By now, most Americans know that the “two-state solution” is no solution to the war that supremacist Muslims have been waging against the state of Israel since its rebirth in 1948. Most Americans in public life know it too, but in public, nearly all of them pay lip service to the idea of a Palestinian state. To do that plausibly, they have to studiously avoid any public mention of facts about the Palestinians that make it glaringly obvious that a Palestinian state is not in America’s national interest; and glaringly clear that empowering the Palestinians and the forces and ideas they represent is a self-destructive policy — a threat to our national security and a defeat for our values.

In the last Republican primary debate of 2011, Newt Gingrich broke the rules, giving voice to three undeniable facts about the Palestinians. He said: “These people are terrorists,” with an “invented identity,” and they teach their children that hating and killing Jews is their highest purpose in life. Michele Bachmann quickly backed him up with a factual account of the ubiquitous Saudi-financed textbooks that teach precisely that, from pre-school through university. Proper foreign-policy types, on and off the stage, reacted as if all this truth-telling were somehow akin to profaning a sacred script, but the Iowa audience was with the truth-tellers. They applauded wildly.

THE “TWO-STATE SOLUTION” IS NO SOLUTION
The “two-state solution” wasn’t always sacrosanct. In the 1940s and ’50s, it didn’t even exist. There were no Palestinians then, although the territory had been called the British Mandate for Palestine (after the old Roman name for Israel, Palestina). Arabs had never called themselves Palestinians; the few Jews who had called themselves that in the 1930s no longer did. There were only Arabs and Jews, and the openly avowed goal of all the Arab states surrounding Israel was to drive the Jews into the sea, and divide up the land amongst themselves. Arabs inside Israel were no less committed to that same pan-Arab goal. It was only in the 1960s, after the abject failure of repeated multi-state military assaults by massed Arab armies, that Arab rulers finally accepted the fact that Israel was not yet weak enough for them to destroy in open warfare.

Worse — from their perspective — each time Israel’s 5 million or fewer Jews defeated the Arabs who attacked her with hordes that numbered in the tens of millions, Israel gained in size and strength, and in the respect and admiration in which most of the world held her. We tend to forget now, but in earlier decades America was not Israel’s only ally. Europe was also pro-Israel then, and the two biggest, most rapidly developing Muslim nations in the region — Turkey and Iran — were Israeli allies. They were our allies too, in those days. Then as now, the Arab world was unified against Israel and against the West, but the Muslim world was not, and Europe had yet to capitulate to the Islamists.

After their major military defeat in 1967, Arab rulers finally faced up to these realities, grasped their implications, and rethought their war strategy. They realized then that, to win, they had to first attack with Taqqiya, not tanks. Taqqiya — lies to deceive the enemy into making himself vulnerable — is a venerable Arab weapon, one that Arab states have wielded for centuries, and they are quite skilled at it. They saw that before attacking Israel again, they had to first win what we call a propaganda war, in order to discredit Israel, strip away her allies, and apply enough diplomatic pressure to wring from her a mounting series of concessions that would, in the end, render the Jewish state indefensible. For a propaganda war like that, enlisting the aid of non-Arabs was critical, and the old Arab rallying cry — “Join your Arab brothers in driving the Jews into the sea” — was not helpful for that purpose. Neither was the image of 22 Arab states — with some 300 million people, millions of square miles of sparsely populated land, and vast amounts of oil wealth — ganging up on a few million Jews, who were clinging to a resource-poor strip of seacoast about half the size of the small ancient state of Israel.

Arab kings and dictators saw that they needed a small ersatz victim group to champion, in order to compete with the all-too-real victim image of the Jews, so they invented one, picking up the name the British had used — Palestine — to conjure up a new Arab people — the Palestinians. And of course, to demand a 23rd Arab state for them. They did this suddenly and in virtual unison, catching by surprise many Arabs in Israel who had no idea they were Palestinians. And from that day to this, Arab leaders have pushed the great Taqqiya relentlessly in every international forum, using the huge amounts of money and leverage their oil wealth gave them to court politicians, diplomats, journalists, and educators around the globe, and to saturate media markets and schools everywhere with their great lie.

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