Fitzgerald: Things looking up for Israel in Europe, if only the Israelis can hold on

And beginning with their defeat in the Six-Day War, the Arabs realized that they would not be able to defeat Israel militarily, at least not yet, not under the new conditions, and with Israel now in possession of "the West Bank" and Gaza and all of the Sinai (some 95% of the territory Israel won by force of arms in that war). They would have to formulate a new strategy to force Israel to disgorge what it had won, to make Israel appear not to be what in fact it still was, a tiny state subject to this unending Arab and Muslim hostility, that no concessions by Israel would ever truly assuage (at least not for the Muslims who took Islam seriously, and that meant, at least, all of the Arab Muslims). So they did several things. They decided on a campaign of diplomatic and economic warfare, accompanied by terrorist acts within Israel and against Israelis overseas, and on a campaign to weaken Israel and to force its former friends to sever ties, or at least to cease being friendly toward Israel, and ready to misunderstand its plight, and the real nature of the war -- the Jihad -- being waged against it.

The first to be won over, largely by bribery of African rulers, were the black African states that had enjoyed good relations with Israel and had benefited greatly from Israel's extensive, and intelligent, aid program in Black Africa, which encouraged the development of small-scale agriculture. All of these countries, or almost all, within a year or two after the Six-Day War, had been persuaded by Arab money and the promise -- never fulfilled -- of more money to come if they did what the Arabs wanted, cut off diplomatic relations with the Jewish state.

In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, there was no need to change tactics. The Communists were anti-Zionist and the policy of the Soviet government was almost forthrightly antisemitic, though all the best people in Russia -- think of Sakharov -- deplored such a policy, and the most advanced non-Jewish Russians took, as if reflexively, Israel's side.

In the countries of Western Europe, the Arabs played on the exaggerated guilt over colonialism. They pretended that the Jews, who had bought land and revived the ancient Jewish commonwealth in the tiny territory that for thousands of years had been associated, by Jews and by many others, with the Jewish nation, were in fact "colonialists" who had come to "colonize." Strange colonists, these, who drained the Huleh marshes, made the desert famously bloom, and did all the work -- the Arabs, in fact, flocked into what in the West was known as "Palestine" in numbers greater than the Jews from 1920 to 1940, and even before, from the turn of the century to 1920, because the Zionist settlers created economic opportunities that, until they arrived, had simply not existed.

All this, however, was forgotten -- not at once, but slowly, as the Arabs kept talking about a newly invented "Palestinian people." Within a decade or two, by dint of constant repetition, this people came to be accepted as real, and not a propagandistic fiction, created -- along with supposedly "Palestinian" folktales and folksongs (in reality, all of them simply standard Arab folktales and folksongs) -- for the sole purpose of disguising the war, the Jihad against Israel. The shock troops of that war were those local Arabs who were now so absurdly called "Palestinians." Arab Muslims led the campaign. Many non-Arab Muslims have naturally joined in. The less they have anything other than Islam, any other identity, to fall back on -- such as the Pakistanis (as compared to Berbers and Kurds and even Iranians before the Islamic Republic of Iran came along to prove itself even more Islamic than the Arabs) - the more this campaign turned out to be a success.

Pim Fortuyn had great sympathy for Israel. He noted in his book "Israel: 50 Years, and Then?" that an intelligent understanding of Israel's situation and of its real history, was fading from European consciousnesses. Now we hear, and not only on the BBC, and read, and not only in The Guardian, that juridically ridiculous phrase, "occupied Arab lands," or "occupied West Bank," for territories which were assigned to Mandatory Palestine by the League of Nations for the sole purpose of creating, from that particular Mandatory territory, the Jewish National Home.

Things became very bleak for Israel in Western Europe. But now things are changing, and they are not changing because of anything the Israelis have done. They remain as inept as ever in the proper presentation of their own history, their own claims, their own rights, their own case. No, what has changed is that, over the last thirty years, the political and media elites of the countries of Western Europe allowed into their midst, into the midst of their countries, and their by-now long-suffering peoples, far too many, even millions, of Muslims. The behavior of those Muslims makes clear that behind that behavior is something else, a Total Belief-System, that is not susceptible of change, and that rests on the idea, inculcated by Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, that between Believer and Unbeliever, Muslim and Infidel, a state of permanent war, though not always of open warfare, must and does exist. And the texts of Islam, the tenets of Islam, are coming into view -- slowly but surely. The behavior of Muslims themselves is by now obviously more threatening and intransigent than the behavior of any of the other many immigrant groups that have arrived in Western Europe.

