PALESTINIAN RADICALISM AND ARAB ANTISEMITISM

The JMCC interviewed 1,179 people in the West Bank and Gaza in late May and early June. Fifty-one percent of people surveyed said the end result of the uprising should be "liberation of all of historic Palestine," referring to pre-1947 British-mandate Palestine, part of which was recognized as the State of Israel in 1948. Forty-three percent of respondents said the aim of the uprising was more limited: to end Israeli occupation and establish a Palestinian state only in the West Bank and Gaza. This compared with a poll taken in December in which 48 percent said the uprising's goal was merely to end the occupation, compared with 44 percent who said the aim should be to eliminate Israel.

A further sign of Palestinian radicalization is the decline of support for the Palestinian Authority and Yasser Arafat himself in favor of the radicals, and the declining support for any peace process with Israel. More than two-thirds of all respondents said they approved of suicide bombings against Israeli civilian targets, and 59 percent declared that the Israeli raids had boosted their approval of the militant Islamic group Hamas, which opposes Israel's existence and represents a major challenge to Arafat's authority.

This poll illustrates an often-neglected ingredient in the ongoing Middle Eastern tragedy: the fact that even if Israel is eventually recognized by all of its Arab neighbors as part of a peace package imposed by the outside world (which is, incidentally, the only way that can ever happen), a growing segment of the Arab world—especially among the young, who are the majority today and the leaders of tomorrow—will not accept the legitimacy of its existence, and won't regard that existence as a permanent feature of the Middle Eastern landscape.

Historical parallels abound. In the aftermath of its defeat in 1870 France was forced to recognize the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, and on that basis maintained full diplomatic and commercial relations with Germany for the ensuing 44 years; yet what could not be on the French lips remained in the French heart throughout, to be fulfilled in 1918. In 1921 the Irish Free State had the partition of the Six Counties imposed on it, and for over eight decades now Ireland has put up with the legality of the fact—however dubious—that has enabled it to maintain normal relations with Great Britain and to join the European Union. And yet the Republic continues to reject the legitimacy of the partition, and its dormant irredentist claim on Ulster is enshrined even in its Constitution. More recently, the Carthaginian peace imposed on the Bosnian Serbs at Dayton in 1995 and on Kosovo in the aftermath of the NATO bombing of 1999 will be challenged as soon as the "international community" gives up policing the Balkans.

The ultimate radicalization is to reject the legitimacy of you adversary's right to exist; it makes the conflict structurally unmanageable, and leads to Final Solutions. It is a grave sin of which both parties in the Middle Eastern conflict are guilty to some extent, but not to the same extent. Legitimate concern for Palestinian rights and institutionalized discrimination of non-Jews in Israel should not blind us to the fact that the problem on the Arab side is structural and antedates the creation of the Jewish state. The problem of Arab antisemitism harks back to the beginning of the remarkable life and times of prophet Muhammad.

"Arab antisemitism" may sound illogical as both Jews and Arabs are supposedly of the same or racially similar Semitic stock. The semantic confusion is due to the invention of the term "antisemitism" by a late 19th century German to give the anti-Jewish sentiment a "scientific" veneer. It was never meant to brand all Semitic peoples in the same category. Ever since it has denoted, and was meant to denote, different types and degrees of animosity to the Jews, and modern antisemitism has found a perfect fit in the Arab world when the drastic deterioration in its relations with the Jews occurred in the 20th century, resulting from the conflicting claims over Palestine. Inherent religious animosity was fully coupled with anti-Jewish attitudes on ethnic and geopolitical grounds, but religious and political aspects of that struggle were as inseparable in the early seventh century as they are today.

THE PROPHET'S LEGACY

In the early days of his prophetic career, in Mecca before the Hijra, Muhammad had hoped to be accepted as God's messenger by the Jews. To win them over he even ordered his followers to turn in the direction of Jerusalem during prayer, and adopted the Jewish Day of Atonement, Ashura, as the Muslim holy day. He seems to have underestimated the allegiance of Arabian Jews to their scriptures and the effect that the many discrepancies between Muhammad's own Koranic pronouncements and the Jewish tradition would have on them. His superficial, second-hand knowledge of the Tradition made it impossible for him to argue on par with the learned merchants of Medina. Muhammad's earlier, favorable pronouncements about the Jews soon evolved into an implacably hostile position: "verily, Allah teaches us, and we believe it, that for a Muslim to kill a Jew, or for him to be killed by a Jew, ensures him an immediate entry into paradise and into the august presence of Allah." The result is summarized in a chillingly euphemistic account by a contemporary Muslim scholar: "The final result of the struggle was the disappearance of these Jewish communities from Arabia proper."1

