Signs of Hate, Signs of Hope:

One Death, Six New Beginnings, and an Ever-changing Balance

AJC Weekly Briefing on Israeli and Middle Eastern Affairs

August 4, 2003

Dr. Eran Lerman

Director Israel/Middle East Office

American Jewish Committee

At this point in time, we do not yet know who killed Oleg Shaikhat, the soldier who was abducted two weeks ago within sight of his home in the Lower Galilee and apparently murdered shortly thereafter, having put up a gallant struggle with the killers. Nor do we know what happened to two other youngsters—who both happen to be American citizens—missing in the same part of the country: a girl of eighteen who disappeared near Tiberias, and a yeshiva student who had been visiting the grave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai in Meron, near Safed, and then vanished. Dark suspicions linger, however, that the murder and the abductions (if that is what they were) may have been a local operation, brutal acts of terrorism carried out by Israeli citizens, “the Arabs of 1948,” as they are commonly called by Palestinian leaders and intellectuals. Indeed, Oleg’s body (Shaikhat was the only fatality in weeks, although several Israelis were wounded in shooting attacks) was found in a shallow grave in an olive grove near the village of Kafr Kana—the very same Kana of the Gospels—which is today a hotbed of radical Islamist incitement.

If anyone had doubts as to the depth of hate and hostility among certain sectors of Israeli Arab citizens, proof was provided this week by a television (Channel 10) documentary on a summer camp organized by a radical group—Abna al-Balad, “sons of the village”—for some 300 children in Kaboul, another Arab village in the Galilee. The children were clearly well indoctrinated, having been taught to adore suicide bombers and aspire to become shahids; one girl explained to the TV reporter that “the Jews should go where they came from, like Russia or Bulgaria. This is Palestine.” While Abna al-Balad (which is ineligible to field candidates for Knesset elections, but has links to MK Azmi Bishara’s party) is nominally a secularist movement and keeps alive the adoration of the late Egyptian dictator Gamal Abd al-Nasser, the happy campers were encouraged to venerate the memory of the Islamist Hamas murderers, such as Yahya Ayyash, the bomb “engineer” who was killed in 1996.            The Israeli police have now moved to disband the camp, very much as Israel expects the PA to do against similar acts of virulent incitement in their areas—but so far, the balance is not yet encouraging, despite some distinct improvements.

 The struggle against the roots and fruit of hate has just begun. It cannot be won by police action alone; it cannot be won if we teach ourselves that we deserve this murderous hatred because somehow we failed to give these poor people a better, equal livelihood. Certainly, much more can and should be done to make their lives better; equally certainly, the lives of Israeli Muslims could have been much better already (as the lives of many Israeli Christian Arabs are) if they had followed the Christians’ example and reduced the size of their families, rather than commit themselves to bearing as many children as possible in the service of the national demographic “war.” In a groundbreaking study, Prof. Amnon Rubenstein—a leading light of the Israeli human rights movement and a former Meretz Party MK—has shown that for all our many faults and failures, Israel’s record in dealing with its Muslim minorities, when compared with that of Western European countries, is not nearly as shameful as some would want us to believe.  

Moreover, as the recent 9/11 revelations (and secret sections about the Saudis) remind us, some of the worst atrocities in human history were perpetrated by highly privileged and even pampered scions of society who were given all they needed—but were taught to hate the “other,” as a way of resolving their identity crises and the difficulties of dealing with modern life. Indeed, as we heard from the Coordination Forum for Countering Anti-Semitism—which met this week in Jerusalem under the auspices of Minister Natan Sharansky—the very concept of modern life has often been interpreted by the haters as another foul Jewish conspiracy.

This is the time, in Oleg’s memory as well as for the sake of all our futures, Jewish and Arab alike, to get angry; to stop tolerating the patterns of hate and dehumanization that have become so pervasive in some Arab societies that we no longer bother to protest them. Even now, Jews continue to be depicted in caricatures in the Arab press—Palestinian, Egyptian, even Jordanian—as snakes and mice, crawling vermin, or a world-strangling octopus. The great Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer spoke passionately at the forum about the terrible threat that the new anti-Semitism of totalitarian Islam poses, not only to Jews, but to the world at large.

And yet, as we steel ourselves for this uncompromising struggle, we should also keep reminding ourselves that this is a winnable war. Hate is not an irreversible human condition. Itamar Marcus, director of Palestinian Media Watch, noted at the forum that until Yasir Arafat’s PA launched its dehumanization campaign, most Palestinians spoke admiringly about Israel as a democracy committed to human rights (certainly much more than any of its Arab neighbors). There are hopeful signs, like the photo, carried by the newspapers here, but probably not seen much in the West, of an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian jointly helping another Palestinian, a disabled man; or the cheers of local residents as the roadblocks of Surda and Ayn Ariq were removed. There also are statistics telling us that Palestinian public support for Mahmoud Abbas is sharply on the rise (basking in the American sun does help!).

In the broader region, there are indications of warming relations with the Arab world; of sharp Egyptian messages to Arafat that his game is up; high-level meetings with Moroccan, Bahraini, and Qatari leaders; and a dance of slow courtship with the president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, whose hints about relations with Israel are all the more remarkable against the background of the virulent, all-pervasive (and Jew-less) anti-Semitism of Pakistani society, chillingly described just recently by the French intellectual Bernard Henri Levi, in his new book, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?.