If Muslim leaders really want to help the Palestinians, they need to give up on their habit of magical thinking, and accept the reality that Israel will remain a Jewish state, and Israel requires leadership that will make the tough decisions necessary to achieve a compromise with the Palestinians. Those Muslims, and their idiotic allies, who supported Hamas’ obscene attack as an “act of resistance”, are not only supporting the delay of any peaceful resolution, the overt antisemitism of many of them will only serve to encourage more Jews to emigrate to Israel, who may decide that it is unsafe to live in countries where many people regard them as guilty by association. This has already been happening in France, where many Jews feel unsafe as a consequence of the open antisemitism of many of its Muslim citizens.

Is peace possible between Israel and the Palestinians? It won’t be, so long as there are people who make political capital from the continuing conflict, and refer to those who are killed in futile battles as “martyrs”, as opposed to people who shouldn’t have died. Some may wonder why I have written so much about this issue; the answer is that it is very personal to me; I spent years in Muslim majority countries, in which I was generally treated with great respect and kindness. I speak Arabic, Farsi, and some Turkish, and my own son had an at least nominally Muslim Egyptian grandfather, whose surname he bears in preference to my own rather risible family name. I also have a very high regard for the Jews; a people who have punched massively over their weight, despite millennia of persecution, which continues to this day.
Wilfred Owen was a poet and a soldier who fought in WWI; he won the Military Cross for gallantry, and was killed in action a week before the signing of the armistice which ended the war. It is generally recognized that WWI was a disastrous endeavor, of which WWII was an almost inevitable outcome. It is quite possible that if WWI had been avoided, there would have been no Holocaust, and Zionism may have remained the pursuit of a small minority. As bravely as Owen fought, no one expressed the horror and pity of war better than him, so I will add his greatest poem, “Strange Meeting”, to the end of this article.

It seemed that out of battle I escaped

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which titanic wars had groined

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred

Then, as I probed them, one stood up and stared

With piteous recognition in fixed eyes

Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall

By his dead smile, I knew we stood in hell

With a thousand fears that vision’s face was grained

Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground

And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan

“Strange Friend”, I said, “Here is not cause to mourn”

“None”, said the other, “Save the undone years

The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours

Was my life also. I went hunting Wild

After the wildest beauty in the world

Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair

But mocks the steady running of the hour

And if it grieves, it grieves richlier than here

For by my glee, might many men have laughed

And of my weeping, something had been left

Which must die, now. I mean the truth untold

The pity of war; the pity war distilled

Now men will go content with what we spoiled

Or discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled

They will be swift, with the swiftness of the tigress

None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress

Courage was mine, and I had mystery

Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery

To miss the march of this retreating world

Into vain citadels that are not walled

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot wheels

I would go up and wash them from sweet wells

Even with truths that lie too deep for taint

I would have poured my spirit without stint

But not through wounds; not on the cess of war

Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were

“I am the enemy you killed, my friend

I knew you in this dark, for so you frowned

Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed

I parried, but my hands were loath and cold

Let us sleep now…”