Mark Cohen has suggested that modern Arab anti-semitism was a late nineteenth century phenomenon for which educated Arab Christians were chiefly responsible. The fact is, Islam is closer to Judaism than to Christianity and, moreover, Jews had been persecuted in European countries traditionally hostile to Islam.
However, anti-Semitism in Arab lands was not the monopoly of Christians. In Shiah dominated areas- e.g. Zaidi portions of Yemen as well as Twelver areas in Iraq- there was a pre-existing tradition of considering Jews to be accursed and associated with 'Dajjal' (anti-Christ). The history of the Druze (whose most venerated figure persecuted Jews with vigor) and other such sects has a similar eschatological tendency which however only Christians (who consider Jews to be 'Deicides') have strenuously cultivated.
In this context, we can only laugh at Ussama Makdisi who writes in Aeon-
By the time I was born in 1968, my grandfather was an emeritus professor and a pillar of Ras Beirut’s small and highly educated Protestant community.
So, he was a Christian living in a Christian dominated State which was doing quite well at that time. Sadly, Maronites were as clannish and gangsterish and crazy as the Druze or other unique sects of the region.
But by then, as well, the optimism of the first half of the 20th century had receded dramatically.
Because Europe was too weak to rule that part of the world. It was abandoned to its own kleptocracies.
European empires had long since cynically partitioned the Ottoman Empire and created several new states including Lebanon.
But Nasser was supposed to have created a United Arab Republic to include Egypt and Syria and perhaps Iraq and so forth. But Nasser was kray kray as were Syrians and Iraqis and Lebanese and everybody else save the Ashkenazi Jews in Israel.
The Arab East, of which the small Mediterranean country was an inseparable part, witnessed the vibrant anticolonial politics of the 1950s and ’60s
which was utterly useless. Nasser got sucked into a costly war in Yemen and then Israel humiliated the Arabs by winning the 6 day war and grabbing their territory. It turned out that 'anti-colonial politics' was stupid shit- like the sort of thing Pundit Nehru indulged in before the Chinese took down his pants in 1962, after which the poor fellow had to go running to Uncle Sam not just for food but also for defence.
atrophy under a variety of repressive Arab regimes during the Cold War.
The problem was not that Arab regimes were repressive. The problem was they were shit.
Lebanon had already experienced a short civil war in 1958.
The US, under the 'Eisenhower doctrine' intervened in Jordan and Lebanon to prevent them turning to the Left and perhaps joining Nasser's Arab Republic. However, by 1968, everybody had realized that Nasser's Egypt wasn't going to become the Prussia of the Arabs- or even retain its position of cultural and religious pre-eminence.
in the Arab East had occurred a decade before that, when Palestine was shattered by Zionists bent on establishing an exclusively Jewish state.
They established a state which could win wars and promote the rule of law. Meanwhile the Arabs were either knifing each other or groaning under the heavy hand of the Secret Police. The calamities of the Arabs were self-created. If they hadn't been so utterly shite, they wouldn't have kept losing territory to Israel.
In their drive to realise this ethnoreligious fantasy,
I suppose a guy from Lebanon might well think that having a State which isn't utterly shite is an 'ethnoreligious fantasy'. The strange thing is that Lebanese people are smarter and more charming than almost anybody else on the planet. Why is their country so hopelessly dysfunctional? The answer is obvious. Too fucking obvious. That's why this professor has to write this nonsense here. If Jews do smart things and run their country well then, obviously, Lebanon has to turn into a horrible shithole because...urm... reality is actually a fantasy- right?
they plunged the region into instability and war.
The Arabs did declare war on Israel- that's true enough. But the Arabs were shit at fighting (except for the British trained Jordanians). They lost and continued to lose because they thought reality was a fantasy.
The Zionists expelled most of the Palestinian natives from their lands and homes in 1948 and confiscated their property.
Coz the Palestinian leader had joined hands with Hitler. Thus, like other defeated Nations, the Palestinians lost land.
In response, long-established Jewish communities across the Arab East found themselves scapegoated and imperilled.
But Grand Mufti Husseini had already scapegoated and imperilled them. His great pal was Hitler who had a 'final solution' for the Jewish problem. But it all turned out to be a fantasy.
Since then, Arabs and Jews have been represented as eternal ontological foes as if their bitter contemporary political struggles rehearsed allegedly ancient religious conflicts.
But Sadat made peace with Begin. Now it is the turn of the Gulf and the Saudis to get cozy with Israel. Meanwhile, Lebanon is a horror show.
How intriguing then to read a poem titled ‘A Lesson from the Zionist Movement’ composed by my grandfather Anis and published in March 1914 in the journal Al-Kulliyya of the Syrian Protestant College – today the American University of Beirut (AUB).
This is silly. Obviously, a Palestinian Christian would have thought that a European sponsor (the Kaiser?) would protect the Christians just as the Brits might protect the Jews. This was a story about extra-territoriality and minorities getting a Great Power protector.
The opening stanzas speak to a time when the word ‘Zionism’ in Arabic (Al-sahyuniyya) had not been completely tainted by the Zionist movement’s later deeds.
