The nation of Israel existed in its own land thousands of years before Muhammad was even a gleam in his father's eye. Continued Jewish residence in the Land of Israel (Zion, in the Bible) continued throughout the 2 millennia of exile that followed the Roman conquest. When Jews from Europe and elsewhere began to return to the land of their ancestors in the late 19th century, it was to a wasteland, a virtually uninhabited backwater province of the Ottoman empire. My own grandfather settled in Rosh Pina, a small village near the Syrian border, in 1882.

Against all odds, and by virtue of hard work and perseverance, those people, called Zionists, recreated Israel. It grew and prospered, in spite of the British Mandate authority's restrictions, and constant attacks by marauding Arab bandits. Impoverished peoples from neighboring Arab countries began to come to Palestine (as it was called under the British) to benefit from new economic opportunities created by the Jewish community. As both sectors grew and prospered, peaceful coexistence was taken for granted. My father, born in Rosh- Pina in 1901, had many Arab friends who visited our home, as we visited theirs. Under a French-installed Christian Maronite-dominated leadership, Lebanon to the north became the "Switzerland of the Middle East", with its progressive banking system and thriving tourist industry.

One of the chief Arab troublemakers in 1930's Palestine was the "Grand Mufti" of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. The British eventually exiled him, as the clouds of the WWII began gathering. He went to Germany, where he became an advisor to the Nazis on Jewish questions, and was even photographed at Hitler's side. It was Hitler's plan to confiscate all Jewish property and exile the Jews to Palestine, but the Mufti convinced him that killing them would be a better solution to "The Jewish Problem".

Jewish refugees from Nazism joined the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Eretz Israel, which numbered some 600,000 at the outbreak of the war. The British allowed some survivors of the Holocaust to trickle in, but even more were smuggled in between the end of the war and the November, 1947 UN resolution establishing the State of Israel in May, 1948. The combined forces of all neighboring Arab states promptly attacked Israel, and were defeated as they were time and time again. Even as these lines are written, Israel is again forced to assert its sovereignty over its land, by rooting out Arafat's terrorists. Arafat was a direct heir to the Mufti's legacy, as was Iraq's Saddam Hussein, who openly professed his admiration of Hitler. Arafat's heirs today adhere to the same "policy".

So please, let's hear no more about a "Right to Exist!" Israel has never ceased to exist, and it will survive all adversity.

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The author served in the Hagana, in the Royal Air Force in WWII, and in the Israel Defense Forces during the War of Liberation (1948/9). He is the author of several books, including "Zion Liberated", a historical biography set in pre-State Israel.