Israel,
Palestine and the tiger of terrorism: anti-semitism and history
by RICHARD WEBSTER
………………………………………………. .…
new statesman
29 November 2002
……………………………………………………
AS
THIS ARTICLE APPEARS
tens
of millions of Muslims throughout the Arab world have almost finished
marking the holy month of Ramadan in the manner which has now become
customary. Not only have they been fasting from dawn to dusk but they have
also been watching a great deal of television. This year a 41-part drama
series shown during Ramadan has ignited international controversy.
‘Knight
without a Horse’ tells how in 1906 an Egyptian, fighting the British
occupation of his country, stumbles on a document which reveals a secret
international Jewish conspiracy for global domination.
The document is none other than the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion which was originally created by the
Russian secret police at the end of the nineteenth century and was
circulated in 1919 to delegates at the Versailles peace conference. The
work (whose translation into English was sponsored in America by Henry
Ford) purports to reveal an international Jewish plot to take over the
government of the world. Once the most widely distributed book after the
Bible, and a crucial influence on Hitler, it was long ago discredited in
the Western world.
The Egyptian television blockbuster, however, treats this anti-semitic
forgery as genuine and blames the creation of the state of Israel
on the machinations of a sinister Jewish world-conspiracy. Its unashamed
anti-semitism gave rise to international protests which included a US
senate resolution. The fact that the series went ahead regardless has
strengthened the arguments of those who have portrayed militant Islam as
the new fascism.
The front cover of a recent edition of the Spectator,
to cite but one example of this tendency,
carries a striking illustration which depicts
terrorism as a
tiger mauling to death a man who cowers on the ground beneath its claws. The article
this relates to bears the title ‘They want to kill us all’ and is
introduced by the following ‘strap’:
Forget
the ‘root causes’, says Mark Steyn,
the massacre in Bali was part of the continuing Islamofascist war against
the West, and those who ignore it are sleepwalking to national suicide.
Steyn is by no means alone in characterising
Islamic extremists in this way. The term ‘Islamofascist’ is now frequently
combined, and implicitly justified, by references to Islamic
anti-semitism. In an article in the Sunday Times Andrew Sullivan
recently wrote: ‘Fanatical anti-semitism, as bad or even worse than
Hitler’s, is now a cultural norm across much of the Arab Middle East and
beyond. It’s the acrid glue that unites Saddam, Arafat, al Qaeda,
Hezbollah, Iran and the Saudis. They all hate the Jews and want to see
them destroyed.’
Such views are not only being expressed on the
right. It was Christopher Hitchens who, in the aftermath of the events of
September 11, spoke of ‘fascism with an Islamic face’. More recently,
immediately after the bombing in Bali, Clive James wrote an article for
the Guardian entitled ‘Don’t blame the West’. A typical Islamic
terrorist, he wrote, ‘believes that Hitler had the right idea, that
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a true story, and that the
obliteration of the state of Israel is a religious requirement.’
The charge that militant Islam
is inherently anti-semitic is, or should be, a deeply disturbing one. The
first question we need to ask is ‘is it true?’. My impression is that this
question tends to be avoided (or at least not adequately addressed) by
commentators such as John Pilger, Robert Fisk and Noam Chomsky who have
written most critically about the war on terrorism. If so, the omission is
a dangerous one, for it leaves extraordinarily powerful ammunition in the
sole possession of those who are the advocates of war. Those advocates
sometimes seem, on this issue, to be seeing reality more clearly than
their opponents do. If we are to redress the balance we need to reconsider
the entire question of Islamic anti-semitism.
The case of
Osama bin Laden is itself instructive. In a series of television
interviews which he gave before the attacks on New York and Washington, he
made it quite clear that, although America may be the prime target for the
killings which he has deliberately incited, the Jihad he supports is
directed against a shadowy alliance of ‘Jews and Crusaders’. He refers to
this elsewhere as ‘the external archenemy, the Crusader-Jewish alliance’.
Read carefully his pronouncements suggest that the ultimate enemy of
extremist Islam is a sinister power of which America is supposedly but the
puppet – the Jews. ‘The leaders in America,’ bin Laden says, ‘have fallen
victim to Jewish Zionist blackmail.’ Inside the Pentagon and the CIA, ‘the
Jews have the upper hand . . . They make use of America to further their
plans for the world, especially the Islamic world.’
The world-view expressed here echoes that of the work which lies at the
heart of the mythology of modern anti-semitism – the Protocols. The
reasons for the pervasive influence of the Protocols within the
Muslim world are not as well known as they should be. Many assume that
this forged anti-semitic document disappeared finally after the second
world war. In fact, however, as it began to go out of circulation in the
West, it was taken up in some parts of the Arab world. In Egypt it became
a key element in President Nasser’s war against Israel, and, as the
current controversy illustrates, the Egyptian media remain in thrall to
anti-semitic rhetoric and imagery to this day.
Even before Nasser, in the years preceding the Second World War, King
Sa’ud had helped to establish an extreme form of anti-semitism in bin
Laden’s own Saudi Arabia. King Feisal continued the tradition of his
father and used to present visiting diplomats (including Henry Kissinger)
with a copy of the Protocols. The Palestinian group Hamas invokes
the Protocols in its very charter; in extremist Islamic discourse
the Jewish people are sometimes depicted not only as the enemies of
Muhammad, but as the friends and allies of Satan, who have laid a plan to
undermine humanity religiously and ethically before seizing control of the
entire world. The only effective counter-measure, it is argued by some, is
to destroy Israel.
