“If analytical clarity is to be achieved, then the actions that need to be explained must be stated clearly.” —Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”
The sympathy for the terrorist entity Hamas and the currency of visceral anti-Jewish bigotry we are witnessing today is, as I have argued in Part 1, founded on the perennial predisposition to antisemitism, sometimes manifest but always latent, as well as the massive extent of popular historical ignorance.
Not only are current events involving Israel almost always decontextualized in the press and bleached of causes and antecedents, but the intentions of Hamas are also for the most part obscure to most observers. Rabbi Michael Barclay correctly points to Article 7 of The Hamas Charter, which calls for the annihilation of all Jews. “To want the destruction of a country that is a mere one-quarter of one percent the size of the rest of the Middle East region,” he comments, “is to express hate towards every Jew, whether they live in Israel or abroad.” Perhaps this is fine with the general run of domestic numpties and would surely meet with the approval of most antisemites.
The larger historical archive is equally shrouded in clouds of oblivion and this is precisely what needs to be made clear to the historically illiterate or the evil-intentioned. Facts may be boring, but are the ground of knowledge. They require patience and open-mindedness to survey and absorb. Here are some of the essential facts and the timeline we should have known, if we had wished to stay in touch with reality rather than fall into the bubbling cauldron of despicable invectives and actions hurled at Israel and Jews.
- The Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916, dividing in advance the spoils of the First Great War, provided for Britain’s solemn commitment to establish a “National Home for the Jews” while recognizing that Lebanon and Syria would become part of the French Mandate. The Balfour Declaration of November 1917, as the Rev. James Parkes writes in his authoritative “Whose Land: A History of the Peoples of Palestine,” recognized “that there existed already a historic Jewish right.” These protocols were incorporated in the League of Nations Covenant of June 1919, in particular Article 22 which certified the Mandates System.
- The San Remo Peace Conference of April 1920 subsequently instructed Great Britain in binding terms to prepare Palestine to become the “national home for the Jewish people.” The special status of the Palestine region, with respect to plenary Jewish settlement, was further underwritten in Article 95 of the Treaty of Sèvres signed in August 1920, which officially recognized the granting of the Mandates of Palestine and Mesopotamia to Britain by the Allied Supreme Council at the end of the war. Interestingly, during the time of the British Mandate, the biblical term Eretz Israel (ארץ ישראל), “Land of the People of Israel,” was one of the official names of the territory. The mandatory principle was confirmed by Winston Churchill, who wrote that “a Jewish state will arise in our day on the banks of the Jordan”—observe the use of the plural. These dispensations eventually culminated in Article 80 of the United Nations Charter.
The original legal obligations were violated by the British, who lopped off nearly 80% of Jewish-mandated territory established by the White Paper of 1922 to create the artificial entity of Transjordan, now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. This act was in contravention of Article 5 of the League of Nations Mandate which stated that “The Mandatory shall be responsible for seeing that no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of, the Government of any foreign Power.”
- The feral antipathy towards Israel, the concerted bid to leverage it out of the community of nations, accounts for the obstinate reluctance on the part of Western academics, intellectuals, professionals, churchmen and journalists to examine the true history of the region, which would expose the Palestinian claim to proprietorship as fraudulent while buttressing the Jewish and Israeli title to rightful occupancy. As Joan Peters has shown in her scrupulously researched seven-year study “From Time Immemorial,” examining census reports and internal memoranda during the British Mandate, a significant portion, perhaps a majority or nearly so of the “original” Palestinian inhabitants were relative newcomers to the territory in dispute, having migrated into the Holy Land from the surrounding Arab countries, mainly from what was then known as Greater Syria (i.e., Syria and Lebanon) when still part of the Ottoman empire, and afterwards during the post-Balfour period. Additionally, between 1932 and 1944 half a million Arabs poured into Palestine to profit from conditions prevailing in the Jewish communities. The British effort to curry favor with the Arabs led to some mathemagical legerdemain regarding the number of indigenous Arab inhabitants. The British may lie, but census reports do not.
- Despite all the pitfalls on the long journey to statehood, on May 11, 1949, the UN General Assembly, by the requisite two-thirds majority, approved the application to admit Israel to the UN by General Assembly Resolution 273. We should consider, too, aside from the legal documentation we are examining here, that Israel is replete with stories, memorial scriptures and artifacts from pre-Biblical times and possesses a calendar that dates to 5783. Israel’s existence is not only official but immemorial.
