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The following letter to the editors was sent by George Fish in Indianapolis.

David Finkel’s fine review-essay, “Myths of the Exile and Return,” in Against the Current 146 (May/June 2010), elevates understanding of the issues involved in the continued Israeli subjugation of the Palestinian people through perpetuation of the Zionist myth of the return of an exiled people to their ancestral homeland. But his essay, while a most welcome clarification, needs to be expanded on through further clarifications, which this letter will attempt to provide.

While the Zionist myth of an ancestral “Jewish people” is well dissected and dismissed by Finkel’s essay, Finkel errs by not giving enough attention to the concrete existence of a “Jewish people” in Europe that was subjected to two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism and persecution that culminated in the Nazi Holocaust. This was clearly an historic “Jewish people” that was seen as constituting a “Jewish problem” in Europe, and of course, this European Jewish people was the subject of the specifically European campaign to exterminate it that culminated in the murder of 6 million Jews during World War II, an extermination subsequently followed by the European refusal to concretely re-settle those specifically European Jews who had survived.

Europe’s blind refusal to take responsibility for what happened during the Holocaust was, of course, a great boon to the Zionists; they could now clamor that a specifically Jewish state, Israel, was necessary to protect Jews from a future Holocaust. Thus were large numbers of Jewish settlers of specifically European origin foisted upon the Palestinian Arabs who lived in Palestine, which was now designated as the specifically Jewish State of Israel. These were, of course, Jewish refugees created, first, by the Holocaust, and, then, by the European refusal to own up to this specifically European atrocity.

These Jews were made refugees in their actual homelands by a specifically European desire to be rid of this “problematic” people, who were then granted a sop at the expense of another people who also didn’t count. This is a necessary expansion of Finkel’s essay: pointing out the specifically European roots of the subsequent Zionist claim that Judaism = Zionism = the necessity of the specifically Jewish State of Israel born of necessity by anti-Semitism and Holocaust memories, and essential to the very physical survival of Jews themselves.

What complicates this matter for us in the early 21st Century is that another myth of an exiled people has also been perpetuated: the myth of an “Arab people” that was also dispossessed, and the identity of this “Arab people” as, further, an “Islamic people” who must confront an alien “Jewish people” in the name of Islam, a confrontation necessitated not only by the just claims of the dispossessed Palestinians, but also by adherence to the Will of Allah. With the defeat of secular Arab nationalism and secular pan-Arabism there has arisen an Islamic pan-Arabism that is just as totalizing as Zionism—and just as pernicious.

The rise of this Islamic pan-Arabism in the wake of the failure of secularist pan-Arabism is the subject of two insightful articles that appear in the current issue of the scholarly journal Critical Review (vol. 22, no. 1, 2010). This Islamic pan-Arabism makes three claims: the “natural” dominance of the Arab world over the whole of worldwide Islam due to the Arabic origins of Islam. This claim is advanced even though the majority of the world’s Muslims are not Arabs (“Arab” properly means the people of the Arabian Peninsula, and those descended from them. Iranians and Indonesians, who inhabit the country with the world’s largest Muslim population, are not Arabs, although most of them are Muslims); the appellation of “Arab” to all who speak Arabic (which is itself a language comprised of many mutually unintelligible dialects); and the further justification of specifically Arab dominance as the “natural” fruit from the “Islamic golden age” that arose in Medieval times when the specifically Arab people successfully led wars of imperial conquest that not only spread Islam beyond the Arabian Peninsula into the Middle East, Africa, the Byzantine Empire and parts of Europe; but also foisted Arab rulers on these non-Arab peoples; forcibly converted their populations to Islam; and also, in certain territories conquered, foisted Arabic on them over their native languages.

Thus another (equally specious) equation: Islam = Arabism = “natural” Arab dominance over both non-Arab Muslims and over non-Islamic peoples living in Islamic countries. Relating this to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, Islamic pan-Arabism supports the claims of the Palestinians not only in the name of Palestinian self-determination, but also by a broader claim of Islamic Arabic superiority over a non-Islamic “alien” people, i.e., Jews as such.

Readers of this letter should also consult Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim in addition to the two articles referenced above. Warraq’s book is a treasure trove of information on Islam and the historical record of the Arab conquest, and a great dispeller of myths on Islam. One of these myths is the supposed tolerance of Jews and Christians within Islamic societies. Jews and Christians were, in fact, second-class citizens who were subject to special taxes due to their “infidel” nature.

Not only was this true historically, but the Koran itself specifically denigrates the Christian and Jewish religions as incompatible with Islam, and also specifically denigrates Jews as worse than Christians. Thus can be found in the Koran itself a specifically Islamic form of what can only be called direct anti-Semitism. Once again, I refer the reader to an easily accessible book: the Penguin Classics edition of the Koran as translated into English by N.J. Dawood. (Both Dawood’s translation and Warraq’s book are available in paperback.)

This specifically Islamic justification for anti-Semitism can be seen in Dawood’s translation (on pp. 391-396) from the Koranic chapter called “The Table,” 5:41-5:82. 5:82 bears quoting in its entirety: “You will find that the most implacable of men in their enmity to the faithful [i.e., Muslims] are the Jews and the pagans, and that the nearest in affection to them are those who say: ‘We are Christians.’ That is because there are priests and monks among them; and because they are free from pride.” It needs also to be noted that certain Islamic groups who support the Palestinians distribute those anti-Semitic “classics,” “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and Henry Ford’s The Eternal Jew.

This brings us now to Hamas, and Islamic Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial, as we know, is the contemporary vogue among anti-Semites, and one infamous example of it in an Islamic country was the conference called in Iran a few years ago under the aegis of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad that specifically promoted Holocaust denial, and was attended by such “luminaries” as U.S. neo-Nazi David Duke. But Holocaust denial is also specifically supported by Hamas. Matthew Rothschild’s article in the September 2, 2009 issue of the Progressive, “The Holocaust and Palestine,” which was also distributed online by the left news listserve Portside, quotes Hamas legislator Jamila al-Shanti as saying, “Talk about the Holocaust and the execution of the Jews contradicts and is against our culture, our principles, our traditions, values, heritage, and religion."

Rothschild’s article also quotes Hamas's spiritual leader Yunis al-Astal remonstrating against the U.N.'s plans to teach children about the Holocaust in the schools it ran in Gaza as "marketing a lie" and a "war crime."

But Rothschild’s article also quotes the late Edward Said, certainly no supporter of the Israeli occupation, in most needed and relevant riposte. “Writing in Le Monde Diplomatique in 1998,” says Rothschild, “Said noted”:

“Whether we like it or not, the Jews are not ordinary colonialists. Yes, they suffered the Holocaust, and yes, they are the victims of anti-Semitism….But no, they cannot use those facts to continue, or initiate, the dispossession of another people that bears no responsibility for either of those prior facts….We must recognize the realities of the Holocaust not as a blank check for Israelis to abuse us, but as a sign of our humanity, our ability to understand history, our requirement that our suffering be mutually acknowledged….The real issue is intellectual truth and the need to combat any sort of apartheid and racial discrimination, no matter who does it. There is now a creeping, nasty wave of anti-Semitism and hypocritical righteousness insinuating itself into our political thought and rhetoric. One thing must be clear in my firm opinion: we are not fighting the injustices of Zionism in order to replace them with an invidious nationalism (religious or civil) that decrees that Arabs in Palestine are more equal than others. The history of the modern Arab world -— with all its political failures, its human rights abuses, its stunning military incompetencies, its decreasing production, the fact that alone of all modern peoples we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development -— is disfigured by a whole series outmoded and discredited ideas, of which the notion that the Jews never suffered and that [the] Holocaust is an obfuscatory confection created by the Elders of Zion is one that is acquiring too much, far too much currency.”

George Fish
Indianapolis, IN