Ruth King

In its sixtieth year, Israel is a nation in retreat.

Since anniversaries beget nostalgia and retrospection, there will be invocations of the epic rescue of the wretched survivors of the Holocaust and the oppressed Jews from Arab countries; of the almost impossible victory of David against an Arab Goliath in 1948; of the lightning victory of 1967; of the come from behind victory in Yom Kippur 1973; of the rescue of the hostages in Entebbe; of the incredible destruction of Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, all of which were the source of pride and renewed confidence for Jews in every corner of the world.

There will be also be obloquy from the international left, including too many in Israel, who see the so-called “occupation” of Judea and Samaria as the “root cause” of the entire conflict. What makes this so risible is that Israel has conceded to every Arab demand in its suicidal quest for accommodation with its enemies, but the drumbeat of attacks from the left escalates in lockstep with the increase in terrorism and destruction.

And from the right (count me in) there will be well-deserved criticism of Israel’s government and its serial appeasements, which only whet the bloodlust of its enemies.

The fact is that all Israel’s achievements are imperiled because its government and elites live in a delusional world. They deny the past, persuading themselves of the existence of an earlier idyllic era of comity between Jews and Arabs to which they can return. They deny the present, refusing to recognize that Arab opposition is not based on reasserting control of “occupied territories” but is rooted in an unwillingness to accept a Jewish state in any boundaries.

Israel has averted its eye from the reality of jihad; from the long and bitter history of Arab oppression starting with the Arab conquest of 600 A.D.; from the Moslem and Arab complicity in the Holocaust and the blood libels which even now permeate Arab/Moslem media, sermons, textbooks and rhetoric in every Arab country including those which have signed peace treaties with Israel.

Why is a foreign Hashemite ruler accepted in 82% of Palestine while a Jewish presence in 10,000 square miles including Judea and Samaria is called a “cancer” that must be annihilated? If the territory of Israel were occupied by Arab Moslems who called it “Islama,” would there be hair-raising calls for their extermination? Would four generations of children be taught to hate and kill them? Would mosques resound with sermons preaching their destruction? Would they be called descendents of pigs and apes? Of course not. “Islama” would simply take its place as the 23rd nation in the all Moslem Arab League.

The Arabs, wealthy or poor, adjoining Israel or at a distance, all are determined to destroy Israel and Islam fuels their fanatic hatred.

Listen to what is said in the mosques and in the Arab street by Israel’s proposed “peace partners.” Just a few weeks ago, on February 28, a Saudi cleric intoned: “What compensation will satisfy us? By Allah, we will not be satisfied even if all the Jews are killed.” Here is the Hamas Charter, article 7:"The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” And here is the Hamas charter, article 15: “The day that enemies usurp part of Moslem land, jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In face of the Jews' usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of jihad be raised.”

What is lost in translation here? The short and simple answer is Islam and jihad, holy war, Palestine restored to the umma.

There were always warnings.

In 1922, United States Congressional resolution 360 stated: "We respectfully submit that the Arabs in Palestine should be and would be happy and content under the present government of that country if it were not for Turkish and Arab agitators, who travel around over the land stirring up trouble by making false representations concerning the true character of the Zionist movement, and by preaching a kind of holy war [jihad] against the immigrant Jews who arrive from day to day.”

Professors Moshe Sharon, Moshe Gil, Raphael Israeli and Mordechai Nissan have meticulously detailed the centuries of jihad against Jewish “infidels” in Palestine.

Saul S. Friedman, Emeritus Professor of History at Youngstown State University, described the frenzy of Islamic anti-Semitism which occurred upon the founding of Israel as “the brew of thirteen centuries of intolerance.” He noted: “Since 1896, the development of modern, political Zionism has placed new tension on, and even destroyed, the traditional master-serf relationship that existed between Arab and Jew in the Middle East. An Arab world that could not tolerate the presence of a single, ‘arrogant’ Jewish vizier in its history was now confronted by a modern state staffed with self-confident Jewish ministers.”

The scholar Bat Ye’Or, a Zeev Jabotinsky of our time, understood that the Arab war against the Jews of Palestine was always a jihad. She warned:

“Since Israelis are to be regarded, perforce, only as a religious community, their national characteristics—a geographical territory related to a past history, a system of legislation, a specific language and culture—are consequently denied. The ‘Arab’ character of the Palestinian territory is inherent in the logic of jihad. Having become fay territory by conquest (i.e. ‘taken from an infidel people’), it must remain within the dar al-Islam. The State of Israel, established on this fay territory, is consequently illegal.

“Israel represents the successful national liberation of a dhimmi civilization. On a territory formerly Arabized by the jihad and the dhimma, a pre-Islamic language, culture, topographical geography, and national institutions have been restored to life. This reversed the process of centuries in which the cultural, social and political structures of the indigenous population of Palestine were destroyed. In 1974, Abu Iyad, second-in-command to Arafat in the Fatah hierarchy, announced: ‘We intend to struggle so that our Palestinian homeland does not become a new Andalusia.’ The comparison of Andalusia to Palestine was not fortuitous since both countries were Arabized, and then de-Arabized by a pre-Arabic culture.”

As Bat Ye’or predicted when she coined the term Eurabia, Western European culture is now being gradually subjected to sharia law and Moslem demands.

For decades Israel and its Western allies concentrated on the Cold War, with Israel seen as a bulwark to thwart Soviet ambitions. That role vanished with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The West ignored the growing aggressiveness of Islam, fueled by the wealth of oil producing Arab states, preparing a jihad against the West. And it failed to see that Israel is a bulwark in the existential battle of the century—Islam against the infidel world.

Geography has dictated that Israel lives in the belly of the Moslem Arab beast and because of its large and potentially seditious Arab population, the beast also lives in Israel’s belly. The failure to understand jihad is Israel’s most colossal — it may well be fatal —blunder.

N.B. My thanks to Dr. Andrew Bostom, physician and scholar, for, as always, pointing me in the right direction. His forthcoming book is The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism, Prometheus Books, May 2008.