Islamic Attitudes to Israel

Efraim Karsh,P.R. Kumaraswamy

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317996507
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Sous-sujet: Politica

This book draws on the research of some of the leading scholars in the fields of Jewish-Islamic relations, the Israeli-Arab conflict and political Islam. These highly topical essays examine the relationship between Israel and the Islamic world from both a thematic and geo-strategic perspective.

Divided into two distinct sections, the first section of the book deals with issues relating to contemporary Jewish-Muslim relations and, in particular, looks at the attitude towards the Jewish state amongst opinion-makers, religious institutions and leaders in the Muslim world. Key issues such as the Islamic attitude to Palestinian suicide-bombing, and Arab anti-Semitism are addressed here. The second section examines the attitude of key Muslim nations – Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan – to the Jewish state, and charts the evolving, bilateral relationship between these nations and Israel from the birth of the Jewish State in 1948 up to the present day.

This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal Israel Affairs.

1

The Long Trail of Islamic Anti-Semitism

EFRAIM KARSH

It has long been a staple of anti-Israel propaganda that, so far as Palestine is concerned, Arabs and Muslims have never had anything against Judaism or Jews but only against Zionism and Zionists. After all, did not Muslims treat their Jewish minorities far better than their European counterparts? Did not Arabs and Jews coexist harmoniously for centuries prior to the advent of the Zionist movement? As Fayez A. Sayegh, the Kuwaiti representative, told the United Nations General Assembly during the debate over the ‘Zionism-is-racism’ resolution in November 1975: ‘We in the Arab world showed hospitality to Jews who came fleeing from persecution in Europe when European anti-Semitism was driving them into our arms;… it was only when the Zionists came that, despite our hospitality to the Jew, we showed hostility to the Zionist’.¹

This idyllic picture is at odds with the historical record. True, persecution of Jews in the Islamic world never reached the scale of Christian Europe. But that did not spare them from centuries of legally institutionalized inferiority, humiliating social restrictions, and the sporadic rapacity of local officials and the Muslim population at large. In pre-Zionist Palestine itself, Arab peasants, revolting in the 1830s against a military conscription imposed by Egyptian authorities, took the occasion to ravage the Jewish communities of Safed and Jerusalem, and when Arab forces arrived from Egypt to quell the insurrection, they slaughtered the Jews of Hebron in turn. A century later, in June 1941, following an abortive pro-Nazi coup in Iraq, the Jews of Baghdad were subjected to a horrendous massacre in which hundreds perished. And so forth.

The truth of the matter is that, for all their protestations to the contrary, Arabs and Muslims have never really distinguished among Zionists, Israelis, and Jews, and often use these terms interchangeably. As Anis Mansur, one of Egypt’s foremost journalists and a one-time confidant of President Anwar Sadat, put it in a moment of candour: ‘There is no such thing in the world as Jew and Israeli. Every Jew is an Israeli. No doubt about that’.² Indeed, the fact that Arab and Muslim anti-Zionism has invariably reflected a hatred well beyond the ‘normal’ level of hostility to be expected of a prolonged and bitter conflict would seem to suggest that, rather than being a response to Zionist activity, it is a manifestation of longstanding prejudice that has been brought out into the open by the vicissitudes of the Arab–Israel conflict.

This is hardly to deny the clash of destinies between two national groups. But it is precisely because Zionism was construed as epitomizing the worst characteristics traditionally associated with Jews in the Muslim- Arab mind that the Zionist enterprise could be portrayed in so lurid a light by politicians and intellectuals alike. As Lutfi Abdel Azim, the editor of a prestigious Egyptian weekly, wrote in 1982, three years after the conclusion of an Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty:

A Jew is a Jew, and hasn’t changed for thousands of years. He is base, contemptible, scorns all moral values, gnaws on live flesh and sucks blood for a pittance. The Jewish Merchant of Venice is no different from the arch-executioners of Deir Yasin and those at the [Palestinian] refugee camps. Both are similar models of inhuman depravity.³

Where do such vicious stereotypes come from? It has been rightly observed that modern, ideological, anti-Semitism is an invention of nineteenth century Europe, and that traditionally the Islamic world was by and large free of such ‘doctrinaire refinements’ (in the phrase of the late Elie Kedourie). But the ease and rapidity with which the precepts of European anti-Semitism were assimilated by the Muslim-Arab world testify to the pre-existence of a deep anti-Jewish bigotry. This bigotry dates to Islam’s earliest days, and indeed to the Prophet Muhammad himself.

