Israel-Palestine conflict has no peaceful solution
Reader comment on item: One-on-one with Daniel Pipes

Submitted by Jay Vail (United States), Dec 4, 2003 at 11:11

I wish I could agree that peace can be brought to the middle east by the simple expedient of Israel somehow convincing the Palestinians to accept it.

The root cause of the conflict is the Muslim determination to regain Israel for the Dar-al-Islam, since Muslims regard it as an insult to Islam to lose any land conquered by the Muslims to the nonMuslims. Such lands must be recovered as a matter of religious duty. This is why the Iranians, the Syrians, until lately the Iraqis, and above all the Saudis finance Hezbollah and Hamas -- and why Arafat rejected the most recent land deal. The Saudis in particular are more than willing to fight to the last Palestinian. Such a view makes peace impossible, for it affords no basis for compromise.

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