Ohr Somayach campaign

 Ohr Somayach is desperately trying to cover a 3 million dollar deficit. This of course means that the educational staff has not been paid. I urge you with all my heart to look at the material on the link and please try to help.

https://causematch.com/ohr-somayach-international-24/474345 

Discovering again what we don't know

 

The Ocean Teems With Networks of Interconnected Bacteria

Nanotube bridge networks grow between the most abundant photosynthetic bacteria in the oceans, suggesting that the world is far more interconnected than anyone realized.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-ocean-teems-with-networks-of-interconnected-bacteria-20250106/?mc_cid=fd0b65eee0&mc_eid=61275b7d81

Prochlorococcus bacteria are so small that you’d have to line up around a thousand of them to match the thickness of a human thumbnail. The ocean seethes with them: The microbes are likely the most abundant(opens a new tab) photosynthetic organism on the planet, and they create a significant portion — 10% to 20% — of the atmosphere’s oxygen. That means that life on Earth depends on the roughly 3 octillion (or 3 × 10²⁷) tiny individual cells toiling away.

Biologists once thought of these organisms as isolated wanderers, adrift in an unfathomable vastness. But the Prochlorococcus population may be more connected than anyone could have imagined. They may be holding conversations across wide distances, not only filling the ocean with envelopes of information and nutrients, but also linking what we thought were their private, inner spaces with the interiors of other cells.

At the University of Córdoba in Spain, not long ago, biologists snapping images of the cyanobacteria under a microscope saw a cell that had grown a long, thin tube and grabbed hold of its neighbor. The image made them sit up. It dawned on them that this was not a fluke.

“We realized the cyanobacteria were connected to each other,” said María del Carmen Muñoz-Marín(opens a new tab), a microbiologist there. There were links between Prochlorococcus cells, and also with another bacterium, called Synechococcus, which often lives nearby. In the images, silvery bridges linked three, four, and sometimes 10 or more cells.

Muñoz-Marín had a hunch about the identity of these mysterious structures. After a battery of tests, she and her colleagues recently reported(opens a new tab) that these bridges are bacterial nanotubes. First observed in a common lab bacterium only 14 years ago, bacterial nanotubes are structures made of cell membrane that allow nutrients and resources to flow between two or more cells.

The structures have been a source of fascination and controversy(opens a new tab) over the last decade, as microbiologists have worked to understand what causes them to form and what, exactly, travels among these networked cells. The images from Muñoz-Marín’s lab marked the first time these structures have been seen in the cyanobacteria responsible for so much of the Earth’s photosynthesis.

They challenge fundamental ideas about bacteria, raising questions such as: How much does Prochlorococcus share with the cells around it? And does it really make sense to think of it, and other bacteria, as single-celled?

Totally Tubular

Many bacteria have active social lives. Some make pili, hairlike growths of protein that link two cells to allow them to exchange DNA. Some form dense plaques together, known as biofilms. And many emit tiny bubbles known as vesicles that contain DNA, RNA or other chemicals, like messages in a bottle for whatever cell happens to intercept them.

It was vesicles that Muñoz-Marín and her colleagues, including José Manuel García-Fernández, a microbiologist at the University of Córdoba, and graduate student Elisa Angulo-Cánovas(opens a new tab), were looking for as they zoomed in on Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus in a dish. When they saw what they suspected were nanotubes, it was a surprise.

 

Growing between these bacteria (left: Prochlorococcus; right: Bacillus subtilis) are nanotube bridges, through which cells transport substances such as amino acids and enzymes. Although these nanotubes were first observed only in 2011, biologists now think that bacteria have been making these structures all along unnoticed.

Nanotubes are a recent addition to scientists’ understanding of bacterial communication. In 2011, Sigal Ben-Yehuda and her postdoc Gyanendra Dubey at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem first published images(opens a new tab) of tiny bridges, made of membrane, between the bacteria Bacillus subtilis. These tubes were actively transporting material: The researchers showed that green fluorescent proteins produced in one cell of the network quickly percolated through the others. They found the same result with calcein, a small molecule that is not able to cross bacterial membranes on its own. These cells were not existing placidly side by side; their inner spaces were linked, more like rooms in a house than detached dwellings.  

It was a startling revelation. The news compelled other biologists to reexamine their own images of cells. It soon became clear that B. subtilis was not the only species producing nanotubes. In populations of Escherichia coli and numerous other bacteria, small but consistent fractions of cells were spotted with nanotubes. In experiments, scientists watched cells sprout the tubes and then investigated what they carried. Moving across these bridges from cell to cell were substances such as amino acids(opens a new tab), the basic building blocks of proteins, as well as enzymes and toxins(opens a new tab). Bacteria, biologists now think, have probably been making these structures all along. Scientists simply hadn’t noticed them or realized their significance.

Not everyone has found it straightforward to get bacteria to make nanotubes. Notably, a group at the Czech Academy of Sciences could see nanotubes only when cells were dying(opens a new tab). Their suggestion that the tubes are a “manifestation of cell death” cast doubt on whether the structures were truly an important part of the cells’ normal biology. Since then, however, additional work has carefully documented that healthy cells do grow the structures. All this suggests that certain conditions must be met for bacteria to take this step. Still, “I think they are everywhere,” Ben-Yehuda said.

The latest findings are particularly eye-opening because Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus are not your average dish-dwelling bacteria. They live in a singularly turbulent environment: the open ocean, where water movement might reasonably be expected to break the fragile tubes. What’s more, they are photosynthetic, meaning that they get most of what they need to survive from the sun. What need could they have for trading through tube networks? There has been another sighting(opens a new tab) of nanotubes in marine bacteria, but those microbes are not photosynthetic — they gobble up nutrients from their immediate environment, a lifestyle in which swapping substances with neighbors might have a more obvious benefit.

So, when Muñoz-Marín and Angulo-Cánovas saw their nanotubes, they were initially skeptical. They wanted to make sure that they weren’t mistaking some accident of how the cells were prepared or how the images had been taken for a natural structure.

“We spent a lot of time to ensure that what we were finding in the images was actually something physiological and not any kind of an artifact,” García-Fernández said. “The results were so shocking in the field of marine cyanobacteria that we were, on the one hand, amazed, and on the other hand, we wanted to be completely sure.”

They put the cells under four radically different kinds of imaging devices — not only a transmission electron microscope, which they had been using when they first spotted the structures, but also a fluorescence microscope, a scanning electron microscope, and an imaging flow cytometer, which images live cells as they zip by. They looked at Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus on their own and at cultures where they lived together. They looked at dead cells and living ones. They even looked at fresh samples of seawater fished out of the Bay of Cádiz. In all the samples they spotted bridges, which connected about 5% of the cells. The nanotubes did not seem to be artifacts.

From left: José Antonio González-Reyes, Jesús Díez, María del Carmen Muñoz-Marín, Elisa Angulo-Cánovas and José Manuel García-Fernández, all based at the University of Córdoba. The researchers were part of an interdisciplinary group that discovered and studied the bacterial nanotubes that grow between photosynthetic ocean bacteria.

University of Córdoba

Next, to see whether the links were in fact nanotubes, they performed versions of the now-canonical experiments with green fluorescent protein and calcein described by Ben-Yehuda and Dubey. The networked cells lit up. The team also confirmed that the links were indeed made of membrane lipids and not protein, which would instead suggest pili. They were convinced, finally, that they were looking at bacterial nanotubes.

These tubes connect some of the most abundant organisms on the planet, they realized. And that immediately made something very clear, something the researchers are still turning over in their minds.

“At the beginning of this century, when you were speaking about phytoplankton in the ocean, you were thinking about independent cells that are isolated,” García-Fernandez said. “But now — and not only from these results, but also from results from other people — I think we have to consider that these guys are not working alone.”

A Cellular Network

There might be a good reason why cyanobacteria, floating in the vast expanse of the ocean, might want to join forces. They have curiously small genomes, said Christian Kost(opens a new tab), a microbial ecologist at the University of Osnabrück in Germany who was not involved in this study. Prochlorococcus has the smallest genome(opens a new tab) of any known free-living photosynthetic cell, with only around 1,700 genes. Synechococcus is not far behind.

Among bacteria, small genomes relieve organisms of the pressure of maintaining bulky DNA, but this state also requires them to scavenge many basic nutrients and metabolites from their neighbors. Bacteria with streamlined genomes sometimes form interdependent communities with organisms that produce what they need and need what they produce.

“This can be much more efficient than a bacterium that attempts to produce all metabolites at the same time,” Kost said. “Now, the problem, when you’re living in a liquid, is: How do you exchange these metabolites with other bacteria?”

 

Nanotubes may be a solution. Nutrients transferred this way will not be swept away by currents, lost to dilution or consumed by a freeloader. In computer simulations, Kost and his colleagues have found that nanotubes can support the development of cooperation among groups of bacteria.

What’s more, “this [new] paper shows that this transfer is both happening within and between species,” he said. “This is super interesting.” In a previous paper(opens a new tab), he and colleagues also noticed different species of bacteria connected by nanotubes.

This kind of cooperation is probably more common than people realize, said Conrad Mullineaux(opens a new tab), a microbiologist at Queen Mary University of London — even in environments like the open ocean, where bacteria may not always be close enough to form nanotubes.

We often speak of bacteria as being simple and single-celled. But bacterial colonies, biofilms and consortiums of different microorganisms can perform complicated feats of engineering and behavior together, sometimes rivaling what multicellular life can achieve. “I like to try to persuade people sometimes, when I’m feeling feisty: You’re a biofilm and I’m a biofilm,” Mullineaux said. If the sea is full of cyanobacteria communicating by nanotube and vesicle, then perhaps this exchange of resources could affect something as fundamental as the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere or the amount of carbon sequestered in the ocean.

Kost, Ben-Yehuda and Mullineaux agree that the new paper’s findings are intriguing. The authors have done all the right tests to ensure that the structures they are seeing are in fact nanotubes, they said. But more work is needed to explain the significance of the finding. In particular, a big open question is what, exactly, Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus are sharing with each other in the wild. Photosynthesis allows these bacteria to draw energy from the sun, but they must pick up nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus from the environment. The researchers are embarking on a series of experiments with Rachel Ann Foster(opens a new tab) of Stockholm University, a specialist in nutrient flow in the ocean, to trace these substances in networked cells.question is how bacteria form these tubes, and under what conditions. The tubes are not much longer than an individual cell, and Prochlorococcus, in particular, is thought to spread out in the water column. Muñoz-Marín and her team are curious about the concentrations of bacteria required for a network to form. “How often would it be possible for these independent cells to get close enough to each other in order to develop these nanotubes?” García-Fernandez asked. The current study shows that nanotubes do form among wild-caught cells, but the precise requirements are unclear.

Looking back at what people thought about bacterial communication when he began to study marine cyanobacteria 25 years ago, García-Fernandez is conscious that the field has undergone a sea change. Scientists once thought they saw myriad individuals floating alongside each other in immense space, competing with neighboring species in a race for resources. “The fact that there can be physical communication between different kind of organisms — I think that changes many, many previous ideas on how the cells work in the ocean,” he said. It’s a far more interconnected world than anyone realized.

The Quanta Newsletter

Bottom of Form

 

What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-entropy-a-measure-of-just-how-little-we-really-know-20241213/?mc_cid=7f931e7b43&mc_eid=61275b7d81

[[This is the introduction to a fascinating article which reveals that even as fundamental and studied a concept as entropy is smothered in doubts and disagreements that show the state of theoretical science to be very immature indeed. I strongly recommend reading the whole article.]]

 

Life is an anthology of destruction. Everything you build eventually breaks. Everyone you love will die. Any sense of order or stability inevitably crumbles. The entire universe follows a dismal trek toward a dull state of ultimate turmoil.

To keep track of this cosmic decay, physicists employ a concept called entropy. Entropy is a measure of disorderliness, and the declaration that entropy is always on the rise — known as the second law of thermodynamics — is among nature’s most inescapable commandments.

I have long felt haunted by the universal tendency toward messiness. Order is fragile. It takes months of careful planning and artistry to craft a vase but an instant to demolish it with a soccer ball. We spend our lives struggling to make sense of a chaotic and unpredictable world, where any attempt to establish control seems only to backfire. The second law demands that machines can never be perfectly efficient, which implies that whenever structure arises in the universe, it ultimately serves only to dissipate energy further — be it a star that eventually explodes or a living organism converting food into heat. We are, despite our best intentions, agents of entropy.

“Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics,” wrote(opens a new tab) Seth Lloyd, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There’s no sidestepping this directive. The growth of entropy is deeply entwined with our most basic experiences, accounting for why time runs forward and why the world appears deterministic rather than quantum mechanically uncertain.

But despite its fundamental importance, entropy is perhaps the most divisive concept in physics. “Entropy has always been a problem,” Lloyd told me. The confusion stems in part from the way the term gets tossed and twisted between disciplines — it has similar but distinct meanings in everything from physics to information theory to ecology. But it’s also because truly wrapping one’s head around entropy requires taking some deeply uncomfortable philosophical leaps.

As physicists have worked to unite seemingly disparate fields over the past century, they have cast entropy in a new light — turning the microscope back on the seer and shifting the notion of disorder to one of ignorance. Entropy is seen not as a property intrinsic to a system but as one that’s relative to an observer who interacts with that system. This modern view illuminates the deep link between information and energy, which is now helping to usher in a mini-industrial revolution on the smallest of scales.

Two hundred years after the seeds of entropy were first sown, what’s emerging is a conception of this quantity that’s more opportunistic than nihilistic. The conceptual evolution is upending the old way of thinking, not just about entropy, but about the purpose of science and our role in the universe.

 

 

Kidney cells learn and remember........

 Memories Are Not Only in the Brain

Study shows kidney and nerve tissue cells learn and make memories in ways similar to neurons

Nov 7, 2024

James Devitt

 

 

https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2024/november/memories-are-not-only-in-the-brain--new-research-finds.html

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It’s common knowledge that our brains—and, specifically, our brain cells—store memories. But a team of scientists has discovered that cells from other parts of the body also perform a memory function, opening new pathways for understanding how memory works and creating the potential to enhance learning and to treat memory-related afflictions. 

“Learning and memory are generally associated with brains and brain cells alone, but our study shows that other cells in the body can learn and form memories, too,” explains New York University’s Nikolay V. Kukushkin, the lead author of the study, which appears in the journal Nature Communications. 

The research sought to better understand if non-brain cells help with memory by borrowing from a long-established neurological property—the massed-spaced effect—which shows that we tend to retain information better when studied in spaced intervals rather than in a single, intensive session—better known as cramming for a test.

In the Nature Communications research, the scientists replicated learning over time by studying two types of non-brain human cells in a laboratory (one from nerve tissue and one from kidney tissue) and exposing them to different patterns of chemical signals—just like brain cells are exposed to patterns of neurotransmitters when we learn new information. In response, the non-brain cells turned on a “memory gene”—the same gene that brain cells turn on when they detect a pattern in the information and restructure their connections in order to form memories.

“Learning and memory are generally associated with brains and brain cells alone, but our study shows that other cells in the body can learn and form memories, too." NYU’s Nikolay Kukushkin 

To monitor the memory and learning process, the scientists engineered these non-brain cells to make a glowing protein, which indicated when the memory gene was on and when it was off.

