Saturday, November 21, 2009

Fouad Ajami

A Reality Check as Israel Turns 60

Posted May 7, 2008

Of all that has been said and written by Arabs about their encounter with Zionism and Israel, nothing I have seen approximates the truth and poignancy of what a distinguished Moroccan historian, Abdallah Laroui, has written: "On a certain day everything would be obliterated and instantaneously reconstructed and the new inhabitants would leave, as if by magic, the land they had despoiled; in this way will justice be dispensed to the victims, on that day when the presence of God shall again make itself felt."

The Arabs who bemoaned the loss of Palestine were in truth made uneasy by the Palestinian refugees.
The Arabs who bemoaned the loss of Palestine were in truth made uneasy by the Palestinian refugees.

The Arab imagination could never reconcile itself to the permanence of the Jewish state. No victories could secure this state the acceptance of its neighbors. It was a fluke of history, they believed, and history itself provided the means of evasion, a way of stubbornly refusing to accept the verdict of what happened in 1948. Modern-day Arabs took to the history of the Crusader Kingdom that had risen in the Levant, lasted for two centuries (1099- 1291), then pulled up stakes and left on the soil its castles and bridges and ruins. This, too, shall pass, it was believed, and the weight of demography and the brutal geographical facts shall prevail.

In its short history, Israel has held up a mirror for the Arabs, who have not liked what they have seen. In the first Arab-Israeli war, in 1948, the paramilitary and volunteers of the new state turned back Arab armies. Although outgunned and outnumbered, the Jews prevailed. There was the embarrassment of the numbers. The population of the new state was a mere 650,000, while that of the surrounding Arab states was approximately 40 million. No Arabs had been prepared for what had unfolded: The war was thought to be a routine endeavor, the defeat of the Jewish state preordained. There were men of public affairs in these Arab states who knew better, but they hadn't had the courage to tell the truth to the unsuspecting crowd.

When the dust of battle settled, the Arabs could see the harvest of their history. The Palestinian upper classes had abandoned their towns, left the destitute and the peasantry to their fate. In their fantasy, the Arabs were a martial people, while the Jews they had known in Baghdad and Cairo and Damascus had been timid souls keen to avoid the dangers of politics and the envy of the crowd. These were different Jews, the Zionists, steeled by the horror of the Holocaust, who would hold their own in the field of battle.

In the succeeding decades, the prophecies of calamity for this Jewish state would not materialize. On a barren, small piece of land, the Zionists built a durable state. It was military but not militaristic. It took in waves of refugees and refashioned them into citizens. It had room for faith but remained a secular enterprise. Under conditions of a long siege, it maintained a deep and abiding democratic ethos. The Arabs could have learned from this experiment, but they drew back in horror. The Arab militaries and the demagogues stepped forth and claimed that they would win the war lost by the old order. But they would fare no better.

Arab perfidy. In their utterances, the Arabs were bound by a code of brotherhood, and the "restoration" of Palestinian rights was the creed of their political world. But in the mirror, Arabs could see their fratricide, the chasm between what they said and what they did. The rulers who professed fidelity to Palestine helped themselves to the fragments of Palestine unclaimed by the Zionists. The Arabs who bemoaned the loss of Palestine were in truth made uneasy by the Palestinian refugees. It would have been the humane thing to tell the refugees that huge historical verdicts are never overturned. But it was safer to offer a steady diet of evasion and escapism.

Israel's 60th anniversary suggests what might have been. In those days of battle, when history was fluid, partition of Palestine was the way out—a Jewish state and an Arab state, side by side. The Zionists opted for moderation and rescue; they would take a state, said their legendary leader Chaim Weizmann, even if it were the size of a tablecloth. The Palestinians held out for the whole thing. This month's festivities marking the return of the Jews to the world of nations should be an occasion for some honest Palestinian (and Arab) retrospect on how Arab history has played out in the intervening decades.

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ISRAEL’S SUSTAINABLE PARASITISM ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

ISRAEL’S SUSTAINABLE PARASITISM ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

Israel and the American Diaspora notoriously donate thousands of dollars to elect corruptible American presidential and congressional officials, who then repay Israel a thousand fold from precious tax revenues; with millions of dollars worth of technologically advanced military equipment and services, and with the priceless lives of thousands of young patriots. In the case of the un-Constitutional Iraq War, Podhoretz Neo-Con Bush sacrificed over a trillion dollars and the lives of 4,000 young patriots, to sole benefit of Israel.

ISLAMOFASCIST AND JUDEOFASCIST SYMBIOSIS

The Islamofascists, in perpetual quest of greater wealth and power, rant to incite the impoverished Islamic peoples to violence against the notorious injustices of the powerful Judeofascist land robbers. The Judeofascists, in perpetual quest for greater wealth and power, wail and lobby to incite the American People into providing military protection against this persecution by outraged Islamofascists. To add credibility to these rantings and wailings, intermittent battles are fought. The result is that these clever Islamofascists and Judeofascists do gain great wealth and power, at the expense of the Arab, Persian, and American peoples.

The continuous illegal sacrifice of the wealth and blood of the American People on behalf Israel is all that perpetuates this destructive symbiotic relationship between the Islamofascists and the Judeofascists. But when, in the normal course of the American Cultural War, the Neo-Cons/Neo-Libs are finally expelled by the Reagan Conservatives and Kennedy Liberals from their positions of power, the economic and military support for the Judeofascists will finally end; and that will end the support for the Islamofascists. The end of the era of Neo-Con/Neo-Lib military intervention in the affairs of the Arab and Persian peoples shall be the start of an era of constructive relations with the American People.

The Judeofascists, who live in a glass house surrounded by Islamofascists, could continue fight for survival politically and militarily, until nuclear armed Israel finally becomes the site of a second great Judeocide, Holocaust II; or, they could offer sincere apologies, and generous economic reparations for the stolen land, damaged infrastructure, and losses of innocent lives; to finally win for themselves by just and peaceful means, what they cannot win by unjust and violent means.

Shall the World be cheering, and the Diaspora wailing; or, shall the World and the Diaspora be cheering?

Isreal in the media

In general the media take a "politically correct" position on Isreal. Criticism of Arab killer assaults is minimized or non existant, but Jewish reaction against these asssults is considered to be shameful, outrageous. Palestinian terrorists routinely shoot killer missiles against Israeli poopulation from Palestinian residential neighborhoods, then when Isreali missiles pinpoint these launchers and happen to kill a civilian who lives 20 feet away. this is carefully photographed by Palestinain media, and released to the Western media, who pick it up as a war crime.

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