This guy was born in 1968, the year some Egyptian nutter published a book titled 'Al-sahyunniya wa-l- Naziyya'. The fact is, Israelis didn't have to fear arbitrary arrest by the secret police. Egyptians did. Arab Republics were genuinely 'National Socialist' and happy to hire genuine German ex-Nazis to train their goons.
The poem acknowledges the industriousness of the Zionist colonists who had arrived in Palestine from Europe at a moment of Arab decline. The lesson my grandfather drew from the Zionist movement was two-fold: the first was that the determination and agency of Zionists to revive themselves might spur the Arabs ‘to match them in their endeavour and enterprise’. This exhortation to progress perhaps reflected my grandfather’s distinctly Protestant Arab modernism, which was influenced heavily by American missionary institutions and culture.
This cretin doesn't get that his grandpappy wanted Christians to rise up the way Jews were rising up. But this meant some Great Power or other must protect the Christians from crazy Muslim clerics.
But the urgent call for the Arabs to join the caravan of modernity also reflected a ubiquitous trope of the ecumenical Arab intellectual and cultural renaissance known as the nahda.
Which accomplished nada. Writing poems doesn't really help make the world a better place.
For that same Zionist determination – and here was the more important lesson my grandfather drew – ultimately threatened to overwhelm the Arabs who needed to stop lamenting their glorious past and overcome their present pitiable condition.
The condition of Arab Christians was pitiable indeed. Did they have a glorious past? Not really. Byzantine Emperors didn't like them. Crusaders kept raping them or using them as beasts of burden. Sad.
‘Is it any wonder that the nation of Moses has settled on our shores, ploughing the land diligently,’ he wrote. My grandfather saw that European Jews had galvanised a Jewish awakening and then an organised Zionist movement. Yet he also alluded to the danger that the well-funded colonists posed to the Arabs of Syria who were still ‘asleep’. He was adamant that God had blessed the Arabs with a land from which valiant men had emerged and a beautiful language that transcended religious difference.
But that 'beautiful language' only established itself after crushing the Christians who spoke Aramaic or Syriac. That's why Christians wanted Lebanon to be carved out of Syria so as to have a State they could dominate under French protection. But the Maronites couldn't run shit. The reason Lebanon is now in such a mess is because its Constitution tried to give Christians hegemony in partnership with urban Sunnis. The Shia peasants rebelled and are now, with Iranian backing, the strongest military force in the country. Thus, the place is bound to decline yet further.
It was for the Arabs to choose whether they would ultimately give way before these zealous outsiders or realise that they had it within themselves to build a free and dignified future. ‘If you are ultimately humiliated,’ he concluded addressing his own Arab people, ‘do not say it is fate and divine decree that had concealed themselves in the passage of time.’
The trouble is, Muslim Arabs considered him a Christian who would demand protection from a European power for his co-religionists.
My grandfather contributed to an incongruent early Arab archive that was still trying to make sense of Zionism and its relationship to a fading Ottoman world.
That 'archive' was a fantasy. Smart Christians get the fuck out of the Middle East.
There was little reason for my grandfather, or for Muslims and Christians across the Levant, to take issue with the religion of Judaism itself, or the desire for a revitalised Jewish cultural or spiritual communalism.
Nonsense! The Brits had Egypt and Jews were considered an advance guard for British Imperialism in the region.
Coexistence, after all, was deeply entrenched in the Arab East.
Hilarious! The region was notorious for pogroms. The Ottomans had been forced to grant more and more freedom to Christians- they were even allowed to build churches after 1839- which of course led to bloody massacres- e.g. that of Aleppo in 1850. By the end of the Nineteenth Century, the genocide of Armenians had begun. No doubt, Protestants considered themselves safe but they knew that could change at a moment's notice.
Four centuries of Ottoman rule had not introduced a shared world between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Indeed. The Ottomans turned their backs on the Levant and Iraq to concentrate on retaining their position in Europe. This meant decline and destitution- but this was not a shared misery. As Western powers forced the Turks to end discriminatory taxes on non-Muslims, the Christians started pulling ahead. Some, in the Sixties, thought that Socialism would put an end to their sectarian vulnerability. But Christian Palestinians like Habash or Sirhan Sirhan shat the bed so spectacularly that both Socialism and Secularism became anathema.
Rather, it had complicated a tradition that had been in place since the rise of Islam.
What tradition was that? Christians getting their heads chopped off?
Although Islamic law privileged Muslims over non-Muslims in an empire ruled by Ottoman Muslim sultans, Christian and Jewish communities were integral parts of a diverse urban fabric. They existed in every corner of the Empire and, in the Arab East, Eastern Jews and Christians of the Empire spoke Arabic. In contrast to Europe, Jews were not singled out for persecution in the Ottoman Empire, which did not seek to make all its subjects practise the same faith or even share the same language or culture. At the Empire’s end, its leaders persecuted and massacred Armenians and hunted down Arab nationalists. But there was no ‘Jewish Question’ in the Ottoman Empire, nor was there a corresponding racialised antisemitism.
The bigger problem was that Ottoman Sultans didn't give a shit about even their own Turkish subjects in Anatolia. Jews, it is true, suffered little at Turkish hands but those in the Levant might be massacred by local Muslims or Druze etc.
There is a reason that Zionism emerged in Europe and not in the Ottoman world.
It is the same reason nothing good emerged in the Ottoman world. Anything which showed promise would suddenly have its head cut off.
Every major Zionist leader was European,
Just as every major Political ideologue or Scientific savant was European
for it was in European cities and towns that
people didn't keep having their head cut off
the noxious combination of nationalism and antisemitism drove some Jews to dream of establishing a separate nationalist state.
Surely the bigger driver was Tzarist pogroms. Western Jews were worried that very poor refugees would turn up on their door. Many British Jews supported the Alien Exclusion Act. To compensate, like Balfour, they supported Zionism which they believed involved giving 'a land without a people to a people without a land'.
There was no menacing imperative driving Ottoman, Eastern or Arab Jews toward a scheme to reconstitute multireligious Palestine into a Jewish ethnoreligious nationalist state.
But Palestinians didn't want the place to be 'multireligious'. Indeed, the day may soon dawn when 'Secularists' in the West Bank have their heads chopped off.
Theodor Herzl, the Viennese
he was from Budapest. He moved to Vienna when he was 18.
founding father of political Zionism, eventually landed on Palestine as the location of his Jewish state not simply because in it had unfolded the great stories and symbols of the Jewish faith and history; he identified it also because he belonged to a European world in which the presence of natives was thought irrelevant to consequential history and destiny.
This was because population was falling there at least partly because of Ottoman misrule. As a matter of fact, 'the presence of natives' has always been irrelevant if those natives are shit at fighting.
In his Zionist tract Der Judenstaat (1896), Herzl wrote: ‘We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism.’
Sadly, this is precisely what we see when we look at Israel. That country is exporting sciencey stuff. Lebanon has quite literally gone down the toilet. Jews did well. Arab Christians couldn't organize a piss up in a brewery. Sad.
Insofar as Herzl and other leading Zionist ideologues thought about the native Arabs at all, they considered them wholly incapable of developing themselves,
Many Lebanese people are demanding that France return as the mandatory power and sort out that country's problems. This is despite the fact that Lebanese people do extremely well almost everywhere they settle.
and certainly unworthy of Palestine itself. They viewed them as a simple, apolitical, passive peasant population, and suggested that, through economic cooperation, these Arabs would sooner or later reconcile themselves to colonial Zionism in Palestine.
Or lose territory. That's how the USA and Australia and so forth got their start.
Herzl’s fantasies lay at the heart of a well-known story of modern Zionism, which inserted itself into a polyphonic Ottoman and Arab landscape.
And succeeded because it changed the landscape into something less fucking polyphonic.
Less known
because it is not worth knowing
is how many Muslim, Christian and Jewish Arabs initially grappled with Zionism, trying to make sense of it, understand it, sometimes after meeting Zionist representatives who spoke of the need for friendship and cooperation between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Jews’ without ever disclosing the ultimate goal of the organised European-led Zionist movement in Palestine. Like my grandfather Anis, some educated Arabs were initially impressed with the apparently modern methods of the Zionists but, like him, they were quick to understand the implications for the Arabs of Palestine. Yusuf Diya’ al-Khalidi, the Muslim Jerusalemite and Ottoman Arab mayor of Jerusalem, sent a letter to the chief Rabbi of France in 1899, asking him to forward it to Herzl, in which he acknowledged that the idea behind Zionism was ‘in theory a completely natural and just idea’ to combat European antisemitism, but its implementation in multireligious Palestine was not. Khalidi expressed his growing concern about the colonial dimension of Zionism in Palestine.
He was hinting that the Ottomans would swallow up a lot bribe money but then hand over the Jews to the Muslims to have their throats slit. On the other hand, if Herzl wanted to give him plenty of Yid money then he could guarantee that Jews would flourish like nobody's business.
As long as the Ottoman Empire existed, the idea of an actual Jewish state seemed remote. Zionists debated among themselves the viability, necessity, form and implications of a Jewish state in Palestine, especially as those who travelled to Palestine recognised that the reality of a large native Arab population posed an obvious conundrum to the nationalist project to establish a Jewish state. The advent of more and more Jewish colonies, sometimes built on land purchased from absentee Arab landlords, began to arouse sustained Palestinian suspicion. The more the Arabs learned about Zionism, the more alarmed they grew.
But their own clan feuds loomed larger in their minds.
After 1904, a new wave of ardent colonists from eastern Europe and Russia rejected Arabic and sought little integration into local society. In 1911, Najib Nassar,
a Christian
the owner and publisher of the Arabic newspaper Al Carmel in Haifa (whom my grandfather had befriended when both were students in Beirut), wrote a short treatise on Zionism. Nassar warned his readers about the modern organisation, motivation and seriousness of the political programme of Zionism. He insisted that he would never have opposed Jewish immigration had Zionism been free of political ambition. Nassar acknowledged how Herzl had worked hard to inspire Jews from around the world to embrace Zionism, but he said that the Zionists did not truly want to ‘Ottomanise’ – rather they wanted to build their separate nationalist state in Palestine, and so had to be resisted urgently.
