Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Currently it seems as though Israel and its enemies have arrived at a standoff. However, taking the long view and keeping in mind that the Muslims can afford to lose a thousand battles while the Israelis cannot afford to lose even one, it seems worth considering what would transpire if the Muslims were to win. The published post-victory plans of the Arabs call for deporting all the Jews who weren’t in Israel prior to 1947 back to where they came from. The most problematic subgroup therefore are the 600,000 Israeli Jews, and their descendants, who were expelled from Arab countries. Would the Arabs want them back in their homelands? Would a population that has grown up on a steady diet of Jew-hatred in their schools, mosques, and media accept Jews back in their midst?

  CONCLUSION

  Day-by-day newspaper accounts of violence in Israel are constructed to provide entertainment between advertising, not to illuminate. Fundamentally the facts are the following:

  Jews are not wanted in Europe or in Islamic countries.

  Although initially settled by some idealistic Zionists, Israel has become primarily a dumping ground for the world’s unwanted Jews and this is its principal significance to non-Muslim countries.

  For dictators in Muslim nations, inculcating mass hatred of Jews has substantial political value; Israel’s principal significance to Muslim countries is as a focus of popular hatred.

  For the dictators and subjects of Arab nations, the State of Israel takes on an additional significance as a place whose successful conquest would signify a resurgence of Arab power as exciting as the Arab conquests circa A.D. 700.

  Palestinian violence continues because it is yielding substantial material support from Arab and European nations, support that should lead to a gradual victory over the Jews and the liberation of all of Palestine.

  Taking the long view, the State of Israel is most simply explained as a concentration camp for Jews. Starting in the 1930s the Europeans expropriated the property of their Jews and collected the physical bodies of those Jews in camps where they could be worked to death—the Nazis did not put healthy Jews into gas chambers but only those who had become exhausted by slave labor. In the 1940s and 1950s the remaining Jews of Central Europe were by and large sent to Israel while at the same time Arab nations expropriated the wealth of their 1,000-and 2,000-year-old Jewish communities and sent the physical bodies of the Jews to Israel (except for some thousands who were killed by mobs). In the last decades of the twentieth century the former Soviet Union began to export its Jewish population, though without the violence and confiscation that had accompanied Jewish migrations from Europe and Arab nations.

  Historically most concentration camps for Jews have eventually turned into death camps and certainly there is no shortage of people worldwide trying to effect this transformation.

  IS THERE REALLY A CRISIS? (PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS)

  This article’s primary practical value is intended to be in freeing you from the tyranny of the daily news. If there is a big news story from Israel, feel free to watch The Simpsons. Elected governments will come and go in Israel. Dictators will rise and fall among the Arab nations. Terrorists will kill civilians. The Israeli army will kill terrorists. American and European university professors will vent their Jew-hatred on Israelis and the Israeli government. Politicians and diplomats will negotiate. Peace agreements will be signed when a military stalemate is reached. War will resume when the Arabs believe that they have a new and useful military tactic. All of these events are insignificant against the larger background of history painted above and compared to the major events that will transpire when the Arabs score a major military breakthrough.

  Referring to an Israeli-Palestinian “crisis” in a headline is a good way to sell newspapers but not an accurate description of a conflict that will enter its second century soon. The last significant event was the signing of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty on March 26, 1979. You could have missed every news report for more than two decades and yet be fully up to date on this crisis.

  Events that would qualitatively change the situation in Israel include the following:

  Palestinian takeover of Jordan or establishment of a Palestinian state elsewhere.

  Islamic revolution in Egypt.

  Acquisition of nuclear weapons by a country ruled by Islamic fundamentalists (or a powerful independent group such as Al-Qaeda).

  To build a strong military force for the ultimate liberation of all Palestine, the Palestinians must have their own sovereign state in which heavy weapons can be accumulated and large armies trained. This fact has not been lost on the neighboring governments. Between 1948 and 1967 the state of Jordan occupied the West Bank and prevented the Palestinians from forming their own state. Between 1967 and the present day the State of Israel has occupied the West Bank and prevented the Palestinians from forming their own state. Lacking sovereignty the Palestinians have been unable to stop the Jordanian and Israeli armies from periodically rolling through their neighborhoods confiscating weapons and arresting terrorists, thus capping the number of effective fighters.

  Start following the news if you hear that a sovereign Palestinian state has been established on the West Bank, because that is a required first step in any larger effort by Palestinians.

  What would be the logical second step? Jew-haters worldwide like to cheerlead for a Palestinian takeover of the present State of Israel, but the reality is that a takeover of Jordan would be much easier and in fact this is where most Palestinian efforts to achieve sovereignty have been focused. Jordan offers five times the land area of Israel defended by a military that is considerably weaker. The majority of Jordan’s citizens are Palestinian yet the country is ruled by foreigners, the Hashemite family of Mecca, who were defeated in their native land by the Bedouins under Ibn-Saud and were granted ownership of most of Palestine by Britain. Relations between Palestinians and the family have been strained ever since. A group of Palestinians organized King Abdullah’s assassination in 1951 at the Al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount. King Hussein, who was wounded in the attack that killed his father, fought a civil war with Yasser Arafat’s PLO in 1970 resulting in the deaths of many thousands of Palestinians and the expulsion of all armed Palestinians to southern Lebanon (these fighters sparked off a fifteen-year civil war between Muslims and Christians in their new host country; more than 100,000 people were killed by their neighbors [plus a few thousand more when Israel invaded from 1982 to 1985]).

