From David Anderson at The Moderate Voice:
Lately the world’s largest open air mental hospital, as the Holy Land has been called, has lived up to its moniker. Trump has helped by moving our embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Some aspects of this destabilizing action have been neglected or misunderstood by the media, however. Firstly, any hope of a Palestinian state is now pretty much dead. For decades what would have been the second state of a two-state model has been chipped away, enclaved, and geographically scattered by Israel, illegally by some measure. Much of the world went along with barely a peep outside Europe. Endorsing Jerusalem as its capital is a de-facto agreement with the current status quo for the entire West Bank.
Twenty years ago, let alone forty or fifty, Trump’s embassy shift would have resulted in all kind of howls from the Islamosphere. Ambassadors would have been recalled, boycotts thrown, state sponsored mass protests and the like. But in the last month apart from a few street demos by Palestinians themselves, Arab push-back has been muted to non-existent. Remember in the 1970s and ‘80s Palestinians, the P.L.O and its attendant non-state allies were terrorism. Spectacular plane hijacking and bombings were regular fare. It was a different, naive era of secular terrorism where Marxist groups and their socialist state supporters fought for the definable goal of “Palestine.” That was before a religious, millenarian suicidal jihad began in the 1990s. Religion has supercharged terrorism – in part by convincing terrorists to die themselves as well as kill others, en-mass, mainly by putting Allah in center of the picture. Today’s terrorist is seeking otherworldly paradise, not a shabby little nation state by the Mediterranean.
The “why” of Trump’s moving the embassy has been misunderstood: is not the work of the “Israel lobby.” Jews get the credit or blame (depending on perspective) for America’s lock-step alliance with Israel, however other factors are at play. Consider there are only four million Jews in the US, the majority of whom vote Democrat even though the Republicans are the more Israel friendly of the two big parties.
It’s the Christians.
Good post. Ironically, the growth of violent Islamic extremism in the Middle East since the 1990s, like the growth of militant Christian fundamentalism in the US since the 1970s, is essentially a conservative reaction to increasing secularism in both societies, especially among the younger generation. In both cases the religious hard-liners, alarmed at seeing “their” people turning away from age-old traditional religious taboos and prejudices, reacted with an all-out effort to re-assert control and re-impose the old ways.
The shift of Middle Eastern terrorism from a nationalist campaign focused on territory to a religious jihad expressing age-old hatred for non-Muslims in general and Jews in particular, has made it both more intransigent and also, because it has become resistant to compromise, less likely to succeed. Nationalists can sometimes reach compromises with fellow nationalists in the opposing nation, but people who believe they’re doing God’s will don’t compromise.
The two reactionary religious extremist movements, in the US and in the Middle East, continue to lash out at each other, provoke each other, feed each other. Trump’s Jerusalem move, the “Muslim ban”, and the various ill-considered military operations in Muslim countries (such as the Iraq invasion) help jihadists to demonize the US in the eyes of more mainstream Muslims. Jihadist terrorist attacks and persecution of Christian minorities in the Middle East help American fundamentalists to demonize Islam. The cycle will probably continue, at varying degrees of intensity, until advancing secularism (in both regions) reduces the extremists to impotence and/or moderates regain firm political control.