The Legitimacy Debate on Israel's Right of Existence

"As Arabs, we are very adept at demanding that our human rights be respected, at least when we live in liberal democracies such as in North America, Europe, and Israel. But what about when it comes to our respecting the human rights of others, particularly Jews?"
"When we examine our attitude towards Jews, both historically and at present, we realize that it is centered on denying Jews the most fundamental human right, the right without which no other human right is relevant: the right to exist."
"Anti-Zionists often repeat the claim that before modern Israel, Jews were able to live in peace in the Middle East, and that it is the establishment of the State of Israel that created Arab hostility towards Jews. That is a lie."
"Before modern Israel, as the historian Martin Gilbert wrote, "Jews held the inferior status of dhimmi, which, despite giving them protection to worship according to their own faith, subjected them to many vexatious and humiliating restrictions in their daily lives." As another historian, G.E. von Grunebaum, wrote, Jews in the Middle East faced "a lengthy list of persecutions, arbitrary confiscations, attempted forced conversions, or pogroms."
"Anti-Zionists claim that Jews are imperialists in the Middle East, as were the British and the French, and like them, they should leave and go back to where they belong. This analogy is of course not true: Jews have an even longer history in the Middle East than do Muslims or Arabs."
"Do Jews belong in Europe, which tried only a few decades ago to kill every Jew, man, woman, or child? Do Jews belong in North America where until a few hundred years ago, there were no Europeans, only Indians?"
"Saying that Jews "belong" in such places is not reality; it is just a convenient claim for anti-Zionists to make."
Fred Maroun, The Gatestone Institute

In May 1948, the Jordanian Arab Legion expelled all of the approximately 2000 Jews who lived in the Old City of Jerusalem, and then turned the Jewish Quarter into rubble.

The pernicious lies and the slanders characterizing the Jewish presence in the Middle East as a recent phenomenon with the Jews as interlopers intent on destroying the hopes and aspirations of Arab Palestinians to secure their own futures where a Jewish historical presence has always existed have succeeded in persuading the international community for whom no slander is too unbelievable as long as it is directed against Jews, that Zionism is evil, a form of unforgivable apartheid.

Islam is a worldwide religion whose progenitor borrowed heavily from Judaism to define, a religion that was meant to appeal to the tribal and cultural heritage of Bedouin peoples in the Middle East. And it was spread primarily not by the force of its spiritual appeal, but by force itself, through the violent conquest of the scimitar. The Prophet Mohammad himself, a middle-aged businessman, had a vision of religion as a unifying force of the Arab Bedouin.

The appeal of monotheism drew him, as did many of the prophets of a much earlier age than his own, and the sacred principles attributed to the Jewish god's demands of the faithful also appealed to him; in essence a partially-ready-made religion with alterations reflecting tribal, clan honour, convincing the faithful drawn from opposing tribes that they would do better to direct their spleen against outsiders while welcoming the brotherhood of Islam.

But Muhammad's plan was one of total usurpation, to convince Judeans that their faith had been upgraded not by the divine messenger that Muhammad claimed to be as the servant of god, but by direct orders of that supreme being who had personally chosen him to deliver the final message of the monotheistic religion having attained its completed state. As such Muhammad demanded what he expected, that the Jewish tribes would capitulate to his superior rendition and submit, relegating Judaism to the ephemera of history.

Jewish tribes lived in what is now the second-most sacred place recognized in Islam. The Qurayza tribes were Jews known to inhabit Medina, their homeland. Judaism had been well established for thousands of years at that point. When the Qurayza Jews refused Mohammad's invitation to set aside their 'practise-rehearsal-temporary' form of monotheism and embrace Islam, the response was deadly. The men were slaughtered, along with Jewish boys, while Jewish women were taken as slaves.

Nothing much has changed since. Traditionally, since the 7th Century when Islam was introduced and the faithful were induced to submit to their obligation to jihad (which was what Mohammad's army had inflicted upon the recalcitrant Jews) as the primary method of prosetylization, there were three ways that Muslims could view their obligation to jihad; permit non-Muslims to continue practising their 'Abrahamic' religion, Judaism or Christianity as long as they paid the taxes involved (jizya), or obligingly hear out supplicants to life state "There is no god but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger", thereby converting to Islam, or to kill the non-believers.

