English

An Old Vice

The Magic of Voting

The winning card is the magic of voting; it is the incomparable joy of democracy; it is the ecstasy that only freedom and equality can give through an act so simple, precise, and yet so rare in the Middle East and in other parts of the world.

Iraqis tidily wrote their choices on folded pieces of paper, knowing that the choice of the rich and the poor, of the handsome and the ugly, of the wise and of the simple, all have the same value; and they all expect to receive something in return for the trust they gave.

The voters who walked through the boulevards of central Baghdad displayed big smiles of victory, defiant of the clear and present danger. They lined up in order, even in the face of a serious and real threat, as the 40 who died on election day confirmed. Women were wearing their best dresses, the ones reserved for holidays, and some brought their children along to witness this historic day.

These brave men and women were saying: "I only lived for this day! I don't face a yes and a no and I don't risk my life anymore for saying no! I finally decide who will sit in the government and who will represent me." They were so proud to show the cameras their blue finger, that same finger that champions wave when they place first in a competition or when they score a goal and run around the field.

They showed and celebrated their courage for having risked their lives for a just and holy cause, for they participated in the most ingenious instrument invented by man to fight injustice and tear down the walls of social and cultural discrimination without shedding a single drop of blood.

The Palestinian Arabs also participated in recent elections with pride; they voted without hesitation and claimed it as proof of dignity and power. Everyone voted: the women, so embittered by losses and deep discomfort, and the young men from the refugee camps, the ones wearing black leather jackets who are used to the cruel logic of death fomented by raids. They all voted. And so it happened in Iraq.

Was there an unconscious sense of triumph in front of a future as uncertain and difficult as the new Iraqi Republic? Was there a sense of victory within the Shiite and Kurd majorities who were ferociously dominated for so long by Saddam Hussein? It does not seem like it. It is actually amazing to realize how little was said in the electoral campaigns of the Shiites about the thousands of killings. The Kurds also avoided focusing on Mr. Hussein's attempts to exterminate them, using his militias to gas them. The proof is the invitation to the Sunnis, written as a law, to participate in the new government, even if they failed to vote.

The magic of voting does not only rest in the psychological effect of self-respect as a citizen, and, hence, of joy and dignity. The vote also pro vides an alternative to violence: It provides an opportunity to make a change without the use of weapons. The vote amazes because it brings quick results to a society where, up until Sunday, no one was fully aware of the responsibility connected to voting.

In other words, Yasser Arafat was not obliged to guarantee the well-being of his people or the return of prisoners. The elections that elevated him with 90% rates were illegitimate. He did not need to communicate a sense of logic for his management of power. His only interest was to promote or not to hinder the basic element of a politics where war was a priority, a war whose price has been primarily paid by the people: the murderous attacks of suicidal terrorists.

Abu Mazen was not elected for his charisma, nor did the voting results resemble the ones of authoritarian Arab countries against alternative components. Abu Mazen must therefore give something back to his people in exchange for the confidence he received. He must bring the prisoners back home and must make the Palestinian state a reality and not an ideological background, as it was during Arafat's tenure.

It is for these reasons that Anu Mazen has so far made an authentic effort to contain the terrorists; of course, this was also made possible by Israeli efforts. Until today, Mazen has almost stopped the launching of Assam rockets from Gaza. Generally, the number of attacks has fallen 85%. All of this has initiated a process that, unless stopped by internal forces, could be revolutionary: the meeting between Ariel Sharon and Abu Mazen and the withdrawal of the Israeli troops from five Palestinian cities in the West Bank.

Likewise in Iraq, the existence of an elected government will bring a larger sense of reality to the Sunni component, which will eventually want to participate in Iraq's future and abandon the bloody past. The government will have to focus on security, on controlling the borders, and, with the help of Americans, it will make considerable improvements. New trust and confidence in a country that displayed so much courage will bring investment and wealth and will be yet further proof of how wise the election was.

A new process has begun and it will continue unless the terrorists manage to inflict a large, shocking attack. Yet the process is already in motion. In Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, and even in the moderate Arab countries, people are dreaming of going to the voting booths as they saw the Iraqis do.

Democracy is contagious and attractive. It is not true that the Arab world or the Muslim world in general is attracted only to dictatorship, as many say with a polemical tone or inaccurate assumptions. There is no man who does not wish to pick the fruit of dignity and pride that only a free vote can give - along with a free press and free movement. Simply put, one part of the world has not yet lived this revolution. This has caused the bloody situation in the Middle East, but maybe today we are witnessing a change, thanks to the revolutionary value of the vote, to democracy, and, hence, to America and her allies.

Condition of Abbas' power is to cope with terror's defeat

Expose 'Anti-Israelism' for what it is...

