If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem, Let My Right Hand Lose its Cunning
Written two days after the start of the October 2023 War Against the Jewish State: Why Israel is resoundingly right.
By
David Gottfried
Jerusalem of Gold, of light and of bronze
I am but a lute for all your songs
As I am writing this, the New York Times reports that at least 700 Israelis have been killed in the first 40 hours of the war. Of course, I can hear Israel’s antagonists say, “that’s not so bad, America lost 3000 people on 9/11.” Of course, the population of Israel is an infinitesimal fraction of America’s population and given Israel’s relatively miniscule size, Israel just suffered the equivalent of losing 70,000 people.
Part of the reason that Israel is suffering so much is Israel’s effort to accommodate Western apologists for anti-Zionists. For years, so called “liberals” and “leftists” (they are not my idea of Leftists and liberals) have bemoaned what they view as Israel’s quasi imperialistic posture in the mid-East, readily accepted the notion that Israel displaced the so called “Palestinians,” and at times their anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish fervor has been so pronounced that they have called the very notion of the Jewish state racist, as when the United Nations passed a resolution, in the mid 70’s, declaring that Zionism was racism. To mollify Western critics, Israel has refrained from fighting when it should have fought. Very simply, Israel should have cleaned-out the Gaza strip a long time ago. In the first 4 hours of fighting, 2500 missile were fired from Gaza into Israeli territory.
Of course, many western critics are not antisemitic. They are just very, very ignorant. Their capacious brains hold a lot of information, but when it comes to the news, all they know are headlines. Let me go beneath the headlines and give you the brief for Israel:
A) Israel should not be deemed guilty of ejecting masses of Arabs from their homes and land:
i. One and a half million Jews were forcibly ejected from several Arab states immediately after Israel’s birth in 1948. They were given no compensation and had to leave their property behind. Sure, some Arabs lost homes that had been in Israel. But plenty of Jews lost their homes in Arab lands. Also, today a very sizable proportion of Israel’s population is Arab, and there are Arabs serving in Israel’s parliament. By contrast, in many Arab states it is not safe to be Jewish, to recite Jewish prayers etc.
And a few words for my Christian brothers: In Lebanon, the Maronite Christians have been persecuted and murdered, by Muslims, for years. In Egypt, Muslim hatred for Christians is not only cruel; it shows that they have IQs as low as the rat-infested basements of their moral sensibility. A few years ago, there was a lot of fear about an infection called “Swine flu.” It was a misnomer as it had nothing to do with pigs. But Egyptian Arabs went on a rampage against the Christian Copts in Egypt, murdering them by the thousands, as they considered Christians a vector of deadly disease.
ii.) One third to one-half of the Arab residents of what is today Israel and the West Bank were the descendants of migrant Arabs who had settled in Israel beginning in the 1840’s; the idea that they have a two-thousand-year connection to the land is a bald-faced lie. Besides, although the Romans had ordered all Jews out of the Holy Land, some Jews always remained in the Holy land in the two millennia since Rome finally fell. Also, Jewish Immigration to Palestine began, on a large scale, in the 1880’s as modern-day Zionism was born.
iii) Britain said, in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, that it intended to bequeath the land mass called Palestine to the Jews. (The name Palestine was coined by the Romans to erase the memory of ancient Judea. However, the people who lived in the land mass called Palestine generally did not identify as Palestinians -- more about that in the next section). In 1917, Palestine was roughly three times larger than what is today called Israel, as Palestine then included the West Bank of the Jordan river AND all of Jordan, which is East of the Jordan River.
That land mass was, in 1917, close to 40 percent Jewish. Since 40 percent of that land mass was Jewish, the boundary between the Jewish state, and the Arab state, should have been East of the Jordan River, not West of the Jordan River, and equity calls for ceding a lot more land to Israel.
iv) A clear majority of Jerusalem has been Jewish since the beginning of the 19th Century. However, when Israeli statehood was born, in 1948, the Arab state of Jordan snatched the old city of Jerusalem from the new state and summarily evicted all of the Jews from the old city. Furthermore, the Jordanians vandalized Jewish cemeteries in and around Jerusalem and used the tombs stones of Jews to pave the latrines of a Jordanian army base in or near Jerusalem. (And Jordanians are usually called moderate and amiable Arabs)
B) Palestinian National identity did not exist before Israel was born; Palestinian identify is a contrivance designed to make Jewish statehood appear illegitimate.
i. There is no Palestinian Religion; most of them are Islamic as are many people all over the world.
ii. There is no Palestinian Language; most of the co called Palestinians speak Arabic.
iii. There never was an independent Palestinian nation.
iv. From 1948 until 1967, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank of the Jordan River, were under Egyptian and Jordanian control respectively. Those lands were populated by so-called Palestinians. However, when Gaza and the West Bank were under the control of Egypt and Jordan, no one said that Egypt and Jordan were denying those so-called Palestinians their right to statehood and self-determination.
