Louis René Beres
Jerusalem Post, June 24, 2024
“Israelis must finally understand that past is prologue, that “Death to Israel” is simply a new phrase for ancient hatreds.”
‘The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews, and kill them….”Sahih Muslim, Book 41, cited at The Charter of Hamas (1988)
Israel is loathed by its jihadist enemies because it is a Jewish state, not because it is Zionist. For these enemies, both state and sub-state, Israel is never more than the individual Jew writ large. It matters not at all to Iran, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, etc., if Israel agrees to political compromises and territorial surrenders. For these recalcitrant foes, Muslims are still obligated to “fight the Jews, and kill them…” For them, a Jewish state in the Dar al Islam (the world of Islam) – any Jewish state – represents an inherently intolerable abomination.
In principle, at least, these enemy postures are immutable. To wit, for Israel’s interconnected and force-multiplying foes, anti-Zionism has never been more than a coded derivative of antisemitism. It follows that before Israel could ever experience any tangible relief from jihadist war and terror, it would first have to acknowledge the true sources of adversarial loathing. Significantly, these sources have absolutely nothing to do with being an “aggressor” or “occupier.”
In the Islamic Middle East, doctrinal antisemites have remained faithful to their most primal hatreds. Essentially, this is because the antisemite, individually and collectively, responds not to any authentic qualities of “The Jew” or the Jewish state, but to his own overwhelming fears and anxieties. As Jean-Paul Sartre explains in Anti-Semite and Jew (1948): “If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.”
How does all this “fit” with current geopolitics in the Middle East, with Arab and Iranian promises that only unending Israeli surrenders will bring peace? What are the genuine concerns of Iranian terror-group antisemites, fears that give rise to perpetual hatred not just of the Jew in microcosm (the Jew as individual), but also the Jew in macrocosm (the sovereign State of Israel)? ….SOURCE