january 2005
Whose hatred?
By Zvi Bar'el
Gamal al-Ghitani, editor of Akhbar al-Adab (Literary News), which is published in Egypt, has taken action. He asked Dr. Ali al-Ratit, an expert in international law, to translate into Arabic the law on controlling anti-Semitism that was signed by President George W. Bush shortly before the elections in the United States. Since its passage in October, the law - which among other things determines that the U.S. State Department will have the authority to identify and keep track of expressions of anti-Semitism everywhere in the world - has been the subject of a fascinating discussion among Arab intellectuals. Most of the Arab anger is directed at the monopoly that the Jews have claimed on the concept of anti-Semitism, when it is the Arabs who are the largest Semitic people in the world.
"The concept of anti-Semitism according to the gang that is ruling today in the White House boils down to Israel as a state, and not even to the Jews as a race or a religion," says Ghitani. According to him, anti-Semitism is nothing more than politics, and if it is about politics, then the Arabs also have to be in the game.
On the practical side, two weeks ago Egypt succeeded in convincing the heads of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to appoint a representative of their own to keep track of hatred of Islam, along with the other "inspector" of anti-Semitic phenomena. At a seminar that was held at Sharm el-Sheikh, and after extensive Egyptian lobbying among the countries that are members of the organization, the current chair of the organization, from Bulgaria, agreed to accept the Egyptians' position that it is necessary to identify and track all the discriminatory phenomena in the world - not just anti-Semitic phenomena.
In Egypt they related to the decision as a huge diplomatic achievement on the way to "equalizing rights" between hatred of Jews and hatred of Arabs or Muslims. Two years ago the OSCE decided that "anti-Semitism is a threat to the stability of societies and is liable to engender violence," and this is the organization's rationale for dealing with the phenomenon. The decision of two weeks ago broadens the scope and in particular gives the Arabs and the Muslims the right to official international standing when it comes to hatred of the other.
Alternative theory
The problem, according to many Arabs, is that the Jews have an undeniable "asset": the Holocaust. Attempts to question the truth or to shatter the mythical number of 6 million Jews who perished in it have crashed in the faces of Holocaust deniers. Therefore, the discourse about numbers has had to be replaced by a different one, and political discourse about the racism of the State of Israel and of the Zionist movement has been found to be a worthy substitute.
Ghitani exemplifies the change well in his explanation in his article: "Sometimes, a number of Arab writers raise questions as to the accuracy of the numbers of Jews who were annihilated in the Nazi concentration camps. We say that these questions are an injustice. Humanity is not only numbers. A single soul is the essence of all humanity, and the annihilation of a single soul is like the annihilation of a million or millions of souls."
But his own conclusion from the moral statement also raises questions, as "the annihilation of a single human soul is a universal crime, the meaning of which is not lessened if the number of those annihilated is small and does not become any greater if the number of those annihilated is large." And when the extent is not the determinant of the differentiation between murder and holocaust, and after the moral position has been expressed with the appropriate sharpness and the question of the numbers has been called "stupid," it is possible to move on to the main point.
According to Ghitani, when Arab intellectuals talk about numbers, "they are diverting attention from a real holocaust, like the one that is occurring in our region day by day, the one that is occurring in Palestine and in Iraq." This is the comparison that the U.S. wanted to make invisible in the new law, says Ghitani. This is the heart of the politics that stands behind the complaints of anti-Semitism.
The adoption of political anti-Semitism, of the sort that sees Zionism and the State of Israel as the excuse for anti-Semitism, is perceived by some Arab intellectuals as a worthy, and certainly more convenient and respectable, alternative to dealing with "the theory of numbers." But for them, too, it is hard to shake off the need to attribute deeper roots to the behavior of the Jews.
"The Jews were not the only ones who fell victim to the Nazis. The Gypsies and the Slavs and the Russians suffered equally. It is true that a large number of Jews were killed by Hitler in the concentration camps, and there is a dispute as to the exact number. But we are more interested in the inhumane approach of the ethnic cleansing than in dealing with the precise number of those who were killed," wrote a Saudi Arabian commentator Suraya al-Shahri last week.
After the "scientific" analysis of the essence of anti- Semitism and the classification of the races of the world according to their early ancestors Ham, Shem and Japhet, Shahri moves on to the real point of the article. "Israel's interest is to maintain the fear of persecution and annihilation in the hearts of all Jews. This was the aim of the Jewish leaders - to prevent them from assimilating in order to preserve their ethnic purity. The Jews needed to be convinced that they are living among other nations temporarily, until they enter the promised land (Palestine). This is the explanation for the reports of Israel's involvement in the organization of persecutions of Jews in various parts of the world .... The founders of the State of Israel knew very well that the shared religious ties among Jews would not suffice to ensure the existence of a Jewish political entity .... Therefore they found the cultural common denominator in the image of a community that is persecuted in a racial context."
This is already an argument that is likely to be accepted by a broader public; it is a "quasi-scientific" analysis of the Zionist identity and its difficulties in organizing its community. These are things that are well understood in communities where the rulers decided how the people should behave and what they should feel.
Asset vs. asset
In this perception, anti-Semitism does indeed exist and Jews (in debatable numbers) were indeed annihilated, but in fact this is a political game intentionally encouraged by the Zionist movement, which wanted to exploit anti-Semitism in order to build a state that would eventually become cruel "like those who harmed the Jews." This is already a relatively sophisticated idea relative to the position set forth by Muhammad Suwan, which he published in the Syrian newspaper Al-Ba'ath. Suwan posits simply that "it is Israel that has implanted the `guilt complex' in Europe for seven decades, during which the Zionists have succeeded in plundering the Europeans financially, culturally and psychologically .... All this happened before the establishment of the European Union, when the countries of Europe were divided and without a unified policy."
The editor of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, Ibrahim Naf'a, formulated his opinion of anti-Semitism a year ago, when he stated: "Israel and the Zionist organizations are becoming increasingly dependent on the weapon of anti-Semitism .... They have succeeded in manipulating the Semitic ethnicity so that it will be unique only to Jews, and thus they will be able to accuse the Arabs of anti-Semitism as well, even though the Arabs are the majority of the Semitic peoples." On the basis of the "corrections" of the Zionist distortion, Naf'a entitled his article "Israel's Anti-Semitism," and enlisted to his aid detailed and ugly statements by Israelis about Arabs, which he gathered from Israeli Internet sites like Walla and that of Maariv.
For example, in reaction to the United Nations report on the state of human development in the Middle East (a report published last year that was devoted to the deplorable state of education and technological development in the Arab countries), which was published on the Walla site, some Israelis responded thus: "Here is another object for the genetic garbage can," "an atomic bomb will solve the problem forever," and also "the Arabs are garbage - the report proves what kind of people we are dealing with." In response to the continued bombardments of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Israelis responded: "Bravo to Sharon who has gone back to the days of [Paratroops] Unit 101." And "When are they going to realize that there cannot be peace as long as there are Arabs?"
"All of this racist venom, with its tone of genocide, reflects the despicable poison that Israeli political and religious leaders have been spewing for years," wrote Naf'a in explanation of why there is also Israeli anti-Semitism.
Now OSCE will also be tracking "Israeli anti-Semitism." "Anti-Semitism versus anti-Semitism - that's what they want," says an Egyptian intellectual. "Asset versus asset. This is the kind of war that our intellectuals are engaged in. What is their next step going to be? To kill 6 million Arabs so that the numbers too will be identical, or perhaps they will also want to convert? Must we always conduct our struggle against American imperialism through Jerusalem? Doesn't every people deserve to have its own disasters?"