The problem here was that after the Young Turk Revolution, local Muslims who took up the anti-Zionist cause- e.g. Shukri al-Asali- were viewed with suspicion by the Pan-Turkic element. Non-Arab Jews represented an ally against the pan-Arabism which, the Turks believed, was being propagated by British agents like W.S Blunt. Shukri was beheaded in 1916 by the Turks.
Interestingly, the British Ambassador to Turkey believed that the Young Turks were crypto-Jews! There was plenty of craziness to go around back then.
Also in 1911, Ruhi al-Khalidi, the nephew of Yusuf Diya’, gave a speech in the Ottoman parliament in Istanbul praising Jews but warning that Zionism would bring an imminent breakdown of relations between Arabs and Jews.
But Arabs had the reputation of always being on the verge of running amok killing all and sundry. The young Turks were in no mood to treat them with anything save cold steel or the hangman's noose.
And in 1913, the Cairo-based journalist and author Jurji Zaydan
a Christian who had been barred from an appointment to the new Cairo University because of his religion
visited Palestine and also saw the writing on the wall.
Christians would have a thin time of it after European powers retreated from a Muslim majority region. The Jews survived because they actually created an effective State. Christians concentrated on fantasy.
Commenting in his ecumenical journal Al-Hilal, Zaydan repeated Nassar’s stark warning to the Arabs about the danger of Zionist colonisation of Palestine.
This is silly. Arabs who didn't live there faced no danger. No doubt, the Christians were happy to try to get into Muslim good books by pointing the finger at Jews. But if Jews concentrated their population on some small sliver of land, then Muslims elsewhere were not greatly discommoded. The true danger that the Arabs should have been warned about was the perils of talking worthless shite instead of doing sensible things.
For Muslim and Christian Arabs of all stations and locales, Zionism unquestionably needed translation.
Fuck off! Nobody gives a shit about a real estate scheme in some small sliver of land without any great endowment of mineral wealth.
Almost everything about Zionism screamed foreignness:
Everything about the Turkish or European rulers of Arab lands screamed foreignness- because they were actually foreign.
the languages the colonists and immigrants spoke; their nationalist ideology; their dress; their settlements; and the relentless efforts of its European leaders – such as the German social scientist and social Darwinist Arthur Ruppin who worked with the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish National Fund to plan the ‘scientific’ colonisation of Palestine – to segregate ‘Jews’ from ‘Arabs’.
In a small sliver of land nobody who didn't live there gave two shits about. Once the Christians got a state of their own- Lebanon- they appeared hypocritical for making a bid deal about the Jews getting something similar. But Lebanon now looks an utter shit-hole. Israel continues to rise. Sad.
For these reasons, educated Arabs left a significant record of observations and thoughts that often distinguished between Zionists and native Jews.
Native Jews were as useless as native Muslims or Christians. Foreigners, however, could get their act together to some good purpose.
In a way that colonial Zionism refused to do, Ruhi al-Khalidi and my grandfather, and many others such as the Jerusalemite educator Khalil Sakakini,
another Christian
could distinguish between a major religion that constituted the shared foundation of the three great monotheistic religions and a political movement that emerged out of one aspect of the Jewish experience in the bitter nationalist climes of central and eastern Europe.
Why didn't these guys, or their descendants, demand that Lebanon stop giving extra representation to Christians? If it is wrong for the Jews to have their own State, why was the creation and continued existence of Lebanon not considered equally wrong? The truth is, the Levant has been going in for 'bitter nationalist' crimes for far longer than the climes of central or eastern Europe. That is why clans survive while States wither.
Arab Jews, however, had a more difficult intellectual reckoning with the early iterations of Zionism in Palestine.
They were told they were stupid and that they smelled bad and should shut the fuck up. This still rankles.
Zionists spoke adamantly about representing the entirety of the Jewish people.
while telling Morrocans and Yemenites and 'Beni-Israelis' and so forth that they were little better than monkeys. On the other hand, once Zionists adopted Hebrew, not German, as the language of instruction for their new Universities, the Mizrachi was somewhat appeased. Still, it was only after it became blindingly obvious that non-Muslims get short shrift in any Islamic Republic that they were reconciled to being Israelis- till they could hook it for the States.
Unlike Christian and Muslim Arabs, Arab Jews wrestled intensely with Zionism as a form of self-identification, not as a foil to their own aspiring modern rejuvenation.
Nonsense! Most thought the thing was a stupid fad which was bound to come to a bad end. Smart Arab Jews were trying to get to America or Australia, not Israel. Still, it must be said, for religious reasons, some did make Aliyah.
Some native Jews saw in the idea of Jewish revival in Palestine an important avenue of Jewish communal self-expression within the Ottoman Empire that had long valorised religious diversity.
No. Either they made Aliyah for religious reasons, or felt they had no other choice in a world where European power was waning.
Others saw it as an alien intrusion that segregated them from their fellow Arabic-speaking Muslim and Christian compatriots.
But Arab Christians were always terribly anti-Semitic. Jews got on better with Muslims coz of similar dietary restrictions.
