There is no diplomatic solution to the Israel-Islamist conflict

In a previous essay – of 33,000 words and split into 19 chapters – I explained why Israel’s multi-fronted fight for survival is vital for the survival of all Judeo-Christian civilization, or “the West”. And I explained how the innate antisemitism of the West is our moral soft underbelly that is being exploited by the world’s Islamists, including Hamas.

In this shorter essay (around 4,500 words) I debunk the West’s so-called solutions to Israel’s expected post-war predicaments in anticipation of Israel’s victory against the Islamist powers.

The West’s “solutions” for Israel have barely changed since they were proposed a century ago during the British Mandate of Palestine, when the name “Palestine” had entirely different meanings and connotations. Since 1936 (and the Peel Commission), the Arabs have rejected the two-state solution and all its iterations, either diplomatically, and/or through terrorism, not least Yasser Arafat’s “al-Aqsa Intifada” in 2000, which he launched immediately following his diplomacy at the Camp David Summit. From 2000 to 2005, Arafat’s Fatah Party joined with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other “resistance” groups to carry out relentless terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians, resulting in the murder of about 1,200 Israelis, the majority by human-suicide bombs.

As I noted in my previous essay, Bill Clinton very recently admitted (in this talk at a Harris/Walz rally in November 2024) that he had been duped at the 2000 Camp David Summit because Arafat and the Palestinians never had any intention of accepting peace with Jews. I think Clinton’s speech is historically important. However, he tails off with some nonsense – perhaps out of a sense of duty to his fellow Democrats – telling us that presidential candidate Donald Trump “would make things worse” for Israel, whereas presidential candidate Kamala Harris would “try to negotiate an end to the violence” and “a new peace process; and that ought to be enough”.

Israel’s fight against Islamism is our fight, including in the information war or cognitive war (chapter 13 of my previous essay). We must robustly challenge Islamist initiatives and propaganda, not least that of the Islamists who are embedded in the institutions, including political institutions, of Western societies. We must stop pretending that Islamists – including the Muslim Association of Britain and the Muslim Council of Britain – are potentially friends with whom we can negotiate, and with whom Israel can negotiate. We must stop pretending that there are diplomatic and democratic solutions for Israel in dealing with Islamism.

Islamism is incompatible with democracy. Here in the UK, Islamism is undermining British democracy, using the freedoms of democracy, and the ideology of multiculturalism, to infiltrate it and pervert it to internationalist causes (particularly Palestinianism).

In this report for the Heritage Foundation in 2020, Robin Simcox explains that the UK is “a hub” for Islamism, both violent and insidiously political, and well-funded by the Gulf States. Similarly, Melanie Phillips’ book Londonistan (2006) explains how the UK surrendered to Islamism decades ago, and in 2023, she wrote articles here and here on the ongoing consequences of our failure to understand, and deal with, Islamism.

See also this very recent piece by Connor Tomlinson on how Islamists influence the UK Government. And see this cautiously optimistic New Year 2025 message from Ayaan herself on how Western democracies seem to be waking up to the threats we face, due in part to Israel’s show of strength against the existential threat from Iran and its many Islamist proxies and allies. At the same time, Ayaan notes, the Conservatives amongst us with anti-Woke instincts are beginning to see that we are the common-sense majority against a loud and powerful minority that has come to inhabit our Western institutions, public and commercial.

Wokeism and Islamism are, philosophically, poles apart, and yet in the West they complement and enable each other, partly because they are both ideologically antisemitic and Palestinianist. Wokeism enables and embraces all philosophies that are not Judeo-Christian, in the interests of “diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)” and, of course, Islamists play the system and infiltrate the system to promote the Islamist causes. The Woke are blindsided and easily duped: “Queers for Palestine”!

