Israel Matzav

It's not about the 'occupation'

What he's saying is nothing new, but it needs to be said over and over again, because the World refuses to get it and continues to pretend that the Israeli-Arab conflict will go away if only Israel would end the 'occupation.' Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon points out that the World's oldest hatred - Jew hatred - has been a fixture in this country since long before June 5, 1967.

In 1929, the Jewish community of Hebron—which stretches back millennia, long before the creation of Islam and the Arab conquest and subsequent occupation of the area—was brutally attacked. The Jews who had been living peacefully with their Muslim neighbors were set upon in a bloody rampage, inspired by Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, who later became notorious as Hitler's genocidal acolyte during the Holocaust. In two days, 67 Jews were hacked or bludgeoned to death. Jewish infants were beheaded and Jewish women were disemboweled. Limbs were hacked off the dead as well as those who managed to survive.

On visiting the scene shortly after the massacre, Britain's High Commissioner for Palestine John Chancellor wrote to his son "I do not think that history records many worse horrors in the last few hundred years."

This and other similar pogroms happened, not only before the "occupation" of Judea and Samaria, but even two decades before the state of Israel was reestablished. From 1948 to 1967, Judea and Samaria were illegally occupied by Jordan, which renamed the area the West Bank, in reference to the East Bank of the Kingdom of Jordan that fell beyond the Jordan River. Not one Israeli was allowed into this area, yet nor did Israel know one day of peace in that time, during which it saw brutal attacks launched from the West Bank against Israeli civilians.

Further evidence against the mantra that the occupation breeds violence can be culled from Palestinian sources. Take Hamas's founding charter, for instance, which does not mention occupation or settlements. What is does contain are calls for the complete destruction of Israel, down to its last inch, such as: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." The charter goes even further, aspiring to a point in time when there will be no Jews left anywhere in the world.

Meanwhile, the Palestine Liberation Organization, currently headed by President Mahmoud Abbas, notes in its founding charter that "this organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank," while still calling for a "liberation of its homeland." This was written in 1964, fully three years before Israel conquered the West Bank during the Six Day War.

It's safe to say that the violence and terror visited upon Israelis has little connection to "occupation" or settlements. This myth has no historical foundation, but is easy to proclaim for those who have little understanding of the conflict.

Read the whole thing.

Now, if he could explain it to his own coalition partners (Ehud Barak and Co.) and the 'loyal' opposition (Tzipi Livni), maybe we could have a unified front against those who would destroy us.

Labels: Danny Ayalon, Judea and Samaria, Muslim Jew hatred

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:39 PM