Through the din of warfare between Sunni and Shi’a, Kurd and Arab, Berber and Arab, Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda, there is the noise of another warfare: the endless war against Israel. This war is a product of the Muslim worldview.

In that view, the world is uncompromisingly divided between Dar al-Islam, the Domain of Islam, where Muslims dominate, and Dar al-Harb, the Domain of War, where Muslims do not yet dominate. It is the duty of every Muslim to participate in the struggle or Jihad, to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the domination, of Islam, everywhere.

And they are doing it, through terrorism, and propaganda, and economic warfare, and hijrah, the newest and most dangerous instrument of jihad, jihad through migration into the vulnerable (because confused about the threat they faced) lands of Dar al-Harb. Israel’s existence is regarded by Muslims as especially insufferable.

For it is an Infidel nation-state, the Infidels in question being the long-despised Jews that sits smack in the middle of Arabdom, contra naturam, an insult to the amour-propre of Muslims everywhere, but especially to Arab Muslims, who conceive of that tiny country metaphorically as either a knife plunged into the heart of Arabdom, or as a cancerous growth in the middle of Arabdom.

And you don’t pull a knife out part-way, you don’t cut out only part of a cancerous tumor. In other words, for most Arabs, Israel eventually has to go, to disappear, to become again what it once was, part of Dar al-Islam. Until the Six-Day War, the Arabs never hid — just read their propaganda — the final result they desired — an end to Israel, and by military means.

But their colossal defeat in that war, and the loss of the territory that the Jordanians had renamed the “West Bank,” led to an entire rethinking of Arab strategy. They understood that they would now have to use non-military means to recover that “West Bank” through diplomacy.