DECONSTRUCTING THOSE ARAB REFUGEES

UNTIL THE 1967 WAR, many in Western Europe saw Israel—correctly—as a tiny and besieged state, surrounded by enemies who wished to destroy it. In this respect, they were helped along by the fact that the leader of those who would after the Six-Day War be carefully renamed as the "Palestinians," were not yet called "Palestinians" but simply "the Arabs" or "the Arab refugees." And their putative leader, Ahmed Shukairy (who was himself half-Turkish), had the habit of expressing himself as a truthful Muslim, and told the world that his goal was the destruction of Israel.

The Arab leaders said the same thing. And those Arab leaders, at the time, did not have the enormous oil wealth that the member-states of OPEC really began to acquire only in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then they enjoyed a really fantastic jump in oil revenues, and thus an equally fantastic increase in perceived power and real ability to buy all kinds of influence along with other, more tangible goods and services, only when OPEC quadrupled the price of oil in the fall of 1973.

And beginning with their defeat in the Six-Day War, the Arabs realized that they would not be able to defeat Israel militarily, at least not yet, not under the new conditions, and with Israel now in possession of "the West Bank" and Gaza and all of the Sinai (some 95% of the territory Israel won by force of arms in that war). They would have to formulate a new strategy to force Israel to disgorge what it had won, to make Israel appear not to be what in fact it still was, a tiny state subject to this unending Arab and Muslim hostility, that no concessions by Israel would ever truly assuage (at least not for the Muslims who took Islam seriously, and that meant, at least, all of the Arab Muslims). So they did several things. They decided on a campaign of diplomatic and economic warfare, accompanied by terrorist acts within Israel and against Israelis overseas, and on a campaign to weaken Israel and to force its former friends to sever ties, or at least to cease being friendly toward Israel, and ready to misunderstand its plight, and the real nature of the war—the Jihad—being waged against it.

The first to be won over, largely by bribery of African rulers, were the black African states that had enjoyed good relations with Israel and had benefited greatly from Israel's extensive, and intelligent, aid program in Black Africa, which encouraged the development of small-scale agriculture. All of these countries, or almost all, within a year or two after the Six-Day War, had been persuaded by Arab money and the promise—never fulfilled—of more money to come if they did what the Arabs wanted, cut off diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.

Read it all as noted JW contributor Hugh Fitzgerald outs the liars and puts the truth back where it belongs.