The word on the street out there regarding the conflict in Israel is that “the occupation is the cause of terror”. I understand this to be part of a narrative that says that Israel is illegally occupying land that does not belong to it but belongs to other groups such as the Palestinians of Gaza, Arabs of the Judea-Samaria region (the West Bank) and even Arab countries in the region.  The narrative states that it is because of this illegal and oppressive and colonizing occupation that these groups are justifiably rising up in resistance. The narrative further declares that this resistance is fully justified in taking the form of violent actions which are commonly known as terror. The implication is that if there were no occupation, there would be no terror.

The core argument in this narrative is that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between what it calls an illegal, oppressive occupation by Israel and terror that is being perpetrated by various groups in the region. To address this core argument let’s ask ourselves some questions:

Is there an illegal, oppressive occupation of the land by Israel? And, If the answer to the first question is yes, then is terror a justified response? And thirdly is it really the so-called occupation that is the reason for the outbreaks of terror?

Firstly, the narrative recognizes Israel as an entity and rightly so. Israel is a modern state. It is a Jewish state formed by Jews on May 14^th, 1948, as a home for the Jews. Beyond this, anyone with any knowledge of secular modern history and ancient biblical history knows that Israel has been a distinct people group for almost 4000 years. Israel was a tribal group at the very beginning and became a kingdom about 3000 years ago and lived in and ruled in the land that is under contention in this narrative today. Knowledgeable people also know that Israel has had a long and complex history through which they experienced banishment from their land and the occupation of their land by other nations the longest banishment being from 70 AD to 1948. A fact to note in all this is that the Jews always had a remnant in the land even during extended periods of banishment.

As far as legality is concerned we can note that the United Nations approved of the establishment of two states, an Arab state and a Jewish state through resolution 181 of November 29^th, 1947. On May 15^th, 1948, one day after Ben-Gurion declared the independent state of Israel, the United States and the Soviet Union recognized Israel.

Based on the foregoing, we can see that the Jews are not illegally engaged in oppressively occupying the land. They are returning to their own land. So, the answer to our first question is no, there is no illegal, oppressive occupation of the land by Israel.

Our second question, if the Jews were illegally occupying the land, would terror be a justified response, is really the old does-the-end-justify-the-means question. I think most people in the western world would say no, no it doesn’t. However, we must remember that the Middle-East is not the Western World.  

Now let’s address our third question: is it really the so-called occupation that is the reason for the outbreaks of terror?

To answer this, let’s recall that back in 1948 when the Arabs were offered an opportunity to form a state alongside a Jewish state, they rejected it and instead immediately attacked the new state of Israel. So, we see that the Arabs did not like the idea of the Jews returning to their land and establishing a state. Furthermore, their sudden willingness to attack Israel indicates that this was not a spur-of-the-moment thing but was the result of a well-developed ongoing hostility.

Is there evidence for this? Well yes, there is abundant evidence. One piece of this evidence is a list that has been compiled of significant attacks on Jews in the land of Israel from the year 1517 up to 1939. This is before Israel became a state. There are no less than 46 separate instances listed. Certainly, in 1517, there was no indication that the local Jews were trying to colonize or occupy Israel any more than the local Arabs were.

That same list shows another 78 attacks from the 1948 Ben Yehuda Street Bombing to the October 7^th, 2023 massacres.

So, the evidence shows that it’s not what the Jews do, that bothers the Arabs, but it is their presence that bothers them so badly.

This spirit has been abundantly evident for a long, long time.

Let’s close this discussion with a couple of excerpts from the book Palestine Betrayed by Efraim Karsh, published by Yale University Press.

“In reality, it was the Mufti (Hajj Amin Husseini, of Jerusalem) who was primarily responsible for the radicalization of Palestinian Arab public opinion. In June 1930, his representatives at the deliberations of the international commission on the future of the Wailing Wall, convened in the wake of the 1929 massacres, refused to recognize any Jewish rights in Palestine (and not only at the Wall), and this recalcitrance was amplified by a pan-Islamic congress held in Jerusalem in December 1931.”

“And so, it goes on. More than six decades after the Mufti and his followers condemned their people to statelessness by rejecting the UN partition resolution and waging a war of annihilation against their Jewish neighbors, their reckless decisions are still being re-enacted by the latest generation of Palestinian leaders. For to refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist, long after the acceptance of this right by the international community, and to insist on the full implementation of the “right of return” at a time when Israel has long agreed to the creation of a Palestinian state roughly along the pre-1967 lines, indicates that in the Palestinian perception peace is not a matter of adjusting borders and territory but rather a euphemism for the destruction of the Jewish state. Only when Palestinian and Arab leaders change these dispositions and eschew their genocidal hopes will the refugees and their descendants be able to leave the squalid camps where they have been kept by their fellow Arabs for decades, and will the Palestinians be able to look forward to putting their self-inflicted “catastrophe” behind them.”