The Jew is Not My Enemy (12 page)

On July 7, 1937, the commission issued its report, recommending that the Palestine Mandate be abolished and mooting the idea of two separate states: the Jewish state was to receive a small portion in the west and north, from Mount Carmel to south of Be’er Tuvia, as well as the Jezreel Valley and the Galilee, while the Arab state was to receive most of the territory in the south and mid-east, which included Judea, Samaria, and the sizable Negev desert.

Today, one look at the proposed partition plan should convince any Muslim that the travails of the Palestinians are rooted in their own political and religious leadership, not a Jewish conspiracy. What the Arab leadership rejected in 1937 should be remembered by all Muslims as a betrayal of their trust and support. The problem is, few Muslims are aware that the Arabs gave up almost 80 per cent of Palestine in
rejecting the Peel Commission Report. They continued down the path of “all or nothing,” a strategy that some still cling to in Hamas and Iran, much to the chagrin of progressive Muslims everywhere.

The
UN
General Assembly Partition Plan of 1947:
The Holocaust and its aftermath added a new dimension to the Arab-Jewish conflict in British Palestine. Holocaust survivors subsisted in displacement camps in Europe, and most, if not all, wanted to move to Palestine. When President Truman came out in support of resettling the Jews, the secretary-general of the newly formed Arab League declared that such a move would touch off a new war between Christendom and Islam, one that would rival the Crusades in scope.

The enormity of the Holocaust had not yet entered the Arab consciousness – denial is still common – and neither had the fact that because of the Grand Mufti of Palestine’s alliance with Hitler, world opinion had swung in favour of the Zionist claim and the desire for a Jewish state in Palestine. Instead of adjusting its tactics to accommodate the new reality, the Arab League acted as if nothing had changed since the end of the 1936–37 intifada. Soon the Arab High Command, or
AHC
, was recreated as the supreme body representing the Palestinians. Here too, however, the haggling between “notable” families ensured there would be no unified voice. In 1946, the
AHC
was disbanded by opponents of the Husseini family, who created the Arab Higher Front (
AHF
). A few months later both the
AHC
and the
AHF
were dissolved by the Arab League, and the Arab High Executive (
AHE
) was created with its top position reserved for the Grand Mufti, fresh from his date with the devil in Berlin. By January 1947, the
AHE
was renamed the Arab Higher Command.

As the Arabs squabbled and uttered empty threats of jihad, the Zionists organized militias, acquired arms and ammunition, and did everything to circumvent the ban on Jewish immigration to Palestine that the British imposed during the war. Meanwhile, London was desperate
to get rid of the Middle Eastern albatross that had hung around its neck since 1917 as it struggled to survive after World War II. In April 1947, Britain asked the United Nations secretary-general to convene a session of the General Assembly to take Palestine off its hands. Within weeks, the General Assembly created the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, or
UNSCOP
, with the mandate to recommend a solution to the Palestinian problem.

For two and a half months, the eleven-member committee, consisting of India, Holland, Sweden, Iran, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Canada, Australia, Peru, Guatemala, and Uruguay, went on a fact-finding mission. None of the superpowers were represented, but three of the delegates had strong Muslim leanings. The delegates of Iran and India were Muslim, and the Yugoslav delegate had to take the substantial Muslim minority in his country into consideration.

From the outset, the reaction to the
UN
committee was predictable. While the Zionists welcomed the
UN
mission, the Arab Higher Command issued a statement saying the
UN
delegation was “pro-Zionist.” The Arabs announced a total boycott and said they would censure anyone who talked to the delegation – a time-tested weapon that has been used by every level of Arab leadership for generations and that always ensures they shoot themselves in the foot rather than deal with the challenge their people face. (Nevertheless, they met the delegation in private and off the record.) As the fate of the Palestinians was being decided, none of their leadership wanted to be seen as weak, thus leaving the field open to the Zionist leadership, who pulled out all the stops to impress upon the delegates the righteousness of their cause and their willingness to compromise.