The organisation, funding and colonial confidence among many Zionists settling in Palestine instigated a cultural and institutional struggle over who truly represented the Jewish community in Palestine
There was no struggle. Money talks. Bullshit walks.
and what the future of Jewish life there would be like. This intra-Jewish conflict split most of the newly arrived Ashkenazi European Zionist colonists from Sephardic Jews long settled in the Ottoman Empire and, of course, from other Middle Eastern Jews who were not Ashkenazi and not necessarily Sephardic.
It was a walkover for the Ashkenazi though some of the richest British and Dutch families were Sephardic. Indeed, in New York, the Sephardics considered themselves a cut above the more recent Ashkenazi migrants.
These lines were not uniformly rigid, for there were native Ashkenazi Arab Jews born in Palestine who refused colonial Zionism, just as many Sephardic Jews who embraced it from the beginning and who worked for or donated to various Zionist institutions. Jews debated Zionism in communal councils, schools, including those of the French-funded Alliance Israélite Universelle, in the multilingual Jewish press, and in their homes. The struggle ultimately impinged upon all Eastern Jewish communities across the Maghrib and Mashriq and into Salonika and other major cities of the Empire.
Jews could have debated themselves to death. Indeed, that is what most people expected. Then sheer brute necessity forced the Jews to either do sensible stuff or perish. That's it. That's the whole story. Jews could flourish in a historically Arab region by not talking Arabic bollocks. Christians couldn't. According to the U.N, 82 percent of Lebanon's population is under the poverty line. Three million are malnourished. Without international assistance, there would be widespread starvation.
Did Jews belong to an ecumenical nation with compatriots of different religions, or fundamentally only to a political nation with other Jews: this basic question dominated the political itinerary of Zionism in Palestine. The European Zionist leaders knew their answer and worked, especially after the inaugural World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, to advocate for eventual Jewish sovereignty in or over Palestine. More immediately, they strove for unimpeded (and ultimately mass) immigration of European Jews to Palestine despite native Arab wishes, and they purchased land there to establish the material basis for a Jewish state in Palestine.
This was a period when European powers were gaining territory in North Africa where they expected to settle substantial numbers of their own citizens. What differentiated Zionism was its lack of military strength and thus its reliance on purchasing land rather than just grabbing it.
For Arab Jews, the question of Zionism was not so simple. The feminist journalist Esther Azharī Moyal and her husband, the journalist Shim‘on Moyal, as well as Nissim Malul, another journalist, struggled with the relationship between Arabism and Zionism.
Journalists frequently struggle with stupid shit so as to carry on publishing their worthless lucubrations.
Unlike the European Zionists, they spoke Arabic and valued Arab culture.
Much good it did them.
Like many of their Arab Jewish compatriots in Syria and Egypt, Malul and the Moyals saw in, or convinced themselves that, Zionism was a cultural and national expression that could coexist with the multireligious reality of Ottoman Palestine.
I think the truth is more complicated. France was always on the look out for Arabic journalists who were attracted to their culture because France believed they might be useful in advancing their own claims in the region.
To honour their commitment to a shared world, the Moyals even named their first-born son after their friend Abdullah Nadim, a childless Egyptian nationalist writer.
After her husband's death Esther Moyal lived in France only returning after the second world war had ended.
For them, reconciliation between Arabism and Zionism did not appear to be merely a diversionary gambit to mollify increasing Arab concern, as it was for leading European Zionists.
Who understood that sneering at the natives was the way to go. They wanted to be seen as similar to the French in Algeria and Morocco or the Italians in Libya or the English in Egypt.
The latter included Nahum Sokolow,
who was considered a British agent
who visited Beirut and Damascus in 1914 to meet prominent Arab intellectuals and public figures, and Victor Jacobson, who as a manager of the Zionist Anglo-Palestine Bank in Istanbul, sought to convince a young Arab journalist As‘ad Daghir of the possibility of cooperation between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Jews’.
This reflected British concern to keep the Indian Muslims on side.
Malul,
whom the Turks suspected of being a British agent which he certainly became
for example, wrote in 1913 that ‘in the role of the Semitic nation we must base our nationalism in Semitism and not blur with European culture, and through Arabic we can found a real Hebrew culture. But if we bring into our culture European foundations then we will simply be committing suicide.’
This was the 'Orientalist' view which had prevailed over the 'Occidentalists' of the Raj. Mahatma Gandhi started talking this stripe of shite when he was still an ultra-loyalist.
And yet Malul committed himself to working for a European-dominated Zionism. He joined the Zionist Office in Jaffa in 1911, at the same time as he was a correspondent for the Arabic Cairo-based newspaper Al-Muqattam.
run by Christians
Together with the Moyals, he consistently sought to rebut anti-Zionism in the Arabic press and to reassure Arab readers that Zionism was indeed compatible with Arab national aspirations.
The other side to this was the possibility of a Coptic Zionist alliance of the sort Lawrence Durrell hints at in his Alexandrian Quartet. In this story, the Jews did well on their own while the Arabic Christians suffered continuous decline.
