The election of an Israeli Jew, Uri Davis, to the governing body of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party is a remarkable development. Never before has one been elected to its revolutionary council. As one of 700 candidates vying for 89 seats, his success shows that the rank and file of Fatah want to reach out to Israelis who support them. That is both encouraging and inspiring — although to what extent Dr. Davis is typical of Israelis is questionable. There are others who, like him, are trenchant critics of Israeli politics, but not many who would call themselves, as he does, “a Palestinian Hebrew-speaking citizen of the apartheid state of Israel.”
Davis is a brave man. It is not easy standing up for justice against one’s own society. He did that, refusing military conscription in the 1960s when almost all other Israelis saw it as treason and then joining Fatah in the 1980s when the organization was still actively engaged in a military struggle against Israel and banned; he had to leave. That takes courage and conviction. Fatah is right to embrace him and, symbolically through him, all Jews who are not Zionists.
Sadly, the opposite is happening in Yemen. There, the last of the ancient Jewish community are preparing to emigrate to Israel. Terrorized by the act of an insane fanatic who murdered a Jewish community leader in December, the overwhelming bulk of Yemeni Jews have decided that they are no longer safe there.
Zionists the world over, furious at Davis’ embrace by the Palestinians, will be ecstatic at this. For the past 60 years, they have been busy enticing Jews from across the Arab world to resettle in Israel. For them it creates facts on the ground — more Jews for a Jewish state.
For Arabs, the Yemen move is the last act of a tragedy for which some Arab governments in the past, unable to distinguish between Judaism and Zionism, have also played a part. It is a multiple tragedy. The Arab world has lost an important part of its own heritage and religious diversity; Jews played a remarkable role in Muslim history, so much so that when they were persecuted in Christian Europe, they found a ready welcome and refuge in Muslim lands.
Meanwhile, the Zionists have been given what they wanted: More Israelis. Most tragic of all, these Israelis of Arab origin have acquired venom over the years, becoming arch-Zionists, bitterly hostile to their former homelands. Long treated as second-class citizens in Israel by European Ashkenazi Jewry, they became prey to the politicians on the far right — men like Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu — who craftily linked support for Arab Jews rights to hard-line anti-Palestinian policies.
The Palestinian embrace of Davis, however, points to a new way of thinking where distinction is made between Judaism and Zionism. Other building blocks exist; Bahrain’s ambassador to Washington, for example, is a Jewish woman and there are Jews on its Shoura council. The divide can be bridged.
We may be seeing the beginning of Arabs and Muslims reaching out to reconnect with that part of Jewry that supports justice for the Palestinians. It has to happen. To equate Judaism with Zionism is to play the Zionists’ game and justify Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. That can never be acceptable.
