In Israel, the Mirage of Normalization

On October 7, 2023, a pogrom occurred in Israel, incompatible with the idea of forming a Jewish state designed to protect Jews from pogroms.

This tragedy, however, was nothing new from the point of view of the Jewish state’s neighbors.

On August 17, 1956, the Syrian government-controlled weekly newspaper Al-Manar was quoted in the French newspaper Le Monde as saying,

It must not be forgotten that, unlike Europe, Hitler took a place of honor in the Arab world. […] Journalists are mistaken in thinking that by calling Nasser (Gamal Abdel Nasser – President of Egypt in 1956-1970 – A.G.) Hitler, they are hurting us. On the contrary, his name fills us with pride. Long live Hitler, the Nazi, who struck our enemies in the heart (it is clear that “enemies” are Jews. – A. G.)! Long live Hitler of the Arab world!”

Chiblit Mallat, professor of Middle East law and politics, wrote:

Peace in the Middle East is only possible by overcoming the legacy of Arab national fascism and supporting politicians willing to implement radical democratic reforms. Arab nationalism, whose foundations were laid by Gamal Abdel-Nasser, is the Middle Eastern analog of European fascism.

In 1965, Nasser made his position on the Jewish state clear:

The meaning of Arab unity is the destruction of Israel.

“The destruction of Israel,” he said on March 8, 1965, “will be destruction by force. We shall enter a Palestine covered not with sand, but drenched in blood.”  The spectacle Nasser dreamed of became a reality in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. It is still very popular among Muslim extremists to support the actions of the Nazis during the Shoah of European Jewry.

Bernard Lewis, a British-American historian specializing in Oriental studies, in his book The Crisis of Islam, characterizes their attitude this way:

In the Arab media, you can find three points of view on the Holocaust: it never happened, it was greatly exaggerated, the Jews deserved it anyway. Some more outspoken writers scold Hitler for not doing the job to the end.

Nostalgia for the Holocaust is widespread among Arabs, and after the pogrom of October 7, 2023, Muslim extremists have hope for the implementation of Nasser’s plans.

The solution to the Palestinian problem in the West and among liberal intellectuals in Israel is considered to be the establishment of an Arab Palestinian state. Support for the creation of an Arab Palestinian state has become an indispensable element of the rules of decency in today’s world. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has grown to monstrous, disproportionate proportions. Israel has been placed at the center of the problems that make up the world’s malaise. The Arab-Israeli conflict has been elevated to the level of a world crisis. It seems that on a planet where millions of people are dying of starvation and epidemics, where genocide has claimed and is claiming millions of lives, there are no matters more important than the quarrel between Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

Israel has tried concessions as a way to make peace: the Oslo Accords (1993), the retreat from Lebanon in 2000, and from Gaza in 2005. All these agreements, concessions and retreats caused not a decrease but an increase in terror against Israel. Israel left Gaza, but Gaza did not leave Israel.

The Arab world has let the genie of Palestinian extremism out of the bottle and has often carried out its wishes instead of having the genie serve it. In recent years, much of the Arab world has seen that this genie, wearing the green robes of Islamic extremists, is far more dangerous to Arab regimes than Israel, and that Arabs have much more to worry about in supporting it.

The Arab world has poisoned itself with extremism by allowing this intoxication to travel through its religious arteries. The poisonous tropical tree “antiaris,” or upas tree, is spreading its poison – extremism – throughout the Arab world.  The danger of this poisoning was felt by the moderate Sunni Arab countries that made the Abrahamic agreements with Israel. There were symptoms of a similar agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as with other Muslim countries that threatened Iranian patron Hamas with a dangerous drop in oil prices.

And on Saturday, the Torah holiday saw a monstrous Jewish pogrom on the level of the Nazi pogroms. 

The West promotes moderation as a core value in the East as well. The Muslim East promotes extremism as one of its core values everywhere. The Palestinian problem has become a convenient ground for increasing violence for the sake of loyalty to Islam. To fight the infidels, Islamic extremists assign as many significant numbers to zero as possible and try to exchange the zero value of human life for military and propaganda purposes for human life highly valued by the West. The failure of the Arab side to succeed in resolving the conflict lies in that technique.

Peaceful dialogue cannot lead to constructive results because of the real, insurmountable difference in the scale of values. The West calls for an end to violence for peace, which is nonsense to Islamic extremists. It equates the two conflicting sides, contrary to Winston Churchill’s admonition, “I am utterly determined to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.” Peace treaties with the Nazis are a failure into the black holes of “progressive” illusions.

These illusions were the mode of existence of “progressive” Israelis who imagined that they were in the West, in a “normal” environment that also favored peace and peace agreements over war. In the nine months before the monstrous pogrom of October 7, 2023, a powerful “pro-democracy” protest movement developed in Israel. There was a struggle for what protesters believed to be the main value that distracted thousands of police and security forces from their work.

Accusing the government of exaggerating the threat from Iran, the protesting Israelis allowed themselves not to fear the “real” threat of an attack on them by Iranian underlings of Hamas and Islamic Palestinian Jihad, who were preparing to annihilate Israelis. The Israelis have allowed themselves to become involved in a serious internal conflict, believing that they live in a normal country, are a normal people like all other Western democratic nations. They have decided that the value of a democratic state is higher than the value of the Jewish state. This perception of reality in the Middle East reflects wishful thinking. Israelis no longer see themselves as the “chosen people” but have decided that they are a nation like any other and that enemies and friends hold the same view.

In the 1973 Doomsday War, like October 7, 2023, Israel was caught off guard, but its opponents were the secular regimes of Egypt and Syria.

Hamas are religious fanatics who have turned the Palestinian struggle against Israel into a religious war, a Jihad. Islamic religious wars have no end date, no date of reconciliation.

Sensitive to the manifestations of Nazism based on the tragic history of the Jewish people, Israelis allowed themselves to overlook the Nazis on their border. In the pursuit of “normalcy,” Israelis have constructed the concept of a “normal” country and engaged in “mainstream” affairs, as if Israel’s democratic problems can be viewed in isolation and independent of its “undemocratic” hostile, fanatical environment. The sense of impending normalization with Arab countries is more like the amnesia of Westerners surrounded by Islamic fundamentalists but mistaking them for bad guys who can be bribed. The illusion of normalization put Israelis to sleep and turned into an awakening that produced a bloody massacre, the biggest Jewish pogrom since the Holocaust. Confidence in the successful Westernization of the Islamic East is a mirage of Western “progressive” man in a desert of barbarians. A mirage in the desert is what people see when in fact there is nothing there.

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