He is the very model of a modern Muslim moderate

Brian of London is back: back in black and glad to be back (though no nooses were harmed). Melanie Phillips, as ever, is trying to patiently educate the well nigh lost cause of left leaning British Jewry through her writings in the Jewish Chronicle. Her piece this week is a careful deconstruction of the “True face of moderate leaders”. In this case Professor Sari Nusseibe who for years has been regarded as the:

“epitome of Palestinian moderation. The urbane president of al Quds university in east Jerusalem, he has been regarded as a “two-state solution” moderate. His actual advocacy of a one-state solution and the swallowing up of Israel has been unaccountably ignored.”

Of course he is the very model of a modern Muslim moderate and has gone and let the side down by actually telling us what is in his head:

Yet now he has let down his guard to reveal more starkly what lies beneath this polished veneer. Considering the Israeli government’s requirement that the Palestinians must acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state, Nusseibeh declared in an al Jazeera article (in English on its website) that this was inherently “problematic” because of its “legal, religious, historical and social implications”.

Those problematic implications are that, for Nusseibeh, a Jewish state would necessarily either be a theocracy or practise apartheid — stripping Israeli Arabs of their civic rights and ethnically cleansing them from Israel, on the basis that in a Jewish state the only people with civic rights would be Jews.

I would encourage you to read Melaine’s, as ever, excellent deconstruction of his position but I’m going to suggest another simpler reason he holds these views.

Most people assume that everyone else thinks as they do. And usually, within your own race, nation or milieu you’d have a good chance of being right. People do this, assuming that everyone wants the same things they want (peace on earth, equitable distribution of everything, reduction of carbon emissions, death to the Jews and so on). It’s a natural thing to do and it’s a wrenching shock for most people to force themselves to understand another person’s brain might be wired completely differently. Such fundamentals as wanting to see one’s kids out live one are not universal values. I want mine to grow up, for example, some parents in Gaza would rather see theirs blow up. That’s quite a shock for some people.

The reason Nusseibeh can’t imagine a Jewish state that doesn’t tend toward a theocratic apartheid state with vanishing rights for non Jews is because that is precisely what happens whenever people guided by Islam achieve political control. It’s just a simple observable fact. And Nusseibeh knows exactly what a Palestinian state would do and he just assumes Jews think and do like he would.

So, in contrast to Melanie, I don’t think “his argument is as bizarre as it is disgusting”. It’s actually perfectly natural transferance of his own wishes, desires and expectations, onto the Jews he so clearly doesn’t understand.

But I don’t think that is a message Melanie Phillips’s readers in the Jewish Chronicle are quite ready for.

The 60th anniversary of Israel’s birth is a milestone as was every other such anniversary going back to that defining moment for Jews and non-Jews alike when David Ben-Gurion proclaimed independence of the Jewish state in Tel Aviv on May 14, 1948.

After nearly two millenniums of wandering in strange lands — following destruction of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem by the Romans and forced exile from the land of their prophets — the birth of Israel has offered Jews a secure home where they may prosper without any fear or apology.

Israel’s birth was assisted by Britain, joined by France, which carved Arab states in lands that were provinces of the Ottoman Empire. If Israel had been born 10 years earlier then a great many Jews who perished in Hitler’s death camps likely would have survived and Britain’s eventual withdrawal from the region probably would have been less acrimonious.

For Ben-Gurion’s generation Israel’s birth was a small promise made even smaller by the UN partitioning British-mandated Palestine, and then arriving so terribly late, even as smoke from the ruins of war-devastated Europe hid the full disclosure of the Jewish devastation in the Holocaust.

There is no parallel in modern history to the story of Israel defying the rancour of old and new enemies of Jews.

This is the story of a people about whom it can truly be said are indestructible despite whatever their enemies have thrown at them.

INSIGNIFICANT FRACTION

The present world population is over six and a half billion people, and Jews are an insignificant fraction of this number, estimated somewhere around 14 million, or a mere 0.2% of the total.

Yet Jewish contributions in the making of the modern world tower above that of any other people in relative terms and the immense odds of survival as a people given the level of hostility directed at them.

From imagining the fundamentals of monotheism to conceiving the fundamentals of space-time relativity of modern physics, Jews have been an immensely creative people through nearly four millenniums of human history.

Their achievements have earned them admiration, envy and implacable enmity of non-Jews.

But Jews have survived through the ages. They first entered recorded history in pagan times while their contemporaries — the ancient Hittites, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Philistines and the Phoenicians — have vanished totally.

Of the ancient peoples from the age of Moses only the Egyptians, the Hindus and the Chinese survive, but their culturally dynamic moment as civilizations lie in the past. And of these three people from ancient times, Egyptians became Arabized as most of them converted to Islam and disowned their pre-Islamic culture.

Israel is a tiny sliver of land in a vast tempest-ridden sea of the Arab-Muslim world, and yet it is here the ancient world’s most enduring story is made fresh again by Jews to live God’s covenant with Abraham as told in their sacred literature.

Jewish survival as a people maybe providential, but turning a desert into one of the rich economies of the world few imagined six decades ago is a minor proof of how much more could be achieved if those fighting Jews joined with them instead by turning their swords into plowshares.

Happy anniversary, Israel.