Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 26
The struggle of the Jews to defend their homeland has become the longest war in history
Tiglath-Pileser III – now there’s a name to conjure with. The Neo-Assyrian monarch bears the dubious distinction of embarking on the very first conquest of Israel in the 8th century BCE i.e. some 2,800 years ago [1].
By my reckoning, that invasion, and the mass deportations that followed in its wake, marked the start of the conflict between Israel and her neighbours, thereby making it by far the longest war in history. (Coming way behind in second place is the 781-year Iberian Religious War, or Reconquista, between the Catholic Spanish Empire and the Moors living in today’s Morocco and Algeria).
Here’s a list of the imperial forces that imposed their rule on the Jewish homeland: Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Seleucids, Romans, Byzantines, Sassanids, Arabs, Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Seljuks, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Ottomans and British. So that you don’t have to, I’ve counted them – 17. That’s a minimum figure as the Babylonians and Arabs each invaded at least twice and Napoleon had a brief ill-fated shot at it too.
For around the latter two millennia of homelessness, Jewish efforts to preserve and then regain sovereignty were ineffectual and disheartening. Religious Jews prayed fervently for the Messiah to no avail. Secular Jews focused on community building and integration into their host societies. All of these efforts floundered in the face of persecution, apathy and assimilation. Until the arrival on the scene of a dapper young journalist called Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century.
Herzl electrified the Jewish world with his revolutionary proposal that the Jewish people return to Zion to establish a fully-fledged modern state. Not all Jews were ready for his radicalism but these refuseniks were largely silenced within a few decades by the growing virulence of antisemitism in Europe – the pogroms and massacres in the east and National Socialism in the west. Self-determination turned out to be the only answer to the existential question posed by the Holocaust.
Historians tend to view the British Mandate (1920-48) as the crucible within which the conflict between the Zionists and their neighbours was brewed. In their struggle to recreate their National Home, as promised by the League of Nations and enshrined in the British Mandate, the Jews found themselves waging a trilateral war against both the Arabs and the British.
The British decision, in January 1947, to relinquish the Mandate led to the UN partition resolution a few months later and to Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948. Jewish rejoicing was short-lived as their reborn state was confronted by a formidable array of Arab militias and armies bent on reversing the tide of history. Israel’s war of independence cost her dearly in human treasure that she could ill afford but the primary aim – survival – had been achieved. The Rhodes armistice agreement in 1949 was supposed to lead to peace. The Arab states, smarting from defeat at the hands of the ragtag Jewish forces, had other ideas and regarded the ceasefire deal as buying time as they prepared for the “second round.”
The 1956 Sinai Campaign (Operation Kadesh) – known as the Suez Crisis in the West, for whom it was a last-gasp projection of fading imperial power – was Israel’s response to escalating Egyptian aggression [2]. Indeed Israel was the only one of the three partner countries that had a legitimate claim to self-defence against attacks on its citizens; Britain and France were simply protecting a colonial-era asset, the Suez Canal. Israel’s actions were legally justified on three grounds – Nasser’s repeated declarations of his intent to destroy the Jewish state (with the help, hardly coincidentally, of former Nazi scientists and engineers), his support for cross-border terrorist attacks on Israel, and his closure of both the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Eilat to Israeli shipping.
The 1967 Six Day War was provoked by Nasser’s closing (again) the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and expelling the UN peacekeeping force from the Sinai. The Arab media were instantly filled with predictions of the impending destruction of the loathsome “Zionist entity” and the massacre of its Jewish inhabitants [2]. When Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against the Egyptian and Syrian air bases, Jordan’s King Hussein joined the fray despite Israel’s frantic pleas that he should desist. Many commentators identify that war as the crucial milestone in the conflict that entrenched the opposing parties in their current irreconcilable positions (a misleadingly simplistic analysis to which I will return in a future blog).
Following that spectacular victory, Israel’s euphoria soon morphed into a complacency that President Sadat exploited in launching the 1973 Yom Kippur war in which the Egyptians attempted to reclaim territory lost in 1967. In the days before the shooting started, the US warned Israel not to repeat a pre-emptive attack of the kind she had employed in 1967. Israel obliged, was nearly overrun by the enemy, and suffered horrendous casualties for her pains.