One sign of the extent to which anti-semitic discourse has found a place
within extremist Islam is provided by a Stockholm website hosted by ‘Radio
Islam’, where the full text of the Protocols, presented as an
authentic historical document, is available in Arabic, English, French,
German, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Swedish, and Spanish. On another
section of the site a revisionist essay claims that the Holocaust is ‘the
most colossal piece of fiction and the most successful of deceptions’.
Evidence of Islamic anti-semitism can also be found closer to home. On my
kitchen table is a white square card. Printed on it, both in English and
in Arabic, are the words ‘KEEP PALESTINE TIDY’. In the centre of the card
the silhouette of a man, his arm outstretched, is dropping a blue star of
David into a litter bin. This powerful piece of propaganda, with its
undertones of hatred and contempt, was given to me by a friend who had
been handed it by an Islamic group when she attended a recent peace march
in London.
One reason we hear so little about Arab and Muslim anti-semitism, except
from pro-Israeli commentators, is that to draw attention to it might seem
unhelpful to the Palestinian cause. It may also seem unjust to accuse of
vilifying their enemies those who fight in the cause of the very group of
people who are among the most vilified in the world: leading Israeli
politicians have described Palestinians as ‘cockroaches in a jar’,
‘two-legged beasts’ ‘lice’ and ‘a cancer in our midst’. As Edward Said
(among others) has pointed out, few national groups have been robbed of
their humanity in the eyes of the world more comprehensively than ordinary
Palestinian men and women.
Just as importantly, some pro-Israeli commentators and pressure groups
have used the charge of anti-semitism in an attempt to silence journalists
who make entirely legitimate criticisms of the Israeli government or the
Israeli military. So frequently have pro-Israeli factions, in making
complaints about anti-semitism, cried wolf in this manner that they have
debased the entire currency of such complaints. In the climate of
scepticism which has naturally resulted it has been much easier for
Palestinian Islamists (such as Hamas) and other Palestinian extremists to
exploit the mythology of anti-semitism without attracting censure from
western liberals.
Yet
demonological anti-semitism, which is almost a religion in itself, remains
essentially destructive, however seemingly just the cause in which it is
deployed. To demonise your enemy is to confuse issues, destroy moral
judgment, and block rational analysis. Such demonisation, which invisibly
licenses terrible acts of destruction, will pervert or corrupt any cause.
We have seen the results in the mutilated bodies of Israelis blown up by
suicide bombers; in the ruins of the twin towers in Manhattan as rescue
workers sifted through rubble for body parts; or in the night-club in Bali
after the recent mass slaughter. As Eduardo Galeano has written, ‘In the
battle between good and evil it is always the people that get killed.’
It is precisely because it can so easily be invoked as a justification for
killing innocent people that Islamic (or secular Arab) anti-semitism –
which, like any form of extreme bigotry, rests on the demonisation of a
hated Other – should be both fully acknowledged and resolutely and firmly
opposed.
But
the argument about demonisation cuts both ways. Merely to
anathematise Islamic terrorists as ‘evil’ is in itself to demonise an
enemy in a manner which risks deepening and intensifying the very moral
wrong which is condemned. The question which we need to ask at the same
time that we oppose it, is why anti-semitism has taken root within Islam.
For demonological anti-semitism is not an Islamic tradition; it is a
specifically western, Christian invention of which the racial
anti-semitism that emerged at the end of the 19th century was a modified
and secularised version.
‘Possibly,’ wrote the theologian Rosemary
Ruether, ‘anti-Judaism is too deeply embedded in the foundations of
Christianity to be rooted out entirely without destroying the whole
structure.’ But whereas Christianity, from the Gospel of John onwards,
always placed the Jews, as Christ-killers, at the very heart of its
demonology, Islam, while revering Jesus as a prophet, actually rejects the
view that he was crucified. This does not mean that Islam has been immune
to anti-Jewish prejudice. The idea that, before Israel’s creation, Muslims
and Jews always lived in harmony in Muslim lands is an idealistic
distortion. At times, Muslims have subjected Jews to discrimination and
persecution of a kind which has even led to violence. But although there
is a significant anti-Jewish strain within the Koran, Islam has never,
until recently, shown signs of succumbing to the kind of demonological
Jew-hatred which has been endemic in so many versions of Christianity.
It was not until around 1900, with the growing influence of Europeans in
the Middle East, and with the active dissemination of anti-semitism by
European colonists, that extreme anti-semitism began to spread both among
Arab Christians and among Muslims. It was the support given by the west –
and above all by Britain – for the creation of a Zionist state in
Palestine, which, almost inevitably, intensified the appeal of such
anti-Jewish bigotry.
The future of the Jewish people
and their Zionist project to settle in Palestine was, in the view of
Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary and author of the Balfour
Declaration of 1917, ‘of far profounder import than the desires and
prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land’.
However, the creation of a Jewish homeland in the middle east was, in part
at least, itself an anti-semitic project. In 1905 (when he had been prime
minister), Balfour himself had introduced the Aliens Bill to limit Jewish
immigration to Britain. Later, having met and talked to Cosima Wagner, he
confessed to sharing many of her anti-semitic views. The only Jewish
member of the British cabinet at the time of the Balfour Declaration,
Edwin Samuel Montagu, opposed it: ‘The policy of His Majesty’s
Government’, he wrote, ‘is anti-semitic . . . and will prove a rallying
ground for anti-semites in every country of the world.’
