Some Real Answers On The Arab-Israeli conflict

This time courtesy of blogpal Dr. Richard Landes, proprieter of that fine site The Augean Stables.

He was asked to respond to a questionaire from a Christian private school in Lexington and answer some basic questions on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

To my mind, Dr. Landes misses covering only two points adequately in my view.First, the fact that Islam's Jew hatred is deeply rooted in the Qu'ran and especially in the Hadith, the recounting of the life, times and saying of Mohammed, and thus the Islamic scriptural equivalent of the Gospels . Until Islam as a whole addresses this, there will be no coexistance not only between the majority Muslims and Jews but between the majority of Muslims and all non-believers.

Second, he neglects to specifically mention a major cause for the hostility towards Israel and the Jews - simple envy and the desire for loot and pillage. That also applies to the West generally, but Israel in particular because it's the nearest at hand.

Of course, barring a total change in Islam there's definitely a fair and just solutionin the real world to the problem of Israel and the Palestinians...for what it's worth.

Here's a sample of Dr. Landes' excellent response:

What do you think is the root cause of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?

On one level, it’s a conflict between two different people for the same territory. But there are plenty of such conflicts that have been resolved, including ones where the damages in lives destroyed and uprooted have been far more terrible than what the Palestinians refer to as the Naqba. In India and Pakistan the division created tens of millions of refugees and over a million people were slaughtered by both sides. In Cyprus, tens of thousands were uprooted to divide the island in two. so the issue is not what happened, but why this conflict, more than any other, is so impossible to solve.

Here, I think the only viable explanation is to understand the blow to Arab/Muslim honor at the creation of a free and independent state run by non-Muslims in Dar-al-Islam. (For a larger discussion of this, see here.) As the Athenians explained to the Melians: “It’s not so terrible to be conquered by those who should rule (like the Spartans, or in this case the Christians), but it is unbearable to be defeated by those who should be subject (like the Melians or, in this case, the Jews).”

If you don’t know about the Muslim principles of Dar-al-Islam (the realm of submission where Muslims rule) and Dar-al-Harb (the land of the sword, with which Muslims are at war), you can’t possibly understand either the permanent hostility of the Arabs to Israel (including their refusal to recognize her), or the willingness of the Arabs to keep the Palestinians suffering in refugee camps so that they can be used as a weapon against Israel.

By Muslim standards, the very existence of Israel is a theological blasphemy and an unbearable affront to their honor. That’s what the Naqba is about. If it were about the terrible suffering of the Palestinians who had to flee as a result of the war (which is what the “pro-”Palestinian would have us believe), then the Arabs and Palestinian leaders would have done something to make their lives better (including using a tiny fraction of the trillions of petrodollars Arab countries have taken in in the last half-century). Instead they confined them to permanent refugee camps (no cement floors allowed, they had to live in tents and the mud for years).

It’s striking that during the Oslo peace process, when the Palestinian authority had control of both refugee camps and territory, they didn’t take one refugee family out of those camps. Indeed, the problem of Oslo was not too many Israeli settlements, but of too few Palestinian settlements. The PA did not behave as if they wanted a state, but as if they wanted to destroy the Israeli state.

What solutions would you offer to solve this problem?

I think that it’s important for the entire world community — and especially representative of the progressive left — to say to the Muslims, “Time to grow up and learn to live with your neighbors and take care of your own people. The Israelis haven’t done anything to you that you haven’t done to others, indeed that you haven’t done to your own people. If you want to live in a peaceful global society, it’s time to put aside vendettas and the need to regain your honor by spilling blood.”

Israel is the test of Islam’s readiness to join the world community as honorable partners, and not as belligerents whose borders are bloody almost everywhere in the world where Muslim countries border other countries, Muslim or not. Until the Palestinians are ready to have a win-win relationship with Israel, there will be no peace. And until the Arab world stops using Israel as its excuse for not liberalizing, Arabs will continue to lose.

The most obvious place to start is with the teaching of hatred in the Palestinian media and schools and mosques. The kind of thing that Palestinian children are taught about Israelis and Jews is as bad as the Nazis taught German youth. (In fact, no priest or minister, even at the height of Nazi frenzy called for the extermination of the Jews, something that happens regularly from the pulpit of the mosques, then broadcast on PA TV).

The other critical thing to address is the Palestinian inability to self-criticize, to take any responsibility for what they’ve done. Ask any Palestinian or pro-Palestinian what the Palestinians have done wrong and you’ll get a blank look. It’s all Israel’s fault. In order for positive-sum relations to work, both sides have to take responsibility. As for the israelis, and the Western Jews, there’s almost no limit to how self-critical they’ll get. Indeed, many have a kind of masochistic omnipotence complex where it’s all “our” fault, and if only we could be better (say sorry more, make more concessions) we can fix anything.

My point is not that Israel hasn’t done things they shouldn’t have, that they have nothing to apologize for. It’s that they are not only ready to, but have done so to such an extent that they take responsibility for things they haven’t done (like Ilan Pappe’s student inventing a massacre at Tantura). When one side takes too much responsibility and the other takes none, it’s a lose-lose — only the haters win.

Read the rest here...