MASSAD: Palestinians, Egyptian Jews and propaganda

January 8, 2013

“The statements made by Issam al-Aryan, a senior leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood,
calling on Egyptian Jews in Israel to return home, are hardly novel,” writes author [AFP]

by Joseph Massad -   7 January 2013

The current propaganda war in Egypt about the Palestinians and about Egyptian Jews, which was provoked by the recent pronouncements of Issam al-Aryan, a senior leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, is nothing but a distraction from the real problems that the country faces with the increasing incompetence of the Morsi government and the opportunism of his vocal opposition.

If this propaganda war did not have major implications with regards to Israel and US plans to undermine the Egyptian uprising and to control its outcome so as to serve US and Israeli interests, it would be nothing but a storm in a teacup. That it has many regional and international implications is what produces the ongoing media frenzy in the country and internationally.

The statements made by al-Aryan calling on Egyptian Jews in Israel to return home, however, are hardly novel. Indeed Egypt had already done so under Anwar Sadat’s rule back in 1975 at the urging of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

In 1975, and based on its understanding that the departure of Arab Jews to go to Israel under the Arab anciens regimes was a boon to the Zionist colonisation of Palestine, the PLO undertook to call for the repatriation of Arab Jews and demanded that the current Arab leaders (none of whom had been in power when Arab Jews left their countries in the 1950s and 1960s) issue an open invitation to them.

Morocco, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, Iraq and Egypt responded to the PLO call and issued an open invitation to Arab Jews to return home. Despite these efforts, neither Israel nor its Arab Jewish communities heeded the call.

Discriminating against Arab Jews

Indeed, it would not be until the last couple of decades that Israel began to exploit the question of Arab Jewry as a counterweight to Palestinian demands for their internationally supported right of return to Palestine from which the Zionists had expelled them.

The same Ashkenazi Jewish leadership that discriminated and discriminates against Arab Jews in Israel began to lead the effort of demanding compensation for Arab Jewish property losses while liberal Zionist commentators and their supporters in the West began to issue statements which summarised what happened in 1948 and after as an equitable “population exchange” between “Arabs” and “Jews” (often compared to the situation of India and Pakistan), and calling on the Palestinians to relinquish all their demands for return and compensation.

That the Palestinians were massacred and forcibly expelled from their homeland while Arab Jews left the Arab world in their majority due to Zionist harassment and endangerment of their lives is often forgotten by such propaganda.

Zionists and Israeli propagandists saw in this comparison another venue to prove how civilised Israel is and how barbaric the Arabs are. The argument goes as follows: The Arab countries mistreated the Palestinian refugees and refused to grant them nationalities and settle them in their new homes and kept them languishing in refugee camps while civilised Israel gave Arab Jews Israeli nationality, and indeed settled them outside refugee camps.
The Zionist contradiction on this question is a bit scandalous. On the one hand, Israel claims that it is the homeland of all Jews, and on the other it argues that Arab Jews came as refugees to the country, rather than “returned” to it.

The Israeli claim about the Palestinian refugees is only partly true, as many Palestinians have been given nationality in some Arab countries (notably Jordan), but unlike Israel, which gave the stolen land and property of the Palestinians it expelled to its Jewish colonial settler population, including to Arab Jews (though the latter received the less valuable lands and property in accordance with Israel’s European Ashkenazi racism against Arab Jews), Arab countries did not settle the Palestinians on Jewish property or in Jewish homes.
Thus, the Israeli crime of stealing Palestinian property and giving it to Jews, which is prohibited by international law, is trotted out as the actions of the civilised Jewish settler-colony compared to the barbaric Arabs. In this context, it is important to affirm that it is the Palestinians who are owed compensation for their stolen property by all the Jewish colonial settlers who have been living on it for some six decades, including Arab Jews.

The fact that Arab Jews were not expelled from any Arab country, even from those where some of them suffered from harassment by the authorities or even from segments of society at large is central to this narrative. In Yemen and Iraq, Israel undertook to remove the Jewish communities through various criminal means, most notably through Mossad bombings of Jewish locations in Iraq, and secret deals with varying Arab regimes, including that of Yemen.

In Algeria, Israel recruited members of the 100,000-strong Jewish community (all of whom carried since 1870 French nationality by virtue of the Crémieux decree issued by France, keeping in mind that a good percentage of them by then were European settlers) to spy on the National Liberation Front revolutionaries and report back to the French authorities.
Indeed, Israeli military forces would carry out military training on occupied Algerian soil with the French occupation authorities in the 1950s. This hardly endeared Algerian Jews to Algerian Muslims, who were suffering under one of the most brutal European occupations in Africa. This situation was of course brought about by French colonial policy of divide and rule, as Algerian Jews had fought in the resistance to the French in the mid-19th century with Emir Abd al-Qadir and Muslim Algerians.

