Michael Anbar Ph.D.
Any human society, even the most primitive, has rules of behavior. Those who violate these rules, which determine social structure, are punished. Murder of any member of a community must be followed by severe punishment. If the murderer comes from outside the community, the killer must be punished just as severely. In addition to the perpetrator, the alien community the killer belongs to is also often punished because it did not prevent that crime. In no case can a society reward murderers of its members, because such reward would encourage additional murders. Any society that does not effectively prohibit murder of its members, whether from within or from without, by appropriate punishments, is eventually doomed.
If the alien society encourages such murders, for whatever reason, this is considered an act of war, and the aggressor and the victim communities must then fight for their survival. Civilized societies follow certain rules of war. For example, unless the goal of the war is to eradicate the enemy, intentional indiscriminate murder of non-combatants is prohibited even in a state of war and must be severely punished.
Existence of society depends on punishments for all crimes, ranging from murder and robbery to petty theft. Effective punishment must deter additional infractions of societal or inter-societal norms and rules. Punishment is usually in kind. Remember Hammurabi’s “a soul for a soul, an eye for an eye”, etc. In orderly societies also crimes against property rights entail appropriate punishments. The same principles of crime and punishment, used to protect private property of individuals, apply also to tribal, or national, property or territory.
These elementary sociological principles seem to escape some “enlightened” members of our society. For almost a century Israeli society has been brutally attacked by Arab murderers with the expressed goal of its annihilation. The Arabs have repeatedly announced their intent. Yet there are presumably intelligent people, even academicians, who dispute and even denounce the right of the Israelis to punish their assailants.
Let us take a look at history. In 1947 the UN passed a resolution to subdivide the western portion of the 1921 British mandate on Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, giving international approval of an independent Jewish state in the ancient homeland of the Jewish nation. However, the Arab nation did not accept this resolution and tried to eliminate by force the incipient Jewish state. The fledgling State of Israel defended its new territory at the cost of 6,373 battle casualties (out of a total Jewish population of 700,000; in US terms this would amount to close to 3 million soldiers killed in battle), and stood up to this brutal assault on its very existence.
The Arabs themselves were unambiguous in accepting responsibility for starting that war. Jamal Husseini informed the Security Council on April 16, 1948: "The representatives of the Jewish Agency told us yesterday they were not the attackers, that the Arabs had begun the fighting. We did not deny this. We told the whole world that we were going to fight." The five Arab armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon and Iraq immediately invaded the new microstate. Their combined intention was expressed publicly by Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League on May 15 1948: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades." In other words, the Arabs threatened not just murder of individuals but of a nation, namely, genocide. Genocide is a crime against humanity.
For this horrendous crime the Arabs were punished, but seemingly insufficiently. In addition to humiliation and loss of materiel they ended up with about 500,000 Arab refugees who fled the bloody battlefield, most of them at the persuasion of the invaders. "The refugees were confident that their absence would not last long, and that they would return within a week or two. Their leaders had promised them that the Arab armies would crush the 'Zionist gangs' very quickly and that there was no need for panic or fear of a long exile." - Monsignor George Hakim, Greek Catholic Bishop of Galilee, in the Beirut newspaper Sada al Janub, August 16, 1948. “The fact that there are these 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 and they must share in the solution of the problem” - Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, the official leadership of the Palestinian Arabs, in the Beirut newspaper, Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1948. "This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boasting of an unrealistic Arab press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of some weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re-enter and retake possession of their country." - Edward Atiyah (then Secretary of the Arab League Office in London) in The Arabs (London, 1955), p. 183. But the Arabs did not pay the price of their failed aggressive policy. That Price was paid by the UN and by the miserable, mislead refugees. The crime of attempted genocide and the ethical crime of bringing misery upon fellow Arabs were not followed by appropriate punishments. This encouraged additional aggression.
By their political maneuvering, the Arabs managed to make the world community pay for keeping those refugees in temporary camps and be used as pawns in the next assault on the Jewish state. That assault took place in 1967 with the declared goal of eradicating the Jewish state. The war was preceded by ominous declarations: On May 17 Cairo Radio's Voice of the Arabs announced: "All Egypt is now prepared to plunge into total war which will put an end to Israel." And on the following day “The sole method we shall apply against Israel is a total war which will result in the extermination of Zionist existence." On May 27 Egyptian president Nasser declared: "Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight." On May 31 Iraqi President Rahman Aref announced: "This is our opportunity to wipe out the ignominy which has been with us since 1948. Our goal is clear--to wipe Israel off the map." On June 5 the Six Days War started and ended by the 10th with a resounding defeat of the aggressors.
