Israel’s Jewish State Provides Safe Haven to Middle East Minorities : Andrew Harrod
https://philosproject.org/jewish-state-israel/
Israeli Arab Christian diplomat George Deek made very interesting comments on Israel as the Middle East’s one hopeful island of diversity this past October.
Israeli diplomat George Deek has often described himself as an “orthodox Christian within the Arab minority in the Jewish State in the Muslim Middle East.” During an Oct. 29 Hudson Institute presentation, he explained that although such diversity in Israel may be complex, it offers one of the few hopes in the Middle East for mutually beneficial coexistence among vastly different groups.
Israel is a national home for a Jewish people truly indigenous to the Middle East, Deek said, pointing out that Israel’s Arab neighbors have repeatedly failed to destroy (through various military and political means) what they have wrongly viewed as a foreign colonial entity. The Palestinian intifadas of 1987 and 2000, particularly the latter, drew inspiration from the idea that “Jews have an alternative; they have a place to go. If we scare them enough, then they will just get up and leave.”
In their own way, Europeans often deny Jewish self-determination by seeing Israel as merely a political concession to Jews seeking refuge from the World War II Nazi genocide. “Rather than recognizing Israel’s legitimacy as a national movement of a people, it makes it a project of European guilt” for having failed to stop the Holocaust, Deek said, adding that Europeans believe that “Israel is our project, and it is a result of our compassion. Therefore we have a duty to monitor our project.” This view makes Israel’s existence conditional.
Deek connected the historical understanding of Israel’s fight for self-determination with larger philosophical questions of a search for truth, as exemplified by his experience as a Fulbright Scholar at Georgetown University. During a course on the Arab-Israeli conflict, his professor argued that Arabs rejected the 1947 United Nations plan dividing the British Palestine mandate into a Jewish and an Arab state because the partition disproportionately favored the Jews. Yet Deek countered that, irrespective of details (noting that the Negev Desert constituted much of the proposed Jewish State), Arabs have consistently rejected the “acceptance of Israel as a Jewish entity in that region in any size or in any shape.” Adding, about his professor, Deek said, “[For] a narrative in which a colonial state of Israel is being delegitimized, she was willing to knit her own story, and to hell with the truth.”
The speaker stressed that Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular must move “from argument for the sake of power to an argument for the sake of truth.” He explained that in an “argument for the sake of truth, both sides win. You either win the argument or by losing it, you win a new truth.” Conversely, in power arguments, people either lose or suppress the truth, foreclosing enlightenment. He referenced Mohammed Dajani, a Palestinian who lost his professorship at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem after bringing students to Auschwitz. An Egyptian encountered similarly angry reactions at home afterpraising his experience studying in Israel.
Linking the intellectual interchange of diverse ideas, vital for human development, with human tolerance, Deek said, “If you can’t accept opinions that are different than yours, eventually you will not be able to accept people who different than you.” Israel’s 1948 creation presented Middle East Arabs with the question, “Are we able to live next to a nation that is different? Are we able to live side-by-side with a country that is neither Muslim nor Arab?”
Deek stressed that a “Middle East that is not able to accept a Jewish State – to accept the right of the Jews to be different – will not be able to accept the right of anyone in the region to be different.” While Christians (who once made up 20 percent of the Middle East’s population and now represent a mere 4 percent), Kurds, women, Yazidis and other minorities all suffer persecution, “Israel is the only minority with both the will and the capability to say, ‘Yes. We are different.’” In the Muslim-majority Middle East, “Everyone else that is being persecuted has to accept the rules of the game or get out.”
Israel’s role as a Jewish nation allows it the unique ability to tolerate the difference of others within it, Deek said, pointing out that in Israel alone among Middle Eastern countries he can wear a cross without fear, Baha’is can build their central temple and Muslims can freely wear the hijab and build minarets. But he did not overlook Israeli communal tensions, like the “death to the Arabs” graffiti Jewish criminals smeared on the graves of his father and other Arabs in an Israeli cemetery while Deek represented Israel in Norway.
Deek shared his optimism for Israel through what Hudson Institute moderator Lee Smithcalled a “repository of interesting and moving stories,” like that of Deek’s grandparents in Jaffa, Israel. Like other Arabs in 1948, they left the emerging Jewish State in answer to Arab pronouncements of impending slaughter by Jews and a quick Arab destruction of Israel, only to later be astonished by Israel’s survival and the absence of massacres. Deek’s grandfather, who had learned Yiddish while harmoniously working with Jews in an electric company, decided while in Lebanese exile to return, and reached Jaffa through an adventure-filled journey on foot with his wife and newborn baby. Deek said that in his grandparents’ subsequently successful Israeli lives, “they found hope where no one else dared looking for it. They came back to live among those who were considered to be their enemies and to make them their friends.”
Deek also told the dramatic story of his music teacher, who was the only Holocaust survivor in his entire family – an achievement he could solely attribute to his role as a violinist in a Nazi officer’s home. Jews like that music teacher “have risen out of their greatest tragedy to create a future of hope in their homeland,” Deek said. “They did that not by looking backward and defining themselves as victims, but rather defining themselves as the agents of hope and responsibility.”
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