Two Competing Views of Israel in the Middle East

 Henry Srebrnik, [Toronto] Jewish Tribune

There are two competing narratives when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian (and wider Arab-Israeli) conflict.

On the one hand, those on the political left, adhering to the thesis propounded by Marxists and post-colonialists, view the entire Zionist enterprise as an imperialist project, the seizure of indigenous Arab lands by white Europeans.

They view Israel as a ‘settler state,’ one similar to the former white-dominated Rhodesia or South Africa.

For them Israel’s defenders are, to quote the late academic Edward Said, “Orientalists,” motivated by a “Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture.”

The other story, subscribed to by the vast majority of Jews, in both Israel and the diaspora, entails the return of a people who originated in the land to reclaim its patrimony.

They contend that Jews in Christian Europe were not only not considered “Europeans” by many people in the host nations where they lived, but were, rather, subject to recurrent waves of violence, culminating in the Holocaust. As well, they add, more than half the Jews in Israel are in any case Mizrachim, Jews native to the Muslim lands of the Middle East, who had been forced to flee their former homes.

Which of these two stories do Israel’s Middle Eastern enemies themselves endorse? Obviously, many of those in left-wing and nationalist movements, including some Palestinian groups, prefer the first. They fancy themselves secularists and so avoid using religious terms, preferring the word “Israeli” to “Jew.”

But, somewhat ironically, the rise of Islamist movements such as, among others, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, prefer a religious reading of the quarrel. Their literature is replete with references to ‘Jewish’ treachery and evil, going all the way back to Qur’anic times – hundreds of years before the establishment of the modern Jewish state.

They may not realize it, but they in fact confirm that Jews are native to the area, and not some recent foreign implant. As well, they demonstrate, by using the word ‘Jew,’ that their issue is not with the Israeli presence in areas occupied since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, but with the very idea of a non-Muslim entity in the region.