There is something unhealthy about Jewish political delusions. Instead of confronting our enemies, we compete in blaming ourselves. First Israel thought it had a partner for peace.

But on discovering this was not the case, Jews and Israelis didn't blame the Arabs; they invented non-existent interlocutors, promoted them, and thereby diminished their own self-esteem.

Instead of confronting the frightening rebirth of Islamic and European anti-Semitism, Jews delude themselves by allowing anti-Semitism in the guise of legitimate criticism of Israeli policies.

But as Minister-without-Portfolio Natan Sharansky made clear, where Israel is criticized illegitimately, that is anti-Semitism. Where Israel is criminalized, judged by a double standard or its very existence is delegitimized, that is anti-Semitism.

Without doubt, the same phenomenon that lies behind Diaspora assaults on Jews, synagogue bombings and arson attacks on Jewish schools is directed against Israel.

Indeed, Israel faces an enemy whose battle cry is: "Kill the Jews wherever they are."

Nevertheless, we are overly cautious in drawing a line between anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism. By doing so we forget a basic truth: Today's conflict was generated by Yasser Arafat. He refused to accept the concessions offered by Ehud Barak and launched a bloodbath against innocents.

Israel responded by defending itself, though, doubtless, some of its actions are open to criticism.

Israelis have difficulty understanding the nature of the polemical attacks used against the Jewish state. By being tarred as an apartheid, colonial, racist state, the enemy is merely employing anti-Semitic canards against Israel.

What good does it do for European states to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day if their newspapers think it legitimate to employ anti-Jewish caricatures in their cartoons? I am thinking of the recent Independent (London) cartoon showing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon naked, blood-spattered, and grinning as he chews on Palestinian babies. The cartoon invokes the memory of similar caricatures of the Jew which appeared in the Nazi-era newspaper Der Stuermer.

Instead of confronting our enemies, we compete in blaming ourselves. Recall the deceit which surrounded the charge that IDF operations in Jenin constituted "the biggest massacre of postwar history." Was this not a modern version of the blood libel?

Conversely, viewing photos of Jewish children killed by terrorists brings back the memory of an earlier generation of children killed by the Nazis.

Can it be that all the efforts to facilitate remembrance have been relegated to museums and have no dynamic, practical consequences? When we say that studying the Shoah helps fight anti-Semitism, aren't we deceiving ourselves?

COMMEMORATING the Holocaust has failed. Politicians pay homage at Yad Vashem, attend Diaspora memorials for the Six Million, and feel themselves inoculated as philo-Semites. This enables them, the morning after, to say Israel practices apartheid, or declare themselves able to understand the motivation of suicide bombers. Would not Theodorakis gladly visit Yad Vashem?

On December 6, 2003 the Calusca Library in Milan, a center of extreme Left activism, organized the presentation of a text denying the Holocaust. An angry ? albeit extreme ? comrade explained that the revolution has to take place now, and in order to find new allies it is necessary to deny the murder of European Jewry. It is the price to be paid for solidarity.

But even in less extremist circles, the Star of David transformed into a swastika does not constitute a problem for left-wing newspapers and their readers.

So what to do, Jews ask themselves, when traditional allies transform into an anti-Semitic enemy?

For many, the first reaction is to negate reality. Most of the damage to Jewish life in modern history has come from the political Right.

Jews, in large measure, feel themselves naturally allied to the Left. More than that, even now Jews perceive themselves as receiving legitimacy from the Left.

Paradoxically, our real weapon is that very legitimacy which we must turn around and use to deny the anti-Semities.

Jews must stop making excuses for anti-Semitism, regardless of its source. With the moral force of old allies who have became enemies, we must challenge what has happened to the Left.

Liberal criticism of the recent visit to Israel by the right-wing Gianfranco Fini, vice president of the Italian Council of Ministers, is hypocritical; all the while Diaspora Jews absolve the Left and forgive its anti-Semitism as legitimate criticism of Israeli policies.

This is a suicidal approach, destroying the unity of the Jewish world and undermining the unity of the concept of anti-Semitism.

There are neither two types of anti-Semitism, nor two kinds of struggles against anti-Semitism.

The 'Left' and Anti-Semitism

Israel's Last Line of Defense

Commentary Magazine, January 2003

 

Waiters, guards, bus drivers, businessmen, and other unlikely heroes.

Almost every other day in Israel, it seems, an ordinary waiter, store guard, or bus driver, a twenty-year-old soldier on leave or a fifty-year-old businessman, will seize a terrorist by the arms and, while his explosive belt is still ticking, push him away from the scene, simultaneously shielding bystanders with his own body. He may save dozens of lives, and may forfeit his own in the process. He is a new kind of citizen-defender, and Israel's last line of defense. The Jewish state begets many like him, but he is also a unique type-very much a local product.