This "disappearance" was not a spontaneous phenomenon but the result of what would be known in our own time as ethnic cleansing and genocide. The first stage consisted of individual murders of Jews (AD 624); the second entailed the expulsion of two tribes from Medina (625-626); the third was completed with the slaughter of one remaining tribe, Banu Qurayzah (627). Muhammad offered the men conversion to Islam as an alternative to death; upon their refusal up to 900 were decapitated at the ditch, in front of their women and children. Torches were lit so that the slaughter could be accomplished all in one day. "Truly the judgment of Allah was pronounced on high" was Muhammad's comment. "Allah" added a few words of his own: "And He has caused to descend from their strongholds the Jews that assisted them. And he struck terror into their hearts. Some you slaughtered and some you took prisoner.2 The widowed or orphaned Jewish women were subsequently raped; Muhammad chose as his concubine one Raihana Bint Amr, whose father and husband were both slaughtered before her eyes, only hours earlier; but such treatment had already been sanctioned by prophetic revelation.

Muhammad's Endloesung was accompanied by dozens of suitably grim "revelations" in the Koran. The Jews have drawn on themselves wrath upon wrath, and their just reward in the form of "disgracing torment" yet awaits them.3 Every time they make a covenant, some party among them throws it aside;4 "And you will not cease to discover deceit in them."5 So Allah brought them down and cast terror into their hearts, had some killed and others made captives, "And He caused you [Muslims] to inherit their lands, and their houses, and their riches, and a land which you had not trodden before"6 The Muslims are able to do so because the Jews are cowards: "If they fight against you, they will show you their backs."7 Until the Day of Resurrection they will be afflicted with humiliating agony.8 They are accursed for their obstinate rebellion and disbelief, so "We have put enmity and hatred amongst them till the Day of Resurrection."9 Even when they seem united "their hearts are divided."10 They have incurred the Curse and Wrath of Allah, who transformed them into monkeys and swine.11 "Indignity is put over them wherever they may be" because they disobeyed Allah and used to transgress beyond bounds.12 They cling greedily to this life even if it is humiliating and villainous life, "And verily, you will find them the greediest of mankind for life."13

In the centuries after Muhammad there have been periods when the Jews were able to live in relative peace under Arabs, but their position was never secure. They were generally viewed with contempt by their Arab neighbors, and their survival was always predicated on their abject subordination and degradation to them. Mass murders of Jewish "protected people" started in Morocco as early as the 8th century, where Idris I wiped out whole communities. A century later Baghdad's Caliph al-Mutawakkil designated a yellow badge for Jews, setting a precedent that would be followed centuries later in Nazi Germany, and synagogues were destroyed throughout Mesopotamia in 854-859. In Tripolitania Jews were considered as property of their Arab masters, who would bequeath the Jews to their heirs upon death. In the 12th century, after anti-Jewish riots the contemporaries commented that their population had "greatly declined."14

On the other side of the Muslim empire, on December 30, 1066, Joseph HaNagid, the Jewish vizier of Granada, was crucified by an Arab mob that proceeded to raze the Jewish quarter of the city and slaughter its 5,000 inhabitants. Muslim preachers, who had objected to what they saw as inordinate Jewish political power, incited the riot. And those were the most civilized Muslims in history, in Baghdad at the peak of one Islamic "golden age" and in Spain at the peak of another.

In 1465, Arab mobs in Fez slaughtered thousands of Jews, leaving only 11 of them alive, after a Jewish deputy vizier allegedly treated a Muslim woman in "an offensive manner." The killings touched off a wave of similar massacres throughout Morocco.15 In Tripolitania in 1785 Ali Burzi Pasha murdered hundreds of Jews. In Algiers Jews were massacred in 1805, 1815 and 1830; and in Marrakesh more than 300 Jews were murdered between 1864 and 1880. Decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were enacted in Egypt and Syria (1014, 1293, 1301) and Yemen (1676). Despite the Koran's prohibition, Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face death in Yemen (1165 and 1678), Morocco (1275, 1465 and 1790-92), and Baghdad (1333 and 1344).16

The situation of Jews in Arab lands reached a low point in the 19th century. Throughout North Africa they were forced to live in ghettos. In Morocco, which contained the largest Jewish community in the Islamic Diaspora, Jews were made to walk barefoot or wear shoes of straw when outside the ghetto. In 1884, the Sultan of Morocco said Jews had to work on Shabbat, could only "clean foul places and latrines," had to part with merchandise at half-price and accept counterfeit coinage, to name a few of the provisions.17 Muslim children freely humiliated them by throwing stones. Writing in 19th century Syria, one Jew lamented, "When a Jew walked among them [the Muslims] in the market, one would throw a stone at him in order to kill him, another would pull his beard, yet another spit on his face. He became the symbol of abuse."

