Reply to Israel Shahak

'Israel-bashing', 'Anti-Zionism', etc., the currently fashionable cause of the Left, is rather difficult to reconcile with their other espoused causes.

On the one-hand, this young nation is berated for its joy and pride in the first homeland it's persecuted people have had for 2,000 years, and for stressing the teaching of a culture and literature that other countries in which Jews lived, did not allow. On the other hand, Nationalism in Black Africa. South East Asia etc. is vigorously supported. Curiously too. Israel's critics seem unconcerned by such examples of Arab intolerance as the carving of 'Jew' arrow the stomach and arms of an American student at Beirut University because she had visited Israel (recently reported in the 'Evening Post'). One's mind boggles at the likely every-day treatment of Jews by the ordinary uneducated people in Arab countries, whether such Jews can worship peacefully, (let alone live safely) or have Jewish culture taught in schools. But, of course, such countries have, in the main, closed Feudal systems, that one would have been excused for thinking were anathema to the Left!

The land Israel was established upon was, in the main swamp and desert, and it was the early Jewish settlers who lost their lives from the various associated diseases, in the draining and reclamation of such land. In all the 2,000 years before this land was brought to its present abundantly productive state, the Arabs who cry dispossession, seem to have made little impression upon this liny territory that one need spectacles to find amid the millions of square miles of Arab lands. It is interesting too, that the Arab leaders who profess such concern for the 'Palestinians', had plenty of time before 1967 (at which time the Israelis were uncompromising enough not to be driven into the sea) to use such territory, since occupied, to establish the Palestinian state they now find such an important precondition of a peace settlement.

Curiously, in all the vast lands of the Middle-East, with all its varying cultures, the Arabs can feel at home only in the orange groves of Jaffa.

Israel's 'intransigence', its 'Masada complex' (or whatever such criticism is levelled at it), the very fact it must live a seige-like existence in respect of the Arabs within its cities and boundaries is, I suggest, merely an inevitable result of a situation where, hours only after its establishment as a State by the United Nations, the Arabs began their policy of belligerancy, and continued and accompanied it with calls to the effect that the only concessions, on any question, be made by Israel alone.

Why should it be that the Jews who were persecuted in the anti-semitic programs in Russia or Poland, or who somehow survived Hitler's 'solution' to the Jewish 'problem', must now see the State of Israel and its citizens looked upon as yet another 'Jewish problem'? to be solved in another 'interesting way'?

Why should the rights of every other Peoples in the world be sacrosanct, save those of the Jews?