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The Age | January 10, 2004 Antipathy towards Israel sometimes blends into anti-Semitism, writes Graham Barrett. Picture the devastation as Iran tries to recover from its latest earthquake, with tens of thousands of casualties and little or no local provision for assistance. A call for help goes out to the world: aid will be accepted from any country except Israel, despite its expertise in emergency rescue. Travel to Kuala Lumpur a few weeks earlier as the retiring Malaysian Prime Minister takes a parting snipe at the "hook-nosed" Jews who "rule the world by proxy", a sentiment echoed in other Islamic capitals. Note now the finding of a recent European Commission poll, which records the belief among Europeans that the country posing the greatest threat to world peace is Israel. Scour the news columns over recent months and add up the stories from a number of nations of a surge of attacks on synagogues and Jewish schools. What has been called the "longest hatred" appears to be burgeoning again in a new and troubling form that blends antipathy towards Israel with anti-Semitism in general. Just six decades after the Holocaust, it is no longer considered socially inappropriate in some educated circles of the West to express anti-Semitic sentiment. It happens right here in Melbourne. If it is emerging as a concern in the West, it is of pathological proportions across the Arab and parts of the wider Islamic world. We discern little of the propaganda and paranoia that inform each new generation of Arabs about Israel and Jews, but most of it would make Joseph Goebbels glow with approval. Playing to millions of television viewers from Cairo to Damascus these days is a multi-part series based on the monstrous fraud of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It is just one of a number of mass media slurs on the Jewish people that invite and encourage young Arabs to believe that this country of fewer than 7 million people is engaged in a conspiracy to destroy them. Sharon, in other words, is a gift to those seeking a case against Israel and the Jews in general. If this sounds fanciful, consider that the official newspaper of the Palestinian Authority portrays the Holocaust as a myth. Sartre wrote that Auschwitz had made literature irrelevant. Now it would seem that Auschwitz has made facts irrelevant, too. A similar revision of history is evident in the opinion polls indicating that millions of Arabs believe the September 11, 2001, atrocities were engineered by Israel. The Pew Research Centre last year recorded that among 15,000 Muslims in nine Islamic countries, a big majority believed that Israel would have to be eliminated for the needs of the Palestinians to be met. None of these beliefs is calculated to promote a reasoned debate, or any debate at all, let alone a rapprochement between the Palestinians and the Jewish state. While hatred is lavished on the lamentable Ariel Sharon, it is ignored that his presence is the reaction to the rejection by the Palestinian leadership of his predecessor's offer to relinquish more than 95 per cent of the West Bank and all of Gaza plus East Jerusalem to a new Palestinian state. Instead of grasping an extraordinary offer of peace, one that made many Israelis gasp, the Palestinians responded with suicide bombers. Sharon's hour arrived as Israelis turned in desperation to the one leader they thought could defend them. The result is a televised feed of the Israeli military seeking and killing extremists - and many innocent men, women and children in the process - demolishing the houses of suicide bombers, building a wall around the West Bank and otherwise exhibiting extreme measures in search of security. Sharon, in other words, is a gift to those seeking a case against Israel and the Jews in general. The veteran Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, who has dedicated his life to eradicating Israel rather than negotiating a settlement, has been able to wrestle from the Jews what the philosopher Bertrand Russell called the "superior virtue of the underdog". The late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said put it in a similar way, calling his people the "victims' victims". This is what plays in a world where image is reality. If Sharon didn't exist, Yasser Arafat would have to invent him. In some measure, he did. Until 1967, when Israel launched a successful pre-emptive war against massing Arab armies, Israel wore the title of victim - as a plucky little state created by the United Nations 20 years earlier, only to be invaded by its neighbours with the intention of driving fledgling Israelis into the Mediterranean. They failed in this and succeeding efforts, and Egypt and Jordan eventually chose a negotiated peace. What endures is a ritual anti-Zionism and a rampant anti-Semitism, employed across the Arab and Islamic world to mask the failures of many of these societies and their autocratic governments to meet the needs and aspirations of their people. The Middle East is a region in serious distress and decline, as Arab scholars have chronicled in a revealing UN study. Israel, with a per capita gross domestic product 20 times that of its neighbours, is everything that Arab states are not: a prosperous democracy with a free press, lively debate and an adaptive temperament. In looking at Israel, many Arabs see not a country that is unusually well placed to help them out of their troubles, but a reflection of their own failings. The Jewish state is the excuse, the scapegoat, the explanation for all those angry young people without jobs or prospects, those feeble economies, unrepresentative political systems, corruption and other afflictions. The Iranians would sooner see their earthquake victims die than be rescued by Israelis. In seeking to make sense of the complexities of the Middle East, many Europeans and others now attach themselves to the spectre of Sharon as a device for rationalising a resurgence in anti-Semitic as well as anti-Zionist emotions. What few remember is that Palestine in 1948 was not simply handed over to the Jewish minority. It was partitioned between Jews and Palestinians after a vote in favour of the creation of a Jewish state by the UN General Assembly. By immediately assaulting Israel, the Arab armies scotched at the outset what will, one day, emerge as a two-state solution. All the violence, hatred, failure, suffering and revenge will have been for nought. Everyone in the Middle East is a victim of that early decision by the Arabs to eschew the sharing of an ancient land, a rejection that is still in force today. "For the Palestinians," as Bill Clinton's Middle East envoy, Dennis Ross, has put it, "victimhood is too often not just a condition, but also a strategy and sadly a self-fulfilling prophecy." At a time when even Sharon is now talking of concessions, including the demolition of at least some of those provocative illegal settlements in the West Bank, the plight of the Palestinians will endure as long as their leaders are resistant to negotiation and compromise. Their only reward will be in relishing the growth of anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish sentiments in a wider world that is again at risk of losing its perspective.
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©-free 2004 Adelaide Institute