The results showed that these cells could determine when the chemical pulses, which imitated bursts of neurotransmitter in the brain, were repeated rather than simply prolonged—just as neurons in our brain can register when we learn with breaks rather than cramming all the material in one sitting. Specifically, when the pulses were delivered in spaced-out intervals, they turned on the “memory gene” more strongly, and for a longer time, than when the same treatment was delivered all at once.

“This reflects the massed-space effect in action,” says Kukushkin, a clinical associate professor of life science at NYU Liberal Studies and a research fellow at NYU’s Center for Neural Science. “It shows that the ability to learn from spaced repetition isn't unique to brain cells, but, in fact, might be a fundamental property of all cells.”

The researchers add that the findings not only offer new ways to study memory, but also point to potential health-related gains.

“This discovery opens new doors for understanding how memory works and could lead to better ways to enhance learning and treat memory problems,” observes Kukushkin. “At the same time, it suggests that in the future, we will need to treat our body more like the brain—for example, consider what our pancreas remembers about the pattern of our past meals to maintain healthy levels of blood glucose or consider what a cancer cell remembers about the pattern of chemotherapy.”

The work was jointly supervised by Kukushkin and Thomas Carew, a professor in NYU’s Center for Neural Science. The study’s authors also included Tasnim Tabassum, an NYU researcher, and Robert Carney, an NYU undergraduate researcher at the time of the study.

Evolutionary paleontology as it is - and should not be - done

 

Fossil Friday: An Ediacaran Animal with a Question Mark

Günter Bechly

November 8, 2024, 6:28 AM

https://evolutionnews.org/2024/11/fossil-friday-an-edicaran-animal-with-a-question-mark/

This Fossil Friday discusses Quaestio simpsonorum from the Late Precambrian of the Ediacaran biota in Australia, which is, well, actually I have no idea what it really is, and neither does anyone else, which makes its genus name very fitting indeed. Here is the backstory of these fossils that were discovered in the 555-million-year-old sandstones of Nilpena Ediacara National Park in the South Australian outback, and were reconstructed as inflated disc-shaped organisms that were floating over microbial mats on the ancient seafloor like a Roomba.

Just a few days ago the study by Evans et al. (2024) with the description of this fossil organism hit the news with sensationalist headlines like “Ancient ‘sea Roomba’ tells a 555-million-year-old story of our evolution” (Thompson 2024), or “Flinders fossil unlocks secrets of first animals on Earth” (Government of South Australia 2024), or “Florida State University scientist discovers one of the earth’s earliest animals in Australian outback” (Harris 2024), or “Enigmatic Fossil Shows Signs Of Being Earth’s First Animal” (Bressan 2024). It was boldly celebrated as “oldest evidence for complex, macroscopic animals” (de Lazaro 2024) and “the earliest moving animals” (Luntz 2024). Wow, that surely sounds like something important.

Is It Really Based on Solid Evidence? 

A first look at the images of the fossil is not very encouraging: The fossils look like structureless blobs, and many fossil collectors might not even have bothered to pick them up. Certainly the actual study showed much more significant details? No, not at all which is a real bummer. Even co-author García-Bellido explicitly admitted to IFLScience “that all we really know about Quaestio is the shape of its outsides” (Luntz 2024). Yes, you heard that right. All we know about this fossil is the shape, which is nothing more than a few-inch-large round impression with a question-mark-like fold in the middle that originates from a kind of notch. Are any organs visible that suggest that it was a multicellular animal? No. Any bilateral symmetry? No, but this does not prevent the scientists from speculating that in spite of the external asymmetry, it might have been a pioneer bilaterian ancestor, because humans are bilaterian animals and internally asymmetrical (authors quoted in de Lazaro 2024). You can’t make this stuff up: They seriously compare a Precambrian blob of jello with a highly derived modern human and claim that external asymmetry in the former and internal asymmetry in the latter could somehow correspond, even though the internal asymmetry of humans does not belong to the ground plan of vertebrate animals even according to mainstream evolutionary biology. This is ridiculous junk science, based on almost useless fossil evidence. Actually, there are even inorganic pseudofossils like salt pseudomorphs that look quite similar to this stuff. All the elaborate hypotheses in the new study are based on the simple circumstance that the structures in the stone seem to show some polarity. Here is news: almost every organism does show some polarity including most protists and plants. This is much ado about nothing.

What about the alleged evidence for motility? Are there any trace fossils that really document active motility? No, but again the scientists claim otherwise. Why? Because a few of the fossils have a similar shaped and similar sized impression close to them, which they interpret as evidence for active movement. However, such structures had been already described under the name Epibaion for the Ediacaran dickinsoniids and are highly controversial in their interpretation as I discussed in a previous article (Bechly 2018). I highly recommend to read the paragraph on these alleged trace fossils in this latter article of mine. While some experts indeed interpreted those structures as grazing traces, others considered the serial impressions as made by dead organisms displaced by slow currents before finally being buried. I personally observed the latter phenomenon in fossil dragonflies from the Upper Jurassic Solnhofen limestone (see Tischlinger 2001). The alleged traces show no continuity and thus no evidence for motility. But who am I, or world leading experts like A. Yu Ivantsov (also see Brasier & Antcliffe 2008 and McIlroy et al. 2009), to disagree with some evolutionary biology graduate student’s views, who thinks that this is “a clear sign that the organism was motile” (Bressan 2024, Harris 2024)? What makes things worse is the whole house of cards of far-reaching hypotheses that are built on this dubious foundation. The authors for example speculate that “the presence of muscles and/or a nervous system based on inferred behaviors would, if verified, constitute further evidence of more advanced differentiation” (Evans et al. 2024). Problem is: they are not verified. There is not a shred of evidence for muscles or nervous systems in any of the fossils! There is not even valid evidence for the inferred behaviors from which the presence of muscles and nervous system was inferred. It is quite revealing for the poor state of evolutionary biology that such imaginative story-telling is not only allowed but apparently welcome in a peer-reviewed science journal titled Evolution & Development.

An “Animal” with a Question Mark

In short: There is neither any convincing evidence for a metazoan affinity of Quaestio, nor for its motility. It is truly an Ediacaran “animal” with a question mark! The much more obvious conclusion is that Quaestio is just another problematic organism of the Ediacaran biota that cannot be connected to any living group. Actually, the scientists themselves did not suggest a direct relationship with any living animals but rather compared Queastio with dickinsoniids, which are of highly questionable animal relationship themselves (Bechly 2018). Sure, Quaestio and dickinsoniids still could be placozoan or coelenterate grade animals, or xenacoelomorph flatworms, even though none of them agrees in size, shape, symmetry or anatomy, or any relevant diagnostic similarities. Thus, they could as well be giant protists (Vendobionta sensu Seilacher), or rather an independent extinct group of multicellular organisms, or almost anything else such as fungi or lichens. There are also similarities between Quaestio and the trilobozoan Ediacaran fossils like Tribrachidium that were initially misidentified as echinoderms, or to other circular Ediacaran fossils like Cyclomedusa (featured above) that were initially misidentified as jellyfish, but later reinterpreted as holdfasts or microbial colonies. We have no clue what all these Ediacaran biota organisms really were. To claim that such undefinable blobs in sandstone represent fossils of the oldest motile animals is massively overselling the evidence to say the least.

