….the whole "Two States for Two Peoples" campaign is nothing more than a special case of the "Then Maybe they Will" doctrine.

For the past 30 years the Israeli political establishment has been prisoner to the "Then Maybe They Will" doctrine. Every major policy decision made by the government has reflected the power of wishful thinking and faith in the make-pretend. Here is a brief recapitulation of the doctrine:

If Israel gives Sinai back to the Egyptians, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL stop the Nazi-like anti-Semitic propaganda in their state-run media.

If Israel agrees to limited autonomy for Palestinians, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL stop seeking Israel's destruction and the world will not try to set up an independent Palestinian Arab terror state.

If Israel provides the Palestinian Authority with arms and funds, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL not be used for terrorist atrocities against Israel.

If Israel grants its Arab citizens affirmative action preferences, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL stop cheering terrorists and seeking the annihilation of Israel and its Jewish population.

If Israel frees thousands of jailed Palestinian terrorists, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL renounce violence and not murder any more Jews.

If Israel agrees to hold talks with representatives of the PLO, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL put a stop to Palestinian terrorism.

If Israel allows the Palestinians to hold elections, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL not elect Hamas.

If the Palestinians elect Hamas, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL not pursue a program of aggression and terrorism against Israel.

If Israel holds talks with terrorists, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL renounce their genocidal ambitions and seek peace.

If Israel conducts a unilateral withdrawal from all of southern Lebanon and allows Hezb'allah terrorists to station rockets on the border, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL not launch any of them.

If Israel sits back while the Syrians exert their hegemony over Lebanon, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL rein in Hezb'allah and stop border attacks on Israel.

If Israel refrains from retaliating against Hezb'allah terrorists after they murder captive Israeli soldiers in cold blood, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL not seek to kidnap any more soldiers.

If Israel agrees to one cease-fire after another with the Arabs, THEN MAYBE THE ARABS WILL eventually comply with one.

If Israel allows Arabs in Israel to build illegally, including on public lands, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL become pro-Israel and moderate.

If Israel agrees to the stationing of UN troops in Lebanon, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL actually do something to stop terror attacks on Israel.

If Israel ignores Hezb'allah border violations, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL come to an end.

If Israel lets the Muslims control the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL respond with friendship and moderation.

If Israel expels all Jews from Gaza as a gesture of friendship to the Palestinians, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL reciprocate with friendship toward the Jews.

If Israel turns the Gaza Strip over to the Palestinians, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL not use it as a base for terror attacks against Israel.

If Israel turns the other cheek after Qassam rocket attacks from Gaza, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL stop being fired.

If Israel allows the Palestinian Authority to control parts of the West Bank, THEN MAYBE THE PALESTINIANS WILL not fire rockets at Jews the same way they do from Gaza.

If Israel returns the Golan Heights to Syria THEN MAYBE THE SYRIANS WILL seek peace and reject the idea of using the Heights to attack Israel again.

If Israel agrees to place its neck in the Oslo/Road Map/Saudi Plan noose, THEN MAYBE THE ARABS WILL not pull the rope.

If Israel officially agrees in principle to let the Palestinians have a state, THEN MAYBE THEY WILL abandon their agenda of annihilating Israel.

Yet there is more to say about that “Two States for Two Peoples Solution” that is the object of Plaut’s scornful analysis.

For each part of this -- the “two states for two peoples” and the “solution” -- should be held up for inspection and ridicule.

Let’s start with the “two peoples.” Who are these “two peoples” of which we hear so much? The "Two Peoples" are supposed to be the Israeli Jews and the "Palestinians." But the "Palestinians" in question are merely the local Arabs, as anyone will come to realize who stays for a minute to think about the matter and to put aside, for the moment, the incessant Arab propaganda since the Six-Day War that led to the invention of the "Palestinian People" and then to the “project” of their “construction,” the “construction of that ‘Palestinian’ identity” -- see Joel Beinin, see Rashid Khalidi, see Joseph Massad. That “construction” is a weapon of war, a weapon of Islamic propaganda. It crumbles, upon inspection, into dust. For those “Palestinians,” or rather, those local Arabs who are now called “Palestinians,” are identical in every important respect, in language, in culture, in ethnic identity, and above all in the shared Total Belief-System, to other Muslim Arabs. They are proudly Muslim or, for the handful of remaining Christians, “Islamochristians” who have internalized the Muslim worldview. All of them proudly share -- see the PLO and Hamas charters -- the idea of a single Arab people, whose most important identifying mark after Islam itself (and for the “islamochristians” it can serve as a substitute for Islam) is ‘Uruba, Arabness.

The second is the naive notion of a "Solution." Americans appear to be particularly susceptible to this idea: everything can be called a "problem," and every problem has a "solution." No. This is not true, and never has been. There is no "solution" to what some might call the "problem" of human inequality, for example, but there are ways we manage to deal with this, including the legal equality -- which is not the same thing as forced equality of outcome -- that the American system attempts to protect, with varying degrees of success. There is no "solution" to political hysteria, or conspiracy theorists -- examples of human stupidity -- but one tries to keep them within manageable bounds.

