There is a photograph most of us can summon without seeing it. A lawn in front of the White House, September 1993. Clinton spreads his arms, Rabin hesitates a second, and then the two hands meet, while the whole world breathes a sigh of relief.
The handshake.
The very image of what we believe about the world here - that any conflict can ultimately be negotiated down to two men, a table, and a signature.
You understand why we love that image. It is our own model in one gesture. Two parties, one compromise, a shared future. This is how the West ends its wars, because deep down we believe that all wars are about interests - and interests can be divided.
But then look at what followed.
After the handshake came the bombs in the buses. After Camp David, where Arafat was offered more than anyone had thought possible, there came no counteroffer - there came an intifada. After 2005, when Israel withdrew every single soldier and every single settler from Gaza and left the greenhouses standing, there came no state. There came Hamas, and after that came the rockets.
And eight years later it repeated itself with a new leader, whom the West called moderate. Olmert offered Abbas more than any Israeli leader ever - he laid the map on the table himself. Abbas left, and he never came back with an answer. Two leaders. Eight years apart. Same silence. It was never the man who could not say yes.
It was the model.
Every time the Western world's - our - model reached out its hand, the other model read the gesture - but it did not read it as an offer of peace. It read it as weakness.
And here one need not guess whether that is so. For they have written it themselves. Hamas' charter from 1988 says in plain words that negotiations, peace initiatives, and international conferences are a waste of time, and that there is only one way.
When they polished the language in 2017 for Western ears, they changed the words, not the goal - "from the river to the sea" still stands. And that sentence is not poetry. It is geography. Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean lies all of Israel - so if everything in between is to be Palestine, there is no Israel left. The slogan does not hide the goal. It is the goal, with coordinates. And when they on rare occasions offer calm, they use their own word for it - hudna. It does not mean peace. It means pause.
The word for real peace naturally exists in their language, but it is not offered to Israel, because in the model and worldview they stand in, the world is divided into two houses - the house that has submitted, and the house that has not yet. With the first house there can be peace. With the second there can only be postponement. Until it submits.
And should anyone doubt what the pause is used for, Hamas' own leadership said it themselves, a few weeks after October 7th, on open screen: we repeat it. Again and again. Until Israel is gone.
This is where the image of the two hands falls apart.
For yes - hands have been shaken before, and some of them still hold. Egypt in 1979. Jordan in 1994. But see who reached out their hand - it was states. Regimes that had to fight their own Islamists to be able to do it. And then see the price it cost. Sadat was shot by his own, two years after the signature - not despite the handshake, but because of it.
The peace was possible because the state placed itself above the religious order and acted as a state among states. But the religious order never forgave it - and that is how one must understand it. It was not an enemy who shot Sadat. It was the model itself, which waited two years before it punished the hand that had reached out.
So it is not about borders. Borders can be negotiated, people have done that for all time. It is about two incompatible answers to what Man is.
The one order, ours, rests on the belief that every Human Being carries something inviolable within, which no power has the right to take - and therefore it can recognise its opponent as Human, even in the middle of war. The other order has submission as the very ideal, inscribed in its own name - and therefore the other's freedom is not a condition one can live with, but a provocation that must cease.
Between "you may exist" and "you must submit" there lies no middle. There is no table where the two sentences can meet halfway, because one is an offer, and the other is a verdict.
And that is why Israel is not just a party in a distant, regional conflict. Israel is the frontmost house. The boundary between the two orders does not run through the Levant by accident - it runs there because that is where the first free house stands. And if that house falls, the boundary does not disappear. It moves. On to the next house that has not yet submitted.
And here too one need not guess. There is an old slogan in the region, which can still be heard at demonstrations - also in European streets -
"After Saturday comes Sunday."
First the Saturday people. Then the Sunday people. First the Jews, then the Christians. The order is not our analysis. It is their promise.
One does not need much imagination to see where the next house lies. Western Europe is already a place where you can be threatened with death for a drawing, where Jews take off the Star of David before they go out the door, and where entire neighbourhoods have grown accustomed to the street's order no longer being the country's.
We do not need to imagine what it looks like when the boundary moves. We can see it from the window.
And what one must understand is that the war is not only fought with rockets. It is fought in language - and there the West has itself fertilised the ground. Against itself.
For decades our own education systems and media have trained generations to see the West as the world's villain - colonial, exploitative, something that must be dismantled. Israel is placed into that narrative as "the last colonial power that must fall".
That a people who return home to the land their language, their prayers, their ethnicity and their archaeology spring from should be colonisers does not hold together unless you stand on your head and think with the other end - but it works, because the word was loaded long before anyone checked whether it fit. It is linguistic hijacking in its purest form.
For look at the "colonial power" that is accused. Two million Arab citizens with voting rights. Arab parties in the Knesset. And an Arab judge in the country's Supreme Court, who helped confirm the prison sentence of a former Israeli president. History's first colonial power, where the colonised judge the colonisers' own head of state. The accusation does not fall because we defend ourselves. It falls by its own weight.
And here the oldest pattern of them all steps forward. When a group gathers around one victim, it never feels like a group from the inside. It feels like justice. A thousand voices saying the same thing at the same time is experienced as proof - but it is not proof, it is mechanics. The purpose of the onslaught is not to win a debate. The purpose is to exhaust, until doubt sets in from within, and the camp begins to split itself.
Therefore one must see the comment threads on social media for what it is - not an argument, but a symptom.
For being in the minority is not the same as being inferior. The Islamist project can mobilise majorities, but it cannot produce what it fights - free people who think for themselves.
They wish our downfall.
We wish their awakening.
That difference is the whole war.
At the same time we must ourselves wake inward. For wars about interests end with handshakes. Wars between orders only end when one can no longer force its will upon the other.
Therefore there will be no handshake. Not because we do not wish it.
But because a handshake requires that both hands mean the same thing by it.
It is not even because they do not want to.
It is because they cannot.
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