"Were England, France, and the U.S. racist in their policy of having relocated 12 million ethnic Germans to Germany after World War II ?"

Charles Levinson's article (Wall Street Journal 2.6.09) reporting on developments in Israeli elections concerning the candidacy of Avigdor Lieberman could use more accuracy and depth.

Unlike Levinson's report that Lieberman's views are like the views of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, they are different in important respects. Lieberman would redraw Israel's boundaries to exclude Arab-Israeli populations and, in land trades, would expel Jews from the territories the way it was done in Gaza. But this would only create Jewish refugees and enable the Arab enemy to transform Israel's eastern territories into Gaza platforms for rocketing Israel's nearby cities. Lieberman's is hardly a right wing program, any more than are the programs of Kadima and Labor, which parties would likewise surrender Israel to the Arab enemy with only variations in detail.

On the other hand, Rabbi Kahane recognized early the since proven implacable nature of the Arab enemy and advocated their relocation while retaining the strategic Jewish territories that Lieberman and the leftist parties would surrender. Rabbi Kahane's approach would strengthen Israel for survival in the long run while Lieberman's bombastic program, damaging to Israel's interest, does not grapple with the Arab threat and would leave Israel worse off.

What does not emerge with Levinson is that Israel deals with an implacable Arab enemy within the Israeli perimeter that is hardly a "minority population" but is actually the vanguard of a huge Arab majority population in the region that has as its priority the destruction of Israel — a goal far more important to them than nationhood, Bush-type democracy, prosperity, or peace.

How would any rational being deal with the problem of preventing the devastation of a jackel in an henhouse? The situation of the innate enmity of the jackals against the hens — akin to that of the Arabs against the Israelis — dictates effective separation of the two if both are to survive and should be used as a paradigm guide.

IF THERE IS A PANGLOSSIAN INSISTENCE THAT SUCH A VIEW IS EXTREMIST, I would suggest that those with rosy colored glasses sit in as I did at Yale on the two hair-raising lectures on Islamic terrorism, one in the classroom of a political science professor and the other by a talk by an Israeli research associate of the Begin-Sadat Center. While the Yale professor noted that the entire 1.3 billion Muslim population could not be accused of being active terrorists, he observed that even the less than 1% of them numbers in the frightening millions. What is more, this savage group is supported by vast numbers of active and passive sympathizers. The professor further observed that even the terrorists do not profess an unusual form of Islam, but mainstream Islam and differ from the relatively passive groups in that they are not active in actualizing Islam's precepts such as jihad, though providing unlimited recruits from their number to the terrorists.

The other speaker from the Begin-Sadat Center illuminated the views of terrorists who are willing to give up their lives in terrorist attacks and suicide, noting the Islamic philosophy that the time of death is already destined and better approached in attaining the rewards of the after life by choosing death in the fight against Islamic enemies like Israel.

With each of the speakers, it became evident that Israel's survival depended wholly on Israel's strength rather than on insane reeducation programs for these enemies of Israel that are the favorites of US dreamers like Bush and Israel's leftist leaderships. Reeducation is no more a doable program with the Arabs than it would have been for the Nazis. The latter required total defeat to accomplish and no one should imagine the reality is different for Israel's enemies.

The question emerges then whether it is racist for Israelis to want The question emerges then whether it is racist for Israelis to want effective programs to enable their country to survive against enemies that do not recognize Israel's legitimacy and wish to either exterminate its Jewish population or, if Western nations will not accept the defeated Jewish remnant, expel it into the Mediterranean.

In this context, Lieberman's approach does not provide any real solution to the determination of Arabs to destroy Israel, as Gaza illustrated. Arab leaderships have shown by past performance that they heartily embrace the destruction of their own Arab community if it makes the region uninhabitable for Israel. (I do not even raise the obvious reality that, even at best, the tiny region of Israel cannot accommodate two peoples.)

Therefore, the Lieberman candidacy would be bad news for Israel. The massive tumult stirred by Lieberman's ineffective, counter productive program — more harmful to Israel's Jews than to anyone else — would not solve Israel's problem with her Arab enemies but would rather enable this enemy to create Gazas along Israel's eastern edge. This is hardly a right wing program that, if racist, is more of a racism directed at peaceful Israelis Jews, who are dehumanized and expelled from their legal homes in favor of Arabs who seek the destruction of these Jews.

Since Levinson raised the issue of Rabbi Kahane's views as allegedly racist, let us see whether this holds water. Rabbi Kahane recognized Israel's legitimate and moral right to exist and possess the unallotted territories of the Mandate of Palestine — the portion remaining after Britain gave almost 78% of its lands to create today's Jordan — lands set aside for a Jewish homeland by the League of Nations. Kahane was clear eyed in recognizing the implacable Arab hostility of the Arabs living within these lands of the Mandate — a hostility rooted in Islam's doctrine of jihad and raw Arab nationalism. Rabbi Kahane saw relocation of these Arabs as the only solution to Israel's survival, relocation being a just cause for the sake of peace in the region.
 

