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The road map to appeasement

Dr. Alex Grobman
SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH STATE
July 3, 2009

"There is reason to believe that [the president] cherished the illusion that presumably he, and he alone, as head of the United States, could bring about a settlement -- if not a reconciliation -- between Arabs and Jews. I remember muttering to myself as I left the White House after hearing the president discourse in rambling fashion about Middle Eastern affairs, ‘I've read of men who thought they might be king of the Jews and other men who thought they might be king of the Arabs, but this is the first time I've listened to a man who dreamt of being king of both the Jews and Arabs'."

Herbert Feis, a State Department economic advisor, did not say this about President Barack Obama's address in Cairo in June 2009, but rather after Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Ibn Saud, king of Saudi Arabia, in February 1945. Roosevelt wanted the Arabs to allow thousands of Jews from Europe to immigrate to Palestine, to which Ibn Saud responded, "Arabs would choose to die rather than yield their land to Jews."

Attempts to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict regularly fail because of the refusal to acknowledge that this dispute has never been about borders, territory or settlements, but about the Arabs refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist. "The struggle with the Zionist enemy is not a matter of borders, but touches on the very existence of the Zionist entity," declared an Arab spokesman.

Unlike the Nazis, who carefully concealed the Final Solution, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority openly avow their intentions in their Charter and Covenant and in the Arab media which is available in English on the Internet on MEMRI and the Palestinian Media Watch.

Coercing Israel to make concessions and accept a two-state solution will not bring peace to the region. One-sided concessions have convinced the Arabs of the rightness of their policies and the efficacy of using violence to cleanse the country of Jews and Christians.

What compelling reason do Arabs have to stop launching rockets indiscriminately into Israeli cities, refuting the Jewish connection to the land of Israel, destroying artifacts and Jewish holy sites, denying the Holocaust, or dehumanizing Jews in their media, textbooks, educational system, political discourse, and religious sermons by portraying them as Satan, sons of apes and pigs, a cancer, and using children as homicide bombers, if the West does not hold them accountable?

Instead of demanding that Arabs cease their incitements and attacks, the U.S. issues meaningless statements of condemnation, and then grants them foreign aid, arms, and military training.

The U.S. pressures Israel to make goodwill gestures in "peace negotiations," yet Israel has never been the aggressor. Is there any example in history where a victor withdraws from territory when the defeated party does not sue for peace, admits there will never be any reconciliation, declares they will not concede the victor's right to exist, and labors relentlessly to destroy him?

When Israel opens her border checkpoints as an act of goodwill, the Arabs dispatch homicide bombers to maim and kill Israeli civilians. After Arab terrorists are released from Israeli prisons, they revert to murdering Jews.

Comparing the plight of the Arabs with that of American blacks is a distortion of history and demeans the experiences of the millions of Africans who were brutally abducted from their homes, transported under inhuman conditions aboard slave ships, and exposed to torture, murder, and rape.

Nothing remotely like this has ever occurred with the Arabs in Israel. Had the Arabs not attacked the Jews before and after Israel was established, they would not be displaced persons today.

If we are to learn from history, we must transmit what actually transpired and not allow those with their own agenda or ignorance to obscure what occurred.

Whether it is naivete, self-delusion or hubris, a number of U.S. presidents and diplomats have assumed that their powers of persuasion could modify fiercely held beliefs about the sanctity of Arab land. Such reasoning has consistently failed.

Those claiming that Jews have a moral obligation to cede land to the Arabs do not understand Israel's legal right to exist as a Jewish state. That right was granted by the British in the Balfour Declaration in November 1917 and later recognized under international law at the San Remo Conference on April 24, 1920 by Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan (who defeated the Ottoman Empire and divided up the empire), the Mandate for Palestine and the Franco-British Boundary Convention of Dec. 23, 1920, as the Jewish national home.

There are no comparable legal documents conferring the same right on the Arabs living in Palestine at that time or since. Which other country would relinquish land that is legally theirs to anyone, let alone to a people engaged in internecine warfare, who cannot even live in peace among themselves?

The West has not learned that Israel represents all that is abhorred about the U.S. and Europe -- a free and open democratic society, and an ethical system encouraging individual expression and independence. Through appeasement, the West has enabled the Arabs to continue what Ben-Gurion called a "permanent war" against the Jewish people.

This latest drive to establish separate Arab and Jewish states will fail because, as Yasser Arafat said, "We don't want peace, we want victory. Peace for us means Israel's destruction and nothing else. What you call peace is peace for Israel.... For us it is shame and injustice. We shall fight on to victory. Even for decades, for generations, if necessary."

Dr. Grobman is a Hebrew University trained historian. He is the author of a number of books including "Nations United: How The U.N. Undermines Israel and The West" and a forthcoming book on Israel's moral and legal right to exist as a Jewish State.