Suicide Bombers Are Not The Problem

As Secretary of State Colin Powell travels through the Middle East, there is hope that if only the suicide bombers can be stopped, perhaps peace can finally come to to fruition.

Unfortunately, though the suicide bombers are "a" problem, they are not "the" problem.

"The" problem is the suicide society that the Arab world -- particularly those living under Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority -- has become.

They are like the madmen who keep driving their heads into stone walls in the hope that someday, somehow, their pain will finally stop.

Yes, they are in pain. But it is overwhelmingly pain they inflicted on themselves, destroying every chance to improve their society and their lives.

Abba Eban said it better than anyone over 30 years ago: "The Arabs have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity."

When Arabs and Jews lived in one political entity under the British mandate, Arab mobs massacred Jews time and again, driving the last Jews out of cities like Hebron where they had lived continuously for over three thousand years. When the United Nations determined that two nations -- one Arab, one Jewish -- should emerge when the mandate ended in 1948, Arabs rose en mass against the new Jewish state. History records the result: 

• ON APRIL 23, 1948 Jamal Husseini, acting chairman of the Palestine Arab Higher Committee (AHC), told the UN Security Council: "The Arabs did not want to submit to a truce ... T hey preferred to abandon their homes, belongings and everything they possessed."
• ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1948, the Beirut Daily Telegraph quoted Emil Ghory, secretary of the AHC, as saying: "The fact that there are those refugees is the direct consequence of the action of the Arab states in opposing partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states agreed upon this policy unanimously..."
• ON OCTOBER 2, 1948, the London Economist reported, in an eyewitness account of the flight of Haifa's Arabs: "There is little doubt that the most potent of the factors [in the flight] were the announcements made over the air by the Arab Higher Executive urging all Arabs in Haifa to quit ... And it was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."
• THE JORDANIAN daily Falastin wrote on February 19, 1949: "The Arab states ... encouraged the Palestinian Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies."
• ON JUNE 8, 1951, Habib Issa, secretary-general of the Arab League, wrote in the New York Lebanese daily al-Hoda that in 1948, Azzam Pasha, then League secretary, had "assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade ... Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property, and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states."
• ON APRIL 9, 1953, the Jordanian daily al-Urdun quoted a refugee, Yunes Ahmed Assad, formerly of Deir Yassin, as saying: "For the flight and fall of the other villages, it is our leaders who are responsible, because of the dissemination of rumors exaggerating Jewish crimes and describing them as atrocities in order to inflame the Arabs ... they instilled fear and terror into the hearts of the Arabs of Palestine until they fled, leaving their homes and property to the enemy."
• ANOTHER refugee told the Jordanian daily a-Difaa on September 6, 1954: "The Arab governments told us, 'Get out so that we can get in.' So we got out, but they did not get in."
• THE PRIME Minister of Syria in 1948, Khaled al-Azem, in his memoirs, published in 1973, listed what he thought were the reasons for the Arab failure in 1948: " ... the fifth factor was the call by the Arab governments to the inhabitants of Palestine to evacuate it and leave for the bordering Arab countries ... We brought destruction upon a million Arab refugees by calling on them and pleading with them to leave their land."
• IN THE MARCH 1976 issue of Falastin a-Thaura, then the official journal of the Beirut-based PLO, Mahmud Abbas ("Abu Mazen"), PLO spokesman, wrote: "The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live."
• "FOLLOWING a visit to refugees in Gaza, a British diplomat reported the following: 'But while they express no bitterness against the Jews... they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states: 'We know who our enemies are,' they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes."

History knows, but the Arab world does not know. Its leaders have lied so long -- the Big Lie used so effectively by Hitler and Stalin in their times -- that history has been turned on its head.

HISTORY UPSIDE DOWN

Now the Arab world believes (or professes to believe) that Israel attacked the Arabs of Palestine plus the combined armies of Lebanon and Syria and Jordan and Iraq and Egypt on Independence Day, 1948, instead of the other way around. That Israel won all of Sinai and Gaza and the West Bank and the Golan Heights in 1967 in a war of aggression against the combined might of the Arab world, instead of the other way around. That Israel has maintained an "illegal occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza for 35 years when the truth is that Israel would have given them all back on any day that the Arabs agreed to peace -- just as it proved by giving Egypt all of Sinai after Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel.

Yes, there has been an illegal occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem -- from 1948 to 1967 -- by the Kingdom of Jordan, which went on to annex all these lands into Jordan itself. By making war on Israel in 1967 and being pushed back to into own legal border at the Jordan River the Kingdom of Jordan lost all claim to these illegally annexed lands.

The West Bank and Gaza, must of which were to form the state to be made up of the Arabs of Palestine after partition, are now back where they were before they rejected that option totally . . . inside the borders of the British mandate territory.

The united "international city of Jerusalem," which was to be administered by the United Nations to assure free access by peaceful adherents of all the world's religions, but was divided and half annexed into Jordan without significant protest by the U.N., has been united and free and open to peaceful adherents of all the world's religions since 1967.

U.N. OBJECTIVES NOW MET

All the objectives of the U.N.'s partition plan of 1947 have now been met except those rejected by the Arab world -- a peaceful state living in harmony with Israel.

The prospect of a free, democratic, prosperous Arab state sharing the land of the mandate is as available today as it has been since 1947 -- except for the total rejection of peace by the Arab world.

That rejection -- and the consequent destruction of all hopes for better lives for the Arab population now mouldering under the corrupt brutality of the Palestinian Authority -- is entirely the responsibility of the Arab world and its two dozen despotic leaders, most of whom hold their power only by terrorizing their own peoples.

Thus the Arabs go on hitting their heads against stone walls hoping that someday, somehow, the pain will finally stop.

Thus the Arab world continues its headlong rush to commit suicide -- by bashing itself to death.