The Jews are to blame, of course

Were it not so sad, the following AP headline, 13 October 2002, would be hilarious (the story’s author is given as Ibrahim Hazboun):

6 Palestinians Killed, Israel Blamed

The story proceeds to “explain” why Israel is "blamed":

Israeli soldiers on Sunday killed two armed men who crossed into southern Israel from Egypt, said the commander of Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, Brig. Gen. Israel Ziv. Three soldiers were wounded in a gunfight that broke out, he added. The Ahmed Abu al-Rish Brigades, an offshoot of the Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the infiltration.

Here are a few more headlines for AP, in the same genre: “typhoon hits - Israel blamed”, “stock market declines - Israel blamed”, “Man falls off ladder - Israel blamed”, “traffic jam on Highway 31 - Israel blamed”, “Islamists Kill 183 in Bali - Israel balmed”.

And why not? Don’t we already have a collection of fantasies that includes: Israeli culpability in the WTO, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the standard blood libels, “Jenin massacre”, etc?

It is important to understand where these fantastic accusations come from and why they are perpetrated. The simple answers are, of course, that they are disseminated to malign the Jewish people and Israel in the hopes that someone will buy the lies. Loss of credibility with educated people is of little concern to the Arab apologists, for they have learnt that they are made of Teflon and that nothing will stick to them. It is also the opinion of some who know the Arabs, like Prof. Fuad Ajami, that the Arab culture is “a culture susceptible to legend”, (Ajami, Fouad. The Dream Palace of the Arabs. NY: Phantom Books, 1998, p. 178).

But, having read the works of the foremost expert on Middle East affairs, Prof. Bernard Lewis, I have to conclude that the “root cause” is deeper. In the “Conclusions” chapter of his recent work,

Bernard Lewis. What went wrong. New York: Oxford U Press, 2002,

the author opines as follows:

In the course of the twentieth century it became abundantly clear in the Middle East and indeed all over the lands of Islam that things had indeed gone badly wrong. Compared with its millennial rival, Christendom, the world of Islam had become poor, weak, and ignorant...

Modernizers--by reform or revolution--concentrated their efforts in three main areas: military, economic, and political. The results achieved were, to say the least, disappointing...

There was worse to come. It was bad enough for Muslims to feel weak and poor after centuries of being rich and strong, to lose the leadership that they had come to regard as their right, and to be reduced to the role of followers of the West. The twentieth century, particularly the second half, brought further humiliations--the awareness that they were no longer even the first among the followers, but were falling ever further back in the lengthening line of eager and more successful Westernizers, notably in East Asia...

"Who did this to us?" is of course a common human response when things are going badly, and there have been indeed many in the Middle East, past and present, who have asked this question. They found several different answers. It is usually easier and always more satisfying to blame others for one's misfortunes. For a long time, the Mongols were the favorite villains...

The rise of nationalism--itself an import from Europe--produced new perceptions. Arabs could lay the blame for their troubles on the Turks who had ruled them for many centuries...

The period of French and British paramountcy in much of the Arab world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced a new and more plausible scapegoat--Western imperialism...
The attempt to transfer the guilt to America has won considerable support, but for similar reasons remains unconvincing...
where hostile stereotypes of the Jew existed in the Islamic tradition, they tended to be contemptuous and dismissive rather than suspicious and obsessive. This made the events of 1948--the failure of five Arab states and armies to prevent half a million Jews from establishing a state in the debris of the British Mandate for Palestine, all the more of a shock. As some writers at the time observed, it was bad enough to be defeated by the great imperial powers of the West; to suffer the same fate at the hands of a contemptible gang of Jews was an intolerable humiliation. Anti-Semitism and its demonized picture of the Jew as a scheming, evil monster provided a soothing answer...

Meanwhile the blame game--the Turks, the Mongols, the imperialists, the Jews, the Americans--continues, and shows little sign of abating. For the governments, at once oppressive and ineffectual, that rule much of the Middle East, this game serves a useful, indeed an essential purpose--to explain the poverty that they have failed to alleviate and to justify the tyranny that they have intensified. In this way they seek to deflect the mounting anger of their unhappy subjects against other, outer targets...

This analysis not only explains why the Arabs disseminate their fantastic lies, but it also constitutes a warning to those who believe that a second Palestinian-Arab state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza will solve any problem whatever: the “root cause”, as Prof. Lewis explains, is very, very, different.

While I can understand why the Arabs spread their fantasies, I have yet to find a satisfactory explanation as to why so many in the West - including well-meaning, intelligent people, as well as the current US president - have swallowed the fantasies about the right of the Palestinian-Arabs to a second sovereign state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, a.k.a. the “Palestinian’s right to self-determination”. Could it be that a concoction of oil and dollars can induce hallucinations even in the best of us?

Contributed by Joseph Alexander Norland