| Fear of the Other Conference papers | |
I would like to start by thanking those behind this very important and timely conference, for organising it and inviting me as a speaker. Its focus is something that has been of great and personal interest to me for some time, and my thoughts on the subject have evolved constantly over the years.
There is a general consensus that Arabophobia, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are alive and well, and this is true to a considerable extent. The phrase “the only good Arab is a dead Arab” has become all too commonplace in my e-mail inbox.
However, I think these phenomena are somewhat exaggerated because people tend to fall back on them in a knee-jerk fashion, without proper thought.
As such, criticism of Israeli policies is often misleadingly described as anti-Semitic. This was explained eloquently and rationally by Brian Klug, one of the organisers of this conference, who I had the pleasure of hosting with Israeli-Palestinian Knesset Member Dr. Azmi Bishara last year at the School of Oriental and African Studies on “The Politics of Anti-Semitism.”
Likewise, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq are deemed to be part of a war against Islam, ignoring those countries’ geo-strategic importance and resource wealth, and the fact that non-Muslim countries such as North Korea have also come under US pressure. Had Iraq been a Buddhist nation, I do not think this would have stopped its occupation.
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the London bombings, I was interviewed at length about an anti-Muslim backlash. I took exception to this term, because while Muslims were certainly targeted, so were members of other communities, such as Hindus, Sikhs, blacks and Christians. The Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes is a stark example. The intention was an anti-Muslim backlash, but the result put members of other communities at risk. Can this then still be called Islamophobia?
After all, what does a Muslim look like? What does an Arab look like? What does a Jew look like? You simply cannot pigeonhole these diverse peoples. When there are backlashes against them, they are often a reaction to stereotypes. Perceived anti-Muslim or anti-Arab backlashes are often actually backlashes against anyone who is not white. Thus we are looking at a much wider problem of general racism, rather than its specific forms.
Arabs, Muslims and Jews have often suffered together. When Christian forces retook Spain from the Moors, Muslims and Jews were expelled wholesale.
When the Crusaders captured Jerusalem, Christians, Jews and Muslims were massacred together because they all looked alike.
I visited the Wansee Hall in Germany this year. This was where the “final solution” to the “Jewish problem” was agreed on. Someone from our tour group asked our guide, a German expert on the Holocaust, if the Germans, having annihilated the Jews, would have turned their sights on the Arabs. To our collective surprise, he told us that in North Africa, Arabs and Jews were being liquidated together in German concentration camps.
In the 1950s, when Mizrahi, Eastern Jews were emigrating to Israel, many were attacked by Ashkenazi, Western Jews because they were mistaken for Palestinians.
And I have spoken to, and read about, Mizrahi Jews who have been attacked recently in France because they were mistaken for Arabs. One Morrocan Jew I got acquainted with this year told me his brother, who lived in France, changed his Arabic name to something more Jewish-sounding to escape harassment.
How then can Muslims and Arabs on the one hand, and Jews on the other, consider themselves as their “other”, when their fortunes and sufferings have been so intertwined?
In fact, there is no exclusivity between being an Arab and being a Jew. After all, what is a Jew from Morocco, Yemen or Iraq if not an Arab Jew?
An interesting side-note is that I recently watched a documentary whereby a huge country-wide DNA study was done in Lebanon to find out who were the descendents of the Phoenicians. It turned out that all the communities in Lebanon – Sunni, Shia, Druze and Christian – were from the same gene pool. This highlighted the tragedy that Lebanon’s civil war pitted family member against family member, and faith should have had no divisive influence.
And on the subject of family, it is not by accident that a popular Arab term for Jews is “cousin.”
Also, if you take Sudan, it is very popular to describe the conflicts there as pitting Arab against African, as if the two are totally separate identities. Many experts on Sudan, and many Sudanese themselves, will tell you that there has been so much intermarriage there that one cannot clearly differentiate between Arab and black.
And I have met many Moroccans, Libyans, Tunisians and so on who see no contradiction between being Arab and African.
But back to my main point, what I am trying to show is that various forms of racism spring from the same well of ignorance. For instance, Ku Klux Klan members were just as much against Jews, Arabs and Muslims as they were against blacks.
Also, you are all aware of the Islamophobic stance taken by the British National Party. Well, there was a documentary last year on the BNP, in which a Jewish undercover journalist uncovered deeply anti-Semitic attitudes as well.
Far-right and neo-Nazi parties in Europe are equally against Arabs, Jews and Muslims, and against immigrants in general.
Therefore, the BNP and other such groups should be more accurately described as generally racist and xenophobic, rather than specifically anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, Arabophobic etc.
It is heartening, then, that despite the Israeli government’s close relationship with apartheid South Africa, Jews, Arabs and Muslims were at the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement, and the civil rights movement in the US. Likwewise, black South Africans have been sympathetic to the liberation movements in Palestine and Iraq.
As this conference is discussing “fear of the other,” it is important to note that with any foreign occupation, apartheid system or colonial/imperialist movement, the fear that both sides have towards each other is different. Specifically, those with power fear the loss of it, and those without power fear the continuance or deterioration of the status quo. The same can be said of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is a generalisation, I know, but one worth making.
One generalisation I disagree with in the context of this conflict is the idea that the Palestinians’ “other” is the Israelis, and vice versa. While there is an element of this in some sections of both societies, on the whole it just is not as simple as that. The diversity of this audience is a testament to that.
Even within those elements who seem to hate all things Israeli or Jewish, or all things Arab or Muslim, I believe a significant part of this is down to ignorance and a lack of familiarity, rather than someone who knowingly takes up a racist attitude.
