With the NSW Labor party adopting a motion to recognise the state of Palestine, Caroline Overington, Associate Editor of The Australian, has written a must-read Op-Ed.
The idea was always for Jews to share the Holy Land with the Palestinians.
Israel accepted those terms in 1947.
The Palestinians did not.
When Israel declared its independence in 1948, it immediately came under attack from Arab neighbours.
Israel has not known a day of peace since.
It has given an inch, in some cases miles, but peace has not been forthcoming.
Israel won a six-day war for survival in 1967 by seizing the Golan Heights and the West Bank and East Jerusalem; and Israel to this day refuses to relinquish all that was taken, citing security concerns.
Incensed Palestinian terrorists have had to find new ways to attack Israel, often shocking the world.
It was Palestinian forces — the PLO — that took Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympics in 1972, and murdered eleven of them.
It was Palestinian forces that hijacked a cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, en-route to Israel in 1985, and pushed an elderly Jewish man in a wheelchair into the sea.
In 1989, the Palestinians launched an intifada — an uprising — against Israel.
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A second intifada, from the year 2000 onward, saw rockets being fired into Israel and wave after wave of suicide bombers from the occupied territories. Terrorists bombed buses, and blew themselves up in town squares.
In 2003, Israel began building a wall to keep the suicide bombers out. The number of attacks against Jewish civilians has since fallen dramatically.
Incensed, the Arab world calls the wall an “apartheid barrier.” Israel, for good reason, calls it a “security wall.”
Despite or perhaps because of the ongoing security threat, Israel thrives. The GDP per capita is $35,000, which is healthy. Israel remains a parliamentary democracy, which is the best kind of government. There have been Arabs in the Knesset, or parliament, since the first parliament, in 1948.
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In short, Israel remains a thriving, delicate, precious, youthful democracy in the Middle East.
In that sense, nothing has changed. But the language of the world is changing.
The hatred of Israel, felt by so many, is now the fault of the Jewish people. Israel is to blame for failing to make peace with their neighbours.
It is the Jewish people that stand in the way of a two-state solution, by refusing to relinquish land taken in a war for Israel’s survival.
In this version of the world, it is the Palestinians, and Hamas in particular, that dearly want to live in harmony with Israel.
A law school graduate, David Lange transitioned from work in the oil and hi-tech industries into fulltime Israel advocacy. He is a respected commentator and Middle East analyst who has often been cited by the mainstream media
A law school graduate, David Lange transitioned from work in the oil and hi-tech industries into fulltime Israel advocacy. He is a respected commentator and Middle East analyst who has often been cited by the mainstream media
