The central issue in the Middle East conflict has never been Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza – rather, it’s the very fact of Israel’s existence.
All major Palestinian organizations are centered around the goal of destroying Israel. The Palestinian National Charter, adopted in 1964, declares its aim to be “the elimination of Zionism in Palestine”. The PLO's 10 Point Program of 1974 reaffirmed this as the organization's goal. The charters of Hamas and Hezbollah both explicitly state that their goal is to “obliterate” Israel. Even while supposedly negotiating for peace, Palestinian leaders have repeatedly stated that any peace agreement would only be a tactic towards the ultimate goal of eliminating Israel entirely.
Palestinians had been attacking the Jewish population in Palestine for decades before Israel was even established. Their resistance to Israel also had an enormous effect on European Jews trying to flee the Nazis, most of whom had nowhere to go but Palestine, and were prevented from entering due to Arab pressure on the British. These refusals resulted in large-scale tragedies such as the Struma affair.
Jews living elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa also suffered greatly from Arab opposition to the creation of Israel. In the 1940’s, Arab mobs attacked Jewish communities (some of which had existed for thousands of years, and were older than Islam itself) in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Morocco and Egypt. In Yemen, the nearly 2000-year old Jewish community of Aden was completely destroyed. These persecutions culminated in the expulsion and/or flight of nearly one million Jews from Arab lands.
When Israel was created in 1948, the armies of five Arab nations invaded with the explicit intention of annihilating it. In the 1967 Six Day War, Arab leaders were again open about their goal of completely eradicating Israel. In recent years, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has continued in this vein by repeatedly calling for Israel’s total destruction.
“The truth is that if Israel were to put down its arms there would be no more Israel. If the Arabs were to put down their arms there would be no more war.”
- Benjamin Netanyahu, 2006