- Following Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War and its acquisition of territory, anti-Zionists demanded that Israel return to its shrunken 1967 borders, proclaiming their opposition to “the immoral and impractical policies that deny Palestinians equal rights,” calling for an end to “the siege on Gaza” and for “a permanent ceasefire,” and putting the onus on Israel to comply. Jimmy Carter’s mendacious book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” is worth examining in some detail. Among the weave of falsehoods that bind its pages, we find that UN Resolution 242 demands that Israel return to Palestinians all land captured in the 1967 war.
This is utter fiction. Carter and his ideological descendants have probably never heard of or paid much attention to Eugene Rostow, former U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and one of the leading architects of UN Resolution 242. Rostow explained in The New Republic for Oct. 21, 1991, that the Resolution allows Israel to administer its conquered territories until a just and lasting peace in the Middle East is achieved and that “the Jews have the same right to settle there as they have to settle in Haifa.”
Further, no Palestinian leader and few Western pundits have acknowledged the raw fact that there are no 1967 borders to which Israel is required to return. In fact, there are only armistice lines that have no bearing on future negotiations to determine final borders. The late Hugh Foot, Lord Caradon, formerly Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations and, along with Rostow, one of the drafters of Resolution 242, stated in the Beirut Daily Star on June 12, 1974, that “It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial.”
Lord Caradon’s account of the meaning and history of the Resolution is supported by the remaining two framers, Arthur Goldberg and Baron George-Brown, who are equally explicit in asserting its original intention. Resolution 242 is a pro-Israel and not, as constantly misreported, a pro-Palestinian article. Yet in the interests of peace, Israel has fruitlessly surrendered much of its war gains in Gaza and the West Bank, creating unnecessary misery for itself.
It follows that Israel’s enemies, and antisemites in general, are either credulous or savage or both. Generally speaking, their leaders are political operators with gelatinous souls, concerned mainly for their personal safety and privilege and cathected on the Islamic voting bloc. Moreover, far too many ordinary citizens are unable to distinguish between a forgery (e.g., “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion“) and a scrupulous work of historical documentation (e.g., the aforementioned “From Time Immemorial“). They are culpably deaf and blind, as Richard Ibrahim indicates, to the purport of an ISIS audio recording titled And Kill Them Wherever You Find Them (Koran 9:5) that pronounces the jihadist worldview of Islam: “The battle with the Jews is a religious one and not a national or populist one! It is not a battle for land, soil, or borders! In fact, it is a war that is legitimized by the Book and the Sunnah.”
Nor are Western dupes aware that they, too, are on the firing line. ISIS is very clear about this: “Chase your preys whether Jewish, Christian, or their allies, on the streets and roads of America, Europe, and the world. Break into their homes…detonate explosives, burn them with grenades and fiery agents, shoot them with bullets, cut their throats with sharp knives, and run them over with vehicles…kill them wherever we come upon them in response to Allah Almighty’s command.”
Yet without bothering to reflect, to study, to interrogate their own prejudices, to educate themselves, to struggle for decency, or to try to understand the psychology of the mob of which they form an eager and heedless part, the antisemitic class is determined to expel the Jew in its midst. Such people, believing they are filtering the world of its impurities, consider themselves above reproach. I have long regarded them as beneath contempt. Such people, to put it frankly, hover somewhere between pitiable and abhorrent.
Victor Davis Hanson cogently writes in The New Criterion:
As in the thousand-year history of Constantinople, Israel’s increased prosperity, stability, and confidence have only instilled greater hatred among its Islamic neighbors, for achieving results that remain impossible in their own countries until they seek changes to their politics, economy, culture, and religious practices.” Given the intransigence of the Islamic fact, the moral baggage of envy and resentment, the weight of its scriptures, and supremacist indoctrination from the cradle, Israel, Hanson concludes, “has to accept the reality that it is a permanent garrison state, an outnumbered Byzantium-like Western outpost in a hostile East surrounded by hostile forces.
It is an “outpost” that the declining West now seems unwilling to consistently defend. Israel is increasingly on its own and must adapt to the new situation by lessening its dependence on an often feckless U.S., building up its own patriotic resolve, refusing to underestimate a resourceful enemy, establishing and advancing its own hard military and industrial capacities — and putting an end to the internal divisions of a fractious electorate that only serves to encourage its adversaries. It’s a no-brainer. There is no other alternative if Israel is to avoid the fate of Byzantium.