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One response to “Arab Public Opinion Poll About Israeli War On Gaza”

1. 

   Conrad Black

   March 28, 2024

   The NDP’s Palestine Motion Was Wrong-Headed From the Start
   By Conrad Black

   The stormy debate in Canada’s House of Commons recently over the NDP’s motion to recognize a Palestinian state,
   ending with a profound last-minute
   government modification of the bill, revealed the widespread
   misunderstanding in Canadian official circles of the nature of the
   present conflict in Gaza. As originally formulated, while the NDP motion
   unambiguously recognized the right of Israel to exist, implicitly as a
   Jewish state, it ascribed no blame whatever to Hamas, which has governed
   Gaza for over 16 years, for the outbreak of the present war.

   No such motion could remotely be acceptable in the legislature of any
   country that authentically wishes a just resolution of the ancient
   conflict in the Middle East now raging in Gaza. It is not six months ago
   that Hamas, which Canada recognizes as a terrorist organization,
   violated a long-agreed ceasefire with Israel, invaded that country by
   land, sea, air, and tunnel, and brutally massacred approximately 1,200
   Israelis, 85 percent of them civilians and many of those women, the very
   young, and the elderly. In many cases, women and children were violated
   and murdered in the most depraved and sadistic manner imaginable, with
   the declared objective of incurring the greatest possible revulsion in
   Israel and the rest of the civilized world. It was a vintage case of
   premeditated terrorism.

   It was also the greatest single death toll of Jews in one day since the
   end of the Holocaust, with the liberation of the Nazi death camps in the
   last weeks of the Second World War in Europe, not excluding the wars of
   survival that Israel was forced to wage in 1948, 1967, and 1973, as well
   as the Suez War of 1956. Israel suffered a loss of life that was
   proportionately 20 times as great as the American loss of life at Pearl
   Harbor, which was at least almost entirely confined to personnel of the
   United States Navy, and in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in
   New York and Washington. Israel immediately announced that it was at
   war, formally confirmed that condition, and formed an all-party national
   unity government representing all shadings of opinion among the almost
   80 percent Jewish population of that country, which was created by the
   United Nations as a Jewish state and homeland in 1948.

   As formulated—and this same misconception affected much of the debate
   over the NDP measure—the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, were treated as
   just another border incident in the long history of skirmishing between
   Israel and extreme Muslim entities on its borders. The character of that
   onslaught was intended by its authors and accepted by its victims to be
   an act of war, not just a border incident, and this was stubbornly
   ignored by the New Democrats in composing their bill. They presented
   what amounted to a no-fault motion, seeking the restoration of a peace
   that has never existed since Israel unilaterally and voluntarily
   withdrew from Gaza in 2006.

   The real problem in the Arab/Israel conflict has been successfully
   reduced to a dispute between Israel and the adjoining territories, whose
   status has not been agreed upon, which claim to represent a nationality
   separate and distinct from the other Arab countries in the area, and who
   further deny that the Jews have any right to a Jewish state. This is no
   longer a view that is shared by the Arab powers who, despite the
   customary window-dressing of support for the Palestinians, are sitting
   conspicuously on their hands. They detest the Muslim terrorists just as
   much as the Israelis do and are ultimately more dangerously threatened
   by them than Israel is.

   An appropriate measure for the Canadian Parliament would have placed the
   blame for this conflict squarely where it belongs, and would have
   emphasized the sine qua non for any resolution of the problem would be
   for the stateless Arabs, in the still unallocated territory of the old
   League of Nations Palestine mandate, to recognize the right of Israel to
   exist as a Jewish state in exchange for the recognition of their right
   to a state whose borders would have to be negotiated. This is what the
   British foreign secretary and former prime minister, Arthur Balfour,
   proposed in 1917 when the Turks still ruled the territory. And this is
   the basis for Palestinian claims to nationality.

   Balfour promised a homeland for the Jewish people without compromising
   the rights of the Arabs. It is the details of this almost impossible
   demarcation that have yet to be determined. No well-meaning calls for a
   ceasefire and the triumph of humanitarian instincts—in a place where
   any such benign human trait has rarely been in evidence since biblical
   times—will facilitate peace, promote Western unity on the issue, or
   confirm any distinction whatever upon Canada.

   The Jews have been a presence in the Middle East for over 5,000 years
   and were one of the larger groups along the eastern Mediterranean shore
   until the majority of Jews became Christians in the early Christian era
   and in emulation of Christ himself, an Aramathean Jew ethnically, but
   evidently the first Christian. The Palestinians, initially the
   Philistines, arrived by sea approximately 2,600 years ago but never
   actually governed themselves beyond tribal matters, as first the
   Persians, then the Macedonians, then the Seleucids, Romans, Byzantines,
   Arabians, Christian crusaders, Turks, and the British and French
   governed the geography now claimed by the Palestinians.

   There is absolutely no contradiction between endorsing the rights of
   Israel to exist as a Jewish state, and the rights of the Palestinians to
   have their own state. The Palestinians were undoubtedly roughly treated
   by Israel at the founding of that state, but in the context of all of
   the Arab powers attacking Israel and urging both revolt and flight upon
   the Palestinians. They have been shabbily treated as pawns by the Arabs
   since.

   It is the Arab powers, and not Israel, that has maintained the
   Palestinians in their destitute and radicalized condition, and it is the
   ancient enemy of the Arabs—the Persians, Iran—which now subsidizes
   Palestinian terrorism and uses the Palestinians as cannon fodder in the
   completely illegal but historically precedented Iranian effort to
   encroach upon the Arabs, while sounding the most hateful tocsin of all:
   anti-Semitism. One more time, and despite the fact that the world
   created Israel as a homeland for the Jews, the Jews are to be
   subjugated, expelled, or simply murdered.

   Shame on all those who would facilitate such an infamy on a people that
   has been oppressed so often, has suffered so deeply and unjustly, and
   yet has achieved so much and has made the desert bloom in the only
   democracy in the Middle East. I excuse the New Democratic MPs from being
   useful idiots for the parties of evil unintentionally, but their
   ignorance of the implications of their motion cannot be so easily
   excused. The fact that the government came to its senses just before the
   NDP motion passed, to turn it into the usual pablum of irrelevant and
   hopeful platitudes, is slightly commendable. Better by far is the
   position of the Conservative Party from the outset that the current
   conflict is a just response by Israel to a monstrous provocation.

   The Hamas leadership has declared that it will win if it is not
   exterminated as a military and terrorist force. The united government of
   Israel has pledged to exterminate it as a military and terrorist force,
   and this course is the only discernible method to translate the present
   conflict into serious progress towards a comprehensive and durable
   solution.

   It is clear from the ratio of combat to noncombatant deaths that Israel
   is proceeding as gently as it can. We should encourage Israel to allow
   as many women, children, and elderly people out of Rafah as possible and
   to assure that the unambiguously civil population receives adequate
   assistance, but we should also encourage them to wipe out Hamas as a
   terrorist organization to the last individual. It is not for us or any
   other country to tell Israel how to win this war. Israel is acting on
   its pledge after the Holocaust that Jews would “never again” go
   passively in large numbers to their deaths. Nor should anyone ask that
   of them.

   The road to peace in this conflict is not a “peace of the
   brave”—it is the extermination of the evil by the just.
   I would love to hear from you. You can email me at
   conrad.black@epochtimes.ca Please mention the Silo when contacting me.

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