In “Why Israel is the Victim” David Horowitz tells the ugly tale of the war against Israel, laying bare the sordid hypocrisies and deceits behind its campaign of violence. No volume can contain the full story of Islamic terrorism or the courageous ways in which the ordinary Israeli confronts it in the streets of his cities. What this essay does tell is the story of the lies behind that terror.
Propaganda precedes war; it digs the graves and waits for them to be filled. The war against the Jews has never been limited to bullets and swords; it has always, first and foremost, been a war of words. When bombs explode on buses and rockets rain down on Israel homes, when mobs chant “Death to the Jews” and Iran races toward the construction of its genocidal bomb; the propaganda lies to cover up these crimes must be bold enough to contain not only the murders of individuals, but the prospective massacre of millions.
The lie big enough to fill a million graves is that Israel has no right to exist, that the Jewish State is an illegitimate entity, an occupier, a warmonger and a conqueror. The big lie is that Israel has sought out the wars that have given it no peace and that the outcomes of those wars make the atrocities of its enemies understandable and even justifiable. That is the big lie that David Horowitz confronts in “Why Israel is the Victim”.
From the latest outburst of violence to its earliest antecedents under the Palestine Mandate, “Why Israel is the Victim” exposes the true nature of the war and wipes away the lies used by the killers and their collaborators to lend moral authority to their crimes. It shows not only why Israel must exist, but also why its existence has been besieged by war and terror.
In “Why Israel is the Victim” David Horowitz tells the ugly tale of the war against Israel, laying bare the sordid hypocrisies and deceits behind its campaign of violence. No volume can contain the full story of Islamic terrorism or the courageous ways in which the ordinary Israeli confronts it in the streets of his cities. What this essay does tell is the story of the lies behind that terror.
Propaganda precedes war; it digs the graves and waits for them to be filled. The war against the Jews has never been limited to bullets and swords; it has always, first and foremost, been a war of words. When bombs explode on buses and rockets rain down on Israel homes, when mobs chant “Death to the Jews” and Iran races toward the construction of its genocidal bomb; the propaganda lies to cover up these crimes must be bold enough to contain not only the murders of individuals, but the prospective massacre of millions.
The lie big enough to fill a million graves is that Israel has no right to exist, that the Jewish State is an illegitimate entity, an occupier, a warmonger and a conqueror. The big lie is that Israel has sought out the wars that have given it no peace and that the outcomes of those wars make the atrocities of its enemies understandable and even justifiable. That is the big lie that David Horowitz confronts in “Why Israel is the Victim”.
From the latest outburst of violence to its earliest antecedents under the Palestine Mandate, “Why Israel is the Victim” exposes the true nature of the war and wipes away the lies used by the killers and their collaborators to lend moral authority to their crimes. It shows not only why Israel must exist, but also why its existence has been besieged by war and terror.
“Why Israel is the Victim” tells us why we should reject the “Blame Israel First” narrative that has so thoroughly saturated the mainstream media. It challenges the false hope of the Two State Solution in sections such as “Self-Determination Is Not the Agenda” and “Refugees: Jewish and Arab”. It confronts the myth of Palestinian victimhood in “The Policy of Resentment and Hate” and delivers a rousing restatement of the true history of the hate that led us to all this in “The Jewish Problem and Its ‘Solution’”.
Recent history shows us that it was not an Israeli refusal to grant the Palestinian Arabs the right of self-determination that led to their campaigns of terror, but that Palestinian self-determination empowered a people steeped in the hatred of Jews to engage in terrorism.
With the peace process each new level of Palestinian self-determination led to an intensified wave of terror against Israel, as chronicled in this pamphlet. In 2006 when the Palestinian Arabs were able to vote in a legislative election for the first time in ten years, they chose Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization that drew its popularity from its unwillingness to even entertain the thought of peace with the Jewish State.
The 2006 election showed once again that the root cause of terrorism lay in a culture where political popularity came from killing Jews, not from bringing peace.
Hamas’ ability to carry out more spectacular terrorist attacks, employing motivated Islamist suicide bombers, gave it the inside track in the election. Where Western political parties might compete for popularity by offering voters peace and prosperity, Palestinian factions competed over who could kill more Jews. And Hamas won based on its killing sprees and its unwillingness to water down its platform of destroying Israel.