Most Islamism (the religio-political philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood) is not violent, but all Islamism is extreme, and all Islamism, violent and non-violent, has the same anti-Western, anti-Christian, and genocidally-antisemitic goals. (According to the Islamist interpretation of the Hadith, all Jews are beyond redemption and must ultimately be killed by Muslims, as I explained in my previous essay.)

In the West, there are far too many political leaders, academics, journalists, activists, and putative experts on the Middle East and North Africa who propose unworkable solutions to heterogeneous problems they evidently have not grasped. One of these unworkable solutions is “the two-state solution”, which here in the UK has been the entrenched, institutionalized government policy for over a century, despite there being, in our times, virtually no Arab support for a two-state solution, neither in the Gaza Strip nor in the “West Bank”. The two-state solution remained UK Government policy despite October 7 2023, for both the previous Conservative Government and the new Labour Government:

… To prevent further spread of the conflict, the UK will continue to invest all efforts for a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The UK will work with our partners towards a two-state solution, based on 1967 lines [sic] with Jerusalem as a shared capital, which provides justice and security for both Israelis and Palestinians.

The UK will work with our partners towards a two-state solution
9 November 2023

To even describe Israel’s present war as the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is itself willful ignorance. The conflict is, in the main, the Israel–Islamist conflict, including the Shia Islamists in Iran and Yemen, thousands of miles away from “Israel-Palestine”. And see Chapter 9 of my previous essay, in which I explain why the “1967 lines” – a short and flat walk to Tel Aviv – are militarily indefensible in 2025. Turkey, whose regime is Islamist, has threatened to invade Israel and take Jerusalem, as have some of the new factions being formed and reformed in Syria in recent weeks. Apart from the Israel-Islamist conflict, Israel is surrounded by revolutionary Socialist/Communist groups that are also determined to eradicate Israel. We might refer to this as the Israel–Arab Socialist-and-pan-Arabism conflict.

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The West’s go-to solution for everything is “democracy”. In the Middle East, democracy is not a solution for anything. Indeed, the Arab kingdoms that have briefly experimented with democracy, or tolerated “pro-democracy” movements encouraged by Western leaders (such as President Barack Obama in Egypt in 2011), have been overwhelmed by popular support for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Democracy in the Islamic nations of the Middle East cannot work, for many reasons, some of which I cover in this essay. In any case, which type of democracy are the “Westplainers” talking about? Jeffersonian? French republican? British constitutional monarchy? These three democratic systems were not established in the USA, France, and Britain until after some of the bloodiest revolutions and civil wars in history. The oldest of these systems, the British system, only became possible with the total and bloody destruction of the Scottish clan system, following the Battle of Culloden, 1746. This is worth remembering, because Palestinian society is thoroughly clan based. Palestinian loyalty is to the clan, not to a supposed nation state, or to a leader who is not of the clan. Apart from clan loyalty, there is a more generalized loyalty (to which the clans might adhere) to the violent and internationalized revolutionary movements of Islamism, Islamic Statism (ISIS), Communism, and pan-Arabism (or various combinations of these movements).

The Jewish state is amenable to democracy because Judaism is amenable to democracy. Islam is not amenable to democracy. Communism is not amenable to democracy. Pan-Arabism is not amenable to democracy.

In Muslim-majority nations there is no democracy (according to any sensible indices of “democracy”) and there is usually persecution of Christians, as we can see on the World Watch List of the Christian charity Open Doors. There is also, of course, generalized persecution in many Muslim nations and Muslim-majority nations, including persecution of Muslims by Muslims. In Nigeria today for instance, the constant fear for Christians and Muslims is kidnapping by the Islamist terror group Boko Haram.