On the eve of the First World War, however, revivified Hebrew, not Arabic or Turkish, was rapidly being made the dominant language of the multilingual Jewish community in Palestine that was itself rapidly coalescing around a Jewish national identity that clearly excluded Palestinians.
Which is why it succeeded. Anti-Colonial 'rainbow coalitions' came a cropper.
Whatever their early admiration for aspects of Zionist modernity, Muslim and Christian Arabs banished them from their collective memory after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War.
Why? The answer was that Jews with backing from the bankers of London, Paris and New York, might have been a potential ally against the Turk.
The Balfour Declaration of November 1917, followed by the imposition of a British mandate in Palestine in 1920, consecrated an overtly colonial phase of Zionism.
Not really. The British Army, for some mystical reason, had become anti-Semitic. Orde Wingate was a notable exception.
Both the British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour’s letter to the Zionist leader Walter Rothschild and Britain’s stated policy openly privileged the foreign European political project of a Jewish ‘national home’ over self-determination for native Arabs.
This is silly. Nobody gave two hoots for Palestine. The big question was whether Syria and Iraq and so forth would be truly independent. In particular, could there be a 'Prussia' for the Arabs? The answer, thankfully, was no. Prussias fuck up.
Although British colonial officials proclaimed that they held the scales of justice in balance, they systematically drove apart Arabs and Jews in Palestine.
Coz Arabs, in a state of nature, spend all their time cuddling and kissing Jews- right?
Britain rejected the possibility of a secular national Palestinian identity,
because the Palestinians rejected it
and ignored or crushed every instance of Palestinian resistance that sought to demonstrate such an identity.
Very true. Every time Palestinians and Jews started kissing and copulating in the streets, the British police would throw a bucket of water on them.
Colonial Zionism, meanwhile, waged an undeclared but open war on Arab Palestine.
And vice versa. Most people thought the Muslims would win coz Jews were supposed to be shit at fighting.
Zionists lobbied the British openly to allow unfettered Jewish immigration to Palestine irrespective of native wishes to lay the demographic foundation for their exclusive ethnoreligious nationalist state.
As opposed to the exclusive ethnoreligious state Muslim state Palestine would otherwise have become.
They wanted to turn the native majority into a minority on its own land.
Lebanon was carved out of Syria to make the Christians a majority. Sadly, they were clannish and crap at running things.
‘The brutal numbers operate against us,’ confided Chaim Weizmann, the Russian-born leader of the Zionist movement, to Balfour in 1918.
The Tzar had been killed. What if Russia and East Europe stopped being beastly to Jews? Zionism would disappear.
Weizmann’s private letters express his racist contempt for ‘the Arab’
While Asquith's letters express his racist contempt for Jews- who, after all, are an Asiatic people.
and disdain for anti-Zionist native Jews: there were too many Palestinians in Palestine to create a Jewish state and not enough native Jews who were committed to colonial Zionism. Weizmann worried that the ‘Arab problem’ might yet derail the territorial and political Zionist project in Palestine. He believed that whereas ‘friendship’ and understanding between Arabs and Jews were possible, they were conditional and secondary to the Zionist conquest of Palestine, and on a complete national separation between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Jews’.
Yes. Back then it was an article of faith for people like Mahatma Gandhi that no good could come of Europeans and Asiatics getting too familiar even if this stopped short of miscegenation.
With British colonial protection, the Zionists built up segregated Jewish political, immigration, educational, labour, economic, land and social organisations.
Though it was the USA which did segregation wholesale.
With each tangible proof of its success, colonial Zionism foreclosed the future of Arab Jews as a viable part of the Arab political community – beginning but not ending in Palestine.
But 'Arab political communities' aren't viable at all. They quickly turn to shit unless ruled by sensible Sultans with lots and lots of oil money.
The tragedy of Arab Jews was that their Arabness was instrumentalised by colonial Zionism
Nope. Their tragedy was being Arab- till they learned Hebrew or emigrated and thus stopped being Arab. But Arab Christians who didn't leave the region have had it worse and, unless settled in Gulf States, can expect yet more misery.
Malul began to work for the Zionist National Committee following the establishment of the pro-Zionist British mandate that lasted until 1948. The Zionist leadership in Palestine sought to collect information on the Arabs of Palestine and to propagandise among them. Like an increasing number of other Arab Jews, Malul cast his lot irrevocably with colonial Zionism. As individuals, they may have been socially intimate with other Arabs of different faiths, and even loved Arabic. Yet they also embraced the central historical premise of a collective colonial Zionism: that Palestine was the national land of the Jewish people. They located themselves in a political and racial hierarchy that consistently placed Ashkenazi European Jews on top, followed by the ambivalently incorporated Sephardic and other Middle Eastern Jews, and finally the non-Jewish native population that had no real place within the Zionist project.
As I mentioned, the high status of American, British and Dutch Sephardic peoples meant that the Chief Sephardic Rabbi was an equal to the Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi in the Thirties. On the other hand, it is true that Arabic speaking Jews were considered a lesser breed.
