Confronting the Anti-Israel Jihad on Campus

David Horowitz:

Israel was not created on any land that belonged to Arabs, let alone “Palestinians.” Israel was created on land that belonged to the Turks for 400 years before the birth of the Jewish State. Four hundred years is longer than America has been in existence. The Arab claim has less justification than the claim of the Iroquois to New York. If one is going to roll back the map 400 years, why not 1,000 or 2,000? The land that is Israel today was owned by the Turks and the Turks are not Arabs, and certainly not Palestinians.

How many people under the age of 25 in this room know this fact, that Israel was created on land belonging to the Turks? I see by your hands that there are about ten. Out of more than several hundred. Some education you’re all getting at this university. For those of you new to this history, the Turks could not prevent this transfer from taking place because they had chosen the wrong side in World War I and were defeated. One of the rules of war is that when you lose, the victors get to redraw the map. This also applies to aggressors in war. The Arabs of Jordan and of all the Arab states bordering Israel launched, not one, but three wars of aggression against the Jewish State. By all the laws of international warfare, the Jews had every right to expel all the Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza. But in fact they didn’t.

After World War II, the entire region of East Prussia – the industrial heartland of Germany – was taken from Germany and given to Poland. That was because they had invaded Poland three times in a century. Twelve million Germans were removed from Prussia and from the homes and lands which they had occupied for nearly a thousand years. That was their punishment for being aggressors, like the Arabs.

There were other nations created out of the ruins of the Turkish empire — Arab nations: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan. Jordan is 70 percent made up of the same ethnic people who live on the West Bank and in Gaza — in other words, Palestinian Arabs. But they are ruled by a Hashemite minority. Where are the calls for the liberation of the Palestinians of Jordan? There are none. Nobody calling for the liberation of Palestine is interested in the self-determination of Palestine. Their first priority is getting rid of the Jews. “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.” The Jordan River is the eastern boundary of Israel, the Mediterranean Sea is the boundary to the West. In other words, Palestinian freedom is synonymous with Israel’s destruction. Who can fail to understand this?

Even the word “Palestine” is not Arabic. It is Latin. The Romans gave the region around the Jordan the name “Palestine” as a humiliation for the Jews whom they had just conquered nearly 2,000 years ago. The name referred to the Philistines, who were the Jews’ enemies but were not Arabs. There were no Arabs in the area until 500 years later. Throughout the subsequent two thousand years, there has never been a political entity or state or country called “Palestine.” The idea of such a country was invented in 1964, fifteen years after Israel’s birth.

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