References

• Bechly G 2018. Why Dickinsonia Was Most Probably Not an Ediacaran Animal. Evolution News September 27, 2018. https://evolutionnews.org/2018/09/why-dickinsonia-was-most-probably-not-an-ediacaran-animal/
• Brasier M & Antcliffe J 2008. Dickinsonia from Ediacara: a new look at morphology and body construction. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 270, 311–323 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2008.07.018
• Bressan D 2024. Enigmatic Fossil Shows Signs Of Being Earth’s First Animal. Forbes October 19, 2024. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2024/10/18/enigmatic-fossil-shows-first-signs-of-being-earths-first-animal/
• de Lazaro E 2024. New Species of Complex Ediacaran Animal Discovered in Australia. SciNews October 17, 2024. https://www.sci.news/paleontology/quaestio-simpsonorum-13355.html
• Evans SD, Hughes IV, Hughes EB, Dzaugis PW, Dzaugis MP, Gehling JG, García-Bellido DC & Droser ML 2024. A new motile animal with implications for the evolution of axial polarity from the Ediacaran of South Australia. Evolution & Development e12491, 1–11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/ede.12491
• Government of South Australia 2024. Flinders fossil unlocks secrets of first animals on Earth. Environment SA News October 14, 2024. https://www.environment.sa.gov.au/news-hub/news/articles/2024/10/flinders-fossil-unlocks-secrets-of-first-animals-on-earth
• Harris M 2024. Florida State University scientist discovers one of the earth’s earliest animals in Australian outback. Florida State University October 14, 2024. https://news.fsu.edu/news/university-news/2024/10/14/florida-state-university-scientist-discovers-one-of-the-earths-earliest-animals-in-australian-outback/
• Luntz S 2024. One Of The Earliest Moving Animals Had A Very Quizzical Shape. IFLScience October 22, 2024. https://www.iflscience.com/one-of-the-earliest-moving-animals-had-a-very-quizzical-shape-76460
• McIlroy D, Brasier MD & Lang AS 2009. Smothering of microbial mats by macrobiota: implications for the Ediacara biota. Journal of the Geological Society 166, 1117–1121. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1144/0016-76492009-073
• Thompson B 2024. Ancient ‘sea Roomba’ tells a 555-million-year-old story of our evolution. New Atlas October 14, 2024. https://newatlas.com/biology/fossil-quaestio-evolution/
• Tischlinger H 2001. Bemerkungen zur Insekten-Taphonomie der Solnhofener Plattenkalke. Archaeopteryx 19, 29–44.

 

 

Crucial Reading on the Palestine Problem

 

'The Palestinian Delusion': Catastrophe in the Middle East

The most important book on the Jihad against Israel in existence. This is the book about which there is no delusion. Review.

Anjuli Pandavar

  Sep 27, 2024, 11:12 AM (GMT+3)

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Middle EastJihadistsAnjuli Pandavar

• 2 minutes

Construction in Judea and Samaria (file)Flash 90

Dr Anjuli Pandavar is a British writer and social critic. She was born into a Muslim family in apartheid South Africa, where she left Islam in 1979. Anjuli is preparing to convert to Judaism. She is one of the staunchest defenders and fiercest critics of Israel. She owns and writes on Murtadd to Human, where she may be contacted.

In light of developments in Israel since 7 October 2023, and as the one year anniversary of that day that lives in infamy approaches, this is the time to read:

The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process, by Robert Spencer, 2019, Bombardier Books, New York.

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This slogan serves as the opening line to Robert Spencer’s book, a line that could just as well have been, “This is the book about which there is no delusion.”

As the book unfolds, it becomes clear that, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, is not just a delusion, but a delusion that contains within itself, Russian-doll fashion, multiple delusions. This appalling slogan is the culminating metaphor for all that has been “The Israeli-Palestinian peace process”, and a well-chosen scene setter. But more importantly, it has its counterpart in the Israeli co-existence delusion.

Robert Spencer’s work is unanswerable because his credentials are impeccable, credentials that come down to two non-negotiable principles: original sources; and intellectual honesty. Those who will dismiss his books can do so only by not reading them. The writer’s life, for Spencer, is one of bravery — there have been attempts on his life, and tenacity — financial services companies have denied him service, bastions of inquiry have de-platformed him, one country has, infamously, debarred him.

Spencer writes like a man who must keep writing, and his readers snap up his books as soon as they hit the shelves, or pre-order them.

Whereas The History of Jihad offers a blow-by-blow account of the fourteen-centuries-long barbaric assault on civilisation that its perpetrators proclaim as jihad, The Palestinian Delusion dissects just one, the most urgent, of jihad’s innumerable contemporary world-wide outbreaks: the jihad to destroy Israel.

The “delusion” in the title refers to multiple delusions: that of a Palestinian nation; that the “Arab-Israeli conflict” is a simple struggle over land; that the so-called “peace process” is a series of negotiations; that Judea and Samaria — what the Jordanians dubbed “The West Bank” during their occupation — and Gaza (and the Golan Heights) are “occupied territories”; and that the Muslim Arabs are the wronged party. Along the way, many lesser and shorter-lived delusions are referred to, both directly and indirectly.

Integral to the Palestinian delusion is the co-existence delusion, that came so strongly to the fore in 2021. "The Arabs" of Israeli fancy consist, so the notion goes, of those Arabs living in the territories that Israel had conquered in defensive wars waged against her many hostile Arab neighbours — territories the global propaganda machine describes as "occupied territories"— and "Israeli Arabs" who co-exist harmoniously with Jews within the territory of Israel. Spencer's book is focused on the circus that came to be known as the "Middle East Peace Process," to which the co-existence delusion is peripheral and so not treated.

The manifestations of these many delusions are expertly woven into the historical sequence of developments in and around the 28,000 square kilometres of mostly resource-starved scrubland on the Eastern Mediterranean shore, from which the Romans had banished almost all the indigenous people, the Jews, less than two thousand years ago. In the chapter ‘How Israel came to be,’ Spencer describes how for the exiled Jews, having had enough of oppression, persecution and pogroms in their scattered existence, the time had come to return to their desolate scrubland. "L'Shana Haba'ah B'Yerushalayim", "Next year in Jerusalem" chants the hope of centuries. They were finally going home.

The only problem was that while they were away, that desolate scrubland had been overrun by Muslims on jihad, and somewhere in the small print of that barbaric doctrine, it says that once Muslims rule a land, it can never ever be ruled by anyone else again, never mind that they seized it in the first place, as in this case, they did to the land of Israel in 634 AD, when the Byzantine Empire still held it.

Robert Spencer’s expertise on the Qur’an, strong enough to deter Muslims and Islamic apologists from challenging him, is on full display in Chapter Two: ‘The Roots of the Hatred of Israel,’ under the subheading, ‘Qur’anic Anti-semitism.’ The main fountainhead of jihad is the Qur’an, of which Spencer dissects no fewer than sixty-nine verses for their role in the extreme Muslim hatred for Jews, whether those Muslims are jihad terrorists or "moderate" Muslims. Of the hadith, the sayings and doings of Muhammad, whose examples Muslims must emulate, the notorious genocide hadith runs:

The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.

No Muslim will repudiate this hadith — think about that when you next dream of how wonderful it would be if Jews and Muslims could co-exist in peace.

Spencer explains, “Muslims are taught in their holiest books not just to despise and mistrust Jews, but that Muslims are doing a good and virtuous deed if they kill them, a deed that will bring about the consummation of all things and the dawning of eternal justice for mankind.”

Israel is not the first place where Muslim rule has been pushed back. Before the re-establishment of Israel, civilisation was restored in various places throughout the 1400 years of jihad conquest: Tartary, Armenia, the Balkans, the Iberian Peninsula, the Mediterranean islands, southern Italy, southern France, India, East Timor and, of course, Israel. Each of these reconquests is a deep affront to Muslims, for centuries the most galling having been the Iberian Peninsula, in particular, Al-Andalus (Spain), about which myths of Muslim multicultural magnanimity abound.