Montagu, who also raised
concerns about the fate of the ‘Mahommedans’ then living in Palestine, may
never have anticipated the extent to which European anti-semitism, having
played such a significant role in providing the new Zionist colony with
its population, would be adopted by Palestinian Arabs. Yet from the 1920s
onwards this is what happened.
The most damaging development
in this respect was itself the result of western meddling. When the Mufti
(religious leader) of Jerusalem died in 1921, the recently appointed
British Governor, Sir Herbert Samuel, took charge of appointing a
successor, inventing the new title of ‘Grand Mufti’.
When the local electoral college of pious Muslims voted for a moderate and
learned leader and placed at the bottom of their list Hajj Amin al-Husseini,
a young man in his twenties, given to fanaticism and hatred of the Jews,
the Governor was initially content and confirmed the appointment. However,
at this point the Hajj’s powerful family, backed by right-wing extremists,
launched a fierce campaign of denigration against the electoral college,
accusing its members of treacherously conspiring with the Jews to appoint
one of their own party.
Sir Herbert, who was himself Jewish, sought the counsel of E. T. Richmond,
who acted as adviser on Muslim Affairs, and who was an extreme
anti-Zionist. Richmond persuaded Sheikh Hisam al-Din, the man who had
already been confirmed in the post, to stand down. He then convinced
Samuel that the best way to restore order was to concede to the agitators
by letting the Hajj become Grand Mufti. This was in spite of the fact that
the Hajj had already been imprisoned by the British in 1920 for his role
in fomenting vicious anti-Jewish riots.
The British themselves were thus responsible for turning an electoral
process upside-down in order to install an extremist Palestinian leader.
This abuse of power would have fateful consequences not only for the
future of Israel but also for ordinary Palestinians who were now subjected
to a leader they had not chosen but for whose ill-judged actions they
would, in the years to come, repeatedly be held responsible.
At first, the Grand Mufti sought to rally both the Muslim masses and
Islamic leaders throughout the world against Zionism by appealing to
feelings of violated sanctity. His claims that the Zionists intended to
re-build Solomon’s temples on the ruins of the Great Mosques used religion
in order to fan the flames of nationalism and anti-Jewish sentiment.
Then, during the 1930s, a large
part of the Arab world was naturally drawn towards Germany. The Middle
East had been effectively taken over since 1918 by Britain and France.
Now, Germany, which had itself been humiliated by the Versailles treaty,
seemed set to humiliate the humiliators. German anti-semitic propaganda
almost immediately began to be used by Arab campaigners against the
Zionist colony which British anti-semitism had helped to establish.
Throughout the war Hajj Amin remained in touch with the German government,
and in 1941, having fled via Syria and Iraq to Berlin, he held talks with
Hitler in which he thanked him for the ‘unequivocal support’ he had shown
for the Palestinians. During this same period, anti-semitic propaganda
broadcast in Arabic from Berlin had a significant effect in Egypt, Iraq,
Morocco, Tunisia and in other Arab countries.
Although such propaganda
disappeared from Europe after the end of the war it continued to circulate
in the Arab world. In Egypt anti-semitism was taken up not only by Nasser,
but also, in a particularly violent form, by Sayyid Qutb, the
western-influenced ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood whom Nasser
executed and who, more than anyone else, shaped the thinking of modern,
militant Islam including that of bin Laden himself. In Qutb’s view, Jews,
who had always rebelled against God, were inherently evil: ‘From such
creatures who kill, massacre and defame prophets, one can only expect the
spilling of human blood and dirty means which would further their
machinations and evilness.’
What this intricate story
should serve to demonstrate is that the destructive form which
anti-semitism has now assumed within militant Islam, though it undoubtedly
does have precursors in the Koran and in Muslim tradition, is not
authentically Islamic; this new form of anti-semitism is distinctively
western. Certainly, the dreams of world-domination which drive extreme
Islamists have been there from the beginning. But such dreams are not
unique to Islam; they are the common property of all three Abrahamic
faiths. For, in that they look forward to a time when the entire world
will bow down to the God they worship, Judaism, Christianity and Islam
have always been, at their scriptural core, ideologies of
world-domination. It was in the Christian tradition alone that the fantasy
of world-domination was denied and projected onto the Jewish people.
Because the historical origins
of Islamic anti-semitism are so complex it is simplistic and unhelpful to
refer, as Christopher Hitchens has done, to ‘fascism with an Islamic
face’. By using this formula, Hitchens – like George Bush announcing a war
against ‘evil’ – intensifies the progressive demonisation of extremist
Islam which has been going on for many years. And Hitchens’s solution is
as chilling as that of the Arab anti-semites. ‘It is impossible,’ he
writes, ‘to compromise with the proponents of sacrificial killing of
civilians, the disseminators of anti-Semitic filth, the violators of women
and the cheerful murderers of children … In confronting such people, the
crucial thing is to be willing and able, if not in fact eager, to kill
them without pity before they can get started.’
