“The force of nationalism will challenge our position. We cannot befriend both Arab and Jew. My proposal is based on befriending the people who are more likely to be loyal friends---the Jews---Though we have done much for the Arabs, they do not know the meaning of gratitude; moreover they would be a liability; the Jew would be an asset—“[Col. Richard Meinertzhagen]
-The Jews have moreover provided their fighting qualities since the Roman occupation of Jerusalem. The Arab is a poor fighter, though an adept at looting, sabotage and murder---[Mine] is a proposal to make our position in the Middle East more secure.
The subject book, A Place Among the Nations, authored by PM Benjamin Netanyahu in May 1993, serves as an understanding for where we are today. Chapter 2, “The Betrayal” is particularly relevant.
“No race has done better out of the fidelity with which the Allies redeemed their promises to the oppressed races than the Arabs.”[Lloyd George].
South African Jan Smuts, a member of the British War Cabinet, who was actively involved in the discussions behind the Balfour Declaration and the Versailles Treaty, recalled the views of the British Cabinet in dealing to favor a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
“It was believed that there was nothing wrong with an Arab minority living among the Jews so long as their individual rights were guaranteed, which is precisely what the declaration required.”[Jan Smuts]
“No one has harmed you---the Jews have a far more difficult task than you.------I am told the Arabs would have done it for themselves. Who is going to believe that? Left to themselves, the Arabs of Palestine would not in 1,000 years have taken effective steps toward the irrigation and electrification of Palestine.
"They would have been quite content to dwell---a handful of ... people---in the wasted sun scorched plains, having the waters of the Jordan continue to flow unbridled and unharnessed into the Dead Sea.” [Winston Churchill]
"According to the Times, the Jordan River---will not do as Palestine’s eastern boundary. Our duty as Mandatory is to make Jewish Palestine not a struggling State but one that is capable of a vigorous and independent national life.
“I went fuming at the mouth with anger and indignation-[ Col. Richard Meinertzhagen]----
-The riots of the1st May and the massacre of the Jews at the Immigration Hostel was a pretty broad hint that the Jaffa Arabs resented any further Jewish immigration into the country." [Judge Samuel].
Historian Paul Johnson believed that the book would be widely recognized as by far the most succinct, readable, powerfully argued and convincing summary of Israel’s case.
Netanyahu’s argument tested the premise that no settlement between Israel and the Arabs would be possible, let alone likely to be durable, unless it is firmly based on the truth. The central difficulty had always been that the Israelis dealt in concrete facts and the Arabs in hyperbolic imaginings.
The first and most important misapprehension is the failure to grasp the tiny size of Palestine/Israel. Viewers found it hard to credit Netanyahu’s assurance that the Arab world was over 500 times the size of the Jewish state, though this is fundamental to Israel’s security problem.
From Netanyahu’s chronological survey of the dispute, consider a few “Big Lies,’ which he was particularly anxious to nail.
Lie [1] The Arabs are in no sense the residual legatees of the Philistines, from whom the word Palestine derives. In the 1st place, Philistine dominion never extended much beyond the coastal strip from Gaza to present-day Tel Aviv. As a people (actually a tribe, ed.) the Philistines were wiped out or absorbed by the Babylonian conquerors. It was the Romans, who invented the term Palestrina, after the Bar Kochba revolt of 135 CE to replace Judea, the historic name of the country, and with the intention of obliterating its Jewish identity.
Lie [2] As Netanyahu put it: "It was not the Jews who usurped the land from the Arabs, but the Arabs who usurped the land from the Jews.”
Lie[3]: The creation of Israel was a form of colonization, akin to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem of the Crusades or the European colonial empires of modern times, all of which have been swept away by the irresistible forces of history, etc. The true analogy is with Spain, where the Muslim–Arab invaders were progressively repulsed, and the country restored to its original integrity.
Lie [4]: Yasir Arafat gives the myth its common form: ”The Jewish invasion began in 1881---Palestine was then a verdant area, inhabited mainly by an Arab people in the course of building its life and dynamically enriching its indigenous culture.” In fact, it was an uncultivated wasteland (see Mark Twain and any other travel books of the period) and by 1881, Jews had outnumbered Arabs in Jerusalem for 60 years.
Lie [5]: Netanyahu puts his finger on what should be regarded as a fatal error of the British Mandate: the decision in 1920 to make the brutally anti-Jewish extremist Haj Amin al-Hussein the Mufti of Jerusalem, although he had only placed 4th in the election to the post, and to compound the mistake by elevating his title to Grand Mufti or Mufti for life.
