It’s little, it’s late, it’s tentative, but it is no longer a denial. Occasionally an honest and bold commentator mentions the unmentionable in the Israeli media: Jewish dhimmitude under Islam. It usually doesn’t get very far. The Jerusalem Post on March 23, 2020 puts a toe in the water with Rabbi Eli Kavon’s Maimonides on Jewish Humiliation under Islamic Rule. It is the smallest toe, gently inserted to make no ripples. Kavon quotes Maimonides:
“God has entangled us with this people, the nation of Ishmael, who treat us so prejudicially and who legislate our harm and hatred…. No nation has ever arisen more harmful than they, nor has anyone done more to humiliate us, degrade us, and consolidate hatred against us.”
Kavon continues, “The myth that historians have propagated is that Jewish life under the Muslims was safer and more successful than the life of Jews in Christendom.” Kudos to Kavon; yes, it is a myth.
Kavon’s extremely brief and carefully-worded treatment of the Jewish dhimmitude question betrays a deep knowledge and understanding of the history of Jewish-Muslim relations, existentially-critical to Jews in Israel, but alas, glaringly lacking. It is not that Jews cannot know this history; they can — it is probably fair to say that as a people, the Jews are among the most learned of all peoples. Rather, it is a history they do not want to know.
Bizarrely, it is not their wrongdoing that the Jews are in denial of; it is their being wronged. Bat Ye’or, in her groundbreaking Understanding Dhimmitude, describes the ferocity with which her book was received in learned Jewish circles, as if acknowledging that Jews were systematically oppressed and abused under Islamic rule is somehow to imply that the Jewish experience under Christian or Nazi rule was less horrible than it was. Bat Ye’or’s book appeared in 2013, when the narrative of “Israeli oppression of the Palestinians,” and “Jewish occupation of Palestinian land,” was well-entrenched and BDS was in full swing. Still, neither of these would explain the Zionists’ apparent ignorance of the Jewish dhimmi experience and its root cause, which allowed them to be caught so off-guard in 1948.
The long-beleaguered Israeli liberal establishment badly wanted, and still want, to be the good guys and the nice guys. You cannot be good if you cannot be nice to all the good Israeli Muslim Arabs in your midst, such is the belief. It’s only the extremists who want to kill all Jews, or failing that, drive them all into the sea. Most Muslims are nice people. We just need to find a way of living together. Few seem to notice that it is only one side that is looking for that elusive way. Fewer still have any inkling at all of what Islam teaches Muslims about Jews, and what Islam expects of Muslims vis-à-vis the Jews, and what is taught in the madrassas and preached in the mosques both in Israel and in “the territories.” If they did, then they would know that it is the very thing that Moses Maimonides warned them about.
Kavon cannot conceal that within him, too, lurks the desperate wish to find the good Muslim that leads him to misinterpret the available data. He takes pains, for example, to distinguish between Maimonides’ experience under the Almohads in al-Andalus and the Maghreb (bad guys), and his experience under the Fatimids and Ayyubids in Egypt (good guys), thereby avoiding having to incriminate the Islamic texts and raise questions about those who adhere to those same texts today.
This is not to suggest that Kavon goes easy on dhimmitude; far from it. “We should not idealise Jewish life under the Muslims which, in some cases, was just as bad as life in Christian lands,” warns Kavon. “Apologists for Islam focus on the positive,” he continues, “and negate much that was negative for Jews living under Muslim authority. The dhimmi humiliation was in force most of the time and the Muslims despised Judaism as a false faith.”
The good rabbi concludes with, “Maimonides’s harsh censure of Islam should come as no surprise for those who have studied the history of Jews under Islam since the epoch of Muhammad.” Indeed, and Bat Ye’or’s Understanding Dhimmitude would not be a bad place to start, followed by Robert Spencer’s The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process, for the consequences of not studying that history.