Points to Ponder On I hereby take upon myself to fulfill the mitzvah, "Love your fellowman as yourself".

For the past fifteen years, Middle East peace-making has been dominated by two consecutive, illusory, political paradigms. The first paradigm, encapsulated by the Oslo Accords of 1993, belonged to a vision in which it is believed that a solution exists to every problem.

The second paradigm – unilateral withdrawal – proposed that reality could be changed by withdrawing from it, by unilaterally disengaging from it. There was a hope that a fence would define a border and Israel would be left alone. But after the fact, the public no longer sees the Gaza disengagement as having brought Israel greater security.

A spokesman on behalf of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, Fatah's military wing, told Ynet that the attackers ‘returned to their base safely.’” -- from this news article.

And meanwhile, the Olmert Government has refused to mount an operation to seize the killers -- known to the Israelis -- of those two young men, Israeli soldiers on leave, on the West Bank. It knows exactly where they are, knows what they did, but will do nothing to "offend" the Slow Jihadists of Fatah.

And in that same meanwhile, the unbearable Tzipi Livni speaks again and again about the necessity, as she idiotically sees it, of "dividing the land." By this she means that Israel, tiny Israel, which now exists on less than one-one thousandth of the total land area possessed by the Arabs, must relinquish part of the one-one thousandth to those Arabs. After all, the Arabs everywhere behave as if all of the Middle East, all of North Africa, belongs to Islam and to Arabs. The Copts, the Maronites, the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, the Berbers, and of course, above all, the Jews, are entitled to nothing: not to a state, not to autonomy, not to equal treatment with Muslim Arabs. No, it all belongs to them, by Divine Right -- as does, in the texts and tenets and attitudes of Islam, the Middle East, North Africa, and indeed the entire world.

Livni's Great Idea, and that of Olmert, is that Israel must "maintain its Jewish character." And the only way that these people can think of doing this is to slice off successive bits of Israel where the Arabs now have a majority. No doubt they will have to keep on slicing bit after bit, as the salami-slicing demands will never let up, and the Muslim Arabs will never -- ever -- acquiesce in the permanent existence of an Infidel nation-state on land once part, as they see it, of Dar al-Islam. The livnis and olmerts of this world do not understand this. They do not want to think about it. They put it out of their minds in a bit of promised-land podsnappery. And certainly they haven't thought deeply about the Arabs who remain, overbreeding, inside whatever part of Israel is left once the olmert-livni "solution" has taken place.

The Bush Administration has been unable to understand Islam. It has been willfully incapable of understanding Islam. Failing to understand it, wanting not to delve too deeply into the matter or listen to those who have done so, and preferring to fashion a policy based on the children's game of "let's pretend," this incoherent and confused administration seeks the explanation elsewhere for the relentless hostility of Muslim states and peoples. This hostility has never, not one whit, been mitigated by the receipt of vast sums, tens or hundreds of billions, in "aid" from Western countries (really a disguised Jizyah), while the American government, while Bush, while Rice, look for the explanations -- "poverty" and "lack of freedom" and anything else that can be offered up -- for that hostility, that meretriciousness, those smiles-with-murder-in-our-hearts behavior of, for example, our "staunch allies" in Egypt, and Saudi Arabia (those Al-Saud, a primitive but exceedingly rich tribe, all daggers-and-dishdashas, with sneers of cold command on their seemingly cloned faces). They look, that is, for everything but the texts and tenets of Islam, that any "defector" from Islam -- Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina -- could tell them about, and which the writings of any legitimate Western scholar of Islam (Schacht, Lammens, Snouck Hurgronje, Jeffrey, and dozens of others) would confirm.

Yes, everything but Islam is thought to explain the behavior and views of Muslims -- in Iraq, in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, in the Sudan, in Egypt and Jordan and the "Palestinian" occupied territories, and in Muslim communities in Thailand, the Philippines, and everywhere else that the meaning and menace of Islam is becoming, through the behavior of Muslims themselves, clear to many people. But even if many dimly or clearly realize that there is something about Islam that needs to be examined, held up for inspection, discussed openly, and policies fashioned that are based not on what one would wish to be the truth but what is the truth, the political and media elites are far behind them -- the very people those elites presume to instruct and to protect.

