For the entire history of the Lesser Jihad against Israel, the promptings of that war from Islam itself have been largely obscured, obscured most of all from the Israelis themselves.
The original opposition of the Arabs to Jews buying land from landowners was naturally muted as long as the Arabs needed Western power to help them against the Turks. But as the earliest leader of the local Arabs -- they were not then, not until after the Six-Day War, renamed the "Palestinians" -- the mufti El Husseini -- made clear, it was Muslims who opposed them, and it should be a common Muslim cause. It took quite a while. Arabs under French rule in North Africa, or miserably poor, and certainly distant from, whatever happened in Mandatory Palestine, would hardly have been in a position to participate in the Lesser Jihad, much less something wider in scope. The Dutch ruled in the East Indies; the British controlled India -- in neither place did the Muslims possess the wherewithal to dream more dangerous dreams. Jihad never went away -- how could it? -- but the wherewithal to conduct Jihad was lacking.
In 1947, the Bishop of Beirut, Moubarac, understood clearly the Muslim basis of the Arab assault on Israel. His speech can be found in Bat Ye'or's Islam and Dhimmitude. The Jews of Israel, however, saw the conflict as one of Arabs who were opposed to the Jews. They knew very little, almost nothing, about Islam. They also knew that many of the local Arab Christians were echoing the sentiments of local Arab Muslims, and assumed, wrongly, that this meant that it was the "Arabs" who were hostile to them. They failed to realize that many of the local Arab Christians were classic dhimmis, who had accepted and internalized Muslim attitudes. That this phenomenon was observable in many communities of non-Muslims under Muslim rule was simply not understood.
The rhetoric of the 1948 attack contained all kinds of allusions to Islam. Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League (and great-uncle to Ayman al-Zawahiri) promised a massacre like that of the Mongols when they conquered the Jews. The still-weak Arabs, however, needed outside help, diplomatic and economic. They were in no position to start muttering darkly about a Jihad against the West.
Pan-Arabism, with which one associates the name of Nasser and then later of Saddam Hussein, who also saw himself as the Arab champion, the Saladin of our age (it didn't matter that Saladin, another native of Tikrit, was a Kurd), was merely a realistic (for its day) subset of pan-Islamism. It was the Arabs who needed to be unified first, and no one could think beyond that goal. Nasser was hardly a Marxist. He was a local despot, with great appeal to Arab youths. This is one of the themes, played on a little too insistently and a little too plangently, by Fouad Ajami in his "predicament" of the Arabs, his "dream palace" of the Arabs shtick that very carefully avoids the subject of Islam.
The "secularists" were never that secular. If Nasser, and then Sadat, treated the Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood, as a menace, it is because they were a menace to them -- a political rival. But this did not make Sadat, in particular, a "secularist" (he actually favored, at times, the Muslim Brotherhood). Saddam Hussein was a Ba'athist because it allowed him to continue to pretend to have a regime open to all, Kurds as well as Arabs, Christians as well as Muslims, Shi'a Muslims as well as Sunni Muslims. And some of them were part of the government. But the real power remained that of Sunnis, and modern Iraq was essentially a Sunni despotism, mild under the monarchy, harsh from Qassem through to Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein knew perfectly well that the Shi'a far outnumbered the Sunnis, and that the opposition to him was most dangerous in the Shi'a mosques. It was to his advantage to minimize the political role of Islam, therefore, but whenever it suited him, he invoked Islam and Muslim history. The battles he spoke of when attacking Iran were the old battles against the Persians by the Islam-bearing Arabs. He was building the largest mosque in the world. He commissioned a Qur'an calligraphed using his blood for ink. He put a Qur'anic phrase on the flag of Iraq. Whether or not he was a deep Believer (he is now apparently reading the Qur'an with great intensity), he was certainly a Believer.
Against Israel, the rhetoric, the attitudes, the entire refusal to contemplate the permanence of an Infidel sovereign state, can all without difficulty be ascribed to Islam. The local dhimmis, such islamochristians as Hanan Ashrawi and Naim Ateek and others, promote the Muslim view and Muslim demands. That may confuse a few, but it should not confuse anyone familiar with the phenomenon.
