By DR. REUVEN BERKO, ISRAEL HAYOM—
As Israeli Jews celebrated the holiday of Shavuot on Wednesday, Palestinians commemorated their 65th Nakba Day, which begins on May 15 according to their calendar. This confluence of dates is a historical jest that has a lot to teach us.
For Jews, this holiday is one of the three pilgrimage festivals on which Jews ascended to the Temple in Jerusalem thousands of years ago, carrying the first fruits of their land. Our sages also said that anyone who sells the land on which he grew these first fruits to a non-Jew is an “idol worshipper” (Tractate Sanhedrin).
The Arab tribes and hordes that arrived here on horseback in the 7th century and afterward, armed with curved swords, came to plunder the land following the exile of its Jewish owners. Most of those now called Palestinians are the descendants of those nomads and Muslim raiders who took over the Israelites’ land. These raiders are trying to oppose the inevitable religious and historical process of the return of the land to its Jewish owners, which even their Prophet Muhammad foretold.
Their defeat in the war they initiated against the Jews who had returned home forced these invaders to return to the Arab regions whence they came. This is called their Nakba. Any Arabs who seek a “right of return” have the right to return to the Arabian deserts they emerged from.
What’s interesting is that while the Middle East burns, and while good Muslims are being killed in Muslim countries, the emir of Qatar as well his Al-Jazeera television station are trying to ignite a conflagration here, as if the battle against Israel could distract the nation from its real problems and cover up the omissions of the Arabs who are not helping their Sunni brethren from being slaughtered by the Shiite (and Alawite) sword in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.
In this context, the emir is conducting a hypocritical campaign against us. When Syrian regime targets were hit in an air campaign attributed to Israel by foreign sources, in effect aiding the rebels, the emir and Arab leaders condemned Israel for “violating Syrian air space.” As if that’s what bothers them.
It turns out that the Qatari emir is a professional hypocrite. On the one hand, he is advancing the “improved” peace process of the Arab League to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel, with mutual land swaps. On the other hand, he funds the Hamas terror organization, whose heads, Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal, call for Israel’s destruction.
At the same time, the emir is sheltering Sheikh Yusuf al-Qardawi, who permitted suicide attacks against Israeli citizens, and recently sent him on a trip of incitement to Gaza. The message carried by the sheikh was to continue the Islamic struggle and carry out jihad against Israel until its destruction.
The emir’s television station is busy inciting the Palestinians never to come to an agreement with Israel and to aspire to its destruction. The two programs, “Their Archive and Our History,” and “The Right that Refuses to be Forgotten,” consist of incessant brainwashing against the “crimes of Zionism,” the destruction of “Palestine’s” villages, the murder and expulsion of their residents and the right of return. The Zionists are “mixed multitudes” with no rights who unlawfully received the land from the British. The British must apologize for the error they caused.
The filmed declaration by senior Fatah figure Jibril Rajoub, who said that Israel is an enemy of Islam, the Arabs and Palestinians, and that if he possessed nuclear weapons he would destroy us, obviates any chance for an agreement. It turns out that agreements, justice, history and logic will not avail. Nor will Quranic verses to the effect that the “blessed land” and the Temple belong to Israel. In our region, power is the only acceptable argument.