Barry Werner – The Arab/Israeli Conflict And Western Antisemitism
The Arab/Israeli conflict has endured well over a hundred years, far longer than most conflicts in history. Is that because it is impossible to resolve? I think not. Most Arab and Muslim countries have given up on their struggle to destroy the Jewish state and increasingly see Israel as a regional partner. They lost patience with the Palestinians’ obstinacy. Most Muslims in the world want the conflict to end. So demonstrably, the Arab/Israeli conflict is not impossible to resolve.
Why then has it endured for so long? In my view, it is because of the involvement of the West.
At the end of WWI, Britain and France held League of Nations Mandates to rule the territories of the former Ottoman Empire. Britain ruled Palestine and Iraq. France ruled Syria and Lebanon. Britain split Palestine to create the Amirate of Trans-Jordan (later renamed Jordan). Britain also indirectly controlled Egypt. Starting in the 1920s, the Arabs of Palestine revolted to stop the Zionist plan to rescue the Jews of Europe by bringing them to Palestine. From the 1930s to 1955, Britain, and to a lesser extent, the US and France, supported the Arabs against the Jews of Palestine/Israel who they considered to be an inconvenient obstacle to their geopolitical plans. Britain’s enmity with Israel ended when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal Company, a joint British-French enterprise that was founded in 1869. Britain needed Israel to help secure the Suez Canal.
From 1956 onward, the West represented itself as a neutral party. However, Western participation in the UN (UNGA, UNHRC, UNWRA, etc., even UNESCO), EU-funded NGOs, ICC, BDS Movement, etc., was an opportunity for individual Western antisemites to get involved. In a variation of orientalism, Western antisemites believe that only Muslim antisemites are authentic Muslims. They encouraged the Palestinians to hope that the Western world would come to its rescue. The Jews and Palestinians would have long ago resolved their differences and Palestinian life could have come back to normal had it not been for the malicious efforts of Western antisemites who pretend interest in the well-being of Arabs when they can blame the suffering on Jews.
There are still many people in the West who believe the ancient stereotypes about Jews being inherently evil. The origins of these stereotypes can be traced back to the early centuries of Christianity when the religion was taking shape. Along with a religion of love, there developed a parallel religion of intolerance toward heterodoxy and the demonization of Jews. Of course, there were periods and places where Jews and Christians lived side by side in relative tranquility. However, the general trend over the last thousand years was to pauperize the Jews and force them out of Western Europe into Eastern Europe, from where they were then forced into the jaws of the Holocaust. The public expression of antisemitism in the West has been muted since the Holocaust, but antisemitism never went away. (Could there have been a Holocaust if Jews did rule the world? Stereotypes resist rational analysis.)
An interesting comparison can be made between the Christian European and the Muslim worlds. Although they were both fiercely intolerant at times, the two worlds differed in that only the Muslim world retained a diversity of non-dominant religious communities. That has become evident in recent years as we witness Islamist fanatics murderously oppressing those communities who managed to survive until now. Radical Islam is a reality, but it is an aberration, not the rule in Muslim history, and most Muslims oppose it.
Certainly, there is antisemitism in the Islamic tradition, but not all of it originated there. Christian missionaries introduced Western antisemitism when the Ottoman Empire opened itself to the West (the Ottomans only permitted missionaries to convert Christian Arabs to Western forms of Christianity). And then, Nazi antisemitism was brought to the Arab world in the 1930s. Later, the Soviet Union harmonized Western antisemitic stereotypes with its anti-Israel propaganda. (That antisemitic anti-Israel propaganda is still current on the left side of the political spectrum in the West.)
But there is not much difference for Islamist fanatics between Jewish Zionists and Christian Crusaders. Jews and Christians had a protected, second-class status (dhimmitude) in the traditional Muslim world provided they accepted the dominance of Muslims. If non-Muslims control land that the followers of Muhammad conquered, Islamist fanatics believe they are bound by their religion to fight a violent jihad to take that land back. For them, Islam is a religion of peace if and only if Muslims dominate non-Muslims. There are also Arabs who think those lands must be ruled only by Arabs. But that sort of racism is more about their interpretation of their religion than it is about their view of the essential nature of Jews, and it is far from universal in Muslim societies.
The Holocaust presents a challenge to Christianity in post-Holocaust Europe. Was that what the “Lamb of God” died for? Unless the Christian world as a whole sees antisemitism as the evil it is, a contradiction of Judeo-Christian values, and unless they see Jesus of Nazareth as the Jew he was, in a Jewish environment and context, there will continue to be fanatic, antisemitic Christians in the Western world who want to fan the flames of war in the Mideast.
Thank God for those Christians who see Western civilization as a Judeo-Christian endeavor and who support Israel. To paraphrase the Bible that is holy to the three major Abrahamic faiths, (Genesis 12), God will bless us when we bless each other and curse us when we curse each other. Jews, Christians, and Muslims need to support each other in bringing the Arab/Israeli conflict to an end.