The war against Israel is not an "ethnic" nor a "tribal" war by Arabs against Jews. When rants against Israel are repeated in Pakistan, or by Mahathir Mohamed in Malaysia, or by the assorted Islamic groups in Indonesia, one sees clearly that what is going on is prompted by the belief-system of Islam. It is a war against a non-Muslim state, by as many Muslims as care to participate. Some may have in the past been held in check by their own dislike of the Arabs. The Iranians and the Turks both make insistently clear that "we are not Arabs" and then go on to speak contemptuously of the Arabs. For a while, the national interests of Iran, as defined by the Shah and his advanced if corrupt coterie, included fair treatment of non-Muslims, and a reasonable attitude toward, even a kind of quasi-alliance, with Israel. Something of the sort seems to have developed, later on, between not Turkey but rather between the keepers-of-the-Kemalist-flame in the Turkish army, and some of its secularists, and Israel.
To assume that the war between the Arabs and Israel is ethnic or tribal ignores the rhetoric, the appeals, the views of Muslims as expressed through time and space. It ignores the simplest and most obvious truth: the entire world in the end belongs to Allah and his people, the best of people. And Israel, a sovereign state run by Jews, is a particular affront, not only for where it is situated (seeming to break up the continuity of one uninterrupted Arab Muslim landmass, as Arab Muslims see it -- for them the Maronites, the Copts, the Berbers, the Kurds, have no rights, hardly exist in what Arabs, with a little help from ARAMCO, began decades ago calling "the Arab World" -- a phrase that misleads, but stuck, so that it keeps on misleading), but because the traditionally despised Jews, despised because they had no power (unlike the local Christians, who at least could look to powerful co-religionists in Western Christendom) were in charge of that sliver of land.
The war of the Arabs against Israel is a "religious" war if we consider Islam to be a religion. It is promoted by, it springs from, the tenets, and attitudes, and atmospherics, of Islam. The Muslim Arabs know this. Other Muslims know this. Islamochristian Arabs pretend that it is not so. And the Israelis, of course, prefer not to recognize that it is so, because such recognition would also lead them to conclude, inexorably, that there is no end to this war, and that negotiations are merely occasions for Arab duplicity, as Muhammad ("War is deception") demonstrated in his own treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya, which he made with the Meccans in 628 A.D., and broke 18 months later, when his side had increased its power. That, as Majid Khadduri notes, is the basis of Muslim treaty-making with Infidels. It always has been; it will remain such.
And the Muslims are not taught to permit Infidels to remain with some sliver of land where their rule will prevail -- especially not on land once held by Muslims. So the recognition by the Israelis of the true nature of the war against them would also force them to conclude that not only are treaties largely pointless, but that there is no end to this, for the size of Israel is irrelevant to its acceptance by the Arab Muslims. If it further shrinks, however, it may tempt an attack, and the only way the peace can be kept is if the Arabs have an excuse not to attack. That excuse can be found in the idea of "Darura" or "necessity," which can be invoked to justify inaction by Arab regimes.
Muslim Arabs, local ("Palestinians") and non-local, understand perfectly why Israel will never be accepted and must in the end disappear. They differ on the instruments through which this may best be achieved. They differ on the amount of time it will take -- there are the Rapid Jihaidsts of Hamas, and Hezbollah, and the Slow Jihadists of Abbas's PLO. But the understanding of what the end result must be, at some point, is shared by all of them.
It is the Israelis, or many of them in the ruling elites, who refuse to see what is staring them in the face. It's too upsetting. It would require seeing control of the "West Bank" as indispensable -- control of the marches, of the invasion route, of the aquifers necessary for Israel to live. It would require ending the participation in the farce of this "Palestinian" people that the Israelis themselves refer to without any seeming understanding of the way that they thereby promote the "two-tiny-peoples" business, that which since the 1967 War began with the careful creation of the "Palestinian people" and has been so relentlessly used to present as a matter of competing nationalisms what is, in fact, a classic Jihad. Classic in aim, that is, but not classic in its instruments. For as with Western Europe, outright military conquest is unlikely.
Other methods are being employed.
Hugh-
"Other Methods" sounds like a good title for your collected essays from JW/DW on this subject.
