January 30, 2025: Last year featured an unusually large number of efforts to rearrange the ethnic, religious and political realities of the Middle East. The most visible and endlessly frustrating effort is the destruction of Israel. After that there are calls for the replacement of Arab dictatorships and sham democracies with true democracies. The only functioning democracy in the region is Israel. At the same time Israelis are frequently blamed for any problems that occur. This hostility to democracy in the Middle East has long been noted. For example, Britain and France did not intend to establish democracies in the Near East after World War I when the collapse of the Ottoman Empire left Europeans, rather than Turks, in charge of the region. Democracy did not appear to work in the Middle East. When they did work, they did not last. Israel was the only exception and most governments and factions in the region hated Israel for its democracy, stability and prosperity.

This hatred most recently expressed itself when Hamas, a Palestinian anti-Israel militia unsuccessfully attacked Israel in October 2023. The Palestinians have, since the 1940’s Israeli war of independence, been their own worst enemies and never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. This mess started a century ago after World War I when the victorious allies had defeated Germany and its Turkish ally. Part of the post-war plan was to reorganize Palestine, the Levant region of Syria and Lebanon as British and French-controlled monarchies. That did not work and Arab nationalists in what is now Israel attacked Jewish settlers from Europe who were seeking to establish a Jewish state in the area. This movement was proposed in the 1890s but was not acted on until 1920, after World War I, with nominal British approval in the Balfour Declaration. This led to increasing Arab violence against Jews.

Then came World War II and the German effort to kill all the Jews in Europe. Six million Jews, and six million other Europeans the Germans considered unworthy, were killed during the war. This led many of the surviving Jews to declare Never Again, and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. This and British forces leaving the region triggered violence from the surrounding Arab states, who urged the Palestinian Arabs living there to flee Israel. The other Arab states urged the Palestinians to flee so they could steal the Palestinians’ land in Israel. At the same time the Israelis urged the Arabs among them to stay. Many did, and currently 20 percent of the Israeli population is Arab, most of them Moslem. The Israelis defeated forces from Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria who sought to destroy Israel. That was followed by Arab Israeli wars in 1957, 1967, and 1973. Israel won every time and that led Egypt and Jordan to make peace with Israel, an arrangement that has persisted to the present.

The Palestinians refused to settle for anything less than the destruction of Israel and eviction of all the Jews in it, and that refusal has persisted. This intransigence first occurred in 1949 when Israel offered to allow 300,000 Palestinians to return. As part of that deal the United States agreed to pay for the construction of homes for 200,000 people in Jordan and another 60,000 in Sinai and the east bank of the Suez Canal. Arab and Palestinian leaders ordered their followers to ignore these offers and continued blaming Israel for the dire situation of Palestinian refugees.

Palestinian radicals, Hamas being one of those groups, insists that Israel be destroyed and replaced by a Palestinian State. These Palestinians ignore the fact that Israel has the strongest military in the region, nuclear weapons, their own ballistic missiles to deliver nuclear warheads and the wealthiest, most advanced economy in the region.

Despite that, Palestinian radicals continue to promote attacks on Israel. Radicals in other Arab states sympathize with the Palestinians but do little more than demonstrate against Israel in their own countries and often get arrested. The Arab governments see Israel as a lucrative economic partner and in some cases a useful partner in counter-terrorism operations. Anti-Israel groups throughout the Arab world are often troublesome for the local Arab governments. Israel shares information about Islamic terrorists with Middle Eastern Arab states and earns a degree of cooperation from these governments. In the streets it is a different story, with radicals calling for attacks on Israel as well as local governments that are not willing to make war on Israel.

Nations in the region regularly claim they are rearranging their relationships with their neighbors. Those claims are rarely fulfilled while the ancient feuds return with new names and occasionally new participants when some other player has disappeared.