Truth is our Best Weapon
Singer, Suzzane
Truth is our Best Weapon Suzzane Singer In Defense of Israel: Talking Points for Diaspora Jews "September 2000 created in effect, a two-front war: a military conflict ... and a moral conflict...
...Palestinians live on land with which they have traditional bonds but where they were never a sovereign nation...
...After World War I, the League of Nations recognized "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine...
...In May 1948, the State of Israel was declared...
...SUZANNE SINGER...
...For more than 400 years, Palestine was ruled by the Ottoman Empire...
...Regarding the 'people of Israel,' they too were Arab tribes, and among the purest of them...
...Arabs refused and attacked the Jewish state before its birth...
...In the film's words: "The name 'Israel' that was given to the neighboring Israeli state—Israelis, Hebrews, or the Hebrew state—is exaggerated, inaccurate and has no truth...
...It describes a short film prepared by Palestinian Media Watch (an organization selfdescribed as "Giving Voice to Palestinian Perspectives"), in which "two seemingly learned scholars on a television panel inform the viewing audience that Israel's population is not really Jewish...
...In 1947, the United Nations General Assembly recommended dividing the Palestine mandate territory into a Jewish and an Arab state...
...By Allah, believe me, in my blood there is more of the ancient Israelites and the Hebrews, our forefathers— and even if the religion of some of them was Jewish—than in the blood of Sharon and Binyamin Netanyahu...
...Most of them came to Israel...
...June 1967, Israel preempted an attack by Arab armies...
...Palestinians until today were preserved as refugees by Arab countries, stateless except in Jordan, used as a political weapon against Israel • During the same years, almost one million Jews left or were driven from their homes in 10 Arab countries...
...In July 2000, when Yassir Arafat refused Israel's offer of a state that gave the Palestinians virtually all they said they wanted, it proved to Israelis that the Palestinians' real objective was elimination of the Jewish state...
...Attacked by five Arab armies, Israel defeated them losing almost one percent of its population—6,000 men and women in battle...
...Currently, a major campaign is underway to rewrite Israel's history...
...I don't ask that we portray Israel as perfect or without inner conflict...
...and a moral conflict against those trying to dismande the Jewish state's historic legitimacy," Yossi Klein Halevi wrote in the Jerusalem Post...
...Here's but one example reported by Arutz Sheva, an e-mail news service from Israel...
...Israel was directed tonegotiate with Egypt and Jordan, the two sovereign powers previously occupying the territory Israel acquired in the war, but they refused to negotiate with Israel...
...None remained refugees...
...They are: • Jews have returned home to the land where they had been sovereign more than 2,000 years ago...
...From that flows the certainty that Israel illegally occupies Palestinian land, that settlements in the West Bank (Judea, Samaria and part of Jerusalem), in Gaza and on the Golan Heights constitute Israeli terror against Palestinians, and that Palestinian terror against Israelis is the only way Palestinians can fight back to regain what is rightfully theirs, including Israeli "settlements" in Tel Aviv and other cities in Israel...
...Now it's time for Diaspora Jews to reciprocate, and fight for Israel's legitimacy among the nations in which they live...
...Following the Six-Day War U N Resolution 242 called for Israel's withdrawal from occupied territories, a just settlement of refugees, and "secure and recognized borders...
...They are foreign invaders imposed by Europeans after the Shoah, who never lived in Israel before...
...But Israel is a 56-year-old miracle and, just as Palestinians stay on message with repeated lies, it is we who must stay on point with simple truths...
...Yossi Klein Halevi put our time in perspective: "In the immediate post-Holocaust era, the founding of Israel gave an insecure Diapora an incalculable boost of empowerment and legitimacy...
...Notliing came as a gift...
...The hugely important task of Diaspora Jews is to offer truth in the face of a drumbeat of lies and distortions spewed from the Palestinian information machine, and repeated daily as accepted wisdom around water coolers and kitchen tables and by political leaders and media pundits...
...During the two wars, about 700,000 Palestinians became refugees, some by force, most at the behest of their leaders who promised that they would soon return...
...Jews would develop it and Arabs would reap benefits...
...Arabs came, as well, anticipating greater prosperity...
...The borders of Israel are exactly those that Israel's army successfully defended from the Arab armies...
...Jews accepted the partition...
...There is no connection at all between the Jews of today, despite their groundless claims, to the ancient Jews of the past...
...Israel's young army, its police and border units, its reservists and its citizens carry the responsibility for preserving the body of Israel...
...In six days Israel defeated the attack and took control of Sinai and Gaza from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria and the West Bank including East Jerusalem from Jordan...
...But more than ever, waging the moral battle requires Diaspora Jews to stand on the front lines of the struggle to assure Israel's legitimacy...
...Attacks on Jews began long before there were Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, long before there was a state of Israel...
...The League decided that because there was no Jewish homeland and many Arab lands, the province of Palestine would be given in trust to the British to become a Jewish homeland...
...Truth is our Best Weapon Suzzane Singer In Defense of Israel: Talking Points for Diaspora Jews "September 2000 created in effect, a two-front war: a military conflict...
...Who are Israelis according to the prevalent Palestinian view...
...Heartened by this hope, pious Jews who had lived for more than two millennia in small numbers in the Holy Land, who had remembered the destroyed Temples in Jerusalem, began to be joined by other Jews...
Vol. 29 • August 2004 • No. 4