In Israel, the olmerts and livnis have allowed themselves to complacently believe that refusing to make Israel's legal, moral, and historic case is the best way to peace. Or perhaps they simply do not possess the facts of that case themselves, or are unable to articulate it properly, so used are they to having accepted the language, the phrases, of the enemy, including the parroting of that phrase "the Palestinian people." They think that identifying thoroughly with your enemy, seeing "his side," is the key to peace -- while being careful, again, to view the conflict exactly as it is presented by Muslims and Arabs for Western consumption, as a matter of "legitimate rights" and "nationalist struggle." In fact, it is entirely a war to weaken, and then eliminate, the Jewish state of Israel, and the Jewish commonwealth which took almost 2000 years to astonishingly rebuild. And if it is lost again, there will be no second chance, with all that that implies for the history, and moral and mental stability, of the civilization of the West.

They, those olmerts and those livnis (suitably egged on by the assorted landaus who control so much of the Israeli press) do not at this point want to learn about Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. They want to negotiate with, "make deals" with the Dar al-Islam by giving away Israeli rights and lands to Muslims, but always, without ever thinking through the nature of Islam. They hope, they wish, they dream -- but they will not spend a month, a week, a day, an hour, considering carefully the nature of Islam, of taking its texts and tenets seriously. Long ago, when the Mandate for Palestine was young, the Jews saw all of Eastern Palestine (east of the Jordan River) lopped off by the British in 1921. This was done, in a fit of temporary and misguided Realpolitik, to curry favor with the local Arab rulers. The British unilaterally removed the application of the provisions of the Mandate for Palestine to all of its intended territory east of the river Jordan -- that is, all of Eastern Palestine, as it had always been defined, and instead incorporated Eastern Palestine into a hastily concocted Emirate of Transjordan (in 1946 promoted to the status of Arab Kingdom). This they gave to Abdullah, the oldest Hashemite son -- a move made necessary, the British felt, because his younger brother Faisal had been "given" the kingdom of Iraq, and a kingdom-less Abdullah might, miffed, have tried to claim Syria as his kingdom, thereby causing trouble with France, the possessor of the League of Nations' Mandate for Syria.

And having lost all of Eastern Palestine, the Jews of Israel, fighting for their lives when attacked in May 1948 by the regular armies of five Arab states, managed to survive. But Ben-Gurion stopped the fighting before that part of Judea and Samaria (toponyms in constant and wide use for 200 years, not least by, inter alios, Jesus) that was later renamed by Jordan as "the West Bank" could be wrested from the Arabs. And the same hesitation left Gaza, also part of Mandatory Palestine, a mandate set up for the express and sole purpose of the establishment of the Jewish National Home, in Arab, in this case Egyptian, hands.

Later, after Israel's astounding victory in June 1967, those assorted Peace Plans -- Rogers, Kissinger, you name it -- became, after Saint Sadat went through his premeditated crowd-pleasing performance, a vague but apparently endless "Peace Process." It meant, in reality, only one thing: acceptance by, parroting by, promotion by, Israel's representatives, of the very terms that the Arabs and Muslims had wished to be used, in refashioning for Western consumption what had always been, and remained, and remains, a Lesser Jihad against Israel. Thus it was that the Israelis expressed their deep belief in, and even sympathy for, the "Palestinians" (even if, in Israel itself, the word "aravim" -- "the Arabs" --was still used). The Israelis adopted this neologism without any seeming understanding of how important it was to resist this refashioning of the language used to describe the actual conflict. This went along with a kind of amnesia about Israel's legal, moral, and historic claims, or in some cases a reluctance, a calamitous diffidence, about asserting, intelligently and repeatedly, the broad outlines, and then the details, of such an overwhelming claim -- as if Israel had lost the ability to recognize that it was in the right, and it was Israel, always and everywhere, that was under permanent assault.

All that peace-processing consisted of was, on the Israeli side, giving up that most precious and tangible of assets, land, for the most intangible and worthless of assets: Muslim Arab "promises" in a treaty made with an Infidel enemy, when as every educated Muslim knows, the model for all such treaties is that made by Muhammad with the Meccans in 628 A.D., at Al-Hudaibiyya, a model that stands for the immutable proposition not, as in the West, of "Pacta Sunt Servanda" (treaties are to be obeyed) but for a temporary truce only. So for this Israel surrendered the Sinai, not once but twice: in 1956, and again under those miserably-negotiated "Camp David Accords" -- with Sadat not only supported by, but egged on to ever-greater demands by the sweetly-vicious Jimmy Carter. They surrendered it for promises promptly dishonored, as they did when they destroyed and abandoned Jewish villages in Gaza, some of which long pre-dated the establishment of the state of Israel, handed over valuable greenhouses in working order, and much else, and then left Gaza -- with the results, for Israeli security, we all see.

