"If analytical clarity is to be achieved, then the actions that need to be explained must be stated clearly." —Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, "Hitler’s Willing Executioners"
The sympathy for the terrorist entity Hamas and the currency of visceral anti-Jewish bigotry we are witnessing today is, as I have argued in Part 1, founded on the perennial predisposition to antisemitism, sometimes manifest but always latent, as well as the massive extent of popular historical ignorance.
Not only are current events involving Israel almost always decontextualized in the press and bleached of causes and antecedents, but the intentions of Hamas are also for the most part obscure to most observers. Rabbi Michael Barclay correctly points to Article 7 of The Hamas Charter, which calls for the annihilation of all Jews. “To want the destruction of a country that is a mere one-quarter of one percent the size of the rest of the Middle East region,” he comments, “is to express hate towards every Jew, whether they live in Israel or abroad.” Perhaps this is fine with the general run of domestic numpties and would surely meet with the approval of most antisemites.
The larger historical archive is equally shrouded in clouds of oblivion and this is precisely what needs to be made clear to the historically illiterate or the evil-intentioned. Facts may be boring, but are the ground of knowledge. They require patience and open-mindedness to survey and absorb. Here are some of the essential facts and the timeline we should have known, if we had wished to stay in touch with reality rather than fall into the bubbling cauldron of despicable invectives and actions hurled at Israel and Jews.
The original legal obligations were violated by the British, who lopped off nearly 80% of Jewish-mandated territory established by the White Paper of 1922 to create the artificial entity of Transjordan, now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. This act was in contravention of Article 5 of the League of Nations Mandate which stated that “The Mandatory shall be responsible for seeing that no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of, the Government of any foreign Power.”
This is utter fiction. Carter and his ideological descendants have probably never heard of or paid much attention to Eugene Rostow, former U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and one of the leading architects of UN Resolution 242. Rostow explained in The New Republic for Oct. 21, 1991, that the Resolution allows Israel to administer its conquered territories until a just and lasting peace in the Middle East is achieved and that “the Jews have the same right to settle there as they have to settle in Haifa.”
Further, no Palestinian leader and few Western pundits have acknowledged the raw fact that there are no 1967 borders to which Israel is required to return. In fact, there are only armistice lines that have no bearing on future negotiations to determine final borders. The late Hugh Foot, Lord Caradon, formerly Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations and, along with Rostow, one of the drafters of Resolution 242, stated in the Beirut Daily Star on June 12, 1974, that “It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial.”
Lord Caradon’s account of the meaning and history of the Resolution is supported by the remaining two framers, Arthur Goldberg and Baron George-Brown, who are equally explicit in asserting its original intention. Resolution 242 is a pro-Israel and not, as constantly misreported, a pro-Palestinian article. Yet in the interests of peace, Israel has fruitlessly surrendered much of its war gains in Gaza and the West Bank, creating unnecessary misery for itself.
It follows that Israel’s enemies, and antisemites in general, are either credulous or savage or both. Generally speaking, their leaders are political operators with gelatinous souls, concerned mainly for their personal safety and privilege and cathected on the Islamic voting bloc. Moreover, far too many ordinary citizens are unable to distinguish between a forgery (e.g., "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion") and a scrupulous work of historical documentation (e.g., the aforementioned "From Time Immemorial"). They are culpably deaf and blind, as Richard Ibrahim indicates, to the purport of an ISIS audio recording titled And Kill Them Wherever You Find Them (Koran 9:5) that pronounces the jihadist worldview of Islam: “The battle with the Jews is a religious one and not a national or populist one! It is not a battle for land, soil, or borders! In fact, it is a war that is legitimized by the Book and the Sunnah.”
Nor are Western dupes aware that they, too, are on the firing line. ISIS is very clear about this: “Chase your preys whether Jewish, Christian, or their allies, on the streets and roads of America, Europe, and the world. Break into their homes…detonate explosives, burn them with grenades and fiery agents, shoot them with bullets, cut their throats with sharp knives, and run them over with vehicles…kill them wherever we come upon them in response to Allah Almighty’s command.”
Yet without bothering to reflect, to study, to interrogate their own prejudices, to educate themselves, to struggle for decency, or to try to understand the psychology of the mob of which they form an eager and heedless part, the antisemitic class is determined to expel the Jew in its midst. Such people, believing they are filtering the world of its impurities, consider themselves above reproach. I have long regarded them as beneath contempt. Such people, to put it frankly, hover somewhere between pitiable and abhorrent.
Victor Davis Hanson cogently writes in The New Criterion:
As in the thousand-year history of Constantinople, Israel’s increased prosperity, stability, and confidence have only instilled greater hatred among its Islamic neighbors, for achieving results that remain impossible in their own countries until they seek changes to their politics, economy, culture, and religious practices.” Given the intransigence of the Islamic fact, the moral baggage of envy and resentment, the weight of its scriptures, and supremacist indoctrination from the cradle, Israel, Hanson concludes, “has to accept the reality that it is a permanent garrison state, an outnumbered Byzantium-like Western outpost in a hostile East surrounded by hostile forces.
It is an “outpost” that the declining West now seems unwilling to consistently defend. Israel is increasingly on its own and must adapt to the new situation by lessening its dependence on an often feckless U.S., building up its own patriotic resolve, refusing to underestimate a resourceful enemy, establishing and advancing its own hard military and industrial capacities — and putting an end to the internal divisions of a fractious electorate that only serves to encourage its adversaries. It’s a no-brainer. There is no other alternative if Israel is to avoid the fate of Byzantium.