The re-establishment of Israel eclipsed all other jihad losses. It shook Muslim supremacism to its core, coming as it did just when Islamic revivalism was getting underway in the aftermath of the demise of the Ottoman caliphate. Not only is Jerusalem the setting of a great Islamic fantasy (a mosque that never was, from which Muhammad rode a beast that never existed, on a journey that never took place, but Muslim rule was replaced with rule by Jews, and the Palestinian Delusion lays out, meticulously, how Islam makes it impossible for Muslims to countenance Jewish rule over Muslims and over lands once ruled by Muslims. “Drive them out from where they drove you out”, says the Qur’an (2:191).

The Israeli co-existence ideologues and "peace process" proponents would do well to consider how it is that Jews are "occupiers" who must cede the land to the "Palestinians", while the Ottomans before them, who had brutally oppressed the region’s Arabs for centuries, were never occupiers, and under whom the "Palestinians" never even knew they existed. Is it because the Ottomans were Turks, or because the Ottomans were Muslims?

The Palestinian Delusion will still, despite its scholarly integrity, meet with incredulity from most. The desire so desperately to believe something not to be true, when confronted with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, can prove an intensely distressing experience. So deeply and successfully have the twin ideological onslaughts of political correctness and multiculturalism wormed their way into the Western psyche, that otherwise rational people become quite irrational when it comes to Islam and Muslims.

Yet credit for conjuring the fantasy nation of “the Palestinians” does not go to either Arabs or Muslims, but to the godless Soviets. One is reminded of the eagerness with which Muslims petitioned the South African apartheid Government to ban Salman Rushdie from entering the country. No association is too shameful, if it serves jihad. The Palestinian Delusion shows that the “Palestinian nation” that so many the world over get so angry and passionate about, is nothing but a squalid KGB Cold War side-project. They even repurposed an Egyptian born in Cairo as the “Palestinian” Yasser Arafat they needed. According to Spencer, Yasser Arafat himself denied the existence of Palestine and Palestinians:

The question of borders doesn’t interest us…. From the Arab standpoint, we mustn’t talk about borders. Palestine is nothing but a drop in an enormous ocean. Our nation is the Arabic nation that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea and beyond it…. The P.L.O. is fighting Israel in the name of Pan-Arabism. What you call ‘Jordan’ is nothing more than Palestine.

King Hussein of Jordan concurred, “The truth is that Jordan is Palestine and Palestine is Jordan.”

So who, exactly, are the people who want to be “The Palestinians”? We read that the Syrians insist that the “Palestinians” are Syrians while the Jordanian king, at least at the time, said they are Jordanians. In reality, nothing distinguishes them from the Muslim Arabs around them: not songs, not national dress, not cuisine, not even cultural quirks like an unshakeable hatred of Jews. Nothing they have is uniquely theirs. Even the “Palestinian” flag is repurposed debris salvaged from the collapsed Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan that existed for all of 138 days in 1958.

While it is absolutely correct that the Jews should retake their land, it stands as one of the great ironies of history that they should have been so unprepared for the ferocity with which the surrounding Arab Muslims would meet them on their return. They had, after all, been dhimmis under Muslim rule all over the Middle East and North Africa for almost one-and-half millennia.[4] It was (and quite patently remains) inconceivable that Muslims, “the very best of people” according to their Allah, would ever countenance “the descendants of apes and pigs” ruling over them. Why the Jews, the Zionists, had such a blind spot for their own 1400-year experience at the hands of Muslims is one of the gaps in The Palestinian Delusion.

The farce that was the “peace process”, Spencer shows, was little more than a monumental scam on the part of “Palestinian” Arabs to dupe Western leaders (they wanted to be duped) and to play the Western liberal intelligentsia (they wanted to be played), with the purpose of getting the leaders to pressure Israel into making concessions to the Arab Muslims and of turning the Western populations against Israel and the Jews in general. It worked.

They even managed to bring Israelis to within a whisker of committing national suicide, having convinced so many of them that they could buy peace with land. Not only did the Jewish nation almost tear itself part when it withdrew from Gaza, the strip promptly turned into a nightmare right on their doorstep for which Israel’s southern communities have suffered intolerable insecurity in their own country ever since.

Staggeringly, while so many costly wars and wars-between-wars plague Israel, after co-existence blew up in their faces in the 2021 “mixed city” pogroms, all around Israel multiple war-machines are ready to attack, and after the worst acts of Jew-killing since the Holocaust, there are still Jews straining, more determined than ever, by means both fair and foul, to return to the "two-state solution". ]

If he has not yet done so, Robert Spencer needs to get The Palestinian Delusion translated into Hebrew.

The Palestinian Delusion reads particularly strongly on the Sadat-Carter-Begin-Rabin fiasco, revealing, perhaps to the surprise of many, just what a sly, duplicitous and dangerous character Sadat was. When reading this, one cannot help but notice that Jimmy Carter was to Anwar Sadat as Nancy Pelosi is to Ilhan Omar, and as Ehud Olmert was, and Benny Gantz is, to Mahmoud Abbas. These are lethal combinations for both the United States and Israel.

Then there is the whole sorry business of the British in Mandate Palestine. Their duplicity, double-dealing and treachery encouraged the Arab Muslims in all their basest Islamic impulses, even after Israel had declared independence. Britain was possibly the only country to recognise Jordan’s annexation of Judea and Samaria, and the bestowing of Jordanian citizenship on the affected Arab Muslim population, despite opposition from the Arab League — a sign of sins to come. The Palestinian Delusion has nothing good to say about either the Brits, or the Arab Muslims, because there is nothing good to be said about them.

The United Nations and its agencies come in for a well-deserved pummelling in The Palestinian Delusion, for they are shown to be little more than instruments of jihad, right down to the inculcation of Jew-hatred in the Muslim children in UN schools, and those children’s early indoctrination into aspiring to be jihad mass murderers. A child in a UN school shares his endearing aspirations: “Stabbing and running over Jews brings dignity to the Palestinians. I’m going to run them over and stab them with knives.” If The Palestinian Delusion has one loud and clear message, it is Get real!

The blatant, relentless and ritualistic discrimination against and legal abuse of Israel at the United Nations are also thoroughly treated, not least the outrageous “inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by war”, contrived especially for Israel after it drove Jordanian troops back out of Judea and Samaria, Egyptian troops back out of Gaza (and all the way across the Suez Canal) and Syrian troops off the Golan Heights, after these countries’ aggressive war of 1967, intent on wiping out Israel.

It has been a basic principle ever since men made war, that if an aggressor loses a war, that aggressor loses such territory as the victim had managed to conquer from it. The book makes clear that it is the first time ever that it is demanded of a country attacked that it returns territory conquered from aggressors in self-defence. Of course, should Israel accept this ridiculous and suicidal principle, any of its many hostile neighbours will have every incentive to try again next year in the full knowledge that they will never lose territory, and the old Islamic pattern of annual jihad war will be restored. The Palestinian Delusion strengthens the view that the United Nations has outlived its original purpose. That is putting it mildly.

Having comprehensively debunked the so-called “two-state solution,” Spencer describes all “one-state solutions” on offer as “grim scenarios.” Grim they certainly are. ‘What is to be done?’ asks Chapter Ten in its title. Indeed, what is to be done? The jihad imperative is absolutely fundamental to Islam. It is never going to go away and will never be repudiated. Spencer is forceful throughout, but in addressing the question of what is to be done, a great deal more forcefulness would be justified.

There is no solution that will establish a permanent peace, but the problem can be managed. Islamic jihadis respect nothing about those whom they regard as infidels except strength… The key to Israel’s survival, therefore, is not negotiations or more concessions of land for a chimerical peace, but strength: military, cultural, and societal strength.

