The Two-STAGE Solution to the Arab-Israel Conflict

I wrote a piece last week titled, “There is no Two-State Solution” to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In this follow-up piece I suggest that if there is a solution – and I sincerely believe there is – it should be seen as a two-stage solution.

My piece last week was short, about 1000 words. This follow-up is somewhat longer.  Thinking properly about new solutions is harder than debunking old ‘solutions’.

The first stage of the two-stage solution is to cure the Arab nations, and the wider Islamic Ummah, of genocidal antisemitism. This is obvious to any intelligent human being of good will, including Muslims who acknowledge that contemporary Islam needs to reform. Such reform would draw on traditions of personal intellectual and spiritual growth.  It would move away from the philosophies of political Islamism, which seek to win the world for Islam by first destroying the Jews of the Jewish state and then taking Jerusalem as the axis mundi.

Setting the Scene

Islam has brought forth great philosophers in the past, and it will – I hope – bring forth again great philosophers, or at least a great and good philosopher.  Invariably in the history of civilisations, a new paradigm, or reformation, or movement  – whether it is for better or for worse, whether it is a blessing or a curse – comes through just one thinker.  By good philosophy I mean philosophy that encourages love of wisdom, as implied in the very word philo-sophia.

The Muslim Arabs and Persians were once the world leaders in all the philosophies and sciences, and, as guardians of the Silk Road, were responsible for some of the greatest ever achievements of assimilation and abstraction of knowledge and wisdom. Where would the Occident be, for instance, without “zero” (or ṣifr in the Arabic):  the ancient Hindu-Arabic imaginary number introduced to Europe by Fibonacci of Pisa in the 13th century CE?  Where would the Roman Catholic Church be without Thomas Aquinas’ exploration of Arab scholarship, and of the Jewish-Arabic scholar Moses Maimonides (himself a student of the Arabs’ philosophy and cosmology)?

Seeking the cure for genocidal antisemitism is not only necessary to protect the Jewish state, but to heal the mind and soul – and stem the corruption of the youth – of all the genocidally-antisemitic Arabs of the Gaza Strip, Fatah, Lebanon/Hezbollah, Syria, Jordan, Qatar, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan… in fact the contemporary Islamic mainstream in the whole of the Middle East and North Africa, and beyond to Iran, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Pakistan…  many of the Muslim-majority nations in other words.

Near the end of my last piece I wrote:

“Antisemitism is a chronic illness that, when it flares up, eats away at the mind of those it infects, and destroys the hater more thoroughly than the hated. It can be cured, or at least controlled. The [Christian] Germans, Austrians, Italians, French, Romanians… today are largely cured of genocidal antisemitism [the underlying philosophical ideology of World War II], but the Arab nations are not, and, alarmingly, we see much evidence now of cross-infection back to Europe.”

And so the first stage of the two-stage solution is “Philosophical Reformation”.

I am going to call the second stage “Eretz Israel”. Failure to achieve the first stage precludes any attempt at the second stage. Unless you cure contemporary Arabs and Iranians of genocidal antisemitism, there is no solution for anything. No solution or ‘deal’ should be attempted with people whose mind and soul are diseased with genocidal antisemitism.

By Eretz Israel I mean a contiguous Jewish state in which measures are taken to ensure Israel remains a Jewish state (rather than a “one-nation democracy”, which would lead to Arabisation/Islamisation), in which non-Jews enjoy the protection of the Jewish state. In fact the millions of Arabs who now live inside the Green Line already do enjoy the protection, and the opportunities, of the Jewish state. And outside the Green Line, Arabs and Bedouhins of the region now enjoy – for the first time in many centuries – freedom from malaria and other endemic diseases, thanks to the Zionist pioneers (as we will see).

Israeli Arabs – especially women and girls – enjoy far more rights and protection than in any contemporary Arab nation, and generally enjoy a higher standard of living. Most Israeli Arabs do not attempt to undermine the Jewish state and its democratic and tolerant setup, which, unlike most contemporary Arab nations, accepts the dignity of difference.  As I wrote in my last piece, in a report commissed by the UK Government last year, we learned that Christians of the Arab nations throughout the Middle East and North Africa are now suffering “near genocide” levels of persecution, including murder, imprisonment and kidnapping.  Some have called this “the greatest story never told of the 21st century”.  It amounts to lethal journalistic neglect by the mainstream media not least, in the UK, the Israel-bashing BBC.

