Iranian PM Ahmadinijad:
“If [the Holocaust] has actually taken place, where did it happen? Why should the Palestinian people become homeless (because of this)? Why should Palestinian children, women and mothers be killed on streets every day for 60 years?”
The president said that these innocent people losing their lives had no role in World War II.
“All of them had been killed in Europe and Palestinian people were not involved in it,” he added. — MEMRI
The assumption is that Israel draws its legitimacy from the Holocaust. But nothing could be farther from the truth. By 1948, the Zionist enterprise in Palestine had been underway for about 60 years. All of the institutions of a state were in place. The League of Nations mandate of 1922 recognized the historic connection of the Jews to the land and the need to create a ‘Jewish National Home’ in Palestine (not in all of Palestine). The Jewish Yishuv in Palestine had built an economy which provided for many more Jews and Arabs than could have lived there if it had not been for Zionism. The Jewish leadership was totally focussed on creating a state, and — as in other areas administered by the colonial powers — it would have happened, Holocaust or no.
The Arab leadership, especially the antisemitic Nazi Haj Amin al-Husseini, refused to agree to any Jewish state anywhere in Palestine, even in the area where there was a clear Jewish majority. This leadership denied the Jews their right to self-determination, denied the legitimacy of the League of Nations mandate, and consistently violated the human rights of the Jews by inciting riots and pogroms, such as the one in Hebron in 1928 in which 67 Jews were murdered and the city ethnically cleansed of its 800 Jews.
In 1937, the British Peel Commission proposed a partition of Palestine into a (small) Jewish and an Arab state. The Zionists accepted it, but the Arabs did not. All subsequent attempts to provide for both Jewish and Arab self-determination, from 1948 through the Clinton/Barak plan of 2000, were rejected by the Arab nations and the Palestinian leadership, as were all attempts to heal the wounds of 1948 by resettling Arab refugees (the Jews resettled their own refugees). In recent years, Yasser Arafat and his cronies stole literally billions of dollars that were intended to help build the infrastructure of a Palestinian state.
So my response to Ahmadinijad is the following: why should the Jewish people continue to suffer from aggressive wars and terrorism because of something that they were not responsible for — the failure of the Arab leadership? The Jews did not refuse any of the partition agreements, the Jews did not prevent a solution to the refugee problem, and the Jews did not impoverish the Palestinian people.
The Arabs and their friends like to turn history upside down, but they can’t change reality.
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