The punishment for this atrocious aggression included, in addition to another humiliating defeat of the Arab nation, territorial losses by Syria (the Golan Heights), Jordan (Judea and Samaria) and Egypt (the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula). That punishment was insufficient. Not ready to accept their defeat and planning to repeat their aggression, the Arabs declared in the 1967 Khartoum conference the dictum of no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and no negotiations with Israel.
The Arab follow-on attack took place in 1973. Unlike the 1967 war, the 1973 Yom Kippur war was not preceded by threatening rhetoric – it was a surprise attack aimed at achieving the objectives of the failed 1967 assault. Again Israel prevailed. This war of survival cost Israel 2,688 casualties (almost four times the number of casualties in the Six Days War). However, the material punishment for this aggression was minimal – it involved loss of face but no additional territorial losses. This insufficient punishment seems to have encouraged the Arabs to maintain their aggression.
Following their defeat in 1973, the Arabs seem to have lost the desire to overrun the Jewish state by a frontal military assault, and eventually Egypt and later Jordan recognized the Jewish state. However, peace treaties and internationally recognized borders are no guarantee against aggression (remember the Anschlus of Austria in 1938, the invasion of Poland in 1939 or the “annexation” of Kuwait in 1990). This has been the reason for the demilitarization of the Sinai Peninsula following the peace treaty with Egypt.
In spite of its peace treaty with the State of Israel, Egypt in concert with Iraq, Iran, Syria and Saudia continued to use the Arabs in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip as proxies to eliminate the Jewish state by deceitful diplomacy (the Oslo accords) and by continuous indiscriminate terror against the Jewish civilian population. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), established in Egypt in 1964, three years before the 1967 assault, became the prime tool of Arab aggression against the State of Israel.
Receiving substantial material and moral support from Egypt and the other Arab states, the PLO and other anti-Israeli terrorist organizations have continued to attack Israeli and American targets in Israel proper, in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip as well as abroad. Notably were the Munich massacre of the Israeli athletes in 1972, the murder of the US ambassador in the Sudan in 1973, and the murder of 241 American marines in Beirut in October 1983. More than 250 Israelis were murdered by Arab terrorists before the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, additional more than 280 Jews were murdered before the start of the 2000 second Intefada, and almost 700 Jews were murdered in the last two years alone (in comparison, less than 700 IDF soldiers fell in the Six Day War).
While the IDF is trying to arrest or kill Arab terrorists who indiscriminately murder Israeli citizen, this is not punishment in kind. While the “Palestinian” population is suffering severely, the objective of the Arabs is to break the morale of the Israelis and blackmail them to make territorial and other concessions to the Arabs; concessions that will facilitate the annihilation of the Jewish state at a later date by demographic subjugation, additional territorial concessions or extermination of the Jewish population by another major military assault on a country with no defensible borders.
In their public relations campaign, the Arab tactical approach is to equate their murderous crimes with the misery of Arab civilians -- equating the suffering of the Arabs in the disputed territories with that of the victims of Arab terror. Using this devious tactic the Arabs have succeeded to exert substantial political pressure on Israel, especially in Europe. The Arabs seem also to rely on the pacifistic and the more submissive political parties in Israel to yield to the Arab demands and facilitate dismantling of the Jewish state in steps (Arafat’s notorious “Salami doctrine”).
The current misery of the Arab civilians is an unintended infliction for the genocidal crimes of the Arab leadership, who are driven by territorial ambitions and religious fervor. It is not punishment in kind. The obvious purpose of the Arab terror is political gain. Israel cannot gain anything by imposing misery on the Arab population at large; this is certainly true in a despotic regime where the public has no political clout. Before gaining political self-determination, the “Palestinian Arabs” must act in their own interest and gain independence from their corrupt leadership and its external puppeteer-allies. As long as this does not happen, the punishment for Arab terrorist policy must be in kind – it must be political -- permanent loss of additional Arab territory and hardening of the Israeli political position in any future negotiations.