Sunset over Kfar Saba, Israel. by Steve Ornstein
Howard Epstein – END THE PRE-OCCUPATION!
The Palestinian people – whose greatest enemies are their leaders – lament the “Occupation” and ask when it will end. Their complaint is that the war of annihilation launched against Israel by Egypt, Syria and Jordan on 5 June 1967 did not end in the slaughter of some two million Jews, but with Judaea and Samaria being returned to Jewish control after some 2,000 years of exile. Since then, and increasingly, they have complained about what they call the “Occupation”; but Israelis have an equal and opposite complaint: that they have to be pre-occupied with yet another dysfunctional Arab entity on its borders. There are four.
In Gaza, the Palestinian people are prisoners of the terrorist group, Hamas, who achieved power by murdering their Fatah brothers in a para-military coup in 2007. Despite Egypt controlling one of the two border crossings into Gaza, Israel, which controls the other, is the butt of international opprobrium whenever, usually after unprovoked missile launches from Gaza into Israeli communities, Israel responds. In the meantime, Israel continues to supply Gaza with electricity and fuel (paid for by Qatar). Thus does Israel remain pre-occupied with the terrorist entity to its west.
As is clear to all, Lebanon is an utterly dysfunctional and totally failed state, effectively controlled by Hezbollah, a client terrorist group of and funded by the world’s greatest exporter of terrorism, Iran. Armed with some 160,000 missiles aimed at Israel, as Iran’s insurance policy to be invoked were Israel to seek to neutralise Iran’s nuclear threat, Hezbollah has in the past few weeks permitted Hamas to fire rockets into Israel. This resulted in large numbers of Israeli abandoning their Pesach holidays in the north.
To the east is arguably the world’s most tragic example of a failed state: Syria. The nest of torturers and murderers run by the Assad family, Alawites, representing but 10% of the population of Syria, turned on the Syrian people in a civil war (a dozen years and counting) which seemed of necessity to involve torturing large numbers of children to death, and the razing of almost all its urban areas.
Would you not be pre-occupied if you found yourself living next to Rose and Fred West? Syria is the West family on both stilts and steroids – and would be a nuclear power had Israel not been sufficiently pre-occupied with it as to pre-empt its nuclear armaments programme in a bombing raid, from which the American shrank, in September 2007.
The fourth entity is composed of the Palestinians (who had no such identity in June 1967) residing in Judaea and Samaria. It is they (and those in Gaza) who speak of the Nakba (catastrophe) of June 1967. Yet a little research shows that they have gained much – and Israel has suffered concomitantly.
Just one example: there are today in Judaea and Samaria some twenty institutions of tertiary education. All were founded after June 1967, with one exception, the Palestine Technical University – Kadoorie, an agricultural college inaugurated in 1930 thanks to a bequest from Iraqi-born, Jewish philanthropist, Sir Ellis Kadoorie. So, in all the years preceding Israeli occupation, only one college existed in Judaea and Samaria, and that was effectively founded by a Jewish philanthropist; and in the years since June 1967, so oppressive has been Israeli dominance there that 19 other colleges or universities have been established and flourished.
Since, as we know, no good turn goes unpunished, we may remind ourselves, just a few days after Yom HaZikaron, that some 25,000 Israeli soldiers have died in the wars inflicted upon Israel, and another 4,000 Israeli civilians have died as the result of terrorism. This is only part of the price, and the burden, of maintaining the integrity of the State, and the continuance of Jewish life, in Israel.
The ongoing burden is our pre-occupation with not only terror and its prevention but also what to do with some 2.75 million Palestinians whose leadership has consistently maintained maximalist and revanchist policies. In simpler terms, they want every last dunam of Israel to be (as Hitler put it) Jüdenrein (purified of Jews).
We do not have the desire to wipe them out (as they would do to us), so we must accommodate them. To give them a state of Palestine on “the West Bank” would not satisfy them or us: them, because they want the whole of Israel, and us because, just as nature abhors a vacuum, so would Iran be sucked into whatever space Israel vacates. A “dagger in the heart of Israel” does not even come close to describing the danger that an Iranian presence in Judaea and Samaria would represent.
So, whilst Palestinians curse of the “Occupation”, the curse that Israel has to labour under is the Pre-Occupation – and it becomes more odious and more dangerous year after year.
Just one more massive problem to contemplate as Israel embarks on the last quartile of its first hundred years. Whether it is greater or smaller than the dangers presented by self-centred governance in Jerusalem, it is too early to say.
© Howard Epstein, www.howard-epstein.com
