The mufti accompanied his 1936-39 war against the Jews with a campaign of terror against his Arab opponents (again, just like Arafat). His henchmen assassinated not only every political rival who contemplated some sort of accommodation, but also practically anyone who could even potentially become a political rival. Hundreds of Arabs were liquidated, a large part of the Palestinian elites. Many more were forced to flee. It was a tragedy from which the Palestinians, who were developing by then a hateful, xenophobic nationalism, never recovered.
In 1948, the British gave up the mandate and the UN partitioned Palestine, offering the Jews only a sliver of the area originally designated as a Jewish national home. Partition arbitrarily deprived the Jews of their internationally sanctioned legal rights to all of Palestine, including what is now the kingdom of Jordan. Nevertheless, Israel accepted it.
The Arabs of Palestine, and the Arab states supporting them, refused to accept partition and launched a war of annihilation against Israel. The British left on May 15, 1948, doing everything they could to render the Jews defenseless before the onslaught of six Arab armies including an Arab legion led by British officers which put siege to Jerusalem and almost starved its population. Against all odds, and at great cost, Israel repulsed the Arab attacks and established itself within the 1949 armistice lines. Jordan unilaterally annexed the remaining heartland territories designated for an Arab state, and Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians never protested perhaps because they considered Jordan their own, since the majority of its inhabitants were Palestinians.
Before Israel ejected Jordan from the ?West Bank? and Egypt from the Gaza Strip in 1967, Palestinians lived for almost two decades under a very repressive Jordanian occupation and under brutal Egyptian military rule in the Gaza Strip in utter destitution and with no rights at all. Gaza was, in effect, a large Egyptian prison camp. Yet they did not protest. Their anger was skillfully directed against Israel, so that they wished it destroyed even though it did not then occupy ?their land? or hold them captive. Nor did any of their friends who today pretend to defend their right for self-determination raise then even a squeak.
Still, the two big lies about Israeli ?occupation? and ‘stolen Arab lands’ continue to be used by the Arabs and have scored great successes, especially in Europe. Barely 60 years after the Holocaust, Arab calumnies help the Europeans salve their conscience so successfully that they are even ready to help Muslim rogue states acquire weapons of mass destruction, and to protect these rogue states against preventative action by the U.S.
It takes democracies a long time to absorb even the most recent and most costly lessons of history. A Europe that fell easy prey to the Big Lies Goebbels spread to keep it disarmed was to pay heavily for its complacency towards Nazi aggression. Last September 11, Americans paid heavily for their own failure to identify in time a danger from a radical and deadly challenge to their basic values and institutions a challenge that before long may be mounted with weapons of mass destruction.
The West will continue to be exposed to grave danger until it finally wakes up and realizes how Arab lies have managed to lull it to the danger from implacable Muslim fundamentalism, a danger Israel has already been facing for so many years. (NationalReviewOnline)
