Historical tragedies do not arise from encounters in which the right clashes with the wrong. Rather, they occur when the right clashes with the right. This is the heart of the conflict between Israel and the Arabs in Palestine. A large number of Jews, responding to the horror of Hitler’s systematic extermination of the Jews of Western Europe, attempted to save themselves by creating a state of their own. They established it in a land that had been occupied by Arabs for centuries, at the precise moment when the Arab people were emerging from the crucible of Western colonialism and rediscovering their national destinies. This Jewish nationalism clashed head-on with Arab nationalism in Palestine.
All the wars between Israel and her Arab neighbours have been the result of this collision. The modern Middle East has been the scene of both irreconcilable hopes and aspirations as well as bitter hatred and violent passions.
The wars were fought with the deepest emotions. Each contestant regarded his rights as self-evident and firmly based on the will of God, morality, reason and law.
As passions rose, irrationality became commonplace. The desperate deed was heaped on the desperate deed until right and wrong, responsibility and guilt could no longer be distinguished. Each side had done things that the other could neither forgive nor forget.
This tragic clash between two valid claims and two appeals for justice has not abated much with time.
All this suggests that there is perhaps no solution to the Arab-Israeli problem outside the course of history. All the Palestinian wars were merely massive eruptions of a historical encounter; nothing less than a protracted war spanning many generations and centuries. As such, they offer us insight into, but not liberation from, some of the darkest recesses of the souls of nations and men.
It is not that the Jews and Muslims were always rivals on this land. There have been many splendid periods in their history when both these communities wonderfully co-existed and reinforced each other’s patterns of life. Another party to this conflict is Christians with valid rights on this land. And this was the reason behind successive Crusades.
In 1099, after a 40-days siege, the Crusaders took Jerusalem. The scale of the massacre traumatised the entire region. The killing lasted two whole days, at the end of which, most of the Muslim population–men, women, children–had been killed. The Jews had fought side by side with the Muslims to defend the city, but the entry of Crusaders created a sense of panic.
In remembrance of the past ritual, the elders instructed the entire Jewish population to gather in the synagogue and its surrounds to offer a collective prayer. It was a fatal mistake. The Crusaders surrounded the perimeter of the synagogue, set fire to the building and made sure that every single Jew was burnt to death.
A thick and greasy cloud of triumphant vulgarity was to cast a long shadow over the entire region for the coming centuries. Exactly nine hundred years after these atrocities, among the worst crimes committed by religious fundamentalism, the Pope apologised for the Crusade.
Jerusalem was taken by Saladin (a Muslim) in 1187 and once again made an open city. The Jews were provided with the state subsidies to rebuild their synagogues. The churches were left untouched. No revenge killings were permitted. Like Caliph Umar five hundred years before him, Saladin proclaimed the freedom of the city for worshippers of all faiths.
General Henry’s vulgarity has been repeated by President Trump in his so-called deal of the century
The Crusades left a deep mark on the European and Arab consciousness. In July 1920, French General Henri Gouraud took charge of Damascus. Syria had been allocated to France in the division of spoils following the First World War, which led to the total collapse of the Ottoman empire. One of his first acts, as he entered the city, was to visit Saladin tomb near the Grand Mosque.
Here, he shocked the entire Arab world by his vulgarity as he stood to attention and declared: “Saladin, we have returned. My presence here consecrates the Cross over the Crescent.”
General Henry’s vulgarity has been repeated by President Trump in his so-called deal of the century. There is as much bad faith in this plan to nowhere as much bad faith there is in the evangelical Christians favour to the Jews. Christian Zionism is a belief among Christians that the return of the Jews to the Holy Land and establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 were as per the Bible prophecy. Christian Zionists believe that the gathering of Jews in Israel is a prerequisite for the second coming of Jesus.
The idea has been common in Protestant circles since the Reformation that the Christians should actively support a Jewish return to the land of Israel, along with the parallel idea that the Jews ought to be encouraged to become Christians as a means of fulfilling Biblical prophesy. (Boyer, Paul S., When Time Shall Be No More, Prophesy belief in Modern America Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)
Here, we see the so-called friendship of Christians with Jews, based on some prophecies of the very uprooting of the Jews.
One must acknowledge the huge struggle and intellectual capacity of the Jews that within a short span of 75 years, people, communities and countries, which did not care much about the Holocaust. Some among them even denied it this year and paid respect to the criminally tortured and killed Jews at Auschwitz. It is an undeniable reality that the Holocaust was not possible if Wall Street had not sponsored a weak Hitler to arm heavily and become a formidable military power to counter the Soviet Union.
Almost all the Western leaders were aware of the gravity of the Holocaust continuing beside them but their preferences were quite different back then. Almost no European country was ready to let Jews take asylum in their boundaries. There were even rogue Jew elements that made life more difficult. It was the Jew unity and resurgence with a vengeance that made Europe and the US their followers.
The present anti-Semitism in the Middle East has been imported from Europe. There stands a strange ambivalent and hypocritical relation between the West and Jews. The present sham deal is but one of its example. This deal cannot even make a start and it is what its framers perhaps wanted. It is high time the both Jews and Arabs, particularly Palestinians, make policies and take decisions, not for the people living oceans away but for themselves and more so, for their children.
The writer is a freelancer