Arab Failures? Israel's Fault!

Jerusalem

The Arab and Muslim world is imploding. Ethno-sectarian, tribal and religious violence rages in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Turkey, Somalia, Sudan and elsewhere in the world of Islam. Tens of thousands of lives are claimed by death delivered at the hands of Muslims to other Muslims, Sunnis detesting Shiites and Shiites deriding Sunnis as apostates. A Syrian dictator has for over four years laid waste to his citizens' aspirations by slaughtering hundreds of thousands and causing millions to flee in terror.

Where Western intervention led by the United States has removed tyrants with blood on their hands, freeing a traumatized public from the iron grip of state terror and devastation, Islamist jihadis have arisen in a demonstration of underestimating the devil you don't know, proving the admonishment of cautionary advice that one should be careful for what one wishes. And through it all, Israel is seen through a universal prism of blame.

CAMERA.org Billboard Calls Out New York Times. (PRNewsFoto/Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America

The West looks on in astonishment at the feeble promise that resulted ultimately of the Arab Spring that brought more despair and darkness as the call to jihad mingled with tribal and ethnic and sectarian malignance transformed promise into greater intolerance, hatred and bloodbaths of startling proportions. The religion of Bedouin territorial strife and bloody conquest has unleashed itself against itself and the result has been a horrific nightmare.

But of course, there is a reason for all of this, this unleashing of a pathology of hatred, revenge and mass atrocities. The Arab and Muslim world has long advised the West that the obvious cause of all this unsettling dysfunction should be blatantly evident in its odious reality; the provocation of a Jewish state in a Muslim geography. It is the evil represented by the existence of the State of Israel that is responsible for Arabs and Muslims at one another's throats.

Israel is responsible for the existence of the tyrants that rule the countries of the Middle East, it is responsible for the miserable social conditions of the people of the Middle East. Israel is responsible for the Arab countries' inability to discipline themselves against warring with one another, just as it is responsible for the inability of those nations to advance themselves in any of the metrics of a modern, advanced society.

The massive human rights abuses that those nations impose upon their populations as they manipulate them and terrorize them are clearly Israel's fault, for if Israel did not exist to provoke the Arab and Muslim world, that world could get on with the business of behaving themselves as decent societies. In the presence of a Jewish state within the larger, engulfing presence of a Muslim majority of nations, enacting the responsibility of Arab national leaders is simply impossible.

June 7, 1967: Three paratroopers mere minutes after taking the Western Wall, Jerusalem, during the Six Day War.

Jewish distraction has that inimical, destabilizing effect. Just as it has had throughout world history. Only now it can be more clearly defined, and the Middle East and beyond seen as a test laboratory. There is the Jewish state, defiling land consecrated to Islam, and there are the perplexed and outraged Muslim nations desperate to dislodge a nation where the rule of law is paramount and respect for others on display through democratic liberalism.

It is known, and it is indisputable that a leading source of the problems besetting the Middle East is Arab rage against Israel because it "weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes", according to former U.S. CENTCOM commander David Petraeus in 2010, telling the Obama administration what it needed confirmed. Violent Islamism would simply disintegrate with the absence of Israel. It's a fact that al-Qaeda and ISIL would also affirm.

Golan during Yom Kippur 1973. An all-too familiar scene as a medic attends to the wounded at an advanced first-aid post.

When the governments of Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya were voided of their totalitarian autocrats Israel did nothing, had no involvement and those who brought those governments down failed to shout their defiance of the existence of Israel, pointing instead to their suffering at the hands of their tyrannical rulers. What an amazing oversight, the rebellious forgot to fuel their anger with Jew-blame. Syria and Yemen appear to be focusing on the Shia/Sunni divide bypassing Israel's fault.

While the Palestinian Hamas corps remains committed to the destruction of Israel, it imposes misery on Palestinian Gazans, reminding them that their enemy-to-the-death is the Jews; destroy them and all will be well. And while Hamas rockets into Israel occasioned finally a defensive response from the Israel Defence Forces resulting in the deaths of 7,000 Palestinians, most of whom were Hamas fighters, Syria's regime has forced the violent deaths of over a quarter-million of its own population.

The United Nations prefers, however, to repeatedly condemn the identifiable culprit in the misery and bloodshed of the Middle East, hammering home lest it be forgotten that the world has never forgotten the perfidy of the Jews. Israel stubbornly insists it plans on going nowhere else in the world; it has settled peacefully in the very historical geography where its heritage placed ancient Jewish establishment and there it will stay.

A sergeant in the Israeli army greets a relative, newly arrived from Ethiopia, 1991.

A small island of vigilant people who have welcomed in their midst non-Jews, including Christians and Muslims, along with other ethnic and cultural groups and given them citizenship and rights of existence in peace and amity. That generosity has often been held in contempt even by the very same minorities who are given place in the Israeli Knesset but it is a commitment that a democracy makes in respect of its own values.