February 13, 2002
Gamla Staff,
I am a 67 year old American of Norwegian ancestry, engineer by
profession
I feel very strongly that the reason America is so blessed is
that we support Israel. The following is a commentary I
submitted to the local newspspaper, The Roanoke Times, in
Roanoke, VA.
Why Do They Hate Us? It's All About Israel
In a speech to Congress on September 20, 2001, President George
W. Bush asked this question. Most Arabs and Muslims knew the
answer, even before they considered who was responsible for the
attacks on America. Most of our leaders, the media, and even
some Middle East authorities, including Israelis, try to obscure
the root cause. They say we are resented by the Muslim world
because we have U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. They say
it's because of our economic sanctions against Iraq, Libya, and
Iran, and our support for repressive Middle East regimes with
feudal monarchies. Also, it's because of our decadent lifestyle.
These are all secondary issues. The main reason is our years of
unstinting support for Israel.
Four thousand years ago, in Genesis, God told Abraham, "I will
bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you."
Mount Moriah - now the Temple Mount in Jerusalem - is where
Jewish and Christian tradition hold that Abraham almost
sacrificed his son Isaac. Isaac's son Jacob was renamed Israel
by God, and given the promise of the land of Canaan (now Israel)
and a covenant that he and his descendants would be "God's
people" forever. Israel became a nation in 1312 B.C. and since
then Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital. Seven hundred and
twenty six years later (586 B.C.), the first Jewish Temple (on
today's Temple Mount) was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzer, king of
Babylon. In 70 A.D., it was the Roman Empire's turn to conquer
Israel and destroy the second Jewish Temple, slaughtering or
driving out much of the Jewish population. The Romans called the
land Palestine for the Philistines, as a humiliation to the Jews
who had defeated the Philistines centuries earlier. Many Jews
left because conditions of life were made unbearable, yet
thousands stayed and rebelled for centuries to rebuild a Jewish
nation in this Holy Land.
Over the next 1,878 years - the Diaspora - various peoples,
religions, and empires, including Christian crusaders, the
Ottomans - and briefly the British - marched through Jerusalem.
None were interested in building a nation there. Included in
these "invaders" were the Arabs. In 636 A.D., Arab marauders
came to the land and uprooted many Jews, but they did not form
an Arab nation, certainly not a "Palestinian" nation. The name
Palestine is mentioned 4 times in the Bible - not once in the
Koran. The name Jerusalem is mentioned 767 times in the Bible -
not once in the Koran. No nation, other than ancient Israel and
the reborn nation of Israel in 1948, has ever reigned as a
sovereign national entity in the land of Canaan.
Modern Israel is a miracle. This tiny nation, now with 6,000,000
people and 7,500 square miles, is the third greatest military
power in the world. In November 1947, the U.N. General Assembly
voted to partition the British mandate of Palestine into two
territories that were envisioned as future states - one
predominantly Jewish, the other Arab. Six months later, on May
14, 1948, hours before the British withdrew, the state of Israel
was proclaimed and immediately recognized by the United States
and Soviet Union. At that moment 54 years ago, the Palestinians
had a state, or a territory designated for a creation of their
state. If reason had governed, two small nations might have
thrived as neighbors at peace. But it was not to be. On May 15,
one day after Israel's declaration of statehood, the Arab
regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria set their
armies in motion with the stridently declared objective of
driving the Jews into the sea. History shows they failed. The
Arabs had 250,000,000 people, Israel 700,000. The Arabs had
1,500,000 square miles of territory, Israel 4,000.
They failed again in 1956 at Suez and, even more decisively, in
the six-day war of 1967, that ended in humiliation, especially
for Egypt, whose soldiers threw down their weapons and fled on
foot back across the Sinai, with some 10,000 perishing in the
retreat. The final failure was in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, which
began with an Egyptian and Syrian attack on October 6, the
Hebrew Day of Atonement and the 10th day of the Muslim holy
month of Ramadan. After four wars and tens of thousands of Arab
and Israeli deaths, the Arab states had enough. In a series of
historic blunders, they ensured the Palestinians continued
statelessness. Having spent lives and treasures to no point,
Egypt and Jordan agreed to peace. The Israelis did not take any
land from the
Palestinians, but bought it or won it in battle from the Arab
nations who attacked them, so the term "occupied territories" is
a misnomer.
Through those 25 years of confrontation and 29 troubled years
since, no Arab country, except for Jordan, has allowed
Palestinians to immigrate in significant numbers, extended
rights of citizenship, or committed resources to relieving the
misery in the refugee camps. About 2 million Palestinian
refugees have lived in camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq,
Saudi Arabia, and Egypt since 1948, and about 1 million live in
the West Bank and Gaza. If the oil rich Arab regimes and the
Palestinian Authority have such compassion for the refugees, why
do they leave them in camps? Israel has absorbed 2 million Jews
from the Soviet Union and the Arab nations, at great expense,
yet there are no Jewish refugee camps. The Palestinians are just
an excuse for the Arabs, a means to have a surrogate guerilla
army within Israel. Generations of young, born in the camps,
have no profession but violence, no ambition but martyrdom, no
creed but rage. So today, Palestinian youths strap explosives to
their bodies and blow themselves to eternity, somehow imagining
it will help secure for their people the state they could have
had in 1948, except for the tragic miscalculations of their Arab
brethren. The virulent hatred is flamed by militant Muslims, who
have declared a holy war of terror against Israel - and the
United States for supporting Israel. Without us, they would
again try to drive the Jews into the sea, and if Israel could be
destroyed the United States would no longer be the enemy. It's
all about Israel.