IF RABBI KAHANE'S APPROACH SEEMS EXTREME AND RACIST — CERTAINLY IT WILL TO THOSE WHO EMBRACE THE INSANITY OF REEDUCATING NAZIS and have no great commitment to Israel's survival — then the same charge of racism ought to be raised against the Western Allies — England, France, and even the U.S. — after World War II. Facing what the Allies believed was a potential threat to peace in Europe by the German ethnic population that lived in the countries surrounding Germany, the Allies relocated this ethnic German population of 12 million to Germany.

Recall that it was the German ethnic population that had stirred Hitler's pretext to demand the strategic lands of Czechoslovakia, just as the Arabs do today in order to wrest from the Jews the lands assigned to them under the Mandate of Palestine. Was this program the expression of Allied racism or was it a valid means to cope with the reality of creating long term peace in Europe, threatened by what they believed was a potentially disruptive ethnic population that could combine with a resurgent Germany. This is the same problem that stares Israel in the face today and is not at all the "potential" problem that the Allies foresaw but a problem all too manifest in Israel by a threatening Arab population that already combines with vast numbers of its fellow Arabs in neighboring Arab countries. For Israel too, like for the Allies, relocation of this threatening Arab population is a valid means to attain an otherwise unattainable regional peace.

Unfortunately, Israel's allies are in bed with the Arab tyrannies that control the oil spigots of the Middle East and these supposed allies immorally make slicing off ever more parts of Israel's own strategic, defensive territories a key feature of appeasement of their Arab partners. The situation in this is nothing more than a rerun of the sellout of Czechoslovakia prior to WWII — a sellout that made that horrific war possible. Thinking then that such a sacrifice of a small country would lead to peace, the Allies actually brought on that great war. This is the fate destined for the Middle East as a result of a similar sellout of Israel, which will surely climax in a major Middle East war, perhaps nuclear.

The irony is that the Western countries today, including the US, insist on retroactively calling themselves "racist" in their achieved relocation of the ethnic German population, as these hypocrites would now insist on calling Israel "racist" were Israel to advocate a life saving program for herself of a similar kind, dissimilar only in that the problem for the Allies was only a distant, "potential" one and for Israel the problem is at hand.

A peaceful relocation program sending the Arabs of Mandate Palestine to live in Arab nations, including some that could be sent to Iraq to prop up the numbers of the Sunni population — a program once advocated by some Arab leaders before 1948 — is no doubt not attainable. On the other hand, a different situation would prevail during war time. Were the Arabs to attack Israel, as is occurring at Gaza, then, as part of Israel's defense action, Arab relocation could be put into action as part of that defense.

Gaza offers a sterling example of the concept. The Gaza salient has been and is an historic invasion route of the lands of Israel from the south. Now that the Arabs have made Gaza into a military base to attack deep into Israel — this after Israel withdrew as a gesture for peace, another solid proof of hostile Arab intention — as a response Israel is well within her defensive right to create the secure borders prescribed by UN Resolution 242 in 1967 to cut off southern Gaza along the border with Egypt, creating a wide corridor that will preclude the illegal weapons supply tunnels from Egypt. The Arab population in the corridor, after being warned that the area was a military zone that is soon to be leveled, would be urged move, either going to Egypt (a reward to Egypt for its service to the Arab terrorists in enabling them to secure 9,000 rockets to assault Israel) or, going further north, compact the Gaza city population and offered Israel's help in their relocation to Arab countries.

Would Egypt find this a cause to go to war against Israel? I hardly think Egypt would create a provocative situation on her side in reaction, lest Egypt deservedly receive the full load of Gaza's population as a further consequence of a war.

Through this seizure of territory that belonged to Israel as part of the Mandate of Palestine and the relocation of its Arabs, Israel would be declaring as the consequence of the Arab war thrust upon her and that a potential impact that awaited other Arab enclaves in the Israeli territories that pursued war. While Jordan might not welcome a million new Arabs across its border, they may well tolerate far less, a few hundred thousand, a little at a time, especially if this population were promptly given transit to live in more roomy Iraq.

The absorption by Arab nations of Arab populations that threaten Israel's peace and survival is the means that would be used to solve the problem of the now millions of Arabs living in Lebanon that are miseducated to call themselves the true owners of Israel. Israel's policy of relocating dangerous, hostile Arab populations that are today the ocean in which the terrorist fish swim will be a sign that the era is over of an Israel that immolates and weakens herself for the futile purpose of winning over implacable Arab hearts and that there is a new Israeli deterimination to survive against the very obvious threat to her existence.

If the Arabs — who are the true "racists" in their forbidding of non Muslim nations from existing in the Middle East and who have not shirked from the expulsion of Jews from their lands, wish to avoid a devastating conflict that will change their government regimes and destroy their societies, they will accept Islam's escape hatch that allows Muslims to desist from jihad to avoid their own devastation. The Arabs must be faced up to that choice in the case of Israel for the sake of attaining peace in the region and enabling their own people to pursue productive lives.
 

David Basch is an architect and city planner in New York as well as the Freeman Center's political philosopher.

This article was posted February 8, 2009 by Freeman Center For Strategic Studies in Military/Strategic, Israeli Political, Jewish History, World History. It is archived at
http://freeman.org/serendipity/index.php?/archives/
414-MORE-ACCURACY-AND-DEPTH-NEEDED.html#extended

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