Middle East Mythology

by Caroline Glick
April 8, 2005 

Tuesday the 2004 Arab Human Development Report was released 
by the UN Development Project. The report placed a large chunk 
of the blame for the Arab world's lack of economic progress and 
political freedom on Israel's creation in 1948 and US support for 
Israel's continued existence, as well as the US military presence 
in Iraq. 

The report's conclusions about Israel and the US were immediately 
rejected by the US and Israel. Greg Sullivan, the spokesman for 
the US State Department's Near Eastern Bureau said, "We think 
it's misguided to blame Israel for the problems and the challenges 
that the Arab world faces." 

Mark Regev, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, was equally blunt, 
"For too long too many people in the Arab world have used Israel 
as an excuse to justify behavior that cannot be justified. You can't 
have democratic elections because of Israel and you can't give 
equal rights to women in Saudi Arabia because of Israel. 
This is of course a cop out." 

The American and Israeli denunciations of the report were, 
of course, wholly reasonable. The notion that 300 million Arabs 
live under the jackboot because some 5 million Jews in Israel 
live in freedom and America supports our right to live in freedom 
is patently insane. So too, it is simply delusional to believe that 
300 million Arabs are so bent out of shape by the fact that 
2.3 million Palestinian Arabs purportedly have their freedoms 
curbed by Israel, that they willingly accept their regimes' right 
to enslave and impoverish them economically and spiritually. 

Yet the greatest irony that is brought to the surface by the 
UNDP report is that in spite of both the American and Israeli 
governments' ability to differentiate between spit and raindrops, 
in point of fact, both Israel and the US are basing their policies 
towards the Palestinians specifically and the Arab world generally 
on an internalization of the UNDP's ridiculous claims. 

How does this manifest itself? 

The view among American policymakers and Israeli Foreign 
Ministry types, both egged on by their ideological bedfellows in 
Europe and the international Left is based on two presumptions. 
The first is that the Palestinian conflict with Israel is the cause 
of the Arab conflict with Israel. The second is that the Palestinians 
are weak and the Israelis are strong and that the way to solve the 
conflict is to strengthen the Palestinians and weaken Israel. 

The second presumption is what leads both Israeli and American 
foreign policy elites to advocate Israeli surrender of land and rights 
to the Palestinians and to support Palestinian acquisition of arms, 
money and sovereignty. 

The first presumption is what leads both Israel and the US to 
ignore the direct dependence of the Palestinian conflict with Israel 
on outside support by Arab League member states led by Egypt. 
Egypt, like the rest of the Arab world has never accepted Israel's 
inherent right to exist as a Jewish state in the Levant. Yet over 
the years, the rhetorical focus shifted from overt calls for Israel's 
destruction through war to overt calls for Israel's destruction 
through the establishment of a Palestinian state and unlimited 
immigration of millions of foreign born Arabs to Israel. 
These calls are obfuscated to a degree by a public fixation on 
the perceived weakness and actual misery of the 2.3 million 
Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza - both of which are 
blamed on Israel. 

Yet the reality on the ground is vastly different from the picture 
painted by UN reports whose basic presumptions, though wrong, 
form the foundations of US and Israeli policy in the region. 
The squalor in which Palestinians reside is wholly premeditated. 
As far back as 1949, the Arab League decided that no member 
state would grant citizenship to the Arabs who left the Land of 
Israel as a result of the Arab invasion of the nascent Jewish state. 
And so these miserable people and their children and grandchildren 
have been incarcerated in the squalor of UN internment camps 
for nearly 60 years. When in the early 1980s then prime minister 
Menachem Begin tried to dismantle the camps in Gaza and 
Judea and Samaria and provide permanent and decent housing 
for their residents, the "refugees" were warned, on pain of death, 
by the pan-Arab and PLO leadership to reject Israel's offers. 

The reason for this was clear: If the Palestinians had been allowed 
to freely develop, a core myth - that Jewish sovereignty is tainted 
with an original sin - a myth which was created to justify the 
continued Arab rejection of Israel, would disappear. And so it 
remains the case that despite the fact that in the last ten years 
the Palestinian Authority has received more international aid per 
capita than any national authority in the history of international aid, 
the Palestinians today remain in abject poverty. More to the point, 
their standard of living went into freefall shortly after the PA was 
established in 1994. Yasser Arafat and his deputies thwarted 
development efforts by stealing the billions they were given. 

