More On Jews and Arabs (4)

No event since the Crusades did more to alter relations between the Christian West and the Muslim East than World War II. We went into the war with a European nation ruling or influencing every single Muslim state except for Afghanistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, from the Atlantic shore of Africa far into the Pacific. (Only after the war did Christian hegemony begin to collapse.)
Moreover, with what seemed to be Christian connivance a non-Muslim Jewish state was being planted in the British protectorate of Palestine. By the late 1930s the Arabs saw themselves as having only one friend in the world—Adolph Hitler. Their one hope was that Nazi Germany might defeat the hated British and French.
There was an attempted Nazi Putsch in Baghdad—led by the colonel who eventually raised Saddam Hussein. There was unrest in Egypt. The Grand Mufti (the religious leader of Palestinian Arabs) of Jerusalem became an outspoken Hitler partisan until the British exiled him.
As war loomed, the British and French found themselves playing a desperate balancing act to keep Muslim protectorates and client states from going over to Hitler’s side. (Had, for example, Turkey gone with Germany as it did in 1915, there might have been no Russian front to absorb such a huge percentage of the German war effort.
All of this in no way redounded to the benefit of Palestinian Jews! What slight door there might have been open to Jewish refugees from Nazi territories was slammed shut. (The door to Depression stricken America was also shut tight—there was nowhere left for Jews to escape to.)
The Palestinian Jews volunteered to fight Hitler. They were permitted to form a single brigade of Jewish soldiers, which became to core of the Israeli Army. This was the first time Jewish military units were permitted to form since Medieval Spain (on the Muslim side, explaining some of the Spanish Inquisition). They were a bit out of practice—but they learned well.
The Mufti escaped to Berlin where he formed two divisions of Bosnian Waffen SS to hunt down anti-Nazi Serbs and Jews. (There would finally be terrible vengeance fifty years later in Bosnia.) DeGaulle’s free French pulled out of Syria and Lebanon after the fall of France—setting up the competing Muslim and Christian states of today.
Britain was left by herself to her near eastern balancing act, desperately trying to save her oil interests as well as block Hitler. By the end of the war, Hitler was no longer Britain’s deadliest near eastern enemy. On his way back from Yalta, Franklin Roosevelt stopped in Saudi Arabia to begin negotiations for oil rights that once had been almost exclusively British.
When Hitler was finally defeated, the Americans stopped Lend Lease and the British Empire collapsed into bankruptcy. By 1948, having kept the door shut to Jewish immigration for as long as they could, the British abandoned Palestine. Arabs may have been briefly hopeful that this new western power, the United States, seemingly bent on the destruction of British power and publicly anti-Semitic, would benefit them.
After all, the United States had sent shiploads full of Jewish children back to the gas ovens rather than take them in. Our anti-Semitism was overt and rampant. Jews were all but unemployable during the Depression, the best universities took only a limited number (thus creating the Jewish “ivy” league).
But when the British pulled out and the United Nations made a feeble effort at creating a partition in Palestine that left Jews in a totally indefensible position, the Arabs were disappointed in America. The Arabs fought even the wretched terms of the 1948 partition only to see the Americans back it. A Jewish State was born—for the first time since 60BC.
President Truman was way down in the polls and he NEEDED the Jewish vote in New York to win re-election. New York was then the state with the biggest block of electoral votes. Enraged, Arabs sent five western equipped armies to invade the tiny Jewish enclaves of Palestine and began their love/hate relationship with America.
The veterans of the Jewish brigade, not more than 5,000 men, an international Jewish community that scoured the world for weapons the British had denied Palestinian Jews, and Jewish civilians that learned war fast, beat back all five armies.
The only one that held—thus saving old Jerusalem for the Arabs—was the British trained and led Arab Legion from Jordan. It blocked the Jewish advance into their ancient capital. The armies of Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria were humiliatingly defeated.
Jews kept the new borders their arms had gained them. It wasn’t good, but it was better. Even though every square inch of Jewish territory remained in range of Arab artillery—which periodically used Jewish school buses and tractors for target practice from sites on the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan—at least the new Israeli army had a few more acres to operate from.
The Arabs at once began their “land for peace” game. The 1948 partition line (that they had violated now became the Arab Holy Grail). “Oh,” they said, “if only these warlike Jews would go back to the 1948 partition line, all would be peace and joy.” They hoped the rest of us would forget how passionately they had opposed that position in 1947-8.
As Arab shells rained down on their farms and Arab grenades sailed through bedroom windows, the Jews gained a striking reputation for uncooperativeness by saying NO.
It remained a nasty situation until the Egyptians threw Britain out of the Suez Canal. The British (and the French) wanted revenge. Who could be more helpful than the Jews who were already in a perpetual state of war with Egypt?
Nobody really knew what the new Israeli Army could do—we were going to find out.