On August 5, 2011 Efraim Karsh and Asaf Romirowsky, both of the Middle East Forum and of King's College in London, published a jointly written article in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal under the title “Land for War” and the subtitle: “If the U.N. Recognizes a unilaterally declared Palestinian state, it would betray its own 'land for peace' formula.” When you finish reading the first paragraph of the article, you feel that the two authors have kicked you in the teeth and have shouted in your face: This is a sick joke. If you insist on reading the rest of it, you alone will be responsible for the anger you will feel is churning your stomach, and the high blood pressure you will know is affecting the rest of your body.
This will happen to you, my friend, because of what you see the authors do to resolution 242. This is the resolution that was passed by the Security Council of the United Nation in 1967 establishing the principle of land for peace as the basis upon which to settle the Middle East conflict. But this was 44 years ago and no settlement has been reached. For Karsh and Romirowsky to come now and say that the body which passed this resolution would betray it if it recognized the establishment of a Palestinian state is to ask the United Nation to perpetuate the status quo of seeking no resolution to the conflict. This alone would be bad enough because it shows how frivolous the authors are when discussing the Middle East conflict but there is worse to come.
I do not know what position these authors took when the Judeo-Israeli organizations worldwide turned all the stones they could turn to reverse the resolution that equated Zionism with racism. And do not know what position they took when those organizations turned all the stones they could turn to cause judge Goldstone to water down the report he wrote on the crimes that Israel committed during the war on Gaza. But what I am certain of is that I cannot assume anything which does not say they favored these two reversals. The reality is that the mentality which powers people like these two regards as definitive and irrevocable every resolution that is taken in favor of Israel or the Jewish causes. And they regard as indefinite and reversible every resolution that is taken against Israel or the Jewish causes. That is, they gladly take what comes to them and they furiously work to reverse what gets away from them. This is in keeping with the adage that was said to apply to the Communist mentality and that went like this: “What is mine is mine and what is yours is debatable.”
On the surface, that saying seems to be a lighthearted expression meant to be put on a bumper sticker to needle people of a certain political persuasion but when you look closely, you see in it something more profound than that. What you see reminds you of the theory that says every culture rests on two main pillars. One pillar may be called the collection of all the narratives that make up a culture, and the other pillar may be called the collection of all the rules, laws and codes of conduct that make up that culture. Thus, the way to construct a culture from the bottom up is to observe life and retain the narratives it imposes on us. These narratives will vary to match what is imposed by the circumstances of living in a certain place at a certain time. But after we do all the observations that we can, we analyze the information we have gathered, draw the conclusions we can draw and make the rules, the laws and the codes of conduct by which we all agree to abide as a society. We now have a culture that is proper to us.
As students interested in how the cultures are created and how they evolve, we realize that the narrative of life is something that is always in flux because it constantly evolves by its nature. As to the rules, the laws and the codes of conduct that we construct from observing the narrative, they hardly change once they have been formulated. In fact, they are meant to be a frozen snapshot in time, something we deliberately make them to be so that they represent the continuity and stability we like to hold on to as life evolves around us powered by its own volition and according to its own rules. Yes, in some cases the frozen snapshot can be amended when the need arises but this is something that is difficult to do because we deliberately make it so. In other cases, the snapshot can even be repealed altogether, and this is something that is even more difficult to do. Otherwise the rules, the laws and the codes of conduct are meant to live for an indefinite period of time.
Thus, the fact that the two authors are asking that the status quo stemming from resolution 242 not be betrayed by the United Nation, shows that they want the narrative of the Middle East situation to be maintained in its current state of flux. What they wish to negate by this is a final status agreement that will end the narrative of occupation. They fear that if this were to happen, what will follow will be the announcement of a set of rules, laws and codes of conduct that will be binding on everyone, including Israel. What they want, instead, is that the occupation of Palestine by Israel remain debatable -- or as they prefer to put it “disputed territory” – until they have achieved something larger, something they keep at the back of their heads for now. And this is the culture by which Israel has lived since its creation, the culture that world Jewry is promoting with all the ingenuity it has and protecting with all the resources it can command.
And of course, there is a reverse corollary to this stance, one we may recall by going back in memory a decade or so ago. It is that if something is ceded to these people -- as they claim George W. Bush did when he apparently wrote a letter by which he gave them the right to build new settlements on Palestinian territory that belongs neither to him nor to America -- they considered this to be the definitive and irreversible law they tried to freeze like a snapshot and make it binding. Undoubtedly, these people hold the opinion that what was grabbed by the Israelis is sacrosanct and what belongs to the Palestinians is disputed and debatable. Nothing can be more Jewish and more communist than this. But now that the two authors have established that principle in the first few paragraphs of their article, they go on to erase history by erasing its most important events. This done, they cherry pick a few trivial points and use them to construct a whole new narrative that bears no resemblance to reality.