Anger against Egyptian Jews

In Egypt, Egyptian Jewish interests would be attacked in 1948 by members of the Muslim Brotherhood and the non-Islamist Young Egypt Party (Misr al-Fatah), which led to the departure of a small number of Jews (especially those with foreign nationality). Israel would later recruit Egyptian Jews as spies who would undertake a bombing campaign in 1954 to undermine Nasser’s standing in the West. Israel would also invade the country in 1956 along with the French and British and occupy Egyptian territory.

At the time, the Egyptian government expelled all French and British nationals in the country (about 17,000), including the Jews among them, as enemy citizens. When Nasser undertook a policy of nationalisation, families who owned big businesses, which were slated for nationalisation, began to leave the country. This included rich Egyptian Muslims, Christians and Jews (many of whom held foreign nationalities), and it also included Syrian Christians, Armenians, Greeks and Italians.

In the wake of the Lavon Affair (in Arabic, it is significantly called the “Lavon Scandal”) in 1954, much popular anger ensued against Egyptian Jews, which was hardly surprising, even though the government discourse tried to maintain the distinction between the community and the terrorist recruits during the ensuing trials of the terrorists.

This should be contrasted with American anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism, which, as As’ad Abukhalil recently noted, continues to target Arab Americans and Muslim Americans eleven years after 9/11, even though not a single one of the terrorists who committed the crimes of that day was an Arab American or a Muslim American.

Indeed just a few weeks ago, a racist New Yorker pushed a young Indian man (who was Hindu) in front of a subway train to his death. “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers,” the suspect told prosecutors. This was the latest victim of American racist violence against Arab and Muslim Americans and of Indian Hindus and Sikhs mistaken for them.

We must also keep in mind that a substantial percentage of the Jews in Egypt were not legally Egyptian, as they did not carry Egyptian nationality and many did not even speak Arabic and carried European passports (Italian, Russian, British and French), a fact that intensified the perception in some popular quarters that they were not loyal to the country. This of course was not the case with the old Egyptian Arab Jewish community (especially the Qarra’in Jews) whose lives were eclipsed by the large and powerful Ashkenazi and Sephardi families who arrived in Egypt in the 19th and early 20th century.

That the Nasser regime did not do enough to safeguard members of the Jewish community from harassment by its own agencies and to shield it from popular anger is true enough and should be subject to much blame, but this is not the same as expelling a population, or deporting it.

This situation also coincided with the ongoing Israeli campaign to bring Arab Jews to Palestine through various criminal means and secret deals, which were successful in Iraq and Yemen and were ongoing in Morocco and which resulted in the destruction of these communities altogether. Israel’s direct efforts to bring about the departure of half of Egypt’s small Jewish community of some 60,000 to Israel (the rest went to France and the Americas) is still not fully known but should not be ignored in analysing the situation.
That most of the terrorist attacks against Jewish interests in Egypt took place under the rule of the Egyptian King Farouk in the 1940s and early 1950s seems irrelevant to the few Egyptian Zionist propagandists today, who appeared this week on Egyptian television and wrote articles in the Egyptian press, insinuating that all that went wrong with Egyptian Jews should be blamed on Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Indeed, such propagandists completely factor out Israeli actions from bringing about the departure of Egyptian Jews. One propagandist referred to the departure of Egyptian Jews as “nuzuh” or “flight”, and agreed with al-Aryan, whom he opposes otherwise, that Jews were indeed “expelled” from Egypt.

We are even treated to the strange claims by the same propagandist that Egyptian Jews he met in the US and France continue to love Egypt, Arabs and Muslims. While there is no doubt that many Egyptian Jews, wherever they may be, harbour positive feelings towards Egypt, many of those prominent among them in the West have expressed much hatred towards Egypt and the Arab world.

Indeed, many among the latter have become prominent because of their hateful views of Egypt while those Egyptian Jews who love Egypt are ignored and given less prominence in the West and Israel.

‘Silent’ about the country of origin

Propagandists on behalf of Zionism often cite the Sephardi Cicurel family, which held British citizenship (a fact they forget to mention), as an asset to Egypt. What is forgotten often is that Moreno Cicurel who immigrated to Egypt from Smyrna (Izmir) and started the major family business, Les Grands Magasins Cicurel, was the maker of the first Zionist flag which flew over Jerusalem in December 1917 for 20 minutes before being taken down by the British.

His granddaughter Lili would marry future French Prime Minister Pierre Mendes-France, whose socialist government fell in 1955, though he would serve as foreign minister in the Guy Mollet government (of the Radical Socialist Party to which Mendes-France belonged) until May 1956.

It was during Mendes-France’s term as prime minister in 1955 that Israeli nuclear scientists were invited to participate in France’s nuclear programme. Israel’s later deal with the French in 1956 to participate in the tripartite invasion of Egypt was concluded with one of the rewards being that France would build Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor where Israel’s nuclear bombs would be manufactured.

It was Israel’s current president Shimon Peres, who supervised the deal then, who tells us:

Before the final signing [of the Sevres Protocol where the plan was hatched to invade Egypt], I asked Ben-Gurion for a brief adjournment, during which I met Mollet and Bourges-Maunoury alone. It was here that I finalised with these two leaders an agreement for the building of a nuclear reactor at Dimona, in southern Israel… and the supply of natural uranium to fuel it. I put forward a series of detailed proposals and, after discussion, they accepted them.

