Introduction

Michael Bird posts on Euangelion regarding fundamentalists’ eschatalogical fascination with Israel, which often manifests itself in the desire to “hurry up” the End Times by taking it upon oneself to fulfil one’s interpretation of prophecy.

Now I entirely agree that it’s completely inappropriate to apply Christian eschatalogical thinking to Israel while ignoring the Church.

However, Mr. Bird makes two points that I’d like to address:

a) Israel has the inalienable right to exist in peace, free from terrorism and violence. Suffice to say, I am not a big fan of the President of Iran. (b) The Palestinians need a homeland and one free from walls, check-points, tanks, and rocket attacks. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank is completely illegal.

Suffice it to say that I agree entirely with his first point. I mostly agree with the first sentence of his second, and entirely disagree with the second sentence.

History

From the first century AD to 1918, what is now referred to as “Palestine” was a sparsely populated backwater ruled by Roman, Persian, Arab and then Turkish empires (with a brief stint by Orlando Bloom), with a small but not insignificant Jewish population. In the late 1900’s, wealthy Jews (calling themselves “Zionists”) began buying land and sponsoring Jewish immigration to the region from a Europe and Russia that was growing increasingly hostile to them.

After the World War I, the British ruled Palestine and promised to establish a Jewish homeland in the region which recognized the rights of all other ethnicities and religions. In 1920 the Arab population rioted and attacked the Jewish population in protest. This prompted the formation of the official Jewish defense force, Haganah, and several Jewish terrorist groups, leading to steady low-level violence between Arabs and Jews throughout the 20’s and 30’s. In 1936 the Husseini family revolted against the British and killed both Jews and Palestinians, to no avail.

During World War II, both Jews and Palestinians served in the Allied forces, although many other Arabs were sympathetic to and allied with the Nazis — the Ba’ath party of Syria and Iraq is explicitly modeled after the National Socialist Party.

In 1948, the United Nations created a two-state solution: certain parts of Palestine were to make up a Jewish state, and the other parts would make up an Arab state. Unfortunately, on the day this went into effect, the new Jewish state was invaded by the armies of 5 Arab countries. In the resulting warfare, Israel captured some of the Arab territory, while large Arab populations were displaced, some simply due to the fighting, some by official Israeli policy, and some by the Arab armies. When the dust settled, Egypt, Syria and Jordan officially annexed the erstwhile Arab parts of Palestine, consigning the displaced Palestinians to “refugee camps”. Israel, meanwhile, gave its remaining Arab inhabitants (20% of the Israeli population, nowadays) full citizenship and participation in government — there are Arab members of parliament, for example.

In 1957, after Egypt blockaded the Red Sea and the Suez Canal from Israeli shipping, Israel, with the cooperation of Britain and France, invaded Egypt and took control of the Canal. After receiving international assurance that its shipping would be free to use the Canal, Israel withdrew from the Sinai peninsula.

In 1964, after Israel, in consultation with the US, and under-the-table agreement with Jordan, began pumping water from the Sea of Gallilee for agricultural use, Yasser Arafat formed the PLO with the express purpose of destroying Israel. After armed conflicts with Arab forces attempting to block the water sources of the Sea of Gallilee, in 1967 Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq declared that they were ready for war with Israel and massed troops on the border. When it became apparent they would not stand down, Israel, fearing that ongoing mobilization would destroy its economy, attacked, capturing the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula. Israel formally annexed the Golan, as it was a strategic buffer zone between it and Syria.

In 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel, which was beaten off.

Diplomatic negotiations in 1979 resulted in the famous “Camp David Accord”, in which Israel gave the Sinai back to Egypt, and Egypt formally recognized the existence of Israel. In the mid-80’s, Israel invaded and established a buffer zone in southern Lebanon, from which Hebollah had been launching attacks on Israel. In 1987, the population of the West Bank and Gaza began the low-level violence and terrorism of the first “intifadeh”.

In 1993 and 1995, the PLO and Israel signed the “Oslo accords”, in which the PLO promised to forego violence, and Israel began a withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. From 1995 to 1999, Israel withdrew from all of Gaza and most of the West Bank, leaving behind the contentious scattered “settlements” of Jewish fundamentalists. In 2000, after moderate Ehud Barak was elected Prime Minister of Israel, and offered the Palestinians full withdrawal from the occupied territories, as well as a suburb of Jerusalem for a capital, the PLO launched the second intifadeh, which led to Israel re-occupying the West Bank and Gaza. Israel also withdrew from Lebanon in 2000.

Despite these concessions, terrorist violence against Israel since 2000 has been an order of magnitude worse than in the two decades prior. In 2003, Israel began building a border fence between its territory and the occupied West Bank (such a fence had been long in existence in Gaza), aimed at curbing the infiltration of suicide bombers. In 2004, Israel withdrew completely from Gaza. However, Palestinian attacks from Gaza continued, mostly rocket attacks over the fence, and culminating in the recent invasion of Israel by military forces from Gaza, and the resulting Israeli offensive back into Gaza.

Conclusion

I would agree with Mr. Bird that it would be nice for the Palestinians to have their own state. But in my humble opinion there is no moral or legal necessity for Israel to give it to them — it’s pure charity on Israel’s part. Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza from Jordan and Egypt during a defensive war, and if every state that captured territory in war had to give it back, the map of the world would look considerably different than it does now.

The fact that the Palestinians have continually refused to accept any kind of state that admits the existence of Israel is a point against them, and shows the necessity of the notorious border wall between the two states. There’s a wall between Egypt and the Gaza strip, and a wall between the West Bank and Jordan, but nobody complains about those. And the fact that the wall will separate some Palestinians from their places of work is a consequence of Israel’s leniality! Israel has allowed a hostile population to enter its territory to work — the other Arab countries who host Palestinian “refugee camps” can hardly say the same. As for tanks and rocket attacks, can anyone say “kassam”? Israel’s tanks and rocket attacks are a direct response to prior Palestinian bombs and rocket attacks.

The stated reason for the Palestinians’ continued non-cooperation with the “peace process” is the so-called “right of return”. This is the idea that the descendents of those who left the Jewish territories in 1948 should have the right to return to those territories. If this were to be implemented, however, the resulting population would have a Palestinian majority, and given the history of the region, this is an uneasy prospect for the Jewish population.

It is certainly true that the Israelis have not exactly been Mr. Nice Guy in the whole situation. But consider the Israeli viewpoint: Israel was founded a few short years after Europeans slaughtered 6 million Jews, and has existed for over half a century as a tiny enclave amid a sea of hostile Arab states explicitly dedicated to finishing the job. So from the Israeli point of view there can be no resolution to the problem that does not ensure the survival of Israel.

And the “right of return” is simply historically absurd. My grandmother left Poland in the summer of 1939, aware of the gathering war clouds in Europe. Should I now have the right to disposess some hapless Polish family of the ancestral farm? Nonsense. There was a war. People were displaced. They moved on, and created new lives for themselves. The fact that the Palestinians have not done so is hardly Israel’s fault — it’s the fault of the surrounding Arab nations who’ve kept them cooped up in “refugee camps” for the last 60 years.