The Jew is Not My Enemy (13 page)

The old David-and-Goliath metaphor of a tiny Israel surrounded by millions of hostile Arabs has now been turned on its head. Today, it is Israel that is seen as Goliath, while the slingshot is in the hands of the stone-throwing Palestinian youth of Ramallah and Nablus. Whereas during the cold war Israel could do no wrong in the eyes of the West, today, Israel’s international isolation is such that it feels it can do no right unless it commits suicide.

Though it is true that many Muslim critics of Israel are motivated by Judeophobia, not all criticism – even the harshest – stems from anti-Semitism. Just as criticism of the abject mediocrity of the Palestinian leadership and the terrorist nature of Hamas should not automatically classify as anti-Arabism or Islamophobia, a critique of Israel’s leadership and opposition to its occupation of Palestinian territories should not be seen as anti-Semitic.

It is in this context that I believe Israel and its policies have contributed to the rise of anti-Semitism in the Arab world, from where it is spreading to the rest of the Muslim world and today is finding resonance inside the radical Left of the West. To conclude that Muslim-Jewish distrust and hate is a one-way street with one party a victim and the other the perpetrator is inaccurate. If Muslim clerics and politicians throughout the world are guilty of spreading hatred against Jews, then some in the Jewish community in North America as well as in Israel are also guilty of unfairly portraying even the most liberal and progressive Arab leaders in a negative light.

The 2009 attacks on the American Task Force on Palestine, or
ATFP
, that associated the group with terror and crime is one such example. If even progressive and liberal leaders of the Arab-American community such as Dr. Ziad Asali,
ATFP
fellow Hussein Ibish, and Prof. Rashid Khalidi are depicted as extremists and a threat to the West, then who is next? Succumbing to a knee-jerk suspicion of all Muslims, particularly Arabs, is no different than the belief among many Muslims that all Jews are evil and devious people who are hated by Allah.

I too have been the target of such allegations. In March 2010, the American-Arab author Wafa Sultan, in a speech at a Toronto synagogue, accused Prophet Muhammad of committing rape. She said, “Muhammad raped Aisha” – his wife – “when she was nine, he was fifty-four.”

I protested her hateful language in an op-ed piece in the
National Post
. I was not alone in finding fault with Sultan’s logic or language; Mark Freiman, the president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, said, “It is ironic that it was in a Jewish synagogue a short while ago that an ex-Muslim made the sweeping allegation that Islam as a faith was intrinsically incapable of political moderation or respecting the norms of secular society.…I add my name and that of the Canadian Jewish Congress to the rejection of such irresponsible charges.”

Nevertheless, I upset a lot of people. Dozens of anti-Muslim bloggers were up in arms, calling me a wolf in sheep’s clothing and accusing me of defending child rape. The Jewish Internet Defense Force, reacting to my article, said:

Another strident supporter of Israel and the Jewish community, Dr. Andrew Bostom, called me “a despicable taqiyya-mongering pile of excrement.” Writing in Pajamas Media, Bostom accused me of “silencing the Jews,” claiming I was a bully, hateful, and disingenuous.
¹

Other pro-Israel blogs accused me of being a potential terrorist: “Tarek Fatah proves my point that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim.… Every ‘moderate’ Muslim is a potential terrorist. The belief in Islam is like a tank of gasoline. It looks innocuous, until it meets the fire. For a ‘moderate’ Muslim to become a murderous jihadist, all it takes is a spark of faith.”
²

Of course this vitriol is not indicative of mainstream Jewish thought, but such attacks on Muslims, simply because we stand up and defend our Prophet, is a sobering reminder of the personal costs of battling hate. Countering such hatred against Muslims is primarily
the responsibility of saner elements of the Jewish community and of other non-Muslims. I am glad many of them rose to the occasion and stood by me. An editorial in the
Calgary Herald
read: “Utterly unreasonable people are calling Fatah an anti-Semite for criticizing the speech for being held in a synagogue, just like he criticizes outrageous speech in mosques. Fatah … is no anti-Semite. On the contrary. The smears against this courageous, thoughtful man who has literally risked his well-being to push for moderation, are nothing short of disgraceful. Even Rabbis walked out of Sultan’s speech. Are they anti-Semitic too?”
³