The Palestinians have an ethnic identity; they are Arabs. As such, they should have been welcomed in any of the Arab states in the region. They were not welcomed and were shoved into refugee camps so the Arabs could use their presence and chronic squalor to foment anti Jewish propaganda.
C. Israel was built by the incandescent rage and will of half-starved refugees from Europe; the notion that Israel is a creation of the imperialistic West is a pseudo-Marxian fantasy.
i. The case of Great Britain
Britain promulgated the Balfour declaration of 1917 which allegedly ceded Palestine to the Jews. (Of course, Britain’s declaration didn’t give Palestine to anyone as Palestine, in 1917, belonged to the Ottoman Turks) Britain issued this declaration largely because it wanted to beat the German Kaiser at his own game. The Kaiser was expected to voice his support for Zionism because Germany was fighting Tzarist Russia, the Tzar was very antisemitic, and the Kaiser believed that if he announced support for Zionism, Jews in Eastern Europe would aid the Kaiser by sabotaging the Tzar’s military campaigns. In any event, in 1920 or 1922, or shortly after Britain pretended to be pro Jewish by issuing the Balfour declaration, Britain reduced the putative Jewish State’s size by about 70 percent (After World War One, Britain got Palestine) by lopping off everything East of the Jordan River and calling that landmass Transjordan and later Jordan. Then, up until 1939, Britain consistently made the proposed size of the Jewish state smaller and smaller until the state consisted of only Tel Aviv, Haifa, and a strip along the coast, between Tel Aviv and Haifa, that was less than a mile wide.
Finally, in 1939, the Brits delivered a blow of quasi Hitlerian proportions: At the very start of World War Two, Britain announced that Jewish Immigration to Palestine would be reduced to 15,000 a year for each of the next 5 years. In other words, Britain gave Hitler a lot of Help: Prior to the autumn of 1941 or 1942, Nazi Germany let Jews leave provided they gave up all their money. However, to leave Germany, the Jews had to have a place to go. Britain slammed the doors shut on Jewish immigration to Palestine, which the Brits had promised as a home for Jews. The Brits were arguably responsible for abetting the extermination of millions of Jews.
After the close of the second world war, the Brits seized vessels, carrying Jews to Palestine, and put the captured Jews in internment camps in Cyprus. After Israel declared independence, 6 Arab States, including Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudia Arabia, with help from Great Britain, tried to strangle the infant Jewish state in its cradle.
Israel did get some aid. She got aid from the communist world as we Jews and Communists stood shoulder to shoulder in the war against Hitler. During her infancy, Israel got all its oil from Russia and a small amount of armaments from the Eastern bloc countries. The affinity between Soviets and Jews is evident in the anthem of the Jewish partisans, which contains lyrics written by Hershel Glik, a Jewish ghetto fighter who died in Vilna in 1944 at the age of 22, and music which had been written for a Soviet battle song:
ii. The Case of America.
America, we are taught to believe, loved Israel to death because America was the first nation to recognize Israel. However, the US did not send a dime or a single bullet or gun to Israel in her early years, when she was perilously close to extinction. Indeed, during the Eisenhower years, America’s mid-east policy revolved around the Baghdad Pact, an Anglo-American-Arab alliance to thwart communist infiltration of the mid-east. Obviously, Israel was excluded from this alliance; the Americans and the Brits thought that Israel was a big part of the problem, and the U.S. State Department held that Israel might infect the Mid East with the “communist virus.”
During the Eisenhower years, Israel was very small geographically; it was only 9 miles thick between the Jordanian held West bank and the Mediterranean Sea at a point only 2 miles North of Tel Aviv, her greatest population center. Nevertheless, the anti-Israeli Eisenhower administration pressured Israel to accept the American Alpha plan which would have compelled Israel to give up even more territory.
Think about this: Foes of Israel have said for years that we would have peace if only Israel had given up the territory she won in the six-day war. However, before the six-day war, when Israel was as thin as a concentration camp wraith, the Eisenhower administration thought Israel should give up even more territory. Luckily, the Eisenhower “peace plan” went nowhere; the Arabs would not accept anything less than the complete destruction of the Jewish state.
In the 1960’s American policy dramatically changed and became pro-Israeli. This had nothing to do with a love of Israel. Very simply, the Democratic Party finally came out for civil rights in a big way. This shattered Democratic Party Strength in the once solidly Democratic South. This meant that Democrats did not have a shot in hell in gaining the Presidency without winning New York. The stress on New York elevated the Jewish vote. Likewise, the more Democrats knew they had to take New York, the more Republicans knew they had to grab the big apple. The political jihad for New York made both parties profess their love for Israel.
