On Democracies and Death Cults: Israel and the Future of Civilization

by Douglas Murray

Israel’s neighbors had first tried to snuff the state out at its moment of birth. In 1947, when the United Nations voted to approve the partition plan creating an Israeli state and a Palestinian state, there were any number of directions in which history might have gone. The Arab states could have accepted their neighbor, with the area recently ruled by the British under League of Nations mandate divided up as the UN had suggested along clear, agreed-upon lines. In 1948, when the State of Israel was created, it was perfectly possible that a Palestinian state could have been formed alongside it. But the Arab states saw the very idea of a slither of the land becoming a Jewish state as an affront. Instead of accepting their neighbor, they decided instead to kill it. The moment in 1948 when Israel was formally re-created and war was immediately waged upon it by all of its neighbors would not be the last time in the state’s history when dancing and war followed one after the other. Of course, the Arab states failed in 1948. The Arabs inside Israel whom the Arab states told to leave, promising that they would soon return to their lands with no Jewish oppressor, were not just let down but abandoned, becoming in the process citizens of Jordan, Lebanon, and other surrounding countries. At the same time, Jews were either expelled or encouraged to leave the Arab countries in which they had lived for centuries. From Yemen, Iran, and Iraq to as far afield as Morocco, the native Jews we...