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We may also consider some very recent postings from the Muslim Brotherhood Children’s Website (based in Egypt, a country allegedly “at peace” with Israel):

Did you know that the Jews murdered 25 of the Prophets of Allah, and that their black history is full of crimes of murder and corruption?

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Did you know that the criminal Jews frequently revile and curse our Lord?

Did you know that the Jews made several attempts to murder our beloved Prophet, but that Allah the Omnipotent saved him from their plot?

Did you know that the corruption and deviance widespread in the world today are the result of activity and planning by the Jews, who are interested in leading people astray, away from the path of Allah?

Did you know that the Jews who occupy our land and our holy places in beloved Palestine are planning to occupy the rest of the Muslim countries and to establish a Greater Israel, from the Euphrates to the Nile, and that they are interested in excavating in the tomb f our beloved Prophet?

Did you know that today the Jews are inciting the entire world against Islam and the Muslims, on the pretext of the war against terror?

And so it goes.

How, then, shall we understand President Obama’s unswerving position on Palestinian statehood? How, too, shall we understand other current advocates of the so-called “peace process?”

Some supporters of the Road Map and its attendant disengagements and realignments, preferring to simply disregard the widely prevailing Arab/Islamic image of Israel as a pathology, base their flawed position on a problematic acceptance of the Palestinian claim to the remaining “territories” (Judea/Samaria). Leaving aside the very questionable nature of the underlying demographic argument (e.g., the commonly stated and unsupported assertion that current Palestinians are descended directly from the ancient Canaanites), these supporters conveniently ignore the continuous Jewish presence in these lands. They also ignore that more than one million Palestinians are now full citizens of Israel. This is a juridical condition that is hardly mirrored in the Arab world, where 900,000 Jews were slaughtered or expelled from area states after 1948, and which presently denies Jews any remotely parallel rights of nationality. Yet, it is the Palestinians – not the Israelis – who cling relentlessly to the idea of Jihad or holy war.

The unchanging struggle to evict the Jews from “all of Palestine” (that is, from Israel proper, as well as from Judea/Samaria/Gaza), is driven by this idea. According to Islamic orthodoxy, the Prophet is said to have predicted a final war to annihilate the Jews. Mohammed, it is reported, had stated: “The hour [i.e., salvation] will not come until you fight against the Jews; and the stone would say, `O Muslim! There is a Jew behind me: come and kill him.'”

Israel’s Peace Process supporters, in advancing Palestinian legal claims, forget, inter alia, that the PLO had openly urged Saddam Hussein to launch annihilatory attacks upon Israel during the 1991 Gulf War. Yassir Arafat had enthusiastically embraced Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, sending units of the Palestinian Liberation Army (PLA) to actively assist with the inter-Arab killing, rape and torture of Kuwaitis. Following the Iraqi aggression in early August 1991, Arafat and the PLO had plainly and vigorously supported Baghdad.

At the Cairo Summit of August 10, 1990, Arafat deflected attention from the invasion toward the crises in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Abdul Abbas sent his own paramilitary forces into the occupied state to help “police” the sheikhdom. So, too, did the PFLP’s George Habash and the DFLP’s Nayef Hawatmeh. At the time, Mohammed Milhem, a senior aide to Arafat, publicly threatened Fatah-led terrorism “everywhere” in support of Iraq. Today, U.S. President Barack Obama uses American tax dollars to “train” Fatah “security forces.” Doesn’t anyone remember U.S. aid to the Afghan “freedom fighters” then called Mujahedeen?

Arab/Islamic critics of Israel often speak of sinister Jewish migrations to “Palestine” after World War I, neglecting to mention that (1) there has been a substantial and continuous Jewish presence in the land for over three thousand years; and (2) there has been a steady Jewish majority in Jerusalem. Nor do they bother to recall that after World War II, when the General Assembly proposed to partition Palestine, this offer followed an earlier (1922) illegal partition by the British which gave almost 80% of the land promised to the Jews by the Balfour Declaration to create the Arab state of Trans Jordan. From the standpoint of authoritative international law at the time of the 1947 partition vote in the United Nations, the Jews had already been unlawfully deprived of four-fifths of their lawful entitlement.

How did protracted warfare first arise between Israel and the Arabs? Not even militant Arab leaders or anti-Zionist historians could conceivably accept the view that the 1948-49 conflict was a war of Jewish origin. On February 16, 1948, the U.N. Palestine Commission reported to the Security Council: “Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein.” Ironically, the Arabs themselves were entirely honest in accepting responsibility for starting the war. Jamal Husseini informed the Security Council on April 16, 1948: “The representatives of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight.”

As for the British commander of Jordan’s Arab Legion, John Bagot Glubb, he remarked candidly: “Early in January, the first detachments of the Arab Liberation Army began to infiltrate into Palestine from Syria. Some came through Jordan and even through Amman…. They were in reality to strike the first blow in the ruin of the Arabs of Palestine.”

LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) lectures and publishes widely on Israeli and US foreign and military policies. He is Strategic and Military Affairs columnist for The Jewish Press.

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Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue and the author of twelve books and several hundred articles on nuclear strategy and nuclear war. He was Chair of Project Daniel, which submitted its special report on Israel’s Strategic Future to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, on January 16, 2003.