The Arab children of Israel are far less likely than other Arabs to be indoctrinated into what is today the Arab-nation equivalent to the Nazi youth being imposed by all the regimes that surround Israel. In fact the education of Arab children in the Gaza Strip and parts of the Palestinian Authority, though using some of the same texts as Nazi Germany, is even worse than it was in Nazi Germany, being in some ways more like the education in Axis Japan. Although the Japanese did not share Hitler’s obsession with Jews – but rather in murdering and raping over 10 million non-Japanese Asians (since 1937) – the education of Arab and Iranian youth today is some ways more like that of Japanese emperor worship, which convinced the Japanese youth of the need for loyality and honour until death (never surrender) and that the ultimate accolade comes through finding the selfless courage to make yourself into a human bomb.

If the Arabs need yet another new state – and frankly I see no justification why they do – it must be nowhere Israel, the Jewish state. Eretz Israel must extend at least from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan, and must be liberated from all attempts at Arabisation/Islamisation. There has been a Jewish attachment to Israel since Biblical times, i.e. since the time according to Biblical accounts of Abraham’s land purchase and of Jacob’s purchase of land from the sons of Hamor.  There has been, according to empirical history, a continuous Jewish presence in the Land for over 2500 years, despite the Seige of Jerusalem in 70 CE.  Yes, Arabs have ruled the Land, but not meaningfully since 1516, when the Turks took it, and ruled it almost continuously until 1917.  There has never been an autonomous Arab state called “Palestine”.  In fact there has never been any autonomous state or unified region/jurisdiction in the Levant called “Palestine”, not even within an empire. The land has historically been seen by Arabs as Arab land, or desired as Arab land, such as part of “Southern Syria” or “Greater Syria” or “Greater Lebanon” or the Levant.

Historically, there is no such thing as “Palestinian people”.  The “Palestinian” identity we known today was created by the PLO as a banner for Arab revolution. There are Arabs, Jews, Druze, Bedhouins… but predominantly Arabs.  If “Palestinian” means you were born in British Palestine, it means Jews who were born there before 1948 are no less “Palestinian” than the Arabs, such as Mahmoud Abbas, who were born there before 1948.

There is nothing Palestinian about the “Palestinian” flag.  It is clearly nothing more or less than the ubiquitous pan-Arab flag of red-green-black-white, representing four historical Arab empires.  It represents Arab culture and history and language, not “Palestinian” culture, history or langauge, because there is no such thing!  During the years of the British Mandate, the British would generally refer to the Jews of the region as “Palestinians” and the Arabs as “Arabs”.  Hence in 1936 when professional Jewish musicians in Mandatory Palestine came together, they chose the name Palestine Symphony Orchestra (now the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra).  Even from 1948 to 1967, Judea and Samaria were not Palestine but Jordan, and the Gaza Strip was not Palestine but Egypt.

And when Arabs occupied what they started to call their ‘West Bank’ from 1948, they did not create a Palestine, or even attempt to create a Palestine. All that mattered was that the occupiers were Arab. Indeed, it was the Egyptian Yasser Arafat, allied with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Soviet Union, who came up with the “Palestine Liberation” narrative in the 1960s, and the idea that there is such a thing as a distinct Palestinian culture and history and state.

Today, the Arab Mamhoud Abbas – the PLO/Fatah’s incumbent head – obviously needs to keep up the “I’m a Palestinian” irredentist narrative as the pretext for Arabisation/Islamisation of the Holy Land (which is why all the Arab nations and wider organisation of Islamic nations support “Palestinian Liberation”).

