A justification for Arab hate towards Jews and Israelis. How the Jews have stolen the land from Arabs through manipulation and guilt.

1. Why the Arabs Hate the Jews
A Historical Account by Brian Chenault
About two thousand years ago a certain Roman emperor had been having a lot of
trouble with an irritating group of people called the Jews. They refused to simply
assimilate, or at least lie down quietly, like so many others who had been conquered
by the vast and mighty Roman Empire. No, instead they insisted on constantly
creating trouble: assembling unlawfully, protesting, filing petitions and other such
annoying actions.
A few years earlier, they had even started a minor uprising when they had followed
some young upstart who had had the affrontery to call himself the "King of the
Jews". Pontius Pilate had put a quick stop to that when he'd had the whelp nailed up
to a crucifix, but these Jews continued to be a source of irritation.
Although it was by no means a serious problem, the emperor could no longer simply
ignore the situation because the conquered area was tying up more legions than it
should have been, and he needed those troops elsewhere. History does not tell us
whether the emperor was too superstitious to utterly obliterate the offending race in a
bloody pogrom.
It certainly does not seem likely, since his predecessors —and indeed, his
successors— did not and would not hesitate to use such tactics in other venues, and
with chilling success. He had the both the available manpower and the authority, and
the Jews were not numerous enough to survive such an assault. Perhaps he suspected
that no campaign of genocide, no matter how thorough, could ever completely
succeed... that the dead would be martyrs and that the few survivors would become
even greater thorns in the empire's side than ever before.
Whatever his reasons, the emperor decided on a new and unusual course of action: he
ordered that the Jews be forcibly removed from their homes by Roman legionnaires
and forcibly relocated to the far-flung corners of the empire. This was done, and the
long, sad journey went down in Jewish history as the diaspora. In their absence their
former homeland, a now-empty patch of prime beachfront real estate on the Eastern
Coast of the Mediterranean Sea, began to slowly fill up with their
former Arab neighbours.
As the next two thousand years went by, the Jews lived on in little communities all
over the world, especially Europe (this, after all, is where the Roman Empire had been
mostly located). We'll never know whether a pogrom by the Roman emperor would
have been more successful, but the diaspora certainly wasn't.
Rather than squelching Jewish culture and religion, this forced exile from their
homeland became a defining event in Jewish history. The diaspora became a crucial
part of the Jewish heritage and tradition, a permanent fixture of their rituals and
within their holy book, the Talmud. For the past two thousand years, in a thousand
little communities all over the world, father has passed to son and rabbi has passed to
congregation the importance of remembering the diaspora.

2. There is no better example of this stubbornness than the contemporary existence of
the Hebrew language. Latin, the language of the Romans, is the basis of French,
Spanish, Italian and Portugese and was considered the educated language of cultured
people everywhere for hundreds of years after Rome fell. The Roman Catholic
Church used it in all its church services all over the world until just a few years ago,
and groups of medical students worldwide are frantically using it right now as they
cram for their next exam in Gross Anatomy class. How many people, however, do
you know today who actually speak Latin as their daily language of diplomacy,
commerce or arguing with their wives about taking the trash out?
Aside from possibly a handful of monks with strange haircuts cloistered in their
fortress somewhere in the Pyrenees, NO ONE speaks Latin anymore. The language of
the great and powerful Roman Empire is finally dead. By contrast, millions of people
listen to the evening news, shout at their employers, and try to convince their wives
they don't really have headaches (and therefore to stay up just a bit longer) every day,
all in Hebrew, the language that the Roman emperor intended to die out when he
ordered the diaspora.
After being scattered by the Romans the Jews settled throughout the known world,
learned the local languages and became a part of the local population. The rabbis,
however, kept the Hebrew language alive, much as Christian monks kept knowledge
and literacy alive through the Dark Ages. The rabbis used Hebrew in church services
and required all Jews to learn at least enough to actively participate.
The language was preserved by each rabbi in the form of great scrolls of holy texts
written in Hebrew, much as medieval monks hoarded books. Also like the monks,
before the advent of the printing press rabbis had to hand-copy out these huge scrolls,
an effort requiring tremendous time and concentration.
