Six Hundred and Forty to One

Ruth R. Wisse, in a December 3 opinion piece in The Harvard Crimson entitled “How Much Land is Enough:”

Before you begin reading this, please have before you on screen, paper, or wall, a reliable full-scale map of the Middle East, one stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan, from the Caspian Sea to the Gulf of Aden. You will note that the territory covering 5.25 million miles belongs to states of the Arab League — 18 independent Arab states and three part-Arab Muslim states, Mauritania, Somalia, and Djibouti.

There is one holdout in that hegemony: Along the Mediterranean, south of Lebanon, east of Egypt, and west of Jordan, is the 8,000 square mile Jewish state of Israel — the only Jewish homeland that ever was and ever will be. . . . The ratio of Arab to Jewish land is 640:1 . . . .

Were I a Palestinian Arab citizen of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (34,495 square miles, population 5.8 million), with its magnificent city of Petra, I would wonder why we didn’t federate with the Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank when that territory was in our possession until 1967? Why didn’t we settle our refugees as the Jews did theirs in a territory one quarter the size of ours? Since the number of Arab refugees from Israel equaled the number of refugee Jews fleeing Arab lands, why didn’t we accept this population exchange? Why did we join the Arab wars on Israel with the aim of driving the Jews into the sea?

. . . I marvel at the fact that some of my colleagues apparently share the assumption that Arab and Muslim leaders are entitled to over one-tenth of the world’s land surface, while questioning the right of Jews to land about one-ninth the size of Syria.

Much has changed in the Middle East during the past six decades, but one political feature remains disturbingly constant. The Arab League formed in 1945 to prevent the emergence of Israel, launching the most lop-sided war in human history, a war that continues hot and cold to the present day, pitting multiple non- and anti-democratic regimes against the Jewish State. . . .

Moreover, the war against Israel required the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs to permanent refugee status, lest their productive redeployment mean (as Cairo radio put it in 1957) “the final disposal of a moral asset.”  The Arab world fueled its war against Israel with the permanent misery of Palestinian Arabs — and ascribed that misery to the “oppressor Jews” in a more perfect moral inversion than any literary Satan ever proposed. . . .

Look again at the full-scale map. Keep it always within reach and often within sight. Don’t let any course or discussion of the Middle East proceed except in its presence. And if the need arises, ask why Arabs and Muslims think they deserve odds greater than 640:1.