“May be the Arab-Israeli conflict doesn’t need any more US special envoy, may be president Obama shouldn’t bother appointing a replacement, for, as far as the Palestinians are concerned, they had enough of this backstage Zionist-manipulated politics disguised as peace envoys”
Dr. Ashraf Ezzat
Cairo's iconic Tahrir square packed with thousands rallying in solidarity with Palestine.
It is hard to believe that those are the same people who were on the verge of being torn apart by the deadly sectarian violence just a few days ago. It is hard to imagine those are the same people who are yet struggling out of a revolution that weighed down heavily on their economy and security.
How could they, in just few days, grow out of their grief and overcome the dreadful shadow of civil war. How could they easily wipe the tears, put out the fire that meant to engulf the whole country and instead put on a smile, hold hands and head for Tahrir square once again. How could the people of Egypt, while preoccupied and deeply engaged in sorting out the post-Mubarak mess, find the time, or better yet the drive to show solidarity to their Palestinian brethren?
We can only understand this through a historical perspective. Only a people who go back thousands of years and who have been exposed to all sorts of experiences and historical episodes could come up with this remarkable construct of resilience.
Calls for third intifada from Cairo and Tel Aviv
Knesset member, Hanin Zoabi.
With the dawn break of Friday, May 13th, the prefixed date for Egyptian masses to support the Palestinian cause, thousands rallied in Tahrir square calling for national unity between Muslims and Christians and at the same time showing their everlasting solidarity for the Palestinians and their legitimate struggle to liberate their homeland from the Israeli occupation.
According to a facebook page created by Arab and Palestinian activists, these Friday rallies at the Cairo’s iconic square are meant to, not only revive the popular support for the Palestinian cause but to officially launch Egyptian mass rallies toward Gaza, in a move that would encourage Palestinians in return to take to the streets and start their third intifada.
This call for a third intifada comes at a critical time the wind of change is storming the whole Arab world. And since Israel has been deliberately inserted inside the heart of that world, it will be hard for the politicians in Tel Aviv not to feel the mighty daft.
As a matter of fact the call for a third intifada has been resonating inside Israel itself and specifically from the Israeli Knesset as Hanin Zoabi, a member of the Knesset representing the Balad party called for a third intifada against Israel.
Zoabi, the first Arab woman to be a Knesset member, recommended the Palestinian intifada would be fashioned after the Egyptian Tahrir square peaceful protests which she added should be the model for all the Arab youth.
George Mitchell
And in response to Zoabi’s call, other knesset members said she should be stripped of her parliamentary immunity and put on trial for calling for rebellion.
But while charges of inciting rebellion could be filed against Hanin zoabi for her support for a nonviolent third intifada aimed at ending the brutal siege on Gaza, defiant statements by Avigdor Leiberman, Israel’s foreign minister, declaring that Israel will not entertain any new building freezes and will not consider more peace negotiations with the new Palestinian coalition pass uncommented upon.
But again, the timing of this call for a third intifada comes on the same day George Mitchell, the Obama administration’s special Middle East peace envoy, plans to resign after more than two unsuccessful years of trying to press Israel and the Palestinians into negotiations.
We have to admit that political endeavors to see an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have utterly failed and may be that what Mitchell’s resignation is trying to say.
The only thing that the American-brokered so called peace talks did is buy more time for Israel to grab more Arabic land and create a hard to change or negotiate reality on the ground.
But more wasted time is a luxury Palestinians cannot afford.
May be the Arab-Israeli conflict doesn’t need any more US special envoy, may be president Obama shouldn’t bother appointing a replacement, for, as far as the Palestinians are concerned, they had enough of this backstage Zionist-manipulated politics disguised as peace envoys.
And may be what the whole Middle East conflict needs right now is a new kind of politics, the politics of the street, the kind that is driven by the power of the people.
In fact, it could very well be the third intifada, that we need.
“Western liberals (in the old-fashioned sense of that word) are always delighted to discover like-minded people in the Third World, and perhaps nowhere more so than in Arab countries. Yet, at least in Egypt, there’s a dirty little secret about these self-described liberal parties: They are, for the most part, virulently anti-Semitic.
Consider the case of Sekina Fouad, a well-known journalist who also serves as the DFP’s vice president. In an article published earlier this year, Ms. Fouad dismisses any distinction between Jews and Israelis, the reason for which is “the extremity of the doctrine of arrogance, distinctiveness and condescension [the Jews] set out from and seek to achieve by all means, and on top of which blood, killing, terrorizing and frightening.” …
… These examples are, sadly, just the tip of an iceberg. What makes them all the more remarkable is that, contrary to stereotype, they do not have particularly ancient roots in Egypt. Until Egypt’s Jews were expelled by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and ’60s, Egypt had a millennia-old, thriving Jewish community. As late as the 1930s, Jewish politicians occupied ministerial posts in Egyptian governments and participated in nationalist politics.
But all that changed with the rise of totalitarian and fascist movements in Europe, which found more than their share of imitators in the Arab world. When Egypt’s monarchy was overthrown in 1952 by a military coup, anti-Semitism became an ideological pillar of the new totalitarian dispensation.
