RUTHFULLY YOURS

Keep Hatred Alive

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The Arab masses have a new hero. His name is Ahmed al-Shahat, a 23-year-old man who climbed a building in Cairo to remove the flag from Israel’s embassy and replace it with an Egyptian one. Thousands of demonstrators cheered him on while burning Israeli flags and chanting “God is great!”

The Arab press has devoted many stories to the man’s exploits, dubbing him “Flagman” – an Arab Spiderman. As journalist Khaled abu-Toameh writes, “It is not that hard to become a hero in the Arab world. It is enough to say something bad about the Jewish state or carry out an anti-Israel attack to turn one into a hero.”

Toameh points out that the flag incident reminds us that, “Egypt in particular, and the Arab world in general, are not headed toward moderation, especially in regard to recognizing Israel’s right to exist.” In fact, the situation has worsened in Tunisia and Egypt, two states that have seen regime change. Last month, Tunisia announced a new ‘pact’ that would act as the basis for a future constitution. The formulators included as part of this pact a rejection of ‘any form of normalization with the Zionist State’. In Egypt, the revolutionaries want more than the Israeli flag to go. They now demand that the Israeli embassy be shut down and Israel’s ambassador expelled. In a recent statement, the Muslim Brotherhood has threatened the ambassador’s life, telling him “leave Egypt or die”.

Yes, hate is still very much alive even in this ‘Arab Spring’.

This hate was kept alive even when Egypt was supposedly honoring its commitments under the Egypt-Israel Treaty, which expressly called for an end to hostile propaganda. During Egyptian President Mubarak’s rule, one could pick up a copy of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” from virtually any street vendor in Cairo. Egyptian newspapers were filled with vicious charges against Israel over the years, from blowing up the Pam Am plane over Lockerbie, Scotland (Al-Masa’a, Dec. 11, 1991) to exporting radiation contaminated food to Egypt (al-Ahram, June 8, 1987) to “introducing most of the plagues that afflict agriculture and animal health” (Al-Jumhuriyah, Sept. 13, 1988).

The young people demonstrating in front of the Israeli embassy in Cairo are the product of this Mubarak-era propaganda, having learned their anti-Semitic ABCs in their homes, schools and from their media. In “Heaven on Earth” (Oxford University Press, 2011), author Richard Landes quotes an Islamic intellectual who explains why it’s important to keep the hatred alive.

“The role of the Islamic stream is to keep the flame of hatred toward Zionism burning in their souls. This is because we are not ready to fight and use our military power, due to the limitations forced on us. We are not capable of conducting daily confrontations with Israel in the battlefield, because it is not in our hand, but rather in the hands of others (meaning, the Palestinian Authority). Nevertheless, we are capable of cultivating the flame of hatred to this enemy in the souls of our sons, daughters, and grandchildren. We can make hatred burn among the public. If we manage to do so, in our homes and with the help of our schools and media, our efforts will be successful. The fighting will come one of these days and if by that time the ideology of hatred has faded, we will be defeated; on the other hand, if on this day we will still hate [Israel], victory will be ours, with the help of Allah.”*

From what source does this extraordinary hatred come? Contrary to the oft-repeated, modern refrain that Jews and Muslims lived in peace for centuries, anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in Islamic and Arab culture, beginning with the Koran (2:61), which states, “And humiliation and wretchedness were stamped upon them and they were visited with wrath from Allah. That was because they disbelieved in Allah’s revelations and slew the prophets wrongfully.”

In 1172, in his Epistle to the Jews of Yemen, the Jewish scholar Maimonides writes: “The nation of Ishmael… persecute us severely and devise ways to harm us and to debase us. … None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None has been able to reduce us as they have. We have done as our sages of blessed memory instructed us, bearing the lies and absurdities of Ishmael. We listen, but remain silent. … In spite of all this, we are not spared from the ferocity of their wickedness, and their outbursts at any time. On the contrary, the more we suffer and choose to conciliate them, the more they choose to act belligerently toward us.”**

Shmuel Katz understood the roots of the conflict well. As he wrote in “Can the Palestinian Problem be Solved?” (Van Leer Foundation, Jerusalem, 1982):

Since the seventh century the Arabs knew the Jews of Palestine as a suppressed and contemptible minority, the subject of constant oppression. The Jews always lived as a vanquished people, shadowed by the memory of their defeat in the year 70. Even though the Christians were also inferior in the Muslim conception, they had the backing of many countries, they had power. But the Jews, oppressed and ostracized even in large parts of the Christian world, had nothing. The Arab himself, even when he was the victim of discrimination, humiliation or maltreatment in a non-Arab Muslim society, always regarded the Jew as being one rung below him.

In terms of the Arab vision, then, the idea of a foreign state —and the more so that of the most despised race of all — “in the heart of the Arab world” was an utter abomination. Its establishment must be blocked, and if established it must be annihilated.

Here, then, in all its unadorned simplicity, is the fundamental truth that underlies the conflict, a truth that has been buried under countless layers of tendentious propaganda. Hundreds, even thousands, of categorical pronouncements, differing only in their wording, affirm and underscore this truth. In May 1946, when the Jewish state was no more than a “threat” on the horizon, leaders of the Arab states meeting at Inshass, Egypt, declared: “The problem of Palestine is not the problem only of the Arabs of Palestine, but of all the Arabs.”

“When Palestine is injured,” Egyptian president Nasser said in 1953, “each of us is injured in his feelings and in his homeland.” The very core of the Arabs’ objective was set forth by the ruling Ba’ath Party of Syria at its conference in 1966: “The existence of Israel in the heart of the Arab homeland constitutes the main base dividing the eastern part from the western part of the Arab nation.”

This Arab truth was flagrantly exposed in the words of Egypt’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Butrus Ghali, in a symposium sponsored by the periodical Al-Siyassa Al-Dawilla in October 1975: “Palestine is the heart of the Arab homeland before it is the homeland of the Palestinians.” …

In Arab history, 1948 is the “year of the disaster.” The valorous Arabs, masters of the world, were vanquished by a handful of members of the despised community; and the state of these heretics, even if it occupied only part of Palestine, remained —strengthened — in its place. Never did the Arabs show even the slightest intimation of acceptance. On the contrary, their rejection of Israel and their determination to take revenge and undo what had been done, with the final purpose of annihilating the Jewish state, intensified. For it was inconceivable that the Jews should have defeated the Arab nation.

When one understands this basic fact, it is no surprise that the Arab Spring has not brought about a change of attitude among the Arab masses. Centuries of slander has placed the hatred of despised Jewry deep into the heart of the Arab volk. Indeed, the tyrants whom the Arab masses have recently overthrown may have helped keep that hatred in check. As the Arabs slough off one dictator after another, don’t expect greater democracy to give way to greater understanding, rather expect greater displays of anti-Semitism and a renewed outburst of enthusiasm for Israel’s demise.

*Salim Al-‘Awa, Islamic intellectual close to Sheikh Qaradawi, published in Al-Istiqlal, August 28, 1998, trans. MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series, no. 5, August 31, 1998 (italics retained from “Heaven on Earth”)

**”The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism”, Andrew G. Bostom, Prometheus Books, 2008