The fight, whether waged by Americans at the Twin Towers, on the porch of your house in Peoria, or as at present in Afghanistan, in Iraq or by the Israeli in wherever, can not be ended by negotiating it away.

When in 1956, once Moscow crushed Hungary’s Revolution, I came to America, one of the first things I did stateside was to enroll in College. Enrollment was a big event. Due to my origins, in Communist-ruled Hungary I had no legal right to an education above the 8th grade. The same policy also ruled out straight A's as well as anything that might have made a kid into the top student in his class. Then and now it seemed to me that it was essential to find out about the formal structures of my new country and what it was that made her system benefit so greatly those living under its aegis. Not by accident, I started in a J.C. (it was for free) with a course in American Government. After only a few lectures in the conservatively constructed program (meaning we got facts before being asked to have an opinion encumbered by reality), I had an awakening experience. It initiated a still-on-going-process to satisfy my curiosity to assess why a successful society is, well, successful. My query quickly led me to the insight that conflicts being “expensive” to all, America’s achievements were often made possible due to her ability to develop a technique for solutions by compromise. This astonished me because, due to my background, I regarded compromisers as weak or cowardly — or both. I then discovered that seeking and developing compromises can be the way of the strong and the wise.

I still hold this position. However, I do not hold it singularly. Therefore, I am cognizant that, depending on the circumstances, my original, instinctively derived attitude can also be correct.

Let me begin by stating the obvious. Compromises are only then superior solutions when all parties to a controversy share a common denominator and are, therefore, willing to enter a bargain. A bargain, in this case, implies a loss and a gain. To qualify for the “bargain,” the contenders must be able to see the matter contested to be as one issue out of numerous other ones that are not formally challenged. As soon as a topic is in the mind of one side inseparably connected to almost every item on its maximalist agenda, there is not much room left for successful compromises. This will be the case because, in this instance, the issue discussed is only a limited component in an open ended struggle that involves the totality of the protagonists’ existence. Giving in here to gain there, once the supposed surrender involves the right to existence, is hardly possible. The issue discussed is not isolated: it therefore becomes only a battle fought as part of a general war interrupted by armistices but not ended by a peace.

Therefore, compromises work when they can serve as bridges between positions that are, but for the issue that is being argued, basically compatible. In matters that symptomatically separate hostile camps that consider their survival as ultimately implying the demise of the other party, agreements on specific points entail a grave risk for the more moderate side among the contracting parties. The risk is that the shrewder side will regard the agreement as merely a tactical respite in its strategic total war against an unaware and thereby numbed foe. Thus this sort of compromise is shrunk into an armistice between rounds and does not amount to a peace. Recent history is full of illustrations that demonstrate that the “compromise” of the moment served one side as an opportunity to strike harder next time and therefore implied a defeat and weakening of the other party. Agreements with National Socialism were in this category. The Führer waged a general war with all political and military means available to him. His “compromises” were part of the political phase of the war to be concluded by physical violence. Meanwhile his opposites, blinded by what their own tradition taught them about dealing successfully with problems, assumed that “peace for our time” is assured by removing isolated issues through a bargain with a “reasonable man” that “split the apple.” Later, negotiating with the USSR’s International Socialists resulted in costly mistakes. As though nothing had happened, the “West” waded willingly into the same trap that earlier Hitler’s National Socialism set for it.

Lessons that contradict experiences that proved to be originally a success are hard to revise once the determining circumstances that have changed demand it. If the technique of compromise worked earlier — such as the “Great Compromise” on the road to the Constitution or when drawing with the Brits a boundary through the Oregon Territory — then it must be a useful tool at present. So why not continue with President Truman’s endeavor to make the “Jews and the Arabs behave like good Christians?” Let them accept a new line in the sand of the Near East separating satisfied parties that hitherto had shown each other their teeth! And, low and behold, once the line is drawn and applied, it will become a good fence over which good neighbors can embrace each other. Similar ideas still guide the naïve in the general conflict between Islamists and the modern world. (It was not called “Western” or “Christian” because it is neither of these any more.)

The advanced world’s difficulty with the Islamic world does not involve the items that are put, out of tactical shrewdness, due to cowardice or confusion, in the foreground. The “fence/wall,” the border controls, administering the Holy Places, the right to return and whatever else is brought up, do not constitute the real issue. All of these matters could, indeed, be solved by a constructive compromise of the sort that has enabled successful societies to become and stay winners. The bone of contention is simpler and, while more fundamental, also harder to resolve.

Allow someone who is in no way connected to Israel to make a run with the ball to clear up the matter. If you follow the arguments on any one of the articulated issues between Palestinians and Israelis to their root, you make a discovery. It is an unpleasant one. So send your children to bed or shove them out on a date with a boy/girl fiend before you continue here.

Now that you are settled we shall carry on! Where were we? At the “root” of the clash. For the Palestinians as they are represented at the moment, every aspect of Arab-Israeli relations appear to focus on the continued existence of a Jewish state. Eliminating it, call it with a rhetorical flourish “driving the Jews into the sea,” is the goal. Anything less has the role of the individual steps on the ladder leading to the top. It is something to claim, to win, and to use to climb to the next echelon where the process will, with some luck, repeat itself.

Whatever your definition of “compromise” might be, the foregoing excludes the application of genuine compromises from the instruments to treat the underlying problem. When the issue is made into one of ultimate victory coupled to total defeat, “compromises” are out of place. In case additional reasons are needed: compromise is about avoiding battles that damage all. In wars whose goal is to erase (like in Ausradieren) one side, a compromise is a defeat. In no case is it in itself a goal to fight for. So the compromiser — the one who is convinced that for a piece of concession he has bought a genuine piece of peace — is, by this reasoning, the loser.

The implications regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians — in whose case there is not even a bona fide negotiating partner willing to PLAY the moderate — is obvious. The connotation pertaining to the US as it now opposes the Jihadists should also be clear. Regardless of what conceivable concessions might be made in the spirit of the American Experience, they will not halt the conflict and eliminate the hate of anti-Americans at home and abroad. Only totally transforming the USA via castration can achieve this. An old and revealing Nazi marching song, (their anthem, the Horst Wessel Lied) comes to mind. It talks about the streets of Germany soon belonging to the chanting marchers. Then it will be Germany. And then the “entire world.” The Communists had the same agenda. They share the thought with the Islamists — who are frequently smart enough not to spell it out with the brutal honesty of the Horst Wessel Lied.

This gets us to the summary and to the obvious. Some will call it polemical just because it follows the reasoning of an unrelenting enemy that makes matters as simple as its concept and goals are brutal. The fight, whether waged by Americans at the Twin Towers, on the porch of your house in Peoria, or as at present in Afghanistan, in Iraq or by the Israeli in wherever, can not be ended by negotiating it away. French and German “neutrality,” Spain’s electoral collapse followed by a cut-and-run, the Philippines' “speeded up” retreat, bring no more lasting refuge for them and the rest of the world from the conflict than other imaginable forms of partial surrender. Only clear victory or an indisputable defeat on all fronts can end this kind of struggle that knows no neutrality, no compromise and no effective ducking when under fire.