Culture of Denial

By: Paula R. Stern
February, 2007

The roots of the Middle East conflict began in denial and so long as death and denial are the tools of the Arab religious and political leaders, the conflict will remain unresolved. Nothing that anyone can do, not the Israelis, not the Europeans, not even the Americans, can change this simple truth.

After centuries of persecution and yearning for the land that was theirs, Jews in large numbers began arriving in Ottoman and then British-mandated Palestine to join and strengthen the existing Jewish community. The land then, as now, was rich enough and the people creative and dedicated enough, to have supported this influx.

Even more, the native Arabs in Palestine during this time could have benefited from this influx just as the native Jewish population did. The Arab population could have joined in draining the swamps in the north and making the desert bloom. They could have joined in building a country that truly would have been the crossroads of the world, the center of commerce and travel and tourism and research and development.

Instead, they denied the rights of the Jews to return to their homeland and did it with violence. Then, as now, the Arabs chose the path of denial. It is a mistake they continue to repeat year after year.  And then, as now, the world rejected their violence and recognized the right of Israel to again take its place among the nations.

When the Arabs denied the Partition Plan which would have given them a state in 1947, that idiocy plunged the region and the world into 6 decades of violence and caused the Palestinians to raise their children to worship death and darkness.

The Arab countries denied their Arab brothers by refusing to absorb 600-700,000 refugees, leaving them for decades in squalor and poverty. There were no language, religious, economic, or cultural barriers that should have prevented the Arab refugees of 1948 from easily being absorbed in the Arab countries to which they emigrated. It was the culture of denial that brought about generations of suffering.

Wars often result in an exchange of population, but rarely are those displaced so despised as to remain seemingly homeless and poor through generations. A similar number, estimated between 600-900,000 Jews were forced to flee their homes in Arab lands.

From Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq and so many other places, hundreds of thousands of Jews came to the new state and were absorbed. It was a painful and slow process, but the Jews of Israel were as determined to absorb as the new immigrants were to be absorbed.

There is no refugee problem in Israel among the Jews who came from Arab lands, because with positive planning, they were given homes. Not so among the Arab nations who worshiped this policy of denial and crowned it with martyrdom and hatred.

A refusal to accept the truth that was obvious to all, continues to plague the Palestinian cause today. Today, the Palestinians not only deny the existence of the state of Israel by refusing to give it “recognition,” but are attempting to deny long-accepted archeological evidence that under the mosques they built on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, lies the buried remains of our two Holy Temples.

The amazing part of their denial is not that they seek to convince the world that there was no Jewish settlement here thousands of years ago, no Jewish Temple, no organized religion. No, the amazing part of their denial is that they actually believe their own lies.

When Ehud Barak met Yasir Arafat and Bill Clinton at Camp David, he made unprecedented and dangerous concessions that would have seriously damaged Israel’s security. To Barak’s flawed way of thinking, the goal of any agreement should have been peace so he was willing to compromise Israel’s security. We should be forever grateful that the culture of denial among the Palestinians manifested itself once again, even if it did plunge us into yet another Intifada.

And finally, we arrive at Iran’s repeated denials of the Holocaust, yet another example of the Arab world attempting to deny what is obvious to all. One need only visit Auschwitz and see the piles of human hair, the eyeglasses, the abandoned suitcases and worst of all, the gas chambers and barracks to know this was a place of great evil and death. The ashes still remain in Maidanek and the bones still rise to the surface during heavy rains in Chelmno.

To deny the Holocaust despite massive physical evidence and the eyewitness testimonies of hundreds of thousands, to deny that the Temple Mount is holy to the Jewish religion because our great Temples once stood there, and to deny Israel’s right to exist, are all failed attempts at denying reality.

Of all the concepts prevalent in the Palestinian and Arab psyche, this culture of denial is perhaps the most damaging not only to the world and the quest for Middle East peace, but especially to the Arabs themselves.

You cannot make peace with those whom you deny and until the denial stops, there is really no reason for the world or Israel to even attempt to negotiate the situation. The roots of the Middle East conflict began in denial so long ago and so it continues today. If things are bad for the Palestinians now, amidst this culture of denial they have elevated to the level of holiness, than they have no one to blame but themselves.

Nothing that anyone can do, not the Israelis, not the Europeans, not even the Americans, can change this simple truth.