Those on the right who have taken up the chant of ‘Islamofascism’
repeatedly enjoin us to ‘forget the root causes’. Yet the vaunted purpose
of the military and political decisions which are being taken now is to
eliminate or lessen the peril which we face. It has been said on many
occasions already, and should be said again, that if we ignore history in
doing this, we may actually increase that peril. For, given the blind
folly of the middle eastern policy we pursued at the beginning of the last
century, there is a very real danger that the cure we now prescribe for
the new Islamic militancy will not be a cure at all but a further and yet
more malignant cause.
If we are to avoid such an outcome we should above all recognise that the
proximate cause for the transfer of a murderous form of anti-semitism from
Christianity to Islam can only be found in the decision of the great
powers, and above all of Britain, to back the Zionist project.
By underwriting the establishment of a Jewish colony in Palestine, the
great powers were not, as some politicians misguidedly believed, providing
a radical solution to the problem of European anti-semitism. On the
contrary they were in some respects guaranteeing the continuation, and
even intensification, of one of the most destructive forms of prejudice
there has ever been. In choosing Palestine they had not succeeded in
finding what Zionists understandably sought – a safe haven for the Jewish
people. Instead they had agreed to locate the new homeland in one of the
most dangerous of all territorial enclaves, where conflict with
Palestinian Arabs was inevitable. When Britain itself imposed an extremist
and anti-semitic leader on ordinary Palestinians, it helped to create in
the Middle East a crucible of hatred.
It was, or should have been, entirely predictable that a historically
oppressed people, placed in these circumstances, and subjected at times to
violent anti-semitic attacks, might in the long term feel themselves
driven, in order to ensure their future safety, to attempt to take what
they had not been given. As early as 1923, Vladimir Jabotinski, the
founder of the Union of Zionist Revisionists, argued that Zionism was
essentially a colonial enterprise and that it should therefore be
militarised: ‘Zionism is a colonising adventure and it therefore stands or
falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is
important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important
to be able to shoot - or else I am through with playing at colonisation.’
Only an ‘iron wall of Jewish bayonets’, he said, could force the
Palestinian Arabs to accept the inevitable - ‘the transformation of
Palestine into Eretz Israel.’
What Jabotinski implicitly
recognised was that any attempt to settle on land already occupied by
another national group was inherently aggressive and would inevitably be
perceived in this way. Although the initial Zionist colonisation of
Palestine was achieved almost entirely by peaceful means, Jabotinski was
entirely correct in anticipating that the Palestinians would increasingly
resort to violence in an attempt to preserve their ownership of a land
which they naturally considered theirs both by history and by right. In
doing so they were reacting not so much to the acts of Zionism, but to its
evident colonial intentions. Within the Zionist movement these were
sometimes made explicit. As David Ben Gurion put it in 1936: ‘I favour
partition of the country because when we become a strong power after the
establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and spread
throughout Palestine.’
Given the terrifying alternatives, particularly when these were confirmed
historically by the rise of Hitler and the mass-killings of innocent
Jewish people which took place in the Holocaust, it should not be
surprising that Zionists would increasingly accept the kind of arguments
which Jabotinski put forward, and would seek to secure their newly
acquired territory by arming themselves.
The state of Israel itself was
established only after a campaign of deliberate killing which was
waged against the British military in order to force them to withdraw and
allow the creation of an Israeli state. When, in February 1947, the
British government effectively conceded that Palestine was ungovernable
and handed the entire problem over to the United Nations, this goal was
within grasp. Once the UN had voted to partition Palestine, however, in
November 1947, the Jewish colonists found themselves under attack from a
Liberation Army assembled by the Arabs. It would seem clear that this
Liberation Army was, to some degree at least, driven not simply by
considerations of self-preservation, but also by anti-semitism. As Azzam
Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League, said in a radio broadcast:
‘This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre.’
The ensuing conflict almost
inevitably led into a spiral of violence. In April 1948, after a number of
Arab attacks on Jewish settlements, the two most extreme Zionist
organisations, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, attacked the Arab village of
Deir Yassin outside Jerusalem in reprisal. After a fierce battle, a
horrific massacre took place during which as many as two hundred men,
women, children and old people were killed and their bodies mutilated.
Although Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun, cannot have known at
this point the details of what had taken place, his reaction was
nevertheless significant. He sent out his congratulations ‘on this
splendid act of conquest .... As at Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will
attack and smite the enemy. God, God thou hast chosen us for conquest.’
The establishment of the state of Israel took place on 14 May 1948 when
Ben Gurion read out the Scroll of Independence in the Tel Aviv museum. The
next day, as the last of the British left, the Arab armies invaded. In the
course of the conflict that followed the Israeli army established military
supremacy over territory which still remains in its possession. As
almost 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled Israeli-occupied land, and took
refuge in Jordan, Transjordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and the Gaza
strip, the modern Arab-Israeli problem was created.
The pattern set during the brutal conflict of 1947-8 is one which has been
continued since. It is a pattern in which Jewish colonists, partly because
of the extremity of their own situation, and the vicious anti-semitism
they have experienced at the hands both of some Europeans and some Arabs,
have frequently felt justified in evicting Palestinians from their homes,
expropriating their land and ruthlessly crushing any resistance.
Given such treatment it was only to be expected that Palestinians would
react like any group of dispossessed people. And that both sides
should increasingly succumb to extremist leaders or factions who saw in
violence the only solution to their conflict.
