Dennis Prager Loses Hope For Peace With The Palestinians

Dennis Prager writes: …Palestinian men reflected two characteristics of the Arab world and parts of the larger Muslim world: one is the lack of acknowledgement that Muslims are committing atrocities; the other is the prevalence of conspiratorial theories to explain many major events. Not only is Islamic State an Israeli and American operation, so was Sept. 11. Likewise, AIDS in Egypt is popularly blamed on Israeli prostitutes. And almost all Egyptians, including the Egyptian government, deny despite overwhelming evidence from the cockpit voice recorder that the Egyptian co-pilot deliberately crashed Egypt Air Flight 990 into the ocean in 1999. Egyptians blame it on Boeing.
My respondents live in the conspiratorial fantasy world that exists in much of the Arab world. Peace simply cannot be made with people who deny reality. Just as World War II was rendered inevitable because of the fantasy world that Germans lived in after their defeat in World War I.
To the question of whether peace is possible, all three said it is — provided Jews, Christians and Palestinians live together . . . under Muslim rule. One of them described such a society; it was exactly as outlined in the Quran and medieval Muslim theology. Muslims and Christians would be allowed have their own communities and pay the jizya. He actually used the word jizya, which refers to the tax that the Quran demands dhimmi (Jews and Christians) pay.
As is written in the Quran (9.29): “Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture — [fight] until they give the jizya willingly while they are humbled.”
Another one of the men spoke eloquently about all people getting along irrespective of religious identity, and no one imposing their specific religious practices on anyone else. And then he added that, after all, “You are a Muslim; everyone who submits to God is a Muslim.”
When added to everything else the three Palestinians told me, and to what the chief spokesman for the Palestinian Authority told me three years ago in Ramallah — that there is no such thing as the Jewish people, only the Jewish religion — it is close to impossible to imagine Palestinians accepting a Jewish state.