Again and again, over the past forty years, since the Six-Day War, we have witnessed those negotiations, those phony handshakes and smiles, those photo ops, that shuttle diplomacy, those hideous dennis-rosses-aaron-millers-martin-indyks -- each more sure of himself than the last, as a tireless, and professional "Arab-Israeli" peace-processor who never, ever, bothered to find out about Islam, and never, ever, managed to grasp the true Arab position, not what its smiling representatives pretended. Yet each of them had notions, bullyingly expressed, in the usual state-department-of-mediocrity fashion (exemplified by that Baker Institute apparatchik, Edward Djerijian) along the lines of the complacent and dead wrong "everyone knew what the outlines of a final settlement would have to look like." Yes, "everyone knew" what "the outlines of a final settlement would look like" (see the sinister Robert Malley -- he'll tell you all about that "final settlement," though he's unlikely to tell you all about his behind-the-scenes malevolent work in the last Clinton Administration as one of its supposedly disinterested "experts" on "Arab-Israeli" affairs. They all know that, just as long as they knew nothing about Islam, nothing about the unassuagable nature of the Lesser Jihad against Israel, nothing about the practical military matters and life-giving aquifers and invasion routes, and all the rest, and nothing, of course, about the one thing that can prevent, not a state of war, between the Muslim Arabs and Israel (that "state of war" will continue as long as Islam exists, as long as Muslims take their Islam seriously), but rather a state of open warfare, which can be permanently prevented if Israel does not surrender further tangible assets, if the Western world begins to wake up from its deep dream of a (false) peace, if the "two-state solution" is held up for inspection, analysis, and mockery, and if, finally, as it recognizes its own Muslim menace within Western Europe, the countries of the West begin to rethink their willful misreporting about, and misunderstanding and cruel abandonment of Israel.

That will happen. The logic of events, the inevitability of Muslim aggressive demands and Muslim violence within the countries of Western Europe, and nothing else, will make that reassessment happen. All Israel has to do is to hold on, not give in, do nothing to whet, by further surrenders to the sly Slow Jihadists of Fatah.

But Olmert and Livni and Haim Ramon are not only willfully unaware of Islam. They are also, in their narrowness, willfully unaware of how attitudes, in the larger Western world, are changing toward Islam because of the behavior of Muslims themselves. And failing to recognize that, and to factor it into their policies, they are in danger of plucking, yet again, a defeat from a conceivable victory, of wounding Israel, yet again, and giving up in peace-processing and political clumsiness and mental paralysis what the people of Israel won by feat of arms, feat of national resolve. And this time, so terrible are they, and so willing to surrender, that the self-inflicted wound will be akin in one way to that wound suffered by Philoctetes that made it impossible for him to fulfill his religious rites. For no doubt the shallow, implacable animus of Israeli leftists, eager to see further surrenders, quick to be outraged by religious Jews, are far less outraged, apparently, by the denial of Jewish historic and legal rights to the state of Israel, and far more exercised by this or that rabbi than by the “moderate” Abbas, that Holocaust-denier, who along with his corrupt cronies in the Jizyah-supported Fatah of Slow Jihadists, contemplates an Israel reduced in size and power by degrees, becoming a dhimmi state that will exist not by right but by Muslim sufferance. And then, by further degrees, it will be reduced until it ultimately disappears, and the Dar al-Islam is cleansed of that intolerable mental affront, the existence of an Infidel nation-state (and still worse, one run by Jews, always regarded as weak and helpless, a people, especially among Arab Muslims, to be despised) smack in the middle of a now-uninterruptible Muslim land mass. Then all will again be right, as Islam continues to expand, in western Europe and elsewhere, the lands within its domain, the ever-expanding -- with a little help from those whom Muslims would wish to reduce to dhimmitude or destroy -- Dar al-Islam.

Posted by Hugh Fitzgerald at January 25, 2008 11:44 AM