(FrontPage Magazine) Bruce Thornton - The implied moral equivalence between murderers and their victims has for decades been a sign of the West's shameful moral idiocy and cowardice when it comes to Israel. Just give the Palestinians their own state, we've been told, and peace will bloom throughout the region. But this solution assumes that a majority of the Palestinian Arabs really want a Palestinian state - something that could have been created before 1967, when the West Bank was illegally occupied by Jordan, or with the five subsequent offers of a state, all summarily rejected. And Israel evacuated Gaza in 2005. Instead of peace, Israel reaped thousands of missiles attacking its civilians. No, Israel is not hated because it thwarts the yearning for a "national self-determination," a Western idea alien to traditional Islam. Israel is hated for what it is: a cultural and civilizational outpost of the infidel West. It is a constant and bitter reproach to Middle Eastern Islamic civilization's failure to adapt to the modern world despite its abundant oil wealth and long history of imperial and colonial success as one of history's biggest empires. Thus nothing Israel does or concedes will change the Islamic need for it quite simply to disappear. The agitation for a Palestinian state is merely a tactic, to be selectively employed for achieving that long-term strategic goal. The writer is an emeritus professor at California State University, Fresno, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
2023-08-17 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive