You Are Going To Solve What?

by James Glaser
August 29, 2006

For about five decades Christian politicians in the West have been trying to solve the problem of the Jews hating the Arabs, and of the Arabs hating the Jews in the Middle East. Needless to say, nobody has come up with a solution yet, and I don't think either the Arab or the Jew is really all that interested in finding one.

Somebody e-mailed the following to me:

    The argument that alienation between Jew and Arab goes back to the Old Testament. Abraham's two sons were half-brothers. One son was Isaac, acclaimed the father of the Jewish people, who was the second son of Abraham, born of his aging wife, Sarah. Ishmael, who is regarded as the patriarch of the Arab peoples, was Abraham's first son, born of Hagar, Sarah's maidservant.

Brothers who never get along will fight about the dumbest things. It doesn't matter if one wants to make atonement for past wrongs, the other will make some smart remark, and the quarrel starts all over again. However if some one else jumps into the fray, chances are that both brothers will stick together and attack the new comer. That is why the West has wisely kept its troops out of Palestine. Back in the late 40's Great Britain had troops there. and every time they were bombed by terrorists, they knew the attack could have come from either side.

Now the West wants to send thousands of troops into Southern Lebanon to stand between the Arab and the Jew—two groups who have been fighting since Moses took the Israelites out of Egypt. There are books written on that, besides the Bible, but any way you look at it, Arabs and Jews have been fighting for thousands and thousands of years.

After World War II somebody in the West decided to put these two groups back together again. It is almost like they wanted to continue the Holocaust.

I believe that some of the reasons the winners of World War II decided to send the Jews to Israel are that Britain, France, and the United States didn't want to deal with making reparations to all of these displaces people. What if the Jews demanded the land they had before the war? What if they demanded the treasures taken from them? What if they wanted their factories back?

Sending the Jewish people to Palestine made them both out of sight and out of mind. Israel has been in a constant state of war almost since that "second exodus" in the 1940's. If they are not in an actual war, they are on a heightened state of alert. You keep people in that frame of mind for a couple of generations and getting them to think about peace is a tall order.

Now we will have thousands of Western troops sitting in the middle. They will be hated by both sides, because they are keeping each from their traditional enemy,

The smart thing to do after WW II would have been to separate these two groups by thousands of miles. At the very least, it would have been smart to have them is separate hemispheres.

If we can't do that, and really we can't now, then we should walk away and let them fight it out. If we continue to take the Jewish side, the Arabs will continue to think of us as the enemy. If we take the Arab side, we already know what will happen. Read about the 34 American sailors killed by Israel when they attacked the USS Liberty.

We are in a no win situation in the Middle East, and we will never be in a winning one. If we walk away now, we could minimize the loss of life help whoever survives. If we stay now, we will be going against over three thousand years of history, and we are not that powerful. Jews and Arabs are not going to get along—period.

Staying in the Middle East is foolish. We are not going to put a stop to a war that has been going on for thousands of years. Those who think we can are fools.




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