Israel and Palestine
Tue., March 4, 10:03 AM
Most people know I have strong emotional ties to the state of Israel. It was part of the curriculum in Sunday School. I had relatives there. And I still have many friends in Israel. (Before you ask, I have stronger ties to the United States. It’s not a unique position.)
Dennis Miller had an interesting piece about the Palestinians a while back. More recently, a friend sent me this explanation, which answers a question I’ve had for years.
In 1948, the partition of Palestine that created the state of Israel gave the West Bank to what was then called Trans-Jordan. I’m not making this up; it was in all the newspapers. And Jordan held that territory until the 1967 wars, when Israel seized it. To cement their hold on the territory, the Israelis built settlements; the Palestinians yelled, “Foul! That’s ours. We demand a Palestinian state.”
If a Palestinian state is so important, why didn’t Jordan create one? The land was there, the people were on it. Arab terrorists used it as a convenient pied-á-terre, from which they could cross the border each night and kill a few more Israelis. (Y’know, that wasn’t mentioned in the newspapers so much.)
A couple of years ago, Bill McLaughlin, who used to be a bureau chief for CBS News and is now a professor at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, embarked on a new project in Jerusalem. They would bring together high school students – Jewish and Muslim, Israeli and Arab – and try to find things they had in common, see whether they could come to a meeting of the minds. It sounded so hopeful and, though I had some reservations, I could only wish them the best. I waited for progress reports and heard none. I’m still looking for some kind of documentation, but I recently heard on the radio that McLaughlin had returned.
“There’s nothing the United States can do,” he says. The two sides have to realize that neither one can have it all. Back to square one.
Would you like to know what my reservations were? I think high school age is too old. These are kids (on both sides) who have been taught since childhood that “They are the enemy. We must kill them all.” You can’t give kids sticks that represent guns and run military drills, teach them stealth and killing, and then turn them into friends. (Not to mention that many of the kids have lost friends and relatives to suicide bombers.)
The 1948 War, 1967 War, the Yom Kippur War – and still it goes on. God made Moses lead the Israelites through the desert for forty years in order to bring a new generation into the Promised Land. At least they were all on the same side. Even God didn’t know it would take more than fifty years this time.