They are most threatening, it seems, in those very countries, Denmark and the Netherlands, which have elevated Tolerance practically to the level of state religions. And since it is not the Chinese, not the Hindus, not the sub-Saharan but Christian black Africans, not the Filipinos or the South Americans, but always and everywhere the Muslims who are the cause of such trouble and anxiety, and since they are the cause of such trouble and anxiety for non-Muslims not in one, or two, or five countries of Western Europe, but absolutely everywhere that they go, that they live, in numbers large enough -- 2 or 5 will apparently do -- it has become clear that there is Something About Islam. It is that very Something that many inhabitants of Western Europe can no longer pretend does not exist. They are now determined to find out just exactly what that Something is.

As soon as the peoples of Western Europe come to realize what Islam is all about -- and they are being forced to realize, for the Muslims in their midst are doing the forcing -- they will, slowly, come to understand not the non-existent "plight" of the non-existent "Palestinian people." They will change, and change in favor of Israel. They will come to realize that, as they become aware of what is truly happening in their own countries. Those countries are now faced from within with what is a quite-unnecessary danger, that of Muslim populations that cannot, save at the edges, among the least-Muslim of Muslims, integrate, and that believe they have not only have a right but a duty to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam. That goal will be, is being, pursued by all means. Those means include, in addition to terrorism and its ever-present threat, such means as the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest (discussed openly among Muslims, and sometimes even, as by Boumediene at the U.N. in 1974, and Qaddafy a few years ago, Arab or other Muslim rulers). That goal requires the slow or rapid undoing of the political and legal institutions of Infidel nation-states, the undoing of social arrangements and understandings, the undoing of the very freedoms, and solicitousness for the individual, that characterize advanced Western democracies, and are regarded as the accomplishment of many centuries of thought.

And as they begin to better comprehend Islam, those Europeans will, necessarily, begin to realize as well that the war against Israel has no end and is unsusceptible of a "solution." For the Arab and Muslim claim, or the Arab Muslim claim, is not to be met, nor assuaged, by any reduction in Israel's size. Already absurdly tiny, Israel is now, in its current borders (including the "West Bank," which is the name the Jordanians gave to those parts of Judea and Samaria, part of the Mandate for Palestine that was always intended to be included in the tiny territory allocated for the Jewish National Home by the League of Nations), existing in a state of permanent peril that no other state must endure. For any of those other states to lecture or hector Israel on why it should surrender more territory, is both cruel and absurd. Once Islam is grasped, both that cruelty, and that absurdity, of such pressures and demands on Israel, will be clear.

The confused and ineffectual Obama Administration has no idea how to deal with Islam, and is very likely going to stick with the folly in Afghanistan because it did not prepare the proper framework. The Cairo speech and what it signified for now still makes it impossible for the Obama Administration to see things aright, to recognize and act on the recognition that Islam is the problem. The American government must stop squandering men, money, materiel, morale, and attention (needed for many other things) on hopeless efforts to make Muslim societies happier or more prosperous and Muslim states more unified, but instead welcome every fissure, ethnic, sectarian, and economic, pre-existing within the Camp of Islam.

Many who never knew, or forgot, the real story of the wars or War being made on Israel. We now understand it well enough to describe that war, accurately, as a Jihad against Israel. This Jihad began against the Jews even before the existence of the State, during the Mandatory period, when it was clear that the Jews would not behave as submissive dhimmis. This Jihad has been pursued steadily ever since, by the Muslim Arabs, against the Infidel nation-state of Israel, by open warfare, by terrorism, by economic boycotts, by diplomatic pressure, by every means. This Jihad will never come to an end, but it can be held intelligently in check if Israel remains overwhelmingly stronger militarily, and if in addition the Arabs and other Muslims are convinced that Israel is overwhelmingly stronger. And Israel, if pushed back still further, as dhimmis, if cruelly pressured to give up control of the "West Bank" to which it has a legal, moral, and historic claim, will be far weaker and will be perceived as much much weaker by its enemies. They will not for one minute be assuaged, but will merely have their appetites for Jihad whetted -- and not only for Jihad against Israel, but against all Infidels, including most importantly those in Western Europe.

Despite the BBC and The Guardian and Agence France-Presse and Der Spiegel and so on, the peoples of Western Europe will come to understand Islam. They will come to realize that the narrative, the cunning re-packaging of the unappeasable murderous hostility to Israel as merely a fight for "national liberation" for the "Palestinians," is false. This "tiny people" was invented precisely after the Six-Day War, by Arab propagandists and their able, and well paid, Western advisers and collaborators. By now such words as "occupied" have worked their daily poison. But despite all this, relief is on the way. The cavalry is coming, and the cavalry is being summoned because of the aggressive and violent behavior of Muslims worldwide. That cavalry is nothing more, and nothing less, than an awakening to the texts, the tenets, the attitudes, the atmospherics, of Islam -- and, inexorably, to the real nature of the conflict between Arab and Jew, which is merely a local case of the permanent Jihad against all Infidels, everywhere, who oppose the dominance, over themselves, of Islam.