Democracy is a Judeo-Christian system of government. Indeed, I argue that our British system is founded on the Biblical-Jewish system. A tour of the Houses of Parliament – the “Mother of Parliaments” – is a tour of the Bible, from the Moses Room to the Central Lobby, and religious paintings throughout. And this should not surprise us, because the world’s first Magna Carta (limiting the power of the monarch, and setting the relationship between the governor and the governed) we have on record is the charter of Samuel the prophet. Samuel laid down the conditions for Israel’s first king, Saul, two millennia before the charter agreed by King John and the Church at Runnymede in 1215. In placing the authority of the English king under the authority of God of Israel, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, drawing on the teachings from his late theological mentor Peter Cantor, used the reference of Samuel’s conditions for King Saul as Biblical precedent. Centuries later, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and the other Founding Fathers acknowledged the Magna Carta in forming the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

(We should not romanticize these events, and we should not consider the king, the barons, and the Church as being beacons of the Scholastic renaissance. The Roman Catholic Church, including in England under the leadership of King John and Archbishop Langton, was entering its most cruelly antisemitic epoch. In 1222, just a few years after the Magna Carta, Langton ordered all English Jews to set themselves apart by wearing the “badge of shame”. It was a precursor to extreme persecution of Jews by English kings and the Church.)

I cannot pretend to be an expert on the Palestinian-Arab social structure, and its clan system, or the socials structures in the wider Arab world, with its clans, tribes, notable families, monarchs, and emirs. But I am a frequent visitor to Israel, and am a friend of some of her journalists, historians, political advisors, and rabbis – with all of whom I am in regular contact. I am not an academic, and my career until retirement three years ago was in scientific and engineering disciplines, but I have been researching and writing as an advocate for Israel for the best part of a decade. I write for two Israeli journals. I have done more research and reading than most on the honour-shame social system, the jihadist death cults now widespread in parts of the Arab world, and the relationships between Arab “secularism” (which can be just as “jihadist” as Islamism), pan-Arab nationalism, and Arab Islamism.

The Palestinians’ loyalty to their clan, including a code of honour binding all its male members, precludes the West’s fantasies of “democracy” as a panacea for the region. Democracies, in their diverse forms, are exclusively Western (Judeo-Christian) forms of government. Islamic nations that are ostensibly democracies, such as Turkey and Pakistan, are obviously not democracies by any sensible indices of “democracy”.

Perhaps the most successful system of government of the nations of the Middle East today (and perhaps a future model for Palestinians if they bring forth de-radicalized leaders and philosophers who forgo Islamism) is the authoritarian regime of UAE, ruled by seven autocratic tribal leaders (or emirs), cooperating while competing for prestige at home and abroad. The UAE is of course an oil-rich nation, whose political stability attracts much inward investment, including from the West. The UAE cut ties with the Muslim Brotherhood/Islamism in 2013, including proscribing the Muslim Association of Britain (and numerous British organisations and individuals) as terrorist. Because the UAE is not a democracy, it avoids the risk of the people voting to put members of the transnational Muslim Brotherhood back into positions of power. The same applies to Egypt. The UAE and Egypt administrations are no doubt keeping a watchful eye on the progress of the Hamas-supporting Brotherhood in Jordan.

The UAE, or any Islamic nation in fact, does not subscribe to human rights (of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Against that, the many people I know, including Jews, who have recently visited or worked in the UAE’s cities, tell me that they feel safer there than in our British cities. In Britain today, where we ostensibly have human rights, we are denied the right to feel safe, particularly in London, which is now notorious for knife crimes, rapes, muggings, and weekly disruptive and intimidating anti-Israel marches organised by the Muslim Association of Britain, the Communists (Socialist Workers Party), and various other Islamist and leftist groups.

Christians, I need to say, are persecuted in the UAE, and the Open Doors charity in 2024 ranked the UAE as 57th on the list of the world’s worst persecutors of Christians. Open Doors states the main drivers of Christian persecution in the UAE as “Islamic oppression” and “clan oppression”, from government officials, mobs, and extended families.

