If you are smoking a cigarette, pondering your seven-deuce off-suit in the hole, and looking around the table wondering who the sucker is... you're the guy.
The Arabs and their western-left allies have the Jews hooked into a sucker's game.
One thing that should, by this late date, be absolutely clear to anyone who has been paying attention to the ongoing war against the Jews of the Middle East, is that the Arab governments, and their peoples, have no intention whatsoever of allowing the Jews to live in peace within our ancestral homeland.
The success in the Arab-Muslim approach to the conflict is due, in part, to the weight of sheer numbers and the heaviness of time. It is certainly not due to anything resembling finesse or sophistication. The Arab world is vast, with estimates ranging from between 300 and 400 million people pushing against a small, historically abused, Jewish population of around 6 million and a Christian minority that is being chased out everywhere in the region other than in Israel.
The Arabs, emphatically, do not want those Jews or Christians living there in freedom or in peace. This is due to millennia-old, Koranically-based anti-Jewish and anti-Christian prejudice and "racism" that is both rife and genocidal in that part of the world.
Given the size of the Arab population in the Middle East, however, it is not difficult for the Arab governments and peoples to place remarkable pressure on the Jews of Israel, or the Christians in the region, without suffering much in the way of uncomfortable blow-black for that hostility. This is particularly true given the fact that Christians authorities in the West are studiously unconcerned with the fate of the Christian minority in the East. Just why they are so unconcerned is anyone's guess, but that they are unconcerned is a fact.
Hostility toward Jews, however, is very convenient from a Muslim propaganda stand-point and in no way causes even a ruffle in Arab comfort, outside of the Palestinian-Arab community that, along with the Jews, bear the brunt of the burden. They can defame the Jews in any way imaginable - I mean, really, spy vultures? - and no one minds and they can use the "Palestinians" as front-line troops against the Jews while suffering no casualties or day-to-day inconveniences, whatsoever.
This, for example, is part of the EU-funded Hamas charter and represents an excellent example of violently-inclined Arab-Muslim anti-Jewish paranoia and hostility that is entirely ignored by their friends in the West:
They (Jews) stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about here and there. They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like. All of them are destructive spying organizations.
They also used the money to take over control of the Imperialist states and made them colonize many countries in order to exploit the wealth of those countries and spread their corruption therein. As regards local and world wars, it has come to pass and no one objects, that they stood behind World War I, so as to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate. They collected material gains and took control of many sources of wealth. They obtained the Balfour Declaration and established the League of Nations in order to rule the world by means of that organization.
They also stood behind World War II, where they collected immense benefits from trading with war materials and prepared for the establishment of their state. They inspired the establishment of the United Nations and the Security Council to replace the League of Nations, in order to rule the world by their intermediary.The only people that suffer from the never-ending conflict are the Jews in Israel and the Palestinian-Arabs... but the Jews get all the blame.
Year upon year, decade after decade, the Arab world encourages "Palestinian" youths to throw themselves, and their rocks, with murderous rage upon the Jews of the Middle East and every time they do so - every time that they fling themselves into yet another psycho-orgiastic anti-Semitic round of intifadan violence against Jews - sadistic western "progressives" pull their hair, raise their quivering fists, and scream from the hillsides that Jews are the New Nazis.
For Israel it is a matter of life and death.
For western progressives it is a matter of break-out-the-popcorn and watch them squirm and die while feeling morally superior.
The Jews of the Middle East are a people living under siege by a much larger hostile majority that honestly believes that Allah despises the Jewish people and that Muslims have every right to kill Jews because Jews are said to be the slayers of prophets and the starters of all wars.
Meanwhile, as the Arab world seethes with a crude and genocidal Medieval anti-Semitism, their western-left apologists condemn Israel as a violent, racist, apartheid, colonial, imperial monstrosity.
Within living memory of the Holocaust, the western Left tells itself that the Jewish State is the worst country in the world and deserves whatever beating that Muslims care to dish out, even as Islamists are slaughtering people throughout northern Iraq and Syria under the crazed Islamic State regime.
What this means, as should be obvious by now, is that there will be no negotiated two-state solution to the Arab-Israel conflict. Not any time in the near future, there will not be.
The Jews of the Middle East have agreed to an additional Arab state within the tiny Jewish homeland since at least the Peel Commission of 1937. From that day until this the Palestinian-Arabs have never accepted a state for themselves in peace next to the Jewish one, yet Barack Obama and the western Left continually and unjustly blame the Jewish people for Arab intransigence and hatred toward us.
There is no one on this planet who wants peace with the Arabs and the Muslims more than do the Jews of that part of the world. They are a tiny minority in a savage environment who want nothing so much as to be left the hell alone so that they can go about creating computer software and litigate against one another.
Despite this, the Obama administration, the EU, the UN, and their terroristically-inclined friends in the PLO and Hamas are ratcheting up pressure on Israel to accept what we Jews have always accepted, a "Palestinian" state carved out of the Jewish homeland, if it is willing to live in peace next to Israel. For some inexplicable reason they cannot seem to take "yes" for an answer and will continue to pressure Israel until such a time as it agrees to what it has long ago already agreed to.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration is endeavoring to wound Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, because Netanyahu dared to suggest that an Iranian nuclear bomb could very well be unhealthy to daisies and small children. He also suggested that given Arab intransigence there would not likely be another Arab state superimposed upon Judea and Samaria any time soon and this is correct. There will not likely be another Arab state because they refuse offer after offer for such a state, in peace next Israel, and then point the trembling finger of blame at the Jews.
Well, as my dear old ma used to say, enough is enough.
The Palestinian-Arabs have no intention whatsoever of coming to a negotiated conclusion of hostilities and this means that the only alternative is unilateral action.
I do not wish to conjure the ghost of Ariel Sharon, but Israel needs to declare its final borders.
What those borders should be is, in my view, entirely up to them.
Finally, while it is true that in the game of Texas Hold 'Em a seven-deuce off-suit is a terrible hand, it can only actually hurt you if you play it.
You do not have to.
Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.