A letter to the editors of Gamla, worth posting for it's shear clarity , historical truth and simplicity:
gamla.org.il
Gamla Staff,
I am a 67 year old American of Norwegian ancestry, engineer by profession
I feel very strongly that the reason America is so blessed is that we support Israel. The following is a commentary I submitted to the local newspspaper, The Roanoke Times, in Roanoke, VA.
Why Do They Hate Us? It's All About Israel ....
In a speech to Congress on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush asked this question. Most Arabs and Muslims knew the answer, even before they considered who was responsible for the attacks on America. Most of our leaders, the media, and even some Middle East authorities, including Israelis, try to obscure the root cause. They say we are resented by the Muslim world because we have U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. They say it's because of our economic sanctions against Iraq, Libya, and Iran, and our support for repressive Middle East regimes with feudal monarchies. Also, it's because of our decadent lifestyle. These are all secondary issues. The main reason is our years of unstinting support for Israel.
Four thousand years ago, in Genesis, God told Abraham, "I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you." Mount Moriah - now the Temple Mount in Jerusalem - is where Jewish and Christian tradition hold that Abraham almost sacrificed his son Isaac. Isaac's son Jacob was renamed Israel by God, and given the promise of the land of Canaan (now Israel) and a covenant that he and his descendants would be "God's people" forever. Israel became a nation in 1312 B.C. and since then Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital. Seven hundred and twenty six years later (586 B.C.), the first Jewish Temple (on today's Temple Mount) was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzer, king of Babylon. In 70 A.D., it was the Roman Empire's turn to conquer Israel and destroy the second Jewish Temple, slaughtering or driving out much of the Jewish population. The Romans called the land Palestine for the Philistines, as a humiliation to the Jews who had defeated the Philistines centuries earlier. Many Jews left because conditions of life were made unbearable, yet thousands stayed and rebelled for centuries to rebuild a Jewish nation in this Holy Land.
Over the next 1,878 years - the Diaspora - various peoples, religions, and empires, including Christian crusaders, the Ottomans - and briefly the British - marched through Jerusalem. None were interested in building a nation there. Included in these "invaders" were the Arabs. In 636 A.D., Arab marauders came to the land and uprooted many Jews, but they did not form an Arab nation, certainly not a "Palestinian" nation. The name Palestine is mentioned 4 times in the Bible - not once in the Koran. The name Jerusalem is mentioned 767 times in the Bible - not once in the Koran. No nation, other than ancient Israel and the reborn nation of Israel in 1948, has ever reigned as a sovereign national entity in the land of Canaan.
Modern Israel is a miracle. This tiny nation, now with 6,000,000 people and 7,500 square miles, is the third greatest military power in the world. In November 1947, the U.N. General Assembly voted to partition the British mandate of Palestine into two territories that were envisioned as future states - one predominantly Jewish, the other Arab. Six months later, on May 14, 1948, hours before the British withdrew, the state of Israel was proclaimed and immediately recognized by the United States and Soviet Union. At that moment 54 years ago, the Palestinians had a state, or a territory designated for a creation of their state. If reason had governed, two small nations might have thrived as neighbors at peace. But it was not to be. On May 15, one day after Israel's declaration of statehood, the Arab regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria set their armies in motion with the stridently declared objective of driving the Jews into the sea. History shows they failed. The Arabs had 250,000,000 people, Israel 700,000. The Arabs had 1,500,000 square miles of territory, Israel 4,000.
They failed again in 1956 at Suez and, even more decisively, in the six-day war of 1967, that ended in humiliation, especially for Egypt, whose soldiers threw down their weapons and fled on foot back across the Sinai, with some 10,000 perishing in the retreat. The final failure was in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, which began with an Egyptian and Syrian attack on October 6, the Hebrew Day of Atonement and the 10th day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. After four wars and tens of thousands of Arab and Israeli deaths, the Arab states had enough. In a series of historic blunders, they ensured the Palestinians continued statelessness. Having spent lives and treasures to no point, Egypt and Jordan agreed to peace. The Israelis did not take any land from the Palestinians, but bought it or won it in battle from the Arab nations who attacked them, so the term "occupied territories" is a misnomer.
Through those 25 years of confrontation and 29 troubled years since, no Arab country, except for Jordan, has allowed Palestinians to immigrate in significant numbers, extended rights of citizenship, or committed resources to relieving the misery in the refugee camps. About 2 million Palestinian refugees have lived in camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt since 1948, and about 1 million live in the West Bank and Gaza.
<font size=4> If the oil rich Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority have such compassion for the refugees, why do they leave them in camps? Israel has absorbed 2 million Jews from the Soviet Union and the Arab nations, at great expense, yet there are no Jewish refugee camps.
The Palestinians are just an excuse for the Arabs, a means to have a surrogate guerilla army within Israel. Generations of young, born in the camps, have no profession but violence, no ambition but martyrdom, no creed but rage. So today, Palestinian youths strap explosives to their bodies and blow themselves to eternity, somehow imagining it will help secure for their people the state they could have had in 1948, except for the tragic miscalculations of their Arab brethren.
The virulent hatred is flamed by militant Muslims, who have declared a holy war of terror against Israel - and the United States for supporting Israel. Without us, they would again try to drive the Jews into the sea, and if Israel could be destroyed the United States would no longer be the enemy. It's all about Israel.
M. Thompson |