“Syria Palaestina” was the name give to the region by Emperor Hadrian, following the crushing of the Jewish revolt of 135 CE (the Bar Kokhba revolt).  Hadrian wanted to wipe from the map evidence of the land’s connection to the Jews.  Who knows, perhaps he even thought that Jews would forget their connection to the Land.  The idea was that “Palestine” alludes to pre-Jewish history, i.e. of the Philistines.  But all we know about the Philistines, apart from the derogatory accounts in the Bible, is they were most probably “Sea Peoples” from Greece and Turkey.  History and archaeology tells us nothing more than that their main source of protein was pig (the DNA of whose bones has been traced back to Greece and Turkey), and they ate dogs too.  The Philistine language and social structure is lost to history.  All we have is some broken pottery and a lot of pig bones.  Jews, on the other hand, have – despite frequent persecution – lived, and worshipped, continuously on the land since Biblical times.  Scratching the surface anywhere in Israel today (including Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights) reveals history that cannot be eradicated with the names “Palestine”/”Philistine”.  There is empirical history for King David, for instance, who united the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and which came to light with the archaeological discovery of the Tel Dan Stele in 1993.

At times over the millennia, Christians and Muslims have been peculiarly interested in Jerusalem – the City of David – but in most epochs of the Common Era, neither Christianity nor Islam has taken much interest in “the Land” or in Jerusalem, which, as a far-flung outpost of this or that Christian or Muslim empire, was allowed to become derelict and diseased. Only a century ago, Jerusalem was one of the most dangerous cities on earth, according to British reports of their new mandate. Typhus, smallpox, cholera, dysentery and yellow fever were endemic, and malaria extremely so.  Life expectancy was low.  The British expeditionary force led by General Allenby, that took Jerusalem in 1917, reported 28,000 cases of malaria among British soldiers, with Allenby’s chief medical officer reporting that Palestine “is one of the most malaria-afflicted countries in the world”.

[ The areas of Judea and Samaria, west of the River Jordan, were never called “West Bank” – a term I refuse to use – until the Arabs of Jordan suddenly occupied and “annexed” it during the 1948 war, proceeding to Jerusalem, which the Jordanians de-Judaized by killing or expelling the Jews, destroying all the synagogues and using ancient Jewish gravestones as latrines. Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria were liberated during 1967 defensive war, when the forces of Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Iraq, expecting to overwhelm Israel with vast numerical superiority, were repelled back through the Sinai in the west and back across the River Jordan in the east. ]

Eretz Israel is I think how Winston Churchill, who visited the region in 1921 just four years after the Balfour Declaration, saw the future of Mandatory Palestine, as it was inherited in its derelict and sparsely populated state from the Ottoman Empire. But this is merely the tittle-tattle of modern history.  I think that we should be more philosophically committed to God of Israel, concerning the destiny of the nations, rather than seeking authority in the writings of Winston Churchill, the Balfour Declaration, and the Sykes-Picot Agreement.  A century later, the situation on the ground is very different. A century ago, Islamism and apocalyptic Jihadism did not exist.

Eretz Israel amounts to less than half of 1% of the Levant, and in relation to the whole Arab-nations landmass of the Middle East and North Africa, it is so tiny that it is nearly invisible on the map. Israel has none of the easily accessible oil/gas resources of much of the rest of the region (although, very recently, Israel has managed to start exploiting gas resources off the Israeli coast). Mandatory Palestine was, as noted, desolate, derelict and diseased, until the Zionist pioneers drained the malarial swamps, and, thanks to the genius of the scientist Israel Jacob Kligler (1888-1944), effected the total eradication of malaria in Israel by the 1960s. (Kliger’s ideas on ecological management, including the planting of thirsty Eucalyptus trees around stagnant water, have been used successfully in the fight against endemic malaria in other parts of the world.)

The established Arab states surrounding Israel are, today, more than horrendous enough to make us realise that they don’t deserve a new start-up “Palestinian Liberation” or Arab-liberation nation that pincers the State of Israel and has an Islamist/PLO Trojan Horse within it. To think that a combination of Hamas, Fatah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad could create a start-up nation that is any better than, say, neighbouring Syria, and the unhinged men who rule it, and the unhinged men of the opposing factions who want to rule it, is delusional in the extreme. Mahmoud Abbas is just as philosophically committed to evil as is Bashar al-Assad and all the other Arab actors whose philosophical ideologies are fuelling Syria’s calamitous civil wars.