For Jews, throughout history, survival has been fraught with one episode after another of attempts to destroy the tribes constituting an ethnicity and a religion with a common tradition and heritage. Jews were long established in the Middle East, not only in lands considered to be Judean, but in other areas as well, geographic places like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria, among others. Although living for the most part on 'tolerance' as a people held to be inferior, life persisted. The diaspora, with the destruction of the Temple(s) of Solomon first by the Babylonians (Iraq), then by the Romans, led to the dispersal of Jews globally.

Throughout Europe Jews settled, and there they continued to be persecuted. Life was one series after another of humiliations, attacks, truncated entitlements, pogroms. Little wonder that Jews mourned after their exile from the Middle East, and yearned for their return, while singing the praises of Jerusalem, the centre of their existence and the worship of Judaism that persisted against all odds through the millennia, the dream of rebuilding the Temple of Solomon sustaining them in their times of travail.

When the Holocaust occurred, demolishing the hope of continued complete integration into Europe, little wonder that Zionism developed, when Jews foresaw no future for themselves anywhere in the world, living under the constant threat of persecution and eventual annihilation. A return to the Holy Land where Judaism first was established and Jews lived on land not only consecrated to Judaism, but historically their own was seen as the absolute and required response to intolerance elsewhere. Existentialism led to Zionism.

Israel is where Jews were meant to be sheltered from the incessant storms of revile and hatred, slander and attack. Where the nation would be safe, and capable of defending itself from future catastrophes. And where, when the aspiring nation declared itself in existence, the hateful wrath of the surrounding Arab states descended in an effort to complete what the Third Reich had left unfinished. Although Israel succeeded in fending off one destructive attack after another, its right to exist has never been affirmed by the outside world.

The physical state militias have abated, but their place has been taken by the non-state militias whose terrorist tactics reflect what the Koran mandates in its faithful. And where the physical attacks of the terrorists have failed to exact maximum damage on a scale satisfying to their intentions, the ongoing game of slander and efforts to convince merely conventional anti-Semitism that seeps out of every dark corner have succeeded to a degree through de-legitimizing Israel in the United Nations.

The world of Islam has invaded the world of the West. There are now multitudes of Muslims from every corner of Earth -- where majority Muslim states exist to torment their own and send them for protection from the state elsewhere as haven-seekers and refugees -- inhabiting Europe and North America. And they have brought with them their detestation of Jews, as Muslims holding Jews accountable for all the ills of their own societies' failings. Jews are pilloried in Europe, led by the plaints of Muslims characterizing Palestinians as victims and Jews as occupiers of their own land.

The power and influence of Arab and Muslim groups in the international community and particularly in the United Nations, against the existence of one tiny state dedicated to the continued existence on Earth of a small minority of people, is enormous. That influence has led to a situation where power espouses the view that Jews do not belong in the Middle East. Muslims have exported their virulent hatred and spite to non-Muslim geographies with that same message. Extended somewhat to the point where Jews can no longer find safe haven even in the countries of Europe where they have lived for hundreds of years?

No place for Jews to be safe and secure anywhere in the world? It's beginning to look increasingly that way. And the United Nations, the very international forum priding itself on upholding human rights and striving for world peace, is sanguine.

Mr. Maroun, a righteous Arab of Lebanese descent can have the last word:
"Everyone, however, despite the treacherous UNESCO's rewriting of history, knows that before that piece of land was called the West Bank, it was called Judea and Samaria for more than two thousand years."
"Everyone knows that Hebron contains the traditional burial site of the biblical Patriarchs and Matriarchs, within the Cave of the Patriarchs, and it is considered the second-holiest site in Judaism. Every reasonable person knows that Jews should unquestionably have the right to exist on that land, even if it is under Arab or Muslim jurisdiction. Yet everyone also knows that no Arab regime is capable or even willing to protect the safety of Jews living under its jurisdiction from the anti-Semitic hatred that emanates from the Arab world."
"East Jerusalem, which was carved away by the Kingdom of Jordan from the rest of Jerusalem during the war of independence, is part of Jerusalem, and contains the Temple Mount, the Jews' holiest site. The Old City in East Jerusalem was inhabited by Jews up until they were ethnically cleansed by Jordan in the war of 1948-1949."