"If we searched the entire world for a person, more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew.  Notice, I do not say the Israeli." —Hassan Nasrallah

Israel finds itself in a cycle of endless small wars due to four political illusions — strategic errors, really.

THE TEMPLE MOUNT

Starting in 1948, the struggle against Israel was about religion — and imprudent tolerance.  When the IDF recovered Jerusalem, twice, in fact, Israel should have done what any Muslim, Arab, Persian, or Ottoman victor would have done: remove or relocate adversarial symbols of religious submission.  The Al Aqsa Mosque, built over the ruins of the Jewish temple by Umayyad Calif Abd al-Malik, is a permanent beacon, a signature of Islamic privilege.  Yet the Jewish temple on the same spot in Jerusalem has a pedigree that precedes Islam by millennia.

After serial defeats, Islam still has its mosque and its "Dome of the Rock" fictions — centrifugal symbols that motivate local and global jihad terror at the expense, to be sure, of Jewish culture, security, safety, peace, and sovereignty.

Wars with, and within, Islam are underwritten by the fusion of realpolitik and toxic religion.  For Islamists, separation of church and state is a sacrilege cultivated by Jews, like-minded infidels, heretics, and apostates.

A case on point might be the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul: originally built as a Christian cathedral by Justinian in 537 A.D.; seized by the Ottomans in 1453 A.D. and converted to a mosque; rebranded as a museum by Atatürk in 1933; and now reopened as a mosque by a modern neo-Ottoman, Recep Tayyip ErdoДџan.

Symbol and significance matter.

Over time, the Christian Church in Turkey, once the majority religion, was systematically extinguished by political atrocity and Islamic intolerance.  Today, Sunni and Shia zealots are united in their quest to see that Jews and Judaism suffer a similar fate in the Levant.

THE TROJAN HORSE

From the start, the modern state of Israel has been beset by enemies from without.  Indeed, the Mideast has been a bad neighborhood for non-Muslims since Mohamed's time.  Israel now has to deal with an internal Arab-Muslim citizen demographic that may hold the balance of domestic secular power.

If Al Aqsa is a brick-and-mortar Trojan Horse in the heart of the Jewish state, the real threat is the Jerusalem jihad, those 1.5 million so-called "Palestinian" Arab-Israelis, a Sunni demographic that would never tolerate a like number of Jews in their midst should they have the upper hand. 

Ironically, as Islamofascists like Hezb'allah and Hamas assume more local control, a second Holocaust is as near as any certainty can be.  Talk of wiping Israel and Jews off the face of the map is not empty rhetoric; it is the lynchpin, the objective, for Palestinian, Shia, and Sunni zealots worldwide.

No subject, at home and abroad, unites Muslims so well as Jew-hate.

GAZA GOATS

In spite of formidable military prowess and exceptional national courage, Israel has always tried to temper victory with justice.  Modern Israel, in part a nation of immigrants, is always sensitive to charges of "imperialism," a slander more appropriate for historical and modern Islam than Judaism.  Conquest, proselytizing, forced conversions, and related atrocities are Islamic, not Judaic values.

From 1948 to 1967, the Gaza strip was occupied and administered by Egypt, yet Cairo never granted Palestinians Egyptian citizenship.  After the 1967 Arab attack against Israel, the IDF took the Sinai and Gaza from Egypt.  Under Israeli control, between 1967 and 1982, the Gaza Strip had a growth rate that averaged 10% per annum.

In the interests of peace with Egypt, the Sinai was returned to Egyptian control, but Cairo never had any illusions about the Muslim Brotherhood or the Palestinian tar baby.  After the Oslo accords of 1993, Israel ceded administrative control of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinian Authority (née PLO), again in the interests of a permanent peace.

In short order, a rift developed between the P.A. on the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.  The PLO and Hamas are joined only by terror and virulent religious bigotry.  Hamas, now allied with Shia Hezb'allah, is poised to take complete control in Arab Palestine, another certainty if de jure Palestine ever holds another election.

By granting measured political autonomy to Gaza, Israel enabled the "two state" fiction, an Arab fantasy where Israel would be flanked on two sides by fratricidal attack dogs dedicated to the demise of Israel.

Hamas does not recognize Israel's right to exist.

Withal, Arab Palestine has never been able to take yes for an answer, and now politics has been hijacked by religious jihad and political terror – again at Israel's expense.

Palestinian autonomy, once a peace offering, is now the dagger pointed at the heart of Zion.

THE TWO-STATE FICTION

Reality is a bitter pill even on a good day.

Unlike the Arabs, many Israelis could never accept the facts of modern Palestinian culture, a Petri dish of discontent and sedition.  Religious jihad today is as much a threat to Arab tribal totalitarians as it is to the state of Israel.  While keeping Palestinians at arm's length, Arab neighbors use the West Bank and Gaza Arabs as confrontation proxies.  Palestinians are in every sense sacrificial goats — permanent Muslim patsies at best, front-line cannon fodder at worst.  

Every janissary, dictator, or Muslim autocrat is, alas, hostage to a persistent mujahedeen threat.  Keeping the Israeli-Palestinian conflict alive serves several Muslim interests, inclinations, and prejudices — and policy worldwide.  Israel was always naïve to think that it could cut a deal with local jihad proxies while the Jerusalem trophy and the Temple Mount were in play.

Any thought of legitimizing a nation, like Palestine, on two Israeli borders is a triumph of hope over experience.  "Two states" has never been the solution — only a toxic problem.  A Palestinian state is a recipe for national suicide and another Jewish holocaust.

GRIM HORIZONS

Over time, there are few silver linings in the clouds over Israel.  Today is no exception.  Clearly, Muslim zealots see the 2021 sea change in Washington politics as a golden opportunity to roll back the Abraham Accords and related progress in Arab-Israeli relations.  The Biden/Harris administration is likely to minimize or ignore the Trump initiatives and return to the recidivist apologetics of the Obama era.  The smoke hardly cleared from the latest Jerusalem jihad when the Biden White House assured Palestinians, and Hamas, that America would rebuild anything that Israel's Defense Force had destroyed.  Thus, Muslim attacks from without and within Israel are now motivated or incentivized, in part, by post-conflict American support and largesse.  Any idea that humanitarian aid can go to Palestinians without Hamas taking a butcher's cut is just another fantasy.

In the West Bank and Gaza, we now have a perfect storm where terror, corruption, and jihad meet at the merge.  Islamic terror and Palestinian corruption are subsidized by the United States again — self-fulfilling prophecies underwritten by American tax monies.

Over time, the Palestinian question was so central to Arab politics that the P.A. or Hamas had the power to kill any initiative that improved relations with Israel.  The Abraham Accords were a benchmark of sorts to the extent that they canceled the Palestinian "veto."

Feckless, if not reckless, American policy now gives veto power back to Hamas, a neo-national terror state.  The Jerusalem jihad has new life in 2021, again at Israel's expense. 

G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of national security.

Image: Walkerssk via Pixabay, Pixabay License.

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