Quite right. There can NEVER be negotiations; just as there have never been. Negotiations are premised on a reality of approximate parity and the presumption of mutual good faith. All else is, to a greater or lesser extent, the stronger extorting while the weaker pleas. In the absurdist theatre of the Middle East peace process, the overwhelmingly powerful Israel pleas, while the overwhelmingly weak Palestinians extort, aided and abetted by their naïve, deluded or self-serving allies and supporters, unshakeably convinced that they hold the moral high ground.

The Arabs Muslims in Judea and Samaria, and Gaza, have proved themselves devoid of all good faith, time after time after time. Knowledge of the Qur’an and the life of Muhammad would teach non-Muslims that treaties and agreements mean nothing to Muslims, except as reprieves from their enemies’ attacks and to lull them into a false sense of security until the Muslims are again able to strike. Thus has it ever been.

Non-Muslims ought to know that the Qur’an and Muhammad set the standards for all Muslims in all matters. They should be familiar with Muhammad’s conduct in the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, and expect Muslims to conduct themselves in exactly the same way. Negotiations with such a people are a nonstarter, always and forever. The Palestinian Delusion could not be clearer about how directly and intimately, Muslims emulate Muhammad.

By invoking Hudaybiyya to justify Oslo, Arafat was saying that despite appearances, he had actually conceded nothing. Muhammad had undertaken the treaty of Hudaybiyya …so that the Muslims could recover their strength after a series of costly battles with the Quraysh. When the Muslims were strong enough to fight again and defeat the Quraysh, he broke the treaty. Arafat was telling Muslim audiences, who would have been familiar with the Treaty of Hudaybiyya, that he had entered into the treaty with Israel not as a retreat from the Palestinian jihad against the Jewish state, but as a tactical move to further the aims of that jihad. And when the Palestinians were strong enough not to need the treaty anymore, he would, like Muhammad, break it.[5]

Palestinians have been firing rockets into Israel since 2001. In 2005 they were rewarded with a state in Gaza, from which rocket fire immediately intensified. Truces to stop Gaza rocket attacks were agreed every week, and every week they were broken, demonstrating the suicidal folly of ceding any territory to the followers of Muhammad.

For months after the IDF ground invasion of Gaza during the current war, Hamas continued to fire rockets into Israel, even from so-called “humanitarian safe zones”. For some reason it has not dawned on the Israelis, after eighteen years of Hamas “human shields,” that to create areas packed with civilians is to provide Hamas with ideal firing positions.

Spencer goes on to caution against the establishment of a Palestinian state. This reviewer would say that it must be Israel’s highest priority that no such state ever be established. The 365 sq Km Gaza strip alone, with its 2.3 million people, is a never-ending nightmare for what remains of Eretz Israel. Because Israel’s response is always limited and the restrictions it imposes on Gaza are always lifted shortly after, to the Arab Muslim mind, these truces are all victories, “Israel bowing to the demands of the resistance,” thereby boosting terrorist recrutement.

This is neither hype nor spin; they actually do believe it. Every time Israelis run for their shelters, Palestinians are affirmed in their superiority; Gazans do not run for cover when Israel bombs their installations, giving flesh, literally, to their barbaric nihilist boast, “We love death more than you love life.” Whether their rockets kill any Israelis or none, whether they are shot out of the sky or land on open ground, every single projectile fired from Gaza is a victory for jihad, yet Israel waits for the rockets to be fired.

Truces agreed with Hamas are broken within the hour, and the rockets fly again, the Jews run for shelters again, and every Arab Muslim is emboldened, again. Job well done, alhamdullillah. Thus does Israel, through her own delusional policies of trusting Muslim agreements, and limited responses to rocket attacks, herself feeds the jihad waged against her.

No inch of the Jewish part of Mandate Palestine can ever be sacrificed for a project as suicidal as a Palestinian state. “[Israel] should not pretend that the establishment of this state has solved or will solve anything.” A sufficiently vocal and disruptive minority not only pretend, but sincerely believe that a Palestinian state will bring peace, despite the massacre on Simchat Torah having removed any danger of such pretence from a now very substantial majority of Israelis.

Judea and Samaria fill Israel’s abdominal cavity. The Jewish state should offer neither apology nor explanation for dealing exactly as it sees fit with those who will destroy it. The Palestinian Delusion can afford to be much more forceful in its conclusions, especially as countries that could have stopped Hitler and did not, are in no position to lecture Israel on what she can and cannot do to prevent the next Holocaust.

If… Israel… assumes full political control over what are at present considered to be the Palestinian territories, …[it] would require a sea change in international politics ever to be seriously considered…

Some Israeli leaders insist that “Israel must be able to defend itself by itself.” While this insistence is generally understood to mean that Israel should be military capable of fending off all potential attackers without recourse to her allies, there might be more to this dictum: the Jewish state does not require international political approval for defending herself. If defending herself means establishing full political control over Gaza, Judea and Samaria, then she must do so without regard to international politics.

It is hardly possible for Israel to be more isolated than she was in the immediate aftermath of her founding, when she was no more than the “desolate wasteland” left behind by centuries of Muslim rule. The country, a confident high-tech miracle that within seventy years, without oil, has managed to lead the world in medical innovation, greened the desert and sent a craft to the Moon. She can hack her way into enemies’ computers, while her soft power is present on every continent. Israel is a very different proposition today to what she was seven decades ago.

“It is time for a new approach”, says Spencer. “The response of Israel, and of the free world in general, should not be fear or hatred, but a sober realism and a determination to remain resolute against the jihad.”

There can be more to this new approach. A few days after the publication of The Palestinian Delusion, news broke of a bill making its way through the Indian Parliament, according to which Indian citizenship would be offered to all persons in neighbouring countries suffering Muslim persecution. Israel has set herself up as a country that rescues Jews from wherever they may be persecuted and provides them with a safe home. While Israel, quite reasonably, focuses on one group of victims regardless of the perpetrators, India, even more reasonably, given the jihad campaigns to exterminate Hindus, focuses on all the victims of one group of perpetrators, Muslims, and wants to offer those victims a safe home.

Astonishingly, Israel permits the practise of Shari’a on her soil. India’s liberation of Muslim women from the extremely unfair, humiliating and degrading (for both women and men) Islamic divorce laws, frustration of Pakistan’s jihad designs on Kashmir and the country’s growing affinity towards the Jewish state, suggest that the new approach Spencer proposes for Israel would be on firmer ground not with “The free world in general” (the major components of which are already ideologically, judicially and politically paralysed in the face of jihad), but rather with hand-picked partners who show no “fear or hatred, but a sober realism and a determination to remain resolute against the jihad.”

Apart from the parts of the United States that have not yet lost their minds, India and Japan are two such partners. Taiwan and the four Visegrád countries could be, too, as could Rwanda, Ethiopia, Kenya, Ukraine, Croatia and Myanmar, at time of writing. Israel, already helping to clear out Hezbollah from South America, is looking at the world with fresh eyes. She does not have to play the game either by obsolete Cold War rules, or to please anyone.

What about the Arab Muslims in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria? Are they not tired of the rampant corruption and nepotism, and of the appalling governance? Is there any glimmer of hope from that quarter of a sensible, civilised and lasting way forward? Whereas The Palestinian Delusion suggests a possible glimmer of hope here, the present reviewer sees none. It is true that everyone who is not on the make in “the Palestinian Territories” is bearing the yoke of an oppressive regime, be it the Palestinian Authority (PA) or Hamas, or in Israel’s Arab towns, the criminal-political complex.