In 1973, Golda Meir would threaten to nuke Egypt using these bombs. Throughout this period, Lili Cicurel, to my knowledge, not once made a public statement, either opposing the French invasion of Egypt or its alliance and nuclear assistance to Israel (she died in 1967).
Indeed, the Cicurel business was not even nationalised. Lili’s uncle Salvator, whose assets were all already outside Egypt, sold the business to the Muslim Gabri family before leaving the country in 1957. The Cicurel business, which was by then owned by the Gabris, would be nationalised by Nasser in 1961.

As for the propaganda that the Cicurels were harassed by the Nasserist government, it is just that: propaganda. As for Mendes-France, he would become a sponsor of Palestinian-Israeli “peace dialogues” in the 1970s in his own home.

Not only did many prominent Egyptian Jews in the West remain silent about their country of origin, many of them are part and parcel of the Western campaigns against Egypt, the Arabs, and Muslims more generally.

Today, the Alexandria-born Haim Saban, the American Likudnik billionaire, is hardly a friend of anything Arab and is a major supporter of extreme Israeli racist and colonial policies.

The Cairo-born Nadav Safran, the former Harvard professor on the CIA payroll, propagandised against Arabs and Muslims and was an early Zionist since before 1948 and was already a colonial settler living in a kibbutz in 1946. He fought in the 1948 Zionist war for the conquest of Palestine.

Propagandistic generalisations

As for Egyptian Jews in the US who have written memoirs about their time in Egypt, one of them complains in his memoirs about the disgusting smells of Egyptians who “smell” of fenugreek.

Of course, there are other Egyptian Jews who are not as prominent and who continue to love Egypt, but propagandistic generalisations of the sort being pushed by the few non-Jewish Egyptian Zionists today that “all Egyptian Jews” in the US and France, at least, if not those in Israel as well, love Egypt and the Arabs, are hardly apt when so many prominent Egyptian Jews expressly manifest their anti-Egyptian and anti-Arab attitudes in the West, let alone in Israel.

Another major commentator in the US on Egyptian Jews is one Lucette Lagnado, who along with her Jewish parents left Egypt in 1963. She would come back to visit after 2005 and published a memoir. She had a book-reading in Zamalek at the Diwan Bookstore where she befriended one of the owners, Hind Wasef, who welcomed her to Cairo and introduced her to Diwan’s customers who welcomed her in turn.

In the meantime, however, Lagnado propagandises like many other Zionists, about the “population exchange” formula, among other Zionist myths. She tells us, towing the Israeli line, of how Jews were “forced out” of their homes in the Arab world while Palestinians simply “fled” Israel. 

Since the revolution, however, and despite the hospitality shown to her by Egyptians when she visited, Lagnado has been propagandising against the new order and tells her Wall Street Journal readers that she will not go back to the country given that the new government is led by the Muslim Brotherhood. Who knows, maybe after al-Aryan’s invitation she will, even though his invitation seems to include only Egyptian Jews in Israel.
As for half of the Egyptian Jewish community who ended up in Israel, many of them would fight in the wars against Egypt and the Arabs, and some became military spokespersons for the Israelis, who often appear on Al Jazeera and speak Egyptian Arabic. It is unclear if those too are being invited back to Egypt.

That all of this was provoked by al-Aryan is not coincidental. In the last few months, the Egyptian remnants of the Mubarak regime and anti-Muslim Brotherhood liberals have continued to market Mubarak’s anti-Palestinian campaigns in the country by claiming that President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood are planning to give Sinai to Gaza Palestinians. Even such illustrious figures as the economist, Galal Amin, participated in spreading these false rumours.

That many of these people (Amin excepted) who fulminate about Sinai and the Palestinians have been silent for three decades on the fact that Sinai remains outside Egyptian sovereignty as a result of the Camp David Accords, and who do not give a hoot about Sinai’s Egyptian population is quite telling of their suspicious agenda. That they have suddenly sprung to attention defending Sinai against a fictional propaganda story that Sinai would be given to the Palestinians is reprehensible at best. Other rumours about the Palestinians abound, such as Morsi’s alleged depriving Egyptians of electricity, which he is allegedly giving for free to Gaza Palestinians.

Concomitant with these rumours is the Egyptian government’s and the opposition’s race to please the United States and its Zionist lobby. While the very same Issam al-Aryan spoke about the tragedy of the Jewish holocaust while in the US on a Muslim Brotherhood promotional trip in May 2011, the naïve and charisma-less Mohamed el-Baradei upped the ante by telling a German newspaper that elected Salafi and Brotherhood members of parliament should not be trusted to draft the Egyptian constitution because they allegedly deny the holocaust!

Al-Aryan’s recent pronouncements on Egyptian Jews are part of this campaign of who can prove to the Americans and the Zionists that they can better serve US and Zionist interests.
This unfortunate level which the post-revolutionary Egyptian protagonists have reached tells us how successful counter-revolutionary forces in Egypt have become, and how they are undermining revolutionary gains and distracting Egyptians from the real economic, social and political challenges facing the country.

