny country surrounded by much larger Arab states bent on its
destruction. Once “the Palestinians” were created, this reality became
forgotten, certainly in the international arena, but even by many
Israelis.
The idea that the only
real obstacle to peace in the Middle East was the conflict between
Israel and the Palestinians not only took hold across the globe; it also
came to shape Israeli foreign policy, including that of right-wing
governments.
It is thus that there
have been repeated U.S.-backed Israeli initiatives to make peace with
the Palestinians. Each of these initiatives has been based on the
assumption that Israel must relinquish land in exchange for Palestinian
promises of peace. Each has ended in war.
Given the stated aims
of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas — the former ruling
over the West Bank and the latter over Gaza — it is no wonder that
Israel’s attempts have failed abysmally. Basing policy on false premises
is never a good idea. Repeating such an error again and again is
psychotic, suicidal, or both.
Nobody is more aware of this than the Arabs themselves. And the more they can milk it for all it’s worth, the better for them.
But don’t take my word
for it. The perpetrators of Israel’s current war against the terrorist
infrastructure in Gaza always articulate it so precisely. This week is
no exception.
For days, Hamas has
been broadcasting battle-cry video clips on its Al-Aqsa TV station,
produced especially for Operation Pillar of Defense. The purpose of
these segments, jointly devised by Hamas and its military wing, the
Al-Qassam Brigades, is twofold: to rally the residents of Gaza around
the regime and to threaten Israel into submission.
One such segment
includes the following warning to the Israel Defense Forces: "The price
will be high, sons of Zion ... Oh occupier, we are coming toward you.
Leave our land. All of Palestine is ours. There is nothing here for you
but death. There is nothing here for you but to be killed and to leave …
In the land that you came to alive, you will end as body parts. That is
Allah's promise."
This is but one of many
and varied examples — translated by Palestinian Media Watch over the
years — of how the Palestinians actually view their conflict with
Israel. It has nothing to do with the 1967 borders. Nor does it have to
do with “occupation”; Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in
2005. Neither is it rooted in poor peace planning. It is an assertion of
a religious imperative that Israel must be destroyed.
Another clip, part
public-service announcement and part horror-film promo, has a narrator
calling out menacingly to the IDF, "From the Al-Qassam Brigades to the
Zionist soldiers: The Al-Qassam Brigades love death more than you love
life.”
This goes to show that
Golda Meir was only partly right. Peace won’t come to the Middle East
when the Arabs love their children more than they hate Israel, but
rather when they stop loving death, period.
She was completely on
the mark, however, when she said that Israelis might be able one day “to
forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to
forgive them for having forced us to kill theirs.”
Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the Arab Spring" (RVP Press).
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