As the
UN
delegation toured Palestine, it was met at every Jewish city and settlement by cheering crowds and flower-bearing children. The team members were given presentations of the Jewish case with simultaneous translations into Spanish, Swedish, Persian, and any other
language required. In contrast, the un team’s visits to Arab centres were always met with hostility and protest. At one Arab school, the children were told not to even look at the visitors. Residents of another village were evacuated to protest the arrival of the un team, who were then greeted by a delegation of children who cursed the visitors.

The Arab tactic backfired to such a degree that even the two Muslims on the un team were dismayed. Iran’s delegate was heard to say, “What asses these Arabs are. The country is so beautiful and, if it were given to the Jews, it could be developed into Europe.” The Indian delegate, though, was sympathetic to the Arab cause and complained privately that the Arab boycott was having a “disastrous effect on his [un] colleagues.”
²⁰
Another telling comment about the antics of the Arab leadership came from the Swedish deputy head of unscop, Paul Mohn. Recalling his meeting with Arab leaders in Lebanon, Mohn wrote in his memoirs that “there is nothing more extreme than meeting all the representatives of the Arab world in one group … when each one tries to show that he is more extreme than the other.”
²¹

UNSCOP
voted to recommend to the un General Assembly a partition of British Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state.

While all this was unfolding, another colony, India, the jewel in the empire, had been partitioned into the Muslim state of Pakistan and the secular Republic of India after the two sides had come to an agreement. However, in Palestine there was no such agreement. The Zionists and the Jewish Agency welcomed the un’s findings, but the Arab reaction was again predictable. Jamal Husseini, the Palestinian representative at the un, slammed the majority finding of unscop, warning that “blood will flow like rivers in the Middle East.”

After months of lobbying by both sides, on November 29, 1947, the un General Assembly voted by two-thirds majority to pass Resolution 181, which called for the creation of a Jewish state on 55 per cent of Palestine and an Arab state on the rest of the territory, with Jerusalem
and its suburbs to be governed by the United Nations in trust. As expected, the Jews rejoiced while the Arab leaders called for a “worldwide jihad in defence of Arab Palestine.”

By the time the deadline for the British to pull out of its Palestine Mandate approached, Arab countries were preparing to declare war on the new state of Israel. The armies of Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan, along with smaller contingents from across the Arab world, poured into Israel to attack it from every flank. Israel repulsed all of them, thus ensuring a long, tragic existence for the Palestinians. For all the bravado and fiery speeches of the Arab leaders, all they ever produced was hot air about their medieval machismo.

Much has been written about the 1948 war, which is rightfully mourned as the al-Naqba – catastrophe – by the Palestinians and celebrated as a new beginning by the Jews. However, Muslims should take a look at the map of Palestine approved by the
UN
in 1947 and ask the question: Who should we blame for putting Jerusalem under Israeli jurisdiction? We cannot blame Israel or the
UN
. Israel after all had accepted the 1947 partition plan that would have left Jerusalem under
UN
trusteeship. The blame falls squarely on the Arab countries who rejected the
UN
resolution. Should we Muslims not take ownership of the errors of the Arab leadership and learn from past mistakes to ensure we don’t repeat them?

By the time the last of the ceasefires were enforced, the state of Israel had expanded its borders beyond the areas sanctioned by the
UN
, while hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced out of or willingly fled their villages and towns to the safety of refugee camps. If the
UN
partition plan had been accepted, would the Palestinians today not have had their own state, with Jerusalem as an international city?

The proposed partition maps of the Peel Plan and the
UN
General Assembly that the Arabs and their Muslim allies rejected must be seen in light of where we are today, or even where we were at the end of the Six Day War of 1967. These maps should show us Muslims the folly of
our choices, but very few of us are willing to take responsibility for or admit to the mistakes of earlier generations. We seem to find more solace in blaming our misery on the Jew.