(And no one has used this for a book title that I can find anywhere online, so it won't be confused with any other works... -the closest I can locate is: "Applied Regression Analysis and Other Multivariable Methods".
While that might also apply to his topic, the pithier one is better for public consumption.
(Let's not let Mr. Spencer get all of the pre-electronic ink!)
Hugh: It is the Israelis, or many of them in the ruling elites, who refuse to see what is staring them in the face. It's too upsetting.
You don't actually know that the Israelis don't see this aspect of the problem pretty clearly. In private conversation, behind closed doors, we don't know what they are saying. They are obliged, for largely pragmatic reasons, to tow the line of what is essentially Christian-inspired peace rhetoric that is at odds with Islamic sentiment. They can't manage this on their own but you could give them more credit for understanding the situation better than you assume. Jews are neither dumb nor cowardly, which is what your statement infers.
Hugh-
It is JihadWatch and you that have taught me that the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict is really a subset of Islam. Nothing makes sense until that is realized by the non-scholar. We search in vain until we understand that. This understanding is the Rosetta Stone for the average American (who is basically a kind man or woman who doesn't like b.s.). It is important for folks to understand the root of the conflict and then be able to put everything else in context.
The Arabs cannot even articulate the alleged name of their purported own nation. They cannot say Palestine, they express it as "Balestine".
Another giveaway that the so-called "Balestinian Beople" was newly and artificially created for propaganda purposes in the West.
Hugo. The Arabs do not say "Balestine". They say "Filistine", because it is closed phonetically (fa). Also, there is no Arab equivalent to "P" in Arabic. This is the reason why.
Can you believe its been 30 years since Entebbe? The glory of that moment was of another time even when it happened.
'Palestinians' worked with Uganda's Idi Amin and the vile Baader-Meinhof gang. I'd forgotten how utterly despicable, craven and revolting the Palestinian terrorists were and forever will be.
"And the Muslims are not taught to permit Infidels to remain with some sliver of land where their rule will prevail -- especially not on land once held by Muslims."
I think there is another factor at work here that explains the intensity of Muslim intolerance of a Jewish-controlled Israel: Mohammed's Islam was conceived to be the true Israel: Islam is the mythological appropriation or theft of Israel. Muslims are the true Israelites. To every good Muslim, Adam was a Muslim; Abraham was a Muslim; Moses was a Muslim; the great Prophets who "opposed" the evil Israelites (and were persecuted by them) were Muslims; Jesus the Jew was a Muslim.
By this mythological revisionism begun by Mohammed, then, Israel belongs to Islam, not to the Jews who abandoned, betrayed and perverted the "guidance" of the true Yahweh, Allah. (There is evidence in the Koran itself that Mohammed originally perceived Jerusalem to be the central sacred axis of Islam, the direction toward which all Muslims should pray.)
For Jews to have wrested control of and simultaneously revived into modern being Israel is that much more outrageous and intolerable to the good Muslim: it is not merely that the Jews have taken (back) a piece of Islamic real estate: the modern Jews who are inheritors of the ancient perverters of Allah's Guidance ("Book") have stolen the very heart of Islam. No compromise is possible for such a spiritual theft.
"For Jews to have wrested control of and simultaneously revived into modern being Israel is that much more outrageous and intolerable to the good Muslim: it is not merely that the Jews have taken (back) a piece of Islamic real estate: the modern Jews who are inheritors of the ancient perverters of Allah's Guidance ("Book") have stolen the very heart of Islam. No compromise is possible for such a spiritual theft."-TV
That's why I don't see a good end (for Muslims) to this thing.
The Prophet Frank (Piece be upon him).
I am sure many people would have seen the large demonstrations in Indonesia over the weekend by Muslims angry that Israel has the temerity to fight back against the Arab siege. The demonstrators, as usual, directed their ignorant spleen against the American embassy in Jakarta. But did you notice how many of the protesters were carrying banners disassociating themselves from Abu Bakar Bashir, the mastermind behind the Bali bombings? And did you notice how many were carrying placards saying things like "Bin Laden: not in my name. Give peace a chance"? I'll venture to say that the answer to both these questions is "none". Meanwhile, all the left-wing dhimmis in the West will be lining up to show "their solidarity with the Palestinian people" and to protest against "Israeli aggression" (Palestinian aggression doesn't count: that's "resistance").
