Arabs and Jews can live in peace

Sunday April 14, 2002 04:21

by Revolutionary Socialist - IST

Jewish socialist John Rose writes

THERE IS a very simple reason why Arabs and Jews have been unable to live in peace together for the past 100 years, and it is summed up in the phrase "the Iron Wall". The Iron Wall is the title of Professor Avi Shlaim's exhaustive and brilliant history of Zionism. Jabotinsky, a right wing Zionist leader and fan of the Italian fascist Mussolini, coined the phrase in the 1920s.

He argued that the European Jewish settlers in Palestine had to develop overwhelming military superiority to break the potential political resistance of the Palestinian Arab majority. This militaristic perspective he called the Iron Wall. Shlaim shows how nearly all of Israel's leaders signed up to the Iron Wall philosophy, not least those who called themselves "socialist", like Israel's first prime minister, Ben Gurion, and the so called peacemaker Rabin.

The Iron Wall separates Arab from Jew because it institutionalises Jewish superiority backed by overwhelming military power. Jabotinsky also argued that the Jew was culturally superior to the Arab, because European culture was superior to Arab culture. Peace between the two peoples depends upon dismantling the Iron Wall. The truth of this argument is well illustrated by looking at the West Bank city of Hebron, one of the oldest Arab and Jewish settlements in Palestine.

The city is allegedly the burial place of the Old Testament prophet Abraham-from whom the city derives its name-and hence has huge symbolic significance for Muslims, Christians and Jews.

Today the city is a permanent military fortress, as thousands of Israeli troops guard a few hundred particularly extreme Jewish religious fanatics. Hebron's Palestinian citizens suffer a virtually permanent curfew. This is not a recent Israeli incursion. Hebron was exempted from Israeli withdrawal in the Oslo peace accords.

Hebron was always a flashpoint in Zionism's history, but it is important to understand the difference between the European settlers and the old town's original Jewish inhabitants. The accomplished Israeli journalist Tom Segev has recently described 800 years of good relations between Arabs and Jews in Hebron.

In the anti-Zionist riots in 1929 in Hebron, people in the Arab community rescued many of their Jewish neighbours from a pogrom. Segev wrote, "Jewish history records few cases of a mass rescue of this dimension." This brings us to the crucial fact that the virulence of European anti-Semitism, with its roots partly in the medieval Christian conception of the Jew, had no echo in the Arab world.

Of course it would be naive to pretend that Arab-Jewish relations were always perfect in the last 2,000 years. They were not. But there was simply not the history of systematic persecution that we find in Christian Europe, which provided the launchpad for Zionism at the end of the 19th century.

In her fascinating history of Jerusalem, Karen Armstrong has argued that Islam's almost unbroken 1,300 year rule of the city was characterised by its tolerance of both Judaism and Christianity: "Jewish visitors from Europe were struck by the freedom enjoyed by the Jews of Palestine. In 1535 David dei Rossi, an Italian Jew, noted that Jews even held government positions, something that would be inconceivable in Europe."

In the 12th century it had been the great Islamic leader Saladin who had invited the Jews back to Jerusalem, from which they had been almost entirely excluded by the Crusaders. He was hailed throughout the Jewish world as the new Cyrus (the Persian king of Old Testament fame who let the Jews back into the city to build the second temple).

Last month I was in Egypt, where I had the good fortune to spend a morning with the truly remarkable Youssef Darwish, a 91 year old Jewish Communist veteran of the post-war workers' struggles that formed the backcloth to Nasser's coup in 1952.

Youssef, all faculties intact and chomping away at cigars, waxed lyrical on many issues, not least the rich texture of Jewish life in Egypt in the early part of the 20th century. It's standard in these sort of discussions to debate the prominent role Jews played in the Communist movement throughout the Arab world. And of course we did.

But what struck me more was something else. It was the long historical Jewish attachment to and involvement in Egypt-one of its greatest medieval synagogues still stands-and the way this blossomed in the early 20th century, with now forgotten cultural expressions in painting, books and later film.

As Youssef says, the banner of independence was being raised, and the idea of achieving equality among the different social groups was vigorously pursued. Later Zionism sucked nearly all the Jews out of Egypt and told them they were coming "home".

