Fitzgerald: The "Two-State Solution": Folly based on folly

Mahmoud Abbas, smarting from Fatah's defeat in Gaza by Hamas, is now cleverly out for a full-court "peace" press. He knows Bush has only eighteen months left, plus the mess in Iraq, which will remain a mess whatever the American administration now does. And Bush is apparently incapable of welcoming the internecine strife, or at least divisions, sectarian and ethnic, that were made inevitable by the removal of Saddam Hussein's iron grip, and that if allowed to fester, can only divide and demoralize and thereby weaken the Camp of Islam and Jihad.

But Bush and Rice and Company are desperate for a "victory." And whenever a "victory" is needed, it's Peace Process Time in the Middle East. That's always good for all kinds of sentimentality, and exaggerated false hopes, and studied inattention to the dismal facts, including the central fact -- the unavoidable fact, the absolutely critical fact -- of Islam, and the impossibility of Arab Muslims ever, ever conceivably accepting the permanence of the Infidel (and what's still worse, Jewish) state of Israel. Peace treaties between Muslims and non-Muslims are always Truce Treaties, to be broken at the earliest opportunity. Yet American and Israeli leaders refuse to read and find out about Muslim views on war and peace. They pretend that Majid Khadduri and everyone else who has studied the Law of War and Peace in Islam never wrote what they wrote. Has Rice ever read, has the State Department ever circulated, the description by Khadduri of such treaty-making? Has Bush, has Cheney, have any of them read about and grasped the significance of the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyyah that Muhammad made with the Meccans in 628 A.D., then broke as soon as he could (in 630 A.D.), following his own prescription that "war is deception"?

Only a fool, a willful ignoramus, at this point, could seriously believe that if Israel makes further concessions, these concessions will lead to, or could possibly lead to, a permanent peace. It isn't possible. Only deterrence keeps the peace between Israel and all those who are conducting Jihad against Israel, whether they are waging it by qital (combat), by terrorism, by the economic pressure (the money weapon) of boycotts, or by demographic pressure (those huge Arab families, so rapidly and deliberately outbreeding the Jews). It is only "Darura" (google "Darura" and "Hugh Fitzgerald"), that is, the principle of Necessity, that can conceivably keep the peace.

Right now it is Necessity, Darura, that causes Mahmoud Abbas, that corrupt collaborator with Yassir Arafat, to do his best to imitate a mild-mannered casper-milquetoast of an accountant. And a foolish and desperate Olmert, and a desperate and foolish Bush, for their own personal reasons wish to arrive at an agreement, any damn agreement. Where are the sensible heads in Israel and America, the people who understand or can be made to understand the principles of Muslim treaty-making, and the clear doctrines of Islam on this score? It is a fantastic idea to believe that Israel yielding more territory to the Arabs can do anything at all, save whet Arab appetites for more. So many mistakes in Iraq and elsewhere can be attributed to ignorance about the texts, tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics of Islam. Now the biggest mistake of all, the one that has been repeatedly made, by successive Israeli governments, may be repeated again, unless the informed and the unswayable come to the fore. Bush will get his little "victory" and Olmert his, but in fact these victories will endanger, possibly mortally, the people and state of Israel.

The Israelis do not deserve that. They do not deserve a government, or so-called "friends" elsewhere, willing to force upon them a "two-state solution" that makes no sense, and that flies directly in the face of the commands and demands of Islam.

Abbas and the Slow Jihadists of Fatah want that Infidel aid in the biggest way. They want as well, as a first step, as much of the West Bank as they can get. And with such permanently hopeful and uncomprehending naifs as now rule Israel (Olmert at the helm, and his second-in-command Haim Ramon, who was such an enthusiast for the destruction of Israeli villages in Gaza, some built decades before the State of Israel came into existence, and finally, the terminally confused Tsipi Livni), Abbas knows that the next year, when these people are still (unaccountably) in office, and when Bush will be desperate for a "victory," will bring him even more Infidel aid.

All the Arabs have tacitly agreed to be as outwardly full of sweet reason as they can until the Muslim populations have another few years to be fruitful and multiply all over Western Europe. Oh, they know exactly what they are doing. They are playing for time, stalling for time, in reaction to the shock of discovering that many in the United States, and even in Western Europe, are beginning to wake up. And they are doing so despite the army of Western hirelings and the careful infiltration and takeover of so many "sources of information" such as academic centers and departments devoted ostensibly to the study of Islam and the Middle East. Right now the Saudis, for example, are all reason and light -- see recent issues of "Aramco World" (always a good indicator). See also the letters campaign from supposedly aw-shucks downhome American-as-apple-pie Muslims. See the barrage of Op/Eds, from Tariq Ramadan's serpentine hiss on up, or down, telling us that "European Islam" or "American Islam" will be so very different from the other kind -- the kind one sees all over the Lands of Islam, and always has seen. Of course, no one ever satisfactorily explains just how this "European Islam" or this "American Islam" will be different from the Islam we have always seen. It will be based on the same immutable texts of Islam, those studied at Al-Azhar in Cairo, by the Islamic scholars of Saudi Arabia, and by those mullahs and ayatollahs now running the Islamic Republic of Iran. The texts are always the same, whatever the emphasis. They are the same ones read and memorized by Muslims everywhere over the past 1350 years.

They are right now, temporarily, engaged in an act of smiles and wiles. And Mahmoud Abbas is no different. His goal remains, as of course it must remain, the disappearance of an Infidel sovereign state in the midst of Dar al-Islam. If he has to lie, briefly, to get it, of course he will. And even if, for some reason, he was not meretricious, but had had a conversion on the non-road to Damascus, it would mean nothing. Other Muslims, who do take their Islam seriously, would follow him.

The decisions to be taken by the likes of Olmert and Bush are momentous. They may decide whether the Jewish state, built by the Jewish people who had to wait 2000 years to rebuild the Jewish commonwealth will live or die. If it dies, they will get no second chance. And the world's Christians, too, will be unlikely to have free access to Jerusalem. And the hearts and minds of Muslims will not have been "won," but rather, will swell with an ominous triumphalism that will be dangerous for what of the non-Muslim West remains.

The "Two-State Solution" is a folly based on folly. Clearer minds and purer hearts are needed, in the government of Israel, and in the government of the United States.

Posted by Hugh at July 28, 2007 1:46 PM
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