Definitely Not Good For The Jews

"As I went around and met with people in the course of our discussions about the [anti-ISIL] coalition ... there wasn't a leader I met with in the region who didn't raise with me spontaneously the need to try to get peace between Israel and the Palestinians, because it was a cause of recruitment and of street anger and agitation that they felt they had to respond to."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry

BRIAN SNYDER/AFP/Getty Images    United States Secretary of State John Kerry arrives at the airport in Jakarta on Monday. Kerry caused anger among right-wing MPs when he suggested that a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians would help the campaign to defeat the jihadists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS).

"It turns out that even when a British Muslim decapitates a British Christian, there will always be someone to blame the Jew."
Israeli MK Naftali Bennett

The American State Department is swift to respond, that what Mr. Kerry said wasn't what he said in that he said it but didn't mean what readers of the statement extract from it respecting its meaning, and in any event it was taken out of context. The context being the endless state of conflict in the Middle East and how undiplomatic it would be to suggest even in passing that there is a universal pathology in the geography that urges the Muslim states to leap for the jugular of the other.

Israel could solve everything in the Arab/Muslim world by simply surrendering to the call of the Palestinian Authority to agree to the 'right of return', to hand over East Jerusalem and with it, Judaism's most sacred symbol, and to sit back and wait for an independent Palestinian State to fully arm and commit to persuading Israel by force of arms that it doesn't really want to remain on Palestinian land it has mistakenly taken for its state, if sheer force of numbers doesn't do the trick first.

That is, when internal conflict within each of the states is given a rest from the perpetual cycle of tribal, ethnic, sectarian hatred so deep that emotions can only be served by the slaughter each takes turn on inflicting on the other. It is Israel's deep and abiding shame that it is responsible for this mass dysfunction. If Israel was indeed tasked by heaven to be a light unto the world through demonstrating that though its citizens suffer from disagreeable opposition to one another, they refrain from murdering one another, it has failed.

To Israel's sagging burden of failure must be added Sudan's misfortune respecting Darfur, when its helicopter gunships and the Arab janjaweed mercilessly slaughtered black Sudanese, raped tens of thousands of Darfurian women and girls, created hundreds of thousands of Darfurian refugees, and the International Criminal Court wrong-headedly blamed the government in Khartoum instead of Israel; guess they erred.

But in its failure externally and its successes internally it infuriates by its example the neighbours surrounding it; initially by proving the capacity and capability of a small state with limited means in manpower and weaponry to resist the resolve of massed troops representing the power of the surrounding Arab states, to remove it from the geography of the Middle East. Since the last of those wars and two subsequent peace treaties, Israel's success at growing itself stands as a moral rebuke.

That there is something in the Arab/Muslim psyche that agitates continually to conquest, to contain and override neighbours' own ambitions that leads them to the disease and unrest that brings on conflicts appears a widespread malady of irresistible presence, overriding the practicality of unity, of the purported usefulness of seeing a shared religion bringing harmony, clouding the reality of a shared heritage, geography and future.

All of which owes to the presence of the State of Israel. The classical dysfunction of the Arab States in dealing with their internal and external inability to function outside the totalitarian mould, to accept with equanimity and generosity those values that bind them in a historical context, to confer upon themselves the human possibility of tolerance and acceptance simply seems to forever elude them as they jockey for position and plot against one another.

Israel's fault. Jihad too is Israel's fault, for if it were not for Israel's presence, the terrorist groups that thrive in the Middle East would not hate and seek to destroy Christian elements of their very own societies that much predate Islam. Without Israel's presence, Sunnis would not visit mass slaughter on Shiites, and Shiites would never think to obliterate all traces of hated Sunni presence, as the Islamic Republic of Iran has in mind, working toward nuclear warheads.

Even so justified it is beyond difficult to figure why a man with global experience, well versed in the art of diplomacy and the understanding of the weight of his office would utter such a naively incredible statement signalling that he understands well the religious umbrage that wreaks rage within the Middle East against the presence of a Jewish state. Giving it the unmistakable credence that his agency lends to it, as his mouth disgorged the libel.

Anyway ... Jews are so prickly ... sigh ... so quick to take offence.