As the world knows, the Israeli army and police force have not succeeded in creating a perfectly hermetic seal against the catastrophic terrorism that has hit the country over the past two years. Barriers, checkpoints, and occasional armed forays into the occupied territories function only partially to deflect the lone suicide bomber armed with TNT and hate. Since September 2000, this latest strategic weapon of the Arabs has claimed 700 dead and thousands of wounded, in a country of only 5 million Jewish inhabitants. Everywhere, you see children in wheelchairs, disfigured victims of every age, not to mention the legions of mourners for family members and friends lost in a moment's horror.

All this has changed the face of civil society in Israel, if not the very concept of civilian life itself. For now, the most effective protection against such attacks, aside from periodic incursions into Palestinian cities, is this spontaneous form of civil defense, the only thing that works even when the terrorists from Jenin and Nablus manage to get past the barriers and show up at a cafe in Tel Aviv or a gas station in the West Bank town of Ariel. It seems to function naturally, on its own, but in truth it is a very strange phenomenon.

Noon. Emek Refaim, the long street that runs through Jerusalem's German Colony, where bougainvillea and jasmine hang down from the weathered three- and four-story stone buildings. By this hour the daily racket has already reached its height: bus and car horns, mothers yelling at their children not to cross in the middle of the street, the din of rock music blasting from car stereos. In among the old Arab houses and the buildings of the Knights Templar-the cemetery of that medieval Christian order abuts the local supermarket and Burger Ranch, the boughs of its trees extending over the stone walls-are dozens of cafes, upscale wine bars, boutiques, sushi joints, vegetarian and Chinese restaurants. It is impossible to find a place to park; the police who patrol the area seem to have accommodated themselves to the prevailing chaos. The cafes are full, chic girls and boys are out walking their dogs, pretending they are in Tel Aviv The large glassed-in terrace of Caffit, where people sit sipping cappuccino, completely exposed to the street, is all open invitation to a terrorist.

Our hero, Shlomi Harel, twenty-three and a waiter, is dressed in a white shirt and dark pants. His eyes are puffy. He was up late the night before: being a waiter, a guitarist, a student, and popular with the ladies will do that. He wears a ring in his left ear and two studs in his right, sports a tattoo on his arm and spiky hair. How many lives has this boy saved? Around 50, but it doesn't show.

"On March 7 at 1:30 I saw a big, fat guy trying to come into the place," he begins. "The guard had already stopped him, but I immediately rushed over. He was sweating a lot, I learned Arabic in the army so I asked him, 'What's your name? What do you want? Where are you going?'-anything to try and identify him, to try to understand. He had this lost look, he was sweating like crazy, and he said, 'I don't speak Hebrew,' in Hebrew. I pushed him into the corner, with the guard's help. I wasn't thinking about anything."

Shlomi has black eyes that his Iraqi-born mother might have painted on him with a paintbrush. He is well mannered, reserved though not exactly shy, dead tired. He would not let me pay for the coffee I drank at the bar, allowing me instead to admire his method of carrying several cups and saucers in one hand. His coworkers and the bar's owners like to laugh about the great Shlomi, whom the international press has made briefly famous. "Oh, you're the real Shlomi, the one and only, the big hero," they exclaim. Everyone seems to adore him.

A civilian hero is deprived of the incidental benefits, such as they are, of armed combat: the adrenalin rush of anticipated battle, the comforting presence of commanding officers and mates. Instead, he is alone with a bomb, his hands clutching a crazy man bent only on killing and being killed. But Shlomi is very cool. From the instant he shoved the sweating and stammering stranger into a corner, he says, the rest of the event unfolded "like a machine."

"I pulled the backpack off his shoulders and it fell onto the floor. I opened the flap and saw the wires sticking out. It didn't explode because some­thing must have been broken. I was lucky. I picked up the backpack, I was still on automatic pilot, and I took it away while someone else pinned the guy down until the police came. Why did I carry it away? I said to myself, 'If someone has to die, better one than many.' And then I thought, 'If it blows up, we'll all die and I'll really look like an idiot.' But it worked out, and so I became a hero."

When he got home his mother screamed at him, hysterically: "You idiot!" She was lying on the sofa, a glass of water in her hand. "I ran home to warn her before she heard the news on the radio, but she raised her hand to slap me, crying' about how I could have been killed." Shlomi laughs, but his eyes are still a little frightened at the thought of his enraged mother.