Hamas’ victory cannot be viewed as an isolated response to Israeli actions. Hamas leaders have stated that they were the vanguard of the Arab Spring, and the 2006 elections foreshadowed the regional downfall of Arab Socialists and the rise of the Islamists. The outcome of the elections in Egypt could have been foreseen from across the border in Gaza.
The defining test of any political philosophy in the Middle East is its ability to defeat foreign powers and drive out foreign influences. Israel has been the target of repeated efforts by both Arab Socialists and Islamists to destroy it because it is the nearest non-Arab and non-Muslim country in the region, but the regional ascendance of Islamists in the Arab Spring forces us to recognize that this phenomenon is not limited to Israel.
War is the force that gives Islamists meaning. During the last Gaza conflict, Hamas’ Al Aqsa TV broadcast the message, “Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah.” Palestinian Arabs who define themselves through conflict, constructing a conflict-based national identity, were destined to become the vanguard of regional Islamization.
The ascendance of Hamas has made it clearer than ever that Palestinian terrorism is not the resistance of helpless people who only want autonomy and territory, but the calculated choice of determined aggressors.
If occupation were the issue, then the less territory Israel “occupied”, the more peace there would be. But the real world results of the peace experiment have led to the exact opposite outcome.
Israel’s withdrawals from Gaza and Lebanon did not lead to peace, they led to greater instability as Hamas and Hezbollah exploited the power vacuum to take over Gaza and Lebanon, and used that newfound power to escalate the conflict with Israel. The less territory Israel has occupied, the more violence there has been directed against her.
The goal of the terrorists has never been an Israeli withdrawal and a separate peace, but the perpetuation of the conflict, and the elimination of the Jewish state.
Half a year after Israel withdrew from Gaza, Hamas swept the Palestinian legislative elections. Another half a year after that, a Hamas raid netted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit as a hostage. Barely a year after Israel had withdrawn from Gaza; Hamas had found a way to bring Israeli soldiers back into Gaza for a renewal of the conflict.
Cut off from attacking Israel directly by a blockade, Hamas deepened its investment in long-range weapons systems, even while complaining that its people were going hungry. After its takeover of Gaza, it significantly improved its weapons capabilities. In 2004, it had achieved its first Kassam fatality killing a 4-year-old boy on his way to a Sderot nursery school, but by 2006, its capabilities had so dramatically improved that it was able to launch its first Katyusha rocket at Ashkelon, the third largest city in Israel’s south with a population of over 100,000.
As the volume and range of Hamas’ rockets increased, Israel was forced to take action. In 2004, Israel suffered 281 rocket attacks. By 2006, that number had increased to over 1,700. In 2008, the number of rocket and mortar attacks approached 4,000 triggering Operation Cast Lead, also known as the Gaza War.
Operation Cast Lead destroyed enough of Hamas’ stockpiles and capabilities to reduce rocket attacks down to the 2004 and 2005 levels, but another dramatic increase in attacks in 2012, with over 2,000 rockets fired into Israel, combined with the smuggling of Fajr 5 rockets capable of reaching Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, forced Israel to carry out a series of strikes against Hamas in Operation Pillar of Defense.
Both times Israel did not choose a conflict of opportunity, but reacted to a disturbing level of Hamas violence, and had nothing to gain from the conflict except for a temporary reduction of violence.
War is a choice. Hamas has chosen war over and over again and the Palestinian Arabs have chosen Hamas. After six years of fighting, in a recent poll 9 out of 10 Palestinian Arabs agreed with the tactics of Hamas proving that their violence is not a reflexive response to occupation, but a choice. The violence does not spring from the occupation. The occupation springs from their violence.
By choosing Hamas in 2006 and today, the Palestinian Arabs were not rejecting peace, for they had never chosen peace. The difference between Hamas and Arafat’s Fatah lay not in a choice between war and peace, but between overt war and covert war. Both Hamas and Fatah had dedicated themselves to the destruction of the Jewish State. The practical difference between them is that Hamas refuses to even pretend to recognize Israel’s right to exist for the sake of extracting strategic territory through negotiations.