One glimmer of hope is that these leftwing fools and Jihad apologists really do represent a "tiny minority" in the West, albeit a vociferous, visible and downright annoying one.
An excellent essay by Hugh, and although I do agree that Islam is the motivating factor for the jihad against Israel (how could it not be?), we still mustn't ignore the tribal Arab element to this war. There are few non-Muslim "Arab" supporters of Israel today and we can't dismiss them all as dhimmis because some of them hate Muslims and Jews equally. Part of the problem is sattelite television, but also old prejudices. Non-Muslim Arabs like Walid Shoebat, Brigette Gabriel and Joseph Farah are quite rare, most of them are like James Zogby and that muppet, Helen Thomas.
"But did you notice how many of the protesters [in Jakarta] were carrying banners disassociating themselves from Abu Bakar Bashir, the mastermind behind the Bali bombings? And did you notice how many were carrying placards saying things like 'Bin Laden: not in my name. Give peace a chance.'"
-- from a posting above
And did you notice that these signs, all in English, carrried by people who did not know a word of English, but strangely had such an idiomatic command that they used such phrases as "not in my name" and "give peace a chance"?
Isn't that the point? Isn't that always the point with these signs in English held up by Muslim protesters, in Jakarta or Karachi or in Ramallah or Gaza -- always in English, always in English that is idiomatic, cliched phrases from American political life?
"Not in my name."
"Give peace a chance."
Indonesians carrying English signs that say "Not in my name" or "Give peace a chance" does not impress. They are probably aware that Islam is getting a bad rep in the West (also, how many of those protestors are applying for visas to study or work in Europe or America, it would be interesting to find out...) and they are in damage control mode. It would be something if they carried placards that said "Imprison Bashir" or "Execute Bashir" but of course they would never do that since he is a Muslim, and a good Muslim at that.
Sorry about the confusion in my previous post. Just to clarify, I was actually being ironic/sarcastic when I asked how many Indonesians were carrying placards saying things like "Bin Laden: Not in my name". There were actually no such placards or slogans. The point I was trying to make was that these same people didn't take to the streets en-masse when the Bali bombers slaughtered hundreds, and nor have they objected to Bashir's disgusting anti-semitism or his outrageous suggestions that the relatives of the victims of the Bali bombers had better convert to Islam because their loved ones' deaths had been the "will of Allah".
Historians usually define a nation by what exists in recorded history. The "Palestinians" don't exist before 1967. There is nothing in recorded history about their customs, language, geographical borders, scriptures, monetary or political systems, leaders, writers or artists before 1967. Palestine is an artifice and a very "successful" one in its way as the only intention is to grab the tiny strip of land that isn't Muslim.
"There were actually no such placards or slogans[reading: "Not in my name" and "Give peace a chance."]."
-- from a posting above
The comment I made, on the stolid assumption that those placards were to be seen in Jakarta, must be withdrawn -- but only in part. For the point remains that in many Arab demonstrations, and certainly in every single televised view of "Palestinian" demonstrations, the placards are all in English, and are meant solely for the outside world, and especially for those American news cameras.
Haidon and Hugo,
You're both right. Hugo is right in that when Arabs are speaking English, they are likely to pronounce the word "palestine" as Balestine because they can't pronounce the P without sufficient exposure to languages other than Arabic, or without proper language training. However, the Arabic name that they now use for "palestine" is Filastin. This name was used by the Arab conquerors before the Crusades for what the East Roman [Byzantine] empire had called Palaestina Prima at the time of the conquest, which was only part of what the Roman Empire called Palaestina after renaming Judea as "Syria Palaestine" after the Bar Kokhba revolt [ca. 132-135 CE]. Jund Filastin [Filastin military district] comprised --roughly speaking-- the southern part of the country, Judah & southern Samaria + northern Negev & part of the coastal plain. The Galilee and northern Samaria was Jund Urdunn [Jordan military district]. Both of these districts contained some territory east of the Jordan.
