Elephant? What elephant?

Times of Israel's takeaway from the admission of a jihad proponent to the inner sanctum of Israeli security is: "But if Ra’am ends up with a deputy minister in the PMO, that would be a first for the Islamist party."

That's it.

On 27 June 1970, speaking of Chile, Henry Kissinger said, “I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” I am reminded of those words today as everyone stood by and watched jihad find its way right into the heart of the Jewish State through the irresponsibility of its own people.

Say what one might about Kissinger’s conduct with respect to Chile, the impact of Israel’s Jewish electorate’s irresponsibility is far more grave in that their country guards the covenant of civilisation: the freedoms and rights of each individual and the equality of all before the law. When jihad comes to prevail in Israel, as it is now on a fast track to doing, not only will Islam fulfil it’s promise to annihilate the Jews, it will reduce all civilisation to the brand of barbarism it calls Shari’a.

Islam, it seems, is an elephant that lies outside the visual spectrum of the Jews, this despite the Jews having been right in the middle of the Islamic field of vision for all of 1400 years. Islam never tires of reminding Muslims that their inveterate enemies are the Jews, that they must forever hate them, and eventually, kill them all.

Until who understands, exactly?

We say very clearly [to Iran]: We won’t let you get nuclear weapons. What don’t you understand?
— Yoshi Cohen, former Head of Mossad.

We want Hamas to understand that their missile attacks on Israel are unacceptable, and that they will think twice or three times before ever doing it again.
— Mark Regev, Senior Advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

If the Director of Mossad and the Senior Advisor to the Prime Minister in 2021 both emphasised the need to make their enemies "understand" just how badly Israel can hurt them, then they are lying to themselves about their enemies’ motivations and about the efficacy of their own assumed deterrence. It is a stubborn delusion that’s been around for a long time.

Trying to make it clear to the other side that the game of breaking the ceasefire is a two-sided one. And we are going to press, and we are going to push, and we are going to bomb, and we are going to punish as much and as long as we can until the other side does understand the rules of the game.
— Ahayon Yariv, Israeli Army spokesman, 10 October 1973.

Why Iran? The Iranians have lost no land to the Jews. Most of them are not even Arab. Why do they hate Israel so much? Why are they prepared to die for Palestine? Because the Jews are the eternal enemies of the Muslims, not of the Arabs, not of the Iranians, of the Muslims, and their Qur’an commands them all, not just the so-called "Islamist jihadists" in Gaza, to kill the Jews and to die in the process of doing so.

I find it extremely hard to believe that Cohen and Regev and Yariv do not understand that their problem is Islam, and in particular, jihad, and that there is nothing for Hamas or Iran or Hizbollah to “understand”. They understand very well that Allah has struck a bargain with them — kill and die for me and I'll give you Paradise — and it is presumptuous in the extreme for a Jew, of all people, to imagine that he can better Allah’s offer. Who, exactly, fails to understand?

The non-existence of co-existence

The Egyptians’ big advantage over us in the Yom Kippur War was that they didn’t lie to themselves regarding how they’d functioned in the Six Day War, and they’d fixed what they were capable of fixing. We lied to ourselves about what had happened in the Six Day War, and now we paid the price.
— Uri Milstein, Israeli military historian.

There is no question in my mind that there is nothing about Islam that I or anyone else can teach to those responsible for Israel’s survival. They know it all already. They know that Iran, Hamas, the PLO, Hizbollah, Al-Qaida, the Taliban, ISIS, Erdoğan, Pakistan, etc., etc., are not all Arabs, but that they are all Muslims, and that Islam, not "Islamist jihadists," call for their destruction.

They also know that those “Israeli Arabs” who are happy, productive and prosperous members of Israeli society are Druze Arabs and Christian Arabs. They know that the disaffected Arabs are all Muslim Arabs. No amount of insisting that they are “citizens of Israel” is going to change the ink on a piece of paper into an allegiance, when the only allegiance inculcated into them, from birth, whether they are in Gaza, Turkey, India, Indonesia, Mali, Trinidad or Israel, is that they are Muslim. To zero in on the handful of Muslims who have, indeed, integrated into Israeli society as evidence of co-existence is to clutch a straw and feel a raft.

Israelis appear not to understand that anyone who calls themselves “Palestinian” is, by definition, not interested in sharing anything with them, the Jews. The people Israelis quaintly refer to as “Israeli Arabs” are a blur of Christians, Druze, and Muslims, all Arabs. "The Arabs" are mostly a bit standoffish, but at least they are peaceful, for the most part, and they vote in regular democratic elections, even for the highest office, even for Zionist parties. In which Arab country do Arabs enjoy such rights and freedoms? Of course they want to be Israeli citizens. It just takes a little time. Perhaps a bit more education, and one or two more will integrate. There are even Muslims in the IDF. Israeli Jews are forever telling themselves they are on the brink of a major co-existence breakthrough.

Then came the latest Gaza War ...and Lod ...and President Rivlin’s pitiful call to “Israeli Arab” leaders to urgently calm things down. Not only did they take their own sweet time about it, former Member of Knesset Mohammad Barakeh, instead of calling for calm for the sake of Israel, called a Palestinian general strike right in the middle of the crisis. Barakeh’s call was taken up “from the river to the sea,” in Gaza, in Israel and in Judea and Samaria. All column inches were at the time taken up with Gaza bombing, “Israeli Arab” rioting and nightly Iron Dome extravaganzas. No one noticed what the term “Palestinian” really meant.

The demonstration [the general strike, AP] that was held shows us that the people who say that Palestinians will forget their nationality or …their Palestinian identity has (sic) failed. The strike showed us that Palestinian people everywhere are the same people and also me as Palestinian Israeli citizen, I seek, and my main goal is, ending the occupation and establishing a Palestinian state.
— Maisam Jaljuli, co-chair of Sikkuy.[1]

Exactly what is meant by "the occupation" becomes abundantly clear from interviews with random Palestinians, whether in Israel, Gaza or Judea and Samaria. There is one question that consistently elicits confusion: “If Israel where to agree to a Palestinian State, will there be peace?” If the response is an immediate “yes”, it invariably turns out after a follow-up question that the interviewee had assumed Israel dissolving itself and Jews vacating all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Upon realising their erroneous assumption, their response changes to an emphatic "no". If they understand the question to imply a two-state solution, they fail to understand how there could be a Palestinian state with Israel still “occupying the Palestinian interior,” and worse, with all the Jews still there. In such case the response is invariably, "I don't understand the question". It is quite obvious that they are not being evasive; the idea of two states simply makes no sense to them. These are not "Islamist jihadists", but the anonymous public assumed to want to live in peace with the Jews.

To the Arab Muslims who call themselves Palestinian, whether in Gaza, “the Palestinian interior” or Judea and Samaria, the conflict is a zero-sum game: either they leave or the Jews leave, and one of them, an “Arab Palestinian and religious Muslim,” is now in the Prime Minister’s Office of the Sate of Israel. I am reminded that Anwar Sadat was assassinated on 6 October 1981, the eighth anniversary of the start of the Yom Kippur War. The resumption of the war against the Jews is seldom more than a bullet away, and now the elephant is right in the war room in the bunker. Mazel tov!

1. “Down to the wire: Will anti-Netanyahu forces agree on Israel coalition?” France 24 English, YouTube, 2 June 2021.