Today Jewish holy books are mass-printed using perfect computer-generated Hebrew
characters, but those manufactured for use in synagogues still take the form of huge
scrolls of imitation papyrus or linen. Jews are nothing if not traditional.
Like the Roman Catholic Church, Jewish synagogues have only recently started using
the local vernacular in their services. Even today, however, when a young man
reaches the proper age he must stand before the congregation and sing out a long
passage in Hebrew which he reads from one of these great scrolls. This rite-of-
passage-into-manhood ceremony is called the bar mitzvah. In answer to recent
political cries for gender equality, Judaism has recently created an equivalent for
adolescent girls called the bat mitzvah.
From the mid-1500's until well into the current century the dominant pattern in the
world was European colonialism. First the Spanish, then Dutch and finally the British
were the preeminent powers in the world -- challenged with varying degrees of
success by likes of the French, Germans and Italians. The Jews stayed in the
background, minding their own business.
No matter where they'd settled, Jews had been seen as just a little bit on the outside by
virtue of their religion, their "secret" language of Hebrew and even their ethnicity, so
they'd been prevented from holding public office, becoming military leaders or even

3. entering institutions of higher learning. As a result, they'd entered the only field left
open to them: business.
As it turned out, they'd seemed to have a knack for it, too: by the late nineteenth
century Jews in Europe were widely perceived as being rich, or at least a little bit
richer on average than everybody else, by virtue of the fact that many of them had
entered jewelry and banking and had done rather well for themselves.
People in power began to assume that a sort of conspiracy existed; they believed that
the Jews were quietly manoeuvreing around behind the scenes, using their money and
the influence it could get them to help put people into power who would be most
sympathetic to their interests. At about this time a pro-Jewish political movement
called Zionism arose in Europe. Its purpose was "to return the Jews to their rightful
historical homeland".
No one bothered to mention that during the intervening two millenia over 75
generations of Arabs had lived and died on that Eastern Mediterranean soil, now
called Palestine. These Arabs figured that they had a bit more right to determine who
was going to live on what was now THEIR homeland than a bunch of European
nations which had still been a bunch of wild barbarian tribes when the Romans had
booted the Jews out in the first place.
One of those wild barbarian tribes, now calling itself the British, was perhaps a bit
influenced in its thinking by Zionist arguments and by the idea that European Jewry
was a rich and influential group one would do well to have one one's side. Besides,
the British Empire was at the height of its power and glory: India was the jewel in its
crown about which books by Rudyard Kipling were being written, Sherlock Holmes
was stalking the streets of London, Stanley and Livingston were making their way
around Africa and Queen Victoria was on the throne.
The sun never set upon the British Empire, she had the largest and most powerful
navy in the world and by George, she'd do whatever the heck she bloody wanted to --
and without any guff from any bleeding Arab beggars! Besides, the whole point was
academic: Palestine had been under the control of the Ottoman Empire (Turkish
Muslims) for centuries, so the Arabs living along the Eastern Mediterranean had no
say about anything anyway.
What harm would it do, then, to issue a meaningless policy statement in order to win
the favour, support and financial attention of the European Jews? So it was that
British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour issued the appropriately-named Balfour
Declaration in support of an independent Jewish homeland to be located in Palestine.
The Jews loved it, of course, but it remained just that -- a meaningless policy
statement. It was certainly forgotten a couple of decades later in 1914 when Archduke
Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by an anarchist in the city of Sarajevo.
The French, Germans and Russians mobilised their troops and, before anyone knew
what had happened, a million mothers' sons were charging out of their trenches only
to cough their lungs up from the mustard gas or be mown down by machine-gun fire.
The Great War, the War to End All Wars, had begun.

4. Trench warfare held the war at a stalemate in Europe for the better part of four years.
British General George Allenby, in charge of the "Southern Front", was under
pressure from his superiours at the War Office in London for some progress against
the Ottoman Empire, a British enemy in the war and the power that controlled the
Middle East as it had for centuries. By manipulating Arab tribesmen into fighting the
Turks in exchange for tentative implications of Arab independence, Allenby ensured
that by the end of the war the Middle East was British-held territory.