Israel, behind the Green Line, although densely populated, is one of the best places in the world to live for Jews, Muslims, Christians, Baha’is, Druze and atheists. The town of Jaffa is perhaps the most religiously plural place on earth, with a cacophony of church bells from Western and Eastern denominations, the Muezzins’ frequent call to prayer, and men with flowing tzitzit muttering Hebrew psalms. In fact, Israel is the only place in the Middle East and North Africa where all these groups live in harmony, able to display signs of their worship and religion, or, indeed, able to publicly challenge the existence of God and challenge all religion per se. (Although I am very much a monotheist, whose faith is deep, life-dominating, and life fulfilling, I believe that intellectual atheists are essential to every healthy society, to challenge lazy notions of God, including of my co-religionists, and make sociological challenges to the obvious faults and contradictions in all the world’s religions today.) Israel, unlike any other nation in the region, is a meritocracy. To take just one example, Israeli-Arab footballers are as likely as Israeli-Jewish footballers to earn their place in the Israel national team.

My piece last week gave some overwhelmingly obvious reasons why the region’s Arabs cannot be given a state called “Palestine” that is situated anywhere near the world’s only Jewish State of Israel.

One only has to look at the godforsaken lands bordering Israel today:

• The government of Lebanon is now controlled by Hezbollah, which is a genocidally-anti-Israelist terrorist organisation backed by the genocidally-anti-Israelist Islamic Republic of Iran. It has about 150,000 rockets cynically distributed behind “human shields” within the towns of south Lebanon.  Lebanon can no longer be considered the region’s uniquely stable Arab nation. It is on the verge of revolution.  And Lebanon/Hezbollah is corrupting its youth with genocidal antisemitism.
• Syria is still deeply involved in internecine inter-Arab conflicts that have already caused about half-a-million deaths, and 13 million refugees/displaced persons. And Syria is corrupting its youth with genocidal antisemitism.
• The Gaza Strip is controlled by the Islamic Resistance Movement (or “Hamas”, a tributary of the Muslim Brotherhood) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, both explicitly genocidally-anti-Israelist. And Hamas and PIJ are corrupting the youth with genocidal antisemitism.
• The other Jew-free areas of Israel, in Judea and Samaria, are controlled by Fatah (aka Palestinian Authority/PLO), which is also explicitly committed, in its covenants, to the genocidal obliteration of Israel. And Palestinian Authority is corrupting its youth with genocidal antisemitism.
• Jordan is one of the most deeply and ideologically antisemitic nations on earth, and is becoming increasingly influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, which is hooking up with its unhinged brothers in the Gaza Strip. We should remember that when the Jordanians administered Jerusalem – between 1948 and 1967 – they imposed an apartheid system which included the destruction of all 35 of the Old City’s synagogues. And Jordan is corrupting its youth with genocidal antisemitism.

And the Levantine Leviathan is not just manifesting itself in failing nations and the corruption of children and youth. There are pan-national caliphater movements operating throughout the Levant, such as the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

And so it is obvious that the last thing Israel can possibly allow is an autonomous new neighbouring state that opens its borders to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists. That would be suicide. When Gazans, Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Iranians and others say they want to murder all Jews, Israel takes them seriously. These are not idle threats. From the Gaza Strip, since the turn of the millennium, tens of thousands of rockets have been fired, indiscriminately, at Israel.  People of the traumatised town of Sderot, close to the Gaza Strip, spend many of their days running for the bomb shelters.  Furthermore, incendiary devices, often attached to kites that make use of the prevailing westerly breeze are continuously launched from the Gaza strip, destroying huge areas of forest, agriculture, nature reserves, and property. Contemporary antisemitic Arabs not only do not care about people (including Israeli Arabs), but are addicted to destroying, in the name of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, everything of God’s good creation on Earth. Were the Islamic Republic Iran and the other Islamic dystopias able to smuggle bigger rockets into the Gaza Strip to annihilate the whole of Israel and murder all Jews, they would.

