Arab Nationalism

"..The Arabs consider the establishment of the State of Israel as the worst/most horrific holocaust that afflicted their nation. This holocaust touched the quintessence of their national honor and greatness, and had since been one of the primary impetus to their revival, their liberation from imperialism, their revolting against the prevailing conditions in their states, and their getting rid of these rulers they considered responsible for this holocaust."

What are the connections between individuals and groups; locally, nationally and internationally? What kind of situations arise which cause people to be susceptible to hate propaganda and to be exploited by the hysteria of fear and xenophobia - much as what happened after 9/11? Governments do little to discourage fear because it motivates support for policies that their constituents might otherwise oppose. People even give up some of their cherished rights if they think it will make them safer. Individuals encourage fear because it helps to drive their agenda - to cause those who are the target of hate to leave - to stay away or to flee.

Xenophobia and Politics of Hate

"Wandering in a desert that with very few exceptions defied the organization of government due to its barren environment, the dominant identification of Arabs was not any form of nationhood but rather the closely knit tribe. Tribalism defined everything; the family, friends, and foes. Any group of settlement outside the tribe was fair game." (Edwin Black, "Banking on Baghdad" 2004)

As Black points out in his book Arabs had reputations as "traders and raiders." And that is how they interacted with the Hebrews in Israel, as traders and as plunderers. The Arabs in the area which is now Israel were mostly Arabs who were Bedouin travelers.

"Bedouins were fond of GHAZU, that is audacious marauding, killing the men in other settlements, kidnapping their wives, and stealing their animals....Ghazu was also a de facto means of Bedouin survival in the parched Arabian climes, where the possessions of others were capriciously---almost routinely---pilfered and plundered as a lifestyle." (Black) Palestinian nationalism was a fiction. The nationalism was pan-Arab and pan-Islam. There was (is) no greater nationalism than that which exists for ALL of the region as one Muslim nation. It is their religious belief. The HAMAS charter even states it. It is an integral component of the Islamic Resistance Movement, that pan-Islam is integral to their religious belief, to Islamism.

"There is no greater and (more) profound nationalism than a situation where the enemy occupies Muslim land. Then the jihad becomes an obligatory duty for every Muslim man and woman." (Muslim Brotherhood)

Peace for Palestinians is the Destruction of Israel - Nothing else will do. The mere existence of Israel has been considered a NAKBA; a "calamity", a "holocaust" (Iranian journalist Amir Taheri, "The Caldron:The Middle East Behind the Headlines" (1988)

"Israel was Jewish, democratic, largely western, socialistic and independent............Israel gradually became the major, if not the only, unifying factor in Arab politics." (Taheri)

Major General Mustafa Hassan in "Israel and the Nuclear Bomb" (Beirut, 1961) wrote:

"The leaders of Zionism thought in the past that in the aftermath of the establishment of Israel the Arabs would acquiesce to the prevailing reality and, with the passage of time, would acknowledge its (Israel's) existence in their midst. However, events proved the error in their thinking. The Arabs consider the establishment of the State of Israel as the worst/most horrific holocaust that afflicted their nation. This holocaust touched the quintessence of their national honor and greatness, and had since been one of the primary impetus to their revival, their liberation from imperialism, their revolting against the prevailing conditions in their states, and their getting rid of these rulers they considered responsible for this holocaust."

This NAQBAH is a continuing reality for as long as Israel continues to exist. "Realpolitik" is not an agreement which will some how magically result in peace. Real politics is living with the intense hatred and knowing that the only solution for peace is to provide security. Arabs and Jews are not going to love each other anytime soon.

The Palestinian Covenant (adopted in 1968) remains unchanged. Yasser Arafat may be dead but the Convenant remains and in an interview Arafat had with Oriana Fallaci in 1972 stated the true nature of "realpolitik" very clearly when he said: "Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else."

Populist Antisemitism is being advanced for socio-political reasons and objectives. There were suicide bombings as far away from Israel as Morocco. Jews were targeted. In a mid 60s article in Les Temps Modernes by a Moroccan named Sa'id Ghallab the issue of anti-Jewish hatred was addressed:

"The worst insult that a Moroccan can make to another is to call him a Jew. My childhood friends have remained anti-Jewish. They vent their virulent Antisemitism by asserting that the state of Israel was the creation of Western imperialism. My Communist comrades themselves have fallen into this trap. Not one issue of a Communist newspaper has denounced the Antisemitism of the Moroccans. And a whole myth of Hitler is cultivated among the lower classes. They exalt (and delight in) the massacre of the Jews carried out by Hitler. They even believe that Hitler is not dead. And they expect his arrival to deliver the Arabs from Israel." (Jean-Pierre Peroncel-Hugoz, "The Raft of Muhammad" - Paragon, 1988) I S R A E L

Israel is not perfect. Far from it. It is a normal state which is concerned with its own self-interests and sometimes it does things which are not popular nor does it seem progressive. But in spite of all that, warts and all, it is still our Israel - because when push comes to shove Israel must be there for Jews. 2,000 years of persecution and hate propaganda by Antisemites has been the cruel teacher of that lesson.

Teddy Katz, was one of those revisionists in Israel who fabricated his thesis for his masters degree about a massacre which never happened. These stories are not unheard of in this world of ours where people look for some kind of attention or in this case used false information to further his own reputation and advance his academic standing. The story of the slaughter of 200 Arabs in the village of Tantura in May of 1948 was a complete fabrication. Teddy Katz retracted and apologized after losing the court battle against him. The damage is however already done and antisemites will repeat the lie and post it to newsgroups and they'll never post the disclosure that it is false.

But still there are people who claim that the Palestinian side is not being presented fairly. Israel is perceived as a foreign presence in an area which is mostly Muslim. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jews have been there for thousands of years, far longer than Arabs, and Jews never left, whereas Arabs moved about.

"If Mohammed had studied Judaism and Christianity closely, he would not have drawn a new religion from them. He would have become either Jewish or Christian, and it would have been impossible for him to fuse these two religions in a way that suited the needs of Arabia...." (E. Renan, Essai de morale et de critique, Paris, 1929)

In Nazi Germany Hitler wanted the west to take his Jews and no one would accept the Jews except Israel. Israel was prepared to take them ALL but even that was denied them because of politics and the British could have saved them, not by accepting them in England, but by allowing them to go to Israel.

In 1948 Arab leaders told the Palestinians to leave while Israel was attacked and all the Jews would be destroyed. And when they lost they wanted Israel to take them back. But they also expelled their Jews from Arab countries - and Israel took them. Israel absorbed more Jews than Arab countries were willing to absorb Palestinians, most of which left of their own volition anyway -- and were not forced out, as alleged.

Most Muslim countries support the Palestinian cause as long as they don't have to take any of them, which is why they have languished in refugee camps - which are really now towns and villages which are funded by the United Nations.

The Arabs say that something must be done about the return of the Arabs who are in refugee camps. The number has grown from a few hundred thousand to millions of Palestinians who purportedly live in these refugee camps. Many are NOT indigenous people displaced by ZIONIST settlement in Israel. It took Jews to make that area livable and prosperous before those Arabs moved there in the first place and it was ONLY THEN that they claimed to be Palestinians. They were as much Palestinians as Edward Said, now deceased was a Palestinian, WHO, of course, was not.

Peace is a multi-step process. The Palestinians have control over 440 villages but intellectuals like the former Dr. Edward Said protested the Israeli military presence on the outskirts of some of these Palestinian towns and villages. Said refers to these areas as Bantustans dominated by Israel. What Dr. Said wouldn't acknowledge are the security concerns Israel has and there is no reason to trust Palestinians since there has not been enough good faith to even rely on the PA to completely police themselves.

One of Eretz Israel's most innovative social experiments was the kvutzah, which was the collective settlement. Often it is said by anti-Zionists that the Jews are racist and therefore separated themselves from the Arabs and Jews prefer to only use Jewish labor. This is a misreading of history.

There was a momentum of Jewish agricultural settlements during the emigration which followed after the pogroms of the late 1800s which received charitable contributions from Jews in the Diaspora, and especially from Baron Rothschild who helped to found colonies in Eretz Israel (which is what that region was always called by the Jews). MOST of the new pioneers were socialists.

