Jan

5

Israel, from David Lillienfeld

January 5, 2017 |

It's not particularly well understood that there were a lot of Jewish settlements in the West Bank prior to partition that were eliminated by the Jordanians.

It's not discussed much—the same way no one pays any attention to the Jews who were summarily kicked out of Arab countries post-partition (and all the way to 1967, when the Egyptian Jewish community was given 24 hours to leave the country before becoming enemies of the state.

As for the, "it's ours now," the Israelis tried that and it didn't get them very far. That was the Begin narrative. Guess what. The world didn't care. The Arabs had the oil, the Arabs had the money, and both were used to "convince" the rest of the world that Zionism was a form of racism and so on.

It's only been during the past 25 years, post-Oslo, that the Said story has taken hold, that Israel is a colony of Europe and that Europeans are responsible for all Israeli activities/actions and should be punished accordingly, absent some form of punishment of Israel.

The one thing that has been constant during the past two thousand years in Jewish history is that anti-semitism has been present, often government or religiously sponsored, and governing the circumstances in which Jewish communities lived. So I respectfully doubt that time will change much from the present—it hasn't up to now and there's no reason to believe (other than the tooth fairy concept) that it will change in the foreseeable future.

Israelis have a Masada complex because that's the situation Israel has been in almost since its founding.

And for those insisting that the US provides an umbrella of security for Israel, I cite the past 8 years, the 4 years of Bush 1, the 8 years of Nixon-Ford, the 8 years of Kennedy-Johnson, and the 8 years of Eisenhower. US policy was at best indifferent absent some overwhelming externality—like the cold war and Soviet intervention. In fact, twice before the US has insisted that Israel return captured territory—in 1956 and in 1973. In both instances, the US used pressures that the Israelis could not resist.

Unfortunately, time isn't on Israel's side. It hasn't been in the past, and there's little basis for thinking it will in the future.


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