Reasonableness and rage

This week 59 years ago May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion read out the declaration proclaiming Israel’s independence.

Some six months earlier in November 1947 the UN voted for the partition of Palestine under British Mandate into two states, one Arab and one Jewish.

Jewish leaders accepted the UN resolution, while the Arab League representing Arab opinion repudiated the UN plan and refused to accept the making of modern Israel.

The history of this period, and of the decades preceding and following Israel’s re-birth, is layered with controversy, yet one dominant motif of this history stands out. Arab misery is in part a self-inflicted consequence of Arab vindictiveness toward Jews, making the Arab-Israeli dispute the most intractable of conflicts over the past 100 years and counting.

Arab refusal to accept Jewish rights to statehood has been accompanied by wars with the intent to annihilate Israel. Bigotry and hate toward Jews on the Arab side has masqueraded as religious edict, and then morphed into the sheer evil of indiscriminate suicide bombings.

Arabs have not been alone in their malice towards Jews and Israel. Big powers have also connived and colluded with Arab states to keep alive Arab-Muslim animus towards Israel.

Britain’s promise made to Jews in the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 laid the grounds for a Jewish home in the lands where God — so does the Koran (5:20-21) of the Muslims record — instructed Moses to take his people. It was from these lands and the temples Jews built to God that the Romans evicted them 2,000 years ago.

But when Jews, threatened in the 1930s with Hitler’s Final Solution for European Jewry needed most urgently support to find refuge, Britain imposed stringent restrictions on Jewish emigration into Palestine. If with British help — instead of London’s opposition to Jews and appeasement of Arabs — Israel had been founded 10 years earlier then many of those Jews who perished in the Holocaust would have survived.

An acceptance of Israel, at any time during the past six decades, would have made for permanent peace between two people claiming rights over the same lands. Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) are instructive that neither nationalism nor religion are insurmountable obstacles to reaching an Arab-Israeli settlement on Palestine as proposed in the UN plan of 1947.

What is missing on the Arab side, in particular with Palestinians, is reasonableness, a quality amply demonstrated by Jews despite the anguish of their tragedy and the rightness of their claims to statehood. Unlike Arabs, Jews accepted what was offered by the UN in 1947 as the least good, and then worked hard to make the best of the circumstances provided.

Elias Khoury, a Palestinian-Christian writer, reflecting on the twists and turns of his native land comments, said, "Palestine isn’t a country for it to have a flag. Palestine is a condition. Every Arab is a Palestinian… Palestine is the condition of us all." In other words, Palestine for Arabs is pathology or a rage and tribal call for rallying in an endless conflict with tribal enemies.

Israel’s success in building a modern economy within a democratic setting holds a mirror to the Arab-Muslim world’s abject failure to meet demands of the modern world with reasonableness.

Arab politics instead burns self-destructively with rage whether it is in the savagery of violence at display in Iraq, in the ethnic genocide unleashed in Darfur, or Palestinians shooting each other as the world watches in disbelief or wrong-headed sympathy.