Heidegger

The Hidden Basis for Hostility to Israel -and America
By Michael Medved
Wednesday, August 1, 2007

….

The historical record makes clear that Arab fury against Jews in the
Middle East bears no connection to any occupation policy or to the
plight of refugees, since this murderous rage claimed countless victims
long before Israel occupied a single square inch or territory and before
a single Palestinian had fled his home.

A brief history of the early conflict (published by the indispensable
Israel Pocket Library) offers a necessary reminder of Palestinian
terrorism as long ago as 1929. In that year, the bitterly anti-Semitic
Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (who later traveled to Berlin and spent most of
the war years at Hitler’s side) claimed that the largely unarmed and
loosely organized Jewish community harbored secret “designs” on Muslim
holy places, and launched bloody attacks on the Jews of Jerusalem. As
the grim story unfolded, “The violence spread to other parts of the
country. On Sabbath, August 24, the Arabs of Hebron fell upon the small,
defenseless Jewish community in the town and slaughtered some 70 men and
women. Old people and infants were butchered; the survivors, numbering
several hundred, being evacuated to Jerusalem.

Attacks on Tel Aviv and the Jewish quarter in Haifa were repulsed, but
on the fifth day of the riots an Arab mob killed 18 Jews and wounded
many more before the Jews could take refuge in the police headquarters
while the mob ransacked and burned the historic Jewish quarter. In Be’er
Toviyah all the settlers held out in a cowshed while the mob plundered
and destroyed the village. Huldah, too, was destroyed after the Jewish
defenders held out for many hours against thousands of Arabs and were
evacuated by a British army patrol.”

A mere eight years later, in 1937, unprovoked Palestinian violence broke
out once again with even bloodier results: “415 Jews were killed by the
terrorists in the period 1937-39, over half of them between July and
October 1938.”

The most striking revelation in these all-but-forgotten chapters of
Middle East history involves the brutal, determined, vicious nature of
Palestinian terrorism before Israel occupied any territory whatever, or
caused the departure of any refugees (the Palestinian population went up
sharply – never declining for even a single year – as Jewish return to
the ancient homeland intensified). As a matter of fact, the devastating
riots of 1929 and 1937-39 (not to mention other deadly attacks in 1921,
1926 and 1936) occurred long before the state of Israel even
existed—making clear that Palestinian violence against their Jewish
neighbors arose from fanatical Jew-hatred, not any objection to the
specific policies of a non-existent state.

For the rest of the column: http://michaelmedved.townhall.com/column…

Posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 11:35 pm
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