ARAB NATIONALISM AND NAZISM

With the emergence of Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th century the Arabs faced a "Jewish problem" for the first time since Muhammad. This time they faced it from a position of weakness, with the Jews for the first time since the destruction of the temple poised to reestablish a polity that would be territorial as well as spiritual and cultural. It was a rude awakening for the Arab world, after the phenomenal success of the earlier centuries, to find itself by the early 20th century on what looked like the losing side of history. The many weaknesses produced the sense that something had gone terribly wrong, but it did not result in the creative self-examination. The question never was "What have we done" and always "What have they done to us?" The Mongols, Turks, and Western imperialists have all had their share of blame apportioned, but, inevitably, in the 1930's the Jews were included among "them" who were to blame.

Hitler's Germany sensed this and made a concerted, and remarkably successful effort to plant "modern" antisemitism in the Arab world. The struggle for Palestine greatly facilitated the acceptance of the antisemitic interpretation of history, but even before Israel was created that struggle had turned into an existential battle of identity, with the complete denial of the legitimacy of Jewish existence as a central component of this campaign. When the Mufti of Jerusalem declared at the Dome on the Rock in 2001 that the negation of Jewish existence is an existential need of Islam, he was reflecting a majority, mainstream Muslim position, and continuing a well-established tradition.

In 1945 one name was missing from the Allies' list of war criminals, that of Haj Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem and the former President of the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine. In May 1941 the Mufti declared jihad against Britain, "the greatest foe of Islam," and made his way to Berlin. When he met Hitler, on November 21, 1941, he declared that the Arabs are Germany's natural friends, ready to cooperate with the Reich with all their hearts by the formation of an Arab Legion.

Hitler promised that as soon as the German armies pushed into the Southern Caucasus the Arabs would be liberated from the British yoke. The Mufti's part of the deal was to raise support for Germany among the Muslims in the Soviet Union, the Balkans and the Middle East. He conducted radio propaganda and set up anti-British espionage and fifth column networks in the Middle East. Partly thanks to his recruiting efforts in the Balkans—and mainly due to their natural proclivities—the Muslims in Bosnia and Albanians in Kosovo, and Chechens flocked en masse into SS volunteer units famous for their savagery against the Serbs.

During the annual protest against the Balfour Declaration held in 1943 at the Luftwaffe hall in Berlin, the Mufti praised the Germans because they "know how to get rid of the Jews, and that brings us close to the Germans and sets us in their camp is that up to day." Echoing Muhammad, on March 1, 1944, the Mufti called in a broadcast from Berlin: "Arabs! Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor." Already in 1941 he pledged "to solve the question of the Jewish elements in Palestine and in other Arab countries as required by national interests, and in the same way as the Jewish question in the Axis lands is being solved." According to German officials who knew him, "The Mufti had repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with whom he was maintaining contact, above all to Hitler, Ribbentrop and Himmler, the extermination of European Jewry. He considered this as a comfortable solution of the Palestinian problem."

Perhaps the "Nazis needed no persuasion or instigation," as he was later to claim, but the foremost Arab spiritual leader of his time did all he could to ensure that the Germans do not waver in their resolve. He went out of his way to prevent any Jews being allowed to leave Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, which were initially willing to let them go. In the end, Eichmann said, "We have promised him that no European Jew would enter Palestine any more." In 1943 the Mufti wrote to the Hungarian foreign minister: "If there are reasons which make their removal necessary, it would be indispensable and infinitively preferable to send them to other countries where they would find themselves under active control, for example, in Poland, in order to protect oneself from their menace and avoid the consequent damage." The choice of "Poland" as the Mufti's favored location for the deportation was chillingly uncoincidental. On July 27, 1944, he accordingly wrote to Himmler: "I ask you, Reichsfuehrer, to do everything necessary to prevent the Jews from emigrating."

