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Denial and Hope in the Mideast

[U.S. News] Mortimer Zuckerman - Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, came to America to stick his thumb in our eye and deliver a sanitized version of "Death to America!" and "The Holocaust Never Occurred." Ahmadinejad's use of the Goebbels technique of the Big Lie has a purpose: to undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel. It is of a piece with the refusal of Palestinians to this day to acknowledge the right of Israel to exist, even though some acknowledge the fact that Israel does exist. It is also one of the main reasons that efforts to broker a peaceful outcome in the Middle East have thus far been futile. And it will likely overhang the newest peace initiative, which the Bush administration hopes to launch this fall. This campaign of repudiation cuts deeply into the Israeli psyche. The Israelis know that the Jews have lived in the Land of Israel without interruption for nearly 4,000 years. They know that, except for a short Crusader kingdom, they are the only people who have had independent sovereignty on this land. And they are the only people for whom Jerusalem has been their capital. They are not a foreign occupier because the State of Israel is the child not of European colonialism but rather of Ottoman decolonialization. It was that Jewish historical bond that led the League of Nations 85 years ago to establish the right of the Jewish people to reconstitute a Jewish homeland on all the territories west of the Jordan River, all the way to the Mediterranean. That same right to a national home was sanctioned again 59 years ago by the new United Nations. After an Arab invasion 40 years ago, the UN passed a resolution affirming Israel's right to "secure and recognized boundaries." As Winston Churchill noted in 1922, "The Jews are in Palestine by right, not sufferance." The refusal of the Palestinians and of Ahmadinejad to recognize this has, for decades, undercut Israeli confidence in their true motives. Jerusalem is the site of the binding of Isaac by Abraham, the place where David built the altar on the threshing floor of Aravna to halt the plague. The Temple Mount was where Jesus was brought as an infant and where he later chased away the money-changers. Mentioned 20 times in the New Testament, the Temple Mount is one of the cornerstones of the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition of the West. Yet it is all denied by the Palestinians. This obduracy, combined with waves of terrorism, has shattered the Israeli-Palestinian relationship.
2007-10-01 01:00:00
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