1. Into every form of life God has breathed the impulse to survive and thrive. This fundamental truth, which reaches highest awareness in our species, was elegantly stated by Darwin in the last paragraph of the first edition of THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES: “There is a grandeur in this view of life” as “having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one...from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

In humanity, this impulse produces PEOPLE-FLOW, the flow of flesh into streams of family / clan / tribe / nation / international organizations. The cover of my book FLOW OF FLESH, REACH OF SPIRIT has a photograph of four hands “flowing” up the rough bark of a tree—one hand for each of the four generations of my family, the tiny top-hand being of our first-born. The book’s thesis is that in all people-flows from the least (the bio-family) to the largest (all humanity on earth at any one moment), every human being reaches out for more meaning than matter can provide, and that “spirit” is the best word for this reaching, this longing (as the Bible puts it) for God.

2. Water flows downward wherever possible, and people flow over the earth by the gravity of opportunity. What motivates people-flow is this impulse to survive and thrive, an urge which has in itself no moral or religious content any more than in an amoeba; and it presses all available powers to overcome resistances to success.

3. The major resistances to people-flows are other peoples. Big peoples flowing into big peoples cause human tsunamis. Big peoples flowing over little peoples elicit, from below, cries of “Injustice!”

4. One accurate description of Middle East history is the flow of big peoples (of the big rivers—the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates) over the little peoples on the land-bridge which the Romans called Palestine.

5. In 1947-48, the organizationally biggest people (the U.N.) flowed a middle-size people (the world’s homeless Jews) over part of a little people (the Arabs of Palestine). The 1947 Partition Plan--to keep the Jews from claiming the whole of Palestine--specified that the Arabs in the part of Palestine not to be flowed over by Jews would be free to form the State of Palestine, and the Arabs in the part to be flowed over were to live with the injustice by leaving or remaining in what became the State of Israel. The day the British left in 1948, the State of Israel was born. (Palestine was mainly Arab, though Jewish immigration had been increasing for five decades.)

6. For six decades, the flowed-over Arabs have refused to swallow the injustice, have tried by every means available to destroy the State of Israel, and have lived the increasing misery of bitter memories instead of the prosperity of a State of Palestine which they could have declared when the Jews declared the State of Israel. From scores of instances of flowed-over peoples, history offers the wisdom of non-violent options where violence offers no lively hope of deliverance from the injustice. But the Palestinians have not availed themselves of this wisdom.

7. All of the above, except Darwin’s God-comment, could be put on the “Politics” pile. I've been talking the politics of the history-long power of big peoples to determine little peoples’ lands and lives. Religion can’t be given full credit or blame for any of it. However, religion’s “reach of spirit” can help little people burn the fuel of hope rather than the fuel of hate. (If it were not so, the Bible couldn't have been written.)

8. But now comes a tragic reality which we must put on the “Religion” pile. It is the Islamic land-doctrine that once in Muslim hands, a territory must remain Muslim. To let it fall into “infidel” hands would be a sin against Allah: permitting the State of Israel to exist is sinning against Allah. The Islamist inflation of this Islamic land-doctrine spotlights the Palestinian Arab plight as a poster for jihadist expansionism, the push to eliminate “dar es harb” (infidel war-territories) so that the whole world will be “dar es islam” (Muslim peace-territory) under a world-empire caliphate—the war-goal negatively motivated by blaming the Muslim world’s troubles on the West, and positively motored by restorationist-romantic fantasies of the glorious Muslim past and by the delusion of a paradisal destiny even for suicide-martyrs.

9. Living toward that final victory, Islamists today seethe with hatred for non-Islamic societies in which they live—societies unsubmissive to the widened rule of “dhimmitude” that such Muslims have the divine right to dominate such societies (extending the Islamic law that in Muslim societies, non-Muslims have the status of a disadvantaged underclass).

I loathe war, and daily pray the Lord’s Prayer for the world’s deliverance from it. But we cannot excuse ourselves from the Islamist war against the West. This religio-political war, launched by radical Muslims determined to advance their views by violence, must be fought, as nonviolently as feasible, by all who believe that violence is--everywhere and always—inimical to the “reach of spirit.”