UNM Israel Alliance

Khaled Abu Toameh – Hudson New York

During a recent visit to several university campuses in the U.S., I discovered that there is more sympathy for Hamas there than there is in Ramallah.

Listening to some students and professors on these campuses, for a moment I thought I was sitting opposite a Hamas spokesman or a would-be-suicide bomber.

I was told, for instance, that Israel has no right to exist, that Israel’s “apartheid system” is worse than the one that existed in South Africa and that Operation Cast Lead was launched only because Hamas was beginning to show signs that it was interested in making peace and not because of the rockets that the Islamic movement was launching at Israeli communities.

I was also told that top Fatah operative Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life terms in prison for masterminding terror attacks against Israeli civilians, was thrown behind bars simply because he was trying to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Furthermore, I was told that all the talk about financial corruption in the Palestinian Authority was “Zionist propaganda” and that Yasser Arafat had done wonderful things for his people, including the establishment of schools, hospitals and universities.

The good news is that these remarks were made only by a minority of people on the campuses who describe themselves as “pro-Palestinian,” although the overwhelming majority of them are not Palestinians or even Arabs or Muslims.

The bad news is that these groups of hard-line activists/thugs are trying to intimidate anyone who dares to say something that they don’t like to hear.

When the self-designated “pro-Palestinian” lobbyists are unable to challenge the facts presented by a speaker, they resort to verbal abuse.

On one campus, for example, I was condemned as an “idiot” because I said that a majority of Palestinians voted for Hamas in the January 2006 election because they were fed up with financial corruption in the Palestinian Authority.

On another campus, I was dubbed as a “mouthpiece for the Zionists” because I said that Israel has a free media. There was another campus where someone told me that I was a ‘liar” because I said that Barghouti was sentenced to five life terms because of his role in terrorism.

And then there was the campus (in Chicago) where I was “greeted” with swastikas that were painted over posters promoting my talk. The perpetrators, of course, never showed up at my event because they would not be able to challenge someone who has been working in the field for nearly 30 years.

What struck me more than anything else was the fact that many of the people I met on the campuses supported Hamas and believed that it had the right to “resist the occupation” even if that meant blowing up children and women on a bus in downtown Jerusalem.

I never imagined that I would need police protection while speaking at a university in the U.S. I have been on many Palestinian campuses in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and I cannot recall one case where I felt intimidated or where someone shouted abuse at me.

Ironically, many of the Arabs and Muslims I met on the campuses were much more understanding and even welcomed my “even-handed analysis” of the Israeli-Arab conflict. After all, the views I voiced were not much different than those made by the leaderships both in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. These views include support for the two-state solution and the idea of coexistence between Jews and Arabs in this part of the world.

The so-called pro-Palestinian “junta” on the campuses has nothing to offer other than hatred and de-legitimization of Israel. If these folks really cared about the Palestinians, they would be campaigning for good government and for the promotion of values of democracy and freedom in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Their hatred for Israel and what it stands for has blinded them to a point where they no longer care about the real interests of the Palestinians, namely the need to end the anarchy and lawlessness, and to dismantle all the armed gangs that are responsible for the death of hundreds of innocent Palestinians over the past few years.

The majority of these activists openly admit that they have never visited Israel or the Palestinian territories. They don’t know -and don’t want to know – that Jews and Arabs here are still doing business together and studying together and meeting with each other on a daily basis because they are destined to live together in this part of the world. They don’t want to hear that despite all the problems life continues and that ordinary Arab and Jewish parents who wake up in the morning just want to send their children to school and go to work before returning home safely and happily.

What is happening on the U.S. campuses is not about supporting the Palestinians as much as it is about promoting hatred for the Jewish state. It is not really about ending the “occupation” as much as it is about ending the existence of Israel.

Many of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas officials I talk to in the context of my work as a journalist sound much more pragmatic than most of the anti-Israel, “pro-Palestinian” folks on the campuses.

Over the past 15 years, much has been written and said about the fact that Palestinian school textbooks don’t promote peace and coexistence and that the Palestinian media often publishes anti-Israel material.

While this may be true, there is no ignoring the fact that the anti-Israel campaign on U.S. campuses is not less dangerous. What is happening on these campuses is not in the frame of freedom of speech. Instead, it is the freedom to disseminate hatred and violence. As such, we should not be surprised if the next generation of jihadists comes not from the Gaza Strip or the mountains and mosques of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but from university campuses across the U.S.

Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs – by Lt.-Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar
The End of the Bush Administration – A Victory for Allah

Some in the Arab world were very satisfied with the American election because to them it meant the end of the Bush administration. Many in the Arab world felt deep humiliation due to George W. Bush, above all else. The Islamic view of the world is that Islam came to the world to replace Judaism and Christianity, not to live side-by-side with them. Then, all of a sudden, comes a religious Christian president and occupies Iraq, the beating heart of Arab history, the capital of the Abbasid dynasty, which for 500 years ruled the Islamic empire. After a few days of fighting in Baghdad, this city came under American infidel rule.

Bush said right after September 11, 2001, that the Americans were on a “crusade.” Immediately, his advisors told him not to use that word because it reminds Muslims of the Crusader Kingdom of 800 years ago, which the hero Saladin wiped out. But his statement was recorded and Al-Jazeera kept showing it. Muslims look at this from a religious point of view and many see what is going on in the region as some kind of test of whose god is more powerful: Allah or the Christian God. This is how too many people in the Middle East are viewing this now. So when Bush left office, this was viewed as some kind of victory for Allah.

One of the major differences between the Middle East and Western societies is the role of religion. We were brought up on the notion of a division between church and state, that the state is for everybody and religion is within your heart. This may be correct in the West, but it is not correct in the Arab world. In the Middle East, almost everything is connected to religion.

The Arab Minorities in Israel

Inside Israel, there are a number of different Arab minorities. There are Muslims, Druze, and Christians, from the religious point of view. There are Bedouins who live in the desert, which is one culture; rural peasants, which is another culture; and those who dwell in cities, either in Arab cities or in mixed cities, which is yet another kind of culture. So you cannot look at the Arab minorities in Israel as one package. You have to relate to them in different ways because they are different and they don’t consider themselves as one group of people.

You can see this in the percentage of those who vote. The percentage of Arabs who vote for Arab parties in the Knesset is only 50 percent. The Arab sector in Israel altogether is about 20 percent of the population, which means in theory that Arab parties could have 24 members, or a fifth of the 120 Knesset members. However, the actual number of Arab Knesset members is around 10, and has been like this for years. Many Arabs do not even vote; they do not see the Knesset as a body that can represent them. In addition, the radical part of the Islamic movement is constantly calling on their people not to vote for the Knesset because that gives some kind of seal of approval to the Israeli state, which has no legitimacy to exist in their eyes.

The Acre Riots of October 2008: Why Didn’t They Spread?

In the mixed city of Acre in October 2008, a car driven by an Arab went into a Jewish neighborhood on the night of Yom Kippur. This triggered five days of violence, demonstrations, breaking into shops, and burning apartments and houses.

At the time of the riots, Islamic Jihad and Hamas called on the Arabs in Israel to do the same thing in all the other mixed cities like Jaffa, Ramla and Lod. They tried to inflame the whole situation, but it didn’t work. The calls to spread the riots to other places in Israel were not answered. Why didn’t the riots spread to other cities? Because at the end of the day, both Jews and Arabs realize that coexistence is better than fighting.

To Whom Does the Country Belong?

In Jaffa, right next to Tel Aviv, there are processes that the Arabs don’t like. Property is being taken by the state and given to contractors who are building new luxury housing near the sea, mainly for Jews, and this creates much resentment among the Arabs living there. This illustrates the key, bottom line question: To whom does this country belong? Every other question is derived from this.

According to the Arab narrative, this has been an Arab Islamic state since the days of Omar, the caliph who conquered the country in the second quarter of the seventh century. According to Islamic oral tradition, he declared that the country between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River was waqf land, meaning it belonged to Muslims all over the world, and no one else could ever have it. So how could the Jews come in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries and buy land there and establish an independent Jewish state, one that has no legitimacy to exist on Islamic soil? It was just like Spain, Sicily, and parts of the Balkans, which at different stages of history were lands of Islam. According to Islam, land can only go one way, to become Islamic, and it can never go the other way.

The wings of the Muslim Brotherhood believe that the Israeli state or the Jewish state has no right to exist to begin with. This is why Hamas and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood cannot even begin to consider recognizing the right of Israel to exist. A temporary peace of ten or twenty years can be given to infidels when Muslims are not powerful enough to conquer their lands, until Allah gives the Muslims the ability to do so.

