Of Declarations and Independence

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bthe Whitehall plaint. “When we came we found a jungle. They bate each other; they fought each other; they died young; they bwere poverty-stricken. We found a jungle and turned it into civ- bilization.” Of course, the reply of the “natives” was: “Yes, but bit was our jungle, and now it is your civilization.”

bOne would have hoped that Prime Minister Rabin, as he bmounted the rostrum on that June day in 1976 to give his views bon the Israeli Arab problem, understood that the heart of the bJewish-Arab problem in Israel is the same as that of the dispute bbetween Israel and the Arab states. All Arabs, including those in bIsrael, believe that the Jews are thieves, robbers who came to an bArab Middle East and stole a part of it. It does little good to bbemoan the fact that the Arab will not “compromise” or accept bthe arguments given by Jews (the bad as well as the very good). bHe is not interested in a British promise to Jews as embodied in bthe Balfour Declaration (“Who were the British to promise ‘our’ bland?”); he is not moved by tales of Jewish suffering under the bGermans or other Europeans (“Let them compensate Jews by bgiving them part of their countries”); and he is not even swayed bby the oft-heard boast that the Jews turned a desert into a bgarden (“Yes, but it was our desert, and now it is your garden”).

bEven to begin to believe, in our time, that it is possible for btwo large nations to occupy the same land in peaceful coex- bistence when they differ in every possible aspect is an illusion of bthe first magnitude. When you add the fact that the present mi- bnority was once a majority, the hopelessness of the situation be- bcomes even more apparent. And when the minority knows that bit has massive support from brother Arab states with potential band power to “free” it; and when it sees a vast majority of the bnations of the world supporting its cause; and when it knows bthat all but one of the superpowers are sympathetic and that the bone supposed ally of Israel is slowly but surely moving to pres- bsure and to weaken her fatally; when the knowledge that a b“Palestine” will sooner or later exist alongside the Israel that bthe minority is struggling against, the hope of “liberation” be- bcomes more and more a certainty in the breast of that minority.

bThe Declaration of Independence of Israel is not relevant to bthe Arabs of the Jewish state. Let the Jews have their declara- btion, they say; give us our independence.