CAN ISRAEL BE A MIDEAST COUNTRY?

...Nonetheless, although critical of the Ashkenazim, the Sephardic, Mideastern Jews tend to blame themselves as well for having withdrawn too easily from a struggle in which they might have played a central role...

...This, however, according to the political theory and practice of Islam itself is a distinction without a difference...

...The achievement of Jewish freedom after so many centuries has provided such a purpose, particularly since Israeli independence came providentially soon after the unlocking of the concentration camps...

...But there will come a day when the Muslim Arabs will have to admit that we, the "Arab Jews" as well—if that is how they wish to call us—have the right to existence and dignity...

...The Jewish presence is frequently called upon to testify to an alleged Muslim innocence of any oppression that might suggest moral claims against Arab society...

...In appearance and atmosphere, Israel today is increasingly a Mideastern country...

...To forestall such logic, Arabs tell themselves that the Jews do not really constitute a nation or a people, but only a religion...

...Special clothing and colors, special limitations of public behavior, special marks of status and rules of obligation all served to keep religious minorities firmly within their own communions and outside the majority society...

...I regret nothing...

...Memmi has asked bitterly...

...To the Arabs, the Jews had become self-assertive, insolent...

...It would seem, therefore, that the demonstrable needs of its own Sephardic majority, as well as the batterings of Muslim and Communist propaganda abroad, would have led Israel long ago to direct public attention to the political and social realities of the Arab-Jewish past...

...If one were to base oneself on this legitimacy, and not on force and numbers, then we have the same rights to our share in these lands—neither more nor less—as the Arab Muslims...

...So the Jews fled from the Muslim lands, with the encouragement of exclusionary regimes happy to see them go...

...Is it possible that continued Egyptian-Israeli contact may encourage more curiosity about Arab-Jewish relations before Zionism...

...Once offered a wider margin for safety and dignity, the Jerusalem community grew so rapidly that by 1872—well before Zionist immigration —Jews outnumbered the combined Muslim and Christian populations of the city...

...Indeed, in nothing is Israel less Western today, and more recognizably Mideastern, than in its tenacious religious orientation...

...It is difficult to imagine that an Israel perceived as a Western enclave can ever be acceptable to them as a rightful part of the Middle East...

...The recovery of our historical identity and our moral dignity will enable us to start a dialogue with the Arab peoples, as free human beings and not as servile dhimmis...

...Both sides proceed from this common ground to positions so widely separate that communication is virtually impossible...

...The Sephardic, Mideastern Jews tend to ascribe a good deal of Israel's insistent European emphasis to its politicians...

...Never, I repeat, never—with the possible exception of two or three very specific intervals such as the Andalusian, and not even then—did the Jews in Arab lands live in other than a humiliated state, vulnerable and periodically mistreated and murdered, so that they should clearly remember their place...

...Today, as yesterday, our life is at stake...

...From the start, the Arabs have viewed Israel as a foreign body arbitrarily grafted upon their world...

...On the other side, eager Israeli identification with foreign powers has served to strengthen the Arab stereotype...

...With a change of venue to the historic grounds of the Middle East, however, the two Semitic peoples might, if they would, look at each other in a clearer light, against the background of their own relationships and mutual entitlements, rather than in the distorting shadow of the Europeans...

...But if one asks, why...

...It challenges fixed assumptions, to include all the historic issues between Arabs and Jews...

...Today the Mideast Jews are finally finding their voice in new organizations, in an awareness of their growing political strength, and in the assertive militance of their youth...

...Long after the seventh century, A.D., the time of the Arabs' conquests, some 90 percent of the world's Jews continued to live under Islam...

...This bitter conviction feeds their faith that, in the manner of foreign bodies in alien environments, Israel must, sooner or later, be expelled or overcome...

...What have we been for centuries if not dominated, humiliated, threatened, and periodically massacred...

...Another eloquent journalist and pamphleteer is from Egypt and uses the pen name of Bat Ye'or, which is Hebrew for Woman of the Nile...

...This dialogue, although inspired by the lesson of the past, nonetheless points to a future of friendship and not of contempt, a future of peace and not of war...

...But now...