Moving out from the Levant, we see other reasons why the region’s Muslims must not be granted a new state bordering Israel:

All 57 Muslim nations are operating as an antisemitic bloc in support of ‘Palestine’s’ constitutional commitment to “obliterate” Israel (cf. the Hamas Covenant), the world’s sole Jewish state, home to half the world’s Jews.  The elder statesman of Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) is the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir bin Mohamad, who said, on his visit to Cambridge University last year, he is happy to be called an “antisemite”. Bin Mohamad said in his address to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in Kuala Lumpur in 2003:

“Jews still rule the world by proxy… but 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counterattack…The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million”. The Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir bin Mohamad, addressing the OIC in 2003

As far as I know, no regime of any Muslim nation has distanced itself from the Malaysian Prime Minister. The Muslim nations are regressing, not progressing. Where nations do try to progress, the pan-national Muslim Brotherhood exerts its influence. Even the Sultan of Brunei, last year, proudly announced that he wants to to make his nation more “Islamic” by introducing death-by-stoning for male homosexuals and adulterers (and 10 years imprisonment of lesbians), and he wants to reintroduce amputation for theft.

Female genital mutilation is still rife in the Muslim countries (sometimes at rates as high as 98% of girls, such as in Somalia, with Egypt not far behind according to a UNICEF report on the subject in 2013), and so are honour killings, including of daughters by their fathers. Child ‘brides’ are common in the Muslim nations, with UNICEF reporting about 1.9 million in Pakistan, many of whom become pregnant before their bodies are able to safely give birth.

In other words, there is no Muslim nation that has human rights. Unreformed Islam continues to trump human rights in all Muslim nations. And as I said in my piece last week, the Arab world is still strongly influenced by medieval shame-honour codes, not least the honour lost by the fact that every coalition of Arab armies that has tried to destroy Israel has been defeated by the Jews. The Arab nations, and Iran, refuse to accept defeat in war with Jews is possible, and so the wars are seen as battles in God’s greater war leading up to the final apocalyptic last battle, which Islam will win.

What I did not mention is my piece last week is that this envisioned last great battle is very much rooted in end-time, or ‘Apocalyptic’ Jihad (cf. Heaven on Earth, the Varieties of Millennial Experience, Dr Richard Landes, Oxford University Press).

When the Arabs finally take Jerusalem (not least according to the Hamas Covenant), heaven will be properly linked to Earth, through Islam, following which the whole world will be so awed that we all convert to Islam, all of us that is apart from the Jews, who are to be pushed into the sea because they are to be eternally punished in Hell. (According to mainstream Islamic teaching since Hitler and 1930s, Jews are “descendants of pigs and apes” and therefore, being unhuman, beyond redemption.)

At this Islamic end time, alas, we infidels of the West will all come to accept that the Ayatollah, Mahmoud Abbas, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, and the Sultan of Brunei were right all along. The Sultan of Brunei will relocate to Jerusalem Al-Quds, where, in the name of his “religion of peace”, he will turn up with his sacks of rocks to stone gays and adulterers. Or perhaps this elder Muslim statesman will discover that there is a better philosophy in Jerusalem than any he will find in the whole of Islam: “let he who is without sin cast the first stone”.

Contemporary Islamic shame-honour (including the shame of losing Jerusalem), and contemporary Islamic apocalypticism, are in fact very much the fuel for contemporary Islamic antisemitism. I have written in several places on this blog about how contemporary Islam (and much of Christianity in fact) is committed to the belief that it must appropriate Time itself.  “Supersessionist” belief, prevalent in Islam and Christianity, sees the need to appropriate the plan for the end that God of Israel revealed to the world when He centred the world on the People Israel, fixing the very centre of history and geography on Jerusalem.  Antisemitism/anti-Israelism, for those of us who have analysed and studied it properly – as monotheists rather than as secular sociologists or political ‘scientists’ – is fundamentally the attempt to either appropriate God – in the case of religious types – or to hide from God – in the case of irreligious types (cf. Antisemitism and its Metaphysical Origins, Dr David Patterson, Cambridge University Press, 2019).  Antisemitism is not, essentially, racism.  It is something far more serious.

