Pointing out that the Gaza War is an entirely justified, and proportionate, response to the atrocities of October 7 invariably provokes gibbering inanities that ‘it began in 1948!’ Along with some boilerplate ignorant drivel about ‘colonisers’.
And this is stunningly hypocritical, because the same people will invariably pontificate that, say, Australia, “Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land”. Indeed, the witless children corralled by violent communists Socialist Alternative to march against Pauline Hanson carried signs stating exactly that. Because, like the British and Europeans, Jews are apparently one group of indigenes who aren’t entitled to sovereignty in their ancient homeland.
But, as Douglas Murray so perspicaciously observed, the Pallywankers are “passionately ignorant” about, well, nearly everything. Especially what really happened in 1948.
But allow me, for the edification of those whose grasp of history begins and ends with a slogan scrawled onto cardboard, to set out what actually happened – because ‘1948’ is not an argument. It’s a tic, ritually intoned by people who have never read a book on the subject and never will, on the principle that a confident voice beats a correct fact every time.
So: November 1947, when the United Nations voted to partition the British Mandate into two states, one Jewish and one Arab.
It was not the conjuring of a nation from thin air. That would be Jordan and Iraq, created ex nihilo by Britain to reward the Hashemites of Saudi Arabia for their help against the Ottomans in WWI. Iraq was created for Faisal bin Hussein, by means of Britain cutting away 77 per cent of its mandate over Palestine earmarked for the Jews, while Jordan was conjured for his brother Abdullah.
Funny how the ‘Palestine’ brigade never agitate against those countries.
Israel, on the other hand, was the recognition of a people whose roots in that land run back for millennia, who had maintained a continual presence under the yoke of 2000 years of foreign conquerors and colonisers, especially Arabs, and whose entitlement to a national home had been formally acknowledged by the British as early as 1917. The Jews were allotted a small, fragmented strip, much of it sand, and Jerusalem, the City of David, was not even theirs to keep, being earmarked as an international city under UN trusteeship.
They said yes. The Arab leadership said no, with gunfire. The day after the vote, Jewish buses were attacked (just another in decades of pogroms committed by Arabs against the remnant Jewish population) and the mandate tumbled into war.
And to those who say Israel stole a country.
There was no Palestinian state to steal from. The land had been ruled by the Ottomans for 400 years and then by the British. Israel got its share through the UN. The rest came from a war the other side started.
On 14 May 1948, Israel declared independence. The next morning, five Arab armies, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, marched in. Their objective was not a Palestinian state, because the Arabs of the region were still two decades from designating themselves ‘Palestinians’, even when (like Yasser Arafat) they were born in Egypt and other Arab states. Not one of which lifted a finger to create a ‘Palestinian’ state in the 19 years that followed.
The goal was never a Palestinian state. The goal was that there would be no Jewish state.
Israel had no army to speak of, no air force and a population sprinkled with Holocaust survivors who had come ashore months earlier. It won because defeat meant a second Auschwitz on the Levantine shore.
And yes, honesty obliges us to say it, some 700,000 Arabs lost their homes in that war. Some were expelled by Israeli forces; that is documented, and decency requires acknowledging it rather than denying it. Others fled the fighting, and a good many were assured by their own leaders that the job would soon be finished and they could return to collect the spoils. They were lied to and they never came back.
But there is a second expulsion that the bien-pensant left has somehow misplaced.
Around 850,000 Jews were driven out or pushed out of Arab countries like Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, and Morocco.
Families whose roots there predated Islam by a thousand years lost everything – houses, businesses, synagogues, the lot. The Jews of Jerusalem’s Old City were ethnically cleansed by Jordan. Israel absorbed them and got on with building.
The Arab states did the precise opposite with the Palestinians.
They kept them in camps and in refugee status that is now passed down to the fourth generation.
Today the rolls swell to nearly six million registered refugees, so that the great-grandson of a man who left Haifa in 1948 is still, officially, a refugee. In Lebanon they remain barred from a long list of professions. From 1948 to 1967 Jordan held the West Bank and Egypt held Gaza, and neither saw fit to establish a Palestinian state. It could have been done at any time. It never was, because the Palestinian cause was never about Palestinian statehood – it was about denial.
Meanwhile the roughly 160,000 Arabs who stayed in Israel became Israeli citizens, with the vote, their own parties and seats in parliament. Today they number around two million.
Israel, with no oil and enemies on every border, drained the swamps and built a country. The Palestinian leadership was offered the same chance and chose war, and has chosen it at every subsequent opportunity.
So the next time some proudly ignorant soul informs you that Israel was built on expulsion, remember the whole picture. The Palestinians were offered a state before Israel existed. The Arab side answered with war. Israel defended itself.
Israel did not start that war. It merely declined to lose it.
Just like they did again 2023.