At the point in the conflict which we have now reached it is not only the
case that both sides have engaged in war; both have also resorted to the
application of terror against civilians and engaged in ‘targeted killings’
(for we should make no mistake that suicide-bombing too is a form of
targeted killing, directed deliberately and indefensibly against innocent
Israeli citizens).
The conflict has reached this stage in part because of our own inaction.
In watching silently, or with insufficient protests, as the newly created
state of Israel became an expansionist power, we have allowed the hatred
engendered by this colonial project to deepen inexorably. And by failing
to recognise the extent to which, over a period of almost a century,
murderous forms of Western anti-semitism were being spread by word of
mouth, by written propaganda, and by Arabic editions of the Protocols,
throughout the Middle East and beyond, we have produced one of the most
dangerous conflicts in history.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all is that, by massively underwriting and
financially supporting only one side in this conflict, and by failing to
address imaginatively, or even at all, the plight of the Palestinians, the
United States, often with the help of other western powers, has
unintentionally multiplied the hatred on both sides.
Partly because the truth of what is happening in the Occupied Territories
has been kept from the American people both by the politicians who are
paid to serve them and by too many of the journalists who claim to inform
them, ordinary American people have themselves become unwitting
participants in the conflict. The taxes which they have paid have been
used on a massive scale to help sustain the brutal occupation of parts of
the land of one of the most beleaguered and defenceless nations in the
world
What makes the conflict potentially even more deadly than it otherwise
would be is that the creation of the state of Israel overlapped
historically with the establishment throughout the Middle East of
western-led or western-inspired regimes which set out to marginalise or
crush traditional religious observance. In Egypt, in Tunisia, in Iran and
elsewhere, such secularism enraged devout Muslims. In Iran, for example,
Britain and America directly sponsored the regimes of two westernising
tyrants, the Shah and his father, who used torture and terror in their
efforts to undermine ordinary Muslim piety. The result was a brutal
Islamic revolution which unleashed anti-Israeli and anti-American
terrorism on an unprecedented scale.
The response of militant Islam to the continued interference by the West
in Muslim affairs has, by its sheer brutality, daring and ruthless
cruelty, licensed (or appeared to license) a counter-response from the
West on a scale which would once have been unimaginable.
Militant Islamists have now
provided America with the seemingly perfect justification to intensify the
policy of world-domination it has long pursued. By adopting a strategy of
murderous terror and by striking principally against American citizens,
they have enabled the naked imperial ambitions of the United States to be
clothed with seeming reasonableness. By embracing extreme forms of
anti-semitism which are unislamic, and a medieval form of shariah law
which is not supported by millions of moderate Muslims, they have assisted
their own demonisation. By calling for the murder of innocent civilians
they have betrayed the ideals of the Prophet and perverted the very faith
that they profess.
The effect of their actions has in many respects been the opposite of what
they seek. In the United States a foreign policy strategy, many elements
of which were actually formulated before September 11, and which would
once have aroused substantial opposition even inside America, has now been
made to appear, in the eyes of many, ethically respectable.
It is certainly true that, when they stress the repressiveness of militant
Islam, its misogyny, its anti-semitism and its religious dreams of
world-domination, commentators like Hitchens, the contrarian leftist, and
Andrew Sullivan, the Catholic Republican, point to aspects of Islamist
thought which are real. Although a grasp of these is essential to any
understanding of our present predicament, they have often been absent from
the left’s analysis of September 11 and its aftermath.
The great danger of the left’s
omissions, and in particular its failure to engage with the problem of
Arab anti-semitism, is that Hitchens, Sullivan and all those commentators
who have characterised their opponents as ‘Islamofascist’, are currently
succeeding in persuading many people of what is false by urging upon them
what is true.
Contrary to what they suggest,
the greatest threat to world peace we now face is not that posed by
Islamist dreams of world-domination; it is that which is posed by our
failure to understand that these cruel and destructive dreams are
themselves intimately related - by a complex process of reciprocal
influence - to western fantasies of world-domination.
Largely because of the massive increase of military and economic power
which has taken place in America over the last half-century, it is these
western fantasies which are much nearer to being realised. Yet precisely
because the imperialism of the United States is the habitual environment
in which we live, these fantasies have been rendered, like the ocean to
the fish, all but invisible to us. So too has the extent to which we have
dislocated the rest of the world in order to turn them into reality.
As the history of Islamic
anti-semitism enters a new phase and the myth of the Protocols is
disseminated further through the Arab world by a television blockbuster,
the partial truths which Hitchens and Sullivan have enunciated so fiercely
cannot be dispensed with.
But the idea that there is some
kind of autonomous ‘Islamofascism’ which can be crushed, or that the West
may defend itself against the terrorists who threaten it by cultivating
that eagerness to kill militant Muslims which Hitchens urges upon us, is a
dangerous delusion.
The symptoms that have led some
to apply the label of ‘Islamofascism’ are not reasons to forget root
causes. They are reasons for us to examine even more carefully than we
have done up to now what those causes actually are.
When we do so, we find that one of the keys to the problem remains in the
history of Western colonialism in the middle east, and above all in
Palestine. It is there, and not in Iraq, or Iran or Syria that our main
political energies and our strategic intelligence should now be deployed.
This revised edition posted 21.00 GMT, 4 January 2003.
A version of this article appeared in the New Statesman on 29
November, 2002.
