''Kill Pavlov''

By Øyvind Strømmen
YellowTimes.org Guest Columnist (Norway)

(YellowTimes.org) -- These days it is not uncommon to see European media criticized for being anti-Semitic. That claim is hardly true, but the critics are right about one thing: The pictures created of Israel and Palestine in the media do not always fit with reality. The media has failed; the conflict in Israel has been painted in the colours of the chessboard, black and white, black and white, always black and white.

No matter what side is painted black and what side is painted white, reality is obscured, many histories forgotten and many voices never heard. One of these forgotten histories is the history about the Jews who moved, fled or were driven out of Arab countries in the years around the establishment of the Israeli state. This is a story about suppression where the roles are reversed, but it is also a story about Arab-speaking Jews meeting a European-Jewish culture, a cultural shock regardless of the common religion.

Though the numbers are disputed, there is little doubt that hundreds of thousands of Jews lived in Arab countries in the time before 1948. Today about 8000 people are left. In Baghdad, once a rich cultural centre for both Jews and Arabs, there are barely any Jews left today. At the same time as Palestinians had to flee from their earth and properties in the Palestinian mandate territory, Jews in Arab countries left their homes. At times, they left as a result of their own romantic ideas about building a Jewish homeland, Zionist thought, but far too often they were forced to leave as a result of anti-Jewish campaigns, angry lynch mobs, pogroms and governments lacking the will or ability to protect a centuries-old minority. Palestinians refer to the sad story about their refugees as an-nakbah, the great catastrophe, but the catastrophe has more than one side. – Synagogues were bombed, family members thrown in jails based on false accusations and innocent people lynched or hanged in front of cheering masses, Gina Malka Waldman writes. She barely got out of Libya alive.

The circumstances varied from country to country, but one thing was common, the pain of having to leave the only home country we had ever had. There are no memorials over the once so vibrant societies in Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Yemen and so on. There were once 38000 Jews in Libya – today, the society is gone. 2500 years of history has disappeared. As we say it in Arabic: ma fdel shei, nothing is left. I cannot even go to Libya to visit the grave of my grandfather.

The Palestinian refugees were not met with open arms in Arab countries, a part of their sad story. The Jewish Arabs coming to Israel were accepted, but also faced many overwhelming challenges. – My grandmother, who is still living in Israel and mostly speaks Arabic, had to learn talking about “us” – Jews – and “them” – Arabs. For people in the Middle East, the difference had been whether one was “Muslim”, “Jew” or “Christian” and not whether one was a Jew or an Arab. The Arabic had to do with common culture and common language, not with religion, Ella Habiba Shohat, an Arab Jew of Iraqi heritage, writes.

Many Arab Jews had unpleasant experiences because they spoke the language of “the enemy.” To this very day, Arab Jews are poorer than most Israelis, have less education and have more problems with crime. They’re also victims of racism from orthodox groups of European heritage who are referring to them as frenks, a word equivalent to “nigger.” The Israeli historian Avi Shlaim comments: - In a way it is demanded that the Arab Jews should forget their own past to accommodate to the memories of an Ashkenazi (European-Jewish) past. The political, military, economic and especially the cultural elite in Israel has always been and still is an Ashkenazi elite.

Some Arab Jews have further problems. Today, Shohat lives in the United States, and she finds it difficult to define her identity, for instance during the first Gulf war. – Some of us refuse to accept “tidy” national and ethnic categories. My fear during the missile attacks on Israel, where parts of my family is living, did not lessen the fear I had after bombings in Iraq, where I also have relatives.

Some have tried to use the Arab Jews as a counterargument against the Palestinian rage over an-nakbah. Palestinians, of course, do not approve and they have received support from some Israelis, like the literalist and peace activist Ran HaCohen: - The so-called ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab countries seems to be a Pavlovian pro-Israeli response every time ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 is mentioned.

HaCohen claims that even though hundreds of thousands of Jews eventually left Arab countries, this happened after the Palestinians were expelled, and that it’s strange to excuse the an-nakbah with the Jews leaving Arab countries years later.

Pavlovian answers, answers coming on reflex, are sadly a common sight in debates on Israel. Any argument from those sympathetic with one side is met with a response starting with “But…” from the other side. – The Palestinians are terrorists! – No, the Israelis are the real terrorists! Furthermore, one is always expected to be either pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli, as Barbara Victor points out in her excellent book on female suicide bombers, “Army of Roses”:

The most frequent question asked of me from both sides when I am working in that part of the world is if I am pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli. It is always posed as an either/or question, and those who want to know are usually not prepared to accept equivocations. Even among journalists themselves, those who work in the region develop reputations about their sympathies for either one side or the other.

In the context of the present Intifada, with Israeli reoccupation of land that had been turned over to the Palestinians and the use of human bombs by Palestinians in what is clearly Israel proper, it has become even more difficult to explain my feelings about this conflict. The either/or responses belong to the extremists on both sides, whether it is General Effe Eytam, who believes the Palestinians should accept the Sinai Desert as their homeland, or Dr. Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, who is determined to turn all the land into an Islamic state.

