(National Review) Saul Singer - Even though the Arab-Israeli conflict is the flashpoint between dictatorships and democracy in the region, it is never portrayed, even by the U.S., as a front within the wider struggle between darkness and light, but as a conventional border dispute. The U.S. continues to relate to the Arab-Israeli conundrum as a head-banging enterprise where Israel must be induced to give up land and the Palestinians to offer peace. The obstacle to peace is Greater Palestine, the idea that Israel has no right to exist. Accordingly, the standard U.S. formulation juxtaposing Israeli settlements and Palestinian terrorism in the same breath - as Rice again did this week - is not just harmless lip service. The whole enterprise of posing as an honest broker between a jihad and its intended victim is a harmful anachronism. It is time for the U.S. to state what the "peace process" has become: a matter of waiting for the Arab world in general, and the Palestinians in particular, to recognize that the Jewish people have a right to a small national home in the midst of a sea of Arab states. The U.S. should, in short, put the Arab jihad against Israel on the same plane as the fight against the global jihad on the West. They are, after all, one and the same. It is impossible to conceive of victory against the wider jihad while politely genuflecting toward its first and most virulent manifestation.
2005-11-18 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive