Some of the answer lies in the fact that most Arab nations of the Middle East have not accepted the presence of Jews in their midst ever since Israel was established in 1948.
Yet, the concept of the eventual re-establishment of a nation for Jewish people in the land of their ancestors is not new – the Palestine region was being considered as a homeland for Jewish people at the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, long before the establishment of Israeli statehood. The European Holocaust of World War II only accelerated the process.
But that notion was not widely accepted, especially in the Middle East.
In 1967, the United Arab Republic (Egypt, Jordan and Syria), joined forces and attacked the newly formed Jewish State. The war lasted only seven days, and Israeli armed forces dealt a decisive and humiliating blow to the UAR.
When hostilities ended, “Israeli forces had taken control of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.”
The UAR had been dealt a bloody nose that it, as well as other Middle East states would not soon forget: In 1973, on Yom Kippur, a coalition of Arab States led by Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack against Israel. It was an invasion which also was destined to fail in its attempt to obliterate the Jewish State.
America and Russia chose sides in that conflict, with the U.S. supporting Israel and the U.S.S.R. backing Israel’s assailants.
In retribution, the OPEC oil cartel, led by Saudi Arabia (now a presumptive ally of the U.S.), drastically cut oil production and declared an oil embargo against the United States. Petroleum prices skyrocketed and an energy crisis spread across our country.
There are two sides to the ongoing Arab/Israeli conflict, and I don’t mean to minimize the impact upon the hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians who continue to suffer from a lack of resolution to this unresolved problem.
However, I have chosen to speak about the impact upon Israel, because of the seemingly interminable hostilities against that nation, as was once more evidenced with the recent unprovoked rocket attacks launched against Israel from the Gaza Strip by Hamas, the militant Palestinian Islamist ruling party in Gaza.
Over the years, Palestinians have not been well served by the covey of differing leadership factions which perceive war and individual acts of terror against Israeli citizens to be the only means for achieving their objectives.
During the last seven days, the leaders of Hamas – a declared terrorist organization by the U.S. – had to know that their own citizens would pay a heavy price for the rocket barrages that caused people in the south of Israel to be terrorized.
Some of those rockets landed as far away as Tel Aviv. There was even a report of a missile falling in Jerusalem – a city considered holy by all three Abrahamic traditions.
In response, Israel massed thousands of its troops on the northern border of Gaza in anticipation of a possible retaliatory invasion. Simultaneously, the Israeli Defense Force initiated a punishing aerial attack against rocket-launching sites in Gaza, many of which were deliberately sited in locations that would guarantee maximum collateral deaths to its civilian population.
When it became obvious that the IDF was prepared to cross the border to eliminate all remaining offensive rocket sites in the Gaza Strip, especially those having long-range missiles supplied to Hamas by Iran, the U. S. dispatched Hillary Clinton to intervene and to broker the cease-fire arrangement which is now in effect
Let’s hope that this peace agreement lasts more than mere months, and that the enemies of Israel don’t miscalculate yet again, as they seem prone to do over and over.
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