In addition to the complexities of Arab and Islamic societies, a century ago, the catastrophic revolutionary philosophical movements of Communism, Fascism, and Nazism, were exported to the Middle East from Christian Europe. There were, and still are today, revolutionary Communist movements throughout the regions surrounding Israel. Furthermore, all three of these movements contributed to the foundational philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood: Islamism, as the British Muslim (Sufi) thinker and reformer Haras Rafiq explained here at an ISGAP conference I attended at Oxford University in 2019. Rafiq explains that Islamism is as strong as ever in the regions surrounding Israel and in the wider Islamic world, and he tells us that the goals of Islamism are [my highlighting]:

• To set up a Utopian state, and enforce their version of Fiqh [jurisprudence] which comes from Sharia. To enforce “Sharia” as state law… Until the 20th century, the attempt to enforce Sharia law has never been done in 1400 years of Islamic history. Islamism wants to impose this state law on everybody [not just Muslims].
• Islamism wants to spread this state around the world. They want what they see as God’s flag on every part of the Earth.
• Islamism wants to wipe Israel off the map.

As I wrote in my previous essay, Islamism, including the desire to wipe Israel off the map “from the river to the sea” is now the mainstream of Islam in some Western nations, including Britain. The ideology is funded by the Gulf States, particularly Qatar, in our media, universities, and mosques.

In Britain we know that Islamism has become the mainstream of Islam because the Muslim Association of Britain – founded in 1997 by Muhammad Sawalha, a former leader of Hamas, affiliated with the Muslim Council of Britain – represents the majority of British Muslims and mosques. The Muslim Council of Britain, also founded in 1997, is Islamist.

About 2 million, or 20% of the population of Central Israel, is Arab. And because Israel is a successful democracy, this is evidence enough for some of our British and US “Westplainers” in positions of influence that Arabs societies are amenable to democracy.

In fact, at elections, voter turnout in the Arab districts of Israel is low. Of those who vote, a minority vote for Jewish parties, including Likud, just as a minority of pro-Israel young Arabs volunteer to serve with the IDF. But most of the Arab votes go to Arabs who are anti-Israel (i.e. who want to remove Israel from the map of nation states), and are typically pro-Hamas/Islamist.

The most successful Arab party of 2022 (the 25th Knesset) is the Arab List, or “Ra’am”, an Islamist Party cut from the same cloth as Hamas, i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood. Ra’am would in fact be a banned organisation in some Arab nations, including neighboring Egypt, because Egypt, following its coup d’état in 2013, removed the Brotherhood from positions of political power. The Egyptian Revolution of 2011 saw the Muslim Brotherhood join forces with the Trotskyist Revolutionary Socialists (Egypt), and some smaller factions and disillusioned youths (galvanized by social media). Elections following the Revolution resulted in success for the Muslim Brotherhood, who were in government until the coup in 2013.

And as I wrote in my previous essay, Nazism not only influenced the Islamists, it influenced Arab secularists and Arab Christians, such as the “Greater Syria” movement that calls itself the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP). The “Greater Syria” movements share with Islamism the ideology of genocidal antisemitism, and the need to eradicate Israel. SSNP was the second largest party in the coalition with the Bashar al-Assad’s Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party. It remains to be seen, following the fall of Assad and the Ba’ath Party, what will happen to remnants of the SSNP. Regardless, every political movement and faction (that I am aware of) in Syria poses a threat to Israel.

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Israel’s principal threats are Islamism, Arab Socialism/Communism, and global antisemitism – including Christian antisemitism – embodied in the United Nations. See my previous essay for a report on Western and Christian antisemitism.

Personally, if I did not have faith in God Almighty, God of Israel, I would consider these problems insurmountable. I would consider Israel’s situation as hopeless, and ultimately Judeo-Christian civilization as hopeless. But I have hope. I have hope that all things will be turned upside down. Pray, might it be soon. I have hope that the world will stop calling evil good, and good evil (Isaiah 5:20). The world will cease from calling the Islamists’ genocide (including the promise to repeat October 7 again, and again, and again…) as “resistance”, and Israel’s resistance as “genocide”. The world will be cured of its “oldest hatred”, and Christians will come to understand the meaning of Israel. Some of the world’s Christians are pro-Israel, of course, but most of the world’s Christians still seem to be anti-Israel.

