Nissan Ratzlav-Katz

An Arab reader once commented to me: "IDF soldiers in occupied Palestine are legitimate targets and they deserve to be attacked. Concerning the right to exist, Israel has no right to exist on the land that was once Palestine.... Your Israel is built on land that belongs to my people."

His statements succinctly and completely summarize the general, publicly and repeatedly avowed Arab position regarding the Jewish state: Israel has no right to exist, as it occupies "Palestine". Therefore, attacks on Israelis are legitimate forms of resistance to this "occupation" (dispute is only about the tactical wisdom of one form, location or timing of attack over another). Therefore, any other issues raised by Arab spokesmen - regarding security fences, human rights, checkpoints or IDF counterterrorism tactics - are merely diplomatic "Trojan Horses", used to stealthily, but inexorably, introduce and make palatable the basic Arab objection to Jewish sovereignty.

The Trojan Horse analogy was made most explicitly by the late and unlamented Faisal Husseini, terrorist, agitator, holder of the Palestinian Authority's "Jerusalem portfolio", and darling of the political Left in Israel and abroad. On July 24, 2001, he told the Egyptian al-Arabi newspaper: "Had the U.S. and Israel not realized, before Oslo, that all that was left of the Palestinian National movement and the Pan-Arab movement was a wooden horse called Arafat or the PLO, they would never have opened their fortified gates and let it inside their walls." Asked what he sees as the ultimate goal of the Arafatian Trojan Horse, Husseini answered: "...When we are asking all the Palestinian forces and factions to look at the Oslo Agreement and at other agreements as `temporary' procedures, or phased goals, this means that we are ambushing the Israelis and cheating them...[I]f we agree to declare our state over what is now only 22% of Palestine, meaning the West Bank and Gaza - our ultimate goal is [still] the liberation of all historical Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, even if this means that the conflict will last for another thousand years or for many generations."

The main faction of the PLO and that led by Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), Fatah, for instance, also announced quite plainly, in December 2001: "Fatah believes that the Zionist movement constitutes the biggest threat against not only the Palestinian national security, but also against the security of the Arab world. It also believes that a legitimate Palestinian entity forms the most important weapon that Arabs have against Israel, the outpost of the imperialist powers."

The physical evidence of the Arab position, as described above, is also overwhelming. No map, no official document, no school textbook in an Arab country includes the state of Israel. The official symbols of the Palestinian Authority, whose alleged recognition of Israel was a sine qua non of negotiations, contain maps of all of present-day Israel (from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, just as Husseini stated was the "ultimate goal").

That understood, debating the Samaria and Judea separation fence, prisoner release figures, Jewish communities in Gaza, etc. seems quite pointless. Indeed, any Arab or far-Left critique of Israel is premised, quite blatantly, on the assumption that Israel has no right to exist and any Arab agreement to its presence in the Middle East is, in and of itself, a major concession.

Despite the prevalence of this attitude to Israel, in the Middle East and in Europe, its basic assumption has no basis in reality. A few facts:

1. There never was any sovereign state of "Palestine" in history. There was, however, a Roman governor who decided to rename the land of the Jews - Judea - Paelestina, in an effort to completely erase the Jewish connection to the land. In the same way, Jerusalem came to be called Aelia Capitolina. The city that is today Amman, Jordan, was named Philadelphia, after the Ptolemaic ruler Philadelphus, in the third century BCE. Did this name change alter the identity of the people whose land it was? Did the name change give rise to a "Philadelphian people"? Did there coalesce local terrorists calling themselves the PLO (Philadelphia Liberation Organization)?

2. Israel is, however, the home of the Jewish people - as recognized by all relevant historical documents - including the Quran. (See "The Table", Sura 5:20, for instance.)

3. Jordan was part of the Palestine Mandate, as well. If Israel has no right to exist, then Hashemite Jordan has no such right, and for the same reason. Otherwise, we must ask, is a Hashemite/Bedouin "occupation" acceptable, but a Jewish one is not? Once, the PLO did hold that Jordan, too, is illegitimate - that is, until the late King Hussein wiped out several tens of thousands of the "Palestinians" in one month in 1970, and expelled the PLO to Lebanon. Then, surprise, their position on Jordan underwent a face-lift. Only Israel, it now seems, is "occupied territory".

4. Furthermore, Arabs themselves have been occupiers of many lands, including Israel. There are Arabs in Israel only because of an Arabian military occupation and subsequent Islamicization in the 7th Century. Just as what happened some time afterwards in Spain to the West and in India to the East. After ten centuries (!) of Arab-Moslem occupation, the Spanish natives retook their land. We Jews took a little longer (twelve centuries). Is Spain now "Christian-occupied territory" according to Arab Moslems? According to Hamas, et al - yes. But then, of course, so is Israel. However, if one holds that the Spaniards are not "occupiers" of Spain, then neither are the Jews "occupiers" in Judea (or Samaria, or the Sharon, the Bashan or Gaza).