#Religion: In all but name, the wish to consummate Hitler's "final solution" for Jews has animated a substantive segment of Arab and Muslim thinking since the establishment of Israel.

 Each of the wars Israel has had to fight, beginning with the war in May 1948 against the combined Arab armies, if lost, had the potential of Jews being exterminated by Arabs in Palestine.

The Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini escaped from Europe after the Nazi defeat and made his way into Egypt. The Allied powers never indicted him as a war criminal; he eventually retired as an Arab hero to Lebanon, where he died in 1974. The leaders of the "Palestinian" movement since 1945 have been the progeny of the Mufti.

The Mufti's politics of jihad declared against Jews, beginning with the riots of 1921, has since then grown in intensity. No "Palestinian" leader has publicly disavowed jihad against Jews. Instead, every aspect of engagement by "Palestinians" with Jews and Israelis is considered an obligation for advancing this jihad until its final expected objective of pushing the Jews out of "Palestine" has been reached.

After the overwhelming defeat suffered by Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the six-day war of June 1967, a practical response was needed by the Arab leaders to quell the seething anger of their people against them and re-direct that anger against Israel, while buying time to rebuild Arab strength. One response came in the Arab League Summit in Khartoum, Sudan, in August-September 1967. There the Egyptian leader, President Gamal Abdel Nasser, spelled out the "three no's" -- "no recognition, no negotiation, no peace" -- in defining the collective Arab stand against Israel.

The other response was to build support for a resistance movement of Arabs both in Gaza (under Egyptian control until June 1967 war) and in the West Bank (under the control of the Kingdom of Jordan). Israel had warned Jordan to stay neutral during the buildup of the crisis ahead of the June 1967 war. But when King Hussein imprudently joined forces with Egypt and Syria against Israel, Jordan's military defeat came with the loss of control over the West Bank. Arab governments officially designated the resistance movement launched from the "occupied" territories as the "Palestinian" struggle against Israel.

In the UN, after the June 1967 war, the great powers met with renewed energy to seek a diplomatic resolution in containing the Arab-Israeli conflict that might be spinning out of control. The result was Resolution 242, carefully crafted and unanimously adopted by the Security Council.

The resolution's preamble, emphasizing "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" was a pious wish with no basis in history or law, for if it did then much of the history of Western powers and their acquisitions of territories as result of wars would need revision. But even more to the point, Arab and Muslim states have continued to contravene the intent of the clause -- Pakistan has occupied parts of Kashmir, Turkey has occupied parts of Cyprus, Morocco has occupied the Spanish Sahara, Russia has occupied Georgia, Ukraine and Crimea, and China has occupied Tibet.

The key point in the English version of Res. 242 with reference to Israel was withdrawal of its armed forces "from territories occupied in the recent conflict". Arthur J. Goldberg, the U.S. ambassador to the UN (1965-68) involved in drafting the resolution, explained,

"The notable omissions in regard to withdrawal, from Israel's viewpoint, are the words all, the, and the June 5, 1967 lines. The Israeli emphasize that there is lacking a declaration requiring Israel to withdraw from all of the territories occupied by it on and after June 5, 1967."[4]

According to Goldberg, Israel tied its withdrawal "from territories" to the principle Res. 242 affirmed that every State in the area is entitled "to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force". Since then, every American administration, until Obama's, has supported this formula of "land-for-peace" without prejudging the outcome of the land that would be returned by Israel in reaching a final agreement with each of its opponents.

Arab states in the years since the adoption of Res. 242 eventually came to accept it as the framework for peace in the region. The reasoning was, again Goldberg, "the Arab States came to the conclusion that the language of the Resolution was the best they could hope for from the United Nations."

Arab leaders also shrewdly sensed the tide of support for Israel as the "underdog" within the UN was shifting as new members, former colonies of the European powers, was emerging as a majority-voting bloc. These new members were more sympathetic to the cause of Arabs as the new "underdog" in the UN.

The leading Arab states in the decade and half after the June 1967 war -- Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, Libya, Lebanon, Tunisia -- continued to characterize their politics in terms of secular nationalism, even as support for Islamic fundamentalist parties began to grow among a new generation of radical youths. The Arab states became more diplomatically adept in pushing their interests at the UN and among the European powers. After the October 1973 war, Arab efforts to isolate Israel grew in tandem with the use of oil as a "weapon".

It is during this period that the "Palestinian" movement under the banner of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and headed by Yasser Arafat, emerged from the shadows of internal Arab politics into the notice of the UN. In 1974 the Arab states with support of non-Arab Muslim countries, nonaligned members of the "third world", and countries of the (former) Soviet bloc arranged for the UN General Assembly to invite Arafat to its opening session in New York. The following year the same group of countries adopted in support of Arab states the General Assembly resolution 3379 (1975) declaring, "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination." This resolution was revoked during the 1991 General Assembly session.

The PLO was not constrained by any of the recognized norms of an established state in waging its asymmetrical terrorist warfare against Israel. At the Munich Summer Olympics in 1972, a wing of the PLO -- the "Black September" faction -- took 11 Israeli athletes hostage and killed them. There were attacks on Israeli civilians and airplane hijackings by Palestinian terror groups, as the Arab war against Israel turned unconventionally terrorist.

The 1979 revolution in Iran under Khomeini was a victory for Muslim fundamentalists in the Middle East. Khomeini repudiated the idea of normalization between Muslims and Jews, between Israel and the Arab-Muslim states in the region and beyond. Khomeini invited Arafat to meet with him in Tehran, and he sharpened the language of jihad against Israel.

In October 1981 President Anwar Sadat of Egypt was killed by his own soldiers in a public military parade in Cairo. Sadat had signed a peace treaty with the Jewish state and had pushed for the normalization of Arab relations with Israel under the UN framework of Res. 242. Palestinians rejoiced over the murder of Sadat.

The Palestinian leadership spoke in a secular setting about Palestinian movement in terms of nationalist struggle, and in an Islamic setting in terms of jihad against Jews and Israel.

When Arafat was asked in South Africa in 1994 about the PLO accepting the Oslo Accords on the basis of Res. 242, he explained it as only a hudna (truce) with the enemy. He referred to the example of the treaty of Hudaibiyyah that Prophet Muhammad negotiated with his opponents in Mecca. In this treaty, Muhammad had promised a ten-year truce; but after he had strengthened his armies, he returned in only three years to obliterate the opposition.

The doublespeak of the Palestinian leadership made no difference within the UN. Since the June 1967 war, the UN began to tilt away from being fair and balanced toward Israel, and extended support to Arabs of the "occupied" West Bank and Gaza as an indigenous "Palestinian" people supposedly wronged by Jews.

After June 1967 war, Palestine came to no longer mean the territory designated for the establishment of Israel, as the Jewish homeland. It came to mean, instead, the land forcibly occupied by an alien people.

Until 1967, opposition to Jews and Israel, had been mounted in the name of Arabs, as was the jihad proclaimed by the Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini on behalf of Arabs and Muslims against Jewish colonial-settlers in Palestine deemed an integral part of the Arab watan (homeland).

But in the years after 1967, Arabs of the territories "occupied" by Israel, and newly designated as "Palestinians," came to be viewed in the Muslim world -- enthusiastically backed by Europe, especially France -- as the vanguard of a jihad against Jews. As Arafat said, agreements to him were merely hudnas (truces) with the enemy until the goals of the jihad -- liberation of "al Quds" (Arabic for Jerusalem) and the annihilation of Israel, which Khomeini put forward as Islamic imperatives -- were realized.