Can we ever forgive our persecutors?

“When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.” (Golda Meir, the fourth prime minister of Israel)

Muslims have been killing Jews in huge numbers for centuries. When they weren’t massacring them, they were oppressing them and making their lives unbearable.

Not only that, they participated in Hitler’s programme of extermination and then proceeded to launch a full-scale, multi-pronged attack on a nation of Holocaust survivors.

Since then, the Arabs and the Muslim world in general have refused to accept Israel as a political reality, preferring instead to terrorise the Jewish state and employ useful idiots in the West to do its dirty work.

But should there ever come a day when peace comes to the Middle East, will the Israelis be able to forgive their Muslim neighbours?

Forgiveness can only come when the Palestinians and the wider Muslim world admit their role in the Holocaust. Will they then apologise and seek to make amends in the same way some Catholics and Protestants did after the Holocaust?

The offenders must express remorse and be genuinely repentant. And some recognition and recompense for the 800,000 Jewish refugees forced to leave Arab lands after 1948 would be nice.

But I just can’t see the Muslim world and the Palestinians, in particular, ever giving up their jihad against Israel.

And this means more deaths of Israeli civilians and soldiers, more frightened children cowering in bomb shelters, and the ever-present threat of a second Holocaust.