...The system was designed, on the contrary, to preserve Muslim supremacy and to demean and exploit the unbeliever...

...But it also is not altogether true...

...SEVERAL HISTORIC FORCES uprooted the ancient Jewish communities of the Middle East, and Zionism was the least of them...

...For the fundamentalist Orthodox, the land of Israel has been divinely bestowed upon the Jewish people and the title deed lies in the eternally binding Torah itself...

...It 368 might offer this further hope: that it would throw open the question, for both Jews and Arabs, of whether Israel is not in fact today, and whether it must not of necessity continue to be in the future, a Mideastern and not a European country...

...Inevitably, and in spite of some legal rights, their status of inferiority invited popular intolerance, contempt, attack...

...Such statements may be read as self-serving, but they do reflect a genuine feeling of offense and367 perhaps more important—recognition of fellow Orientals...

...Their communities, in and out of Palestine, were ruled by a succession of Muslim despots...

...But it was religion that united them, gave them their collective symbols and loyalties...

...With the spread of European influence and law, the Jews began to enjoy civil rights, citizenship, and freedoms that had been impossible under Muslim rule...

...That this plain historical fact is so often obscured is testament to the singular influence that, with regard to the Middle East, 19th-century Romanticism continues to exert upon the 20th-century imagination...

...For the Arabs, of course, European imperialism was another dislocation...

...Clearly, Mideast peace would require mutual adjustment on cognitive as well as territorial borders...

...Israel as a European nation is the central myth of the Arab-Israeli conflict...

...And so peace with Israel, even when conceivable, is at best an act of generosity to a stranger...

...Under the Ottomans, the autonomous Jewish and Christian communities were known as millets...

...Among these, the sudden liberties now allowed the Jews appeared particularly galling in the light of the diminished status of the Arabs themselves...

...Suspicion and resentment were rife on both sides...

...Patently, a Middle East without Jews is a historical absurdity...

...But the Arabs did, nonetheless, adopt many Western ideas, including that of the territorially defined, secular nation-state...

...THIS CIRCLE OF PERCEPTIONS is not easy to break out of...

...Some have openly worried that Israel might become a "Levantine" society, with all the word implies of backwardness, apathy, corruption...

...They had neither the right nor the means to defend themselves, being expressly forbidden to bear arms or to strike Muslims...

...This Arab gospel does not altogether forget Mideast Jewry...

...Many of them had been rural or mountain people in the Muslim countries, or had been isolated by extreme urban poverty from the opportunities of the short-lived European emancipation...

...It cannot seriously be supposed that such a caste system would have produced a tolerant, let alone an egalitarian, society...

...In the terms in which the Arab-Israeli argument has proceeded thus far, there seems little promise of change...

...Westernizing the Oriental population has been viewed as a national priority, and for this purpose any educational or cultural Levantine orientation could only be a setback...

...In a bargain they couldn't refuse, they agreed to pay for their "protection" with obedience and humility and perpetual tribute...

...This has been, claims Bat Ye'or (Giselle Littman), "one of the longest and most oppressive imperialisms of history...

...The power of myth rests not upon factual accuracy but upon symbolic expression...

...Far more responsible were Western ideas, European colonialism, and Arab nationalism...

...Their names often said as much, as in the official designation of such Christian groups as the Greek, Armenian, and Frankish (meaning Roman Catholic) nations...

...Each individual gropes with the mystery in his own way, to be sure...

...It was this entity that signed treaties of capitulation with the Arabs and was responsible for their observance...

...Nor was that its intention...

...It is unfortunate, therefore, that both Israelis and Arabs ignore the post-Biblical history of the Middle East...

...By the Muslim Arabs...

...To the Jews of Africa and Asia, the intrusion of the West brought the beginnings of emancipation...

...That this should be so, more than three decades after the achievement of Israeli independence, suggests a singular rigidity in both Arab and Israeli thinking...

...On the one side, Arab enmity and exclusion have helped to keep Israel aligned with and dependent upon the West...

...They simply moved to a now also independent Israel, where they have helped to strengthen a prevailing nationalist climate that similarly—in un-European fashion—is strongly religious and fundamentalist...

...This was a frequent belief among the ancient Semitic peoples...

