A poster at Jihad Watch recently asked: "My big question is this: What does Israel have to do with dhimmitude or the West?"
Answer: Everything. Israel is part of the West, and the West would not be the West without Israel's contribution to that West.
Israel, or the Jews, lost their land (as did so many other non-Muslim and non-Arab peoples) during the Muslim conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, in which islamization was accompanied by arabization. (In some places, however, such as Iran, that arabization was seen for what it was: cultural and linguistic imperialism that convinced so many of those conquered that they were "Arabs" or would have to become “Arabs” in order to be "Muslims.") Yet many Jews managed to start returning to build a Jewish Commonwealth, many decades before the Mandate for Palestine was created by the League of Nations. They continued to return, with great difficulty, during the period of the Mandate as well, despite a largely unsympathetic British mandatory authority that did not abide by the terms of the Mandate. See Article 6 of the Mandate, for example, which required the Mandatory power to "facilitate close Jewish settlement on the land." And other Jews, survivors of the death camps, also came to join the effort. Nearly a million arrived from where, in the various Muslim Arab lands, they had been subjected to mistreatment and endured insecurity as dhimmis (as did all the non-Muslims under Islam).
The Jews of Israel, at least the 50% of the population that came from Arab countries, are no longer willing to live as dhimmis, and will not return to that status. The Jews who were the descendants of those who left the Land of Israel to go further afield, into Europe, are only now beginning to learn about what Islam is all about -- as is the rest of the Infidel world, and not a moment too soon.
And they, and the rest of the West, and the rest of the non-Western Infidels, will begin to recognize, in larger and larger numbers, that the war that is today being made on Israel is merely a classic Jihad, and always has been. It has been obscured, partly by the artful use by Muslims of islamochristians among the "West Bank" Arabs (Hanan Ashrawi, Naim Ateek, Michel Sabbah, etc.), to promote the Islamic agenda. But it has mainly been obscured by the careful creation of that utterly phony "Palestinian" identity that so much effort was put into "constructing." See, for example, Mahmoud Darwish for one careful "constructor" who, before the Six-Day War, used to declare that "I am an Arab" and then, presto-chango, stopped saying that and after that war spoke of himself to Westerners only as a "Palestinian." He and others did this for reasons that Zuhair Mohsen incautiously spelled out to James Dorsey in an interview for the Dutch newspaper "Trouw."
The Jihad against Israel is conducted through qitaal, conventional combat, and also through terrorism, as well as through diplomatic and economic pressure, and propaganda. The works. There may be differences on questions of timing and tactics between the Fast Jihadists of Hamas and the Slow Jihadists of Fatah, but there is no difference at all on the ultimate goal: Israel, as a place where Jews can live on land once possessed by Muslims, and not live as dhimmis, must cease to exist. That's it. No other outcome for Muslim Arabs -- save for a handful of the most intellectually and morally advanced -- is tolerable.
And the Jihad against Israel received a lot of attention -- though it is seen not as a Jihad but as the Arabs wanted it to be seen, as a "struggle of a tiny people, the "Palestinians," etc., against an “occupier" and so on. This propaganda campaign began even before the OPEC trillions arrived, and before Muslim millions had foolishly been allowed to settle in the Western countries, and before Western technological advances (audiocassettes, videocassettes, satellite television, the Internet) were appropriated by Muslims -- who were incapable themselves of developing such things -- in order to spread further the message, the full deadly message, of Islam, to the farthest corners of Dar al-Harb, because the entire world, you see, belongs to Allah and to his people.
That's what Israel "has to do with dhimmitude and the West."
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Hugh,
In the next to the last sentence, didn't you mean the "farthest corners of Dar al-Harb," the Domain of War (i.e., non-Muslim lands)?