Do you remember that moment in the opening of the musical “Fiddler on the Roof” when Tevye the Dairyman introduces the schnorrer (beggar) as one of the “special types” in the shtetl of Anatevka?
The schnorrer appears, asks for alms, and a man gives him one kopek. The schorrer says, “One kopek? Last week you gave me two kopeks.” “I had a bad week,” says the man.
“So?” replies the schnorrer. “If you had a bad week, why should I suffer?”
This repartee aptly helps summarize the Palestinians’ case against Israel and why they regard Israel’s founding as “Al-Nakba” (“The Disaster”) — a word and concept I am sick and tired of hearing from them and their anti-Israel friends, but which they stick in our faces every time Israel celebrates the anniversary of its independence. (See photos of demonstrators at Milwaukee’s Yom HaAtzmaut celebration on this site.)
So what, say the Palestinians and their friends, if European nations treated their vulnerable minority of Jews as second class citizens at best and vermin at worst during the nearly 2,000 years between the Roman Empire’s conquest of the Hasmonean (Maccabee) Jewish state to 1948.
The “poor Palestinians” didn’t create the ghettos, the pogroms, the expulsions from nearly every European country, or the Nazi extermination camps.
Rather, says this “narrative,” the “poor Palestinians” were largely peaceful peasants or townies who had been in the land for centuries — or even millennia, according to some who propose the utter fantasy that the modern Palestinian Arabs are direct descendants of the pre-Israelite Canaanites.
Then along came the Zionist Jews who unjustifiably took the land and “ethnically cleansed” them from it. Worse, says this “narrative,” the Jews had the temerity to create a state with a Jewish culture that “privileges” Jews over non-Jews. Never mind that all other Middle East countries have Muslim cultures and really do privilege Muslims over non-Muslims, in at least one case (Saudi Arabia) to the point of declaring by law that no non-Muslims can be citizens.
Exposing the lie
And that point helps expose the lie of this “narrative.” The “narrative” could be construed as true and a plausible case against Israel only if the Palestinians, their Arab brethren and their common culture were and are truly innocent of anti-Jewish prejudice and persecution.
But they were not and are not innocent. As I keep saying, and as so much of the world seemingly either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know, Israel exists because of what Jews endured in the Arab/Muslim world as much as because of what they endured in Europe. From Islam’s founding in the 600s C.E., Arabs/Muslims made plenty of their own contributions to the centuries of Jewish wandering, vulnerability, misery and injustice that the Jewish state of Israel corrects.
I wish I had the space to quote in its entirety the chapter “Islamic Antisemitism” from the book “Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism” by Dennis Prager and Rabbi Joseph Telushkin.
“The two guiding principles of Islam’s treatment of Jews and Christians are that Islam dominates and is not dominated, and that Jews and Christians are to be subservient and degraded,” they wrote. “The subservience that [Jews and Christians] were required to show publicly to Muslims is analogous to the behavior once expected of Blacks in the Jim Crow American South.”
I also wish I had the space to quote large chunks of David Pryce-Jones’ book “The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs” on the power of the shame-honor complex in that culture.
“The loss of Palestine, in sum, was a public revelation that the Arabs were defeated by the Jews whom they were known to hold in contempt,” he wrote. “From the moment when Israel could no longer be extricated from the Arab response of shame, Arab self-interest and rationality were forfeit… Shame-honor dictates revenge, not compromise.”
Add to these a passage excerpted in a recent Jerusalem Post issue from Israeli historian Benny Morris’ new book “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War.” He describes “the depth of the Arabs’ abhorrence of the Zionist-Jewish presence in Palestine, an abhorrence anchored in centuries of Islamic Judeophobia with deep religious and historical roots…. The 1948 War, from the Arabs’ perspective, was a war of religion as much as, if not more than, a nationalist war over territory.”
All this evidence leads me to one conclusion: The founding of Israel was a “disaster” for the Palestinian-Arab-Muslim world primarily because it freed Jews and Judaism from being dominated by, and subservient to, Muslims and Islam. Israel’s existence rectifies long-standing injustices that Palestinians-Arabs-Muslims felt they had a right to inflict upon Jews.
And Arab-Muslim culture for 60 years has found this situation to be utterly intolerable. It must somehow be undone — preferably by war, but if that fails then by an internationally imposed “right of return” for Palestinian refugees, or by creating a “one-state solution” — anything to put Muslims and Islam unjustly on top of Jews and Judaism again.
I do not claim that Israel has been perfectly humane and just in its treatment of Palestinian Arabs or Israel’s Arab citizens. It hasn’t been; and where Israelis have committed injustices, these should be rectified. But all those actions are minor injustices in a project that has been in the main a huge act of justice; while the Arab-Muslim world’s hatred of Israel comes primarily from the desire to commit and to rationalize huge injustices.
In fact, one might argue that Israel has been “inflicted” on the Arab-Muslim world to do justice for how Arab-Muslim culture has treated non-Muslims in the past, and for the many people in that culture today seeking to revive that past. As the great American journalist and author H. L. Mencken wrote, “Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”
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