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"At 50, Israel Still Debates Its Identity," declared the headline of the lead editorial in the May 5 Philadelphia Daily News. But the sub-headline of the editorial zeroed in on the main point: "The Only Lasting Solution is Peace; the Only Lasting Peace is Two States." Once again, the Daily News has used its editorial columns to browbeat Israel. And this time, the editors added some spice to the usual anti-Israel stew by extensively rewriting Israel's history.
The editorial began by briefly acknowledging a few of Israel's cultural and scholarly achievements, as well as Israel's protection of the holy places of all religions in Jerusalem. With that out of the way, the editorial got to its real point: accusing Israel of mistreating the Arabs and demanding that Israel make sweeping concessions to the Arabs.
According to the News editorial, when Israel was established, "more than 2 million Palestinians...lost their homes as a side effect of the world's decision to provide a haven for the remnant of European Jewry who survived the Holocaust."
That's three huge anti-Israel falsehoods in a single sentence.
First: the number of Arabs who left Israel during the 1948 war was not "two million," but approximately 700,000.
Second: they didn't "lose their homes" as a result of Israel's creation--they abandoned their homes to get out of the way of the six invading Arab armies, whose leaders promised the Palestinian Arabs they could soon return to seize the spoils of war (i.e. the homes and property of the slaughtered Jews).
Third: Israel was not established as a result of "the world's decision." The 1947 United Nations vote approved the creation of a Jewish State in principle, but neither the U.N. nor the United States took any concrete steps to facilitate its establishment. When the Jews went ahead and declared their state, and the Arabs invaded, the Truman administration clamped on arms embargo on newborn Israel. Israel was created because its people fought for it, not because of any favors from "the world."
The News' version of the Arab-Israeli conflict from 1948 to the present was even worse than its distorted account of the 1948 war: "Five wars, scores of terrorist attacks and 30 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza have not settled the issue." Notice how there were "wars" and "terrorist attacks," but no indication that the Arabs were to blame for them. And notice how the Israeli presence in the territories is presented as the equivalent of the wars and the terrorist attacks.
The News then proceeded to dismiss Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's emphasis on security, declaring that "Israel [is] the dominant power in the region, the only nuclear power. Israel can deal from strength--if it chooses to deal." No mention of the nuclear reactors that Egypt, Syria, Iran, and Iraq possess. No acknowledgment of the Arab states' giant arsenals of chemical and biological weapons. No reference to the deadly long-range Scud missiles that Syria recently obtained. In the eyes of the News, Israel is in no danger, so there's no reason for it to hesitate handing over half its territory to Yassir Arafat.
The "real danger," according to the pontificators at the News, is from Israel itself: "Israel faces less danger from the Arabs than it does from the policies it has used to subdue them--lost opportunities for economic growth ... restrictions on movement and free speech ... the sometimes violent suppression of Palestinians in the occupied territory." Sure, the Palestinian Arabs have experienced lost opportunities for economic growth--but that's because the oil-rich Arab sheikhs refused to give their brethren in Gaza any economic aid, preferring to let them languish in refugee camps in order to make Israel look bad. Restrictions on movement and free speech? The Arabs living under Israeli rule had more freedom of movement and speech than the residents of any of the 22 Arab states. But in any event, 98% of the Arabs in the territories have been living under Arafat's rule since 1995, so if the News is upset about restrictions on movement and speech, it should address its complaints to Arafat and his totalitarian regime. As for "violent suppression of Palestinians"--Israeli troops have used force only in self-defense, in response to Palestinian Arab violence. The Arabs can't hurl firebombs at Israeli soldiers and then complain about "violent suppression" when the Israelis shoot back.
"The only lasting peace is a two-state solution," the News declared--in other words, give Arafat a full-fledged state next to Israel, and there will be peace. Sounds like a simple, neat solution--so why didn't Israel ever think of it? Because Israel knows that the "two-state solution" defies both history and political reality. It defies history, because the Arabs ruled Judea, Samaria, and Gaza from 1948 through 1967--and there wasn't any peace then. They weren't interested in a state next to Israel; if they were, they would have established one at some point during those 19 years. They were interested in a state instead of Israel. The "two-state solution" also defies political reality--the reality that the PLO's official Covenant still calls for the destruction of Israel; the reality that Arafat still continually assures Arab audiences that taking over the territories is just the first phase in the PLO's longstanding plan for destroying Israel, phase by phase.
The News editorial concluded with what can only be described as chutzpah. Demanding that Israel acquiesce to the creation of a PLO state, the News asserted: "As Judaism's revered Rabbi Hillel once said: If not now, when?" It is, to put it mildly, difficult to imagine that Hillel would have favored handing over the most sacred parts of the Land of Israel to those whose official Covenant still calls for the annihilation of the Jewish State. It was Hillel's good fortune that he never had to contend with the "sages" of the Philadelphia Daily News.