Is Occupation Really The Reason For Today's Violence?

By: Jan Wilhem van der Hoeven, Director
International Christian Zionist Center
April 2002

Is there then no one among you "courageous and objective 
reporting journalists or diplomats for that matter, who can 
muster enough honesty to ask the needed, maybe difficult, 
but certainly intelligent questions to those Arab spokespersons 
who falsely claim that all the gruesome terror 'is only' in 
response to the illegal occupation by Israel or the territories!

I always wait for one truly independent journalist to ask: 
but why does Israel occupy your territory?  Was it not in 
response to your aggression at the outset of the Six-Day war 
that forced Israel to deal in six days with that aggression, 
an aggression which announced aim was the destruction and
dismantling of the state of Israel?

Is it not precisely because you never wanted to accept a 
sovereign Jewish state - however small - as the piece allotted 
to them by the United Nations partition plan - that Israel 
today occupies 'your land'.  Is it not true that Israel is 
still occupying 'your lands'because up to this day it is YOU, 
not them, who refuse to live in peace and dignity with your 
home come brother?

Is it not abundantly clear for all those who have the 
intelligence and honesty to be informed of the facts that 
you are still occupied by Israel not because Israel wanted 
it, but because you failed again and again to take hold of 
Israel's outstretched hand that offered you peace and nearly 
all the territories - as then lately and under the auspices 
of President Clinton - if you would only stop your terror 
and designs to dismantle the Jewish State?

How dare you then suggest that terror has any justification 
or relation to Israel's occupation of 'your lands'?  Why are 
the journalists and politicians who are often so ready to 
ask the difficult and critical questions to Israeli 
spokespersons hardly ever capable of asking these most simple 
and straightforward questions to the Arab spokespersons?

What binds them or prevents them to do so?  Of whom or what 
are they afraid? Is it because they want to be seen 'in with 
their colleagues' and the critical line that many of them 
have chosen to adopt towards Israel? Hungry for their 
colleagues and their superior's approval?  
Is their no one with fortitude of character to be really 
truthful and objective?  Is there no one among you who, 
that whatever the cost to himself and his popularity dares
to say it as it is?

Would Britain's journalists have had any sympathy and 
understanding for Argentineans who would have sent their 
suicide bombers all over England exploding themselves in 
undergrounds, shops, restaurants, buses, market places and 
Christmas dinner parties claiming only to do so because
Britain occupied 'their Falkland Islands'.  Would the 
journalists of this world have accepted with equal 
understanding such claims and excuses for similar horrifying 
and indiscriminate massacres and uncontrolled lynching of 
British soldier's by Argentinean "freedom fighters," that we 
have experienced of late at the hands of Palestinian 
terrorists here in Israel?  I wonder!