After the “al-Naqba,” the Islamist baton would move from Hajj al-Husayni to Sayyid Qutb, who would carry it through the postwar years until his death in 1966. In the previous chapter I dwelled on how Qutb internationalized the jihadi movement by suggesting that the only way to defeat Israel and the Jews was to return to the fundamentalist doctrine of Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. Today, that Islamist baton is firmly in the hands of al-Banna’s grandson, the charming, sweet-talking Swiss-born Tariq Ramadan. The language may have developed a level of sophistication, but the message remains the same: the Jews and the state of Israel are the reason why Muslims are stuck in a quagmire of despair.

Few Muslims dare to state publicly that
Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. Those of us who do, incur huge risks. Not only are we wrongfully portrayed as endorsing Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territories, but it is claimed we are the ultimate enemies of Islam: Muslims who have betrayed our faith and who have acted against Allah’s covenant and his fabled curse on the Jews.

This religious blackmail by the Islamist hate-mongers has forced countless Muslims who believe that both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have valid claims to maintain a troubling silence. Those of us who defend Israel’s right to exist without the sword of Damocles hanging over its head have not surrendered our right to criticize the Jewish state when it deserves criticism.

In my case, I have straddled the fence and remained conflicted for decades. I felt delighted as a teenager to shake the hand of Leila Khaled when she came to Pakistan.
^*
As a student at Karachi University,
I raised funds for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; in Toronto I demonstrated outside the Israeli consulate. But never once in my entire life have I had even an iota of anti-Semitism in my soul. While I met my first Palestinian in 1967, at Karachi University, my first friendship with a Jew had to wait until 1993, in Toronto, when I was hired by Julius Deutsch, a fascinating trade unionist. (He passed away in early 2010.) In lengthy chats with him, I was surprised to learn there were Jews in the same boat as me: supportive of Israel, but critical of its tactics in resolving the Palestinian question. Deutsch, son of German Jews who fled to Sydney after World War II, became my doorway to understanding the complex nature of the Middle East crisis. I learned from this Jew that things are rarely ever black and white and that the truth is usually found in the grey areas of overlapping narratives.

During those heady days of the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s, there was one thing that this Muslim and his Jewish friend and boss agreed upon: since Israel was the dominant power, it carried a bigger responsibility to move along the path to peace, and that failure on this road would further fan Muslim anti-Semitism. It was on the encouragement of Julius Deutsch that I ran for a seat in the Ontario Legislature, spoke for gay rights inside a mosque, and defended Israel’s legitimacy in a Muslim community centre.

Years later, Irshad Manji, a well-known Canadian author, accused me of being anti-Jewish simply because in a conversation I had judged her book as catering exclusively to an Israeli audience. Manji is a bright woman, but like so many others on both sides of this dispute, she could not understand how one could be both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian at the same time, and with a clear conscience.

Muslims need to reconcile themselves to the fact that Israel is a country created by the United Nations General Assembly with the support of a two-thirds majority. Questioning Israel’s moral and legal right
to exist as a state within secure borders that are recognized by its neighbours should cease to be a subject of endless debate.

The Jews are an ethno-religious group with roots going back more than three thousand years. Since most national groups – from Arabs to Indians, Japanese to Germans – have a homeland, why not the Jews? I believe it is fundamentally anti-Jewish to incessantly challenge the moral and ethical basis of Israel as a Jewish state. If the Timorese can have a country and if Eritrea and Kosovo can be carved out of Africa and Europe in the twenty-first century, then surely the Jewish people deserve the right to have a state of their own in a place where they have had a presence for more than three thousand years. Israel’s demand for an end to the relentless threat to its very existence is valid and needs no justification or explanation. On the other hand, Israel needs to recognize that just as it has the right to a sovereign state with an internationally recognized and guaranteed border, so do the Palestinians. As long as Israel continues to occupy Palestinian territories, the rest of the world will deem it an occupying power.