As I've mentioned before, the fanatical Muslim/Arab Nationalist movement needs Israel to distract their populations from domestic failures and foreign ambitions. If you're going to play the victim, you have to have a victimizer. If Israel were to go away, either they would transfer their enmity to those who helped Israel, or they would continue justifying their actions by postulating some worldwide Jewish conspiracy. The "clash of civilizations" is just getting started.

Bin Ladin has gone on record as saying he wants Spain back
for Islam, even though it was never conquered by Arabs, but by North African Muslims. The rest of Europe will follow eventually. The Jews play the same role in the Jihadist universe that they played in Hitler's: a convenient excuse and a distraction.

Having said that, I do believe the average Muslim and Arab is perfectly capable of coexisting with Israel, as are the Turks, Jordanians, and Egyptians, but the Jihadist movement is constantly keeping the issue festering with provocations and terrorism. They know that the attempt to defeat terrorism militarily will cause many casualties amongst the innocent, and they have shown themselves perfectly capable of doing exactly that to keep the struggle alive. They're doing it in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now in Lebanon. The Iranians have even longer term goals, they are Persian Shiites, they know eventually they'll be facing Sunni Arabs and secular Turks as rivals for regional dominance.

I do believe the Bush administration understood this, and this is the true cause of the invasion of Iraq, an attempt to create an American puppet in the heart of the Middle East that would subvert the Jihadists by bringing democracy, prosperity and liberal secularism to the region. The idea was a bold move, and if it had worked it would have been called a brilliant stroke of geopolitics by history. But it didn't, it has failed, mostly because it was bungled in execution, not in concept. Now let's see if Mr Bush can come up with a Plan B, or if he'll just hang on impotently until 2008 and dump it into the lap of the next administration.