By choosing Hamas, the Palestinian Arabs were sending the message that they felt confident enough to be able to dispense with Fatah’s dissembling and strong enough to no longer need to lie to Israel and America about wanting peace.
The ascendance of Hamas is the logical progression of the entire history of the conflict that you will read about in this pamphlet. It is the inevitable outcome of a war of destruction based on race and religion. It contains within it the inescapable truth that peace is farthest away when the terrorist groups who would destroy Israel are strongest.
Israel’s attempt to make peace with the Palestinians has not ushered in an era of peace; instead it has served as a microcosm of the first fifty years of the conflict chronicled in “Why Israel is the Victim.” A slow bloody recapitulation of the unfortunate truth that the Israeli-Arab conflict is not a war of land, but a war of blood, that is not being fought to settle the ownership of a few hills or a few miles, but to exterminate the nearly 6 million Jews living among those miles and hills.
Looking down on the earth from space, Israel appears as only a tiny strip of land wedged at an angle between Africa, Europe and the Middle East against the Mediterranean Sea. From up here there is little to distinguish the otherwise indistinct land and no way to conceive of the terrible life and death struggle taking place in the hills, deserts and cities below.
The Jewish State, like the Jewish People, is small in size but great in presence. The scattered people that half the world has tried to destroy have formed into a nation that half the world is trying to destroy again. Only four years separated the Nazi gas chambers of 1944 from the invading Arab armies of 1948, who, along with the Nazi-funded Muslim Brotherhood, were bent on wiping out the indigenous Jewish population along with the Holocaust survivors who had made their way to the ports and shoals of the rebuilt Jewish State.
Before 1948, the Jews of Israel lived in a state of constant victimization at the hands of Islamic leaders such as Haj Amin al-Husseini, Hitler’s Mufti, and Izz ad-Din al-Qassam of The Black Hand gang, after whom Hamas’ Qassam rockets are named. After 1948 they were forced to live in a state of constant vigilance against the invasions of armies and the bombs, bullets and shells of terrorists.
Once Israel had won its independence hardly a single decade passed without another war of aggression against her. From 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 to 1982, the coming of each new decade meant a new war. Nor was there peace between these wars. When Gaza and the West Bank were in Egyptian and Jordanian hands, Fedayeen terrorists used them as bases to invade Israel and carry out attacks within the 1948 borders. When Israel turned these territories over to the Palestinian Authority, they once again became bases of terror.
At no point in time, regardless of the date, the prime minister or the policy, did Israel enjoy peace. Whether Israel was led by the right or by the left, whether it made war or peace, the violence of its enemies remained unchanged. No matter how often Israel changed, how it was transformed by waves of immigration, by political and religious movements, by peace programs and technological booms, its enemies remained unwaveringly bent on its destruction.
As a nation of wandering exiles, Jews had lived with the knowledge that they had no rights that could not be taken away at a whim and no certainty of safety that would endure beyond the next explosion of violence. That is still how Israel lives today, no longer as a wandering people, but as a nation alone.
The way that a majority treats a minority is a test of its character. Nazi Germany showed what it intended for Europe with its treatment of the Jews. As did the Soviet Union. The Muslim world has likewise shown its intentions toward the rest of the world with its treatment of Israel; the only non-Muslim country in the region.
Europe’s apathy toward Hitler’s depredations in the 1930s foreshadowed its unwillingness to halt Nazi territorial expansionism. The apathy of the international community toward the war against Israel warns us of a similar apathy in a conflict that will extend as far beyond the borders of the Jewish State, as Nazi atrocities extended beyond the broken windows of the synagogues of Berlin.
Within the pages of this pamphlet you will find the story of this new war against the Jews, as a people, and against Israel, as a Jewish State.
The old saying, “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on,” is truer than ever in the age of the Internet when the speed of lies has become instantaneous. The pamphlet that you are about to read represents an equally instantaneous response to those lies with the best possible weapon; the truth.
Arm yourself with it.
Daniel Greenfield, Shillman Fellow.
Jan. 31, 2013: Republican Chuck Hagel testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill. (AP)