Upon migrating from his hometown of Mecca to the northern site of Medina (in 622), Muhammad sought to woo the local Jewish population by emphasizing the similarity between his incipient religion and Judaism and adopting a number of religious Jewish practices and rituals.⁴ As these gestures failed to impress the Medina Jews, who became Muhammad’s staunchest critics, highlighting the gaps and inconsistencies in the Qur’an and its misrepresentation of the Old Testament stories, the embittered prophet turned against Medina’s three Jewish tribes with great ferocity. Using some trivial incident as a pretext, he expelled the weakest of the three, the Qainuqa, from the city and divided their properties among the Muslims. (Muhammad had originally meant to kill the Qainuqa men but was dissuaded from doing so by a local potentate.) Two years later, in March 625, after a Muslim defeat had dented Muhammad’s prestige in the eyes of the neighbouring Bedouin tribes, it was the turn of the Nadir to pay the price of the prophet’s setback: after a few weeks’ siege they were driven from the city and their lands were given to the Muslims. The last and most powerful Jewish tribe – Quraiza – suffered more profusely following the abortive Meccan siege of Medina in the spring of 627. Charged with collaboration with the enemy, the tribe’s 600–800 men were brought in small groups to trenches dug the previous day, seated on the edge, then beheaded one by one and thrown in. The women and children were sold into slavery and the money they fetched, together with the proceeds from the tribe’s possessions, was divided among the Muslims.⁵ This process was completed on Muhammad’s deathbed in the form of an injunction ordering the expulsion of Jews (and Christians) from the peninsula: ‘Two faiths will not live together in the land of the Arabs’.⁶

This physical elimination was accompanied by Islam’s growing break with its Jewish origins. The direction of prayer was changed from Jerusalem to Mecca, Friday was substituted for Sabbath as the holy day of rest, the minaret replaced the Jewish trumpets (and Christian bells) as the summons to the prayer, and Ramadan was designated as a month of fasting. Moreover, reflecting Muhammad’s outrage over the rejection of his religious message by the contemporary Jewish community, both the Qur’an and later biographical traditions of the prophet abound with negative depictions of Jews. In these works they are portrayed as a deceitful, evil, and treacherous people who in their insatiable urge for domination would readily betray an ally and swindle a non-Jew. They tampered with the Holy Scriptures, spurned Allah’s divine message, and persecuted His messenger Muhammad just as they had done to previous prophets, including Jesus of Nazareth. For this perfidy, they will incur a string of retributions, both in the afterlife, when they will burn in hell, and here on earth where they have been justly condemned to an existence of wretchedness and humiliation.

As this summary suggests, the traits associated with Jews make a paradoxical mixture: they are seen as both domineering and wretched, both haughty and low. But such is the age-old Muslim stereotype – as it is, mutatis mutandis, the Christian. Coming to know Jews as a small subject community in their midst, most Muslims held them in the contempt reserved for the powerless. ‘I never saw the curse denounced against the children of Israel more fully brought to bear than in the East’, wrote an early nineteenth century Western traveller to the Ottoman Empire, ‘where they are considered rather as a link between animals and human beings than as men possessed by the same attributes’. To another contemporary visitor to the region, the Jews’ ‘pusillanimity is so excessive, that they flee before the uplifted hand of a child’.⁷ That was one side of the picture. As for the other, even Egypt’s President Sadat, the man who would go farther than any other Middle Eastern leader in accepting the existence of a sovereign Jewish state, could remind his people in April 1972 of why the Jews had been brought so low, and why their power was still to be feared:

They were the neighbours of the Prophet in Medina. They were his neighbours, and he negotiated with them and reached an agreement with them. But in the end they proved that they were men of deceit and treachery, since they concluded a treaty with his enemies, so as to strike him in Medina and attack him from within… They are a nation of traitors and liars, contrivers of plots, a people born for deeds of treachery.⁸