Of course, what would really happen if the Muslims took Jerusalem is that all the internecine Muslim factions that are already tearing the Arab nations to pieces would be energised by the prospect of being the rightful and deserving and God-sanctioned owner of the centre of the world: God’s seat on Earth. Each faction would think it should have supreme authority in the Holy Land, as in fact happened in the mid-19th century between Christian factions: the cause of the Crimean War (1853-1856), which dragged in the empires of Europe, Turkey and Russia, was caused by a Christian inter-denominational dispute over who should have authority over Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The First Stage of the Two-Stage Solution:

Philosophical Reform (using the example of post-War West Germany)

The first stage is to cure the Arab nations, and the wider Muslim Ummah, of genocidal antisemitism. Until this is done, “deals” or “solutions” or “agreements” can never work, and should not be attempted.

The “Trump Deal of the Century”, from the outline I have seen of it this week, cannot possibly work. It is largely a product of the liberal Western mind. It has a large monetary element in it: $50 billion, sold as “Peace to Prosperity”. I doubt there is any region of the world that receives more money that the Gaza Strip and the regions administered by Palestinian Authority.  Little if any of this money goes to truly helping the people, rather it goes to helping to bring about the goals of the anti-Israelist ideology of the donor Arab nations.  The Arab nations, such as the Gulf States, and many Muslim nations, do not lack money.  Money will not bring peace to the Arab nations or the Muslim nations.  I mentioned the Sultan of Brunei, perhaps the richest leader of any regime in the world, and ruling over one of the world’s richest nations by GDP.  A nation that wants to stone gays to death, and to amputate thieves, is not a nation at peace with itself, and no amount of money is going to make it so.

Offering genocidal-antisemites money in the hope that their new “prosperity” will change their ideology is naïve and immoral in the extreme. Qatar has the highest GDP of all nations of the world, and yet no nation is as committed to supporting the goals of the Muslim Brotherhood, goals which begin by wiping Israel off the map. The $billions that are already pumped into the region are not used to support the ordinary people, such as the Arab ‘refugees’ that have been held in refugee tents and shacks, by Arabs for decades. The money is embezzled, used for terrorism, such as the hundreds of miles of terror tunnel networks in the Gaza Strip, and used to reward the slayers of Jews, or their families if the slayers ‘martyr’ themselves. And it is used to keep the Gazan leadership in luxury: mansions, luxury hotels, restaurants and exclusive shopping malls (i.e. the parts of the Gaza Strip that are not filmed for the Western media). One does not need to visit too many Arab nations to quickly see that, today, Arabs do not generally care about Arabs or other peoples, and this is even outside the few Arab nations where there are presently no inter-Arab wars and conflicts. What Arabs do care about, and about the only thing they can agree on (even agree with the Turks and Iranians) is taking Israel from the Jews in the name of Arab/Islamic honour.

Antisemitism is a chronic disease of the mind and soul. When it resurges – as it has somewhere in world in every generation since the advent of Christianity – it becomes genocidal antisemitism, i.e. the form of antisemitism in which the antisemite becomes so intellectually and spiritually sick, and lacking in compassion, that, with a perverse and quasi-religious  conviction, he becomes convinced of the need to murder Jews, and even that he needs to do so for God, on the grounds that God’s Chosen are now the Unchosen, to be replaced by the antisemites.

I am not suggesting that all contemporary Muslims and Christians can be cured of antisemitism. They certainly cannot in my own faith community, the Church of England. As I have written elsewhere on this blog, the default position for the CofE clergy is antisemitism: and the problem is institutional in the sense that the antisemites don’t know that they are antisemites, and are unaware that they are teaching it.  But I do think that those who are now suffering from genocidal antisemitism can be cured. Within living memory, Germany, Austria, France, Romania and other nations of Europe were cured, if not of antisemitism, of genocidal antisemitism.

What I called the Two-Stage solution has in fact worked, within living memory. The two stage solution cured Germany and other nations of Europe, but let’s look at Germany in particular.

