Contrary to what some Israelphobes might think, one does not have to be Jewish to believe that Israel has a right to live in its own ancestral homeland, and that it has a right to defend itself. I am not Jewish, but I fully support Israel’s right to exist. And that is as simple as it gets when I say that I am a Zionist.
That does not mean I think everything done by the Israeli government is always right, but I reject the haters who think that supporting those who want to see Israel wiped off the face of the earth is somehow preferable. Clueless wonders in the West who support the murderous terrorists in Gaza, Iran and elsewhere demonstrate their complete lack of moral and mental clarity.
And one can also be an Arab to make the case for Israel and its fundamental right to exist. A brand-new book offers just that. I refer to The Arab Case for Israel: And Other Essays from a Distant Conflict by Hussain Abdul-Hussain (Wicked Son, 2026).
The author, who was originally from Lebanon and Iraq, now resides in the US. The thirteen chapters in this book are all well-worth reading, but here I will simply examine and quote from the first two. Early on in Chapter 1, “The Arab Case for Israel,” he says this:
In 2004, when I arrived in America, I felt that the sky was the limit. I got my hands on everything Israeli and Hebrew that I could find. I became fluent enough to be able to read Hebrew and listen to Israelis debating in their native language. My biggest surprise was that, unlike most Arabs and I had thought, the Israelis were not obsessed with killing Arabs. The Jews around the world had a story of their own, one that made sense. They were persecuted in most countries, with everything Jewish threatened: their heritage, their culture, their language, their ability to practice their religion without fear.
In a lawless world that had sat back and watched one third of Jews killed in less than a decade, Zionism was a project to protect Jews by returning them to their native land. Jews needed sovereignty: a government with muscles that could protect them and offer them refuge when they needed it. As the Zionists’ early debates teach us, any strip of land would have sufficed for the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. But to attract the majority of Jews from around the world, nothing could beat the historic Land of Israel, which had been dominated by non-Jews since the first century CE: ruled by Romans, followed by Christians, until Muslims took over in 636 CE, with intermittent periods of Christian Crusader rule. Starting in 1507, Muslim Ottoman Turks became the sovereigns over the land that, in 1920, the British made into Mandate Palestine.
As I consumed intra-Israeli and intra-Jewish debates, my views on Israel changed. Jews had no master plan to rule the world. They were like everybody else. They wanted to live a decent life while enjoying their heritage and passing it on to their children, like every other community on this planet.
Throughout history, most Arab and Muslim states have never offered non-Arabs or non-Muslims space to preserve their heritage, practice it, and pass it on, without forcing these minorities to single themselves out and live at a disadvantage for not assimilating with the majority culture. In fact, Muslims and Arabs have not been able to live at peace with one another, this animosity often flaring up as civil wars; the Sunni-Shia vendetta has been going on for 1,400 years.
I thus started asking myself this question: If a Muslim-born, Iraqi-Lebanese Arab like me was not able in most Arab countries to express a dissenting view on religion, politics, policies, current affairs, or almost anything else, how could non-Muslims and non-Arabs—Jews, Christians, Copts, Kurds, and other ethnic groups under Muslim rule—survive in such an inhospitable Arab World, where liberty was unheard of? (pp. 15-16)
He goes on to state:
Like all other minorities around the world, the Jews dreamt of their own corner on earth where they could be a majority and design the public space in their image: Hebrew as the official language, Jewish calendar recognized for days off and holidays, the founding myth of the state focusing on the ancestors—true or imagined—of the Jewish nation. If there were no Israel, Jews would still be outsiders in their host countries, or their millennia-old culture would disappear. By contrast, if there was no Palestine, Arabs of Palestine would still get all of these advantages in any of the twenty-one sovereign Arab states. Arab civilization faced no existential threat.
Unlike most other minorities—especially in the Middle East—the Jews succeeded in making their dream come true. In 1948, they declared the State of Israel. Other minorities in the Arab world still suffer today under whichever government arrangement they have reached with the Arab majority—whether federal, such as the Kurds in Iraq, or consensual democracy, as with Lebanon’s Christians and Druze.