A library of links
This web-based
bibliography is still being compiled and will gradually (and probably
slowly) expand.
After reading an earlier
version of this essay, one American commentator, who maintains an
interesting and at times unusually well-written online journal under the
title
De Spectaculis,
relayed to his readers his own response. The essay itself was worth
recommending, he wrote, but ‘the real treasure is the collection of links
at the end. Read the articles. Think about them. Wrestle with the
implications. There are opportunities for understanding collected here,
opportunities for peace.’
I can only endorse that appeal. For the links collected here are offered
not as an appendix to the main article, but as a part of it. And because
they represent the voices of moderate Palestinians and Israelis who are
seeking ways of ensuring peace and co-existence, they are indeed, I
believe, the most valuable part.
(It should be noted that all the Palestinian voices represented here
implicitly or explicitly accept that some form of reconciliation with or
co-existence with Israelis will be a part of any solution to the
conflict. A century ago the entire question of Zionism and of the right
of the Jewish people to their own homeland was a matter of open debate.
Today, after more than a century of Zionism and half a century of Israeli
history, Israel’s right to exist is not, or should not be, at issue among
serious commentators in the west. It may not be anti-semitic to raise this
question; but it is, as many moderate, peace-seeking Palestinians would
agree, generally unhelpful. At the same time it is important to recognise
that Israel’s right to exist is not generally conceded by Islamists and by
some other extreme Palestinian groups. The fear, felt by most Israelis at
some level or another, that there are those in the region who are
dedicated to destroying Israel and removing it from the map of the Middle
East is not an irrational anxiety; it is grimly realistic.)
Introductory
essentials
Sharon's best
weapon
by Naomi Klein
In this acute and
politically wise article, Naomi Klein argues in the Guardian that
Israel's prime minister Ariel Sharon and the Zionist right thrive on
anti-semitism and on the failure of others to oppose it:
'It's easy for social justice activists
to tell themselves that since Jews already have such powerful defenders in
Washington and Jerusalem, anti-semitism is one battle they don't need to
fight. This is a deadly error. It is precisely because anti-semitism is
used and abused by the likes of Sharon that the fight against it must be
reclaimed.'
'When anti-semitism is no longer treated as
Jewish business, to be taken care of by Israel and the rightwing Zionist
lobby, Sharon is robbed of his most effective weapon in the indefensible
and increasingly brutal occupation.'
Two Wronged
Peoples
David Astor
The classic 1967 editorial written by
David Astor, the Observer's greatest editor.
My Fellow
Muslims, we must fight anti-semitism
by Joseph Algazy
Article from Ha'aretz (the
liberal-progressive Israeli newspaper). In it Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim and
the grandson of Hassan Al-Bana, founder of the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood, speaks out against anti-semitism.
A Horseless
Rider
by Quais S. Saleh
In Counterpunch Quais Saleh, a Palestinian Arab, opposes
the broadcasting of the Protocols TV blockbuster:
'Bigotry should be rejected, regardless of who it is directed against.
Feeding Arab families (including the children) carefully measured doses of
hatred is morally repugnant and will eventually come back to haunt us when
this cycle of bigotry starts enveloping the next target. Taking the
program off-air will be a victory for reason, universal values, and the
old Arab tradition of tolerance that now seem to be under constant
attack.'
The Second Intifada:
A Palestinian Perspective
by Samah Jabr
Samah Jabr is a young Palestinian doctor who
was born and brought up in Jerusalem where she still lives and works. A
child during the first Intifada, she reflects here upon the second, taking
as her starting point the kind of defamation and demonisation for which
there is no convenient name like 'anti-semitism' but which is just as
dangerous and just as destructive:
'During the horror that faces us daily on the
West Bank, these are some of the interviews heard on television.
Said one Israeli settler when asked how he
felt about the death of 12-year-old Muhammad Al-Durra, a Palestinian boy
in Gaza: "Our kids are the kids of God; theirs are the kids of Satan."
"They [Palestinians] are not humans...they
are animals," said another . . . '.
In her article Jabr goes on, with simple and
moving eloquence, to convey the human tragedy of present-day Palestine.
We can never
lose
by Samah Jabr
Here Jabr explores the central moral dilemma
of all those who find themselves victims of oppression - how to resist
those who demonise you without demonising them in return:
'Dehumanizing one’s enemy is nothing new to our world; it seems to be a
universal human fault. It is a self-engineered ploy and an immature
defense mechanism that helps people to feel less guilty about the crimes
they commit against others. It is also an ominous sign, predictive of one
nation’s desire to eradicate another.
'We will win the cultural battle only if we
don’t fail to see the human in our enemy, and if we preserve the moral
aspect of our cause. When we rise above the atrocities we have been
exposed to, and never subject others to them, we’ll never get
psychologically defeated . . . We are a nation of unarmed civilians and
although a nuclear power like Israel can surely win the military battle,
and kill most of us, no military power can destroy our love, pride and
dignity.'
Propaganda and
war
by Edward Said
How can it be that, in the first section of a
web bibliography about Israel and Palestine which is headed 'introductory
essentials' there are (including this one) five articles written by
Palestinians or Muslims and only one (which is also critical of Israel) by
a writer who is Jewish?
