Jews And Arabs--An Ancient Feud

Two thousand years is a long time for a fight to go on. As Israeli troop push their way into Gaza in response to Hamas’ rocket fire, it’s here we go again. Actually, the first time Israeli troops pushed into Gaza was a bit over THREE THOUSAND years ago. But those weren’t Arabs. (Try Philistines.)
Hostile forces from Gaza have been a thorn in Israel’s side for millennia. Hostiles on the West Bank have harassed and threatened to cut Israel in two for even longer. Today’s headlines could have been written in Sumerian and ancient Egyptian dispatches.
In those days, marauders came on camel back and raided Israeli settlements; now they sit back and fire rockets. It probably feels all the same to the Israelis—whether you hide in caves from sword wielding raiders or hide in today’s mandatory cement reinforced bomb shelters in your basement.
Today’s Israeli forces face one disadvantage that their ancestors could never have dreamt of. No foreign powers or United Nations were around to urge “restraint”. (Can you imagine what Churchill’s response would have been to someone who urged British restraint in 1940 while German bombs were raining down on London and Coventry? Or Stalin’s a year later when the panzers were at the outskirts of Moscow? But we feel free to tell the Israelis, “Never mind those silly little rockets that blow up your houses and kill your children—show restraint.” How much would we show?)
We were all much happier with the Jews when they did show restraint—and lined up quietly for Hitler’s gas ovens. This was the Jew we had learned to deal with in the Middle Ages—when they had no means to resist the stake and the knout. We haven’t gotten used to Jews who act like King David (1000 BC).
If the Israeli don’t show restraint and if they go after the sites and people who shoot the rockets, our oil prices could go way, way up again. So we beg them to endure the shelling quietly and do nothing to seriously antagonize the oil-rich Arabs who buy the rockets for Hamas.
They had an interview on Fox News the other day with a young man who had once been privy to all of the inside information in Hamas. His father had run the outfit. He told the interviewer flatly that Hamas will never agree to any permanent peace with Israel. They follow the Koran.
Land that was once Allah’s can never, ever be allowed to go back to the adherents of any other religion. Jews must forever leave the area—or die. Hamas will call for truces, the young man said, so they can regroup and rearm—but just as this latest one ended with Hamas violence, so will they all.
Arafat used to talk peace when he spoke publicly to the Western World. But insiders know that he never stopped calling for the total destruction of Israel when he spoke privately, in Arabic, to his Arab friends. Hamas and Hezbollah have the same policy. Starting with the murdered Abdullah of Jordan (1951) and going through the assassination of Sadat (1981) it can be a lethal thing for an Arab leader to talk peace to Israel.
The irony is that this land of Israel that the Arabs want back so badly had been largely abandoned by them in the 1800s. When a relative handful of Jewish refugees from Russian pogroms showed up in the 1870s and started buying land from the few remaining Bedouin, they had to re-dig long forgotten wells and work desperately hard to make desert yield crops.
When Arabs saw that these tiny Jewish settlements were green and thriving where only bare sand had been for centuries before, they returned. Many “Palestinian refugees” have antecedents in Israel that are no longer than the modern Israelis.
They came back, said, “Oh, you can make it work? Well, then, it’s ours—now that it’s fertile.” By the 1920s and on into the 1940s they rioted and killed to make it so. British overlords, desperate to quiet the Arabs where they had oil wells, denied the Jews means to defend themselves.
It was, in many ways, Medieval Europe all over again. Unarmed Jews, armed assailants—with the cops definitely biased in favor of the thugs. Then came World War II, with the Arabs largely pro-Hitler (the Muslim Grand Mufti of Jerusalem raised two divisions of Waffen SS in Bosnia and ordered the slaughter of Yugoslav Jews and Serbs that directly led to the troubles of the 1990s—when the Serbs finally paid the Bosnian Nazis back.
The British were forced to turn to their one sure, pro-democracy ally in all the Middle East—the Jews in Israel. Jews were allowed to form a single brigade—but that was enough to teach Jews modern warfare. Officers from that brigade led the Israel Defense Force for decades.
(What happened to the murderous Mufti? After Hitler fell, he escaped to Cairo. There was talk of hauling him up before the Nuremburg Tribunal, but the Arabs threatened oil retaliation. He lived out his years sending a nephew to kill Jews in his old stamping grounds, a kid named Yasser Arafat. A lot of Arab leaders coming out of that era had strong Nazi connections: Nasser, Saddam Hussein, etc.)
I’ll leave you with a question for today. Do you think oil prices that declined from $140 to 40 a barrel in less than six months (and put Dubai out of business) have hurt Arabs in general? Could it be possible that the folk who have financed the Palestinians, Hamas, Hezbollah for decades, said to Hamas, “Your truce with Israel ends in January, go mix it up, fire a few rockets and raise our oil profits.”?
As Lenin and Samuel Adams knew so well, if you can get a few civilians killed in the process, it makes such wonderful anti-Tsarist, anti-British or anti-Jewish propaganda. For those who seek the destruction of Israel, the present crisis seems to be win-win. (We’ll pay more for oil to buy more rockets.)
When did this hatred between Arab and Jew begin—when did Arabs begin to encroach on Israeli territory? (Arabs began moving in on Jewish territory around the time of Alexander the Great.) This is one of those stories that goes on and on and on. More next time.