Shlomi is something of a Zionist, as Zionists go in real life. He was not a big believer in the Oslo peace process, but he was a little believer in it. He likes the idea of peace, and terrorism scares him more than war. But what is the alternative? Slowly, the dirty cups still balanced in his hand, Shlomi offers his ex-post-facto philosophy: "It went well, that's a sign that life goes on. If the backpack had blown up, I wouldn't be here to talk about it. So," he lapses into Arabic, 'ya-Allah, we have to live. We move around, we keep going, nonstop. People do their best, they're walking on eggs."

In Gilo, the Jerusalem neighborhood where Shlomi lives, the whole area was under nonstop bombardment a year ago. "When a shell landed in my apartment building it was really scary. There, it was hard to plan: if it hit you, it hit you. But when you can do something, things go a lot better." For having done something, Shlomi came into $5,000, a prize from an American philanthropist. "I'm saving it," he says.

*

In the old days in Israel, heroism of the Shlomi type was both a national reality and a national ethic. It was part and parcel of the popular ideology of the ruling (mostly left-wing) elites, forged in the crucible of the 1948 war and, even earlier, in the age of the pioneering kibbutzniks and those who made the desert bloom. Driving it was a very anti­heroic dream: namely, the dream of a normal life in one's own land, among one's own people. This brand of valor had nothing to do with the outsized, myth-soaked heroism familiar to us from the propa­ganda and the statuary of fascism and Communism. It was not about gargantuan deeds by superhuman champions; it was family- and home-oriented, and rather intimate in tone. It was celebrated in lots of sad and even rueful songs, but few marches.

No doubt to the astonishment of many, it is still alive, having survived even the era of rampant consumerism and the good life. There are still many yuppies in Israel, but their roots would appear to run only a few inches deep. That there are also deep political divisions concerning the country's future goes without saying, some of them reflected in emigration figures and even in desertions from army service; but considering the circumstances, these, too, are remarkably contained. As for the post-Zionist interpretation of Israel's history, which replaced the anti-heroic hero with a bellicose, aggressive villain-the mythically rapacious, colonialist Jew who first oppressed and then drove out the native Palestinian inhabitants of the land-this mendacious reading likewise seems to have failed to take hold in Israeli consciousness, at least to anything like the extent once feared. The classic Zionist personality has assuredly gone through more than a few permutations over the last decades, but the essential character seems to have remained largely intact. Which is perhaps not so surprising, since it is unfortunately grounded in an implacable existential reality.

And it is evidently contagious. On October 12 of this year, Mikhail Sarkisov, a thirty-one-year-old recent immigrant from Turkmenistan, saved the lives of about 40 people who were sitting in the Cafe Tayelet along the oceanfront in Tel Aviv. Sarkisov had been a guard for three weeks, his training having consisted mostly of a stint in the Russian army. He was living in a trailer, without a bathroom or a refrigerator, his only items of luxury being a well-groomed moustache and a gold-well, maybe gold-ring. He had been issued a fake pistol because he did not yet have a gun license. When an Arab terrorist, his jacket bulging, approached, Sarkisov confronted him even as the metal detector started to go off.

"What do you have there?" he asked. "It's mine," the terrorist responded. "I didn't ask whose it was," was Sarkisov's swift retort. "I asked what you have there." As the Palestinian put his hand in his pocket, Sarkisov and two customers threw themselves at him and wrestled him down. "I understood that he was a terrorist because he spoke Hebrew very badly," says Sarkisov in a Hebrew flavored by a strong Turkmenistan accent.

Up until this day, Sarkisov had been treated very poorly by the company that hires guards for places like Tayelet and is linked to the worst criminal elements-whom it also recruits as guards. But now Sarkisov is smiling because they have given him a place to live. Also, he received $5,000 from the same American donor, and Prime Minister Sharon has presented him with an honorary plaque. Sarkisov the hero is a man without social or personal resources: recently separated from his wife, he lives alone; as if in a Charlie Chaplin film, he found himself armed with a fake pistol, and required blindly to act his part. But somehow he was prepared without question to give his life for his countrymen.

And how if not by some theory of positive contagion are we to understand the heroism of seventeen-year-old Rami Mahmoud Mahameed? This young Arab Israeli was at the bus station in Umm el Fahm in central Israel when he saw a Palestinian carrying a large black bag on his shoulders and wearing very dirty shoes. As the two were alone in the station, Rami politely asked to borrow the stranger's cell phone. Moving away, he quietly called the police. Then, instead of fleeing, he sat down next to the terrorist and waited. "I did what I wanted to do," Rami said later, as if surprised that anyone would find his actions peculiar. The police arrived in time to halt an arriving bus before it could enter the yard and grabbed the terrorist, who blew himself up. Rami was seriously injured. "Even if I had to die, I would have stayed there," Rami said later at the hospital, where at first he was under suspicion of having been an accomplice. "I thought to myself when I saw him, 'OK, if you want to kill yourself, go do it in Jenin.'"