The answer to this question is given by Edward Said in one of the most
powerful of all his articles. As he implicitly recognises, every supporter
of Israel will be anxious that Zionist points of view should be widely
disseminated and widely understood. But, to a very large degree, that has
already been achieved in the western media. As Said points out in this
article from Al Ahram, 'Israel has already poured hundreds of
millions of dollars into what in Hebrew is called hasbara, or
information for the outside world (hence, propaganda).'
It is the Palestinian view which has been marginalised or suppressed and
that is why I have deliberately sought to 'over-represent' it in this
section of the bibliography.
Said goes on to say this:
'Overall, then . . . Palestinians are viewed neither in terms of a story
that is theirs, nor in terms of a human image with which people can easily
identify. So successful has Israeli propaganda been that it would seem
that Palestinians really have few, if any positive connotations. They are
almost completely dehumanised.'
'In the American mind, analogies with South
Africa's liberation struggle or with the horrible fate of the Native
Americans most emphatically do not occur. We must make those analogies
above all by humanising ourselves and thus reversing the cynical, ugly
process whereby American columnists like Charles Krauthammer and George
Will audaciously call for more killing and bombing of Palestinians, a
suggestion they would not dare do for any other people. Why should we
passively accept the fate of flies or mosquitoes, to be killed wantonly
with American backing any time war criminal Sharon decides to wipe out a
few more of us?'
Said then relays the news that the American
Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) is, at the time he writes, about
to launch 'an unprecedented public information campaign in the mass media
to redress the balance and present the Palestinians as human beings - can
you believe the irony of such a necessity? - as women who are teachers and
doctors as well as mothers, men who work in the field and are nuclear
engineers, as people who have had years and years of military occupation
and are still fighting back.'
'This new ADC campaign,' Said writes, 'sets
out to restore [to the Palestinians] their history and humanity, to show
them (as they have always been) as people "like us", fighting for the
right to live in freedom, to raise their children, to die in peace. Once
even the glimmerings of this story penetrate the American consciousness,
the truth will, I hope, begin to dissipate the vast cloud of evil
propaganda with which Israel has covered reality. . . And then, we can
hope again.'
What went wrong? The answer is provided by the date on which this article
appeared. It was the issue of Al Ahram dated 30 August - 5
September 2001. A week later the plan to restore to Palestinans their
humanity in the eyes of American beholders was one of the casualties
which, along with thousands of innocent citizens, would be found among the
rubble of the Twin Towers in Manhattan.
In the September attacks bin Laden did not only kill US citizens. Without
ever intending to, he destroyed the most intelligent and far-sighted
campaign which had ever been conceived in America on behalf of one of the
most beleaguered of all nations; he bombed the hopes of ordinary
Palestinians.
Israeli and Jewish perspectives
Manufacturing
Anti-Semites
by Uri Avnery
Uri Avnery, a leading figure in the Israeli
peace movement, argues that, because of the policies of Sharon, Jewish
people throughout the world are trapped in a dangerous vicious circle:
'Sharon's actions create repulsion and opposition throughout the world.
These reinforce anti-Semitism. Faced with this danger, Jewish
organizations are pushed into defending Israel and giving it unqualified
support. This support enables the anti-Semites to attack not only the
government of Israel, but the local Jews, too. And so on.'
Of Murder and
Suicide
Ami Isseroff
A sceptical Israeli view which, while sympathetic to the plight of the
Palestinian people, depicts some of the latest terrorist murders as 'an
inevitable result of the chaos and gangsterism that govern Palestinian
society'.
This Land is
Your Land
Jacqueline Rose
Literature professor Jacqueline Rose reflects
on a recent visit to Israel.
Interview with
the historian Ilan Pappe:
Israeli Jewish
myths and the prospect of American war
interviewed by Joseph Cooper and Kristin Karlson
Illan Pappe is, along with Benny Morris
and Avi Shlaim one of the 'new historians' who have attempted to re-write
the history of the birth of Israel, rejecting the orthodox Israeli view
that the majority of Palestinian refugees who fled during the conflict of
1947-9 left of their own accord. Pappe's own work is contested by many of
his fellow scholars. A
particularly fierce
controversy
continues to rage around his
role in Teddy Katz's MA thesis concerning a massacre which allegdly took
place in Tantura in 1948.
Benny Morris
and the Reign of Error
Efraim Karsh
Karsh's attack on Morris's scholarship
has sometimes been portrayed as a successful exercise in discrediting the
man who was once regarded as the leading Israeli 'new historian'.
Peace? No
Chance
Benny Morris
The radical historian changes tack and in
this article, published in February 2002, launches a fierce attack on the
Palestinian leadership.
A
Betrayal
of History
Avi Shlaim
In a reply to Morris's article, his
fellow 'new historian' Avi Shlaim characterises the view of his erstwhile
intellectual ally as 'simplistic, selective and self-serving'.
Christians who hate Jews
Melanie Phillips
An unusual and disturbing perspective on Christian anti-semitism and the
role of 'replacement theology' in rekindling traditional Christian
anti-semitism.
The
doctor and the ambassador
An exchange
of letters between Ismail Zayid and Norman Spector
Dr. Ismail Zayid, a retired physician and
exiled Palestinian, is President of the Canada Palestine Association.
Norman Spector is a former
Canadian ambassador to Israel who is now a columnist for
the Toronto-based newspaper, the Globe. In this exchange Dr
Zayid reaffirms the view that Palestians were indeed systematically driven
out of Palestine in 1948. For the home page of his pro-Palestine website,
which forms a rich resource of information and links, click
here.