Of course, many Americans think that America does too much for Israel (Pat Buchanan called the U.S. Congress Israeli-occupied territory). However, almost all Americans are completely unmindful of what Israel does for America. Israel does America’s dirty work. For example, when Congress, in the 1980’s, forbade Reagan from sending any aid to the anticommunist Contras of Central America, Reagan demanded that Israel kick back some of its foreign aid to the contras.
D) Why Nations need land
For starters, everyone who does not have any sense of geography should be categorically excluded from any discussion about Israel and its battle with the Arabs.
Very simply, Israel is but a mere speck in a sea of Arab wrath. One can drive from Tel Aviv, midway between Israel’s Northern boundary and her Southern boundary, to the Gaza strip in a couple of hours at most. One can drive from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in well under an hour’s time. Generally, when people see maps of the area, they only see Israel and the West bank. However, there is a vast Arab expanse to the East and the West. True, Israel has a peace agreement with Egypt, but Egypt has a long history of coup de tats and the wrong gun fired at the wrong time can make Egypt Iran’s partner in crime. We are told that Saudi Arabia is on the verge of a peace agreement with Israel, but I remember that less than ten years ago Saudi Arabia had celebrity studded telethons, on television, to raise money for suicide bombers. (I witnessed a report of an Arab Mother, expressing her great happiness at having gotten a color television from the Saudi’s because her son blew himself up in a suicide mission in Israel)
Nevertheless Europeans, with their two-thousand-year history of bashing the Jews (the Jews started the bubonic plague by poisoning the wells, the Jews use the blood of Christian children to make matzah, the Jews need a lot of blood because Jewish men, as well as Jewish women, menstruate) say Israel has no security interest in holding onto the West Bank. Get this straight:
France thought that its security interests compelled it to rule Vietnam which was about 8 thousand miles from France. The Vietnamese never threatened France. By contrast, the West bank is not 8 thousand miles from Israel; it is adjacent to Israel. No Frenchmen has any goddamn business telling us what our security needs are.
E) Signatures on Peace Agreements provide all the security of Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella shtupping him up his butt.
Some people have suggested, with all the innocence of little girls in white lace, that Israel can enter into a peace agreement with a very simple and supposedly equitable principle: Land for Peace.
People have said that Israel shouldn’t fear that Peace won’t be enforced; they say that America will enforce a peace agreement.
But American can walk away from its agreements just like everybody else. For years, America had remained committed to South Vietnam, but after a while America let South Vietnam fall into Hanoi’s hands like a ripe apple. For years we told Taiwan that we would never let Communist China enter the United Nations, but after Nixon was invited to China and enjoyed a succession of great Chinese banquets, Nixon let the Chinese Communists have a seat at the United Nations. Also, when Trump ascended to the White House, he ripped up America’s solemn committments to other nations as if they were toilet paper he had smeared on his bunghole.
And let’s not forget that Hitler said, time after time, that Germany had no designs on Poland, France, etc. etc.
Hell, even American politicians are big time liars. Just a couple of weeks ago, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives lost his post, in part, because Democrats couldn’t stand him for all the times he had lied. And let’s not forget the granddaddy of deceptions: Richard Nixon’s treasonous lies in October and November of 1968. Shortly before the November elections, America and the Communists were close to settling the war in Vietnam. Humphrey, the Democratic opponent of Nixon, rose in the polls. Nixon’s emissaries then told the South Vietnamese to bolt from the peace talks because that would give Nixon the election and he, Nixon, would be more supportive of the non-communist South Vietnamese. The South Vietnamese did bolt from the peace talks, Nixon was elected and 4 years later Nixon entered into the same agreement that was before us in 1968. In the interim, close to another 30,000 American G.I’s were killed.
Since American politicians are adept and avid liars, certainly Arab politicians must be exquisite liars. After all, Islam, unlike Judaism or Christianity, actually praises lying. According to the Koran, in Islam’s formative days, when all the key persons were situated in Mecca and Medina, two factions were poised to massacre each other in battle. The pro-Islamic faction promised peace, The other faction believed this promise of peace. The pro-Islamic faction repudiated their promise of peace with a surprise attack, the other side was annihilated and Islamics site this segment of the Koran as demonstrative proof that lying in the furtherance of military victory is always a good thing.
And, by the way, you don’t have to be an Archie Bunker to be uneasy about Islam. Soviet scholars, up until the late 1950s (When the USSR tried to woo the Arab world), wrote that Islam was more reactionary, fascistic and hierarchical than Christianity and Judaism by a mile. Tell me: How did they decide that one gets 72 and not 71 virgins in heaven after killing for Allah.
Excellent, much needed reminder of historical facts. Thank you, David.