That the rejection of Israel still forms a solid basis for Arab and 
Islamic unity was again made clear in a conference this week 
in Malaysia devoted to "Peace in Palestine." The conference gave 
itself a psychological warfare boost by inviting five anti-Israel 
Israeli and Jewish activists to participate in the proceedings. 
Led by Malaysia's Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi the 
participants called for an international "anti-Israeli apartheid" 
campaign demanding a total international boycott on Israel until 
a Palestinian state is established with Jerusalem as its capital 
and Israel becomes a non-Jewish state as a result of unlimited 
Arab immigration. The fact that the Arab and Muslim, (and Jewish) 
participants expressed views that were even more extreme than 
the rhetoric emanating from the PA is indicative of the source of 
the continued pressure for the indefinite prolongation of the 
Palestinian conflict with Israel. 

Let us return now to the presumptions that form the basis of 
American and Israeli policy towards the Palestinians specifically 
and the Arab world generally. We see that by internalizing the 
view that the Palestinian conflict is the source of the Arab conflict 
with Israel and that the way to solve the Palestinian conflict is 
to empower the Palestinians at Israel's expense, both Israel and 
the US are initiating policies that distance rather than advance 
their stated goals of peace and security through the democratization 
of Palestinian society and the Arab world writ large. This is so 
because the guiding presumptions themselves are not simply 
wrong, but are the polar opposites of the facts on the ground. 

These facts are that the Palestinian conflict with Israel is largely 
a direct result of the Arab world's rejection of Israel's right to exist. 
And weakening Israel, by strengthening the Palestinians or in any 
other manner advances none of these goals. 

Arab strength is based on Arab control of the world's largest oil 
reserves; irredentist Arab immigrant communities throughout the 
Western world and specifically in Europe that demand their host 
governments' adopt stridently anti-Israel foreign policies or face 
violence and instability at home and in global oil markets; 
and Arab Islamic terrorism and militarism which is financed and 
engendered in the oil-rich, authoritarian Arab world. 

The fact that it is Arab power rather than Palestinian weakness 
that is fuelling the conflict is made clear by the EU's Middle East 
policies. As Bat Ye'or, the noted scholar of jihad ideology and 
Arab-European politics makes crystal clear in her new book 
Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, Western European abandonment 
of its early support for Israel came not in the wake of Israel's 
stunning victory in the 1967 Six Day War, but in the aftermath of 
the OPEC oil embargo in 1973. 

It was the concerted pan-Arab attack on the economies of 
Western Europe in 1973, not Israel's acquisition of territory in 
1967 that caused Europe to embrace the cause of the Palestinians. 
And it is the power that immigrant voters and activists wield 
against the European electorate and the threat of violence 
wielded by Arab terrorists that ensure that year in and year out 
regardless of the brutality of Arab rhetoric and violence, 
the Europeans remain faithful to the ideology of Israeli criminality 
and Palestinian victimhood. 

Israeli and American policymakers alike have repeatedly claimed 
that by strengthening PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, he will gain 
legitimacy among the Palestinians to move ahead with peace with 
Israel. They also claim that in the aftermath of Israel's planned 
removal of its forces and expulsion of its citizenry from northern 
Samaria and Gaza this summer, the PA will be strengthened 
and that as a result, chances for peace will be increased. 

Yet again, the facts on the ground belie this view. At the end of 
the summer, oil prices will no doubt be edging towards $60 a 
barrel. Egypt will have two armored brigades sitting in the Sinai 
Peninsula. Israel, smarting from its self-inflicted wounds and 
bearing an extraordinary financial, political and social burden 
of resettling thousands of Israeli refugees, will be weaker and 
therefore less able to mount the will and the ability to fend off 
terror assaults. Finally, there is no reason to assume that Abbas, 
who has devoted most of his time since replacing Arafat to 
coddling terrorists and currying favor with their state sponsors, 
will be in any rush to improve the economic situation in the 
Palestinian areas. Indeed, again, advancing their economic and 
political fortunes is actually antithetical to the interests of the PLO 
and the Arab world. 

Given the fact that the America and Israeli governments are both 
basing their policies on the same false presumptions that formed 
the basis of the UNDP report they were so quick to reject, 
perhaps the real question is why did it bother them so much? 
And the second question is, if they are still able to tell the 
difference between spit and raindrops, when will they adopt 
policies that reflect the distinction?