In return it was with the architect of the holocaust, Heinrich Himmler, that Islam had found its most ardent admirers and promoters in the pre-multicultural Europe. Himmler's hatred of "soft" Christianity was matched by his liking for Islam, which he saw as a masculine, martial religion based on the SS qualities of blind obedience and readiness for self-sacrifice, untainted by compassion for one's enemies. While Hitler did not think much of Himmler's neopagan mysticism, he was happy to let Islam become the "SS religion." By creating an SS division composed of Bosnian Muslims Himmler was only taking the first step in the planned grand alliance between Nazi Germany and the Islamic world. One of his closest aides, Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, boasted that "a link is created between Islam and National-Socialism on an open, honest basis. It will be directed in terms of blood and race from the North, and in the ideological-spiritual sphere from the East."

MODERN HEIRS

After the war the danger returned at the time of the partition of Palestine in 1947. In Iraq the cleansing commenced in 1941, during the festival of Shavuot, when 180 Jews were murdered in a farhoud [pogrom] in Baghdad. Six years later the Syrian delegate at the United Nations, Faris el-Khouri, warned: "Unless the Palestine problem is settled, we shall have difficulty in protecting and safeguarding the Jews in the Arab world."18 This was a self-fulfilling prophecy: Over one thousand Jews were killed in the ensuing anti-Jewish rioting in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria and Yemen, triggering the mass exodus of Jews from all Arab countries.19 In the early 1940's there were close to a million Jews throughout the Arab world. There are only a few thousand left today, mainly elderly. The number of Jews displaced from the Arab world in the aftermath of the creation of Israel exceeds that of Palestinians expelled by the Israelis.

The contemporary heirs to the Nazi view of Judentum are not skinheads and Aryan Nation survivalists. They are schools, religious leaders, and mainstream intellectuals in the Arab world. Quite apart from the ups and downs of the misnamed "peace process" in the Middle East, quite apart from the more or less bellicose posture of the government of Israel, the crude way they actively demonize all Jews as such is startling. Take the most prominent and influential daily newspaper in the Arab world, Al-Ahram, a semi-official organ of the Egyptian government. In June 2001 it carried an op-ed article, "What exactly do the Jews want?"—and the answer was worthy of the Voelkische Beobachter six decades earlier:

The Jews share boundless hatred of the gentiles, they kill women and children and sow destruction . . . Israel is today populated by people who are not descendants of the Children of Israel, but rather a mixture of slaves, Aryans and the remnants of the Khazars, and they are not Semites. In other words, people without an identity, whose only purpose is blackmails, theft and control over property and land, with the assistance of the Western countries.20

The second most influential Egyptian daily is Al-Akhbar, which went a step further on April 18, 2001: "Our thanks go the late Hitler who wrought, in advance, the vengeance of the Palestinians upon the most despicable villains on the face of the earth. However, we rebuke Hitler for the fact that the vengeance was insufficient."

It is hard to imagine hatred more vitriolic than that which reproaches the Nazis for not completing the Final Solution more thoroughly. What is remarkable is not that such sentiments exist, but that they are freely circulated in the mainstream media and internalized by the opinion-making elite throughout the Muslim world. In the same league we find the claim that the Holocaust in fact never happened and that the Jews and Israelis are the real Nazis is regularly made. The Jewish-Nazi theme is a favorite of Arab caricaturists, some of whom use the swastika interchangeably with the Magen David, or juxtapose them. Graphic depiction of the Jews appear to have been lifted directly from the pages of Der Stuermer.

Syria is in the forefront. Mustafa Tlass, Syria's foreign minister, published a booklet, The Matza of Zion, about the infamous Damascus Trial of 1840, and concluded that Jews use non-Jewish blood for ritual purposes. The "Jewish Section" of the Makhabarat, the Syrian secret police, exercised strict control over the lives of the remaining members of the community. Just like Soviet citizens before 1989, Jews could travel abroad only if other family members remained behind in order to ensure the return of the traveler. Within the country there were tight restrictions on Jewish mobility and Jews had to seek permission to travel more than several kilometers from their homes. The documents of Jews were marked with a special designation indicating that the bearer is a Jew. Jews were not permitted to serve in the Syrian government, army, police or nationalized industry.

Even in countries not directly engaged against Israel, such as Morocco, demonization of the Jews is widespread. In October 1996 an op-ed article appeared in the Moroccan weekly al-Usbu' that provides an apt illustration of the genre. It claimed that "the Jews are a special kind of human being" by virtue of being spiteful and criminal, and congenitally dishonest:

They are not content with the usurpation of the lands but they aim at the annihilation of mankind entirely in order to fulfill their devilish dreams. They cannot be satisfied without seeing the shedding of Moslem blood. The only arm which will enable us to confront this Jewish racist octopus is to know the Jews and we cannot know them unless we read the Holy Koran. You, the Moslem rulers, read the Koran and forget about the politicians' accounts. The Jews are the enemy number one of the Moslems.