The anti-Israelism of Pope Francis, and the former Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, amounts to antisemitism and Blood Libel, not least their curious obsession for condemning the actions of Israel at war, including outrageous accusations of genocide of Gazans (whose population has continued to grow since October 7). At the same time, the Pope and Welby have been curiously reticent about the Islamists’ committing genocide of Christians throughout the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia since the turn of the millennium. The Church of England is aware of this silent genocide of Christians, because the Church was commissioned in 2018 by the Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt to report on Christian persecution, a report that has 75 instances of the word “genocide”.

The West must learn that Islamism is a threat to the whole world, including the world’s Muslims. Islamism consumes the masses today in much the same way that, within living memory, Communism, Fascism, and Nazism consumed the masses in many European nations. As I explained in my previous essay, these European movements were Millennialist movements, and many Fascists and Nazis identified as Christian. Genocidal antisemitism is at the root of all these movements.

Before we can even think about diplomatic and political solutions for Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, the task, for we non-Jews, Christian, Muslim, and irreligious, is to rid the world of antisemitism. Anyone proposing solutions for Israel without consistently and meaningfully proposing solutions to defeat antisemitism, and especially genocidal antisemitism, must be ignored. Statements, such as those we often here from the UK’s Prime Minister and politicians of all parties that, “we must tackle antisemitism and all forms of hatred” must be ignored. Anyone who does not understand the uniqueness of antisemitism does not understand antisemitism (see Chapter 4 of my previous essay) and its metaphysical roots.

I think that it is time to start debating solutions about what happens in the Gaza Strip and Judea and Samaria after Israel, pray, wins its seven-front war. It is time to start proposing and debating solutions that ensure that Israel remains the Jewish state, such as a continuing democracy for central Israel and the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, and non-democratic solutions that would satisfy, as far as is possible, the notable families, clans, and (Bedouin) tribes of the region. These would be – if you permit me to think out loud – autonomous tribal regions, but with Israeli forces maintaining security for the whole region, up to, and if necessary beyond, the borders with Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. (Since the IDF entered Rafah in May 2024, we have come to learn that Egypt cannot be trusted to prevent Iranian military materiél being smuggled into the Gaza Strip. Similarly the forces of the UN in south Lebanon (UNIFIL) utterly and cynically failed to prevent Hezbollah repopulating, and rebuilding a terrorist infrastructure in the buffer between the “Blue Line” and the Litani River, including thousands of missile launchers, and tunnels leading into Israel.)

If I were an Israeli politician, I would push for exclusion from the Knesset every political party whose stated aim is the Islamist aim to eradicate Israel. Of course, a democratic purist would balk at such ideas, but Israel is a unique nation with unique problems and unique divine obligations, in order to be a blessing for all nations. The goal of Israel is not pure democracy, the goal of the Jewish state is God of Israel, as I wrote in this piece for The Times of Israel: Holy Apartness is not Apartheid.

One cannot look to other nations for precedents or examples. As for some of the ideas from intellectuals I have seen mooted for a federation – a kind of democratic binational or trinational state – these ideas, once again, ignore the fact that Islam and democracy are incompatible. As I have argued, democracy is a Judeo-Christian system, with its own history of successes and failures (Mussolini and Hitler were democratically elected, for example). Many Westplainers forget that Israel is – to those of us who worship God of Israel – the Holy Land, the source of the Law, or Torah, on which, as I have explained, Western democracies are overwhelmingly indebted.