Lie [6]: The motive of Arab terrorism. It is a lamentable fact that Arab terrorism has always been aimed primarily at instilling fear into the Arab population rather than the Jewish one, and that; in consequence, no democratic Arab verdict on how to create a peaceful settlement has ever been possible.
Less generally grasped is the fact that much Arab violence is directed against other Arabs, with the Israelis as distressed and helpless onlookers.
Lie [7] Israel is the direct source of aggression. Netanyahu calls this “the reversal of causality” and devotes an interesting chapter setting it right-side-up again, with particular reference to the 'West Bank'.
Lie [8] : Israelis like Netanyahu, who have spent their adult lives dealing with the Arabs, know their strength and limitations far better than any outsiders; despite accusations to that effect, it is not they who are responsible for the caricature Arab of Western demonology.
Lie [9] Israel has to defend itself, and this brings Netanyahu to the 9th lie; the myth of Israel’s strength. Netanyahu points out, if Israel had not retained the so-called “occupied territories”, the Yom Kippur War of 1973 would have extinguished the state. It is important that his demonstration of the right to live in this territory, but to render it secure should be widely read.
The constructive part of Netanyahu’s argument: his belief that Israel must break free of the statist straightjacket in which its founders placed it, and so unleash the enormous creative energies of one of the most gifted peoples in world history.
Developments today
Recently, the STRAITS TIMES, published, “Israel is ‘not a banana republic’, Netanyahu says, rejecting US criticism.” This paper focused on the rift between Israel and the US, its closest ally, over the war in the Gaza Strip when Israel’s PM Netanyahu accused a top-ranking US lawmaker of treating his country like a “banana republic.”
Netanyahu, facing increasing pressure to negotiate a ceasefire which would free murderous terrorists and put Israel into its position on October 6, , lashed out at US senator Chuck Schumer over his call for elections to be held in Israel when the war winds down. In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union, Netanyahu correctly claimed that Schumer, the Senate majority leader, was attempting to topple the Israeli government and said that the call for an election was “totally inappropriate”.
Netanyahu rightly said that it was something for the Israeli public to do of its own judgment and that Israel was not a “banana republic.” In his so doing, one is reminded of the US announcing that it would be taking punitive measures against Israel. It enraged PM Menachem Begin, who in an unprecedented move summoned the American Ambassador, Samuel Lewis to read him a prepared statement which said, among other things:
“Three times in the last 6 months the US government has ‘punished’ Israel—after the attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad; after we bombed the PLO headquarters in Beirut, and now you are punishing us after the Knesset passed on all 3 readings, by an overwhelming majority of two thirds, the ‘Golan Heights Law’.
"What kind of expression is this—‘punishing Israel?’ Are we a vassal state of yours? Are we a banana republic? Are we youths of 14 who, if they don’t behave properly, are slapped across the fingers? You have no right to ‘punish’ Israel and I protest the very use of the term-------“
Return to current times. Ceasefire talks continue endlessly. Joe, Jim and Hunter believed the Biden name would open doors for clients around the world. Joe called it the ‘Delaware Way’. Importantly, Miranda Devine showed through her book, "Laptop from hell" how Joe used his power as a US Senator to get Hunter jobs with companies and at pay levels Hunter didn’t deserve e.g. Burisma wasn’t the 1st time someone paid Hunter for nothing.
The Biden family also managed to acquire and sell real estate at hefty profits. Devine details these facts as she carefully builds the case against Joe leading to the wholesale selling of assets once Joe became VP, with Hunter always serving as the point-of-contact to keep Beau ‘clean’ en route to him becoming a US senator.
No person reading Chapters 9 through 14 of Devine's book can conclude anything other than there is significant direct and circumstantial evidence of Joe’s knowledge of and involvement in the Biden family swindle. Former partner Tony Bobulinski figured out the swindle.
Devine does a meticulous job of tying various trips abroad or events in Washington, DC to facts gleaned via other sources to show Joe miraculously always showing up at dinners, hosting breakfasts or highlighting Hunter’s presence to his clients or potential ‘investors.’
Joe even bragged about his power in getting the prosecutor fired in exchange for $1 billion in US funds! What happened to Justice? The fact that within a few months of Joe leaving office Burisma halved Hunter’s monthly pay should have been all anyone needed to ‘see’ the swindle.
The last vital detail fleshed out by Devine is the extent of the Biden family’s relationship with Chinese President XI Jinping. She demonstrates the relationship dating back decades to show that Joe and Hunter have deep ties to Xi and his power base.
With the failings of modern day justice, the conclusion for Trump, Joe and Netanyahu may well be other than just.