Immediately after the war, the newly-created League of Nations, really just an old-
boys' club of the same old European colonialist powers, legitimised continued
occupation of territory captured by the victors in the war by ceding areas to their
occupying victorious forces as "mandates". The idea was that the "big brother" nation
would prepare the mandated area for eventual independence, but in practise it was
colonialism by any other name... which still smelled just as bad.
Britain got the League of Nations mandate for the Middle East, which included
Palestine. Zionist groups and Jews worldwide immediately began pressuring the
British to live up to the promises they'd made decades earlier in the Balfour
Declaration. If they did nothing the Jews would accuse them of going back on their
word, but if they started airlifting massive numbers of Jews into Palestine the local
Arabs would riot. They tried to go the middle ground and brought in a slow trickle by
sea.
This went on for nearly thirty years while the British controlled the area, and the
Arabs certainly did riot, more than a few times. The population of Jewish immigrants
slowly swelled, living in an uneasy peace with the Arabs. Then one day a man with a
severe little moustache started raving about how the Jews had ruined his country, the
rest of Europe and the world besides. The joke was on him, of course; Adolf didn't
realise that he himself had Jewish blood, but his countrymen bought it hook, line and
sinker, and the Second World Warwas on.
During the war Palestine remained under British control, never seriously threatened
by the massive tank battles in the North African desert between British General
Bernard Montgomery and German Field Marshal Erwin 'The Desert Fox' Rommel. At
war's end, though, the world was a very different place. All the 'great powers' of
Europe were totally tapped out, shattered and economically devastated. Even
England, which had resisted invasion, had taken a beating from German bombs.
Suddenly only one country had a healthy economy. Suddenly only one country had no
domestic damage at all from the war. Suddenly only one country had the largest and
most powerful navy in the world, and it wasn't England any more. Suddenly only one
country had the atomic bomb. Suddenly only one country had the undivided attention
of every other country in the world, was calling the shots, could do whatever it
wanted to and had the force to back up its foreign policy initiatives.
The United States started pressuring all former colonial powers to grant independence
to their colonies. Her moral high ground for doing this was that she herself had been a
colony and had had to fight for her independence, so she sympathised with other
colonies that wanted independence. A more likely reason for doing this is that since
colonies trade exclusively with their host countries, excluding other nations, the U.S.

5. wanted to get those host countries out of those colonies as quickly as possible so that
she could get access and start selling Coca-Cola and other fine American products.
They grumbled, but Britain and the other former colonial powers of Europe started
vacating their colonies rapidly, not only because the United States was pressuring
them to but also because they could no longer spare the troops, funds or resources to
maintain those colonies when so much reconstruction needed to take place back in
their home countries. Amongst others, Britain was making plans to vacate its League
of Nations mandates in the Middle East -- including Palestine.
The world had been shocked, sickened and horrified beyond description when it had
seen photographs and newsreels of the ghastly 'final solution' of
the Nazis. Concentration campsliberated by the Americans had yielded mass
graves, poison-gas showers, non-stop crematoria and living skeletons with haunted
eyes. The carnage was so far beyond anything ever seen before that even conventional
language did not have a word for it. A new word was created to describe it: genocide.
No one could conceive of anything that anyone could ever have done to deserve such
a fate. The hearts of everyone on Earth went out to the Jews. Everyone felt guilty for
not having stopped Hitler sooner, before six million Jews had gone to their deaths.
Filled with shock, compassion, guilt, shame, remorse and regret, the world of 1945
could deny the Jews nothing.
The British were rapidly vacating the land of Palestine, the Jewish homeland of two
thousand years ago. Many Jews had emigrated there during the last thirty years. Many
European Jews were wandering around the continent as "Displaced Persons", sole
survivors of their families or villages with nowhere to go. The world felt shamed and
wanted to "do something for the Jews" to "make up" for what had happened. Some
Jews themselves and other Zionists were clamouring about the Balfour Declaration,
made by the British in a very different world over fifty years and two world wars ago.
