Israel's Right to Self-Defense

Following each massacre in Israel, whether of soldiers, pregnant women, or children on their way to school, Arab leaders and their spokespersons appear in the media and insist that the way to end the violence is to end the occupation. Moreover, they argue, the occupation is the cause of the war in the Middle East and of world terrorism—Arab terrorists blow themselves up and murder others because they are frustrated victims of occupation.

In their public relations campaign, however, the questions that the Arab leaders skillfully deflect are the following: If occupation leads to so many horrific consequences—war, suicide murders, and the condemnation of the world—why does Israel occupy the land? If the answer to all the problems in the Middle East is indeed the occupation, why does Israel not leave the contested territories, or, better yet, why did Israel go into the territories in the first place?

The Arab propaganda machine would like us to believe that taking over land is in line with Israel's expansionist policy—that the Jewish State would like to return to its biblical heydays when Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza strip were home to vibrant Jewish communities. While a fringe element of Israeli society does hold these hopes, the allegation that this minority remotely represents—or has at any time, since the birth of modern Zionism over a hundred years ago, represented—the dominant voice within Israel could not be further from the truth.

Since 1948, when Israel was a small coastal strip of land—narrower even than it is today—the Israeli leadership, backed by the overwhelming majority from the right and the left of the political spectrum, asked for peaceful coexistence with the Arab population, within Israel and outside it. Long before the state of Israel came into existence, the Jews in Palestine expressed, in words and deeds, their desire to live as equals in the holy land. So why did Israel capture land in the wars of 1948 and 1967? The answer is simple: self-defense.

Arabs, who had been given over eighty percent of the land of historic Palestine, rejected outright the United Nations's 1947 decision to grant the Jews a homeland on a small part of Palestine, and then launched a "war of extermination" against Israel; twenty years later, the Jewish State responded to calls for "Israel's death" by Egyptian president Gamel Abdel Nasser and other Arab leaders. And it is because the wars were fought in self-defense that Israel has every moral right to the land that has been used to attack it and endanger its livelihood.

What about the rights of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, though? Don't they have a right to the land? Palestinian refugees, and other Arabs who suffered as a result of the war against Israel, are, in the words of historian Richard Landes, "not innocent victims, but frustrated aggressors." And aggressors—those who initiate force and disrespect the rights of others—do not deserve that their own rights be respected. A person who tries to steal property from another or, worse, attempts to murder the other, loses his rights. A thief is put in jail as punishment for his felony, and to prevent a recurrence of the crime; analogously, Palestinians in the contested territories are deprived of some of their freedoms because they looted and murdered, and because there is nothing to suggest that they would change their ways were they given independence.

The Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat has one overarching objective—the destruction of the Jewish State. Official Palestinian maps and insignia depict Palestine on the entire land of Israel, not just on the contested territories. Palestinian leaders are talking about the Oslo Accord as a Trojan horse, a first step toward the final solution that is the annihilation of Israel.

The Arabs, in opposing the occupation, are essentially asking Israel to let go of the grip so that they can have the freedom to destroy it. Israel wants to survive, and therefore has no choice but to keep control of the contested territories. Capturing land has been imposed on the Jewish State by its enemies.

Israel is willing to make many painful concessions, except for the single concession that the Palestinians seek: that Israel commit suicide. Israelis want to live and let live, but that, it seems, is too much to ask for from the hostile population of the Middle East. And yet, Israelis will continue to live and thrive—ideally in peace, but, if necessary, by defending themselves in war.

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