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As the Jewish state celebrates its 61st year of independence, Israelis cannot help but wonder whether their country will be lucky enough to see the day of its centennial. An astounding 47 percent of Israelis, according to a recent poll, fear the answer is an emphatic no; when you look at the present state of affairs in the region, you can hardly blame them.

What is it that Israelis fear so much so as to warrant this level of pessimism? After all, as far as one can tell from CNN's Middle East coverage, the gravest threats facing Israel today are the Palestinian stone thrower and occasional suicide bomber. And the media suggests that these problems can disappear at the flick of a finger, if Israel would only end its "brutal occupation of the Palestinian territories."If Israel would only give up the West Bank, and East Jerusalem as the cherry on the cake, the conflict would end virtually overnight.

This conception of the conflict is hollow and self-contradictory to the point of being laughable, and naturally is prevalent mainly among the uninformed. Anti-Israelis trace the roots of the conflict back to Israel's acquisition of the West Bank and Gaza in the Arab-initiated 1967 Six Day War, justifying terrorism as an understandableif not legitimateavenue in the Palestinian struggle for the liberation of their land. And yet this begs the obvious (or to some, not so obvious) question: Why was there Palestinian terrorism prior to the 1967 war and subsequent Israeli occupation?

Why did Palestinian Fedayeen militants penetrate Israel on an almost daily basis to massacre Israeli farmers in the early 1950s, when Gaza was under Egyptian rule and the West Bank under Jordanian rule? Why was the infamous "Palestine Liberation Organization" founded in 1964, three years before the occupation even began? Why were Palestinians slaughtering Jews by the hundreds as early as the 1920s?

The answer to all these is surprisingly simple, and is nowhere made clearer than in an official statement issued by Palestinian leadership in 1938: "We will never accept a Jewish state, even if it is the size of a postage stamp." The Palestinians reject the very idea of Israel. They reject an Israel of any size, of any shape, and of any form. But this principled opposition to a sovereign Jewish state is certainly not unique to the Palestinians; and it is here that we find yet another absurdity in the idea that the occupation is the cause of the conflict.

The four wars of extermination unsuccessfully waged by the Arab world against Israel have had nothing to do with the West Bank and Gaza, unless anti-Israelis are willing to argue that five Arab armies marched on Israel the day of its independence in 1948 because they had received some prior notice of an occupation that would come nineteen years later. As in every dispute, Arabs and Jews must find some common grounds on which to someday build compromise.

In this case, the consensus must be that both parties have a certain claim to the land. For the Jews, it is the indisputable 3,000-year connection to the land of Israel; for the Arabs, it is the fact that they were the local inhabitants by default when the Jews finally returned at the end of the 19th century. The Jews have recognized this right from the beginning, as is evident in their embrace of every serious two-state solution put on the table.

The Palestinians have consistently answered with rejection and terrorism, backed by the Arab world at large. Facing an irrational opposition that denies Israel the very right to exist, prospects for peace look grimmer today than ever before. It is hard to believe that 53 percent of Israelis are so optimistic about their future...

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