I agree with David Goldman that the most significant omission from Obama’s Cairo speech was reference to the long-standing ties of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.
Israel was not founded because of European guilt over the Holocaust. It was wrong to suggest this – not only factually wrong, but morally wrong.
In 1922 the League of Nations gave the British Empire a mandate over the former Palestinian region of the Ottoman Empire, with the purpose of establishing a Jewish homeland.
The present day Palestinian people have no such long standing connection to the land. They are not descendants of the Philistines after whom that region was named. They are Arabs. There has never been an independent state called Palestine.
Nonetheless, in the end, the largest area of that mandate went to form the Palestinian Arab kingdom of Jordan. What was left was partitioned again, until the Jewish homeland was whittled down to one sixth of one percent of the Middle East.
Long before Christianity and Islam appeared on the world stage, the covenant between the people of Israel and the Land of Israel was entrenched and unwavering. Every day we prayed in our ancient tongue for our return to Zion. Every day.
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