The Challenge and the Immediate and Long-Term Solutions
The Republicans were the first to call on Arabs to reconcile with Israel, based on a civilizational perspective of the Middle East problem. While the Arabs were focused solely on the military defeat of June 1967, the Republicans were looking deeper - at the intellectual defeat and the scientific decline that had afflicted the people of the Quran and the people of knowledge. The Arabs live off superficial aspects of both Western civilization and Islam, without possessing the tools for confrontation. They neither produce weapons nor know how to use them effectively, which has, from the outset, directed them toward introspection - to restore their relationship with their Lord and to build their lives according to the guidance of a new civilization founded on the principles of Islam. This civilization would address what Western civilization has failed to achieve: reconciling the need for comprehensive social justice with the need for absolute individual freedom - thereby realizing peace on earth.
This requires an immediate solution to the Middle East problem, one that allows the Arabs to disengage from military conflict, which has tied them to international power blocs and distanced them from their religion. As the book states: “The immediate phase aims to create a breathing space - or, let’s say, a truce - during which the Arabs can begin addressing the long-term phase.”
The Republicans’ proposal for a peaceful solution to the Middle East issue, which was initially met with rejection, is now becoming increasingly recognized as a practical suggestion. The fifth war in Lebanon has demonstrated that the Arabs are, in practical terms, incapable of engaging in war. Even Syria, which considered itself the first frontline state, abandoned the Palestinians to face Israel’s advanced military machine alone, establishing (silent) peace agreement with the Israelis.
In addition to the emergence of new factors that render war impossible, one of which is the unprecedented clarity of the Soviet deception toward the Arabs. This makes any call to rely on Soviet military support a naive and ignorant proposition. Additionally, the Palestinians have lost their military bases in Lebanon and have been scattered across Arab countries, depriving them of the strategic advantage they once had in Lebanon - where they had direct access to Israel’s borders and could target Israeli colonies with their artillery.
This situation has ultimately tied the Palestinian resistance movement to the political agenda of Arab states, which have proven both unwilling and unable to engage in war.
The challenge facing the Arabs - which we emphasized after the June 1967 war - returns today, following the June 1982 war, with even greater urgency and a higher level of warning: either the Arabs achieve victory through the civilization of Islam, or they will be cast out of history. As the book asserts: “The Israelis live off the core of Western mechanized civilization and excel in modern warfare, while the Arabs live off its superficial aspects. They neither design nor manufacture machinery, nor do they maintain or use it properly. Therefore, they lack insight into modern scientific warfare.”
This was proven during the June 1967 war, when Egypt lost its air force in a swift Israeli airstrike, and again in the June 1982 war, when Syria lost its SAM missile bases in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley following an astonishing electronic warfare campaign by the Israelis, who had harnessed the latest technological advancements in electronics to enhance their offensive and defensive capabilities.
It has thus been practically demonstrated that the Arabs, at their current level of civilizational and technological backwardness, are incapable of defeating Western civilization militarily - of which Israel represents geographical, political, and military embodiment.
From a principled standpoint, humanity no longer seeks those who teach it the art of war. It has spent its long history in blood, tears, and toil, scorched in modern times by the inferno of two world wars, while teetering on the brink of a third. Contemporary humanity has failed to achieve peace on earth, and its need for peace has become a matter of life or death.
What the Arabs must do is rise to the level of the challenge before them by reviving the civilization of Islam - a civilization of peace - within themselves. Through this revival, they could offer humanity, lost in a labyrinth of confusion, a renewed lifeblood to revitalize the essence of existence with love and peace, thereby reclaiming their place in history, as their predecessors once did.
We aim to emphasize that the Arabs' lag in both military and civil technology reflects their detachment from their era and from the essence of Islam. In reality, they are battling the modern Western mind - the very mind that created the material civilization on whose superficial aspects the Arabs subsist. Today, that Western mind stands at the pinnacle of its material achievements, scientific accomplishments, and technological revolutions.
The Arabs are confronting this mind with a clan mindset, driven by Arab tribal spirit, religious and nationalistic fanaticism! As the book aptly puts it:
"They combat Zionist Israeli racism with Arab racism” Jews fighting Jews.
The book continues to explain that: “The Arabs do not engage in thinking (or critical thinking); they navigate the path of contemporary life driven by emotions and wishful thinking, - a perilous course in itself. Despite the material wealth brought to them by oil and their attempts to purchase and implant material civilization in the heart of the desert, the intellectual bareness of Arab thought has left them incapable of embracing the spirit of the age, which yearns for (knowledge). This includes both the technological material knowledge, which currently dominates, and the material-spiritual knowledge enshrined within the folds of the Quran, which is destined to prevail in the future. It is this knowledge that the Arabs are supposed to rediscover and revive, for in it lies their true honor, dignity, and victory over Western civilization.
We find no words more eloquent and vivid in describing the Arabs’ current state of confusion and alienation than the following passages from the book: “Today, the Arabs are lost in the wilderness. They are in the wilderness with no Moses, no Aaron, no Joshua - indeed, with no leader at all. They have forgotten Allah, and so Allah has forgotten them: (So it will be: Our signs came to you, but you forgot them, and likewise, you will be forgotten today) (20:126).”
Allah is protective of the Arabs because He made them the inheritors of the Arabic Quran and the descendants of the Arab Prophet, and because He made them the custodians of the religion of monotheism. The afflictions and setbacks they endure in their modern history are nothing but the fire of trial, which, if they benefit from, will prepare them to fulfill their mission - a mission of civilization, ethics, and peace that will fertilize the present mechanized Western civilization.
Islam, in its fundamental principles as presented by the Republican thought, is the Arabs’ Joshua who will lead them out of the desert of confusion and into the promised land. Their future will be something that no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no heart has ever imagined.
