I wonder.

We were at the JCC yesterday for our synagogue’s summer picnic, and as I was walking along the sidewalk to the picnic area, I noticed something that speaks volumes to me of Jewish inability to recognize the complete and utter failure of trying to talk to Arabs.
The sidewalk in question is a “Timeline of Jewish History”, starting from the creation of the world and going through the present day. The whole thing is probably a quarter-mile long and includes a diversion into a Holocaust memorial garden, all of which is actually rather neat; the design is not what I’m on about.
The last large stone in the sidewalk before you get to the picnic area has something to do with “Peace comes to Israel”, and it has various famous dates such as the Begin-Sadat accord and the Oslo accord. This takes us up to 1993.
But there is NOTHING WHATSOEVER pointing out that there have been two intifadas since then. Nothing that points up the futility of dealing with kill-crazed Arabs who will say anything to give themselves a little more time to polish off the dirty Jews.
And the unwillingness of American Jews to recognize the failings inherent in dealing with Arabs as people of goodwill is perfectly pointed up by this omission.
The basic mistake made in 1947 by the first Israelis was in thinking that their Arab neighbors could ever be their friends. Individual Arabs, certainly. But the mass of Arabs? Never. This was not an American/Russian standoff where we were fairly sure that Americans and Russians, in the main, could be friends. Religion wasn’t standing in the way.
Islam did, does, and always will stand in the way of Arabs making a sincere effort to live with the rest of the world. Until there is a “Protestant Reformation” of Islam that defangs it and makes it a religion that can be lived with, I believe the Arab world to be our permanent and unrelenting enemy. There is no accomodation with one whose first reaction to the differences between you is to try to kill you.
Wall off the Arabs. Support Israel. Stop accomodating an ideology that is diametrically opposed to our own.
That’s what needs to happen, and it needs to happen before one of our own cities is laid waste.