Israel’s Right to Exist

As soon as the media starts reporting on Israeli attacks against the Palestinian terrorists, the Palestinian sympathizers are out demonstrating in front of the Israeli embassy or consulate, or the UN. They are demonstrating against Israel despite the Palestinians being the aggressors! That doesn’t make any sense. Israeli civilian neighborhoods are attacked and Israel is the bad guy? Where’s the logic in that?

Their usual response is that Israel is occupying Palestinian land and the Jews should get out. The response to that ridiculous statement is lengthy and will have to be the subject of another post, but let me make a few points about Israel’s right to exist:

1. Israel for the Jews and Jordan for the Arabs were carved out of the British Mandate in 1948. There was no Palestinian state, and there has never been one. In carving up the mandate, the Arabs got a lot more land than the Jews.

2. Israel was legally established in accordance with the United Nations resolutions, and has been recognized by many nations around the world.

3. The only “occupation” of land by Israel is land seized in response to unprovoked attacks by surrounding Arab nations. As a matter of fact, Israel gave back to Egypt the Sinai Peninsula.

What’s the Point?

One has to ask, what’s the point of these Palestinian rocket attacks? It is to induce terror, presumably to drive Israel to the point that the Jews abandon their country and settle elsewhere. After all, it is the stated goal of Hamas and other terrorist organizations to “drive the Jews into the sea.” We must never forget that. Meanwhile, the Jews aren’t going anywhere, so the Palestinians might as well get used to it.

Israel is militarily powerful and able to defend itself from the terrorists. It is the Palestinian people who are paying the penalty and will continue to suffer if these rocket attacks continue. If Hamas really cared about the Palestinian people, they would seek peace with Israel. Rocket launchings would stop, Israeli strikes would stop, and eventually the Palestinians would have a much better quality of life than the squalor many of them endure today. Israel is a modern, prosperous country, and the Palestinians could share in that if they just decided to coexist with Israel.

So I say to the Palestinians, in the words of the famous song, “Give peace a chance.”