Yet, it is not the Palestinian population as a whole that will rise up against their corrupt and abusive leaders, especially not when the “enemy” is the Jews. Muslims are taught that no matter how reprehensible a leader might be (“even if he is an Abyssinian with raisins for hair”), if the leader is a Muslim, then you obey him. The sole exception is made for the Muslim leader who commands his subjects to act against Allah. In that case and that case alone may they rise against him. In other words, so long as Muslim leaders fight against Israel, they are likely to be safe from their long-suffering populations.

These are totalitarian societies structured on dependent subordination with an entire ideological infrastructure, Islam, to keep that mediaeval social system in place. To the general population in such a society, the leaders are entitled to whatever they help themselves to and The Palestinian Delusion tells us exactly by how much these leaders have been helping themselves.

The way Arabs see the world, the inherent good of nepotism is self-evident. In Arab society, no one is entitled to anything, except the leader of the land and the husband of the house, who dispense favours and hand-outs to their dependent subordinates. There is neither professionalism, nor service. There are no rights, only the dispensing and denial of favours. A problem only arises when the leader fails to dispense sufficient hand-outs. The role of hand-outs in the political economy of both Gaza and the PA is part of the explanation for the latter's contemptuous rejection of the $50 billion aid package that the Trump Administration had put together to improve the lives of the Palestinians: they would be upstaged. As far as Hamas is concerned, one cannot negotiate with something that doesn't exist.

Arab societies operate on deference and adulation, behaviour by which dependent subordinates secure favours and hand-outs. This is where ‘pay-for-slay’ comes in. It is not just that the PA is a corrupt Jew-hating terrorist outfit that pays its people to kill Jews, with pay-for-slay, the PA manages to kill two birds with one stone: keep up jihad and keep the hand-outs flowing (more on this below). Only those people who have broken the ideological and psychological bonds of dependent subordination and become autonomous individuals — the kind of people who characterise free societies — have a problem with corruption, and they are firmly under the boot of the PA security apparatus and Hamas terror. Yet only with such people lies hope, and not nearly enough for Israel to build a policy on.

The Palestinian Delusion describes Hamas’ exhorting and offering to pay Gazans for getting themselves or their family members killed at the border fence with Israel, so as to make propaganda capital out of their deaths. This monstrous cynicism was once again on full display during the 2021 Gaza War, with civilians either refusing to vacate or forced to remain in buildings that the Israel Defence Forces were warning them were about to be bombed. Spencer quotes Mahmoud al-Habbash, PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ adviser on Islamic affairs and Sharia top-judge, denouncing this Hamas practise and belittling the propaganda value of civilian deaths, essentially accusing Hamas of ‘bigging it up’.

When you hear them [Hamas’ heroic slogans], you think that the people saying them are inside the al-Aqsa Mosque after they liberated it. And afterwards you discover that they’re only selling illusions, trading in suffering and blood, trading in victims, [saying]: ‘You Palestinians, our people, go and die so that we’ll go to the TV and media with strong declarations.’ These [Hamas] acts of ‘heroism’ don’t fool anyone anymore. The Palestinian people…sides with the PLO.

This built-in abuse of Palestinians manifests also in Hamas’s tunnels not being available for “civilians” to take shelter in. “They are the responsibility of the United Nations,” says Hamas. What happens to the supposed “humanitarian aid” that the West and the Israeli government send into Gaza? Hamas seizes it and sells it to the population at exorbitant prices to pay more to terrorists.

Spencer sees in the periodic PA spats with Hamas the two sides jockeying for popular support. But the judge’s outburst above is more sinister than that. Qur’an 9:111 teaches Muslims that: “Indeed, Allah has purchased from the believers their lives and their properties, for that they will have Paradise. They fight in the cause of Allah, so they slay and are slain”, (emph. AP)

Hamas, being an even more primitive outfit than the PA, lacks the administrative infrastructure, proximity to Jews and vast revenues to run its own pay-for-slay programme, let alone eclipse that of the PA. Whereas the PA offers pay-for-slay, Hamas can only manage pay-for-be slain. It is quick and dirty and has the potential to rapidly mushroom and draw the envy of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, who have had their opportunities for martyrdom severely curtailed since the erection of the security barrier, the growing presence of armed Jewish communities in their midst, and the embargo on PA tax revenues equivalent to pay-for-slay funds. The PA is anxious for its own pay-for-slay policy not to be upstaged by any Hamas imitation, and is ready to fight to protect the pre-eminence of its generous policy in the eyes of the Palestinian population.

Every time Israel withholds PA taxes, it compounds the Palestinian population’s perception of Israel as oppressing them, and the PA wastes no time in making the most of that perception. Fear of facilitating a Hamas take-over of Judea and Samaria stays the Israelis’ hand in their dealings with the PA, a predicament of their own making.

Concomitant with the 7 October massacre, the Palestinian Authority is again touted as the lesser evil of the Palestinian governance jihad double-act that, after a bit of straightening-out, can take over Gaza from Hamas. They seem to forget how Hamas came to rule Gaza in the first place. The start of The Palestinian Delusion excellently contextualises the jihad facing Israel, setting it within the doctrines of Islam.

Surprisingly, there is no matching contextualisation at the end of the book, missing the opportunity for a more political, rather than doctrinal, contextualisation. If Islam is the problem, as the book clearly and rightly shows it to be, then even if the Palestinian question were soluble, it is but a single manifestation of a much greater problem: the orchestration of global jihad by the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Allah’s diplomats. This organisation’s stranglehold over the European Union and the United Nations allows it to direct nations against Israel as instruments of the Qur’anic jihad imperative.

There is no telling which country will bend to its will next. But it is facing growing frustration on a number of fronts, not least on account of Visegrád (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) refusal to bow to EU bullying, Brexit’s implications for the jihad in Britain, India upsetting all the regional jihad schemes by going on the offensive, and President Trump’s moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem and defunding UNRWA, the significance of latter two is well highlighted in The Palestinian Delusion.

What of Israel’s Muslim Members of Knesset (MKs)? In whose name do they ride? They are Muslims, adherents of the scripture that commands them to, “Drive them out from where they drove you out,” and followers of a prophet who stressed to his followers that,

The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.

When those Muslim MKs were sworn in to high office in the Jewish state, were they asked to renounce Qur’an 2:191 and Muhammad’s notorious genocide hadith narrated at Sahih Muslim 6985? If Israel does not make the Muslim MKs publicly renounce these expectations of their faith, it might learn their allegiance under circumstances it would not wish to contemplate, the prospect of which just became very real with the Muslim Brotherhood gaining a foothold inside an Israeli government, thankfully short-lived. Yet it managed, as it was leaving office, to formally cede Israeli territorial waters to Hezbollah, the Arab Muslim terrorist outfit that effectively runs Lebanon. Publicly renouncing the specific Arabic wording of the Islamic doctrines demanding the destruction of Israel, rather than simply swearing allegiance to Israel as a Jewish state (about which Islam, in any case, would require them to lie), would be the real acid test of those MKs’ allegiance to Israel.

No Muslim will ever renounce anything in the Qur’an, or anything Muhammad had said or done (although many have tried to wheedle their way around these), yet these Muslim MKs assumed office in Israel. How many Jews know the story of Khaybar? Every Muslim does. Too many Jews believe they need to bend over just a little more in their niceness to Arab Muslims and everything will be alright. Such Jews are proud of “their” Arabs, of how the latter have even embraced democracy. Some whit described this as the my-friend-Ahmed syndrome.