  After Palestinian sovereignty the next important event to watch for is an Islamic revolution in Egypt, a country with a population of 70 million and an economy twice the size of Israel’s. Currently the population is kept under control by a 500,000-man military that has modernized its capabilities with $38 billion in U.S. military aid between 1978 and 2000. The army spends much of its time finding, torturing, and killing Islamic fundamentalists but still has plenty of energy left over to train for a big battle with Israel. If the Muslim Brotherhood manages to seize power in Egypt, the Israel Defense Forces could face their toughest challenges since the 1973 Ramadan War.

  WHAT CAN WE, AS AVERAGE AMERICAN CITIZENS, DO?

  Terrorism is funded by wealth. There are plenty of poor people in this world who hate the United States but we never hear from them because they can’t afford airplane tickets, weapons, training, etc. When people get richer they buy more of all the things that they enjoy. If you give extra money to a group of French people you’ll see that some is spent on fancy wine and cheese. Flip on the TV and watch Muslims worldwide celebrating the collapse of the World Trade Center or the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia . These are folks who will spend a portion of any new wealth on the killing of Americans. The principal source of Muslim wealth is oil. As a society the most effective way that we can protect ourselves from Muslim violence is by reducing our consumption of oil. They may still hate us but they will have less money to put their hatred into action.

  Oil is an especially bad thing to buy and burn. Any country that earns most of its incom
e from natural resource extraction is a place where it is easy for a ruling elite to transfer that income into its pockets. You don’t need the consent or assistance of your subjects to strike a deal with a foreign oil company and watch them extract the product. Burning oil contributes to air pollution and atmospheric carbon dioxide, thus leading to global warming. “Roughly half the oil consumed in the U.S. goes for cars and trucks,” noted The Wall Street Journal on March 18, 2003. The same article quotes Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, in 1981: “If we force Western countries to invest heavily in finding alternative sources of energy, they will. This will take them no more than seven to ten years and will result in their reduced dependence on oil as a source of energy to a point which will jeopardize Saudi Arabia’s interests.”

  If we were to tax oil to reflect its true military and environmental cost, it would encourage investment in more fuelefficient technology. Half of our oil is burned up in cars and trucks whose powerplants are scarcely different from the engine in a Model T Ford. One can build an engine with precise computer-controlled solenoid-lifted valves rather than a sloppy camshaft, but when gas is cheap it isn’t worth the extra capital cost (see “Why Not a 40-mpg SUV? Technology exists to double gas guzzlers’ fuel efficiency. So what’s the holdup?” in the November 2002 Technology Review). Toyota and Honda show-rooms offer hybrid cars that get fifty miles per gallon but at current gas prices it takes years to recover the higher initial investment. High-tech windmills are good enough that Denmark is able to generate 20 percent of its electricity from wind power; in the United States it is slightly cheaper to take a fossilized dinosaur from Venezuela and light it on fire so that’s what we do. Would you invest in genetic engineering of bacteria that could separate hydrogen fuel from water if you knew that a Sheik in Riyadh could wipe out your company with the stroke of a pen?

  If you want to know who is funding terrorists, look in the vanity mirror as you turn the key of your SUV. If you want to stop funding terrorists, work for a $20-per-barrel tax on imported oil and a $10-per-barrel tax on domestic oil, which doesn’t require an expensive military to defend but we still want to discourage its use to curb pollution. The tax should be phased in over five years, thus giving businesses and consumers time to replace inefficient older machines.

  Terrorism is theater. Terrorism will taper off if people lose interest in news coverage of acts of terror. It is tough to ignore a spectacular event such as the destruction of the World Trade Center, but we can do our share by ignoring newspaper and television stories about run-of-the-mill terrorism. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is like a traffic accident on Interstate 95: a tragedy for the handful of people involved that wouldn’t have affected the rest of us if we hadn’t slowed down to gawk. The last couple of years have been the most violent and even so the number of people killed on both sides has been about 1,000 per year. Shouldn’t this many deaths provoke our sympathy and interest? If we’re motivated by humanitarian concerns, there are richer opportunities for saving lives right here at home. For example, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 Americans are killed every year by medical malpractice (To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, Kohn et al., 2000). The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration reports that 41,821 people died in motor vehicle crashes in the United States in 2000, at a cost to the economy of $230.6 billion, not including intangibles such as physical pain or reduced quality of life. Many of these deaths could be prevented with simple engineering, information system, and procedural improvements. If we want to be unselfish and help foreigners we might look at malaria, a preventable disease that kills between one and three million people each year.

