There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein, or the Iranian mullahs, or any other group or state that decided to use weapons of mass destruction to wipe out Israel -- even though that would also necessarily entail killing every single "Palestinian" Arab -- would eagerly do so, because what is at stake is so much larger: it is the elimination of an imagined insult, the product of deep historical unsettlement and resentment, channeled and encouraged by central tenets of Islam, and the atmospherics that derive from those tenets. Many of the "Palestinian" Arabs themselves have been taught to welcome the chance to collectively become one suicide bomber. Israel's size is irrelevant; its existence is the affront. The goal is to shrink it, and then to do away with it altogether.

Arab Muslim hostility and resentment toward all Infidels is for now focused on Israel and on the United States, but Islamic doctrine is clear: all Infidels, everywhere, must ultimately be subjugated to Islam. The current focus may be on the Infidel Jews, but Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Confucians, Jains, agnostics, and atheists -- should also understand that the threat is directed at them.

Legally, the case for "self-determination" for the "Palestinian people" falters before the fact that the Palestine Mandate still applies to the West Bank and Gaza (the League of Nations' Mandate was inherited by the United Nations, which was not free to tamper with it).Those unallocated portions of the Mandate, then, are still subject to its clauses and its intent: the encouragement of "close Jewish settlement on the land" in order to help create the Jewish National Home.

The Palestine Mandate carved out of a sliver of the former Ottoman territories was not intended to create a Jewish and an Arab state, but only a Jewish state, that would emerge from the "encouragement" of "Jewish immigration" (by not barring it) and "close Jewish settlement on the land" as the Mandate expressly recognized. It seemed only just, considering the vast territories that were reserved for the Arabs (hardly the only people in what is misleadingly called "the Arab world," for there are many others who have been there for a very long time, including the Turks, Persians, Jews, Armenians, Kurds, and Berbers).

There were several other Mandates (the one given to France for Syria and Lebanon, and another given to Great Britain, for Mesopotamia), set up for the express purpose of creating Arab States, as was done. That is why Feisal, the leading Arab political figure of the Mandate period, looked forward to a future Arab State (he was expecting only one, not 22), and to close cooperation between "the Arab State and Palestine."

But even in Mandatory Palestine, as originally created, an Arab state did emerge. Despite protests from the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, 78% of the territory east of the Jordan River which was originally to be included in the Mandatory Palestine, was instead offered as a consolation prize to the Hashemites, the former Guardians of the Holy Places (Sherifs of Mecca and Medina), who a few years earlier had fled before the triumphant Wahhabis of Al-Saud. This territory formed the Emirate of Transjordan, which in 1946 became the independent Arab Kingdom of Jordan.

Those who claim, earnestly, that they look forward to a "safe and secure" Israel living "side by side" with an unthreatening "Palestinian state" (the whole region word-painted as a veritable Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks, with assorted lions lying down with a single lamb) are in the position of Lewis Carroll's White Queen, who told an inquisitive Alice that "sometimes I can believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast." And so she could. But Alice was in Wonderland, and then tumbled Through the Looking Glass. Those who live in the real world, however, are under no obligation to believe in "six impossible things," or even two, or even one -- not before breakfast, and not after.

Hugh Fitzgerald is a lecturer on the manipulation of language for political ends.

Outpost               - 8 -               June 2002