Among the recurring themes in the press in Islamic countries is that Judaism is a sinister religion and that Jews are a grotesque life form. Jews are also often represented as part of a diabolical cabal that strives at world domination. Political and economic expert Dr. Amira Al-Sinwani thus wrote in the Egyptian government-controlled daily Al-Akhbar: "We all understand why Israel conceals The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published at the First Zionist Congress in the city of Basel in 1897, when we look at the calls for destruction and the immorality, a world Jewish government that will rule the world." To support the claim Dr. Al-Sanwani referred to a book published in 1935 in Nazi Germany, A Handbook on the Jewish Question.21

In the aftermath of September 11, the most widely spread view all over the Arab world-even at top governmental levels-is that "the Jews" carried out the attacks. Syrian foreign minister Mustafa Tlass, who has revived the "blood libel," claimed during a meeting in Damascus with a delegation from the British Royal College of Defense Studies that the Mossad planned the operation as part of a Jewish conspiracy.22 Former Egyptian ambassador to Afghanistan Ahmad Al-'Amrawi stated that the Zionist movement and American intelligence organizations planned the attacks. Lebanese Druse leader Walid Jumblatt told Al-Ayyam daily that he thought the Mossad and American intelligence did it.

Columnist after columnist, in one leading paper after another, in Iran, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and elsewhere opined that "what happened is the work of Jewish-Israeli-American Zionism, and the act of the large Zionist Jewish mind controlling the world economically, politically, and through the media," and that "they, more than anyone, are capable of hiding a crime they carry out, and they can be certain that no one will ask them what they have done."23 Syrian ambassador to Tehran Turky Muhammad Saqr even declared that Syria has documented proof that "4,000 Jews employed at the WTC did not show up for work before the attack, which clearly attests to Zionist involvement in these attacks."24 The most respected daily in the Arab world, Al-Ahram, joined the fray: "At the WTC, thousands of Jews worked in finance and the stock market, but none of them were there on the day of the incident. Out of 6,000 killed, of 65 nationalities from 60 countries, not one was a Jew!!"25

CONCLUSION

As Fouad Ajami has observed in The Dream Palace of the Arabs, "the custodians of political power" in the Arab world determined some time ago that diplomatic accommodation would be the order of the day, but the intellectual class was given a green light to ensure that no peace with "the Other" was possible. When faced with concerns about antisemitism in the Arab media officials claim that is the price of a 'free' press-even in countries that have none.

It is objectionable as well as regrettable that Israel was not intended as a state in which all of its citizens, Jews and non-Jews, would be treated alike. But while Israel's treatment of non-Jews, and Palestinian Arabs in particular, is discriminatory and even racist, the darkly psychotic hatred of the Arab-as-such-the hatred that leads to literal genocide is mercifully confined to a fanatical fringe (more often imported from Brooklyn than born in Israel). It is on the Arab side that the illegitimacy of the Other is not only morally acceptable but also divinely ordained. A well-meaning outsider contemplating Middle Eastern solutions would do no favor to the longsuffering Palestinians to remain politely silent on this fact.


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1 W.N. Arafat, "New light on the story of Banu Qurayza and the Jews of Medina," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, (1976), pp. 100-107.

2 Koran, 33:25

3 2:88-90

4 2:100

5 5:13

6 33:26-27

7 3:111

8 7:167

9 5:64

10 59:14

11 5:60

12 3:112

13 2:96

14 Middle East Digest, September 1999

15 Maurice Roumani, The Case of the Jews from Arab Countries: A Neglected Issue, Tel Aviv: World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries, 1977, pp. 26-27.

16 Bat Ye'or, The Dhimmi. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985

17 Middle East Digest, September 1999.

18 The New York Times, February 19, 1947.

19 Maurice Roumani, The Case of the Jews from Arab Countries: A Neglected Issue, (Tel Aviv: World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries, 1977), pp. 30-31

20 Dr. Mustafa Mahmud in Al-Ahram, 23 June 2001

21 http://www.memri.com quoting original source. Charles Krauthammer also referred to this article, in his March 6, 1998 column in The Washington Post entitled "Arafat's Children."

22 The Jerusalem Post (Israel), October 19, 2001.

23 Cf. comprehensive analysis of Arabic media reports on http://www.memri.com

24 IRNA (Iran), October 24, 2001.

25 Al-Ahram, October 7, 2001.