A world without Israel
Joseph Farah
Posted: July 28, 20061:00 a.m. Eastern
The world is full of Israel-haters.
I don't know why. It probably has something to do with anti-Semitism – and even more to do with lack of knowledge and understanding about the Middle East.
So, I thought it might be a good exercise to consider what the world would be like if Israel had never been reborn in 1948.
Let's suppose that United Nations vote to partition the Palestinian region into two – one Arab and one Jewish – went differently. Let's imagine the Soviet Union or some other nation that supported the Jewish state voted the other way. What would the Middle East be like today? What would the world be like?
Well, for starters, the blame-Israel-first crowd needs to remember that the bloodiest conflicts in the Middle East in the last 60 years would still have taken place – because they had nothing to do with the state of Israel.
For instance, does anyone doubt that the Iran-Iraq war, which killed more than 1 million people and featured the widespread use of chemical weapons, would still have taken place – even without an Israel on the map?
Not even Saddam Hussein or the Ayatollah Khomeini could suggest that Jews had anything to do with that little dust-up. It was simply the latest round in fighting between ancient enemies, a turf war between a Sunni Muslim dictator and a Shiite Muslim dictator.
But what might have happened to nearly 1 million Jews in Arab lands who found a home in Israel after 1948? Those million refugees often left hostile Arab lands with little more than the clothes on their back. They often risked their lives to flee. Today, those Jews, if they were lucky, would still be living under the yoke of Muslim tyranny, living in "dhimmi" status. Surely many would have been murdered in the kinds of pogroms that regularly occurred in Arab and Muslim countries while they still maintained Jewish communities.
We hear so much about the "Arab refugee crisis" that was created by the 1948 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The highest estimates of Arabs who fled Israel during that war are put at 500,000. They fled, most often, because they were instructed to do so by the Arab leaders who declared war on Israel at its very birth. Yet, nearly 60 years later, this refugee population hasn't decreased, it has increased exponentially!
Why?
Not because Israel has created any new Arab refugees. It is because the Arab nations have refused to settle the original refugees they encouraged into refugee status. They see them as critical pawns in their asymmetrical conflict with Israel.
One thing is certain. Without Israel, there would have been no Palestinian national movement. There would be no Palestinian Authority. There would be no future Palestinian state.
Why?
Because prior to the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel conquered what we call the West Bank and East Jerusalem, there was no such movement. Even though there was no Palestinian Arab state and never had been, no one had ever promoted one. When Jordan controlled the West Bank, the so-called "Palestinians" were not agitating for a homeland. They'd never had a country of their own and apparently never wanted one. Suddenly, when Israel captured the ancient Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria, the Arabs discovered their sense of Palestinian nationalism for the first time ever.
I can also promise you that if Israel had not unified Jerusalem and declared it the eternal capital of the Jewish state, it would not be considered the third-holiest site in Islam.
How do I know this?
Because during the time that East Jerusalem was under the administration of King Hussein of Jordan, prior to June 1967, not a single Arab leader ever visited – including the king himself. It would seem that if Jerusalem had always been so important to the Muslims, their leaders would have expressed some interest in it before Israel captured the city in war.
The modern Islamic jihad movement is thought to have been launched in earnest in 1979, when the Ayatollah Khomeini assumed power from the overthrown shah. At the time, Khomeini made clear that the real enemy – "the Great Satan," as he called it – was the United States of America, not Israel.
No one, of course, knows what might have happened or not happened if Israel had never been reborn. But it does seem clear that most of the bad things that happened in the Middle East in the last 60 years would have happened anyway. Could it be that, if the Jewish state had never been, many more horrible things might have happened?
Personally, I suspect so.
Joseph Farah is founder, editor and CEO of WND and a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators Syndicate. His latest book is "Taking America Back." He also edits the weekly online intelligence newsletter Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, in which he utilizes his sources developed over 30 years in the news business.

Israel vs. Hezbollah, right vs. wrong
Joseph Farah
Posted: August 11, 20061:00 a.m. Eastern
How people view the conflict in Lebanon is a barometer for determining their ability to discern right from wrong.
If you hear someone fudge on this conflict, it is an indication of a moral failing, a weakness in their heart, a defect in their brain, a darkness in their very soul.
There is no better picture of evil in the world today that the terrorist organization Hezbollah. Founded by the mullahs in Iran, facilitated by two generations of dictators in Syria, it was Hezbollah that killed 241 U.S. Marines sent to Beirut to protect the Lebanese people. Collectively, its terrorist attacks – from Latin America to Asia – have probably killed more innocent people than have been murdered even by al-Qaida.
Hezbollah is bigger and better armed than al-Qaida. And it has maintained an operational alliance with Osama bin Laden's terror network for years.
Quite simply, Hezbollah seeks in the short term to kill all the Jews in the Middle East or scatter them abroad. In the long term, it seeks to impose a worldwide Shiite theocracy like the one currently enjoyed by the people of Iran.
In the other corner, we have Israel. It is hardly a flawless and perfect state. There is no such thing in the world and never has been. But it is a legitimate state founded where no other state existed by a consensus of world opinion following the murder of 6 million Jews in Germany's concentration camps. Israel served as a refuge for nearly 1 million Arab Jews persecuted throughout the Middle East – more, by the way, than even the most exaggerated claims of Arab Palestinian refugees displaced by the war of 1948.
As many other observers have pointed out, you don't need to know much about the complicated history of the Middle East to understand the difference between Israel and its enemies. If Israel's enemies – including Hezbollah – had the power to destroy Israel, it would do so in a heartbeat. Israel, however, actually possesses such awesome power and, of course, has never used it.
There is no moral murkiness here. The raw, unadulterated evil that is Hezbollah is on display for all to see. The basic decency and compassion of the Jewish state has been on display for nearly 60 years.
Yet, look around us and see how many people are still "confused." A recent Los Angeles Times poll showed most Democrats are incapable of making any distinctions between these two warring parties. Sadly, a third of Republicans are also unwilling or unable to distinguish good from evil when it comes to this conflict.
Looking outside the U.S., the picture of moral confusion is even worse. At least half the world is cheering on Hezbollah.
This has nothing to do with Israel's behavior or the behavior of the U.S. Nothing we or the Jews of Israel could do would change the opinion of those aligned with Hezbollah. Like the pharaoh in Egypt, their hearts have been hardened. It will take an act of God to get people like that to see the light – something to hope and pray for, perhaps, but not something any argument will change.
It's disturbing to me to see so many people living in moral confusion – moral darkness. It's worse to think so many Americans are falling into this abyss. It's even more shocking to see so many Israelis incapable of understanding the stakes in this conflict.
There are a lot of people getting weak in the knees right now.
It's not without precedent.
It happened before in 1939.
The dangers we face in the world today are comparable to what the world faced back then – maybe worse.
Today, the Nazis are those claiming to be the original Aryans. In fact, that's a derivation of the name of their country – Iran. They speak openly of wanting to destroy all the Jews. They are working feverishly on the development of nuclear weapons – something Hitler could only dream about.
It's not a time for going wobbly. It's not a time for moral confusion. It's not a time for myopia in distinguishing right from wrong.
Joseph Farah is founder, editor and CEO of WND and a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators Syndicate. His latest book is "Taking America Back." He also edits the weekly online intelligence newsletter Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, in which he utilizes his sources developed over 30 years in the news business.