Look what they do to history. They say this: “...resolution 242 asked [Israel] to withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip … Israel has persistently striven to make peace with its Arab neighbors. It withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula … Repeated efforts to persuade Syrian President Hafez Assad to follow in Egypt's footsteps came to naught however … As to the Palestinians, their rejection of resolution 242 was absolute.” We shall come to the question of the Palestinian response in a moment but for now let us examine the history that the authors chose to erase.
The reality is that the conflict in the Middle East started with the illegal immigration of the Jews into Palestine. Thus began the troubles between the Jews on one side and the Palestinians of Christian and Muslim persuasions on the other side. This conflict is still ongoing and has not been resolved as yet. But while it was in the making, a number of other conflicts began to rise to the surface as it became increasingly apparent to the people of the region that those who invaded Palestine had more than Palestine on their mind. Hungry for new lands on which to expand and thirsty for the water that is scare in that part of the world, the Israelis never stopped encroaching on the properties of their neighbors. They tried every trick they could think of to occupy and hold on to the sources of the rivers situated in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. As to Egypt, the Israelis joined the British and French invasion of the Sinai in 1956 which turned out to be the dry run they undertook to train for the invasion that they launched in 1967.
This was the year that Israel executed the blitz through which it occupied the lands mentioned in resolution 242. And so you ask: What happened after that? Well, unlike the impression you get from reading the account rendered by the two authors where they say that Israel persistently strove to make peace with its Arab neighbors, the Israelis did not give up the Sinai, half of the Golan Heights or the Gaza Strip because the Arabs blew kisses at them or because they blew kisses at the Arabs. They gave up these lands because they got their ass kicked in the Sinai, on the Golan Heights and in Gaza. The same thing happened to them later in South Lebanon when they got their ass kicked there too and they had to withdraw in a hurry, tail between their legs.
The fact is that these people will never do something good on their own and will never do it as long as they have the flimsiest of hope that they can hang on to what they grabbed from their neighbors. Life to them is a constant fight to the death whereby they can only kill or die trying to kill the others. Luckily, an unexpected development may come to the fore at times and offer a more civilized alternative. It happened this time when the Israelis realized that it was cheaper to distill seawater than to fight the Arab states and try to steal their waters. They said so themselves and vowed never to fight the Arabs who have the means to defend themselves and defend their sources of water. Unfortunately, however, this does not include the defenseless Palestinians whose water the Israelis are stealing in the same old savage way.
We now look at what the two authors claim to have been the Palestinian responses. What they do in this regard is that they take a two-pronged approach in their presentation, and they use that as a method to turn reality upside down. First, they lump the mediation, the rapprochement and the conciliation that were attempted between the Palestinians and the Israelis through the direct and indirect negotiations that took place between the parties over the decades, and they blame the repeated failures to reach a settlement not on both sides but on the Palestinians alone. In doing this, they make the subtle but false argument that the narrative of the occupation is ongoing today because the Palestinians want it to remain so.
Second, the authors cherry pick a few pronouncements made by high and low ranking Palestinians which they present as being the frozen snapshot and definitive rule adopted by the Palestinian people and their leadership. In doing this, the authors of the article hope to reach into the mind of the reader and while there transform the occupation of Palestine into an irrevocable law that would be acceptable to all. Thus, they hope to transform the right of the Palestinian people into a disputed and debatable narrative that will eventually be resolved in favor of the Israelis. Nothing can be more Jewish and more demonic than this.
Efraim Karsh and Asaf Romirowsky take several paragraphs to put things upside down as they cover the period from 1967 to now. The sad part is that they stuff their description of the events with distortions and spins that do not deserve being responded to for two reasons. First, to respond to a description that is glaringly false is to dignify it, something I do not wish to do. Second, the descriptions are collectively contradicted by the well known fact that the outline of an agreed upon settlement already exists. It is also well known that the settlement is not being implemented because of one reason only which is that the Israelis are refusing to swap lands of equal size as stipulated in resolution 242. What they want is gobble up most if not all of what they call Judea and Samaria in return for little or nothing at all. And this is probably what the authors mean with the title they chose for their article: Land for War.
It now seems appropriate to expand on this title and say that the message of world Jewry to the Palestinians comes down to this: If you, Palestinians, want your land back, you will have to do what the Egyptians, the Syrians and the Lebanese did which is to come and get it by war. And there is nothing surprising in this; it has been the recurrent history of the ancient Hebrew tribes since the beginning of recorded history.
It is now the religion of those who follow in their footsteps whether they are of Hebrew descent or any other descent. And what the rest of the world should do is put pressure on the Americans to stop destroying themselves by the fact that they cannot say no to a bunch of riffraffs who have managed to make themselves look indispensable in the sausage making factory of a Congress that was rendered useless by none other than the riffraffs themselves.
PS: This will have to be the last article I post before undergoing a cataract operation. I plan to start my summer vacation today and remain on leave until I recuperate. I hope to see you here again in a few weeks time.