Survival despite the odds

Imagine your reaction if you were told by someone that they "recognised Australia's right to exist". I suspect they would be introduced to a range of expletives with which they were not familiar. Now you know how Israelis feel as they celebrate their nation's 60th birthday. That's 59 more than most predicted.

In the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, debate raged as to how to resolve the claims of Arabs and Jews to the British mandated territory of Palestine. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations accepted the recommendation of its Special Committee on Palestine, by 33 votes to 13, to divide the territory into two states, one Arab, one Jewish.

Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, made it clear that it was far from what he wanted, but on behalf of the Jewish people he accepted. This was that moment in history where the problem could have been solved. Had the Arab nations agreed, the bitterness and acrimony of the previous 70 years would have ended and tens of thousands of lives would not have been lost during the ensuing 60 years. Instead the Arabs set out to strangle Israel at its birth.

From November 1947 until the British withdrawal on May 14, 1948, savage fighting broke out between the Haganah and Arab irregulars. On May 15, the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, with the help of Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Libya, attacked Israel. The Israel Defence Forces, drawn from a Jewish population of 650,000 and equipped with light arms, with no navy or air force, defended itself against an Arab population in excess of 100 million. To the world's surprise, Israel survived. Somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 Arabs became refugees.

Terrible things happen in war, and the Middle East conflict has been no exception. Arab propagandists who allege that Deir Yassin, in 1948, was a massacre of Arabs by Jews, conveniently ignore endless massacres of Jews by Arabs, including Hebron, Kfar Etzion, Hadassah Hospital and Safed, to name but a few.

Nor do they tell us of the likely fate of 650,000 Jews if the Arabs had won.

The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who spent the war as a guest of Hitler and visited Auschwitz with Himmler, was so impressed he planned a similar death camp for Palestine. "Our fundamental condition for co-operating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine," he said.

Fast forward to 1967 when the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, moved tens of thousands of troops into the Sinai, ordered the United Nations forces out and blocked the Straits of Tiran, thus denying Israel access to the Indian Ocean. "We intend to open a general assault against Israel. This will be total war. Our basic aim will be to destroy Israel," he said.