No! The conflict between the Arabs and the Jews does not go back centuries

(Also published in the Delaware County Daily Times, Thursday, January 15, 2009, p17)

By Dr. Mahmoud S. Audi

Misguided or misinformed, journalists, TV news reporters and anchors, politicians, and innocent lay people, to dismiss the current egregious assault on Gaza as something not to be worried about, have been saying,that the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis “goes back centuries.” It does not. In fact, the Arabs and the Muslims, and the Jews had been the best of citizens of the Arab and the Muslim worlds, including the centuries they had lived together in peace and prosperity in Spain, where they had also suffered together the pains of the Inquisition.
Here, from memory, are some major chronological events and pointers to support the premise of this article:
• Both the Jews and the Arabs are the children of Abraham and they both belong to the same ethnic tribes, the Semites.
• When the Jews fled Egypt with Moses they invaded Palestine and established short lived kingdoms in the conquered land.
• When the Persians expanded their empire to the Mediterranean Sea, they dispersed the Jews away from Palestine. Some of them fled south into the Arabian Peninsula.
• As the Persian Empire weakened, some Jews returned to Palestine and lived in rebuilt and short lived kingdoms.
• During the first century A.D., the Romans dispersed the Jews from Palestine after they had conquered the land east of the Mediterranean Sea. These Jews have become the ancestors of the current European Jews, Arab Jews, Persian Jews, Indian Jews, and other Jews.
• At about seven hundred years after the birth of Jesus, Prophet Muhammad was called upon to carry the message of Islam from God to the world.
• Christian Arabs, Jewish Arabs, and pagan Arabs lived together in Yathrib (the current Saudi Arabian city: Medina). The three communities welcomed Prophet Muhammad when he and his followers fled their home town: Mecca, because his tribe and other Arab tribes refused to accept Islam and vowed to kill the Prophet and his followers. The pagans have converted to Islam, and most of the Christians and the Jews kept their religions; they have become the People of the Book.
• The Prophet of Islam wanted to establish alliances with the two communities to fend against the pagans of Mecca who might invade Medina, but the Jews wanted an exclusive pact with the Prophet and he yielded. However, soon afterwards conspiracies against the young religion started to spawn. They were discovered and eliminated. But they continued. This led the Prophet to declare that there would be no place for the Jews and the Christians in the city. Some of the Arab Jews and the Arab Christians went to what is now known as Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq.
• Later when the Muslim Empire spread throughout the land, the Jews and the Christians went wherever their Muslim cousins and brothers went. They had become among the elite of the Muslim world. Many of them became leading artisans and intellectuals.
• In later centuries the Jews of Europe had become the objects of persecuted in their own countries. They had been despised and put to trial in Christian countries from Russia in the east to France and Spain in the west. They had also been despised in Christian America.
• There were highly publicized trials of Jews in Christian Russia and in Christian France in the nineteen century. That led to a conference of prominent Jewish leaders in Switzerland. The conclusion of the conference was the establishment of Zionism, a political movement, in 1898. The grand goal of the movement is the establishing of the Kingdom of Israel from Egypt to Iraq.
• That year, that conference, and that decision put the Arabs and the Zionists on a collision course that continues to produce violence in that area and in the world.

Another Gaza Massacre as of Saturday, January 3, 2009 – Equivalent Statistics

Since Saturday 27 December 2008, the Israeli piloted F-16s has dropped hundreds of tons of explosives on Gaza, killing hundreds of men, women, and children without discrimination. The number killed is about 500--about 125 of them were civilians. The total killing is equivalent to 100,000 US citizens, and the civilians killed are equivalent to 25,000 US citizens. The 2000 Palestinians killed by the Israeli war machine is equivalent of about quarter million Americans.
Do you see the travesty, are you outraged? Cry out loud, assert your humanity, stand by the weak and feed the hungry. Cry loud enough,to let the President hear you.

The Suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza

The late Edward Said was a prominent Arab American. He was for decades a distinguished professor at Columbia University, New York. For a while he intellectually participated in framing the plight of the Palestinians. He was born in Palestine and spent most of his life in the USA. He recently died of cancer in New York City.
The suffering of the Palestinians and the current focus on slaughtering the Palestinians, destroying their homes, schools, mosques, in Gaza is not new. Edward Said wrote the following in August 2002, which I received via email from The Friends of Sabeel—North America. “Sabeel” is an Arabic word which means “The Way.” It is the voice of the Palestinian Christians. Sabeel has friends all over the world and they include Muslims and Jews.
"Every Palestinian has become a prisoner. Gaza is surrounded by an electrified fence on three sides: imprisoned like animals, Gazans are unable to move, unable to work, unable to sell their vegetables or fruit, unable to go to school. They are exposed from the air to
Israeli planes and helicopters and are gunned down like turkeys on the ground by tanks and machine guns. Impoverished and starved, Gaza is a human nightmare.

Hope has been eliminated from the Palestinian vocabulary so that only raw defiance remains.

Palestinians must die a slow death so that Israel can have its security, which is just around the corner but cannot be realized because of the special Israeli "insecurity." The whole world must sympathize, while the cries of Palestinian orphans, sick old women, bereaved communities, and tortured prisoners simply go unheard and unrecorded. Doubtless, we will be told, these horrors serve a larger purpose than mere sadistic cruelty. After all, "the two sides" are engaged in a "cycle of violence" that has to be stopped, sometime, somewhere. Once in a while we ought to pause and declare indignantly that there is only one side with an army and a country: the other is a stateless dispossessed population of people without rights or any present way of securing them. The language of suffering and concrete daily life has been either hijacked or so perverted as, in my opinion, to be useless except as pure fiction deployed as a screen for the purpose of more killing and painstaking torture - slowly, fastidiously, inexorably.

That is the truth of what Palestinians suffer."

Edward Said
August, 2002