*

Of course, it helps that Israel's regular army, the IDF, is a citizen-army in the fullest sense, based on almost universal conscription and drawing much of its moral and cultural strength from a national mentality of preparedness and service that has been built up over the generations. It also helps, if in a grotesque way, that the enemy is so completely ruthless. "When I went into Jenin, I was astonished," says a reserve officer who participated in the operation in that West Bank city last April. "Under the beds, in the cabinets, in the kitchen, in the refrigerator there were explosives. The portraits of shahids ['martyrs'] were everywhere. It was sheer madness. Here were people who had built themselves a lovely city, who had been doing quite well financially, who had excellent rapport with their Jewish neighbors. We met a child carrying a bag of explosives. He must have been about seven years old." The terrible, sickening aggression of the enemy, the feeling of oppressiveness and rage that it induces in everyone who must face it, brings out a potent response. Besides, thanks to army training, the plain fact is that many people are used to reacting-when necessary, "like a machine."

A typical case is Eli Federman. If his family name is known in Israel, it is mostly on account of his brother, Noam, a former spokesman for Meir Kahane's extreme right-wing Kach movement, who has been arrested 45 times. "My relationship with Noam is like my relationship with Yasir Arafat. To say we don't see eye to eye is an understatement," Eli asserts. On May 25, Eli saw in the distance a car driving much too quickly toward the Tel Aviv night club where he is a guard. With his imposing physique-he did his military service in a crack battalion-he started shoving people away and firing his gun. A bullet hit the oncoming terrorist, and the wildly careering car blew up.

Federman had lived in Thailand for a long time, and had married there; that country holds a totemic place in the mentality of many young Israelis, whose post-army years often begin with a tour of the Asian hot spots. Today he lives with his family in a relatively leafy, lower-middle-class suburb. After the car blew up, he says matter-of-factly, he went over and "shot a few more bullets in [the terrorist's] head. We have to be as thorough as possible in the territories, not let them get as far as here." Benjamin Ben Eliezer, then Israel's defense minister, inadvertently added a layer of complexity to the definition of the new Israeli hero when he hailed Federman as one "who deserves credit for defending the rights of people to get on with their daily routine and also have fun "-a hero who upholds a democracy's right to party.

I have not mentioned the bus drivers, who almost merit a category of their own as involuntary soldiers along Israel's civilian front line. They include Baruch Neuman, whose regular route runs from Petach Tikva to the Tel Hashomer hospital complex outside Tel Aviv. At the stop near Bar Ilan University, he saw a man trying to enter through the rear exit. This is forbidden for security reasons. He slammed the door in the passenger's face, causing him to fall back bleeding to the pavement. Terrified that he had injured someone, Neuman got off, together with a passenger who was a doctor, to inspect the damage. Opening the wounded man's jacket, they saw the explosive belt and, in a flash, pinned the man's hands. He tried to resist, and was kicking hard.

"He was big and strong, and he could have managed to activate the bomb at any moment," Neuman recalls. "We started to shout: 'It's a terrorist! Run! Run!' My only thought was, 'Hold onto those big arms.'" All the passengers except for one old lady managed to flee in time. "As the minutes went by he gained more and more movement, and we also un­derstood that the bomb could be activated from afar, like with a cell phone. We decided to get away, and on the count of three we started to run. He blew up, but by that point there was hardly anyone around."

"A hero knows what he's doing," Neuman says in self-deprecation. "I acted out of pure instinct. I was doing my job and I was responsible for the safety of my passengers; I see them every day, you know. Are my wife and children proud of me? Yes-especially of the fact that I came home in one piece."

On February 1 of last year, another bus driver named Menashe Uriel broke up a major bomb attempt by pushing away a young man who was trying to get on his bus strapped with explosives. He rolled onto the ground with him. "The boy was sixteen years old, and he held his bag tight. I was sure I was going to die, but the bus was jam-packed with kids going to the Love Festival, and with soldiers heading north "-a postmodern mix if ever there was one-"so I did what I had to do."

*

Not all who have done what they had to do have lived to talk about it. Yossef Twitto, the head of the response team in the West Bank community of Itamar, heard shots from a home one night last June but arrived too late to save the situation-three children dead, two wounded, all in the same family; when he burst in, the terrorist mowed him down, too. Another guard, Mordechai Tomer, nineteen, blond with a broad smile, was killed in Jerusalem when he stopped a car and asked to see identification papers; the driver blew himself up. And so it goes.