And there is no "solution" to what Islam inculcates, about which there is no ambiguity. It insists that between Muslim and non-Muslim there is a permanent divide between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the regions of the world where, in the former, Islam is dominant and Muslims rule, and the latter, the House of War, where non-Muslims continue to resist the natural and just and right dominance of Islam. That resistance -- whether by war, or by legal and political institutions that flatly contradict the Shari'a, or by other means -- is seen not as "defensive" but as constituting "offensive war" made against Muslims. When non-Muslims successfully resisted Muslim attempts, over a thousand years, to seize through military conquest more of Europe -- near Poitiers in the eighth century, or at Vienna as late as the seventeenth century, in the Muslim view these successful attempts were "offensive" in nature. And now Muslims have been allowed to move into Europe in large numbers, really only during the last several decades, and to multiply, while being supported by every possible benefit that generous welfare states can offer. Meanwhile, the indigenous non-Muslims, beset by economic worries (in large part, from the high cost of continuing to support a system that Muslim immigrants have everywhere managed to take full advantage of, and then some), have plummeting birth rates.

There is no "solution" to the ideology of Islam. There is only a sober understanding, by those who are the intended victims of that ideology, and a making of common cause of all non-Muslims. This common cause should be based not least on an intelligent awareness of Islamic triumphalism, whereby any success against non-Muslims anywhere merely whets, and does not sate, Muslim appetites for further success. For in the mental background of history-haunted Muslims, especially Arab Muslims, are the first century or two of uninterrupted Arab conquests, a past that they keep hoping will again be their future.

There is no "solution" to the Arab Jihad against Israel, or to the Jihad, carried out in the main by non-Arab Muslims, against India, or to those being waged within Thailand, or the Philippines, or in any number of non-Muslim lands. And in Western Europe, the "struggle" or Jihad to push back, to undo, the Infidels in the lands they still, preposterously, consider their own, is not -- not right now, while the Western world still possesses much greater military might -- military in nature. It does not involve qitaal and not even, as yet, terrorism. No, the main weapons of the Jihad in Western Europe are deployment of the Money Weapon, carefully targeted and well-financed and non-stop campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest. The first can be halted by interdicting all Saudi and other aid from outside, and vigilantly monitoring the so-called "Muslim charities." The second can be undone by counter-campaigns, designed to immunize those targeted groups. I have already written on what could be done to make black prisoners far more resistant to the siren-song of Islam in prisons. And as to the third, there should be a halt to Muslim immigration, a return-to-sender of all illegal Muslim immigrants, and a stripping of citizenship from all those who cannot offer -- without perjuring themselves -- loyalty to the political and legal institutions that exist. There should also be other requirements, cultural and linguistic, demanded for naturalization, including a raising of the age of marriage, an enforcement of the laws against polygamy, a monitoring of the mosques to ensure that hatred of, and violence toward, Infidels is nowhere to be found (and that strips Islam of so much that makes Islam Islam). There should be enforcement of anti-fraud laws, so that the massive fiddling of the system by Muslim immigrants is halted, and those who have amassed wealth through that fiddling have it seized, systematically and relentlessly.

All of these measures, as yet entirely unaccomplished, are reasonable, are justified, and would have immediate and steadily growing support. For more and more non-Muslims are becoming aware, despite their own appeasement-minded elites (particularly in all trans-national or multi-national groups, such as the upper bureaucracy of the E.U.), of what Islam means, of what Islam is all about.

No "two peoples."

No "solution." The very idea that everything is susceptible of "solution" puts one in mind of some of the criticisms of American naivete and assumptions that the world is always and everywhere malleable, to be set right by Yankee can-do-it-iveness. This is the kind of thing that did not escape notice from nineteenth century observers, from the days of Mrs. Trollope and Tocqueville to those of James Bryce, nor from native-born analysts of the American character, from Mark Twain to H. L. Mencken all the way to today, with you, dear reader, and with me.

But if there is no "solution," there is a policy that will make things less, rather than more, dangerous for Israel and for the rest of the non-Muslim world. There is a policy that does not require doing violence to justice, to equity, and to history. There is a policy that will not lead to a whetting of Arab and Muslim triumphalism. And that policy requires getting used to, and not being upset by, the permanent existence of low-level strife between Israel and its Arab tormentors, who will never give up their desire to harm the state and people of Israel. But if the Israelis are not dictated to, not constantly pressured, not made the object of a thousand resolutions and kibitzing quartets loaded as any gambling den's dice, they can hold firm against the Jihad. And while they do, the rest of the Infidel world will be catching up in its own understanding of how it too is threatened by the very same ideology. And that will, or should, in the end lessen pressure on Israel, and make for an alliance among all threatened non-Muslims, no longer trying to cut their separate deals at the expense of this or that Infidel nation-state -- Israel, India, or a dozen others.

No "solution" but permanent containment. That is the way to deal with the matter: Containment. It worked before. It is the only way.