Among the many mistakes Israel has made is its strategic error in how it played the divide-and-rule game with the Palestinians. There was a time when Israel considered Islamists the lesser of two evils and in fact encouraged them as a means of countering the secular and nationalist Palestinians. But Israel must recognize the mistake it made when it undermined the traditional leadership of its adversary by encouraging their religious and Islamist rivals, Hamas. Victor Ostrovsky, the former Mossad officer who wrote
The Other Side of Deception
, levels the charge that the Israeli Right had a hand in encouraging Islamic fundamentalism among Palestinians as a way to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization. He wrote, “Supporting the radical elements of Muslim fundamentalism sat well with Mossad’s general plan for the region. An Arab world run by fundamentalists would not be a party to any negotiations with the West, thus leaving Israel again as the only democratic, rational country in the region. And if the Mossad could arrange for Hamas … to take over the Palestinian streets from the
PLO
, then the picture would be complete.”
⁴

It is not just Ostrovsky who has made this claim. Ziad Abu Amr of Birzeit University, in his book
Islamic Fundamentalism in the West Bank and Gaza: Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic Jihad
, writes about the sudden
appearance of Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas hoodlums on campuses trying to elbow out the plo: “The Muslim Brotherhood leadership urged Fatah” – the dominant faction of the plo – “to purge its ranks of Marxist elements, to be aware of the futility of secularism, and to cooperate closely with Islamic groups.”
⁵
For his book
Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam
, Robert Dreyfuss interviewed Philip Wilcox, the U.S. ambassador to Jerusalem in the mid-1980s. Wilcox told him that “there were persistent rumours that the Israel secret service gave covert support to Hamas, because they were seen as rivals to the plo.”
⁶

The plo and Fatah were aware of this nexus. The Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat accused Hamas and its leader, Sheikh Yassin, of acting “with the direct support of reactionary Arab regimes … in collusion with Israeli occupation.” He told the Italian newspaper
Corriere della Sera
in 2001, “Hamas is a creation of Israel, which at the time of Prime Minister Shamir, gave them money and more than 700 institutions, among them schools, universities and mosques.” According to Arafat, “Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin admitted Israeli support for Hamas [to him], in the presence of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.” Rabin, he said, described this support as a “fatal error.”
⁷

Not only did Israel have a hand in nurturing the budding crop of Islamists, it did everything possible to undermine the credibility of Palestine’s secular and democratic leadership, which had reconciled itself with the state of Israel and was willing to build peace, if not friendship, with the Jewish state. When Israel complains that it has no peace partner, that is not entirely true. Israel had ten years to deliver on Oslo, but all it did was build additional settlements, restrict Arafat to his Ramallah compound, and put Marwan Barghouti in prison. Who did they expect would fill this vacuum? Gandhi?

Today, Israel holds all the cards in the Middle East dispute and thus carries a bigger responsibility to resolve the conflict. What happens
inside Israel and the occupied territories causes ripples throughout the Muslim world. Every time Israel deals harshly with the Palestinians, anger at Israel grows. The road to anti-Semitism is short.

Take, for example, the publication in Israel in 2009 of the book
Torat Hamelech: Dinei Nefashot Bein Yisrael Le’Amim
(The King’s Torah: Laws of Life and Death between Jews and the Nations), in which the authors, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira and Rabbi Yosef Elite Elitzur, cite sources from the Bible, the Talmud, and later rabbinical literature to condone and justify the killing of non-Jews. Gentile non-combatants, they argue, including innocent children and babies, can be killed in situations in which their presence endangers, even indirectly, the lives of Jews. “Little children are often situated in this way,” they write. “They block the rescue of Jews and they do this against their will. Even so, it is permitted to kill them because their very presence facilitates the killing [of Jews].”