...Why shouldn't we submit our reckoning to the world...

...Yet Israel is perceived —by itself as well as by others—to be a European nation...

...if they are no longer oppressed, if they are in turn becoming oppressors, or possess unjust political regimes, I do not see why they should not be called upon to render accounts...

...Eventually, and in part because it is after all a democracy with strong socialist leanings, Israel came to believe that its security lay within the duty, self-interest, and power of the democratic countries...

...The Arabs were colonized, it is true...

...In Palestine, the establishment of a British consulate in 1838 offered the Jewish population for the first time the promise of protection against arbitrary abuse...

...After having been dispossessed of their rights by conquest in the jihad, or holy war, the dhimmi from then on were permanently degraded, held to be morally inferior, and condemned to live as subject peoples and landless nations once their homelands had been Arabized and Islamized: This political aspect of the dhimmi condition was at the root of the numerous bloody conflicts since the early 19th century, whenever dhimmi people fought to regain control of its national territory from Islamic domination, whether Ottoman or Arab, i.e., the Greeks, the Serbs, the Rumanians, the Bulgarians, the Maronites, the Armenians, and more recently the Jews...

...Denominational autonomy was both practice and law—a very circumscribed autonomy, to be sure...

...This has meant beating back challenges not only from Oriental "outsiders" but also from younger, nativeborn Israelis...

...We welcome you to live amongst us," said Anwar Sadat to the Jews in Jerusalem, begging the question of historic rights and leaving Arabs still resentful and Israelis still insecure...

...Despite their prominence, however, the Oriental Sephardic Jews are a poor and disadvantaged class in the country, troubled, among other things, by problems of pride and self-image...

...Nineteenth-century European and American travelers have left letters and memoirs describing mistreatment of Jews in the Arab lands...

...However, most of these Jewish refugees remained in the Middle East...

...And now, naturally, they are reacting to an awareness of their handicaps and to the inevitable alienation of their youth by calling upon the country to give equal time and notice to their history, their claims, their traditions...

...Thus the Jewish people existed in the Muslim empires as a corporate entity with defined political status, rights, and obligations...

...The Jewish millet or nation of scattered communities, always an essential part of the region, has now simply come back together into a state...

...If the Israelis find their "root and legitimation" in a European past, then the Arabs see the consequent needs of the Jewish people as no proper moral or political concern of theirs...

...Their homeland was occupied, their lands were expropriated...

...The Israeli political system is one in which party leaderships have been enabled to perpetuate themselves, thus creating an old guard that, it is asserted, is zealous to protect its own power...

...In Muslim countries, people have always lived by their religious identities...

...Whether Islam appropriated the doctrine directly from Judaism or came to it out of an Arabian tradition, the fact remains that there is no room in orthodox Islam, either, for territorial compromise on land that, it declares, God took back from the Jews and gave to the Muslims...

...They imposed this 19th-century European concept somewhat shakily, however, upon their own traditional ideals concerning the political priorities of Islam, the unity of an ethnic Arab nation, and the predominance of a national culture of Arabism...

...Their religions also show a strong family resemblance, and not least in their shared conviction of an eternal, covenanted trinity of God, People, and sacred Land...

...But at the least it would introduce fresh currents of thought in a debate that now is bogged down in sterile repetition, intransigence, and escalating violence...

...The yellow Jewish badge, as it happens, was an Arab innovation...

...Islamic governments, moreover, went to great pains to enforce religious separation...

...For the Jews, the Arab populations had a remembered reputation of fanaticism and violence from which their customary appeal in the past had been to Turkish, European, and other outside imperial authorities that were now gone...

...Memmi is the author of The Colonizer and the Colonized, a popular Third World liberation text of the 1950s...

...But for Israel as a whole, the Holocaust has become the felt source of its legitimacy and ultimately the almost sacred symbol of national consciousness and will...

...Thirteen centuries (and more) of life together have left a complex record, of course...

...Speaking for the recently formed World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries, Bat Ye'or said: For centuries, we kept silent when our human dignity and rights were flouted...

...Opening the book now would surely expose a wide difference in point of view between the conquerors and the conquered...

...During those dark centuries, we lived as if we were blind so as not to see our disgrace, as if we were deaf so as not to hear endless insults...

