There have been two historical hells which the re-establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Israel has helped to alleviate. It is true that the founders of modern Zionism were European, and they were not aware, or little aware, of the Muslim attitude toward Jews. The mistreatment of Jews in Arab and Muslim lands was less evident by the late-19th century, and less ferocious because of the pressure of Europeans. This was true except in places remote from the Europeans, such as Yemen, where the condition of the Jews was particularly bad, though some Yemenis recognized and even took pride in a connection between Yemen and Jews from ancient times.
For example, the loi Cremieux in 1870 lifted from Jews in Algeria the burden of having been subject to Muslim law; now they would be subject to French law, which gave them a legal equality impossible for non-Muslims under any Muslim legal system. Furthermore, the steady pressure by the European Great Powers on the Ottoman government led to a series of laws, beginning with the Tanzimat reforms of 1839, that were at first honored in the breach, but over time did lead to better conditions for non-Muslims — though that did not prevent, the old attitudes and unequal treatment (as in the taxation, during World War II, of non-Muslims alone) of non-Muslims, from continuing even in modern, Kemalist Turkey.
It is a staple of Arab propaganda that Israel was founded “as a response to Europe,” or, still more specifically, “to the Nazis, and why should the Arabs pay for it.” But this is nonsense. The Jews who bought land — and remember, not a single inch of land was taken by Jewish settlers prior to 1948 and the Arab attack, and very little afterward. Nearly 90% of the land of Mandatory Palestine was state and waste land, which is not surprising, because most of the land elsewhere in the Ottoman domains was also owned by the state. As the natural successor to Turkey, the Mandatory Authority in Palestine took control of these waste and state lands. The Mandate for Palestine was set up (just like the Mandates for Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq) with an express purpose, and in the case of Mandatory Palestine that express purpose was “the establishment of the Jewish National Home,” when after the British left, and Israel declared its independence, it rightly inherited those state and waste lands.
The local Arabs who left did so, beginning in late 1947, because they were told that war was coming, that the Arabs would not let Israel survive, and they believed it. They are no more entitled to our sympathy than any others who might leave in such a situation. And they are certainly not owed any preferential treatment, as they have received for 50 years, to the great detriment of real refugees, not political pawns, in such places as the Sudan, or the Kurds who fled from Saddam Hussein into the mountains, or the millions of Hindus who fled Bangladesh during and after the 1970-71 war between Bengalis in what was then East Pakistan and the army of West Pakistan. Many of the world’s largest refugee problems have been caused by Muslim or Arab mistreatment of non-Muslims or, in the case of Darfur and the Kurds, of non-Arab Muslims (for Islam is a vehicle of Arab supremacism). Yet they have not received the attention due to them because of the way in which local Arabs in Gaza and the “West Bank” and in those so-called refugee camps elsewhere (the ones with the Internet cafes and the DVD stores), have managed to virtually monopolize the attention of the U.N.’s refugee agency, and to have most of its money directed to its, at this point, undeserving Arab recipients. The Arab Muslim nations in OPEC have received, since 1973, ten trillion dollars in oil revenues, entirely as a result of an accident of geology — yet it is the world’s Infidels who are asked to pay for the so-called “Palestinian” refugees who, at this point, and for several decades, have come to believe that they are entitled to remain on the Infidel world’s permanent dole, and to use much of that money to prepare for, or to conduct, warfare as part of their contribution to the without-end Lesser Jihad against the Infidel state of Israel.
All aid from Infidel lands to Muslim states and peoples should be ended — beginning with those trans-national transfers pushed by the U.N., as with UNRWA (which should have been shut down fifty years ago at the latest), an organization now staffed almost entirely by “Palestinians” who have turned much of the U.N. refugee effort into essentially a private agency for the nearly-exclusive benefit of other “Palestinian” Arabs. And so too should the other two great transfers of wealth from Infidels to Muslims: the enormous sums that Infidel taxpayers in Western Europe give to Muslim immigrants who do not wish them or the Infidel nation-states in which those Muslims now reside well, but who receive — not gratefully but as if by right — as many of the benefits as they can possible squeeze out of those nation-states, and then some. And finally, there is the vast transfer of wealth from Infidel oil-consuming nations to the Muslim oil states, which transfers must and can be diminished by clever and relentless self-taxation (on gasoline for example), and a war-footing project, to diminish the use of fossil fuels. And of course that will mean a diminishment of OPEC revenues and perceived (though entirely factitious) power.
Even if there were no problem with the worldwide menace of Jihad, with its various instruments (Da’wa, demographic conquest, the money weapon) the environmental crisis will demand, from those who pay no attention to that menace or are unconcerned by it, the same kind of energy projects, leading inevitably to the same results as those ardently desired by those who do recognize the menace of Jihad, in its larger sense and through all of its varied instruments, and are not indifferent but permanently alarmed.