The Muslim Brotherhood looks at the Jewish state in Israel as if the Jews occupied the country and removed it from the bosom of Islam in which it existed until 1948. When you ask to whom the country belongs, this is the basis of the Islamic perspective.

At the same time, Jews feel that this country belongs to them. From the Jewish perspective, this country was populated by Jews and two Jewish kingdoms were here until 1900 years ago. We Jews were expelled with no justification and we came back to our country. This is what gives justification to the Jews having our state here and not in Uganda or Argentina or Birobijan. It even appears in the Koran that this country had been given to the Jews.

We say today that the two narratives are fighting. The Islamic narrative says that this country is Islamic, and the Jewish narrative states that this country in its entirety belongs to the Jews. However, while we want to keep the Jewish nature of our state, most of us are not willing to kick out the Arabs who live here.

The struggle of narratives is a problem that we all have to live with. There are problems in life which cannot be solved, and the contradiction between those two narratives cannot be solved.

The Future Vision of Palestinian Arabs in Israel

In 2006 a group of forty modern Arab intellectuals, politicians, and university lecturers published a very interesting document in both Hebrew and Arabic. The document, which was approved by the Committee of Arab Local Authorities in Israel – the most significant organ of Arabs in Israel – was entitled: “The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel and their Relations with the State.”

Its opening statement reads: “Israel is the outcome of a colonialist action which was initiated by the Jewish-Zionist elites in Europe and in the West, was established with the help of colonialist states, Britain and France, and was strengthened by the influx of Jews into Palestine, especially in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust.” At least they recognize the fact that there was a Holocaust. In many other places Arab deny even that.

In addition, Sheikh Ibrahim Sarsour, chairman of the United Arab List, the largest Arab party in the Feb. 10, 2009, elections for the Israeli Knesset, said in a speech: “Participating in the elections to the Knesset does not abolish our ideology according to which the rule on earth, or at least on Arab and Islamic land, should be Islamic and headed by the Caliph.”1 The party won 113,954 votes and 4 seats.

In the Muslim Narrative, History Only Begins in 622 CE

To call Israel a colonialist state is to undermine Israel’s legitimacy as the state of the Jewish people who see themselves as the owners of this country. It means a total denial of Jewish history, and echoes the Islamic approach to Jewish history. According to this approach, since Islam came to the world in the year 622 CE with the hijra of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina, all of history before that time lost any meaning or significance. Even the prophets – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, Solomon, Jesus – all became Muslims, according to the Islamic narrative. So since Islam denies what happened before Islam, they can say that Israel is an outcome of a colonialist action because the fact that Jews were here 1900 years ago, before Islam, has no meaning anymore since that was before Islam came into the world.

This leads us back to the way Islam as a religion looks at the State of Israel and its existence in this waqf land. The document of the Arabs in Israel, which we mentioned before, is replete with expressions of how Israel is an illegitimate entity and how the Arabs are the natives. This is the way they look at the state where they live.

What other states have to contend with the fact that a significant minority is challenging the very legitimacy of the state? Even Arabs and Muslims in Britain or France are not yet challenging the legitimacy of those states, but here, in Israel, they feel free to do it.

Are the Palestinians Really the Natives?

But are the Palestinians really the natives? Many Palestinians, even in Israel, bear names like al-Masri (referring to Egypt) or al-Iraqi or al-Tarabulsi (referring to Tripoli in northern Lebanon). The minister of refugees in the Palestinian Authority was Abdallah al-Horani, meaning that either he or his parents came from al-Horan in southern Syria. They are not originally from this place. They immigrated here and their family names reflect the name of the place they came from. Since when are they Palestinians?

What about the Palestinians who live today in Lebanon and the West Bank and are still in refugees camps sixty years after 1948? Where else in the world do you see refugee camps for sixty years? But where do they have the right to return to, those who came from Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria? To Haifa, where they worked for a few years for the British who brought them from Syria to work in the harbor, or to Syria and the other Arab countries where they originally came from? The world has bought this slogan of Palestinian refugees without checking where they came from originally.