According to the
Jerusalem Post
, the two rabbis also advocate the killing of young children if it is perceived that these children will grow up to be enemies of the Jews. “There is an argument for killing the very young if it is clear that they will grow up to hurt us [Jews],” write Shapira and Elitzur. “And in this situation the attack should be directed at them and not just indirectly while attacking adults.”

In a chapter titled “Attacking the Innocent,” the two rabbis argue that although the main brunt of a war effort should be against those with an intent to kill, even someone who merely belongs to the nation of the enemy should be considered an enemy. They assert that it is permitted to kill a civilian who helps combatants fighting against Jews. And as if they had not given their followers enough reasons to kill Muslims, Shapira and Elitzur also argue for vigilante freelance murder: “One does not need a decision by the nation to permit the spilling of blood of those from the evil empire. Even individuals attacked by the evil sovereignty can retaliate.”
⁸

The
Jerusalem Post
reported that the book, which was being sold at Mercaz Harav Yeshiva, the flagship educational institution of Orthodox Zionism, had sold out within a week of publication; the book’s sales were soon news across the Islamic blogosphere. Critics of Israel fingered it as proof of Israel’s anti-Islamic nature and used it to support their claim that Israel had deliberately killed children in their last incursion into Gaza. The book was released just a week after a Jewish settler was arrested for allegedly murdering two Palestinians and severely wounding a Christian.

While it is true that The King’s Torah is an obscure book that most Jews do not take seriously, it does have the support of a vocal minority and it does fan the flames. The fact is, Islamists use such material to validate their portrayal of Jews as being fundamentally anti-Muslim.

Compared with the incessant slander of Jews in the Muslim world, though, expressions of hate towards Muslims such as The King’s Torah are isolated. I have spent countless hours trying to locate explicit attacks on Islam by Jewish religious authorities, but have found little evidence of such literature, either in medieval history or in the modern era. Even in Maimonides’
Epistle to Yemen
, in which the medieval Jewish scholar bemoans the tribulations of Jews under a harsh Islamic ruler, the critique of the Muslim is mild. But the fact remains that even the rarest of attacks on Islam, Muslims, or Arabs validates the Islamist position that the Jews are the enemies of Muslims and that Israel is primarily a cancerous growth, placed in the heart of the Islamic world by the kuffar.

More than attacks on Islam or Muslims, the daily humiliation that a Palestinian experiences in his own town and neighbourhood is difficult to imagine for Muslims who may face occasional discrimination, but know very little about what it is like to live with restrictions placed on our movements and freedoms. An entire generation of Palestinians
has known no other existence but occupation. One may fault the Palestinian leadership for avoiding every opportunity to resolve the conflict, but not the people who have no voice. The late Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban remarked soon after the Geneva peace talks in 1973 that “Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” but that is little consolation to the Palestinian who was born and died in a refugee camp.

If what Abba Eban said was true – and I believe it is – then is it not an acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the Palestinian grievance? Eban’s remark may be seen as an indictment of the Palestinian leadership, but it is certainly an admission that in this dispute, the Palestinians have been wronged. And if successive Israeli governments, and most of Israel’s political parties, agree that the Palestinian leadership, from the mufti to Arafat, is responsible for botching the peace process, it still does not address the central questions: Why cannot Israel withdraw unilaterally from territories it occupied in the Six Day War of 1967? What stops Israel from interpreting
UN
Security Resolution 242 the way it wishes to and pulling back so that a trip from Bethlehem to Ramallah ceases to be a nightmare for the residents of the two Palestinian cities? At the risk of sounding naive, have not the Israelis withdrawn unilaterally from South Lebanon and Gaza? Did they not walk away from the Sinai? And why not the West Bank and the parts of East Jerusalem that they are willing to vacate, which could then become the capital of a future Palestinian state?