Diversity smugness is at dangerous levels in Israel, as the very conviction that inspired the murder of doctors and nurses on their way to Hadassah Hospital, also has a voice in the Knesset. As soon as those Muslim MKs gain the slightest leverage over state actions, they will break cover. Muslims know this, and are already emboldened enough to break into the IDF Head Quarters in Tel-Aviv. Shortly after 7 October, MK Ayman Odeh got away with demanding Israel engage in an “exchange of prisoners” with Hamas. Only in jihad are terrorists in Israeli jails and captives in Hamas attics and tunnels equivalents. Such people sit in the Knesset. After the Simchat Torah massacre, significant numbers of Jews finally started taking note. The Palestinian Delusion covers an enormous canvas. It would be unfair to expect it to have addressed the jihad against Israel from every conceivable angle. It is, after all, a pioneering work.

Many who should have listened to Bat Ye’or did not, and the delusions rolled on. Perhaps, after “the worst massacre since the Holocaust,” they will now listen to Robert Spencer, although I very much doubt one book will heal the Jews from their malaise. His natural audience and focus is the United States, its government, its security establishment and its people. The Palestinian Delusion, however, is far more immediately critical to the survival of Israel than it is to the US, and one would hope for a Hebrew translation soon.

So back to the question: What is to be done? The only party to this mess even remotely interested in peace is Israel. The only way peace will be arrived at is if Israel were to impose it. Imposing peace, of course, means by military force, and that does not necessarily mean oppression. To attain and maintain peace means keeping the Muslim Arab propensities for jihad in check, and having a severe deterrent at the ready for anyone who would be inspired to obey 2:191, or to emulate Muhammad at the expense of the Jews, or to call for the same, including by enjoining obedience to many anti-Semitic verses in the Qur’an.

The key to success of Israeli military force is permanent insecurity for Arab Muslims, the only condition that Islam recognises as a valid excuse for suspending jihad. The surest way of accomplishing such permanent insecurity is by Arab Muslims permanently losing territory every time they attack Israel. The entire point of jihad is the violent subjugation of the entire world “until all religion is for Allah.” Every part of the earth that is now subjugated, or was once subjugated, is “Muslim land” and the greatest humiliation for those on jihad is to lose Muslim land. Humiliation equals defeat. This is why those advocating for Israel annexing and Jews closely settling Gaza and Judea and Samaria are correct.

Israel's security planners talk of extending Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley. this should have been done long ago. Similarly, Judea split from Samaria with a corridor opened between Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley, and northern Gaza physically split from the rest of Gaza. The Mediterranean holds lots of water; why not a lovely deep marina running the entire Netzarim Corridor. These are necessary first steps to peace.

But alas, Arab Muslims are on television exhorting their people, be they in Gaza, the "Palestinian interior" (Israel) or Judea and Samaria to “martyrdom”. In 2021, supposed “Arab citizens of Israel,” burnt down synagogues, assaulted Jews, and attempted to drown Jewish children in public pools. Everyone is going to be horrified when the first "Israeli Arab" heads the call and beheads the first Jew. It seems no warnings are loud enough. It is as if acknowledging that such things can happen is to wish for them to happen. Thankfully, 7 October, in its own grotesque way, is changing this, too.

The Palestinian Delusion demonstrates convincingly that “The Palestinian Struggle,” is not a struggle over land, in the limited sense of where a people settles, but in the more comprehensive sense of imposing an order on territory. The jihad against Israel might not be a war over land, but it is a war by means of land. Arab Muslims do not want the land so they can establish Palestine; they want the land so they can disestablish Israel, nay, obliterate Israel and all evidence that there had ever been anything other than “Muslim land”. Their threat to “flatten Tel Aviv” is not an idle one and is meant quite literally. The fate of the Gaza greenhouses should have been a wake-up call, but was it? Struggling Palestinians have higher priorities than Singapore-on-the-Med. The “Zionist entity” is a glittering stain that must be expunged from their squalid wasteland. They long not for the vanished gardens of Cordoba, but fight to restore desolation. Then will they call it peace. To that end do they need the land they do not want.

Concomitantly, the more land Muslims lose, the greater the reversal of their jihad. Shrinking Gaza is not only about greater security for Israel’s southern communities, it is about resetting the Muslims’ problem to its original state before all the concessions swindled and bullied out of Israel. Jews ruling over all the land assigned them in the division of Mandate Palestine, namely, from the river to the sea, must be the end-state sought. If for every rocket fired, Gaza has had to pay in lost land, the rocket problem might well have been solved by now, if not the Gaza problem altogether.

The general lesson from The Palestinian Delusion is: whoever you are, and especially if you are the Israeli Government and security establishment, whatever assumptions you are making about Arab Muslims, think again. Are you projecting your own rationale onto their minds? Are you projecting your own value-system onto their ethics? Are you projecting your own aspirations onto their hearts? Delusion upon delusion upon delusion characterised the so-called “peace process.” This edifice of fantasies must be dismantled, rather than endlessly searching for a “partner for peace” that does not exist, that cannot exist.

And what about the numbers game? Firstly, the so-called “right of return”, as Spencer’s book shows, is irrelevant. They were never expelled, leave aside the fact that most who did depart Israel in 1948 have since departed this world altogether — there is no need for Israel to pay any attention to the “hereditary refugee status” conjured up especially for “Palestinians.” No one else inherits their parents’ refugee status.

Secondly, a people that calls for the extermination of another people is, by definition, the worst of all peoples. The Jews have nothing to prove when it comes to “being better than that” — they are not calling for the harming, let alone extermination, of anyone. Jews being themselves the object of Islamic extermination doctrine and Muslim exhortation, have a great deal of moral latitude in how they deal with a population that seeks to exterminate them before they even remotely begin to approach the Palestinians’ depravity.

With that preamble, Israeli could do a lot worse than deporting anyone who calls for the extermination of Jews to the Arab part of Mandate Palestine (or anywhere that would have them). This would include reading to others or approvingly quoting any Qur’an verse or hadith that calls for harming Jews. The Jewish state cannot afford the luxury of balking at the idea of expelling people who would see Jews exterminated, especially when it has itself expelled Jews from Gaza (part of Mandate Palestine designated for the Jewish National Home), for the benefit of those who have never hidden their intention to annihilate the Jewish state, and only intensified their efforts to that end whenever they take over Jewish territory — land for peace, indeed.

All madrassas and all mosques are places of exhortation to exterminate the Jews by virtue of the simple fact that the Qur’an and the hadith are taught and propagated within, as they are in the UN schools, where, “every child is indoctrinated that they should kill the Jews.” As a humanitarian gesture, compare a $100,000 send-off in each Arab Muslim family’s bags as they board the plane out of Israel, to rockets landing on Jewish family homes. This way Israel can she save herself and preserve her humanity, the only humanity in a sea of hatred and spite. The threat from within her borders neutralised, the Palestinian delusion may finally be laid to rest.

Some might despair at the thought of scrapping decades of hard "peace" and "co-existence" work. The Palestinian Delusion shows those to have been decades of failure. Israel must draw a line under it regardless of what anyone says. Her very existence depends on it. Can the toxic harvest of Gush Katif, where Israel did more damage to herself than she has ever done to the Muslims who wish to destroy her, ever be redeemed?

The Palestinian Delusion is a formidable addition to Robert Spencer’s already considerable oeuvre. Important as this book was when it first appeared in 2019, the events since 7 October 2023, have given this book an enhanced importance, even urgency. Even if academic Islam scholarship were not in craven, sycophantic prostration before Islamic intimidation, Spencer’s brave and honest work on exposing Islam and the dangers it poses for the world would still tower above them all. Posterity will recognise Spencer as one of the most important scholars in his field. Should civilisation survive the current onslaught of Islamic barbarism, Robert Spencer’s work, not least The Palestinian Delusion reviewed here, will be amongst those to have enabled that survival. Not all the beneficiaries will have the grace to acknowledge their debt.