Almost before the British were out of Palestine, the United States stepped in and
declared that the area would once again be the Jewish homeland. The Americans were
trying not only to make up for the Second World War, but to correct an ancient
historical wrong. Huge waves of Jewish immigrants flocked to their ancient ancestral
homeland.
As these European "displaced persons" found a home once again, they created a
whole new flood of "displaced persons" -- Arabs whose umpteenth great-grandfather
had farmed the same land 75 generatons ago, forced to leave because a newly-arrived
European Jew had become the new owner. These Arabs, today called the Palestinians,
left in droves.
It took two years from wars' end for the British to finish vacating and for the brief
period of American assistance with Jewish immigration to conclude. Jews all over the
world had been delighted with the idea; those who didn't emigrate to live there were
quite generous financially. The United States gave much financial and military
assistance so that in 1947 the area which had been known as Palestine for two
thousand years declared itself the state of Israel.

6. The brand-new state was promptly attacked at the same time by several of its
outraged Arab neighbours. They themselves had been under the boot of the Ottomans
for centuries, then had had to endure the British, but now that the entire Middle East
had looked as though it were finally going to be free and self-determining, here had
come the meddling Americans to eject the Palestinians —brother Arabs— and move
Jews in in their place!
Aside from this strange, offensive new outpost there were no Jews for thousands of
miles around — only Arabs. For the Arabs it was like surgically transplanting a tuft of
blond hair onto a head full of black. They saw these Jews sitting proudly on land that
had been Arab land for two thousand years, while the 'rightful' Palestinian-Arab
owners sat shivering in refugee camps just outside the borders of the new state.
Outraged and offended, they attacked with their combined military force.
Unfortunately for the Arab states that attacked in 1947, U.S. weapons and training
that had been provided to the Israeli military allowed Israel to trounce them. In other
Arab-Israeli conflicts (1956, 1967 and 1973), almost always started by the Arabs, the
same has been the result: one was called the Six-Day War because that's all the time it
took the Israelis to win, while another was called the Yom Kippur War because the
Arabs tried to win by surprise-attacking on the holiest Jewish day.
The previous Palestinian inhabitants haven't been sitting idly in their refugee camps
on Israel's borders for fifty years while fellow Arabs from other Arab countries have
been fighting and dying in attempts to win back their land for them. The Palestinians
formed the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), a terrorist group that has been
bombing Israel and conducting other terrorist raids on her for decades.
For many years now Yasser Arafat has been the leader of the PLO, and thus Public
Enemy Number One of the Israeli state. He was controversial in the 1980s for once
wearing his customary pistol on a visit to the Pope and because the United States
didn't want to grant him a visa to enter the U.S. so he could speak at the United
Nations.
The first real progress in the Arab-Israeli situation was made by President Carter, who
got Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to
sign a peace treaty. We later found out what ordinary Arabs thought of that when
some of Sadat's own people assassinated him as he stood on the reviewing stand
during a parade.
The fact that Israel recently allowed the Gaza Strip to become an 'autonomous Arab
zone' with its own police force and Yasser Arafat (Israel's Public Enemy Number
One), of all people, as its leader, is probably the most encouraging move towards
peace since the Americans started the whole mess in the 1940s. Of course, we found
out what ordinary Israelis thought of that when a former member of his own security
forces assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the guy who made the Gaza
Strip thing possible, as he moved through a crowded public square a few months ago.
Since historic agreements signed in Oslo, Norway in September of 1993 between the
Israelis and the PLO set the Gaza Strip aside for the Palestinians, the PLO and its
leader have been kept busy with the headaches of self-rule. Those Palestinians and

7. other Arabs who felt that this arrangement was not good enough and that there was
still more for which Israel must answer felt that the PLO had gone soft and sold out;
they became dissatisfied with the PLO as the representative of their interests.
These extreme anti-Israelis formed a group called Hezbollah, a fundamentalist Islamic
force composed of Palestinians and other sympathetic Arabs. Backed by the
sympathetic Islamic countries of Iran and Syria, since the 1993 Oslo accords
Hezbollah has set up shop in Israel's chaotic bordering neighbour to the North,
Lebanon, which has been paralysed for decades by civil war.
