For the sake of brevity, many are referring to recently announced deals between Israel and the Gulf states of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain as “peace agreements.” The know-it-alls then like to shout that they’re not “peace” deals, but normalization, since Israel was never formally at war with either of these countries.

What they ignore, what all Western peace brokers and observers ignore, is that the State of Israel has been at war with Islam (and therefore with the entire Muslim Ummah) since its rebirth in 1948. Really, it goes back further than that. A state of religious war has existed since the 1920s, when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, began preaching that the pre-state Jewish community must be driven from lands formerly under Muslim rule. His religious incitement was the foundation of repeated Arab invasions of Israel long before it was “occupying” the West Bank. And that brand of incitement can still be heard in mosques across the Middle East today.

Despite decades of direct political engagement, it still seems difficult for Western...