WORDS OF WISDOM

Golda Meir was Prime Minister of Israel from February 1969 to June 1974:

                                                                                        

“When in 1921 I came to Palestine – until the end of World War I a barren, sparsely inhabited Turkish province – we, the Jewish pioneers, were the avowed Palestinians. So we were named in the world. Arab nationalists, on the other hand, categorically rejected the name. Arab spokesmen continued to insist that the land we had cherished for centuries was, like Lebanon, merely a fragment of Syria.

Until the 1960’s, attention was focused on the Arab refugees for whose plight the Arab states would allow no solution - though many constructive and far-reaching proposals were made, by Israel and the world community.

I repeatedly expressed my sympathy for the needless sufferings of refugees whose abnormal situation was created, and exploited by the Arab states, as a tactic in their campaign against Israel.

Most of the refugees never left Palestine; they are settled on the West Bank and in Jordan, the majority of whose population is Palestinian. Whatever terminology is used, both the people involved and the territory on which they live are Palestinian.

I repeat again. We dispossessed no Arabs. Our toil in the deserts and marshes of Palestine, created more habitable living space for both Arab and Jew. Until 1948, the Arabs of Palestine multiplied and flourished, as the direct result of Zionist settlement. Whatever subsequent ills befell the Arabs were the inevitable result of the Arab design to drive us into the sea.

We successively accepted the creation of Transjordan, three-fourths of the area of historic Palestine, and finally, the painful compromise of the 1947 partition resolution - in the hope for peace. Yet, though Israel was left with only one-fifth of the territory originally assigned for the Jewish homeland, the Arabs invaded the young state.

Hussein was asked by Levi Eshkol not to go to war in 1967. If Hussein  had not done so, the West Bank would have still been in his hands.

If Assad had not gone to war in ’67, the Golan Heights would have still belonged to him.

If Nasser hadn’t gone to war in ’67, the whole of Sinai and the Gaza Strip would have been in his hands.

I was repeatedly asked the foolish question by well-meaning people as to why we didn’t go back to the 1967 borders. I never got from them  a single wise answer as to why, if the 1967 borders were so important and holy, did the Arabs go to war against Israel in the first place?

A mini-Palestine state, planted as a time bomb against Israel on the West Bank, would only serve as a focal point for the further exploitation of regional tensions by the Soviet Union.

At no point has the P.L.O. renounced its program for the ‘elimination of the Zionist entity.’ With startling chutzpah (cheek), P.L.O. spokesmen admit that their proposed state on the West Bank would be merely a convenient ‘point of departure,’ a tactical ‘first stage’. Finally, a combatant arsenal, strategically situated for the easier penetration of Israel.

There are 22 Arab states, rich in oil, land and sovereignty. There is only one small state in which Jewish national independence has been most dearly achieved. Surely it is not extravagant to demand that, in the current power play, the right of a small democracy to freedom and life not be betrayed.”

 

 

 

 

When you fight for your home, family, friends and colleagues with your back up against the wall, there is no more dangerous and deadly enemy.