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University and he is the author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question published by Routledge.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Hamas and the old/new American crescent

The PA has "very little more to offer" to Israel and the US is the deciding factor in its "survivability or demise".

If the outcome of the so-called "Arab Spring" has been the accession to power of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt and a similar Islamist movement in Tunisia, and the strengthening of sectarian and tribalist jihadists in the guise of "fighters for democracy" in Libya and Syria (the temporary defeat of the Bahraini and Yemeni peoples' uprisings notwithstanding), the recent admission of Hamas to the ranks of forces that not only do not threaten American interests in the region, but also would like to work to enhance them is a notable transformation.

Qatar has been the mover and shaker in this battle to extend and upgrade the informal international legitimacy that Hamas has in the eyes of the people of the region and Third World allies to the official level of Arab and Western governments. That Hamas, with Qatari support, was the first Islamist party in the Arab world that won a solid electoral victory in 2006 did not serve to grant it the legitimacy it deserved in the eyes of the United States, the most formidable anti-democratic force in the region and the world.

Instead, it galvanised the US, Israel and the collaborationist Palestinian Authority to stage a coup against it to deprive it of that victory. Having understood that the electoral strategy failed to have Hamas replace Fateh at the helm of the PA, Qatar and the top leadership of Hamas realised that the "Arab Spring" offers important new opportunities in this regard.

Jordan's king receives Hamas leader

Slowly but surely, Hamas was pulled out of Syria and is being fully taken out of the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah alliance that threatens US-Israeli-Saudi strategy in the region, not only by transferring its top leadership from Damascus to Qatar, but also through a major rehabilitation effort of Hamas in Jordan, whose King Abdullah had exiled members of the Hamas leadership in 1999 on the orders of the US and Israel.

Jordanian electoral politics

As this will spell the accelerated rate at which Hamas will be offering concessions and reassurances to American interests following in the footsteps of Fateh, the PA is becoming most worried about its standing and its increasing dispensability for both Israel and the United States. US-supported and -protected Arab dictators have always feared only one type of domestic opposition to their rule, namely opposition groups who offer to serve US imperial interests as loyally as the existing regimes do.

Such fear was always warranted and well-founded, especially in the case of Egypt where the US has been for over a decade and a half courting the Muslim Brothers whose neoliberal businessmen leadership had assured the US of full compliance and collaboration with US policies better than even Mubarak could offer (indeed in contrast with the neoliberal right-wing of the Egyptian Brothers led by millionaire Khairat al-Shater, the centrist Abdel al-Moneim Aboul Fotouh was done away with fairly quickly, first by being expelled from the Muslim Brothers and later by losing the elections).

I should note here that the US' openness to what it calls "moderate" Islamists has also been supported by a good number of Zionists and Israeli strategists who have been debating such alliances and their long term costs and benefits for the Jewish settler-colony.

The Fateh-controlled PA, like all other Arab dictatorships, prefers a Hamas that threatens US interests and fears most of all a Hamas that is willing to serve them as well as, if not better, than the PA has. The recent flexibility of Hamas on this question, with the prompting of Qatar, has raised alarm bells in PA corridors. Al Jazeera's revelations about the possible poisoning and murder of Yasser Arafat are hardly incidental to the effort of finishing off the PA, once and for all. The PA's futile bid for UN membership is a last ditch effort to save itself, with ambivalent Saudi backing.

Enter the quagmire of Jordanian electoral politics, and I use the term "electoral" very loosely. Jordan has been witnessing a wide-ranging movement for change for the last year and a half, whose leaders are Transjordanian Jordanians as well as former regime operatives (of all geographic origins) who have fallen out of favour in recent years, or at least have been pushed away from the centre of decision-making.

The majority of Palestinian Jordanians have remained quiescent throughout, terrorised as they are, not only by the ongoing institutionalised government discrimination against them which includes their ongoing unconstitutional denationalisation, but also by the poisonous chauvinism of a substantial segment of Transjordanian nationalists, some of whom call for the denationalisation and expulsion of Palestinian Jordanian citizens from the country outright.

Anti-Palestinian cause

The anti-Palestinian cause in chauvinist Transjordanian circles (on the right or on the left) is so widespread that many of the pro-reform and pro-revolutionary elements leading the pro-democracy struggle in the country see their legitimate struggle for democracy and against the dictatorship of the regime and their chauvinist anti-Palestinianism as one and the same fight - meaning that democracy will put political power in the hands of Transjordanian Jordanians, where it should reside, and take it out of the hands of the monarchy, which the chauvinists allege, against all existing evidence and historical facts, is an ally of Palestinian Jordanian interests.

This is not unrelated to the fact that King Abdullah is married to a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian and that his son and crown prince, Hussein, is therefore half-Palestinian. This has always bothered the chauvinists, who, however, do not seem bothered by the fact that the king himself is half-British and his former crown prince - his brother Hamzah - is half-American, presumably, because, unlike the Palestinians as depicted by the chauvinists, neither the British nor the Americans have imperial designs on Jordan at all!