At the time of this writing, I read that discussions are being held between the USA, Israel, and the UAE, with a view to the US and the UAE working to ultimately install a “reformed Palestinian Authority (PA)”. I am very sceptical. As I explained in my previous essay, PA/Fatah (founded by Yasser Arafat) is itself thoroughly radical (what I call “secular jihadist”), and yet has almost no support because it is not radical enough and because it is not Islamist. Over 80% of Palestinians support various factions whose core ideology is genocidal antisemitism. As I wrote in Chapter 14 of my previous essay:

The vast majority of Palestinians of ‘West Bank’ (according to a recent poll by Birzeit University, Ramallah, for Arab World Research and Development) support Palestinian Islamic Jihad (84%), al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades (80%), al-Qassam Brigades (89%), and Hamas (76%). 84% of respondents supported the massacres and kidnappings of October 7.

In other words, which Palestinians would, and could, lead this “reformed PA”, and from where in the PA would they find a meaningful mandate to govern? For most of these people, brainwashed since childhood (including by UNRWA), the eradication of Israel and the murder of every last Jew is the meaning of life, being the necessary prelude to the Islamic “Day of Resurrection” (see Chapter 16 of my previous essay).

The diplomatic and political solutions now being mooted ignore the Nazi elephant in the room. As I wrote here in 2019: The primary and sustaining cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict is genocidal antisemitism. It’s as simple as that. And it’s as serious as that.

Until we begin to tackle Arab antisemitism, Persian antisemitism, Christian antisemitism, and antisemitism in global bodies such as the United Nations, the World Council of Churches, and many antisemitic NGOs, Israel’s only solution is military violence, which, I maintain, the West must support. The radicalization of the Palestinians cannot be blamed only on the Arab nations, Turkey, Iran, and the rest of the Islamic bloc. The West is also to blame, as I wrote in this piece for the Times of Israel in 2021, on the support for anti-Israel jihadism from Germany’s government, churches, and NGOs.

I know that many in the West are appalled at the images of destroyed buildings in the Gaza Strip, as many of the people are forced to live in tents. It seems unfair. It seems excessive. It seems disproportionate. But this destruction is wholly the responsibility of the world’s Islamists, not least Hamas, who used the many $billions donated to the Strip (donated by Islamist regimes and the West) to build 300-plus miles of terror infrastructure, much of which is tunneled under civilian habitations, with the tunnel entrances at the basement of houses. Hamas is still operating in these tunnels, still holding Israeli hostages, and still launching rockets at Israel, because Hamas and its sponsors want to perpetuate the war. The necessary destruction of these tunnels has destroyed, or at least rendered unsafe, the buildings above them. We can expect to see yet more explosions in the Strip before we see the massive and lengthy project of reconstruction.

Arabs of the Gaza Strip had a higher standard of living than Arabs in the poorest nations, such as Somalia, Yemen, and Syria. Although there was high unemployment in Gaza and the other Palestinian territories, this is partly because eternal “refugees” have been living off handouts from the rich Arab nations in order that they can maintain a perpetual “right-to-return-refugee” status. In this article for The Algemeiner, IDF intelligence officer and Arabist Dr. Mordechai Kedar explains.

Here and here are short video clips of the luxurious side of Gaza before October 7, and an indication of what could have been had its people not obsessively pursued the destruction of Israel since 2000 (the “Second Intifada”).

Here are images and a short clip of Yahya Sinwar, fleeing into the tunnel complex with his family, evidently preparing for a long stay (going back and forth with goods, over a period of several hours), the day before he launched the October 7 massacres and hostage taking. And hundreds of smuggling tunnels were discovered at Rafah, some wide enough to drive a tank through.

The Islamists’ apocalyptic goals do not stop at Israel. Israel is holding the front line for the whole of the West. Since October 7 2023, most Jewish Israelis, even the liberals and the leftists, have come to realise that they can never again attempt diplomatic solutions with people whose core ideology is genocidal anti-Israelism, and neither should we.

Link to my previous essay:

Why Christians, and Western Civilisation, must help Israel in her Apocalyptic Fight | mark pickles, writer and artist.