Rabbi Sussman’s Five Reasons for Israel’s Legitimacy

The unfavorable portrayal of Israel in the media is neither innocent nor accidental. It is part of the Arab effort to eliminate the Jewish state, anon-Arab presence on Arab soil.  The message given is that Israel like apartheid South Africa or some European colony is based on the expulsion and oppression of its original inhabitants the Arabs and therefore does not have a right to exist as an independent nation among nations.

Five reasons for Israel’s legitimacy:

Jews are descendants of the ancient inhabitants of the land of Israel. Jews were not colonial settlers, but people returning to the land of their ancestors. There is a strong cultural continuity between the Jews of ancient time and the present. Present day genetic testing shows that Jews of Europe are genetically a Mediterranean people and are genetically dissimilar from the Europeans.

Jews did not expel the Arabs. Jews wanted very much to live in peace with the Arabs as is stated in the Israeli Declaration of Independence. The Arabs of Palestine however tried to drive the Jews out and were unsuccessful and ending up becoming refuges. Had the Arabs of Palestine accepted the 1948 Partition Plan there would have been no Palestinian refugees.

It is a myth that Israel uses excessive force in the conflict. Israel has a military code of ethics which enjoins higher ethical standards than most countries even the United States. It is referred to as “tohar haneshek (Purity of Arms).” It has to be remembered that Israel is fighting for its existence not for additional territory or power against nations and groups that have been quite open about their desire to eliminate Israel ‘off the face of the map.” Remember that the oft complaint about checkpoints did not exist until terrorism became a problem twenty years after Israel occupied the West bank and Gaza in the Sixth Day War.”

Israel is making the Palestinians suffer for the European Holocaust which the Arabs of Palestine have nothing to do with. First of all, the Arabs of Palestine made a substantial contribution to the Holocaust in that they successfully pressured the British through what is known as the “Great Arab Revolt” which was a series of violent attacks against the British and Jews in Palestine to virtually eliminate Jewish immigration to Palestine in the late 1930s. This resulted in trapping the Jewish communities in Europe, even though according to the League of Nations Charter for the British mandate of Palestine, Palestine was supposed to be for intensive settlement of the Jews. The establishment of the State of Israel was the result of the activities of the Zionist movement in Palestine and around the world more than it was a sympathetic reaction to the Holocaust.

Jews are not taught and have not been taught to hate Arabs. Any hostility to Arabs in Israel is because Israel is fighting for its existence against Arabs who believe it has no right to exist. Israel does not have hostility to Arabs, Arab culture and Arab religion as a policy, goal or value. This can be contrasted to Arab anti-semitism which is constantly trying to defame Jews with terrible canards such as that Judaism mandates ritual murder ( part of a book by Tlass, the Foreign Minister of Syria) or that Jews are plotting to harvest the organs of Arab children or that the holocaust is a Jewish invention designed to get the world to acquiesce to the theft of Palestine and the expulsion of its Arab population as written years ago by Abbas the present head off the Palestinian authority.