The Only Arabs Who Live in a Democracy Live in Israel

Most Arabs today live either in Arab dictatorships or in democracies but in exile. No Arab state is a real democracy. The only significant group of Arabs who live in a democracy are the Arabs in Israel. Yet I would say the vast majority do not want to turn this state into an Arab state. Very few of them want to live in an Arab state. Everyone in Israel is free to emigrate, but there are no Arabs lining up to emigrate to other countries. They know exactly what the situation is because they see what goes on everywhere in the Arab world on Al-Jazeera, day and night: In Egypt, half of the population lives in unplanned neighborhoods with no running water, electricity, sewage, infrastructure, paved roads, or health care. Hardly anyone in the Arab sector in Israel lives in such conditions, except for some of the Bedouin in the Negev who willingly choose the culture of the desert.

The Arab sector in Israel does not want to change where they live into an Arab state. Maybe some in the Islamic movement would like to have an Islamic state here just like they want to have an Islamic state everywhere, to kick out the Arab regimes and establish a caliphate instead. But the majority of Arabs in Israel still prefer the current situation since, despite whatever discrimination they may experience, living in Israel is still far better than living in any Arab country in the Middle East.

The Arabs in Israel are much more clever than their brothers in the Palestinian Authority. The Muslims in Israel look at what happens in Gaza and do not envy those who live there. They don’t envy the people of Iran under the regime of the ayatollahs either, where 95 percent of the Iranians are secular. And they don’t want to live like the Shi’ites in Lebanon. Arab Israeli citizens are much wiser than that. They know exactly what the alternative is.

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Note

1. See http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3216531,00.html and http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/ 0,7340,L-3217055,00.html. The issue of a caliphate is not mentioned in the party’s formal platform.

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Lt.-Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar served in IDF Military Intelligence for 25 years, specializing in Arab political discourse, Arab mass media, Islamic groups, and the Syrian domestic arena. Dr. Kedar teaches in the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University and is a research associate at the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies. This Jerusalem Issue Brief is based on his presentation at the Institute for Contemporary Affairs in Jerusalem on November 5, 2008.

editorial by Lynn Provencio

At UNM the from March 8-13, “Another Jewish Voice” (AJV) sponsored the “Jerusalem Dispossed” photo exhibit, which tours internationally. AJV was founded locally by members of the “Middle East Peace and Justice Alliance“, which has been the active anti-Israel voice locally for many years. The exhibit was created by the “Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions” (ICAHD), one of several affiliated left wing anti-Israel groups that work internationally to move public opinion against Israel, by means of exhibits such as this, protests, speakers and tours. The full exhibit, introduction and photo captions are available online.

The UNM Israel Alliance had a table near the “Jerusalem Dispossessed” photography exhibition from Monday through Thursday to provide factual information about Israel and provide an opportunity for dialog. We had many visitors across the political and ideological spectrum, from pro-Israel people who signed up our email list and shouted “Go Israel!” as they passed, to anti-Israel people who came to debate or give us their own flyers. It was encouraging to see how many people came by, inclined to believe what they had heard negative about Israel, yet willing to get more information and look into the issue for themselves.

Going by the arguments against Israel presented by visitors to our table and the arguments I’ve heard in other places, the anti-Israel view is driven by emotions, prejudice, a political agenda and a love of conspiracy theories, and is not well supported or well reasoned.

From our visitors at the table we heard that Jewish Globalist bankers make up a Zionist plot to rule the world, and Zionists aren’t regular Jews, they are European Jews. An elderly couple who were European Jews informed us of this. They pointed us to several books and articles in the same vein. This view of Jews and not Jews and a globalist Jewish conspiracy appears to be gaining popularity in anti-Israel circles, among Jews as much as the rest. This brings up a particular problem for Jews: how to go along and agree with the anti-Jewish crowd that you love when you are a Jew? The answer appears to be akin to developing a disassociated personality. It is not us, it is them! We are real Jews, “they” are not! They are Khazars, or they are Zionists, or they are religious…not us!

This couple also explained that Zionists never paid a penny for any land in Palestine. There are many financial records dating back from the days of the Ottoman Empire until today that show that Jews privately and corporately through the Jewish National Fund, systematically bought back the land in Israel from whoever were the owners at the time. The lands were not taken by force, nor were the sales forced, as the anti-Jewish mufti Haj al Husseini of Jerusalem admitted.

Several people pointed out a genetic study that says most Arabs in the region have pretty much the same genes as Jews. Those little Arab children who make up poetry about forming mountains of Jewish skulls and drinking Jewish blood for the camera and their admiring parents will have to stop now. Now they know they themselves are Jews, and that will change everything. After all, this is Jew against Arab, and now they know they are Jews. Otherwise they will have to eat their brothers, which I believe is forbidden by Islamic law, although other cannibalism is evidently allowed, as we saw in Ramallah.