  SHALOM LAPPIN

  Israel and the New Anti-Semitism

  SINCE THE COLLAPSE of the Oslo peace process and the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has generated an increasingly hostile view of Israel throughout Western Europe. Much of this reaction consists of sharp criticism of Israel’s conduct in suppressing the Palestinian uprising in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. To the extent that this response is directed at Israel’s actions and policies, it is legitimate comment on the behavior of a state and its government. The severity of the criticism can, in part, be attributed to the fact that Israel is a relatively strong, developed country that is using its army to sustain the occupation of a large Palestinian population that is politically dispossessed and suffering economically. As the current violence has become increasingly brutal on both sides, the asymmetry of power between Israel and the Palestinians and Ariel Sharon’s determination to entrench the occupation through settlement expansion while forcing the Palestinians into virtual capitulation have seriously undermined European support for Israel.

  There are, however, good reasons for doubting whether all the hostility directed at Israel can be construed simply as opposition to its policies. The obsessive focus of European journalists and opinion makers on Israel’s war with the Palestinians contrasts sharply with the relative indifference of (much) liberal opinion to other recent, as well as ongoing human rights violations on a significantly larger scale. Slobodan Milosevic’s bloody campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo attracted little if any organized protest in Europe until the United States initiated a NATO bombing campaign to force the Serbian army out of Kosovo in 1999. At that point, European peace groups launched a series of large protests against the intervention. The fact that many European Union countries actively collaborated with the Milosevic government during the Bosnian War and did virtually nothing to stop its onslaught produced no apparent outrage among most purveyors of progressive politics in these countries. While the mass murder of more than six thousand Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica shocked some people, there was no demonization of Serbia, no calls for academic boycotts of Serbian universities. The International War Crimes Court in The Hague is prosecuting indicted Balkan war criminals, Milosevic foremost among them, while popular opinion in Europe, particularly on the left, has remained largely detached from the events that led to the court’s creation.

  Russia’s unrestrained assault on Muslim separatists in Chechnya has been met with little more than occasional censure from human rights activists. It goes largely unreported and causes little if any concern in Europe. In both the Balkans and in Chechnya the level of violence and severe human rights abuses has been, to date, far higher than in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Although this doesn’t justify Israel’s actions in the territories, it does raise serious questions concerning the motivation behind some of the current hostility to Israel. Both the Balkans and Russia are natural areas of European interest. They are close to home and involve countries with which Western Europe is closely involved. Why, then, is there such a stark contrast between the relative calm with which the Balkan and Chechen wars have been received on one hand and the intense reaction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the other?

  One explanation for the current European view of Israel runs as follows: Israel was established as an act of compensation to the Jews on the part of Western countries burdened with the guilt of the Holocaust. This guilt allowed them to disregard the cost that Israel’s creation inflicted on the Palestinians, who were innocent of the Holocaust. Now that several generations have passed and Israel has become a regional superpower, the Europeans no longer wish to relate to Israel as a nation of victims. They insist on redressing the dispossession of the Palestinians.

  The historical claim on which this view is based is incorrect. The United Nations partition plan of 1947 that established Israel was adopted largely because of American and Soviet support. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union suffered Holocaust guilt in 1947, nor should they have. They, together with Britain, were responsible for destroying Nazism and ending its genocide against the Jews. Stalin was staunchly anti-Zionist but supported the creation of Israel as a way of gaining political influence in a strategically important r
egion still dominated by Britain. Truman remained undecided about partition until shortly before the vote, with both the State Department and the Pentagon split on whether or not to support the plan. Although historical and moral considerations seem to have played a role in Truman’s decision, the desire to deepen American influence in the Middle East, displace Britain, and block Soviet penetration was probably the decisive factor in determining his position. Britain, the other major player in the partition debate, did its best to prevent the emergence of a Jewish state in Palestine. After the war it took the view that Jewish Holocaust survivors and refugees should be repatriated to the countries from which they had come. This included Polish Jews at a time when postwar pogroms were taking place in Poland against returning survivors. Britain blocked the immigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine right up until the end of its mandate in 1948. It abstained from the UN partition vote, and it actively supported the Jordanian Legion in the 1948 war. It changed its policy and supported Israel only in the early 1950s. The idea that the creation of Israel was the product of Western guilt over the Holocaust is, then, largely unfounded.

  Nonetheless, the idea that Israel was created through Holocaust guilt has gained widespread currency in Europe. This idea is used to impose moral conditions on Israel that are not generally applied to other countries. If Israel was created as an act of expiation for crimes against the Jews, so this reasoning goes, then its legitimacy depends upon its not oppressing other people. The idea of Israel as a conditional concession wrung from the West through Jewish suffering in Europe goes some way toward explaining the glee (relief?) with which Israel’s more strident European critics insist on comparing its treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazi persecution of the Jews. The obvious perversity and inappropriateness of the comparison is the source of its attraction. Not only are the victims of the Nazis transformed into the oppressors, but the basis of their collective legitimacy is undermined. The power of the comparison has not been lost on Arab nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists, who invoke it regularly.