During the 1930s and ’40s, the Zionist paramilitary Irgun bombed markets, public buildings and cinemas in a campaign of terror. Its most notorious act was the massacre of Palestinian civilians at Deir Yassin in April 1948. The Irgun created a unit made of Arab and Arabic-speaking Eastern Jews to infiltrate and terrorise the Arabs of Palestine.
Quite true. But, by then, Arabic speaking Jews could read the writing on the wall. Grand Mufti Husseini had done a swell job of getting Iraqis etc to kill their Jewish neighbors.
Colonial Zionism used Arab Jews to study, observe, inform on, manage and eventually help to dominate their former compatriots.
While Pan-Arabism concentrated on talking nonsense and then stabbing each other in the back or the side or anywhere a knife could reach.
And yet colonial Zionism, paradoxically, was premised on the total rejection of Jewish Arab being.
How is that 'paradoxical'? Arabs were terrible at running things save under smart Sultans. That's why there is no United Arab Republic.
The tragedy of Arab Jews was that their Arabness was instrumentalised by colonial Zionism, which denied the legitimacy of their Arab Jewish identity. They were made – and made themselves – settler-colonials in a sea of contradictory circumstances. After the Nakba (the disaster of Palestinian displacement) of 1948, the Ashkenazi-dominated state sought to de-Arabise the mass of Arab Jewish immigrants who arrived in the newly created state of Israel. David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, shuddered at the thought that Arab Jews would turn the new state into another ‘Levantine’ country populated by what he and many other European colonists saw as inferior ‘primitive’ Eastern Jews. ‘We are alien to them and they are alien to us,’ Ben-Gurion said of these Jews whom he also considered too close to Arab culture, and Jews ‘only in the sense that they are not non-Jews’.
But Israel, thanks perhaps to its British institutions, started doing sensible things. It became a melting pot. Military service under adverse conditions forged a Rule of Law Democracy which began to rise economically in the Eighties thanks to some Reaganite 'tough love'. As it became more and more financially viable as a knowledge economy, sensible Arab states made peace it.
Although colonial Zionism demanded the historically novel nationalist separation of ‘Arab’ and ‘Jew’,
as opposed to the historically inevitable killing or forced conversion of every last Arab Jew
its leaders publicly proclaimed that there was every possibility of rapprochement with the Arabs outside of Palestine – so long as they acquiesced to the abandonment of Palestine and the Palestinians.
And also expelling them from your country if they make too much of a nuisance for themselves. Apparently, Black September was the fault of a Christian Arab- George Habash. Lebanon, of course, won't give work permits to Palestinians or allow them to own land or run businesses or work as Doctors or Lawyers.
Weizmann, for example, hoped to come to terms with ‘the Hedjaz Arabs, who are more interesting than the local baystryuks’ [from байструк, Russian for ‘bastard’].As the scale and political ambition of Zionist colonisation in Palestine became more apparent, however, so did the question of Palestine become a core element of modern Arab identity.
Till the Arabs realized it was silly. Palestinians are a nuisance. Get rid of them if they act up.
In 1919, the desperate Hashemite Prince Faysal
whose daddy had lost to the Saudis just as he himself had lost to the French in Syria
was willing to sign a treaty of friendship between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Jews’ in London apparently drafted by Weizmann.
Coz peeps back then thought Arabs always lived up to anything they signed- right?
Faysal was perhaps taken in by Weizmann’s assurances that no harm would come to the local Palestinian population. More likely, he wanted the Zionists to support his political ambitions in neighbouring Syria. A year later, the fantasy of this kind of friendship, unmoored as it was from the reality in Palestine and from the overwhelming sentiment expressed by Syrians more broadly in opposition to colonial Zionism, was shattered by Arab-Jewish clashes in Jerusalem precipitated by Zionist colonisation.
Arabs attacked Jews. This forced the Jews to organize and defend themselves. They kept getting better at it. The Arabs didn't. Sad.
By the time the great anticolonial revolt against the British mandate in Palestine erupted in 1936, Arab attempts to distinguish Jews from Zionists were increasingly overwhelmed by facts on the ground.
Viz that Arabs were shit at fighting. This was because they were shit at organizing themselves.
The relentless Zionist insistence that a diverse Jewish people constituted a singular ethnoreligious political community
is an unquestionable reality. Nobody can be sure that Arab Christianity will survive in the region.
made such a distinction both utterly vital and immensely difficult to sustain. Violent anti-Jewish Arab reactions to violent colonial Zionism and Western imperialism exacerbated a new and growing chasm between Arabs and Jews. History masqueraded as destiny.
And destiny masqueraded as Arabs being shit at fighting or- forget fighting- just making sure a warehouse filled with chemically unstable stuff doesn't blow up half the city.
My grandfather was travelling in the United States in 1948 when the Nakba occurred. It is not clear if Ustadh Anis remembered his poem of decades earlier; the memoir in which he recounts his trip does not mention it. Instead, he recalled his bewilderment at the extent of Zionist propaganda in the US over the question of Palestine.
He must have been equally bewildered that the Americans had a low opinion of Herr Hitler- who was such a great pal of Grand Mufti Husseini.