I was amazed at how obsessed the left wing is with race, and how many times racial theories were floated as reasons for their opinions.

Another woman, a local anti-Israel activist for many years and the sponsor of the exhibit, said that the issue with Israel was nothing but “human rights”, and not a matter of Arab vs. Jew. This goes against what Hamas, Fatah and the PLO claim. She said that Arabs did not want to fight with Jews. If that were the case, they could just stop attacking. She said the Israeli government, the European Jewish ruling elite, was the cause of hostilities, due to their violation of practically everyone’s human rights. Is this a tolerant, peaceful balanced view?

The lady gave me a postcard in Hamas green, calling on the US government to quit supporting apartheid. I assumed she meant the apartheid that makes it dangerous for a Jew to enter an Arab area within Israel without being accompanied by left wing chaperones. It could be the apartheid that puts a death sentence on any Arab who sells property to a Jew, or who appears not to hate Israel. Perhaps the apartheid she referred to was the Islamic apartheid that puts heavy restrictions on Jews and Christians in Arab countries, even visitors, and which has driven out the Jewish population in most cases. But no, she meant the apartheid that gives Arabs full citizenship in Israel, allows 14 Arab members of Knesset, and lets Arabs get state benefits, education and health care, allows for Mosques and free worship, allows Arab media that calls for the end of Israel, and lets them own property and start businesses in Israel, along with Jews.

Next she lapsed into nostalgia about the imagined golden days when there was no strife between Arabs and Jews in Israel, and Jews could go freely into Arab towns and vice versa. Indeed, in the early days it happened that Jews and Arabs were sometimes allies, and there was much more peaceful interaction between Arab and Jew than what we see today. In many cases those Arab allies were killed by the invading Arab armies of 1948 and 1967. Likewise today, an Arab accused of being a “collaborator” generally receives a death sentence or must flee to Israel. When Arab countries allied to attack Israel en masse three times in a generation, it didn’t help Jewish/Arab friendship. When Abu Amar, Abu Jihad, Abu Mazen and all the other Abus moved in with Fatah, the PLO, the PFLP and so on, and began to carry out terrorist attacks in Israel and train children to hate and attack Jews, relations between Arabs and Jews began to suffer. When the Muslim Brotherhood, which has religious and racial hatred as its theme and religious supremacy as its goal came to power in the form of Hamas, it became much worse. This was not addressed by the anti-Israel spokeswoman.

As usual, the spokeswoman said that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. If Israel were genocidal as Arabs and anti-Israel left wingers claim, it could have already accomplished genocide, but it has not even come close. It has not even tried weakly. The Arab population is not decreasing, it is expanding steadily, as it has since Jews first began to move back to Palestine. Genocide does not result in a larger population. In one breath she said that Israel was committing genocide against the Arabs in Gaza. When I pointed out that the population was increasing rather than decreasing, she said scornfully that Israel doesn’t have the ability to commit genocide. You can’t have it both ways.

One young man, evidently in training since a friend stood a ways back observing, came up to the table and after much hesitation said that he was more interested in the “plight of the Palestinians” than Israel, and that Israeli towns were illegal. I asked him on what grounds were they illegal. He said because of international law. I asked him what international law made Jewish towns illegal. He was not able to answer, so he repeated his statement about international law. I explained to him that G8, UN and Arab League desires and proclamations did not constitute international law. UN resolutions, whether General Assembly or Security council, do not have authority to define boundaries, nor to regulate where or when a nation may build towns. Only treaties signed by the participating parties are binding as international law, and nations do not sign international treaties about where they may build towns. Even the International Court of Justice may not legislate these issues, and its decisions are not binding, as in the case of their judgment against Israel’s security fence.

International opinion is not international law, and he has picked up a false slogan and thought it was true. I advised him to look into the all the charters, treaties and resolutions that apply to Israel and learn for himself, rather than repeating what he has been told. He retrieved some fliers from his waiting friend and deposited them on the table, anti-Israel fliers with an emotional message and no substance. Probably he will not research the matter, but will continue to parrot propaganda in order to gain approval from his peers.

Are you a person who cares about truth and justice? Don’t just believe what people tell you. Find out for yourself what is true.