Sudden death, ever-present in the consciousness of Israelis, can lead to action, but also leads to a certain fatalism. Unlike in societies at peace, Israeli young people do not feel immortal. They live often to excess: dangerous trips, crazy nights, spur-of-the­moment impulses, exaggerated behavior punctuated by uncontrollable laughter and loud shouting. Beneath it looms the silence of death. "I knew perfectly well that he would have died to stop a terrorist. We'd discussed it many times," says the widow of Tamir Matan, forty-one, killed together with two young soldiers when the suicide bomber they were trying to stop blew himself up at a gas station.

This fatalism too is not new. In a 1947 novel by Moshe Shamir, He Walked in the Fields-a work much derided by later generations of intellectuals for its apotheosizing of the values of the old Zionist settlement in Palestine-the protagonist throws himself onto a bomb to save a comrade, even though his own girlfriend is pregnant with their child. Uri is a rural hero, torn between the dream of a quiet farmer's life and the ideal of service, of duty. For a man who would have preferred the countryside and love, duty wins out. He is like the boy in a famous ballad by the Zionist poet Natan Alterman, another self-sacrificing hero who gives his life to save his army buddies and does not even know why; or like the protagonist of another bal­lad about the terrible battle of Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem during the 1948-49 War of Independence, who "between the grenades and shots... ran and laid the explosive. I do not know why I got the medal of honor. All I wanted was to go home quietly."

*

Not too far from the King David Hotel, a sumptuous new hotel is being built; a suicide bomber blew himself up there, splattering blood onto the pale blue windows. A mere 100 yards away, in a pedestrian mall, dozens of kids lost their lives to two suicide bombers as they sat drinking Coca-Cola and chatting while music wafted from the restaurant doorways. Not far from the Moment Cafe, where eleven young people were murdered in June, and from the Sbarro pizzeria, where fifteen were blown to bits, lies the big Mahanei Yehuda market, and not far from the market is the large building that houses my gym. Everything is near everything else in a city as small as Jerusalem. After class one day, the gym instructor, soaked in sweat, her voice barely audible above the exercise music, shouted: "Good for you, girls, coming to gym even with the way things are."

Good for you? Whom was she talking to? What was she talking about? But as I looked around, at the Orthodox women, out of breath, carefully replacing their wigs or kerchiefs, at the rest of us pulling on our slacks before walking out the door to take our kids to school or shop in the supermarket or ride the city buses or sit and drink cappuccino as if mass murderers were not planning to murder us where we stood, my eyes welled with tears. Good for you. Really, well done.

Written on the walls of Durban

How Suicide Bombers Are Made

During his historic visit to Syria last May, Pope John Paul II was unexpectedly upstaged by the country’s young new president, Bashar al-Assad. Greeting the pontiff at the airport in Damascus, Assad used the occasion not to declare his own hopes for mutual understanding among the world’s great faiths but—rather less in keeping with the spirit of the moment—to mount a vicious attack on the Jews. They have “tried,” he inveighed in the presence of the Pope, “to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality with which they betrayed Jesus Christ,” and in “the same way they tried to betray and kill the prophet Muhammad.”

So spectacular a venting of hate could hardly pass unnoted, and thus, for the duration of a news cycle, the usual fare of Middle East reporting—rock-throwers and settlers, bombings and retaliatory strikes, ceasefires and “confidence-building” measures—gave way to tongue-clucking over the charged words of the Syrian president. As the New York Times lamented, Assad had not only “marred” the Pope’s visit but had reinforced his own “growing reputation for irresponsible leadership.” So the coverage generally went, admonishing a new leader whose inexperience and immaturity had seemingly led him to embrace, as the Times put it, “bigotry.”

Largely ignored amid all this was a far bigger story—a story not about a petty tyrant but about the poison that rose so readily to his lips. As few journalists either knew or thought it worthwhile to relate, such sentiments as Assad expressed are hardly uncommon in today’s Arab world. Wherever one looks, from Cairo and Gaza to Damascus and Baghdad, from political and religious figures to writers and educators, from lawyers to pop stars, and in every organ of the media, the very people with whom the state of Israel is expected to live in peace have devoted themselves with ever-greater ingenuity to slandering and demonizing the Jewish state, the Jewish people, and Judaism itself—and calling openly for their annihilation. Only by turning a determinedly blind eye to this river of hatred is it possible to be persuaded that, after all, “everybody” in the Middle East really wants the same thing.

The anti-Semitic propaganda that circulates in such abundance in the Arab world draws its energy in large part from the technique of the “big lie”—that is, the insistent assertion of outrageous falsehoods about Israel or the Jews, the more outrageous the better. The examples are truly numberless. In Egypt and Jordan, news sources have repeatedly warned that Israel has distributed drug-laced chewing gum and candy, intended (it is said) to kill children and make women sexually corrupt. When foot-and-mouth disease broke out recently among cattle in the Palestinian Authority (PA), the Israelis were quickly accused of intentionally spreading the illness (despite the immediate mobilization of Israeli veterinary groups to treat the animals).