While en route back to Lebanon, he was dismayed to hear about the assassination of the Swedish UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte by ‘the Zionists’. For almost all Arabs of that moment, whether they were Muslim or Christian, Sunni or Shi‘i, poor or rich – whether they lived in Morocco, Syria, Iraq, Yemen or Saudi Arabia – Zionism had become anathema to the same extent that the ‘Palestinian cause’ (al qadiyya al-filastiniyya) became a unifying idea.
What happened next? The Arabs (with the exception of the Jordanians) unified to show the world they were utterly shit at fighting.
My grandfather, for example, noted in his classic Literary Trends in the Modern Arab World (first published in the early 1950s), that ‘Palestine constitutes a general Arab national cause and as such Arabic literature in every part of the Arab world expresses deep sympathy for Palestine and is preoccupied by her fate.’
Arabs did sympathize with Palestinians till they had to live with them and discovered they were a perfect nuisance. On the other hand, Lebanon did give citizenship to many Christians.
For the minority of Jewish Arabs who remained in the Arab world after 1948, the identification ‘Palestine’ was immensely complicated by Zionist efforts to cajole them to ‘return’ to Palestine, by propaganda, and by anti-Jewish scapegoating and violence in places such as Iraq. But it remained evident – a fragile thread to a past and possible future of solidarity that transcends ethnoreligious nationalism.
Hilarious! Jews will be safe in Iraq! That's a 'possible future'- thinks nobody at all.
This Arab consciousness of the calamity of Zionism stemmed not from inveterate religious hatred on the part of Arabs against Jews, but rather from a profound shared sense of an unbearable and still ongoing injustice that demands restitution.
The injustice being that though Arabs are as smart as anybody else, collectively they tend to be a bit shit.
After 1948, Arab leaders could not contemplate an open alliance with Zionism as Prince Faysal had done 30 years earlier.
But Eygpt's alliance with Israel is scarcely a secret. Erdogan seems to be making nice with both. But it is Saudi and Gulf friendship with Israel that is the game changer.
Some Arab intellectuals such as Constantine Zurayk
the Christian who coined the term 'nakba'.
frankly admitted the modernity of the Zionist project in Palestine, but saw it as a sinister system that had to be studied and defeated.
Whereas Syrians now think the sinister system that has to be defeated is...Syrian.
The success of Zionism threatened the foundations of secular Arab unity and identity
though neither existed.
because
some Christian cretin said so
it privileged an ethnoreligious nationalism in a region rich in religious pluralism.
only in the imagination of Christian cretins.
This did not stop secret collusion between Arab leaders such as Faysal’s brother King Abdullah of Jordan and the Zionists, nor eventually, under massive US pressure and after several more wars broke the back of Arab armies, ‘peace’ treaties between fiercely antidemocratic Arab potentates dependent upon the US and nakedly racist Israeli leaders. My grandfather Anis’s death in 1977 occurred in the same year as the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s hugely controversial trip to Jerusalem, where he was met by Israel’s prime minister (and unrepentant former Irgun member) Menachem Begin who rejected completely Palestinian self-determination. When Sadat was assassinated a few years later in Cairo, celebratory gunfire erupted in Beirut where my grandfather had lived and died.
Sadat could make peace because the Egyptian Armed forces had performed quite creditably. More importantly, Egypt got back territory which might have lots of oil. Beirut was always crackling with gunfire. The Civil War began in 1975 and lasted till 1990. Lebanon is an example of a 'region rich in religious pluralism' turning into a fucking basket case despite having some of the smartest people on the planet. It seems 'ethnoreligious nationalism' is the way to go. Tell the minority to fuck off by all means. But do sensible things whether or not they whine.
Arabs had long coexisted with compatriots of the Jewish faith;
by killing them or taxing them to the hilt
but that was fundamentally different from acquiescing to, let alone being compelled to accept, an ethnoreligious state violently built on what had always been, and what remains, a multireligious land.
Very true. Beating and raping your neighbor is different from being beaten and raped by your neighbor. That's one reason not to live in a 'multireligious land' where your neighbor thinks he'll go to heaven if he kills you.
Like virtually all other Arabs, my grandfather Anis recognised the enormity of the injustice perpetrated in Palestine in 1948
which was nothing at all compared to the injustices perpetrated by Husseini's great pal- Hitler
but he also wondered if the Arabs were then sufficiently prepared, or in a position, to successfully reverse this injustice.
Coz Muslims fight best in 'jihad' not for 'multireligious' shite.
He wrote that ‘Palestine has been torn from their hands. Now they struggle to regain portions of it. Should we issue a call to arms, or say that time will ultimately rule in favour of justice because time is the fairest of judges?’
Time had judged Christianity to be unworthy to prevail in the place of its birth. Strangely, it held the Jews worthy to return and rule over their Holy City. Why? The simplest answer is best. Arab Christians talked collective bollocks though they may have feathered their own nests smartly enough. The Jews stopped talking bollocks and did sensible things. They paid a price for what they achieved and because they were Jewish they made sure that got value for money. Now the world needs Israel coz it is a center for scientific innovation. But it does not need Lebanon though everybody likes Lebanese people while few are greatly enthused by Sabras. Sad, but there it is.