"They had come, too, not merely to establish a Socialist commonwealth, but to rebuild their nationhood, their very manhood, by the sweat of their brows. The emphasis of the Second Aliyah (*) was upon physical labor on the sail of Palestine. The youthful visionaries who fled the misery of the Pale evinced a genuine sense of guild for having been alienated from the land. It was a Russian, no less than a Jewish, reaction. Slav writes, from the populist Narodniki to the universally venerated Tolstoy, had been accustomed to extol the peasant as the repository of all virtue; and notwithstanding the Slav muzhik's affinity for pogroms, the Jewish intelligentsia expressed unconscious resentment of the creeping industrial revolution in eastern Europe, a social transformation that dislodged the Jews economically and confronted them with the new and more vicious Antisemitism of the urban lower-middle class. Agriculture alone, then, would make the Jews independent. As members also of Poalei Zion, the newcomers appreciated that Socialist thinkers from Marx to Lenin had cited the absence of a Jewish peasant class as evidence that the Jews were not a nation, but rather a peculiar social or functional entity. It was this assertion that had now to be disproved." (Professor Howard M. Sachar, "A History of Israel, From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time." (revised edition) 96)

"It was significant, at the turn of the century, that virtually all of the influential Zionist writers shared a common antipathy to the rootless, marginal existence of the Diaspora." (Sachar) - which re-awakened this need and reverential feeling for physical labor. There was almost a sense of religious zeal for physical labor as acts of personal redemption for the pioneers. The prophet of this "religion of labor" was Aaron David Gordon who "as Gordon saw it, the vital element in nationhood was creativity, and labor was the bedrock of creativity. Without labor, the Jews would remain an island in an Arab sea." (Sachar)

AND Gordon said: "The land will not be ours and we shall not be the people of the land. Here, then, we shall also be aliens" It was necessary for Jews to do their own labor. At least at that stage of development it was important to them.

The momentum of Jewish labor in Eretz Israel was helped along by the Jewish National Fund which negotiated land purchases at prices well in excess of the land's worth to compensate the Arab owners, many of which were absentee owners - and as land was acquired by the JNF the "immediate task was to create employment opportunities for thousands of new immigrants." (Sachar). The JNF director, Dr. Arthur Ruppin, a 32 year old German Jew and sociologist who graduated from the university of Berlin and Halle, proposed buying millions of dunams (a dunam is a 1/4 of an acre) and reselling the land to Jewish immigrants on very easy terms - and also to train Jewish labor to work the collective farms settlements in Judea and Galilee. Dr. Ruppin also organized the acquisition and settlement of Jews in cities and in the countryside and "immigrants were given shelter and agricultural training at farms" (Sachar) with JNF funding. The kvutzah was Ruppin's idea. He was the father of the modern day kibbutzim.

Many Jews were fleeing from the Pale (Jewish ghettos imposed on them by the monarchy) and from the rise in antisemitism which again erupted in Europe and not seen with this intensity since the massacres in Poland about 300 years earlier. That is the way it is with Jews in the Diaspora. There are periods of relative calm and even prosperity. Jews become very comfortable and then antisemitism again rears its ugly head. Today we are seeing again a rise in this phenomenon - in an openness of hate and threats which could easily erupt once more into a catastrophe for the Jews. Only today Israel is also being threatened by the world community which often sides with the Arabs - although for a period after the Holocaust it wasn't so. BUT today is different and the American president is pushing Israel into accepting a Palestinian state which intends to destroy it, something that the U.S. would not accept for itself -- not while leaders of that movement in the territories and surrounding countries are still sworn to destroy Israel.

Warts and All....

Israel is not perfect. Far from it. It is a normal state which is concerned with its own self-interests and sometimes it does things which are not popular nor does it seem progressive. But in spite of all that, warts and all, it is still our Israel - because when push comes to shove Israel must be there for Jews.

Hank Roth

All (if any) quoting per the Fair Use Doctrine
for educational and discussion purposes pursuant to
Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, Copyright Law.

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