On a personal level, I have dated European women whose parents were initially very dubious about the fact they were dating an Arab Muslim, until they met me and got to know me. They then realised that I was a decent human being just like them, that I was not strapped to a bomb, that I would not kidnap their daughters and veil them.
There is another striking and personal example of how familiarity breaks down walls. This year I took part in an exercise undertaken by the German government to bring together three delegations of journalists – Palestinian, Israeli and German – for a week in Munich and Berlin. All but one Israeli had never met a Palestinian, and most of the Palestinians had never met an Israeli other than as soldiers at checkpoints. There was a great deal of anxiety initially on both sides about how everyone would get on, especially since one of the Israelis was a settler, and most of the rest were either involved with the Israeli army or intelligence. But within one night, the tensions melted away as people got to know each other. It became clear within a few days that, when we would go out for meals, people would not separate along national lines. Israelis and Palestinians would sit together in different groups according to who they liked personally, not where they came from. In fact, some of the friendships went beyond the platonic! By the end of the week, everyone was trying to arrange future get-togethers, and urging the Germans to repeat this exercise. The last night was the most memorable for me – all of us sitting at a shisha café, an Israeli playing the guitar while people sang in Hebrew and Arabic. Just a couple of weeks back, an Israeli in the delegation who was an army officer invited me to her wedding. All this from just one week together.
Basically, there is simply not enough interaction between these communities on an equal footing. It is not about an inherent, insurmountable animosity.
One cannot claim that the “others” in this conflict are Islam and Judaism. This ignores the fact that there is a sizable and growing number of Jews in Israel and worldwide fighting for Palestinian rights.
It also ignores the Christians of the Holy Land who suffer occupation and discrimination, and the fact there are non-Jews and non-Muslims who have taken sides in the conflict.
In America, for instance, you have Christian Zionists rising in political power, as well as a growing Christian movement of divestment from Israel.
The dangerous and false premise of the Judaism-Islam prism of the “other” is that it implies that Israel speaks for world Jewry, and that Palestine is a solely Islamic concern.
While working last year for the UN Development Programme in Ramallah, the son of Hamas leader Sheikh Hassan Yusef became one of my closest friends. A wonderfully moderate man, we would often talk politics, and I asked him once about his attitude towards Jews. He told me he would not, and could not, hate Jews because this would mean his own defeat as a human being. He has had Jewish and Israeli friends who would be guests in his home, he told me, and his grievance was with his people’s oppressors, not Jews in general. This from a man whose father is a leader of an organisation described as religiously fanatic.
But one also cannot say the “others” in this conflict are Palestinians and Israelis. Currently, one in five Israelis is a Palestinian, and this ratio is steadily growing. It is estimated that by 2025, a quarter of Israel’s population will be of Palestinian origin, and by this I mean Israeli citizens, not Palestinians under occupation.
This ignores the diversity in political views within Israeli and Palestinian societies. There are many Israeli Jews who fight for Palestinian rights and a just peace, and they are often called traitors by other Israeli Jews.
I witnessed this first-hand at London’s pro-Israel demonstration a few years back, when members of Jews for Justice for Palestinians and other Jewish peace groups bravely withstood a barrage of insults and spitting.
Think also of the recent Gaza withdrawal, where settlers were calling Israeli soldiers and supporters of the withdrawal Nazis. To settlers, the majority of the Israeli Jewish public became their “other.”
There are deep and bitter divisions between Israeli Zionists and non-Zionists, and even within the Zionist movement itself, as well as between a secular majority and the increasingly powerful and vocal religious minority.
Likewise, there are many secular Palestinians who feel ever-more estranged from their increasingly popular religious and even fundamentalist compatriots. There are those who accept Zionism, who wrangle with those bitterly opposed to it. There are those who support armed resistance, those who oppose it, those who support refugee rights, those who say they are impractical, those who accept total withdrawal, those who will settle for less.
These issues are so sensitive for Palestinians and Israelis that people within their own communities can be viewed as “others.”
Indeed, I have more in common with my fellow Jewish peace activists than I have with, say, an Arab or Muslim extremist. An Arab who shouts “death to Jews” is just as much an “other” to me as a Jew who shouts “death to Arabs”. Why should I feel somehow closer to the Arab because he is an Arab?
To be a true peace activist, one must be a universal humanist. One form of hatred and intolerance is just as lamentable as another.
Last year, on behalf of Arab Media Watch, I worked with Jewish peace groups to organise a commemoration of the Israeli occupation. It was an extremely moving event which went very well. One night, we were all sitting together, eating humus and planning things. The next day, someone asked me how it felt being the only Palestinian in the group. It was only then that that occurred to me. To me, we were just dedicated people, friends, with a just cause. Nationality had not entered my mind. But once it did, it gave me a sense of pride that we could all work together for a common cause.
Working with Jewish and Israeli peace groups has become a priority for me, and it is this that has made me realise that we are not that different after all, that theories of “the other” are so much more complex than people assume them to be. Arab, Muslim, Jewish and Israeli peace groups often row in the same direction, but sometimes, unfortunately, on different boats. This must change.
In short, regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict, there is no single, monolithic “other.” There are many “others,” depending on the issues, characters and ideologies involved, and “others” are just as prevalent among the communities as between them. It is not about ethnicity or faith. Give both peoples more credit.
The positive thing about having cross-communal “others” is that it opens up countless opportunities for cooperation and integration, which is vital for peace and prosperity.
We should also move away from the notion that having an “other” or “others” necessarily implies the need for fear. In this respect, I would like to end with a quote from the Quran:
“O mankind! We created you from a single pair of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other, not that ye may despise each other.”