In today’s world, which glorifies victimhood and punishes success, the miracle called Israel became the target of envy and hate, and not only among Arabs and Muslims. (p. 17)
The Arab Case for Israel: And Other Essays from a Distant Conflictby Abdul-Hussain, Hussain (Author), Ortagus, Morgan (Foreword)
Abdul-Hussain explains how it is in the best interests of Israel’s neighbours to support the nation instead of seeking to destroy it:
Interests need clear eyes and cold hearts, not angry Al-Jazeera newscasts and the never-ending quest for global sympathy with Arab misery. Nations are like individuals: sometimes they win and sometimes they lose. When they fall, the smart ones cut their losses, pick up their pieces, and move on, not dwelling on their own failure and feeling sorry for themselves.
Shaming the world into delegitimizing Israel may succeed, but it will never improve Arab lives, or make their states modern and functional, or result in the creation of a modern liberal democracy called Palestine.
Because I am a proud Arab and still have hundreds of dear friends and family who live in that part of the world, I have an interest in seeing living standards improve and states become successful. For change to take place among the Arabs, introspection is imperative. Admitting error is a virtue, as the Arab saying goes. (p. 37)
And in Chapter Two, “The Myth of Ancient Palestine,” Abdul-Hussain writes:
Palestinians argue that they hail from an ancient nation. Even Jesus Christ, an Aramaic-speaking Jew from Galilee, is anachronistically depicted as a Palestinian. In this narrative, the ancient nation of Palestine was invaded in 1948 and occupied by imperial European Jews, who took the state and made it their own.
This chapter will show that not only is this Palestinian narrative false, but that when the Brits declared Mandate Palestine, the Sunni Arab majority categorically opposed it, seeing it as an imperial scheme to divide Arabs and Muslims and keep them from establishing a greater Arab/Muslim nation. The Sunni Arab rejection of Palestine mirrored the Sunni Arab rejection of French-created Lebanon, to the north. In both cases, it was the minorities who saw an advantage in the smaller mandate states and thus endorsed them. Smaller states made the Sunni Arab majority less overwhelming, especially compared to living in a large Arab and/or Muslim state.
The collapse of the Turkish Ottoman Muslim empire forced its former subjects in the Levant to start thinking about and debating their collective identity, which had to evolve from imperial provincial to local national. Palestinian nationalism was thus born, not in 1920, as commonly believed, but much later, in 1969.
This chapter will debunk the dominant narrative and offer a more plausible alternative. Perhaps if the Arabs, including Palestinians, realize that their national identity is not as ancient and fixed as they think, they will find it easier to trade it for more useful advantages, such as a higher standard of living. (pp. 40-41)
He looks in great detail at the history of all this over the past century, then says this near the end of the chapter:
For most of the twentieth century, the Arabs of Palestine rejected the very creation of a Palestinian nation—not only because the Arabs opposed a possible Jewish homeland, but because dividing the Middle East into nation states stood at odds with both the pan-Arab and pan-Islamist nationalism that had started to rise in Arabic speaking lands in the nineteenth century, in response to a surge in nationalism in Europe.
As in Lebanon—where non-Muslim minorities, especially Christians, endorsed their newfound countries as independent states within their European man-made borders—it was Jews and Christians who endorsed Palestine within its 1920 borders. Almost every enterprise with the word “Palestine” in it was Jewish, whether Palestine Airways or the Palestine soccer national team.
And, as in Lebanon—where Muslim Sunnis opposed the country’s European-drawn borders and insisted on joining a to-be-created greater Arab or Muslim nation—Muslim Sunnis in Palestine also rejected a Palestine within 1920 borders in demanded union with a short-lived Hashemite Arab Kingdom in Damascus.
Until 1964, the Arabs in Palestine rarely perceived of themselves as Palestinians, independent of the to-be-created Arab nation. Even when the PLO was founded in 1964, its primary motive was to join Egyptian Nasser’s United Arab Republic…. (pp. 73-74)
As mentioned, this entire volume deserves careful reading. Anyone who cares about not just the Middle East, but the entire world, should put aside their reckless anti-Zionism and start acknowledging the right of Israel to exist, and the benefits that flow from that reality.