...Applauding Sadat's peace initiative she wrote: "Only a knowledge of history can help one understand that this gesture breaks with traditional attitudes of the past thirteen centuries...

...Both peoples feel themselves bitterly aggrieved—but, it is important to note, rather less by each other than by European traumas: the Jews by their savage European persecutions, the Arabs by a high-handed European colonialism, which, after everything else, is demanding that they now submit to the payment of Europe's own bills...

...Karl Marx, writing in the New York Daily Tribune in 1854, was still able to note that "nothing equals the misery and the sufferings of the Jews at Jerusalem, inhabiting the most filthy quarter of the town...

...For example, Palestinian spokesman Edward Said, in his recent book The Question of Palestine, charges that the Occidental Israelis have become the oppressors of both Palestinian Arabs and Oriental Jews, and that Israel's achievements have been "on behalf of European Jews, less so for the Oriental majority...

...The Oriental Jews continue to be the forgotten Semitic refugees, the overlooked Israelis...

...Can the image of Israel change, at long last...

...But at least there could be no infuriating questions about somebody else's bills, no outraged feelings of being innocent pawns in somebody else's games...

...The European Ashkenazic Jews,* although a minority, control the govern*There are, of course, some West European Sephardic Jews—descendants of the Jews of Spain who were expelled in 1492—who usually (ironically) hold high status in the Jewish communities.—Ens...

...But weren't we...

...The shock was that the imperialism was Christian and the imposed rules were alien...

...The shock was not imperialism itself since that, after all, had been the accepted system of Muslim government...

...the constant objects of Mussulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins...

...The State of Israel is not the outcome only of the sufferings of European Jewry...

...She finds that the deepest psychological root of the ArabIsraeli conflict lies in the collective image or stereotype, in the Arab-Islamic consciousness, of the native non-Muslim peoples, or dhimmi...

...What about us...

...But it must be stated unequivocally, once and for all: we defended the Arabs because they were oppressed...

...What is painted instead is a double image...

...The principle of religious separatism was also fundamental to the political organization of the Islamic state...

...But in this century they have for the most part been ignored, and they complain especially that they have never been helped to establish a visible international presence— in the United Nations, for example, where Oxford accents and South African and Polish connections have clearly not advanced Israel's cause...

...The necessity to come to terms with an event so terrible has engendered a deep Jewish need to find some purpose in the suffering, some transcendent meaning to sustain confidence in a more promising future, perhaps even faith in a benevolent God...

...The emergent although decentralized Arab nationalisms, inextricably intertwined with Islam, were a passionate mix of religion with culture, peoplehood, and land...

...Not surprisingly, they were soon submerged in the more assertive and advanced culture of the European Jews...

...It is widely admitted that the Israeli Ashkenazim are inclined to look down upon African and Asian Jews, to disparage their culture and fear their influence...

...The Jews, many of them so recently liberated from Islam and Arabism, found themselves en365 dangered as soon as the several Arab nations won their independence after World War II...

...Yet it is these years that might give the independence of Israel a political legitimacy, with roots in the historic consciousness of both peoples...

...Yet'Israelis virtually never dispute these assumptions, no matter how vigorously they may object to the conclusions that follow...

...The prospects for perceptual change seem fairly dim—unless, perhaps, a fresh viewpoint can be introduced by the Sephardic Jews themselves...

...The word, significantly, is derived from the Arabic word milla, which means both religion and nation...

...For the Arabs to recognize the right of national sovereignty of the Jewish people in its own land would be to acknowledge at last "that decolonization is a universal process applicable to Arabs also...

...Israel has been seriously hurt by widespread charges of imperialism, colonialism, and racism, all of which rest upon the twin assumptions that Israelis have no native rights in the Middle East and no moral or political claims against the Arabs...

...To be sure, its history forced Israel into an early reliance upon Europe, and Arab hostility has steadily reinforced the association...

...To defend Israel's rights against a different background—to suggest, even, that another history may be of more weight to the world— appears to make light of wounds still bleeding...

...Even if Arab imperialism had in fact been as benevolent as is claimed, it would still not follow that Jewry in the Middle East does not in this century, like other subjugated peoples, have the right to freedom...