As the exceedingly conservative government of Prime Minister Fayez al-Tarawneh, at the instructions of the Palace, the labile US ambassador, and the ubiquitous Jordanian Mukhabarat, insists on refusing to reform the undemocratic election law which marginalises the majority of Jordanians (especially of Palestinian Jordanians) and on holding the elections before the end of the year despite the declaration by all significant political forces in the country that they will boycott them, the reform agenda in Jordan seems closed until further notice.

Indeed, al-Tarawneh, whose education in electoral democracy is limited at best, has threatened to criminalise calls for boycotting the elections, hinting that if people do not register to vote, they could open themselves up to government prosecution.

In the meantime, former regime servants, like Marwan Muashsher (Jordan's first ambassador to Israel and the country’s former ambassador to the United States and a former minister), who is a prominent member of the pro-reform loyalist political elite, are calling for the reform of the existing electoral law (as are the Muslim Brothers and other opposition groups), as a way of defusing the popular mobilisation against the regime and ending the crudest aspects of institutionalised discrimination against Palestinian-Jordanians.

Such measures, elite reformists believe, would strengthen the regime and the government through a democratic veneer that will certainly be undercut by traditional regime co-optation of parliamentarians.

Unlike the Muslim Brothers and a large part of the popular opposition in the country who call for constitutional amendments to limit the absolute power of the king, the former regime operatives limit their call to reforming the election law.

Fateh and Hamas

They seem, however, oblivious, to the fact, that even if Jordan were to enact the most democratic and representative of electoral laws, and if it were to run the freest elections (compared to past parliamentary elections, which, even Jordanian prime ministers now admit, were forged), and were to end institutionalised anti-Palestinian discrimination, none of these important measures would guarantee democracy in the country, mainly due to the basic fact of constitutional limitations on the power of Jordanian parliaments, which the King with absolute power guaranteed him by the current constitution, could dissolve at will.

That the strategy of Prime Minister al-Tarawneh is not working is evidenced by the very low turnout of Jordanians registering to vote. As a result, the government has sought to bring in Hamas and Fateh to compete for the favour of the Jordanian regime in its struggle against democratic reform. Both Fateh and Hamas have jumped at the opportunity to serve the regime and government interests in the country, in the case of Fateh as part of its attempt to salvage whatever legitimacy it can, and in the case of Hamas as part of its attempt to prove its mettle to US interests.

Fateh and Hamas were brought in to mobilise Palestinian Jordanian citizens, especially those who live in the refugee camps, and who have remained outside the ongoing popular mobilisation in the country, to register to vote and defeat the opposition's call for a boycott. Hamas was further asked, in the person of its diasporic leader, Khaled Mish'al (one of the top Hamas leaders who had been unconstitutionally barred as a Jordanian citizen from entering the country by King Abdullah in 1999) to persuade the Jordanian Muslim Brothers to relent on the boycott and participate in the elections.

The competition is now on as to who will prove to be more effective in serving US interests in Jordan, Fateh or Hamas. As Qatar has been reassuring the Americans, increasingly successfully, that the takeover of political power by Islamist forces, specifically the Muslim Brothers and kindred groups, is the best option for the US to stabilise the region for decades to come without its imperial strategy being threatened, its push to bring Hamas into the fold of US strategy may soon prove successful.

This is in line with Qatar's support of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt and the Ennahda party in Tunisia, as well as its support of the Muslim Brothers in Syria and assorted Islamist forces in Libya. We must bear in mind here that Mish'al's recent move to Qatar is not a new one. When King Abdullah banished him from Jordan in 1999, Mish'al went to Qatar and only moved to Syria in 2001, also under US and Israeli pressure at the time, though he remained the organisation’s most senior link to the Qataris.

Same old American crescent

In the meantime, the PA is drowning in its own miasma of corruption, tyranny and collaboration with the Israelis and the Americans. That it has very little more to offer to Israel and the US is the deciding factor in its survivability or demise and the strengthening of Hamas's legitimacy in US and Israeli eyes. We remain unsure if or when Hamas will declare to the Americans, following Arafat's humiliating performance in 1989, that its charter is "caduc" and that its anti-colonial resistance has indeed been "terrorism" all along, which it now "renounces".

It also remains unclear what kind of opposition and resistance exists within Hamas to this new political transformation. As the buzz is increasing in the Arab media about a much delayed Palestinian "spring" in the West Bank, it remains to be seen if this would help this process of substituting Hamas for Fateh along or not.

In Egypt and Tunisia, the rule of the Muslim Brothers and Ennahda party is proceeding with active oppositions (and not only of the counter-revolutionary forces of the anciens regimes which indeed remain active) and popular checks and balances and a popular insistence on the democratic functioning of governance. Moreover, as the Muslim Brothers have ideological red lines that they cannot cross easily with regards to relations with Israel, their limitations will ensure that American demands on that score will not be fully satisfied.