Sadly, Victor is wrong about one thing: the either/or-responses no longer belong merely to the extremists. Even in Scandinavian newspapers, you will find those responses written by people belonging to mainstream political movements. If you arrange a rally against terrorism and invite Israeli bus drivers, you’re automatically seen as supportive of Israeli politics. If you oppose the building of the separation fence inside Palestine, you can expect being called an anti-Semite – opposed to Jews’ right to self-defense.

But what kind of friends does Israelis and Palestinians really need? For me, the answer is obvious. They need the kind of friends who are both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli, the kind of friends that rally against terrorism, but also criticize Israeli politics, the kind of friends that don’t give either/or responses. It’s time to kill Pavlov. Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis are “right.” The Palestinians can not demand the right of return for everyone who fled in 1948 and their ancestors, but have a right to an independent Palestine. The Israelis can not expect the Palestinians to accept solutions where a viable Palestine becomes an impossibility, but they have every right to accept a Jewish national home in the Middle East. Suicide bombers are often desperate people who have experienced humiliation and sometimes have seen friends, neighbours or family members killed. But if losing a family member in this bloody war does create a suicide bomber in itself, then we would have seen Israeli mothers blowing themselves up in Jenin. When religious leaders accept and even encourage “martyr actions,” secular leaders start using them themselves to cling to power; television channels send cartoons and music videos glorifying martyrdom as a lethal atmosphere is created.

Though the media has failed utterly in letting them be heard, there are sensible voices in both Palestine and Israel. One of them belongs to Dr. Iyad Sarraj who criticizes the extremist brand of Islam that has hijacked the Palestinian fight for freedom, but also the injustice that made that hijacking easy:

"We are not against Islam, but we want a redefinition of Islam that will give our people a dose of hope instead of despair for the future. We want Islam redefined in the context of humanity. One of the signs of failure in this part of the world, for Muslims and Jews, is that they are both victims of their extremist leaders. But it is far more tragic for us because our children are being taught in the mosques, on television, and in schools to die. I was brought up here in Gaza and went to all the schools and was never taught to hate."

But if you are a little Palestinian growing up next door to a settlement and you see Israeli children enjoying swimming pools when you have no drinking water, you don’t learn how to love Jews. You learn how to be envious of them. When you have bombs falling on your house, you learn how to hate and not make peace. You don’t need a teacher to teach you how to hate and not make peace because the best teacher is Ariel Sharon. Fear and paranoia are intertwined and the Zionist project has failed. It was supposed to give Jews a safe haven and instead it has given them constant bloodshed.

This is one of the saddest facts about the ongoing conflict. The Jews were meant to find a safe place in Israel, but today few places are less safe – almost every Israeli knows someone who knows someone who knew someone killed or maimed in a suicide attack. Of course, as Sarraj surely knows, the people conducting those attacks have had plenty of teachers feeding them hatred for their neighbours. Manar television, Hezbollah’s privately owned satellite station, for example, is a lighthouse of hate. After each suicide bombing in Israel, Manar broadcasts the images as well as describes the suicide bomber’s life to its Palestinian audience. But this is not merely news reporting, it’s propaganda. The word “Israel” is never mentioned on Manar; instead, the country is referred to as “the Zionist entity.” During Ramadan 2002, Manar broadcast a series titled "Knight Without a Horse," based on the late-nineteenth-century book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraud claiming to detail a plan by the Jews to control the world.

Andalib Audawan, a Palestinian feminist, says this in an interview with Victor:

"The extreme version of Islam has dominated our society, and I say it with sadness, that it’s a tragedy first for us. There are always logical explanations and excuses why our leaders have adopted this policy, to keep their base of power or to get us out from under occupation, but I don’t accept this. The simple explanation is that all the extreme groups are using suicide bombers to send a spectacular message, and they are using it because it is the most effective way to send this message. God help us all if we don’t stop this insanity now."

Andawan is right. This is madness, a madness we need to fight against. While we should absolutely criticize Israeli policy when needed and point out the numerous Israeli human rights violations, it is never acceptable to ally with extremists. What Israel and Palestine need know are friends who dare to tell them the truth – a truth that, strangely enough, was also understood by the Saddam supporter and PLO member Abdullah Horani, quoted in Victors “Army of Roses”:

“No one wins in this conflict”, he said thoughtfully. “Here in Gaza or in Ramallah, people have no jobs, no money. They are constantly humiliated by the Israelis. The only winners are the people who manufacture the American flags. Every time we burn one, they make more money to send their families away to a safe place”. He shrugged. “Probably in America”.

[Øyvind Strømmen is a Norwegian freelance journalist specializing on the Middle East, Central Asia and Islam. Editor of the Norwegian alternative newspaper dilettant.no he's currently writing a book on Islamism.]

Øyvind Strømmen encourages your comments: post [at] dilettant.no

YellowTimes.org is an international news and opinion publication. YellowTimes.org encourages its material to be reproduced, reprinted, or broadcast provided that any such reproduction identifies the original source, http://www.YellowTimes.org. Internet web links to http://www.YellowTimes.org are appreciated.