The Germans, as they entered the 20th century, were arguably the most advanced nation in the world in terms of science and cultural heritage. Like the Arabs at their peak, Germany had the best thinkers in many domains, not least science. (Fortunately, some of the leading German scientists were Jews, who fled Germany and worked for the Allies, and through whom the Allies discovered the atomic bomb before Germany.)

If you think about it, West Germany was saved through philosophical reform.

In Germany, this philosophical reform began by destroying the regime that was brainwashing its people and its youth. Unfortunately, in the case of the Germans, this reform first required the Allies’ commitment to total war. It was only when the Germans were literally grovelling around in the dirt, their stomachs empty, their Führer dead, their women raped and murdered by the Red Army, that they gave up the quasi-religious ideology of genocidal antisemitism, and rethought what it means to be “Germans”. Britain, which took responsibility for rebuilding Germany’s industrial heartland, did so according to the British vision of “Christian civilisation”. As Britain set about the reconstruction of the Ruhr Valley, it also set about the reconstruction of philosophy, compelling the judges to swear loyalty to Almighty God (i.e. Judicial Independence), rather than loyalty to this or that regime, or to Hitler or Stalin. Britain rebuilt the institutions of government, education, police, the law courts… a process the British called “denazification”. Hence the new German political parties were explicitly “Christian” political parties (as they are to this day), but, again, Christian in the sense of faith in God Almighty rather than the perverted faith of almost all the wartime Protestant churches, which were loyal to Hitler under the ecumenical umbrella of the antisemitic “Protestant Reich Church”.

Good philosophy is vital. To see how vital philosophy is, we simply need to see the difference in humanity between West Germans and East Germans after the War.

East Germany continued to corrupt its people and its youth through loyalty to Socialism and Stalin. (The Socialist Unity Party, Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, formed in 1946.) And the Lutheran Church in East Germany was compelled to be loyal to the Party, and was allowed to remain antisemitic (according to the German Protestant theologian Dr Petra Heldt, who has written and spoken much on contemporary Christian antisemitism, easily available in English on the Internet).  Although many East Germans tried to escape, many were loyal to the new regime, even though that meant killing fellow Germans who were not loyal to the regime’s “socialist unity”. In other words, East Germany fell out of the frying pan and into the fire: from German National Socialism to Russian International Socialism. There was no judicial independence, and there was no  underlying philosophical theology which insisted “thou shalt not kill”.  Rather, the underlying philosophy was what the Soviets called “Scientific Atheism”.  Germans were persuaded to spy on one another, to ensure universal loyalty to the Socialist state. The judges were loyal to the Stasi, nay were the Stasi, and would condemn fellow Germans to death for lack of loyalty, or for planning to escape to the West. East German border guards were issued a shoot-to-kill order. And like the Arab nations and Iran today, there was no true meritocracy, but rather reward and punishment according to one’s loyalty or lack of loyalty to the party.

And so, you see, it is only through good philosophical reform that corrupted nations can come into peace and prosperity. Nations whose regimes corrupt their youth with murderous ideologies are condemned nations with a doomed youth.

Today, the Arabs of the Levant, like the Germans of 75 years ago, need philosophical reform, which includes of course denazification of the people. Just as European Christianity was denazified, I’m sure that contemporary Islam can emerge from its dark age and denazify.  The question is, can we bring down the Nazi regimes of the Levant without war?  How do Muslim reformers reintroduce good philosophy, revelant to our times, to Islam?  One thing we cannot do is enter into the conflicts of the region with the view to “regime change”.  Take Syria for instance.  If the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party were to fall, it would most likely be replaced with its main opposition, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, which is equally genocidally antisemitic.  In fact the Syrian Social Nationalist Party is a pan-Arab-nation Nazi party, founded in the 1930s, which has kept the swastika as the party flag to this day.  The party was so in love with Hitler’s Germany and antisemitic philosophy that it chose as its party anthem Deutschland über alles.

I have hope. News travels fast these days. Communication is more intense than ever. Perhaps all it takes is for one good Muslim philosopher to break through, just as one bad Muslim philosopher – Sayyid Qutb, 1906-1966 – inspired the global political movement that calls itself “Islamism and the “Muslim Brotherhood”, drawing from the terrible Western “isms” and bad philosophies that overwhelmed the world with darkness in the 20th century.