Since then, Egypt has evolved, coming to terms (of a sort) with Israel and adopting some market-based economic principles. But anti-Semitism remains the glue holding Egypt’s disparate political forces together. This is especially true of the so-called liberals, who think they can traffic on their anti-Semitism to gain favor in quarters where they would otherwise be suspect…”
http://www.hnn.us/blogs/entries/119133.html
Messrs. Bargisi and Tadros are senior partners with the Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth.
Noga,
The average arabs wouldn’t know what the hell ” anti-semitism” meant. So, let’s call it Anti-Zioninism.
This hasen’t been on the rise in the Arab world during Post- WWII due to any totalitarianism or fascism, but simply due to the Israeli occupation of the Arab land of Palestine.
There have been quite a few number of researches done on the subject of anti-semitism in the Arab world. You are correct that “antisemitism’ as such was not a familiar construct for Arabs but once they got the principles, they embraced it. Here is an example:
“It was not only Heinrich Himmler who waxed lyrical about the “ideological closeness” of National Socialism and Islam, coining the concept of Muselgermanen (“Muslimo-Germans”).16 Haj Amin el-Husseini, too, referred to the parallels between Muslim and German ideals, identifying the following points of contact: (1) monotheism – unity of leadership; (2) the ordering power – obedience and discipline; (3) the struggle and the honor of falling in battle; (4) community; (5) family and offspring; (6) glorification of work and creativity; and (7) attitude toward the Jews – “in the struggle against Jewry, Islam and National Socialism come very close to one another.”17
However, precisely this last point was by no means self-evident. Racialist anti-Semitism and the fantasy of the Jewish world conspiracy were of European origin and foreign to the original Islamic view of the Jews. Only in the Christ legend did the Jews appear as a deadly and powerful force who allegedly went so far as to kill God’s only son.
Islam was quite a different story. Here it was not the Jews who murdered the Prophet, but the Prophet who murdered the Jews: in the years between 623 and 627 Mohammed enslaved, expelled, or killed all the Jewish tribes of Medina. As a result, the characteristic features of Christian anti-Semitism did not arise in the Muslim world. “There were no fears of Jewish conspiracy and domination, no charges of diabolic evil. Jews were not accused of poisoning wells or spreading the plague.”18 Instead, the Jews were treated with contempt or condescending tolerance. This cultural inheritance made the idea that the Jews of all people could represent a permanent danger for the Muslims and the world seem absurd.
This insane idea had therefore to be hammered into the Arab- Islamic world all the more forcefully. The conflict over immigration and land ownership in Palestine was not the reason, merely an opportunity, for its spread. Thus, for example, the pamphlet on “Islam and Jewry” distributed by the Germans to Muslim members of the “Handzar” Bosnian SS division talked about an “ancient enmity,” while Radio Zeesen evoked in ever-new variations the theme of the “eternal enemy, the Jew.” A speech given by the Mufti in November 1943 is typical:
This people has been the enemy of the Arabs and Islam since it came into being. The Holy Koran expressed this old enmity in the following words: “you will find that the most hostilely-disposed toward the believers are the Jews.” They tried to poison the praiseworthy Prophet, put up resistance to him, were filled with hostility to him and plotted against him. This was the case over 1300 years ago. Since then, they have never ceased to hatch plots against the Arabs and Mohammedans.19
Thus was an eternal threat to all Muslims concocted from Mohammed’s defeated contemporaries.
For the Mufti, the reference back to the seventh century fit the bill for a second reason: his hatred of the Jews was a declaration of war on the “invasion of liberal ideas” into the world of Islam. Since the start of the 20th century, Egypt had been opening up to the outside world; in the 1920s Turkey replaced the Caliphate with the Atatürkist model; and Reza Khan, too, was promoting the secularization of Iran. The Mufti made not the slightest concession to this reformist trend in his sphere of control. He saw Jerusalem as the crystallization point for the “rebirth of Islam” and Palestine as the center from whence resistance to the Jews and the modern world was destined to emanate. Speaking at a religious conference in 1935, the Mufti complained: “The cinema, the theatre and some shameless magazines enter our houses and courtyards like adders, where they kill morality and demolish the foundation of society.” The Jews were blamed for this alleged corruption of moral values, as demonstrated by another statement of Haj Amin el-Husseini: “They [the Jews] have also spread here their customs and usages which are opposed to our religion and to our whole way of life. The Jewish girls who run around in shorts demoralise our youth by their mere presence.”20
El-Husseini tirelessly used his office to Islamize anti-Zionism and provide a religious rationale for hatred of Jews. Anyone who failed to accept his guidelines would be denounced by name in the mosque during Friday prayers, excluded from the rites of marriage and burial, or physically threatened. The Mufti implemented this policy along with his most prominent Palestinian ally of the time, the Islamic fundamentalist Izz al-Din al-Qassam, whose name is borne by Hamas’s suicide-bombing units. Al-Qassam was the first sheikh of modern times who, in 1931 in the Haifa region, set up a movement that united the ideology of a devout return to the original Islam of the seventh century with the practice of militant jihad against the infidels.21″
http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/national-socialism-and-anti-semitism-in-the-arab-world
It hardly matters what you call it. A rose is a rose by any other name.