The Arabs are ready to sign a treaty with Israel only if it leaves them enough leeway, and promises a firm enough potential, to bring about Israel's demise. And if they fail to impose their will on Israel via peace talks, they resort to violence: a daily and draining intifada calculated to make life in Israel untenable. World Jewry, which is conceived as the main life artery of Israel, is similarly harassed. Together with the intifada in Israel, Muslim/Arab communities throughout the Western world have launched violent attacks. In Sydney and Paris, London and Johannesburg, hundreds of events of this sort have been visited on cities and towns which seemingly had nothing to do with the Middle East: synagogues have been torched, Jews assaulted, cemetaries desecrated, Israeli flags burned or trampled upon, and jihad summons issued urging Muslims to join in the liberation of Jerusalem from the Zionists.

These manifestations of hostility and intolerance highlight the increasingly burdensome issue of the Islamic penetration of the Western world, mostly via illegal immigration. This means that the demographic balance will be affected, especially in countries such as the U.S., Canada and Australia, just as it is already in Western Europe, which accords political asylum to refugees from Islamic countries. It means that these immigrants, both the already established and the newcomers, import to their countries of shelter their hatred for Israel and the Jews. This in itself is likely to undermine the enviable status the Jews enjoy in these countries. The Muslims are determined to undermine this, both by sheer numbers and by violence and intimidation towards the Jews themselves, signaling to the general population that Jews are "dangerous" and that they and their neighborhoods should be avoided. It is easy to forsee the anti-Semitism that will be encouraged when common people who never liked the Jews are made to feel the latter have become a cumbersome liability.

In our days, the globalization of information has caused the universalization of Arab and Islamic solidarity. International Arab and Islamic concerns have been hijacked by activist groups who transmit instantly material from the local media in each Islamic country. Not only are their messages regarding the oppression of Palestinians and the dangers that the Jews pose to the Muslim holy places broadcast widely via the Internet, but activists also raise funds, urge co-religionists to demonstrate, violently if necessary, in support of those causes, and even provide instructions on how to join terrorist lodges or to concoct explosives. Thus what happens on the ground in Gaza or Nablus has immediate reverberations in the streets of Melbourne and London, not to speak of the Arab street from Rabat to Baghdad, or the Islamic street from Teheran to Jakarta.

From the Palestinian point of view, the right of return is the supreme test case. The Arabs understand full well that a mass return of Palestinians to Israel, together with the million Palestinian Arabs already living in Israel, would turn the country into another Gaza; hence their insistence upon becoming full-fledged citizens upon their return to the land. One wonders, why should they want to be citizens of a state they hate unless they want to dismantle it from within? And when they gain the majority and make the land into another corrupt, poor, backward, dictatorial, and overcrowded country, Israel's sin of humiliating excellence will be wiped out. The Arabs understand full well that a successful and democratic Israel will persist only so long as the Jewish majority leads it, and will vanish when the Arabs take control.

Successful and westernized Israel, like the West itself, is deeply hated by the Arab and Islamic worlds. It is in the nature of things that the backward and the poor detest whose whom they cannot resemble. Therefore Israel and the West are always interwined. One can hear in campuses around the world that both are neo-colonialist or neo-imperialist, enemies of Islam and of the Third World. In these demonstrations, the Israeli and American flags are always burned in tandem. Israel is the Western corrupting arm in the heart of the Arab and Islamic world, that does the ground work of undermining Islam, of corrupting its youth with foreign values, music, pornography, and permissiveness. Hence the commitment to fight them both relentlessly and ruthlessly, even at the price of self-perdition.

Given the absence of any willingness to accept Israel, much less to conclude peace with her, there is no reason for Israel to rush into a settlement which can only prejudice its most vital interests. A long series of "agreements" have been signed: Oslo I and Oslo II, Camp David Conferences I and II were convened, a Cairo Accord I and II were signed, Sharm el-Sheikh meetings I and II were held, and Taba and Eilat, Wye and Washington, and no concrete and palpable result ensued. If there are so many agreements, maybe there were none? Israel and the Arabs did sign, under external prodding, masses of papers, raised expectations for the upcoming era of peace, but the result is frustration. Israel has demonstrated in all stages of negotiations a dismal misunder-

Outpost               - 10 -               September-October 2001