Especially garish have been the fabrications directed at Israel’s response to the now year-old intifada. Earlier this year, at the world economic forum in Davos, Switzerland, a thunderstruck audience heard Yasir Arafat himself declare that Israel was using depleted uranium and nerve gas against Palestinian civilians. Official PA television obligingly furnished “evidence” for this charge, broadcasting scenes of hapless victims racked by vomiting and convulsions. Another recent film clip from Palestinian television offered a “re-enactment” of an assault by the Israeli army on a Palestinian house, culminating in the staged rape and murder of a little girl in front of her horrified parents. As for Israeli victims of Arab terrorists, the PA’s Voice of Palestine radio assured its listeners in April that Israel was lying about the assassination of a ten-month-old girl by a Palestinian sniper in Hebron; in fact, the commentator explained, the baby was retarded and had been smothered by her own mother.

The Arab press has also helped itself to the rich trove of classical European anti-Semitism. Outstanding in this regard has been Al-Ahram, Egypt’s leading government-sponsored daily. One recent series related in great detail how Jews use the blood of Gentiles to make matzah for Passover. Not to be outdone, colum­nist Mustafa Mahmud informed his readers that, to understand the true intentions of the Jews, one must consult The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in which the leaders of the international Jewish conspiracy acknowledge openly their “limitless ambitions, inexhaustible greed, merciless vengeance, and hatred beyond imagination. . . . Cunning,” they allegedly declare, “is our approach, mystery is our way.”*

In a class of its own is the effort of Arab and Islamic spokesmen to distort or dismiss the record of Nazi genocide. Indeed, nowhere else in the world is Holocaust denial more warmly or widely espoused. A conference of “scholars” held in Amman in mid-May concluded that the scope of the Nazi war against the Jews had been greatly exaggerated, a claim enthusiastically parroted by the Jordan Times. On Palestinian television, Issam Sissalem of the Islamic University of Gaza recently asserted that, far from being extermination camps, Chelmo, Dachau, and Auschwitz were in fact mere “places of disinfection.”

On April 13—observed in Israel as Holocaust Remembrance Day—the official Palestinian newspaper Al-Hayat al-Jadida featured a column by Hiri Manzour titled “The Fable of the Holocaust.” Among his claims: that “the figure of 6 million Jews cremated in the Nazi Auschwitz camps is a lie,” promulgated by Jews in order to carry out their “operation of international marketing.” A few weeks later, at a well-attended pan-Islamic conference in Teheran, Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, used his opening remarks to make a similar point. “There is proof,” he declared, “that the Zionists had close ties with the German Nazis, and exaggerated all the data regarding the killing of the Jews . . . as an expedient to attract the solidarity of public opinion and smooth the way for the occupation of Palestine and the justification of Zionist crimes.”

Occasionally, to be sure, the same organs of anti-Semitic opinion that deny the Holocaust do find it necessary to affirm that it took place—but only so that they can laud its perpetrators. A columnist in Egypt’s government-sponsored Al-Akhbar thus expressed his “thanks to Hitler, of blessed memory, who on behalf of the Palestinians took revenge in advance on the most vile criminals on the face of the earth. Still, we do have a complaint against [Hitler], for his revenge on them was not enough.”

Another variation on this theme is the now incessant comparison of Israel itself to Hitlerite Germany. In the eyes of Al-Ahram, “the atrocities committed by the Israeli army show . . . how those who complain about Nazi practices use the same methods against the Palestinians.” For its sister Egyptian paper, Al-Akhbar, the ostensibly dovish Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres is in actuality “a bird of prey, a master in the killing of the innocents,” and a man responsible for deeds that “make Israel worse than the Nazis.” In May, a columnist for Egypt’s Al-Arabi wrote, “Zionism is not only another face of Nazism, but rather a double Nazism.” Unsurprisingly, President Assad of Syria also favors such language, recently asserting that “Israel is racist, [Prime Minister] Sharon is racist, the Israelis are racist. They are more racist than the Nazis.”

The effect of this relentless vilification is not difficult to discern. In the Arab world, where countervailing sources of information about Jews and the Jewish state are rare to nonexistent, Israel has been transformed into little more than a diabolical abstraction, not a country at all but a malignant force embodying every possible negative attribute—aggressor, usurper, sinner, occupier, corrupter, infidel, murderer, barbarian. As for Israelis themselves, they are seen not as citizens, workers, students, or parents but as the uniformed foot soldiers of that same dark force. The uncomplicated sentiment produced by these caricatures is neatly captured by the latest hit song in Cairo, Damascus, and East Jerusalem. Its title: “I Hate Israel.”

