For many years, according at least to the U.S. State Department and other Western diplomatic agencies, the “Palestinians” were wishing for a separate state. This is the “two-state” solution to the “Israeli” problem, said to be otherwise intractable. (I will be placing my scare quotes carefully.)

Most Americans, and probably most Catholics, have been willing to concede this as a diplomatic fix; it gives us something glib to say. Most Israelis are, also, willing to be glib. They offer, or used to offer, “land for peace.” This never worked for them.

I do not have the space or patience to rehearse the whole history of the Arab response to “Zionism,” from Ottoman times to the present. Since 1948, it has often been expressed with murderous violence, through aggressive wars and acts of terrorism. Repeatedly, neighboring Arab states have tried to wipe the “new” entity off the map.

This was unwise, on the part of the Arabs, because they lost every war, to an Israel fighting valiantly for survival; including at the beginning when the odds were entirely on the Arab side.

A fecund people, the Arabs in and around the old British mandate of Palestine had essentially two options. They could stay and become citizens (there are two million Arab Israelis now), or they could flee and become refugees. Half fled: voluntarily, unlike the Jews who were evicted from almost every Muslim country.

These hard facts will not be accepted by the enemies of Israel. They continue to wish Israel would go away; yet it won’t, and the genocidal fantasy has led them to a terrible fate.

Of course, the “Palestinian” leaders have earned the greatest punishment for this, because they established a vile, psychopathic “education” system over their refugees, with much supplementary propaganda. They have in effect brainwashed this population, to entrap their loyalties. That they have been successfully brainwashed can be demonstrated, for “Palestinian” views are not shared by the larger Arab world, who are even less welcoming to “Palestinians” than to Israelis.

It takes some effort to create a class of fanatic Jew-killers, such as we saw on October 7th. It is morally worse even than the corruption with which these leaders have enriched and armed themselves; and even than the specific acts of hostage-taking, savage torture, and gratuitous killing done to whoever comes their way. They have delivered their own people into the Hell that is Gaza.

By the concept of Intifada, they have spread their scheme of violent chaos wherever Arab emigrants can be found, and who have children who can be radicalized. For Muslims living away from the traditional Ummah are easily infected with the Islamist bacillus, a disease that invades and spoils Arab life and religion.

This is the reason why conversion to Christianity has become the only practical alternative for Muslims who find themselves at a dead end. For Christianity provides a path out of the quagmire (whereas atheism negates even Islam’s merits).

The Catholic Church could help, by welcoming the Muslim convert and caring particularly for his needs, in the spirit of a Holy Crusade. Her present attitude, of avoiding trespass into Muslim territory and showing timid, artificial “tolerance” for the very Islamic doctrines that are used to oppress Christians, is a failure of our obligation to the Muslim neighbor, and an abandonment of  Christ.

Instead, let’s grow spines.

The excuse for spinelessness is mostly fear. We think the Muslims might kill us if we make an evangelical approach, and sometimes they will. But Saint Francis did not hesitate in his journey to Damietta, or in his approach to the Sultan of Egypt, when he lovingly presented the basic Catholic truths.

(If God is on our side, who can be against us?)

From what I could follow in the news this week, events on the campuses of Columbia, Fordham, UCLA, and so on suggest a reversal of our pusillanimity in the face of Hamas rioting. We begin to see that a large majority of Americans – about three-quarters of those polled – understand the points I was making above, and that they believe the “Palestinians” are not victims, but have often got what they deserved.

The “beatdown” administered by blue-state police is thus a hopeful sign that Americans are not incurably stupid. Moreover, developments in the Sunni Arab world give hope, too, that they will stand with Israel in opposition to Iran and its proxies. Certainly, their sympathy with the “Palestinians” evaporated long ago.

We must be careful what we wish for. Under terrorist leadership for many decades, the “Palestinian” wish for freedom, “from the river to the sea,” and thus for the extinction of Israel, created a situation for them in which their only friends are malevolent crazies.

It is not just a question of prayer, for prayer is not always beneficial. As Christians ought to know, it matters what you pray for. Praying for peace, while setting conditions, is praying to the Devil. And it gets worse when the Devil sets out to reward our prayers.

We do not love with CONDITIONS. God makes His answers indifferently to them, and He helpfully ignores what is not good for us.

The Western peacenik thinks that peace and all good things can be advanced by dialogue, and in this case dialogue “between the faiths,” under rules written by those who have no religion at all. It is one of many propositions we might have hoped would have perished on October 7th, rather than so many women and children.

“Peace talks” have generally contributed to the occasion for war, and all the peace talks in which Israel ever participated, have ended poorly. The most promising, such as Oslo, cost them most dear.

Hamas was the anfractuous reward for the painful Israeli evacuation of Gaza in 2005, the product of some “peace process.”

For Israel has something to learn, too: that glib wishes bring the opposite result, in every case.

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Casey Chalk The Jewish Difference and the Difference It Makes

Robert W. Shaffern The Long History of Arab/Israeli Conflict