Popular pressure on the new regimes, as has been evidenced, will also restrict their full compliance with US strategy, especially on the economic side of it. Indeed, how far the two new regimes can go in accommodating US interests, despite their sincere commitment to them, remains to be seen.

In Libya, the instability of the new order will remain for the foreseeable future, while in Syria, the regime has recently reasserted its military power over the jihadists in Damascus and Aleppo who have hijacked the pro-democracy movement. As a result and increasingly, the outcome in Syria is no longer assured as it once was for American, Saudi and Qatari interests.

As Hamas is admitted into the US camp, the new "crescent" that is slated to dominate (part of) the region is not "Shiite" and anti-American at all, as US and Saudi propaganda and their allies have claimed for the last decade, but the very same old American crescent, headed by the old tyrannical regimes and the triumphant Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates. That this is the American plan being executed for the region is clear enough, its success however is far from being certain.

Joseph Massad teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian  

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!

Postcolonial Theory, Whiteness & Palestine

By Gilad Atzmon
Added graphics by Alex

Postcolonial, feminist and gay studies share many similarities to the extent that some academics regard these fields as theoretically and ideologically complementary. These fields of study are primarily concerned with politics, the structure of hegemony, the oppressed and the mechanism that brings about injustice. It is only natural then, that these realms of thought, primarily concerned with prejudice and injustice, would become key instruments in our understanding of Zionism and Israeli oppression.

Without questioning the intellectual validity and the theoretical substance of the postcolonial spectrum of thought, it is clear that some contemporary leading trends within this realm of studies emphasize the role of ‘White male’ and the ‘phallus’ as being at the core of contemporary Western society’s malaise. So the next question is almost inevitable –Where does it leave the ‘White male’? Or more anecdotally, am I, a person who happens to be wrapped in pale skin and is also attached to a white phallic organ, do I bear responsibility for centuries of European genocides? Would my responsibility lessen once I decide to chop my male organ off?  Am I, or any other White male, left with any authentic ethical role?  Or are we biologically doomed to be the epitome of every wrongdoing of the Western society for generations? The astute postcolonial theorist may suggest that ‘Masculinity’, ‘Whiteness’ and the ‘Phallus’ are mere symbolic representations rather than ‘things in themselves’.

Some postcolonial and feminist theoreticians would argue that imperialism, like patriarchy is, after all, a ‘phallo-centric’, ‘supremacist’, ‘White’ ideology that subjugates and dominates its subjects. This is an interesting and even intriguing statement, yet I am not so sure that it is valid or at all relevant to our understanding of Zionism and the crimes committed by the Jewish state. Zionism and Israel are clearly supremacist ideologies, yet is AIPAC’s push for a war against Iran ‘phallo-centric’? Is the Zionist appetite for Palestinian land ‘patriarchal’, or inspired by any form of ‘phallic’ enthusiasm or even ‘Whiteness’? Is the ‘War against Terror’ that left about one and a half million fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan, ‘phallicly’ orientated or is it the White male again?

Meet the Jewish Settlers

Let’s face it, Zionism, Israeli politics and Jewish Lobbying are not particularly ‘phallo-centric’ or ‘patriarchal’. They also have little to do with ‘Whiteness’. Zionism, and Israel are actually primarily ‘Judeo-centric’ to the bone. They are racially driven and fuelled by a particular supremacist culture that is inspired by some aspects of Talmudic Goy hating and some sporadic (and false) Old Testament (false) interpretations. But this is exactly the verdict the postcolonial scholar attempts to prevent us from reaching.

It is especially embarrassing because Israelis and Zionists openly draw their inspiration and expansionist enthusiasm from Jewish culture and texts, which they interpret in a very particular self-serving manner.

In spite of the fact that this discourse, in its current form, is pretty much, irrelevant to our understanding of Zionism and Israel, this postcolonial discourse is still, very popular amongst some anti Zionists and in particular, Jewish anti Zionists. The reason is pretty simple; it is effective in diverting attention from the real issues; it disguises the magnitude of Jewish power, Jewish politics, the inherent ‘Jewish’ nature of the ‘Jewish State’ and Jewish intellectual hegemony within the west and the Left in particular. Within the realm of the postcolonial discourse we are not even allowed to mention the ‘J word’, let alone criticise Jewish lobbying or Jewish power structures.


Prominent ’Israeli’ Seeks Despicable Nazi Remedy for Palestinians



In fact, the postcolonial discourse, allows its acolytes to talk endlessly and passionately about Israel and Zionism without saying anything meaningful.

It allows the Left to refer to Zionism as ‘settler colonialism’ in spite of the embarrassing fact that no one actually knows where or what exactly is the Jewish ‘mother state’ is[1].

Postcolonial scholars also encourage us to refer to Israel as an Apartheid state in spite of the fact that Apartheid is a racially driven system of exploitation of the indigenous. The Postcolonial enthusiast would obviously turn a blind eye to the fact that Israel is not interested in exploitation of the Palestinians. It prefers to see them gone.