Given the depth of anti-Jewish feeling in the Arab Middle East, it is hardly surprising that some of the hoariest and most bizarre themes of European anti-Semitism should have struck a responsive chord when they made their way there over the course of the centuries. Thus, special derision is reserved in Arab writings (as in Christian ones) for the biblical notion of the chosen people, seen in Anis Mansur’s words as the quintessence of ‘Judaism’s perception of the Jews as… masters of the universe – its peoples, lands, and skies… to whom all other peoples are but servants, undeserving of belief in the Jewish God’. To this doctrine is attributed, in turn, the license Jews supposedly take in mistreating non-Jews, with the Talmud characterized as not only condoning but actually requiring acts like the swindling of Gentiles and the ‘rape of women of other religions’.⁹

Then there is the ‘blood libel’, that medieval Christian fabrication according to which Jews use Gentile blood, and particularly the blood of children, for ritual purposes. Imported to the Ottoman Empire by Christians in the fifteenth century, this fantastical charge acquired a mythic status, reaching a peak of popularity in the nineteenth century. Among the numerous places in which the libel surfaced, and local Jews were made to suffer for it, were Aleppo (1810, 1850, 1875); Antioch (1826); Beirut (1824, 1862, 1874); Damascus (1840, 1848, 1890); Deir al-Qamar (1847); Homs (1829); Tripoli (1834); Jerusalem (1847); Alexandria (1870, 1882, 1901–1902); Port Said (1903, 1908); and Cairo (1844, 1890, 1901–1902).¹⁰

Although most of these incidents were of Christian manufacture, and although Ottoman authorities often extended help to the persecuted Jews, the libel itself was quickly internalized in the Muslim imagination, where it remains firmly implanted to this day. Thus, in August 1972 King Faisal of Saudi Arabia could confide to the mass-circulation Egyptian magazine al-Musawwar that ‘while I was in Paris on a visit, the police discovered five murdered children. Their blood had been drained, and it turned out that some Jews had murdered them in order to take their blood and mix it with the bread that they eat on that day’. For his part, the long-time Syrian Defence Minister Mustafa Talas wrote a book titled The Matzah of Zion about the 1840 Damascus Blood Libel, in which the medieval fabrication is taken for a historically verified fact.¹¹

Nor is the blood libel kept alive only by avowed anti-Semites (like King Faisal and Talas). Rather, it is prevalent even among scholars and intellectuals. In Israeli Religious Thought: Stages and Sects, published by a respectable Egyptian academic press, Dr Hasan Zaza, a professor of Hebrew at Ein Shams University in Cairo, accepts the veracity of the blood libel despite his awareness that Jewish religious law specifically forbids the eating of anything containing blood. For how is it possible, he asks rhetorically, that a charge that has been levelled time and again all over the world for so many generations could be just an unsubstantiated rumour?¹² As late as 28 October 2000, the largest Egyptian government daily, al-Ahram, which is probably the world’s foremost Arabic-language newspaper, published an almost full-page article titled ‘Jewish Matzah made of Arab blood’.

Perhaps the most successful anti-Semitic import of all in the Muslim- Arab world is the theory of an organized Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination, particularly as spelled out in the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This virulent anti-Semitic tract, which was fabricated by the Russian secret police at the turn of the twentieth century, made its appearance in Western Europe during and immediately after the First World War. As early as 1918, Chaim Weizmann, travelling in Palestine with the Zionist Commission, was presented with copies of the Protocols by his Arab interlocutors. Translated into Arabic in the mid-1920s, the work has retained its popular appeal to this day, published in numerous editions and in several different translations, including one by the brother of Egyptian president Gamal Abde...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. The Long Trail of Islamic Anti-Semitism
• 2. Fundamentals of the Modern Muslim–Jewish Polemic
• 3. The ‘Ulama’ and the Cult of Death in Palestine
• 4. Inter-Faith Strife: The Al-Azhar Discourse on Israel
• 5. Political Islam and the Palestinian – Israeli Conflict
• 6. Hizballah and Israel: Strategic Threat on the Northern Border
• 7. Iran, Israel and the Middle East Conflict
• 8. Israel and Pakistan: Public Rhetoric Versus Political Pragmatism
• 9. The Republic of Indonesia and Israel
• 10. Egypt’s Policy Towards Israel: The Impact of Foreign and Domestic Constraints
• 11. How has Turkey Viewed Israel?
• Index