It keeps on happening over and over again, week in, week out. The Israelis send their helicopter gunships to strafe Palestinian targets and their occupation soldiers to kill protesters; and Palestinians send their young patriots to blow themselves up along with as many Israelis as possible. In both cases, innocent men, women and children die. Arabs and Jews.
So let’s invoke the old cliche again about how this “cycle of violence” is not leading anyone anywhere. Killing each others’ civilians is madness. And it is a worse kind of madness to suggest that Arab and Jew cannot or should not, one day, find a way to live together as equals. Never mind who is to blame for the failure of the peace talks at Camp David, and never mind who started all this havoc.
Allocating blame at this point is, well, pointless and will only get us into the chicken and egg circularity.
The question before us is this: Is peace between Arabs and Jews possible or does the conflict between them represent two dialectically opposed forces, two determined peoples, destined to slog it out till one or the other is totally vanquished?
I give an emphatic no to this question. And in this regard I will here indulge a recollection.
Several years ago, in 1992 to be exact, I was hitch-hiking my way around the south of Spain, visiting the lands of Andalus, and touching base with the civilizational glories of Islam in that part of the world. By happenstance, the year I was there marked the 500th anniversary of the end of Arab rule there, the end of a unique period of spiritual, intellectual and cultural coexistence between the three monotheistic faiths of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in medieval Spain.
Even five centuries after the fact, proof of that rich confluence between these three religious sensibilities, in Toledo, Cordova and Seville, among other places, endures. It was quite revealing to see inscriptions etched next to each other, attesting to the collaborative efforts by masters from these three faiths, in medicine, law, philosophy, literature, astronomy and theological studies.
To be sure, all of that was made possible of the expansive nature of Islam, a faith that saw its realm not as a “nation”, in the modern European sense of the word, but as a commonwealth of nations where all men, regardless of their religious, racial, regional and linguistic backgrounds came together in social oneness, defined by diversity within unity.
Alas, that vision of harmony, that endured for centuries in the Iberian Peninsula, was never recaptured. Indeed, what followed the simultaneous expulsion of Arabs and Jews, in 1492 was the precursor of the triumph, in modern Christian Europe, of intolerance and massacre. And it was in Muslim lands, in the wake of their expulsion, that the Jews found shelter and home, all the way across North Africa, the Levant and Turkey — till Zionism, nurtured on, and deriving its ideology from, the venomous nationalisms that characterized the European imperial sensibility at the time, was given birth a century ago.
I call nationalism both venomous and dangerous if it is the kind that defines itself as exclusivist, exulting its sense of peoplehood over another. Take that nationalism to its final decimal point and you end up with Nazism. (During World War I and World War II, Europeans slaughtered each other in the millions, all in the name of their miserable nation-states. And Russian soldiers, leaving their Marxist trans-national concept of the “solidarity of the working classes” by the wayside, killed to defend “mother Russia”, not Helgian phenomenology.”)
That type of nationalism, of course, is not to be confused with struggles by victimized peoples, say, in Ireland and Vietnam, in Algeria and Palestine, in India and in South Africa, to liberate themselves from colonialism and exploitation. Struggles like that arise as if from an echo chamber in an oppressed people’s historical being, from a network of meanings that transcend what I call here “nationalism”.
Jews and Arabs lived together and thrived together in the past, and did so for hundreds of years. They can do it again. That will come about when Jews realize that to live as equals in the Holy Land, they have to recognize others as equals, where the plus-minus dichotomy that exists today between them and the Palestinians, as occupier-occupied, victimizer-victimized, state-stateless, must be brought to an end.
Back to Toledo, Spain. In a museum there, I saw several scrolls, 12th century theological studies, composed in Arabic, Latin and Hebrew, and penned by, respectively, Abu Rashid (often rendered in English as Averroes), Thomas Aquinas and Moses Maimonides, sitting there side by side in a display case, as if to attest not just to the civilizational glory an richness that was Andalus, but to attest also to the multiracial, multicultural and multilinguistic tolerance that characterized that epoch.
By an ironic twist of fate, while I was in town, in the last week of March, the king of Spain rescinded the decree that, exactly 500 years before, had officially formalized the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula.
No Arab king is likely to feel the need to rescind any such decree because, before the advent of Zionism, no Arab country had ever expelled a minority, Jewish or otherwise. Expulsion of people is not part of our Islamic tradition. Fighting against oppressors, however, is.
The killing of innocent people, especially children, is wrong. And I say that in equal measure to both Palestinians and Israelis. To Palestinians I say it will not advance your cause or endear you to the world to pursue such a tactic. To Israelis I say stop the madness before it consumes you, like a marsh-fire and you find yourselves facing an expulsion decree for the second time in 500 years.
