Mousa Abu Marzook is the deputy chairman of Hamas, the Muslim supremacist and ferociously anti-Israel terrorist organization. Some time ago, according to the Jan. 25 New York Times, anthropologist Scott Atran and psychologist Jeremy Ginges asked him what he might accept to make peace with Israel.
He firmly rejected any trade that didn’t include Palestinian refugees’ “right of return” to Israel and angrily rejected the inclusion of any kind of material or financial aid to the Palestinians for rebuilding.
But when the questioners included a possible Israeli apology for the events of 1948, “he brightened” and said, “Yes, an apology is important as a beginning.”
I have read elsewhere of other Arabs demanding that Israel apologize for “driving the Palestinians out.” And my reactions have tended to be a combination of bewilderment and anger.
To me, and I am sure to others, this looks or feels like Arabs and Muslims demanding that Jews apologize for daring to continue to exist, for daring to demand, fight for and win their own security and freedom. It seems to come from a chutzpahdik position that anything Jews do to defend themselves against Muslims is automatically wrong, while anything Muslims do to Jews is automatically right.
And I recall something Andrew Bostom, the editor and author of “The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism,” said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post (June 19, 2008). When he has talked with Muslims about the doctrines and history of Muslim anti-Semitism, Bostom said, “The response I get … is ‘What’s wrong with that?’”
Trade some dignity?
Clearly, a lot is wrong with that. I have long contended that Israel exists every bit as much as a response to Muslim anti-Semitism as to European. In any event, after 2,000 years of wandering, persecution, insecurity and world indifference to all that, I don’t think Jews need to apologize for creating and supporting one country in which our survival and well-being are the top priorities.
In fact, such a demand is demeaning. A sense of honor may not be as important to Jewish and Western culture as it is to Arab, but we do have one, and my first sense is that to apologize in this way would be dishonorable.
But this New York Times article has given me a bit of pause. Atran and Ginges wrote that they have surveyed almost 4,000 Palestinians and Israelis “across the political spectrum.”
And they found something fascinating: “Absolutists who violently rejected offers of money or peace for sacred land were considerably more inclined to accept deals that involved their enemies making symbolic but difficult gestures.
"For example, Palestinian hard-liners were more willing to consider recognizing the right of Israel to exist if the Israelis simply offered an official apology for Palestinian suffering in the 1948 war.”
The narratives about that war are as different as sea and land. As another article in the same Times issue points out, what to Jews is the War of Independence to Palestinian Arabs is The Disaster, and the latter have maintained their sense of grievance and injustice ever since. As far as we are concerned, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned above, they are wrong.
Still, as pervaded with Islamic supremacist anti-Semitism as Arab and Muslim culture may be, innocent Arabs were victimized by that war — maybe not as deliberately or as ferociously as the Palestinians and their allies allege, but they still suffered. The emotions about this have been powerful enough to fuel six decades of hostility that no proposals for material compromise appear able to reduce.
Moreover, as I have read in such books as Raphael Patai’s “The Arab Mind” and David Pryce-Jones’ “The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs,” Arab culture places a high value on appearances, sometimes higher than reality.
Finally, Jewish tradition demands that we do almost everything we can to try to establish peace. As Milwaukee’s own Rabbi David Shapiro wrote in his essay “The Jewish Attitude Towards Peace and War” in his book “Studies in Jewish Thought”:
“The Torah enjoins peace, say the Aggadists, under all circumstances and in all possible ways, even toward the enemies of Israel. Peace, unlike other religious precepts, must be sought after and pursued. We may not wait til peacemaking remains a last resort for the prevention of wars on a massive scale or conflicts on a personal level.”
With all that in mind, I’m beginning to wonder: Might it be worth investigating if there is a way for Israel to apologize to the Arab world for at least some of the War of Independence or the Palestinian refugee problem? Might it even be worth sacrificing some — repeat, some — dignity if by doing so a huge psychological barrier to making peace can be weakened?
I am prepared to believe the answer might be no. “Leo Rosten’s Treasury of Jewish Quotations” includes an unsourced observation: “For the sake of peace one may lie, but peace itself should never be a lie.”
Moreover, “symbolic but difficult gestures” must come from the Arab side also. Atran and Ginges also discovered that “Israeli respondents said they could live with a partition of Jerusalem and borders very close to those that existed before the 1967 war if Hamas and the other major Palestinian groups explicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist.”
Still, for the sake of peace, it never hurts to ask or investigate, especially if, as Atran and Ginges conclude, “the science says” that such a gesture “may be the best way to start cutting the knot.”
What do you think?
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