Dennis Prager writes: Whenever I have received a call from a listener to my radio show challenging Israel’s legitimacy, I have asked these people if they ever called a radio show to challenge any other country’s legitimacy. In particular, I ask, have they ever questioned the legitimacy of Pakistan?
The answer, of course, is always “no.” In fact, no caller ever understood why I even mentioned Pakistan.
There are two reasons for this.
First, of all the 200-plus countries in the world, only Israel’s legitimacy is challenged. So mentioning any other country seems strange to a caller. Second, almost no one outside of India and Pakistan knows anything about the founding of Pakistan.
Only months before the U.N. adopted a proposal to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state in 1947, India was partitioned into a Muslim and a Hindu state. The Hindu state was, of course, India. And the Muslim state became known as Pakistan. It comprises 310,000 square miles, about 40,000 square miles larger than Texas.
In both cases, the declaration of an independent state resulted in violence. As soon as the newly established state of Israel was declared in May 1948, it was invaded by six Arab armies. And the partition of India led to a terrible violence between Muslims and Hindus.
According to the final report of the United Nations Conciliation Commission from Dec. 28, 1949, the 1948 war of Israel’s independence created 726,000 Arabs refugees. Many sources put the figure at about 200,000 less. A roughly equal number of Jewish refugees — approximately 700,000 — were created when they were forcibly expelled from the Arab countries where they had lived for countless generations. In addition, approximately 10,000 Arabs were killed in the fighting that ensued after the Arab invasion of Israel.
Now let’s turn to the creation of Pakistan. According to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, the creation of Pakistan resulted in 14 million refugees — Hindus fleeing Pakistan and Muslims fleeing India. Assuming a 50-50 split, the creation of Pakistan produced about seven million Hindu refugees — at least 10 times the number of Arab refugees that resulted from the war surrounding Israel’s creation. And the Mideast war, it should be recalled, was started by the Arab nations surrounding Israel. Were it not for the Arab rejection of Israel’s creation (and existence within any borders) and the subsequent Arab invasion, there would have been no Arab refugees.
And regarding deaths, the highest estimate of Arab deaths during the 1948 war following the partition of Palestine is 10,000. The number of deaths that resulted from the creation of Pakistan is around one million.
This writer carries no brief for Israel. All that is written and argued about “Israel’s right to exist” is nonsense. Neither Israel nor the United States nor any other nation has a right to exist. A state’s ability to survive depends solely on its own social cohesion, economic viability, and domestic political, international, and military behavior and actions, not on some non-existent right the Israel-First lobby dreamed-up to use to propagandized the American people into eternally supporting a nation that is completely irrelevant — and, indeed, bloodily counter-productive — to genuine U.S. national security interests.
That said, Israel and all nation-states have an absolute right to defend themselves in the manner they deem mandatory for their survival. In the now-dying Western democracies that defense includes the process of national elections to choose national political leaders. For a foreign nation to interfere in such elections — as the disloyal U.S. citizen Israel-Firsters and Mexican governments routinely do in U.S. elections — is to undermine the intervened-in nation’s absolute right of self-defense. The Obama administration’s State Department apparently identified disloyal Israeli citizens in Israel and transferred to them at least $350,000 for to use in a campaign meant to defeat Mr. Netanyahu in the recent Israeli election. Such intervention is tantamount to an act of war, just as it is criminal negligence for any government to refuse to identify and aggressively prosecute those of its citizens who use foreign money to influence a national election.
JEFF* says: Dennis Prager knows nothing about the partition of India and apparently very little about the founding of Israel as well.
This has nothing to do with a state’s legitimacy or its right to defend itself (both of which are dealt with better in Scheuer’s piece) but with propaganda to deliberately misstate established historical facts.
In the case of India and Pakistan, the division of British Imperial India into West Pakistan, India and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was agreed to by the parties. As far as I know, the Arabs never agreed to the partition of Palestine. Not all Muslims fled the new India for Pakistan. India is the country with the second largest number of Muslims, after Indonesia and well ahead of Pakistan. Neither the Indians nor Pakistanis were European refugees. With the exception of Kashmir in which the Indian government persuaded the ruling prince to join India rather than allow a plebiscite in the majority Muslim state, there was little fighting between Indian and Pakistani forces. There are many histories of this. I would refer him to Nirad Choudhuri, or even for popular history Collins and LaPierre, but if he paid attention to the movie Gandhi he would have evinced a higher understanding than his comments you quoted.
Prager states that 700,000 Jews were expelled by Arab states at the same time as Israel was founded. This is not true. Ultimately 700,000 Jews emigrated to Israel, but this was after the war of Independence and most of them were not “expelled.” Many of them regretted coming to Israel.
Prager minimizes the impact of the War of Independence by saying 10,000 Arabs were killed. When one considers that he means civilians, it is a pretty fucked up statement. Benny Morris, Tom Segev and other respected Israeli historians show that the neighboring Arab states never asked the native Palestinians to flee until their armies could come in and defeat the nascent Jewish state. Ari Shavit writes in great detail about the war crimes perpetrated by Israel to ethnically cleanse Arab areas desired by the Israeli government. Perhaps these people weren’t killed, but they were forced out of ancestral houses and land at gunpoint with only what they could carry or load in an oxcart.