From such hatred it is but a short step to incitement and acts of violence. Arab schools teach not just that Israel is evil, but that extirpating this evil is the noblest of callings. As a text for Syrian tenth graders puts it, “The logic of justice obligates the application of the single verdict [on the Jews] from which there is no escape: namely, that their criminal intentions be turned against them and that they be exterminated” (emphasis added). In Gaza and the West Bank, textbooks at every grade level praise the young man who elects to become a shahid, a martyr for the cause of Palestine and Islam.

The lessons hardly stop at the classroom door. Palestinian television openly urges children to sacrifice themselves. In one much-aired film clip, an image of twelve-year-old Mohammed al-Dura—the boy killed last September in an exchange of fire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen—appears in front of a landscape of paradise, replete with fountains and flowers, beckoning his peers to follow.

In early June, just two weeks after the fatal collapse of a Jerusalem wedding hall, PA television broadcast a sermon by Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi praying that “this oppressive Knesset will [similarly] collapse over the heads of the Jews” and calling down blessings upon “whoever has put a belt of explosives on his body or on his sons and plunged into the midst of the Jews.” Slogan-chanting mass demonstrations, with Israeli and American flags aflame and masked gunmen firing shots into the air, reinforce the message. One need look no further to understand how children grow up wanting to be suicide bombers—a pursuit that won a fresh wave of media acclaim after a bombing at a Tel Aviv discothèque took 21 Israeli lives and that according to a recent poll has the approval of over three-quarters of Palestinians. “This missile,” wrote an ecstatic Palestinian columnist, meaning the bomber himself, “carried a soul striving for martyrdom, a heart that embraces Palestine, and a body that treads over all the Zionist invaders.”

Virulent anti-Semitism is no less essential in maintaining the region’s most militant and totalitarian-minded regimes. Such standing as Syria’s Bashar Assad now enjoys in the wider Arab world derives in large part from his unceasing denunciations of Israel and the Jews. For his part, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein has repeatedly made known his readiness to destroy the “criminal Zionist entity.” Should his own efforts not suffice, he has even sought divine aid, ending his speech at the recent Arab summit with the pithy entreaty, “God damn the Jews.”

As for “moderates” like King Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt, offering a wide latitude to anti-Semitic vituperation enables them to demonstrate their own populist bona fides, to show their sympathy with the Arab “street.” Do they themselves endorse such views? Of course not, they hasten to declare, disingenuously suggesting that nothing can be done about it since under their regimes even government-owned newspapers and television stations possess the right to speak their mind.

That moderate Arab leaders have remained mum in the face of rising anti-Semitism may be all too understandable, considering their overall records as statesmen. The West’s moral and political leaders should be another matter, but they are not. In the days after Assad’s anti-Semitic diatribe in Damascus, one waited in vain for the Pope—the same Pope who has recognized the state of Israel and visited the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem—to utter a word of protest. The incident was, in many respects, a replay of then-First Lady Hillary Clinton’s refusal to confront Suha Arafat when, at an event in Ramallah two years ago, the wife of the PA’s president accused Israel of deliberately poisoning Palestinian air and water. And if any of the assembled leaders at the world economic conference in Davos thought to protest Yasir Arafat’s lies publicly, their intervention has not been recorded.

One source of the general silence may be a subtle form of racism, or what George W. Bush in another context called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” The Arabs, it is implicitly suggested, are a backward people, not to be held to the civilized standards of the West. In this reading, rabid anti-Semitism is just another feature of Arab culture—the same ancient culture that is often also portrayed, with reason, as one of the world’s most civilized and sophisticated.

Many Westerners who fastidiously ignore the Arabs’ outrageous lies and insults about Jews also believe that the Arabs do, after all, have a legitimate grievance against Israel, however excessively they may at times express it. Once the substantive demands of the Palestinians or the Syrians are met, this line of thought goes, their hatred of Israel and the Jews will likewise subside, it being just a form of politics by other means. Throughout the Oslo years, the government of Israel itself seemed to share this attitude, systematically ignoring or explaining away the Arabs’ unremitting verbal incitement.

But if we have learned nothing else from the latest intifada, it is that the Arab world’s grievance against Israel has little to do with the minutiae of dividing up territory and political authority. It has to do instead with the entire Zionist project, with the very existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. What Westerners (including some Israelis) dismiss as so much unfortunate rhetoric is an exact articulation of that grievance, whose goal is not to achieve but to prevent accommodation. For how can one accommodate a people who are nothing but murderers of children, instruments of world conspiracy, sworn enemies of religious and historical truth, and perfecters of Nazi brutality—a people who according to Islamic authorities must be driven out and killed, their body parts “spread all over the trees and electricity poles”? No, anti-Semitism in the Middle East is not just politics by other means; it is an end in itself.