Sublime

THOUGH ISRAEL HAD PROVEN that it could make peace with nations willing to accept its existence and take on those who planned its destruction, the Jewish state’s new challenge was not standing armies, but terrorism—most notably the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Although the Palestinian demand for the destruction of Israel and the transfer of its Jewish population—as articulated in its covenant—is far less compelling from a moral perspective than the complaints of other stateless and occupied people, such as the Tibetans, the Kurds, and the Basques, the PLO’s resort to global terrorism has leapfrogged Pale

The Palestinian refugee issue has always been a ploy designed to turn Israel into a Palestinian state, and Arafat’s rejection of the generous Barak offer demonstrated this with little ambiguity.

While in Israel there were voices who advocated relinquishing lands so that the two people might live side by side, the PLO was hardly open to compromise. Its attitude to Zionism was explicit in its charter: Zionism is a colonialist movement in its inception, aggressive and expansionist in its goals, racist and segregationist in its configurations

Advocates often play games with the demographics in order to support their agenda-driven conclusions. In estimating the Arab population of Palestine at the time of the U.N. partition of 1947, advocates of the Arab cause sometimes include the population of what is now Jordan, as well as what is now the West Bank and Gaza. In assessing the fairness o

The Jewish state proposed by UNSCOP was at least larger than the area designated to them by Peel; Peel had proposed 20 percent of Palestine west of the Jordan for the Jews, and 80 percent for the Arabs. UNSCOP, on the other hand, proposed 55 percent for the Jews and 45 percent for the Arabs.

A second area of international effort involves taking refugees in on a temporary basis, although this often turns out to be an open-ended if not permanent commitment. The countries that have accepted the largest number of refugees in recent years include Turkey, Pakistan, Uganda, and Sudan, all neighbors of those countries where conflict has genera