It told the same nonsense to Jews from all over the Arab world, and helped them to forget their long history as it recruited them to build the Iron Wall against their new Palestinian Arab neighbours. Recovering that history someday soon will be an important part of showing just how Arabs and Jews can live together in peace.

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Comments (5 of 5)

To Tim Hourigan: yes it DOES matter

by Phuq Hedd

Mon Apr 15, 2002 17:31

Tim,
your naive rant misses the point entirely. Until the majority of Israelis understand that the attitudes and beliefs expressed by the original post are incorrect then they are going to act BASED UPON THOSE BELIEFS!

Your "think of the children! PEOPLE are DYING!" rant does nothing to convince a Zionist that they should stop. "Sure," they'll respond, "people are dying, but there's no alternative because the `Arabs' are all insane demonic people that are trying to eat Jewish babies. So we have no alternative but to kill them before they kill us."

It's good that you want to draw attention to the immediate casualties, but unless Zionists can be convinced that they are wrong and that their extreme viewpoint is invalid then you can do all the exhortation that you like and it won't make a blind bit of difference.

HISTORY IS IRRELVANT WHEN BOMBS ARE DROPPING

by Tim Hourigan

Mon Apr 15, 2002 17:06

What the hell does it matter right now about colonial histories and WWII?

That is the surest sign of propoganda.
It's like harping back to 1169 to defend IRA car bombings.

DEAL with what is happening NOW and the PEOPLE who are DYING NOW.
Or is the RIGHTEOUSNESS of your CAUSE all that matters to you?

Honestly, what a waste of time your posting was.
Ambulances, clean water, life free of explosives, that is what is needed, not a damned history lesson.

The Aryan nation is our real enemy

by yossela

Sun Apr 14, 2002 23:35

Before the holocaust the majority of Jewish people lived in Europe, there were no Arabs in Europe. For centuries european Jews suffered all kinds of persecution and pogroms in Europe, not at the hands of Arabs, but at the hands of the gentile Aryan europeans, culminating in the holocaust. It was all the atrocities and the persecution by Aryan europeans, and the subsequent refusal of Allied aryan nations to give refuge to most of the holocaust survivors, that led Jews to think that if they had a state of their own, they would be free from persecution. Arabs are not our enemies, they did not organise the mass extermination of our race, for centuries Jews have not suffered at the hands of Arabs, but at the hands of the Aryan nations. It is only westernised capitalist right wing settlers ignorant of their past and forgetful of our own past suffering, our degradation and our persecution by bullies, who are now adopting the jackboot redneck tactics of our former concentration camp wardens, and persecuting another downtrodden non gentile peoples such as the Palestinians.

Sun Apr 14, 2002 23:34

Usual distortion of the facts

by lalric

Sun Apr 14, 2002 05:50

Miltary superiority was necessary for the Zionists to survive after numerous pogroms and rioting by Arab gangs, not unlike what Arafat does today.

All the Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan etc etc were all created by Colonial powers.

They had little of nothing to do with indigenious cultures. Most of them are of multiple tribes and cultures with just a religion common to all. Israel was the only country that had a culture that was tied to the land. Archeology proves that the Jewish people had been there for over 3000 years, longer than any other nation on earth.

The Arab population grew exponentially due to a great degree to migration from other Arab lands as Jewish immigrants purchased land for agriculatural development and improved the local economy; arabs found working for Jews a better prospect as they always got paid on time for their labor, also quoted in Tom Segev's book,

Also quoted in Tom Segev's book is the same Arab leaders who encouraged and benefited most from land sales to Jews were the most vitriolic in stiring up anti semitic and anti zionist feeling.

It is also untrue to suggest the Arabs treated the Jews in other Arab countries better than Chrisendom. There has been many instances of persecution of Jews, including many pograms. There was also many laws that were discriminatory in Arab territories and the Jews were treated as second class. Their word in any court was not counted because they were non believers.

Jabotinsky influence on Zionism was limited in the years he was alive. His influence on Israeli politics only really came in to being when Menachem Begin formed the first Likud government in 1977.

Based on the way the Middle East was divided up in the first half of the 20th century and also in consideration of the horrific crimes the world has perpetrated against jewry, Zionism still got a very raw deal while the Arabs got 99% of the pickings and still want the final 1%.

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Arabs and Jews can live in peace

Comments (5 of 5)