The Jew is Not My Enemy (15 page)

If as victors of many wars Israel still cannot facilitate the creation of a viable and sovereign Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, then it will always be known as a country that swallowed another state and people. The enmity this will generate will last for generations. At some time in the future, the Arabs are bound to regain their ability to stand up for themselves and take advantage of the strategic geopolitical position they command in the region.

It is not just the risk Israel faces from neighbouring Arab states, if ever they wake from their century-long malaise and slumber, but from its own Muslim citizenry, which makes up about 20 per cent of the population. Granted, these Muslims would rather live in Israel than any other country, and compared to the living conditions of minorities in Muslim states, Israel’s Muslims have an enviable right to freedom of worship. However, even inside Israel, the Islamist forces are gaining in strength and influencing attitudes towards the state. If Israel chooses to remain an occupying power in the West Bank and blockades the Gaza Strip, it would be naive on the part of its leadership to assume this will have no effect on its Arab population.

In 2008 I visited Israel and spent time in Muslim towns and villages meeting clerics, politicians, and young Muslim men wearing distinctly Israel Defense Forces trousers. At every meeting I asked a blunt question: “As a Muslim, do you feel you live in an apartheid state?” Invariably, the answer was a firm no. As one man in his twenties, in the northern town of Shibli (where a sign reading
“Allahu Akbar”
graces the entrance), told me,
“Wallah al azeem” –
as God is my witness – “I will never wish to trade my Israeli citizenship for any of those wretched Arab countries who do not know how to treat their own citizens with dignity.” I asked the same question of Imam Mohammad Odeh outside his spectacular mosque north of Haifa. He grinned before admitting, “We Muslims
have difficulties, there is no doubt, and we feel Israel should end the occupation of the West Bank, but to say we Muslims are living in an apartheid state is a lie.” After a tour of the mosque, where we prayed, he invited me to his home. What followed was a long, heartfelt story of a Palestinian living as an Israeli citizen, the imam of a mosque and leader of a community of two thousand. Hurt was written on his face, but his complaints were aimed not at Israel but towards the intellectual bankruptcy of the men who lead the Palestinians. I asked him if he truly, in his heart, felt Israeli, and without hesitating he said, “Yes.”

It is Arabs like the young man in Shibli and the imam in Haifa that Israel risks alienating if it continues down its arrogant path of occupation. The humiliation experienced by their fellow Muslims while going through the ugly checkpoints that separate Israel from the West Bank is bound to affect the loyalties of Arab Israelis.

Within Israel itself the voices for an end to the occupation are no longer restricted to the fringe on the left. Authors such as Amos Oz and academics like Shlomo Avineri have long argued the positions taken up by the much-weakened Peace Now movement. But when its most decorated soldier, former prime minister Ehud Barak, joins these ranks and warns Israel of the risks of avoiding a peace settlement with the Palestinians, Israelis must pay attention. Labour leader Barak, who is defence minister in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition cabinet, shocked his audience when he told a conference on national security in early 2010 that if Israel failed to accomplish peace with the Palestinians, it would end up either as a state with no Jewish majority or an “apartheid” regime. Israelis who scoff at Barak do so at their own peril. The call for a just peace and the creation of a Palestinian state is not a favour to the Palestinians, but an absolute necessity for the survival of the Jewish state.

What was significant about Barak’s unusually blunt warning to his compatriots was the fact that he shared the head table with Palestinian
prime minister Salam Fayyad. This was a rare and public admission by a senior Israeli minister that the deadlocked peace process would hurt Israel, not the Palestinians. The Palestinians demanded an end to the construction of settlements before returning to the bargaining table, and Barak likely recognizes what other Israeli politicians are missing. They may see the absence of the Palestinians as an opportunity to expand their settlements, while he realizes that if the Palestinians stayed away, the West Bank would still cling to Israel.

Choosing his words carefully, Barak appealed to Israelis on both right and left by saying a peace agreement with the Palestinians was the only way to secure Israel’s future as a “Zionist, Jewish, democratic state.” “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic.… If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.” Israel, he said, risked losing its very legitimacy if no peace deal were forthcoming. “The pendulum of legitimacy is going to move gradually towards the other pole.”
¹³

If my Israeli friends find the words of Ehud Barak jarring, then perhaps they should listen to another of their celebrated defence ministers, the legendary Moshe Dayan. Addressing Israelis who were angered by his invitation to the Palestinian poet Fadwa Toukan to his home soon after the 1967 Six Day War, Dayan told a radio show host, “If you, sir, living in Israel, don’t want to hear what she [Toukan] is saying, this troubles me. I would have personally liked her to come to Tel Aviv and even if we should then bite our lips, we should listen to her, in order to understand what the public which she is representing is feeling. I don’t think that if you would listen to her you would join Al Fatah. But you may perhaps understand why a youngster from one of the villages joins Al Fatah. And this is important not only so that you understand what is going on there now, in this period of warfare, but also so that we could understand which avenues to follow to reach a framework within
which we could live together. For ultimately there is no choice, we shall have to live together.”
¹⁴

Moshe Dayan continued to pursue his campaign for accommodation with the Palestinians with respect and dignity. In 1969, he spoke to the students of Haifa University:

Moshe Dayan’s closing remarks to the students in Haifa in 1969 echo what Ehud Barak told his audience in 2010. Forty years ago, Dayan – the man who, I was told as a teenager, was “the one-eyed Dajaal,” or Antichrist – uttered words of wisdom that have gone unheeded.