Hence, since it aims to get rid of the indigenous, Israel should be realised as an avid follower of the Lebensraum (Living-space) philosophy.

From that perspective at least, Israel should be equated with Nazi Germany rather than with South Africa.

The postcolonial discourse, in its current form, allows its anti Zionist enthusiasts to spin endlessly. They can refer to Israel and Zionism without actually disturbing, hurting or even touching Israelis, Zionists and Jewish political structures.

The postcolonial theorist is basically engaged in an attack on an imaginary phantasmic construction that has zero relevance to Zionist ideology or Israeli politics whatsoever. It is basically an advanced form of an intellectual onanism.

Like Rabbinical Judaism and Stalinism, the postcolonial discourse is extremely intolerant towards dissent and criticism. It surrounds itself with a defense wall, operates as an intellectual ghetto. In fact, it also invented political correctness just to police and curtail, by means of self-censorship, any freedom of expression.

Arab and Palestinian Postcolonial Scholarship

Edward Said with Mahmoud Marwish.

One of the most influential postcolonial thinkers was Palestinian- American literary theorist Edward Said. Said’s polemic, Orientalism (1979) was a deeply profound attempt to grasp the West’s vision of the Orient, the colony and Islam. The term Orientalism, as coined by Said, covers three interrelated meanings. First, it names the academic study of the Orient. Secondly, it is a form of deliberation that constitutes the Arab as the ‘other’.  Thirdly, it is the structures that maintain Western domination over the Orient.

Being an outstanding creative intellect, Said engaged in a vast examination of a multitude of Orientalist discourse. His writings refer to political and historical texts as well as literature and media. Said obviously realised the immense importance of cultural criticism and cultural studies.

Confusingly, some of Edward Said’s Palestinian and Arab successors seem to oppose the very field of study Said championed.  

For example, as much as Said was immersed in deep cultural examination and discourse analysis, Palestinian activist and academic Ali Abunimah recently claimed the following.

“We should be very clear in condemning explanations which try to blame a culture or a religion for a political situation.“

Abunimah basically believes that culture doesn’t explain ‘anything at all’. It seems to me that Abunimah, who often integrates the term ‘Orientalism’ into his political statements and tweets, is apparently unfamiliar with the intellectual core of Edward Said’s thought and methodology.

Ali Abunimah is not happy at all with my reading of the conflict. This is understandable and totally legitimate and furthermore, he is not alone. Other exiled Palestinians seem also to be very concerned. Their outrage at my argument that Israel is not a European style colonial state implies that they fear the end to a discourse in which they have invested so much. Some of those Palestinians were very happy to add their names to the list of book burners who demanded my disavowal.

This was indeed a very sad turn – futile, yet, at the same time both revealing and predictable. Though those Arab and Palestinian scholars criticized my work for being ‘racist’ without providing a single racist comment by me, it was disappointing to discover that, it was in fact their writing that was actually saturated with biological determinist comments and peppered with blunt racism.

Recently we came across a video of cultural BDS leader Omar Barghouti exploring some ‘postcolonial’ ideas. He for instance, insisted that “the white race is the most violent in the history of mankind.” This is an outrageous sweeping generalization especially since , Barghouti surely knows that Zionism is Judeo-centric and has very little to do with Whiteness. It is not the degree of ‘Whiteness’ that constitutes the racist element within the Israeli legal system, it is rather the ‘degree of Jewishness’ that makes an Arab Jew privileged in comparison to a Palestinian with a very similar skin colour. Omar Barghouti is studying in a ‘Zionist’ Tel Aviv university (while asking the rest of us to boycott the same university). Seemingly, he has internalised the Zionist academic postcolonial jargon and has integrated and implemented some biological determinist and racist ideas into his pro-Palestinian political thinking.

And Omar Barghouti is not alone. Assad Abu Khalil, AKA The Angry Arab, is another postcolonial enthusiast who also engages in a similar racially driven approach.

In his blog post White Man and Paul Newman, Angry AbuKhalil writes “the White Man is not a racial category–or it is not merely a racial category but also a political and epistemological category.” Not only does Angry Arab agree that the ‘White Man’ is partially a racial category, he even goes as far as linking skin colour with a political stand and even epistemology.[2]

Of course, I realise that being an Arab academic in a Zionised American or British university is a tough mission.

I guess that for some time the postcolonial discourse was the only possible template that allowed a criticism of Israel and Zionism. But the time is ripe to move on. We’d better now call a spade a spade.  It is time to call Israel what it is, namely “The Jewish State”. The time has come to ask what the Jewish State is all about and what is the true meaning of the Jewish symbols that decorate Israeli tanks and airplanes? The time has come for us to grasp that the Jewish Lobby is a primary threat to world peace.

But can we do it all while being thought-policed by the rigid boundaries of the postcolonial realm?  Can we talk about Jewish identity politics while some prominent Palestinians activists attempt – to block any discussion on Jewish culture & power?  My answer is yes we can, and we’d better make every possible effort to liberate our discourse from the Judeo-centric postcolonial grip.

