“Palestinian medical students were recently refused entry to Jerusalem after they rejected a Shin Bet officer’s demand that they spy on fellow students at Al-Quds University. They were thus prevented from continuing their medical training. As usual, the Shin Bet offered “security reasons” as its explanation for denying the students their education.”

I’ve often seen reference to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, in forums such as these from Israel defenders. I don’t think he deserves much standing in the diagnosis of either the current or even the historical reasons of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And while a campaign of purging political-tribal enemies certainly existed, it was a small digression in the larger story of the conflict.

The second phrase I quoted is ridiculous, where did that come from?

The truth behind the collaboration issue is covered in great detail in Hillel Cohen’s book, Army of Shadows.

I found two Israeli historians who both highly praised this book in 2008. Neve Gordon’s excellent essay on several books including Army of Shadows and Benny Morris’ review. Reading these two articles will vastly improve anyone’s knowledge of the complex relationships between Israelis and Arabs before 1967. (btw, the second section of Morris’ piece, which is strangely formatted in bold and centered, doesn’t match the historian’s viewpoint of the first section. It is really a polemic tying Islamism to the early period of Palestinian anti-Zionism.)

I disagree. A solid majority of Americans have zero issue with a frozen conflict between Israel and Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and the Palestinians of the West Bank. Ok, that solid majority includes those Americans who do not even think about this.

The noisy minority of the left who only see Israel as “occupier” and worse, unfortunately includes President Obama, and a few key advisors, who also seem to want an American military presence inside Pakistan’s FATA, a schizophrenic idea for the same group who want no combat troops in Iraq. Why not just occupy Yemen, and push the conflict there, and leave Israel and the Palestinians to do what they were doing before President Obama decided apartments in North Jerusalem were an international crisis?

I have now read Chuck Hagel’s October 2009 speech to J Street, and Jim Jones and Hillary Clinton’s speeches in April. This belief that only peace between Israel and Lebanon, and between Israel and Syria, and between Israel and the Palestinians will somehow undermine Iran, and placate the Pakistan Taliban who will then placate the Afghan Taliban, is inside-out foreign policy.

Islamists who still believe in Salafist jihad and/or Shi’a millenialism would have to invent a new enemy if there were no Jews or Israel.
Actually, the new enemy IS the United States, the Crusaders occupying Muslim land, playing whack-a-mole with missile strikes.

The most powerful and central factor in the Middle East is Islam and for the Muslim world the Koran is the truth and whatever confutes or denies the Koran is sinful and an abomination.

A sovereign Jewish state, the equal of its Muslim neighbors, at the center of the Arab world, is a direct contradiction of the Koran, and its truth. It is a living insult and refutation of Islam. Already in Mohammed’s lifetime the Jews of Arabia were defeated and reduced, by the Prophet, for eternity, to a subordinate condition. The dhimmis were a protected people, spared the fate of other non-believers, but confined to a special niche in Islam where they were subjected to humiliation and second class citizenship. For these despised Jews to now throw off the verdict of the Koran and repudiate their station and seize a land which Islam has since 640 considered its own, and aspire to equality with Muslim is a blatant contradiction of Mohammed’s words and a direct challenge to the truth of the faith.

This is at the root of the conflict, not any injustice to the Palestinian Arabs, not land theft, or cultural nonconformity, or military defeat. None of that is unforgivable or unacceptable to the Arab world. It has inflicted and suffered worse. What is unforgivable however, and unacceptable on any terms, is having the Koran and the most fundamental of Muslim teachings confuted and defied in Islam’s very heartland. This is the source of the infection, of the enmity, of the hate and unacceptability of theJewish state.

But I must digress. There is a truly distrubing “piece” of rubbish by something called a Robert Wright in today’s NYT that finds simple answers from psychology 101 for terrorist behaviors (after having damned “simple answers” by more knowledgeable others such as Daniel Pipes and Jeffrey Goldberg). In dreaming up what must be for him less troubling motivations for the recent NYC attempted bombing, Wright paints a trace-the-dots picture of an alienated immigrant lost in a strange land (but also a tolerant and inclusive land–should one want inclusiveness, doubtful in the case of many if not most Muslim immigrants–all of which he conveniently fails to mention) and critiques the “jihadi intent” ascribed to others like Pipes.

As if any of us who migrated somewhere and felt alienated would naturally think of mass murdering as many innocents as possible in the most brutal fashion possible all for a clearly defined cause, Jihad, as a solution to the personal problem of cultural isolation. Uh-huh! Sorry Fellow Traveler Wright, speaking personally, I’m pretty sure that’s not in my DNA nor that of anyone I’ve ever known. Speak for yourself.

This is the most dangerous level of moral- equivalency imaginable, nearly approaching a hallucinatory state of disordered thinking, and yet sadly not unusual from the unhinged left as sponsored by the NYT. In that regard, I can’t say how refreshing it is to read an informed and moderate liberal like Mr. Mead who not only writes well and clearly but looks at these thorny issues with eyes wide open.

I would question the last comment about how Israelis and Palestinians “can’t afford to blow off” these concerns from others who don’t live there. Reading that I could only wonder if these “concerns’ of complete outsiders aren’t themselves largely responsible to the continuing ratcheting up of the problem. Maybe we should back off.

BTW, all good and thoughtful letters above as they usually are here.