Because too many in the latest generations of young adults are content to accept factless narratives fed to them by leftist teachers, it is necessary to provide another primer on the real history of Israel and the Palestinians.
Herein, as concisely and as relevant to the current war as possible, is that primer.
Start with the fact that never in the history of the world has there been a “Palestinian state.” Today’s inhabitants of Gaza cannot claim they are seeking a restoration of some historic birthright. On the other hand, it is indisputable that Jews have lived and often ruled in that territory for thousands of years, with vast archaeological and other definitive proof that most of the history (the facts, not necessarily the interpretations) of what Christians call the “Old Testament” is true.
For the past half-millennium, the area now under Israeli control was ruled either by Ottoman Turks or by Western powers operating under broad, international recognition of the land essentially as a conservatorship rather than as actual territory “owned” by those Western powers. Jews always lived there in significant numbers, though, with the numbers growing as Jews continually faced pogroms and other brutish treatment almost wherever else they settled, no matter how much philanthropy they practiced.
After the Germans attempted total genocide of Jews during the Holocaust, the United Nations provided for a two-state solution in the region, with one dominated by Jews and the other by Arabs. The Jews accepted the proposal. The Arabs didn’t. When the British conservatorship ended in accord with the U.N. resolution, Jews declared the state of Israel even as the five major Arab nations immediately declared war and attacked. In response, Jews forcibly evicted non-Jews from parts of the newly formed nation, although at least as many were welcome to keep their homes if they would accept the new democratic state of Israel with human rights guarantees. Instead, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs voluntarily abandoned the area rather than accept living in a Jewish state.
For those who stayed, though, Israel largely lived up to its original promises. Today, more than 20% of the population of Israel is Arab, with another 5% other forms of non-Jews (including Christians). Every one of them enjoys more freedom, more prosperity, and far more guaranteed human rights than the “Palestinian” inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank. Arabs can be citizens in Israel, and they have elected members to the Knesset since 1949. Arab Christians for years have served as justices on Israel’s Supreme Court. Today, even an Arab Muslim sits on the court.
Of course, any Jew who tried to live in similar peace in Gaza wouldn’t be allowed to live at all. (Nor, by the way, would any of the American campuses’ “Queers for Palestine,” who surely would be not just killed but actually tortured to death if they dared walk down a Gazan or West Bank street with even the slightest public displays of affection.)
For decades, a subgroup of the non-Jews who fled Israel, led by Yasser Arafat, practiced terrorism whenever and wherever it could. The Palestine Liberation Organization wasn’t merely anti-Jewish but anti-civilization. It fought a civil war against the government of Jordan in 1970 and lost. It destabilized Lebanon. It was anathema in Egypt. It was, in short, a veritable plague on the planet.
Meanwhile, Arab or Muslim states repeatedly waged war on Israel. In 1967, Egypt closed maritime passages to Israeli shipping and amassed troops on Israel’s border, leading to a major Israeli victory in the Six-Day War despite help for Egypt from Jordan and Syria. In 1973, a coalition of Arab states launched a surprise attack against Israel on the latter’s holy day of Yom Kippur. Again, Israel prevailed.
Remember, Jews govern a mere 8,000 square miles in the Middle East. Arab nations already control 5 million square miles. Israel’s population is less than 10 million, of which only 7.2 million are Jews. The Arab world consists of 475 million people. Somehow, those 475 million keep failing to conquer the 7 million, and somehow, most of those nations can’t bear the idea of Jews holding just a tiny sliver of land where Jews have lived for 3,300 years.
How, pray tell, is it the Israelis who are considered “oppressors”? What sort of moronicism allows malicious college students to chant that the Israelis should be eradicated “from the river to the sea”?
Meanwhile, as for the Palestinians: Despite the PLO’s decades of terrorism, which made its legions into pariahs even among Arab states, President Bill Clinton in the 1990s pushed Israel to negotiate with PLO leader Arafat. Israel repeatedly was told that if it gave up land, it would be afforded peace. Israel repeatedly gave up land, but it received no peace.
Clinton, though, convinced Israel again to accept a two-state solution, giving the Palestinians something they had never enjoyed in history. Ever. By Clinton’s own account, it was Arafat who then reneged on the deal. Even so, Israel allowed the PLO’s supposedly non-terrorist branch, Fatah, to exercise effective governing autonomy on the West Bank and in Gaza — both of them territories Israel had every right to claim for its own. Not even Fatah, despite being wrongly labeled by liberal U.S. media outlets as “moderate,” would do so much as acknowledge Israel’s right to exist or renounce violence against its civilians.
Instead, Arafat, in 2000, launched five years of “intifada,” meaning violent uprisings, against the very Israeli nation that had just granted Palestinians the first largely autonomous rule they had ever, ever exercised. Again and again, Jewish civilians were targeted, ambushed, and killed.
Nonetheless, when the intifada finally exhausted itself, Israel actually began providing humanitarian aid to both areas, the West Bank and Gaza, under Palestinian authority. Israel did this, even though, in Gaza, the people used a 2006 election to throw out the already-murderous Fatah movement in favor of the avowedly terroristic Hamas. Israel did this even though Hamas repeatedly launched rocket attacks at innocent Israeli communities, most notably with a concentrated effort for months in 2014, with Israel avoiding thousands of deaths only because its own ingenious Iron Dome anti-missile system proved so successful.
In the meantime, Israel has sought peace with its Arab neighbors. It has signed peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan and has informal detente with Saudi Arabia and others.
In Gaza, Israel not only provided aid itself and encouraged the international community to provide more aid to the Palestinians, but it also provided the water and power systems used in Gaza. Hamas took most of the aid intended for humanitarian purposes and used it for military-terroristic designs. It has even bragged about this, including how it took massive water pipes and turned them into weapons casings. If the people of Gaza suffered for these past 18 years, it was because of Hamas’s corruption and violence, not because Israel did anything to them.
Then came Hamas’s surprise attack last Oct. 7 that killed at least 1,200 Israelis and took hundreds of hostages. At least in previous Hamas atrocities, the Palestinian group always claimed to be reacting to some direct provocation, such as a Palestinian citizen being mistreated after crossing an Israeli checkpoint. Not this time. This time, Hamas didn’t even bother to pretend there was an Israeli provocation. This time, Hamas just sent in its hang-gliders and its rockets as part of a “revolution,” one that targeted not soldiers but peaceful citizens — torturing some, raping many, beheading babies, and even cutting open the womb of a pregnant woman and killing her baby in front of the woman’s eyes as the woman herself presumably bled to an agonizing death.
Hamas videotaped itself doing these atrocities and boasted about them.
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And what had Israel done to deserve any of this? Not a single thing, other than to ask to live in peace on a tiny sliver of 8,000 square miles, smaller than the state of New Jersey, to which a large proportion of them had returned after centuries of being abused and slaughtered and after a Holocaust that deliberately killed 6 million of their fellow Jews.
If, knowing this history, you think it is the Israelis here who are the colonizers, the aggressors, the oppressors, the ones at fault, then, well, there is something very wrong with your own mind and your own soul.
