Author: Stan Goodenough
Publication: Jerusalem Newswire
Date: November 5, 2005
URL: http://www.jnewswire.com/article/723
It was with dismay - though perhaps with less
surprise than there would have been, say, a year or two ago - that many in
Israel heard of their government's decision last Wednesday to approve a plan
whereby the Rafah crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt - a border the
Sharon government earlier insisted would remain closed unless Israel was able
to control who entered and left the area - could now be opened under the supervision
of the European Union.
Doubtless the EU, which has long pushed hard
for a participating role in efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict,
was delighted at this new development. Apparently they will waste no time
in sending out a team to inspect the situation on the ground pursuant to taking
up their posts at the crossing.
"Ah-ha!" I can hear them exulting
in Brussels. "At last we have our foot in the door."
It's something foreign groups have been trying
to achieve - with some success - for quite some time.
Living just off the main road that runs from
Jerusalem through Bethlehem to Hebron, I often see the official vehicles of
alien organizations driving backwards and forwards between Israel's capital
and Judea, the ancient heartland of the Jewish people.
I'm not talking about the CC cars - vehicles
carrying foreign consular staff around the city (although there are also far
too many of those, and the way they ignore Israeli traffic regulations and
apparently believe themselves deserving of VIP treatment can be irritating
too.)
It's the other vehicles. They're marked clearly,
these shiny vans, trucks and four-by-fours, their insignia often emblazoned
on both sides and splashed across the broad expanse of their hoods. Some have
pennants, even flags, flapping from their antennae.
Weaving through the locals who are making
their daily way to school and work, everything about these vehicles seems
to be saying: "We're here, Israel. We're watching you. Don't you forget
it!"
These watchers-on-wheels belong to the United
Nations, the European Union, and the International Red Cross.
There is also the TIPH - the Temporary International
Presence in Hebron - which, despite its promisingly provisional-sounding name,
has been anything but transitory. With staff from Denmark, Italy, Norway,
Sweden, Switzerland and Turkey, the TIPH has enjoyed the run of the land for
nearly 12 years.
Without exception, those being conveyed hither
and thither, all of them guests of the Israeli government, represent organizations
and countries committed to wresting half of this millennia-old Jewish homeland
out of Israel's hands' and placing it, decisively and irrevocably, into the
hands of the Arabs. (Interestingly, a great many of the staff driving and/or
being ferried around in these vehicles are Arab themselves.)
Talk about a global conspiracy!
They would protest any such charge - many
of these, hopefully, well-meaning folk. The Jews and Arabs have a long-standing
quarrel, they would say. For the sake of regional and world peace we simply
wish to try and referee an end to the conflict.
And blessed, as everybody knows, are the peacemakers.
Amen?
It is, however, a matter of some importance
that a referee on a football field or in a boxing ring should be welcomed
by both sides and trusted to be impartial, neutral, unprejudiced, even-handed,
fair and just.
What happens instead?
Given voice by the world's overwhelmingly
pro-Palestinian press, the Arab side cries, wails, pleads for, then demands
international intervention to save them from "their oppressors."
The Jewish side doggedly resists the call
- citing prejudiced precedents, biased bodies, the need to preserve its sovereignty,
and so on.
Pained by what it sees in its newspapers and
on TV, the international community presses one of Israel's most sensitive
nerves - its fear of gentile rejection and concomitant hunger for a global
embrace. Rhetorically, the world wonders aloud whether the Jewish state does
not have something to hide after all.
Urging Israel to soften its stance they ask
to come in, just to "observe."
Israel caves.
Once here, these visitors observe alright.
But they are watching from the Arab corner of the ring. They monitor, they
comment, they report. And without exception, the reports sent back to Geneva,
Brussels and New York are saturated with sympathy for the Arab side; loaded
heavily with negativity towards Israel.
These foreigners are here, quite unashamedly,
to defend the underdog. Dishonestly, though, they will not come out and actually
say that they are on "Palestinian" side. Furthermore, they have
misidentified who the underdog is.
For them, Israel is Goliath - the mighty,
established state with powerful tanks, missiles, F-16s, and a record of exceptional
military prowess.
The Palestinian Arabs are David - small, armed
only with simple weapons, they are taking on the mighty Jewish giant, even
willing to sacrifice themselves (although of course these "observers"
do not approve of the use of suicide bombs, even though the willingness to
resort to such "desperate" measures is "understandable.")
This perception turns reality on its head.
Israel is a small nation, the remnant of a
once mighty people that were robbed of their land and condemned to nearly
two millennia of global wandering, encountering rejection and hatred on every
side.
They endured numerous efforts - some more
passive, most violent in the extreme - to do away with them as a nation. Against
all the "odds" they survived, finally returning to their longed-for
home just a few decades ago, but only after fully one-third of those whose
descendants made it through the centuries of exile were swallowed up in the
Holocaust.
Whereas but for the success of anti-Semitism
they would have been, in number, one of the greatest nations alive today,
there are a mere 15 million or so Jews left in the world. Their homeland is
tiny - not much more than 10,000 square miles in size. It has virtually no
natural resources. Its citizens, re-gathered from over 100 different countries,
have had to be absorbed and integrated into one people again. Since their
return from the late 1800s, the challenges facing them on every level have
been staggering.
It is important to remember that while there
are many Arab states, there is only one Arab nation. It hails originally from
Arabia, and is enormous, numbering some 320 million people in 22 countries
that stretch from Morocco and Algeria in the West to Yemen and Oman in the
east.
Underneath many of these lands lies the black
gold that has at once fueled the international campaign against Israel while
paying for enormous quantities of state-of-the-art western weaponry and being
spent lavishly on American and other politicians susceptible to its lure.
Represented in the United Nations by 22 delegates
as opposed to Israel's one, with numerous other (non-Arab) countries on their
side, the Arabs are in no way threatened by Israel. Meanwhile, they have infiltrated
their message of hate into university campuses across the United States. Europe
is already well on the way to becoming Islamicized. Projections are that Great
Britain and France will be Muslim states within 10 to 15 years.
While millions of Arabs across the region
hate Israel and believe they should be contributing to her demise, the Jews
of Israel direct no such venom or design against the Arab states. The Jewish
state's only desire is to live together with the Arabs in a peace that will
bring enormous growth and prosperity to all the peoples of the Middle East.
These truths are not held as reality by the
world. Israel is the Goliath. The Palestinians are the underdog, a peasant
people struggling to throw off the yoke of imperial occupation and oppression.
Virtually every international presence in
Israel subscribes to this same perspective, which from their point of view
justifies the actions of the TIPH, the UN or the EU in having sympathy for
the Arab side.
And it is precisely this misplaced sympathy
that has seen these foreign "observers" become, from the start,
foreign bodies detrimental to Israel's wellbeing; they should be expelled,
not invited in.
Only Israel should be responsible for Israel's
security. Abdicating that responsibility in a very real way risks a high cost
in Jewish lives and the erosion of Israel's position on its minimum security
needs.
Let the European Union stay at home.
