Many people, including some at the highest levels of the State Department, take very seriously treaties between Muslim states and non-Muslim states. On what evidence? Whenever and wherever a Muslim Arab state has been in a position to violate its agreements with Israel, to breach them in every important respect, it has done so. The Armistice Agreements of 1949 were violated by Israel’s neighbors, and terrorist attacks from both Jordan (formerly the Emirate of Transjordan) continued until Unit 101 under Ariel Sharon inflicted such damage in response as to force Jordan to change its ways.
With Egypt, from which there were thousands of separate fedayeen attacks, mostly shootings of Israeli farmers, from 1949 to 1956, the rapid seizure of the Sinai in the Suez campaign was the only thing that convinced Nasser to put a stop to them. And his own guarantees to get Israel to withdraw from the Sinai were abandoned, some right away, Within 48 hours of Israel’s withdrawal, despite his solemn promises, Egyptian troops were again in the Sinai, and the Suez Canal was never made available to Israel’s ships. Other guarantees he did not abandon until May 1967, when he blockaded Israel’s shipping through the Straits of Tiran and moved up hundreds of thousands of troops. He told hysterical Cairene crowds that this would be the end of Israel.
The same goes for all of the interim agreements, under Rogers and Kissinger and the rest of them. And of course every single commitment made to end “hostile propaganda” and to encourage “friendly relations” that Egypt committed itself to under the Camp David Accords were violated by the Egyptian side, more blatantly of course after Israel had scrupulously fulfilled its side of the bargain, and given up, in three slices, the entire Sinai, together with three major airfields Israel had built, and the oilfields it had discovered, and the tourist site of Sharm el Sheikh, and the roads and other infrastructure. It was all worth tens of billions of dollars, and was given up uncomplainingly for nothing at all.
Oh, but Egypt made “peace” with Israel, you say? That “peace” is enforced the same way a “peace” with Syria or Saudi Arabia is kept: by the fear of what the Israelis can do in response. That, and only that, is what keeps the “peace” between Israel and its Muslim neighbors.
As for Jordan, the same goes for it and that so-called “Peace Treaty” which the plucky little king, Abdullah’s father, signed, and which despite its provisions has not led to the Jordanian government discouraging or inhibiting in any way the virulence of anti-Israel hatred. It is not a real peace but a paper peace, to be observed by Jordan only because, for now, like Egypt, it does not want to endanger its receipt of Jizya from the Americans — and most of all because it knows that it has much more to lose in an encounter with Israel.
But Abdullah the kinglet should not think his mediagenic wife and of course everyone’s favorite, Queen Noor, with her own meretricious mythmaking in that “Act of Faith” book, or his attempts to civilize Jordan with a Deerfield-in-Amman, will save his bacon in the West. No longer. The jig is up. Too many people are learning about Islam, and the sweetness-and-light charade just won’t do. Not now. Not ever again.
(Digresson about that Deerfield-in-Amman plan: The elites in the Muslim lands get their high school and sometimes pre-high school education from Western non-Muslim schools, whether it is Chalabi and Allawi and others going to Jesuit-run Baghdad College, or Edward Said at Anglican-run Victoria College. Then they follow this with the American University in Beirut, or the American University in Cairo, or Roberts College, or Catholic schools in Pakistan. Why, even “Baroness” Khan received her westernized gloss early on from a Catholic school in Karachi. Some go on to Radcliffe — Pinky Bhutto — or other schools.)
Amazingly, however, they never think to ask themselves: why is it we went to Infidel schools, non-Muslim schools, and want the same for our children? And why do we want them to be able to live in the West? And why do we get our medical care in the West? And why can we breathe freely only in the West? Could it be, could it conceivably be, that the problem with our own societies and countries is that one thing that we keep defending and yet, by our own behavior, we show that we try to avoid or evade — and that one thing is Islam?
We want everything the West has to offer, but we refuse to recognize that what the West has to offer: its education, its art, its science, its human freedoms, are not available in the world of Islam because of…Islam.
Only when the abdullahs and abdulletts of this world are forced to recognize this truth will there be progress and the possibility of some kind of “dialogue.” Until then, such “dialogue” will continue to consist of apologetic nonsense and lies, and nothing but.