I should say that our Western/Christian philosophy also needs reform. There has, as yet, been no convincing philosophical response to the damage done by the most influential European philosophers – including the Socialists, Postmodernists and Neo-Marxists – of the 20th century, whose ideas still dominate Western universities, and are corrupting our youth.  And there has, as yet, been no convincing philosophical-theological response to the relativisation of time and geography on Earth since Einstein.  The West too, then, has lost its philosophical centring, and there is a resurgence of antisemitism/anti-Israelism, including, if not especially, amongst Christians (that I have written about elewhere on this blog, and will continue to do so).

The Second Stage of the Two-Stage Solution:

Eretz Israel

My second-stage ideas are, of course, nothing more than that: simply ideas. But perhaps they can help open up different kinds of discussion than the conventional wisdom quacked by liberal virtue-signallers and by Western politicians afraid to deviate from the “two-state solution” script.

I think the second stage can be summed up with the two words Eretz Israel, whose loyalty is to nothing less than God Almighty, God of Israel.  Great Israeli leaders such as David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin would have disagreed, but they were committed atheists/secularists.  Israel, of all nations, must have good philosophy that aims to serve, and aim for, nothing less than God.

As I wrote in a piece a few weeks ago, once there is peace in Jerusalem, there will be peace in the world. This is not my idea, but the idea of the Biblical prophets and teachers of both Jewish and Christian scripture, including Jesus. Jerusalem was, is, and always will be, the microcosm of the world.

A great challenge in the second stage is to encourage the world – almost all the nations – away from hatred of the Jewish state to love of the Jewish state. Can the United Nations move from hatred of the Magen David to love of the Magen David?

I have mentioned the perversity of the UN’s antisemitic treatment of Israel in several of my pieces. For the benefit of the new reader, here is something I wrote a few weeks ago:

Recently Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, has tweeted a list of the UN Human Rights Council condemnations of human rights between 2006 and 2016:

Israel – 68 UN human rights condemnations
Iraq – 0 UN human rights condemnations
Cuba – 0 UN human rights condemnations
Qatar – 0 UN human rights condemnations
China – 0 UN human rights condemnations
Russia – 0 UN human rights condemnations
Turkey – 0 UN human rights condemnations
Somalia – 0 UN human rights condemnations
Pakistan – 0 UN human rights condemnations
Venezuela – 0 UN human rights condemnations
Zimbabwe – 0 UN human rights condemnations … etc, etc

The annual United Nations General Assembly nation-specific condemnations are similar. Typically the UNGA will issue about 20 condemnations of Israel, and a total of 5 or 6 for all the other nations of the world combined!  Israel 20, Rest of the World 5. How outrageous and stupid and dangerously-antisemitic the UN has allowed itself to become!

When the nations become united in their love of Israel, rather than hatred and furious rage towards Israel, then the world will be at peace.  Israel, which, despite being permanently under seige (cognitive as well as physical violence and Gazan vandalism), already offers the world so much through her great ideas and innovation, not least in medicine, ecology and re-greening the deserts.  Imagine what she could do, and give, if we freed her up and encouraged her to live up to God’s vision.

Israel can never be a true liberal democracy, and, I suggest, must not aim to become one. I would argue that every nation in the world apart from the nation of Israel can potentially be a true liberal democracy, and I wish that more nations would aim for liberal democracy (ideally with secular/religious constitutional balance, as in my native England).

And so when, or if, the walls within Eretz Israel come down (after stage 1, or the denazification) as did the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, something resembling the status quo of power in Israel must be maintained. From what I know of Israel, the Jews want to extend the hand of friendship to Arabs, but this cannot happen until the Arabs (Muslim and Christian, including the Anglican bishops) surrounding Israel are cured of their deep and overwhelming antisemitism. The Jewish tribe must rule Israel, whose primary loyalty is to God Almighty, God of Israel, and not some lesser god or judge or alternative to God, such as liberal democracy for its own sake.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.