Israel-Palestine -- joined at the hip

By Aussiegirl

Today's American Thinker has a short but excellent history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Regardless of Golda Meir's statement, quoted at the end of the article, peace with a Palestine that joyfully elects a Martyr Mom seems a long way off.

The American Thinker

History doesn’t solve problems, but it explains them, including the evolution of the intractable Israel-Palestine problem.

[...] Until 1948 all inhabitants of Palestine — Jews, Muslims, Christians, Circassians, Druzes, Bahais, and others — were called Palestinians. When they went abroad, they carried Palestinian passports, issued first by the Turks and later by the British, who conquered Palestine in 1917. And when, in 1922, the British and the League of Nations, the United Nations’ predecessor, established an official body to represent the Jews of that land, it was called not the Jewish Agency or the Jewish Agency for Israel, but the Jewish Agency for Palestine.

[...] Now why is it that the Arabs and other Muslims have rejected every opportunity to have a sovereign and peaceful Palestinian state next to the State of Israel? Why, in 2000, did Palestine Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat reject Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s offer to return to the Palestinians 95 percent of the Israeli-occupied territories, including a portion of East Jerusalem to be used as their capital? And why did Arafat respond by launching a suicide-bombing intifada?

Why did the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who knows very well that in 538 BC King Cyrus of Persia let the Jews leave Babylon and return to Judah, vow to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth? And why did Hamas leader Khalid Mish’al write in Britain’s Guardian newspaper soon after his party won the Gaza Strip election that “We shall never recognize the legitimacy of a Zionist state”?

[...] Muslims want Israel to disappear because of the geopolitics of their religion. Islam emerged in Arabia. In a short time it enveloped peoples and places as far away as Indonesia. So Islam developed the notion that once a non-Muslim land is conquered, it belongs to the Ummah, the universal community of Islam, forever. Should the Infidel retake his land, such as the Christian reconquest of Spain in 1492, the reconquest is temporary until Islam conquers the Infidel’s land again.

[...] The rejectionists cannot abide in their midst Infidel Unbelievers who also possess the attributes of sovereignty: a country, a flag, a language, an army, an anthem, and a culture. Even Israeli Arabs, like Ibrahim Sansour, a leader of the Islamic Movement, reject the Jewish state and the other Infidel states in the world.

“We wish to see the establishment of the Islamic caliphate without borders, and that is what scares the West.”

It should scare Israel and the entire Western world.

[...] When will there be peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians?

Long before the Palestinians began using suicide bombers and long before Palestinian mothers began to encourage their offspring to become suicide bombers, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir answered the question this way:

“There will be peace between us and our neighbors when they love their children more than they hate ours.”