After the Crusades, the Muslim rulers --first Mamluks, later Ottomans-- did NOT resume usage of the name Filastin for any district of any size anywhere. What they now call Filastin was in Ottoman times simply considered as part of Bilad Al-Sham [Syria or Greater Syria].
Hugh,
Concerning the dhimmi Christian "Arabs". In Islamic law and practice during the time of early Islam, jizyah was not taken from the Christian Arab tribes, like Taghlib, Tanukh and Ghassan. Most of these tribes became Muslims later and the few who were left Christians mixed with the local Syriac Christians. Thus the Christian Arabs disappeared in the two or three centuries of early Islam.
Among those Palestinian Christians, the Armenians were also considered Arabs and are still considered Arabs in the state of Israel. For many Arab nationalists, the Palestinian and Mizrahi Jews in general were also considered Arabs. So it seems to me illogical that Palestinian Christians be considered as Arabs and that the Palestinian Arabophone Jews are excluded. After all, Palestinian Christians descend from those Jews and Samaritans who became Christians and from all sorts of Christians who chose to live in Palestine. But it is impossible that they all descend from Muslim Arabs who converted to Christianity. It is impossible that they became Arabs, because in Islamic law adoption is forbidden and as a result adoption into any Arab tribe is also forbidden. In Islam, genealogies have to be preserved for legal purposes, especially in inheritence issues. Non-Arab converts to Islam became clients of Arab tribes but were never considered as blood members of these tribes as well as Arabs. If non-Arab Muslims couldn't become Arabs, then how could infidels become Arabs. In fact, if we were to say that they are Arabs because they "arabized", then the Mirzahi Jews should be considered Arabs.
Even if these Christians consider themselves as Arabs now, this is an artificial union between them and the Arabs. They quality as infidels is a reminder that they are not. In reality, the epithet 'Arab' is the equivalent of 'dhimmi'. Through this name, these Christians are denied any right of a separate identity. Their destiny is bound to "the Arab World", i.e. Arabophone Dar al-Islam, and they have to follow the destiny of their Muslim "breathern" (i.e. Masters). Worst of all, they deny this right for themselves, which is a pathetic dhimmi-behaviour.
I think this issue should be dealt with. Although those Christians form a tiny minority, which would lead any of us to say: "Why should we care about them, they make no difference?", this issue is bound to the subject treated here. The subjucation of Christians under the name of 'Arabs' is a very important tactic used by Muslims in their modern cold war against the infidels. Worst, the West has chosen to leave those Christians to the Muslims because it doesn't want them to cause any headaches and to distrupt its relations with the Muslims. Worst than that, the West, since the 19th century, has invented the concept of "Arab Christians" and these tactics, which the Muslim followed faithfully.
Hugh:
Did the "Arab Christians" align themselves with "Arab Muslims" simply because they were dhimmified, or, similarly, because they wanted to be on the side of the probable "winners" or, could it also have been a case of hating Jews more than they hated Muslims because the Jews were guilty of the deicide of Christ -- a fundamental bone of contention that predated Islam and the Islamic conquests of Christian nations by many, many centuries.
Libanicus, I think I follow what you are saying. But I don't agree with every point of your argument. Actually, many of the Jews [and Christians] in Arab countries were moving away from the Arabic language [or the Judeo-Arabic dialect] as far back as the 19th century. Many Jews went to schools in French operated by the Alliance Israelite Francaise, and sometimes to Christian schools, such as the ubiquitous Ecole des Freres. Likewise, many Christians went to schools conducted in European languages, French, English, Italian, etc. Now, you're right in saying that the Arab nationalists wanted opportunistically to appropriate the non-Muslim subject peoples to Arabism for political purposes but that need has run out and the mask has dropped, as I'm sure you know.
For the Jews, the Arabs dropped the "we're all Arabs," line before WW 2, when they came under Nazi influence.
In Israel, few of the Jews descended from Jews from Arab countries are interested in preserving the Arabic language, although almost everybody knows some Arabic. Arabic is offered as a second foreign language in many high schools as a second foreign language [as are French and other tongues, in some places Yiddish and Ladino], while English is compulsory. But not many are enthusiastic about studying Arabic. One girl who had studied it told me that it was needed in order to know what the enemy was saying.