No matter what a stacked International Court of Justice rules, the case against Israel's defensive barrier is lost on its merits. Every country has a right to defend itself, and Israel's barrier is not the world's only defensive wall. From India's border with Pakistan, to our own border with Mexico here in the US, nations have constructed similar obstacles to keep out threats.
This does not mean one cannot be distressed by the suffering of all of those who are caught up in this conflict. Still, the victims of the Israel-Arab dispute continue to receive the most extraordinary international attention, despite the fact that the few thousand casualties on both sides are dwarfed in size by the millions killed in Cambodia, Rwanda, and even at the hands of Iraq's deposed dictator, Saddam Hussein.
Arab states and their allies criticize the route of the barrier because it does not strictly adhere to the Green Line, the armistice line that served as a border for eighteen years between Israel and Jordan. During that time, the Arab world refused to accept Israel's existence or any border for that tiny state.
Even today, only one nation, Costa Rica, has their embassy in Israel's capital, Jerusalem. The United States, which has an embassy in Tel Aviv, has two consular offices in Jerusalem, one on each side of the old barbed wire border that divided that ancient city before it was reunified in 1967. This was because following the War of Independence, Arab states and much of the world refused to accept any part of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, including areas that have been under Israel's control since 1948. Thus, while the Arabs hypocritically insist the land beyond the 1967 border is not Israel's, they are equally adamant that all of the territory of that small state is still in dispute. To the Arab world and their sympathizers there is no Israeli land, only Palestinian.
This was recognized when the United Nations passed Resolution 242 at the end of the Six Day War. Israel was expected to withdraw from territories occupied, but the word "all" was specifically left out. As the British Foreign Secretary told the House of Commons, "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial." Israel has withdrawn, in exchange for a peace agreement, from the massive Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptians did not want Gaza back.
In modern times, sovereignty over the territories beyond the old armistice line, the so-called "occupied territories", has never been established. As for ancient times, no matter what a viewer thinks of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, one point all agree on. When Jesus walked the streets of Jerusalem, there were only Romans and Jews. There were no Arab "Palestinians".
Those who have ruled over that land for nearly 2000 years since Rome destroyed the Jewish state - most recently the Ottomans, the British, the Jordanians and the Egyptians - have all vanished or relinquished their claims.
From 1948 to 1967, there were no Israelis in the areas beyond the Green Line. There was also no Palestinian state, because an Arab state alongside Israel was not, and has never been, the Arab goal. Their goal then, as it is now, has been the destruction of Israel.
The latest attempt to prevent the Israelis from defending themselves from a three-year campaign of deliberate murder was played out in The Hague, at the request of a United Nations General Assembly that has never seen fit to condemn the massacre of Israeli bus passengers and diners, blown to smithereens by Palestinian Arab terrorists. This is a global variation of the schoolyard bully's rule ? what is yours (Israel) is mine, what has no owner (Gaza and the West Bank) is mine, and, of course, what is mine (the rest of the Arab world, 100 times the size of Israel) is also mine.
But what really drives these bullies to distraction is that the little Jewish kids have learned to defend themselves. After 2000 years, they are no longer willing to play a permanent role as victim.
Before 2000 and the intifada campaign of murder in busses, on street corners and in restaurants, there was no wall. It was not needed. It is a response to the violent behavior of Arab terrorists. What seems like unending violence, and the need for defensive barriers, will not end until Arabs stop Palestinian killers instead of teaching children that the more Jews murdered the more one is a hero, and that the best one can do is die as a martyr, whether as a suicide killer or shielding terrorists behind young bodies. That is real child abuse. When the killing stops, Israel's defensive barrier can join its rightful spot in the dustbin of history. Then the children of the region, Israeli and Arab, can go back to their real job, growing up.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said in 1957, "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." Unfortunately, that time has not yet come, so a fence will have to substitute. Good fences may, in this case, be the best chance at making good neighbors.
This does not mean one cannot be distressed by the suffering of all of those who are caught up in this conflict. Still, the victims of the Israel-Arab dispute continue to receive the most extraordinary international attention, despite the fact that the few thousand casualties on both sides are dwarfed in size by the millions killed in Cambodia, Rwanda, and even at the hands of Iraq's deposed dictator, Saddam Hussein.
Arab states and their allies criticize the route of the barrier because it does not strictly adhere to the Green Line, the armistice line that served as a border for eighteen years between Israel and Jordan. During that time, the Arab world refused to accept Israel's existence or any border for that tiny state.
Even today, only one nation, Costa Rica, has their embassy in Israel's capital, Jerusalem. The United States, which has an embassy in Tel Aviv, has two consular offices in Jerusalem, one on each side of the old barbed wire border that divided that ancient city before it was reunified in 1967. This was because following the War of Independence, Arab states and much of the world refused to accept any part of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, including areas that have been under Israel's control since 1948. Thus, while the Arabs hypocritically insist the land beyond the 1967 border is not Israel's, they are equally adamant that all of the territory of that small state is still in dispute. To the Arab world and their sympathizers there is no Israeli land, only Palestinian.
This was recognized when the United Nations passed Resolution 242 at the end of the Six Day War. Israel was expected to withdraw from territories occupied, but the word "all" was specifically left out. As the British Foreign Secretary told the House of Commons, "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial." Israel has withdrawn, in exchange for a peace agreement, from the massive Sinai Peninsula. The Egyptians did not want Gaza back.
In modern times, sovereignty over the territories beyond the old armistice line, the so-called "occupied territories", has never been established. As for ancient times, no matter what a viewer thinks of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, one point all agree on. When Jesus walked the streets of Jerusalem, there were only Romans and Jews. There were no Arab "Palestinians".
Those who have ruled over that land for nearly 2000 years since Rome destroyed the Jewish state - most recently the Ottomans, the British, the Jordanians and the Egyptians - have all vanished or relinquished their claims.
From 1948 to 1967, there were no Israelis in the areas beyond the Green Line. There was also no Palestinian state, because an Arab state alongside Israel was not, and has never been, the Arab goal. Their goal then, as it is now, has been the destruction of Israel.
The latest attempt to prevent the Israelis from defending themselves from a three-year campaign of deliberate murder was played out in The Hague, at the request of a United Nations General Assembly that has never seen fit to condemn the massacre of Israeli bus passengers and diners, blown to smithereens by Palestinian Arab terrorists. This is a global variation of the schoolyard bully's rule ? what is yours (Israel) is mine, what has no owner (Gaza and the West Bank) is mine, and, of course, what is mine (the rest of the Arab world, 100 times the size of Israel) is also mine.
But what really drives these bullies to distraction is that the little Jewish kids have learned to defend themselves. After 2000 years, they are no longer willing to play a permanent role as victim.
Before 2000 and the intifada campaign of murder in busses, on street corners and in restaurants, there was no wall. It was not needed. It is a response to the violent behavior of Arab terrorists. What seems like unending violence, and the need for defensive barriers, will not end until Arabs stop Palestinian killers instead of teaching children that the more Jews murdered the more one is a hero, and that the best one can do is die as a martyr, whether as a suicide killer or shielding terrorists behind young bodies. That is real child abuse. When the killing stops, Israel's defensive barrier can join its rightful spot in the dustbin of history. Then the children of the region, Israeli and Arab, can go back to their real job, growing up.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said in 1957, "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." Unfortunately, that time has not yet come, so a fence will have to substitute. Good fences may, in this case, be the best chance at making good neighbors.