Probably the most controversial episode in Israel’s military history was the 1982 Peace for Galilee campaign that turned into the nightmarish First Lebanon War. The Israeli media dubbed it a “war of choice” though it followed years of Katyusha rocket attacks and gruesome terrorist atrocities perpetrated by the PLO. Again Israel prevailed and the PLO was expelled from Southern Lebanon.
Despairing of ever defeating Israel militarily, Arafat and his allies now focused their efforts almost exclusively on terrorism. The two “intifadas” of 1987-94 and 2000-2005 exacted a dreadful price on both sides and achieved nothing for the PLO but that didn’t deter the Iranian proxy militia Hezbollah from mounting renewed attacks on northern Israel in 2006 thereby triggering the Second Lebanon War. When that too failed, the Iranians gave the green light to Hamas, Gaza’s totalitarian rulers since 2007, to test Israel’s southern flank by launching intermittent waves of rocket attacks aimed indiscriminately at civilians over the subsequent 15 years. Whenever Israel responded, as any other country would do, she was yet again hypocritically condemned by the international community for protecting her citizens.
Just War Theory posits that there are circumstances in which war is acceptable and even necessary. From St Augustine in the fourth century to the UN Charter in the twentieth, theologians, philosophers and diplomats have sought to define the conditions under which war is justifiable. First and foremost of these is the principle of defending one’s country against an aggressor. Despite its long record of antipathy towards Israel, the UN [3] itself offers legitimacy for Israel’s military record. Here is article 51 of its charter: Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of collective or individual self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations.
The legal right of Israel to self-defence is beyond doubt. Israelis have always set the bar for war high for themselves while their critics, true to their discriminatory tradition, set it – for Israel alone – virtually beyond reach. Why does the world tolerate this double standard? An even more important question is too rarely asked: what motivates and sustains the enduring belligerence of Israel’s enemies? The answer is depressingly banal: their violent rejection of the Jewish right to self-determination.
This statement from the Friends of Israel Initiative [4] neatly summarises Israel’s predicament:
“Unlike any other country in the world, Israel has not had to endure wars between periods of peace but has experienced periods of limited quiet during a long war against it with no end in sight...The conflict is neither rational nor logical: rather than benefit those who attack Israel, it works against their own interests as well as Israel’s. Israel’s enemies have never won an armed conflict against Israel and know that they cannot ever win such a conflict, yet they continue their aggression.”
Acknowledging reality, Egypt and Jordan memorably bucked that trend – and have recently been joined by a handful of others via the Abraham Accords – but this conciliatory approach has been more than offset by an Islamist Iran and its extremist proxies who ceaselessly strive to exploit weaknesses in Israel’s protective armour. Not wishing to be outflanked by these jihadist actors, even the “moderate” Palestinian leadership has resolutely eschewed genuine peace-making.
King Tiglath-Pileser III couldn’t have known what he was starting all those aeons ago, or that his attempt to liquidate the Jewish state would be emulated down the generations by other Middle Eastern leaders from Haj Amin al-Husseini, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hafez al-Assad and Yasser Arafat in the 20th century to Mahmoud Abbas, Ismail Haniya, Hassan Nasrallah and Ali Khamenei in the 21st.
That’s why this problem seems insoluble, though in reality the solution is, and always has been, at hand. We patiently await the arrival of more Middle Eastern statesmen in the mould of President Sadat and King Hussein – starting with a Palestinian leader willing to reciprocate repeated Israeli offers to negotiate a just peace. Until that happens, the war against the Jews looks likely to enter its fourth millennium.
1. Gordis D. Israel. A Concise History of a Nation Reborn. New York, Harper Collins, 2016, p36.
2. Shapira A. Israel: A History. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2014.
3. United Nations Charter, Chapter VII Article 51. https://legal.un.org/repertory/art51.shtml
4. Friends of Israel Initiative 2017. Why The Allen Plan Is Detrimental to Israel’s Future Security. http://www.friendsofisraelinitiative.org/contents/uploads/papers/pdf/Why%20the%20Allen%20Plan%20is%20Detrimental%20for%20Israel’s%20Future%20Security%204.0%20(2).pdf
