> As to Israel, no position adopted by Israel will ever
> placate them. Israel is in the Caliphate-to-be. Just
> like when Russia withdrew from Chechnya in 1996, any
> olive branch held out by Israel will be seen by the
> Jihadis as a sign of weakness. This is why Israel is
> in such a shitty situation. Really founding that
> country was a bad idea.
=========================
Carving an independent Palestine from the British Empire as a "Jewish state"
called Israel in which Arabs were excluded and dispossessed was a bad idea
in itself, but I don't think its existence has been seriously threatened in
the past or will be in the future. It will remain the strongest nuclear and
economic power in the region for quite some time, even in the absence of US
aid. I expect any weakening of the attachment to a purely Jewish state would
arise from a gradual relaxation of tensions inside the country following a
peace settlement, rather than the abrupt overthrow of Zionism by military
means from without.
The appearance and spread of millenarian Islam within the Middle East is not surprising given the great stresses to which its populations are being subjected, notably the military occupations and threats of a wider war emanating from the US and Israel. But you and others may be greatly exaggerating the appeal of these movements to the urban middle and working class populations in Tehran, Baghdad, Cairo, and Beirut which are more secular in outlook and support the Islamists for nationalist rather than mystical religious reasons. This is certainly true of city dwellers who are a generation removed from the countryside.
If the occupations end, and notwithstanding the residual hatred for Israel and the US, people outside Israel will also welcome the opportunity to turn to more private pursuits and will not want to risk nuclear incineration in the cause of some quixotic jihad for the restoration of an ancient caliphate. I think we sometimes forget how much others are very much like us, except caught up in vastly different circumstances.
No, I'm confident it is US economic imperialism and the miltary occupations and nothing but imperialism and occupation which explains the attraction of al Qaeda and other Islamist movements which are leading the armed resistance. I think their appeal would diminish in peacetime, with the more reactionary among them disappearing from the political scene, and the more deeply rooted popular movements like Hamas and Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood becoming more inegrated into new bourgeois democratic structures.