Whiteness, The Jew & The Queer

In the last few weeks I have wondered why Omar Barghouti attacks the ‘White race’? Is it really necessary? Couldn’t he just refer to the ‘West’, America, Orientalism or the ‘British Empire’?

Why does Angry Arab fight the White man? Is it really an elementary political category?  Does the introduction of racial categories and biological determinism serve the Palestinian cause or Arab liberation?  

I decided to jump into the water and immersed myself in some contemporary texts about whiteness and postcolonial theory. I thought that it may help me to understand the emergence of such thoughts.

Following the recommendation of my friend and musical partner Sarah Gillespie, one of the first texts I picked was Richard Dyer’s ‘White’. Dyer is a respected film scholar and a leading writer on the topic.

It didn’t take more than five pages before I stumbled upon a very interesting passage that opened my eyes. In the next few lines Dyer speaks about his childhood friendship with a Jewish pal and the impact it had on him. 

“The key figure here was a Jewish boy at school, whom I’ll call Danny Marker. I used to visit him and his family in Golders Green, a Jewish neighbourhood of London. I knew by then that I was a homosexual and I envied Danny and his family-they too were an oppressed minority, whom, like queers, you could not always spot; but, unlike us, they had this wonderful, warm community and culture and the wrongfulness of their oppression was socially recognised. I now believe that there are intellectual and political problems with making and analogy between Jews and queers, between ethnic and sexual discrimination, but I am trying to say how it felt then. I envied Danny’s ethnicity and wanted to be part of it, indeed, felt at home with it.”  (White, Richard Dyer,  White Pg 5) 

In The Wandering Who, I wrote extensively about the clear ideological and theoretical continuum between Zionism and other marginal thoughts. I explored the deep ideological similarity between Queer theory and the Jewish national aspiration.

On the one hand we notice a legitimate and reasonable call against injustice – the Zionist and the Queer theorist demand to become ‘people like other people’ a call obviously understood and supported by many. But on the other hand, we also detect another forceful demand – to maintain and preserve uniqueness and differentiation. As one can imagine, the humanist call for equality can easily clash with the forceful self-centric, clannish demand for preservation (especially when celebrated on the expense of others).

However, Richard Dyer explores here another special affinity between the queer and the Jew. As a homosexual he expresses a clear and innocent envy of his Jewish schoolmate’s social landscape. Dyer notices that in spite of being oppressed, the Jews have managed to form a “warm and wonderful community and culture.”  

Dyer’s feeling at home within the Jewish family nest may explain why Tel Aviv has become a Gay capital.

It explains why some prominent Queer activists feel so strongly and positively about the Jewish State, Zionism, Jewish culture and Jewishness in general. But it also may explain why some Arab and exiled Palestinian secular academics, feel some affinity to the Jewish dominated anti Zionist postcolonial nest. Operating as an intellectual ghetto, it may also retain some Jewish characteristics, it is probably a ‘warm community’ as Dyer describes it. It may even be that some Palestinian postcolonial secular academics would feel more comfortable in Tel Aviv University than in Al-Azhar University in Gaza.

I obviously understand it and I am far from being judgmental. But am I naïve to expect Palestinian activists and intellectuals to ensure that the, ‘wrongfulness of Palestinian oppression’ be widely and ‘socially recognised’ by the masses, rather than by a few postcolonial Jewish Anti Zionists?

It is time for our discourse to leave the ghetto.

I guess that in order to achieve such a goal, we must transcend the decaying postcolonial discourse or else completely revise it. We must drift away from any form of marginal ideology.  We must be able to deconstruct Jewish texts and Jewish cultural discourse with the same vigor that Edward Said deconstructed the European canon, whether it was Charles Dickens or Lord Balfour. We actually better locate the issue of Palestine at the forefront of the battle for a better world, humanity and humanism.

We should engage in an inclusive, open intellectual debate that welcomes all oppressed (queers, gays, Arabs, Muslims, people of colour and so on) and oppressors too. At the end of the day, with 50 million Americans living in deep poverty watching 30.000 drones fly over their heads, Gaza is now in Detroit, Newark and Philadelphia. Our solidarity with Palestine can now become a true force of genuine empathy. We don’t now just put ourselves in the shoes of the Palestinians, we actually wear them. We all strive for the same liberty. We are one.

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[1]  If Israel is the Jewish ‘Settler State’ we better be informed at last where is the Jewish ‘mother state’ for colonialism is defined by a clear material, cultural and spiritual exchange between a mother and a settler states.

[2] It would be wrong not to mention professor Joseph Massad of Columbia University. Following his Mentor Edward Said, Massad also writes  about the role of colonialism, its structure, its impact  and the scars it left behind. Like Barghouti and Abu Khalil, Massad also refers occasionally to skin colour. Yet, unlike Barghouti and Abu Khalil, Massad seems to be far more careful and astute. Rather than falling into the banal biological determinist trap, he seems to critically refer and examine the role of skin colour from structural, social, cultural and political perspectives.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

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