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David Frankfurter brought his family to Ra'anana, Israel from their native Sydney, Australia in 1992. He is a business consultant, corporate executive and writer who frequently comments on the Middle East conflict.
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By David Frankfurter
November 29, 2004
Today is the anniversary of the UN vote on resolution 181, which approved the partition of the western part Palestine into a predominately Jewish state and a predominately Arab state. (It is vital to recall that the UN partition plan referred to western Palestine, to underscore that in 1921 the eastern part was ripped off the Jewish National Home by the British Government and handed over to the then Emir Abdullah.)
The above is the start of a fixed text that tens of pro-Israel bloggers are circulating the web today to commemorate the 57th anniversary of the decision by the United Nations to found of the Sate of Israel. It is a key piece of international law relating to Israel and the Palestinians ? usually ignored by those who claim "international law" as a pretext to refuse to recognize Israel's right to defend her citizens.
As one of the few Israelis in the web circle promoting this topic, I am taking the liberty of diverting from the full map and set text to bring my own perspectives on this anniversary.
This is not just the anniversary of the formation of a Jewish state, when a relatively small number of Jews, both natives and the refugees who had fled the murderous Nazis and the bloody hostility simultaneously unleashed in their Arab allies, decided to take on the threat of the surrounding sea of hostile Arab countries and declare that they would accept crumbs the world had given them, stop being 'Palestinian Jews' under British rule and start being independent 'Israelis'.
Simultaneously, the 'Palestinian Arabs' decided to set an equally historic precedent. This was the first time that they rejected the formation of a separate Palestinian Arab state.
Just as hundreds of thousands of Jews fled Arab countries, a similar number of Palestinian Arabs fled the Jewish state, and became refugees ? to this day waiting the promise of the surrounding Arab nations to 'throw the Jews into the sea'.
The rag-tag Jews meanwhile, miraculously and with divinely inspired determination, defended their small nation time and time again from invading Arab armies. Sitting on land granted to them by international law, often (as with my home in Ra'anana) purchased at going rates from their Arab neighbours, they built a modern nation. A democracy with achievements that outstrip the neighbours' ? and often the rest of the world. While simultaneously dedicating resources to fight imposed war after war, Jews have built a full democracy in which learning of all types flourishes. Top of the list in innovation, patents issued, medical discoveries, new technologies, and almost every other field of human endeavour. Black and white, Sephardi and Ashkenazi, Ethiopian and Russian, Eastern and Western, refugee and idealist, religious and secular, all mixed together. Making the most of the little that the world grudgingly granted.
I can't help but contrast this with our Palestinian neighbours. Bent on destruction rather than building, rejecting every opportunity for a state granted to them. Their refugees still stay in cities that are labeled 'refugee camps', with a leadership determined to keep them as the world's beggars. A front for creaming off billions in international aid, and a focus for their own self-destructive tendencies.
Leading their people to start and lose war after war, they keep their people in grinding poverty just so the world can be encouraged to 'see what those Jews have done to us'.
One can only wonder if in the post-Arafat era things might change. In English, the Fatah leadership speak of final negotiations and a state by 2005, but it is hard to tell if the conditions they are attaching are electioneering to get them voted in, or a genuine continuation of the hard-line positions that effectively nullify any chances of a solution. If, as they say, the PLO leadership will not abandon the 'right of return', then any compromise is lip service.
It is just another front for the recently re-invented 'one state solution' being pushed by the PLO. Bring millions of Palestinian 'refugees' into Israel and destroy the Jewish state by democratic demographics, impose another Muslim dictatorship and (at long last) throw the Jews into the sea. A real recipe for peace. And when those intransigent Jews reject it, the Palestinians will be able to bleat to the international forums once again.
November 29. The anniversary of the first rejection by the Palestinian Arabs of their own independent state.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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