...Both now seem to be engaged in moving the conflict outright to a religious battlefield from which retreat can be cut off entirely...

...He was active in the Tunisian nationalist movement, which, however, became openly Muslim and exclusionary once it had won independence...

...Within Israel, African and Asian Jews today make up well over half the Jewish population, at least half the Jewish electorate, and a steadily growing majority of Jewish youth...

...Clearly, this sort of talk puts a new drama on the stage...

...And by whom...

...Shifting attention from Europe and the Holocaust, therefore, can seem threatening, even sacrilegious...

...They arrived in Israel some 30 years ago with the typical health, education, and economic problems of a deprived Mideastern population...

...The case for Israel, put in terms of Jewish oppressions and needs, is usually grounded upon recollections of European happenings alone, with a bill of complaints only against the West and Christianity...

...A historical examination of the Middle East would show, at the very least, a more complex picture...

...This history of the Islamic millet system, among other factors, led the English historian James Parkes to observe that, far from being an alien intrusion, the national independence of Israel in the 20th century is in fact a normal development...

...Indeed, one frustrated Arab demand has always been that the problems of the region be considered against the perspectives of its own history and traditions...

...the first response is likely to be, the Holocaust...

...This entity collected taxes, administered civil regulations, was held accountable for the conduct of the collectivity, formally represented its members, and negotiated for them in the councils of empire and government, occasionally even with foreign powers...

...The Jewish communities, like the Christian, were permitted their own internal organization and regulation, their own schools and religious courts...

...Together, these combined to destroy the old millet system of the Ottoman empire and made new political arrangements both necessary and inevitable...

...Yet neither the Arabs nor the Israelis are inclined to reexamine their ideologies and rhetoric for the sake of peace...

...Memmi states firmly, however, that It is now too late for us to become Arab Jews...

...Territorial nationalism is a European idea, and the separation of church and state a Christian precept...

...They visibly affect the Israeli economy, its culture, its style...

...And would it make a difference...

...366 ment...

...Their new selfaffirmation may possibly change the debate...

...Just as the identification of Israel with Europe serves as a keystone of Arab dogma, so the European connection is central to Israeli ideology, civic practice, national self-awareness...

...They see the disparagement as an extension of that general European contempt for Arabs and Arabism that has nourished their own smarting sense of racism...

...It is significant, incidentally, that Arabs, too, often express resentment at the Israeli treatment of Mideast Jews...

...To look to worldly sources of legitimacy is irrelevant and mischievous, since the simple clarity of the Biblical doctrine can only be muddied by extraneous argument...

...Their old limited autonomy and legal protections were now gone, nor could they help accept once more the role of a restricted minority in Arab society...

...This Israeli behavior seems self-defeating, yet it is seldom questioned or examined...

...They required that non-Muslims keep themselves conspicuously lab364 eled at all times...

...They were once the Jewish majority and leadership in Palestine, they point out...

...One can only imagine such change, however, on some common historical terrain, in a vocabulary of common experience and memory...

...Such a shift of viewpoint can hardly be expected magically to stop the conflict...

...Like most myths, it is not entirely untrue...

...And if there are many Jews to whom no further proof of Israel's right may injustice be asked, after the Holocaust, there are also many to whom no further proof can in conscience be required, after the word of God...

...The Christian color was blue...

...Memmi has written...

...One of their most articulate spokesmen is Albert Memmi, sociologist and novelist, who was born and raised in a Tunisian ghetto...

...Memmi is explicit in his definition of legitimate Jewish rights in the Middle East: As natives of those countries called Arab and indigenous to those lands well before the arrival of the Arabs, we shared with them to a great extent languages, traditions, and cultures...

...Although Jews are indigenously visible in bright pictures of Arab tolerance, they are nowhere to be found on the landscapes of self-government...

...Unhappily, this fundamental Arab-Israeli "agreement" blocks any further agreement...

...In the conduct of its foreign affairs, Israel has lined up with the West and sought actively to play the part of a recognized outpost of European and American interests...

...For the subjugated Mideastern peoples who resisted conversion to Islam, their religion has always been, in effect, their nation...