By Richard Mather
For decades the West has lectured Israel on the need to partition its territory in order to placate Arab terrorists. Under pressure, Israel has pursued the narrative of land-for-peace, but without success. This has not stopped France from calling for an international peace conference "to preserve and achieve the two-state solution." Everybody knows that the plan is without hope. The Arabs have rejected a two-state solution on seven occasions since the mid-1930s. Nothing is going to change. Why? Because religion – and not land – is at the core of Arab rejectionism.
Anti-Jewish violence in Mandate Palestine, Israel and other parts of the region has always been religiously-motivated. If you look at the documents, news reports and speeches from the 1920s and 1930s, you'll see that Arab hatred of Palestinian Jews was couched in extreme religious – i.e. Islamist – terms. The anti-Jewish histrionics of Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini (who sought assistance from Hitler) is a case in point. So it is not surprising that a democratic Jewish state, where Jews run their own affairs, is anathema to the racist supremacism of the Islamist Arabs.
Unfortunately, France and the rest of the West are blind to the religious warfare being waged against the Jews. Having discarded much of their Christian heritage, Europe and America show little understanding of religious conflict. Policymakers tend to misread the Israeli-Arab dispute as a clash over land or the so-called settlements. So it is no surprise that that the same policymakers in Berlin, Washington and Brussels are simply incapable of recognising the fact that physical and sexual attacks by Muslims on Western women and children are shaped by deep-seated Islamic contempt for “unbelievers.”
This is where the Islamists have the advantage. They understand only too well that the war against Jews and the West is a religious, imperialistic, even apocalyptic, conflict. The West, by contrast, is ignorant of this reality because it is embarrassed by talk of colonialism and has rejected religion as a way of life. The near-total destruction of Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s, combined with the post-1945 deChristianisation of Europe, has left the continent without a religious counter-ideology on which to base a comprehensive response to Islamic supremacism. America, while still more religious than Europe, is also prone to fits of embarrassment when it comes to talking about colonialism and how religious faith shapes people’s lives.
The situation would not be so bad if the West had replaced the Christian religion with a robust and confident humanism that emphasises critical thinking, freedom and progress. Sadly, many people have become inhuman politically-correct automatons who tolerate the intolerable by creating “safe spaces” on their campuses and institutions for a whole host of unsavoury people who wish to kill Jews and undermine hard-won civil freedoms. And anyone who dares to criticise this mindless set-up is branded an Islamophobe, a racist, a Zio-Nazi or Tory scum.
But there is one thing that Western policymakers can do, while it is still possible. And that is to stop sending out mixed messages over the Israeli-Arab conflict issue and wholeheartedly support the Jewish state, which is on the frontline in the war against Islamism. If the West is not prepared to divide its own capital cities, then it shouldn't pressure Israel into dividing Jerusalem which is of more religious, cultural and historical importance to the Jewish people than Brussels is to the Europeans. Moreover, the English, Danes, French, Germans and Italians have to ask themselves whether they have more in common with a democratic and pluralistic society like Israel or with an anti-democratic, gay-bashing, Islamist quasi-state such as Gaza? Of course, unless Western nations get their act together and stop the creeping Islamisation of their societies, they will become less like Israel and more like Gaza.
Western support for the Palestinian Arabs is possibly one of the worst collective foreign policy decisions ever made. This is true on several levels. Propping up the Palestinian Authority and UNRWA has cost the international community billions of dollars and yielded zero returns. European anti-Semitism is now at levels unseen since the 1940s, which illustrates the very high price Europe has paid for its unethical support of Palestinian nationalism. Moreover, singling out Israel has emboldened Islamists around the world who smell the decay of Western moral failure and attack civilians in schools, cafes, bars, workplaces, supermarkets, nightclubs, trains and buses. As long as Western policymakers continue to be duped by Ramallah into believing that the ‘Palestine issue’ is the key to unlocking the problems of the Middle East, they will continue to be wrong-footed in what is shaping up to be a global conflict between liberal democracy and Islamism.