It's All Our Fault

Caroline Glick from the Jerusalem Post packs another winner with her Column One: Middle East mythology. It's inspired by the offensive 2004 Arab Human Development Report released by the UN that foolishly blames the lack of economic progress and political freedom in the Arab world squarely on the shoulders of Israel due to her creation in 1948 and the US support for its continued existence. Oh yeah -- and the US military presence in Iraq. Course it has nothing to do with how the Arabs live their lives or the choices they make. Blame Israel -- it must be their fault. Yet we all know it's more complicated than that.

...leads both Israel and the US to ignore the direct dependence of the Palestinian conflict with Israel on outside support by Arab League member states led by Egypt. Egypt, like the rest of the Arab world has never accepted Israel's inherent right to exist as a Jewish state in the Levant. Yet over the years, the rhetorical focus shifted from overt calls for Israel's destruction through war to overt calls for Israel's destruction through the establishment of a Palestinian state and unlimited immigration of millions of foreign born Arabs to Israel. These calls are obfuscated to a degree by a public fixation on the perceived weakness and actual misery of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza – both of which are blamed on Israel.

Yet the reality on the ground is vastly different from the picture painted by UN reports whose basic presumptions, though wrong, form the foundations of US and Israeli policy in the region. The squalor in which Palestinians reside is wholly premeditated. As far back as 1949, the Arab League decided that no member state would grant citizenship to the Arabs who left the Land of Israel as a result of the Arab invasion of the nascent Jewish state. And so these miserable people and their children and grandchildren have been incarcerated in the squalor of UN internment camps for nearly 60 years.

Now comes the really great sentence by Glick -- bold is my emphasis:

When in the early 1980s then prime minister Menachem Begin tried to dismantle the camps in Gaza and Judea and Samaria and provide permanent and decent housing for their residents, the "refugees" were warned, on pain of death, by the pan-Arab and PLO leadership to reject Israel's offers.

But back to the report -- if I were an Arab, I would be completely offended by it. Does the UN really expect us to believe that Arabs are incapable of taking responsibility for their own lives? Do they really think of Arabs only as victims? We all know how untrue that is. I'm sure the UN probably thinks anti-Semitism is Israel's fault as well. Glick sums it up perfectly with the following paragraph:

Arab strength is based on Arab control of the world's largest oil reserves; irredentist Arab immigrant communities throughout the Western world and specifically in Europe that demand their host governments' adopt stridently anti-Israel foreign policies or face violence and instability at home and in global oil markets; and Arab Islamic terrorism and militarism which is financed and engendered in the oil-rich, authoritarian Arab world.

Is it any wonder that anti-Semitism is on the rise or that the UN would put out such a ridiculous report?

I highly recommend the whole article.