The situation in Lebanon is so fractious and its government so weak that Hezbollah
has actually taken over the running of schools and hospitals in some areas, gaining it
popular support amongst some Lebanese. Its primary purpose for existence being to
inflict harm upon Israel, however, in April 1996 Hezbollah began raining fire down
upon its hated enemy in the form of Katoushka rockets.
Surrounded as it is by hostile neighbours who would prefer to see the blood of all its
citizens running through the sands, Israel has perhaps understandably developed a
'massive retaliation' policy over the years. To guerrilla attacks by the Egyptian-backed
Palestinian terrorist group fedayeen ("self-sacrificers", the predecessor of the PLO
and Hezbollah) in the 1950s, Israel invaded Egyptian army posts in the dead of night,
shooting hundreds of Egyptian troops as they slept, and on 29 October 1956 actually
invaded Egypt herself, taking the entire Sinai Peninsula from her.
In Israel's belief that she must show a tough face in order to deter aggression, she has
not hesitated even to operate far outside her home region. On 3 July 1976 she reacted
to the hijacking of an airplane containing her Olympic team by storming the plane
with a massive assault force as it sat on an airport runway in Entebbe, Uganda, a
country well into Africa and decidedly not in Israel's home region, the Middle East.
Israel had refused to negotiate or even talk to the hijackers, it attacked without regard
to casualties and it took no prisoners. The message was clear: don't mess with us.
When terrorists attacked Israel from bases in Southern Lebanon in March of 1978,
Israel responded by invading Lebanon. When Mossad, Israel's secret intelligence
service, learned in 1981 that its neighbouring country of Iraq (with its new leader
Saddam Hussein) had an atomic reactor near its capital city of Baghdad that would
enable it to manufacture nuclear weapons, Israeli jets invaded Iraqi airspace, flew on
over to Baghdad one fine day and blew the atomic reactor to Kingdom Come.
When Israel's ambassador to Great Britain was wounded in a PLO terrorist attack on
the streets of London —just one man, mind you— Israel responded by launching a
massive, all-out, coordinated land, sea and air attack against PLO bases
in Lebanon on 6 June 1982. By 14 June they had the PLO trapped and surrounded in
Lebanon's capital city of Beirut and were pummeling them into oblivion with round-
the-clock bombing.
If Ronnie Ray-gun hadn't yanked on the leash of his Israeli pit bull and forced him to
wait while the United States Navy evacuated what was left of the PLO from Beirut,
the Israelis almost certainly would've done there and then to the Palestinians what the

8. Romans hadn't done to the Jews almost two thousand years earlier. In any case, the
message "don't mess with us" was once again clear.
With the election of Yitzhak Rabin as Israeli prime minister in 1992 on a campaign of
peace and reconciliation with Israel's Arab neighbours, it looked as though perhaps
such stiff reprisals might no longer be necessary. In the historic Oslo accords of 1993
the PLO recognised Israel's right to exist and Israel acknowledged the PLO as the
representative of the Palestinians. The Gaza Strip and the West bank of the Jordan
river were designated as Palestinian homelands, and Israel and Jordan (the country)
signed a treaty ending their 46-year state of war in 1994. Things were really looking
up.
A few months ago, however, we found out what at least some ordinary Israelis
thought of all this 'peace with the Arabs' stuff when a former member of his own
security forces assassinated Rabin as he moved through a crowded public square.
Shimon Peres became Israel's new prime minister and tried to continue as best he
could his predecessor's policies of peace and reconciliation with Arabs.
When the extreme Palestinian-Arab Islamic fundamentalist terrorist group Hezbollah
started firing salvos of deadly Katoushka rockets at Israel from its guerrilla bases in
Lebanon in April of 1996, frightened, disappointed Israelis began to cry loudly to
their government that perhaps those ingrate Arabs would only take advantage of
peace and reconciliation, would only understand the language of force. Perhaps, some
said, the only sure policy for security was the old 'massive retaliation'.
Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, facing an upcoming election and terrorist
rockets raining fire down on those who would be deciding whether or not to vote him
into office again, didn't take long to decide. On Thursday, 11 April 1996, Israeli
ground-based planes and helicopter gunships operating from navy vessels in the
Mediterranean launched a massive, non-stop bombing assault on Lebanon.
As of Wednesday, 24 April 1996 the Israeli bombing is still going full-force... but
Hezbollah rocket attacks from Israel against Lebanon continue unabated. The Israelis,
who have code-named their bombing campaign "Operation Grapes of Wrath", pledge
to continue it until Hezbollah's rocket attacks cease. In years to come it may be Israel
who will taste the sour grapes, since its military offensive in the first six short days
already produced 800,000 homeless refugees in Lebanon -- many of whom will
probably become embittered towards Israel and provide excellent new recruits for
Hezbollah.
On Monday, 15 April 1996 the United Nations Security Council in New York spent
the entire day debating the situation but in the end could reach no decisions. United
States Ambassador to the United Nations Madeline Albright made it clear that the
U.S. position was that Israel's actions were appropriate and justifiable, and implied
rather obviously that the U.S. would use its veto power as a permanent member of the
Security Council to block any punitive measures the council might attempt.
The reactions of Syria and Iran, the two Islamic Arab countries which helped
establish Hezbollah in the first place and continue to fund and supply her, have been
no surprise: they have loudly decried that Israel is committing a monstrous crime

9. against humanity and must be stopped. Israel, for its part, has pointed out that both
Hitler and Hezbollah launched attacks trying to kill Jews, and reminds the
international community what the countries of the world felt was necessary to do
about Hitler. With all this rhetoric, the average confused bystander surely must be
wondering what to believe.
Synopsis
Two thousand years ago the Romans committed a great wrong against the Jewish
people. One hundred years ago the British made a promise that that wrong would be
made right. Fifty years ago, after the Germans committed another great wrong against
the Jewish people, the Americans tried to make up for it by honouring England's
promise. In the process, they committed a great wrong against the Palestinians, who
even today still sit shivering in their refugee camps.
The Palestinian Arabs hate the Jews for taking away their homes. The rest of the
Arabs hate the Jews for taking away the homes of their brethren. All the Arabs hate
the Americans for what they did to the Palestinians. So now today, in a region
consisting of dozens of Muslim countries twice as wide as the United States,
stretching from Morocco on the West coast of North Africa to Pakistan on the Indian
Subcontinent, everyone speaks a form of Arabic, obeys Islamic law and worships a
single god most recently revealed to him by Muhammad the last Prophet...
...everyone, that is, except for those living on one tiny little strip of land, forty-seven
miles long. For two thousand years the people there also spoke Arabic, obeyed
Islamic law and worshipped the god most recently revealed by Muhammad. Now,
however, those people are shivering in camps on the borders of what used to be their
land. Today the people on that strip of land speak Hebrew, follow Talmudic law and
worship the god of Abraham, Isaac, Rebecca and Sarah.
It has been suggested that there are historical parallels between the Arab-Israeli
situation and the plight of the native inhabitants of North America (Native Americans
/ American Indians). Very few people are suggesting today that everyone whose
ancestors came to North America after A.D. 1500 should go back where they came
from so that the Native Americans can have their lands back. Why, then, was
Palestine "returned" to the Jews? We were all taught as children that two wrongs don't
make a right, so why did the U.S. try to right a two-thousand-year-old historical
wrong by wronging the Palestinians?
Such speculation, however, is merely crying over historically spilt milk: wouldn't
removing the Israelis yet again, or blasting them out of existence as the Arabs tried so
many times to do, simply be more of the same? Viewing the Middle East as it is
today, should we not seek to learn from the mistakes of the past? Shouldn't we seek to
learn not only from the mistakes of the Romans and the Nazis, but also from the
mistakes we ourselves as Americans made a mere half-century ago when we sought to
offer a quick fix to someone else's problems? Good intentions are not enough; surely
only listening to and understanding the problems of those who must LIVE there, and
then giving help IF it is requested, will finally bring peace.