History Revisted Ad Infinitum

"I'm committed to working with Israel and the Palestinians to reach an agreement, but any agreement cannot be imposed by the United States or any other nation."
"The Palestinians and Israelis must work together to reach an agreement that allows both peoples to live, worship and thrive and prosper in peace."
"We'll [Trump administration] start a process which hopefully will lead to peace."
"Over the course of my lifetime, I've always heard that perhaps the toughest deal to make is the deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Let's see if we can prove them wrong, OK?"
"There's such hatred, but hopefully there won't be such hatred for very long."
American President Donald J. Trump

"Our strategic option, our strategic choice, is to bring about peace based on the vision of the two-state, a Palestinian state, with its capital in East Jerusalem, that lives in peace and stability with the state of Israel, based on the borders of 1967".
Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas 

"The man who kills himself [Islamic suicide bomber] today doesn't kill himself because of the words of Hassan al-Bana or Sayyid al-Qutb, or anyone else. He kills himself because of what the consensus of the ulema, and the four schools of jurisprudence, have all agreed to. Hassan al-Bana did not create these ideas [of jihad against infidels and apostates, destroying churches, etc.]; they've been around for many, many centuries.... I am talking about Islam [now], not how it is being taught in schools."
Islam al-Behery—popular Egyptian Muslim reformer  

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas came to the White House for the first time in nearly 

three years on Wednesday for a meeting with President Trump. Photo: Screenshot.

Every American President in the last 60 years has had his turn to take a stab at settling the adversarial controversy over  what part of the 'Palestinian' geography belongs to Israel and what portion should be reserved for the Palestinians. Unfortunately, the geography in question was historically by heritage rights, Israel's from ancient times forward to the present, for there has never been a lapse of Jewish presence in the Holy Land. Jerusalem and Israel were wrenched from Israelites by violence and the bulk of the Jewish population forcibly  scattered.

Wherever Jews settled, in the Arab countries of the Middle East, in North Africa, in India, China, across Europe and North America, they were there on sufferance. A people held as the 'others', generally despised and denied equality with the population they lived among, their human rights violated, their futures straitened, their security and entitlements under prevailing laws truncated. And finally, legendary anti-Semitism victimized them with pogroms and eventually a genocidal plan to obliterate them entirely.

The world's Jews learned over time and through a thoroughly existential trauma that none but Jews would ever come to the defence of Jews, and the goal of Zionism, the return of the wandering Jews of the diaspora to the place of their birth as a people was identified as the only reasonable solution to the observable problem of an existence denied by the outside world. But even there, Jews found resistance to their re-established haven. Simply put, the religion of conquest has never deviated from its founding war footage; whatever Islam has gained in geography and adherents it cleaves to.

Islam al-Behery, quoted above, an Egyptian Muslim reformer, emphasizes that anyone entering any mosque or bookstore requesting a publication containing rulings of the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence will find that "everything that is happening today will be found in them; killing the people of the book [Jews and Christians] is obligatory [of the faithful under Islam]." His contention is, as he puts it, the 'bomb' that ignites Islamist violence against non-Muslims is 'the book'; the Koran, the Hadiths, the sacred writings of Islam.

Who more authoritative than Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the Islamic scholar and cleric who heads the Egyptian Al-Azhar mosque an Islamic philosophy professor whom Pope Frances recently travelled to Egypt to meet with, to persuade him that Christianity and Islam have much in common, both being religions of peace and goodwill, and that it is in both their interests to counsel their followers against violence against the 'other'. In the instance of Muslims, that would be to advise against engaging in jihad, one of the major pillars of Islam.

Yet Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, imam of the Al-Azhar mosque and intellectual spiritual authority of  Al-Azhar University, the recognized foremost Sunni authority, has shunted aside Egyptian President al-Sisi's plea to modernize Islam and remove from its screed the injunction to view non-Muslims as enemies deserving death. The imam, recognized as the world's most influential Muslim, supports the death penalty for 'apostates', insists on total Sharia, will not denounce ISIL, considers art immoral, and rejects the very concept of reforming Islam.

In all of this, he is like Mahmoud Abbas, showing to the outside world, the face of reasonability while turned inwardly to espouse and incite to violence, as "resistance" against "occupation". The PLO, of which Mr. Abbas's Fatah is part of, sees one "Palestine", not a Palestinian state alongside an Israeli state, but one swallowing the Israeli state to 'restore' to the Arab Palestinians what they believe they are entitled to; what the original Palestinians, Jews, believed to be their heritage.

While Mahmoud Abbas just enjoyed a full-state visit to the United States to discuss a 'two-state solution' to the historically intractable issue of violence committed by Palestinians against Israeli Jews in an effort to dislodge them from land they claim as their own, they are not prepared to accept the presence of a Jewish state; it is anathema to Islam. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has effectively co-oped the United Nations and its offshoots as an influential clique whose major focus is the delegitimization of the State of Israel.

The Palestinians have long embarked on a public relations enterprise to augment their violent crusade against Israel, portraying themselves as peaceful and misunderstood, victims of a heartless oppression, gaining the support of the West in characterizing Israel as the oppressor of a vulnerable population of Arabs. The slanders and the boycott movement of Israeli interests; academic and economic in nature, to leave Israel friendless and defenceless against a tide of world condemnation masks the never-ending, violently deadly attacks Israel faces by an Arab population that will be satisfied with nothing but complete capitulation to Arab/Palestinian demands.

The Palestinian Authority oversees school curricula, television programming and summer camps for Palestinian children that orient them relentlessly toward identifying Jews as lethal enemies, inculcating in Palestinian children the nationalist and racist/religious desire to strike out at the enemy, viewing martyrdom as a blessed symbol of love and dedication. Little wonder that adolescents and young adults are so readily manipulated into attacking Israelis with knives and vehicles in paroxysms of pure hatred.

And that the PLO administers, on behalf of the Palestinian Authority which pays it with foreign charitable funding, to do so, financial rewards in return for violent assaults to the families of martyrs or jailed assailants of Jews; the more heinous the crime committed the greater the payout. A scheme to reward the violators of Israeli citizens by giving their families generous monthly pensions in reflection of work well done. The greater the damage done, the higher the payments. In 2010 Abbas amended the Palestinian Prisoners Law, increasing monthly payments to families of terrorists from $275-$1110 to $390-$3320 per month, according to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW).

Abbas, like the imam of the Al-Azhar University and Mosque, speaks one way to the gullible West and another entirely to Fatah and the PLO. Islam does not permit 'normalization' with the enemy. And Israel is the enemy targeted by the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, no less the Palestinian Authority. The demand that East Jerusalem be apportioned to a Palestinian state as its capital, would leave Israel and Jews without access to their most holy site in their eternal city.

The nation that defeated the strength of the combined Arab armies arrayed against it with the intention of obliterating it from the Middle East, sees itself left adrift, the West championing the violent aggressors, seemingly disinterested in Israel's survival.

A replay of history, over and over and over again.