“We have to supply the people [Palestinians] with employment and services, give them civil rights, and not treat them as enemies. The question is: What are we aiming for? Shall we be an occupying power, keeping the Arabs as an oppressed population of second- and third-class citizens and tell them: ‘You won’t do this, you won’t do that, you won’t study at the university, and if you protest, we shall impose curfew?’ Or should we aim at a common life, with Jews learning to live together with Arabs? If so, we have to be neighbours, and not conquerors.”
¹⁶

Much water has flowed down the River Jordan since Dayan spoke those words in the wake of Israel’s sweeping victory in the Six Day War. The Arabs and Israel clashed again in 1973, and blood soaked the Sinai before peace would dawn between Egypt and Israel, but not Palestine. Many opportunities have been lost, along with countless lives. It may very well be the fault of the Arab leadership for first promising the Palestinians a military victory, later usurping their land to expand their own territories, keeping them in refugee camps on a diet of fiery rhetoric, using their cause to further their own dictatorships and kingdoms, and in the end abandoning them as orphans of history in the lap of Iran and the ayatollahs. Today, these lost children of Ishmael have become helpless puppets in the hands of the world jihadi movement that forces young men and women to die while the dream of a Palestine recedes faster than ever. The idea of Palestine may well die in this game of deliberate tactics, yet the Palestinian will still be there, just like the Old Man of the Sea with his legs locked around Sindbad’s neck.

Israel and the Jewish Diaspora must recognize that not all anti-Zionism or anti-Israelism necessarily reflects anti-Semitism or a hatred of Jews. As Bernard Lewis notes in
Semites and Anti-Semites
, “To determine whether opponents of Zionism or critics of Israel are inspired by honest or by dishonest (clandestine anti-Semitic) motives, one must examine
each case – government, party, group, or individual – separately, and in doing so look for specific ascertainable criteria.”
¹⁷

Lewis admits this is a difficult task. However, he suggests that in trying to distinguish between honest and dishonest criticism of Israel, one should take into account the context and the culture from which this criticism emerges. In the Arab world, where tempers easily run high and the rhetoric is laced with religious zeal, for example, he says, “Fair comment may sometimes look like bigotry.” He contrasts this with the West, where speech is restrained, and a comment that may appear fair and balanced could very well reflect bigotry. Lewis goes to the extent of suggesting that even when Arabs talk of “liquidating the Zionist entity,” they are not necessarily expressing anti-Semitism. Because most Arabs consider the creation of the state of Israel an act of injustice and the continued occupation a standing aggression, he says, their language should be seen as an expression of their legitimate political objectives. He admits that Arab hostility towards Israel rests on a genuine grievance that has given rise to a prejudice, but adds that that prejudice was not the cause of opposition to Israel.

Having said that, Lewis does draw a firm line: “When Arab spokesmen, not content with denouncing the misdeeds of the Israelis, attribute these misdeeds to innate Jewish racial characteristics discernible throughout history … then no doubt remains that those Arabs who write and distribute these things are engaged in anti-Semitic activities.”
¹⁸

Today, more than at any time in the last hundred years, leading Palestinians have come to terms with the existence of Israel as a Jewish state and a fact of life. From President Abbas to Prime Minister Fayyad of the Palestinian Authority; from Prof. Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University to Ziad Asali of the American Task Force on Palestine, there is not a hint of anti-Semitism in their attitudes. Numerous ordinary Palestinians I have met in Toronto, New York, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem have issues with Hamas and reject the hysterical and
religiously laced hatred spouted from the pulpit. These are men and women who see the future in a secular democratic Palestine that is sovereign and free from the diktat of either Iran or Saudi Arabia. However, if they too are attacked as anti-Semitic by U.S.-based Zionist groups and individuals, who at times cross the line and attack Islam as a threat to humanity, then the prospects are bleak indeed, not only for Palestine but for Israel as well.

In his 1991 documentary,
Deadly Currents
, about the first Palestinian intifada, Emmy Award–winning journalist Simcha Jacobovici interviews the eighty-eight-year-old Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the former editor of the
Encyclopaedia Hebraica
. Leibowitz predicts a gloomy future for Israel unless it ends the occupation. Calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state, he says, “There is no chance for a continuous existence of the state of Israel as an apparatus for violent domination of another people.” When Jacobovici asks, “Do you mean Israel’s survival is in danger if the occupation continues?” he responds, “Not only danger: doom is certain.” Nudged to explain why, Leibowitz says: “Internally, the state of Israel will become a fascist state. Externally, we will have to face the entire Arab world from Morocco to Kuwait with the sympathy of the entire world on the side of the Arabs.”

If the Palestinian state ends up as a stillborn child, then Israel will have to exist as a Jewish state with a Muslim majority population governed by race laws reminiscent of 1960s South Africa. At that stage, the words of Moshe Dayan in 1969, Yeshayahu Leibowitz in 1991, or Ehud Barak in 2010 will be meaningless. They will reverberate in the collective conscience of the Jews of Israel, reminding them that they could have avoided their dilemma but were too paranoid to see the opportunities and too overconfident to notice the minefield they were walking into.

Israel should grant freedom to the Palestinians by ending its occupation, not only because the occupation is illegal but because it is
immoral. Helping to create an independent sovereign state of Palestine will be the right thing to do and would contribute immensely to the fight against Muslim anti-Semitism.