Peace Movements and Possible Solutions
Gush Shalom
Israeli peace movement
Courage to
Refuse
Israeli soldiers who have declared that
'we shall not continue to fight beyond the 1967 borders in order to
dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an entire people.' Perhaps the most
powerful part of this website are the articles written by some of those
who have refused.
A State for All
Its Citizens - One Palestinian’s Dream of Peace
by Samah Jabr
Can a two-state solution work?
Arab
and Islamic Anti-Semitism
If the first section of this
bibliography might appear to over-represent the views of Palestinians, the
essays and article in this section are almost all written by Jewish
scholars from a pro-Israel point of view. Their perspective on bigoty and
demonisation is in nearly all cases a narrow one, and almost nowhere in
them is there any recognition of the plight of the Palestinians, or of the
extent to which they have been dehumanised and demonised in the
imagination and language of right-wing Zionists and others. The essays
are included here not because I necessarily endorse their arguments or
conclusions (or share their perspective), but because, in most cases, they
contain valuable material which ought to be better known than it is.
Muslim
Anti-Semitism: A Clear and Present Danger
by Robert S. Wistrich
This long, 18,000-word essay is the most
substantial and detailed account of Islamic anti-semitism available
online. It is published by the American Jewish Comittee and written by
Robert S Wistrich, Neuberger Professor of Modern European and Jewish
History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (For my 1992 review of
Wistrich's Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred, a book which
contains four chapters on Islamic anti-semitism, click
here.)
The Islamic
Fundamentalist View of Life as a Perennial Battle
by David Zeidan
An extremely helpful survey
which includes a section on the anti-semitism of Sayyid Qutb which is
directly relevant to the beliefs of bin Laden.
The Long Trail
of Arab Anti-Semitism
by Efraim Karsh
Efraim Karsh is Professor of
Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, University of London. This
article originally appeared in Commentary in December 2000.
On the Salience
of Islamic Anti-Semitism
by
Martin Kramer
The text of a lecture
delivered at the Institute of Jewish Affairs in London in 1995. Martin
Kramer is a former director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern
and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. He has recently achieved a
degree of notoriety as an ally of
Daniel Pipes
and a supporter of
Campus Watch (1)
(2)
. Given his current profile, this article is a
surprisingly measured and helpful contribution. Particularly worthy of
note is his assessment of the role played by anti-semitism in Islamism,
something which he saw much earlier and much more clearly than
many: 'Islam is not inherently antisemitic. But Islamism is, and anyone
viewing the world through its prism will inevitably see conspiring Jews.'
Although this may overstate the position, in that it fails to allow for
the many different forms which Islamism can take, it comes much closer to
being an accurate assessment of the dominant form of modern Islamism than
the views expressed by most middle eastern scholars in 1995 - or even
today.
Kramer, who has a
website
of his own, is now the editor of the Middle East Quarterly - part of the
Daniel Pipes think-tank,
Middle East Forum.
Islamic
Anti-Semitism as a Political Instrument
by Yossef Bodansky
Yossef Bodansky is the director of the
Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare and a
former senior consultant to the U.S. Departments of Defense and State.
What Went
Wrong?
by Bernard Lewis
Bernard Lewis, whose book
Semites and
Anti-Semites (1986), was one of first full-length
studies of the rise of Islamic anti-semitism, writes here of Islam's sense
of failure and its search for external scapegoats - including the Jews -
to blame for its modern predicament.
Muslim
Anti-Semitism
by Bernard Lewis
Lewis on the Islamization of the classic
motifs of Western anti-semitism and on the consequences of this for the
peace process.
The New
Anti-Semitism
by Daniel Pipes
In an article whose tone and perspective
renders it likely to increase the very kinds of intolerance it opposes,
Pipes examines the prevalence of anti-semitism among western, and
particularly American Muslims.
Protocols
by Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan reflects in the New
Republic (30 October, 2001) on his own reluctance to acknowledge the
reality and depth of Islamic anti-semitism.
Think
tanks and pressure groups
Memri
The Middle East Media Research Institute. For
a critical perspective on the role of this organisation, see Brian
Whitaker's Guardian article,
Selective Memri
Anti-Defamation
League
Long-established Jewish organisation
campaiging against anti-semitism. Commentary to follow.
Middle East
Forum
The Daniel Pipes think-tank
which unashamedly declares as its aim that of working 'to define and
promote American interests in the Middle East'. This includes seeking 'a
stable supply and a low price of oil'.
IPCRI
Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information. Describes itself
as 'the only joint Israeli-Palestinian public policy think-tank in the
world. It is devoted to developing practical solutions for the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.'
Alternative
Information Centre
A Palestinian Israeli organisation which seeks to disseminate news 'while
promoting cooperation between Palestinians and Israelis based on the
values of social justice, solidarity and community involvement'.
Palestine
Solidarity Campaign
UK based campaigning organisation
dedicated to the Palestinian cause.
Jews for
Justice for Palestinians
A recently founded network of British
Jews, including a number of prominent figures, 'who oppose Israeli
policies that undermine the livelihoods, human, civil and political rights
of the Palestinian people'.
The MidEastWeb
Group
An internet based group, whose 'goal is to
weave a world-wide web of Arabs, Jews and others who want to build a new
Middle East based on coexistence and neighborly relations'.
