Abba Eban got it right , December 21, 1973 -- exactly 35 years ago
In the wake of the Yom Kippur War, on December 21, 1973, exactly 35 years ago, Abba Eban addressed the UN's Geneva Peace Conference. What he said then is, sadly, just as applicable today. Here are a few excerpts. they are worth reading.
"[It will be] necessary for political and intellectual leaders in the Arab world to reject the fallacy that Israel is alien to the Middle East. Israel is not alien to the Middle East: it is an organic part of its texture and memory. Take Israel and all that has flowed from Israel out of Middle Eastern history and you evacuate that history of its central experiences. Israel's historic, religious, national roots in the Land of Israel are a primary element of mankind's cultural history. Nothing - not even dispersion, exile, martyrdom, long separation - has ever disrupted this connexion. Modern Israel is the resumption of a primary current in the flow of universal history. We ask our neighbours to believe that it is an authentic reality from which most of the other elements in Middle Eastern history take their birth. Israel is no more or less than the Jewish people's resolve to be itself and to live, renewed, within its own frame of values, and thus to contribute its particular shape of mind to the universal human legacy.
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There is also need for attitudinal change. Bertrand Russell wrote that "all wars originate in classrooms". Long years of conflict have given successive generations of our people a distorted vision of each other. The transition to peace should have its effects in educational systems, expelling all the images and stereotypes which nations at war invoke both as causes and consequences of their hostility. A peace settlement should unlock the arteries of our region's communications.
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The attainment of peace will make it possible to resolve the problem of refugees by co-operative regional action with international aid. We find it astonishing that States whose revenues from oil exports surpass 15,000 million dollars a year were not able to solve this problem in a spirit of kinship and human solidarity. In the very years when the Arab refugee problem was created by the assault on Israel in 1947 and 1948, 700,000 Jewish refugees from Arab and Moslem lands and from the debris of Hitler's Europe were received by Israel and integrated in full citizenship and economic dignity. There have been other such solutions in Europe, in the Indian sub-continent, in Africa. The Arab refugee problem is not basically intractable: it has been perpetuated by a conscious decision to perpetuate it. ...
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hat tip to ElderofZiyon.blogspot.com
