Article #5:

The Roots of Hatred / Decades after Holocaust, a

different anti-Semitism prevails
Matthew McAllester
Newsday
01-17-2004
The Roots of Hatred / Decades after Holocaust, a different anti-Semitism prevails
By Matthew McAllester. STAFF CORRESPONDENT

- Gaza City, Gaza Strip

Ghazi Hamad is the editor-in-chief of Al Risala, a newspaper that supports
the Palestinian militant Islamic group Hamas. In his office on a recent
afternoon, Hamad stressed that Palestinians do not hate Jews or their religion.
"Hamas, the whole of the Palestinians, clearly distinguish between Israelis
and Jews," he said. "I think our principles and religion ask us to respect the
people of the Bible. We don't fight against the Jews. We fight against the
occupation."
Given a bit more time, Hamad veered to darker themes. Jews, he suggested,
were to blame for the Nazi Holocaust of World War II. Adolf Hitler "came to
punish the Jews because of their faults and their practices," Hamad said, and
Jewish leaders "coordinated with the Germans to kill the Jews in Europe."
What of the historical estimate - based on Nazi files and European
statistical records - that 6 million Jews died?
"I don't believe it was 6 million," Hamad said. "Maybe 100,000. Maybe
10,000. I don't know. I think that Israel exploits this to gain sympathy."
In the end, Hamad wound up voicing the anti-Semitism he initially denied.
Jews can't live in peace, he said. They hate everyone who is not a Jew; they
use sex and money to control the world.
Does God love the Jews?
"I don't think so," Hamad said, grinning.
Hamad's inconsistent messages sit at a new intersection in the long history
of anti-Semitism: The Palestinian intifada, or uprising, against Israeli rule

has helped spark a wave of attacks on Jews in Europe; Muslim terrorists like
Osama bin Laden espouse the annihilation of the Jews; Palestinian society and
language is plagued by the language of anti-Semitism.
Six decades after the Holocaust, it is Arab and Muslim terrorism, rather
than Naziism, that threatens Jews and Israel. Under the surface, both Israeli
and Palestinian scholars say, there are differences between Arab and
Palestinian anti-Semitism and the older, European version - differences that
may even point out opportunities to solve the conflict. But, they say, both
Israelis and Palestinians are quick to seize the powerful imagery and rhetoric
of classic anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, a habit that could help to close
whatever doors to peacemaking remain open.
The current technological imbalance - Israel has a nuclear deterrent, the
Palestinians' most lethal weapon is suicide bombers - means that Palestinians
and other Muslims do not now threaten the existence of Israel as the Nazis once
did Jews in Europe.
But read Jews' letters to the editor in Israel or France, talk to Jews in
Jerusalem or Auschwitz or London, and many say they fear as never before that
radical Islamists increasingly are determined to kill all of the world's Jews.
Perhaps at no point since World War II do Jews feel that their very existence
is more threatened than now. "Jews are paranoiac, but they are being
persecuted," said Yehuda Bauer, one of Israel's leading specialists on
anti-Semitism, repeating an old maxim.
It is a relative few dispassionate Palestinians who openly question, or
even acknowledge, the persistent racism of Palestinian discourse about the
Israelis. It is inexcusable and can be murderous, they say, but Palestinians do
not, broadly, have the genocidal impulses of the Nazis.
That is a crucial distinction, observers on both sides say. For now,
Palestinian and Arab anti-Semitism grows amid a war over the land and amid most
Palestinians' isolation from Jews. By contrast, the Nazis saw Jews every day
and fixed them with an unyielding, unreasoning and inchoate hatred that focused
on their destruction as a people.
To many Israeli and Palestinian observers, these distinct versions of
anti-Semitism mark the difference between an enemy of Israel that ultimately
wants to reach an agreement and an enemy of the Jews that ultimately wants to
annihilate them.
But in the absence of any sort of meaningful peace negotiations in the
Middle East, they say, the danger is that the former might mutate into the
latter.

TELEVISION'S INFLUENCE
The tortured mix that is Palestinian anti-Semitism can be heard from other
Gazans besides Hamad. Two teenage boys recently spoke of Jews in a jumble of
territorial rivalry, ignorance and unexpected empathy.
"The Islamic religion encourages us to respect the Jewish religion as one
revealed from heaven," said Emad Hamed, 15, a never-shaved boy with a
prematurely serious air about him. "It's possible that there are good Jews
outside [Israel]," he theorized, "but they're not in the majority."
How many Jews were killed by the Nazis?
Emad and his friend Wael Siam, 14, looked confused. "We have no knowledge
of that," Siam said.
Told about the Holocaust, the boys looked upset. "I will never support
people like that," Hamed said of the Nazis. "They killed innocent people ...
They destroyed human dignity."
Israelis say youths like Hamed and Siam learn anti-Semitism from men like
Maher Moneer Al-Rayyes, the general director of the Palestine Satellite
Channel, the Palestinian Authority's satellite television station. Israel's
government and several independent Israeli organizations long have compiled
examples of what they say is anti-Semitic content on Palestinian Authority
television.
One evening, Al-Rayyes spoke at length about why it was impossible to
consider Palestinian television anti-Semitic. The wide-screen television in a
corner of his large office showed his station's broadcast of an Egyptian serial
from the 1980s - a drama described as "based on fact" about Egyptians spying
for Israel.
It was not hard to spot the Israeli characters - mainly bald men with big
noses, narrow eyes and hunched shoulders.
Aren't those Jewish stereotypes? Al-Rayyes was asked.
"No," he said finally, after being asked four times. The physical
characteristics were simply to show their Jewishness, Al-Rayyes said. Had the
show featured a Scot, he would have worn a kilt to show his Scottishness.
"These are the only two scenes you have seen," interjected Anwar El-Agha,
the station's international relations director, looking nervously from the
television to his boss. "Look at other scenes and the Jews look like normal
people, like Arabs."
The following day, in the Rafah refugee camp at Gaza's southern tip, men

sat in white plastic chairs under a green-and-white striped tent that flapped
in a cold wind off the Mediterranean. Friends and relatives of the Hams family,
they were there to mourn Mustapha, a 17-year-old who had been shot the day
before by an Israeli soldier.
Rafah has seen more killing than any place in the intifada. Few people have
work. Palestinians there often refer to Gaza, especially Rafah, as a "big
concentration camp," where the Israelis who control the perimeter are the
guards. It is they who have the power of life and death over the occupants, and
the power to destroy homes or deprive people of health care, schooling and
work.
This leads Mustapha's father, Abed, to the view that the Jews are "worse,
worse" than the Nazis.
And yet, to Abdullah Al-Jazaar, a relative, the Jews are simply territorial
enemies: "We have no problem with the Jews," he said. "We have a problem with
the ones occupying our land. The Jews lived peacefully with the Muslims for
years."
From diverse Palestinians, one inconsistency was the same: The Jews are our
enemy only because they have taken our land; but the Jews are also a jumble of
unlikable ethnic traits, and God does not love them.

IMPORTED SLURS
The exasperated psychiatrist with the British passport he uses every two
months to get out of Gaza because the place drives him nuts walked around his
large living room in slippers and lamented the spiralling anti-Semitism in
Europe and the Arab world. It can have only worsening consequences for his own
people, said Eyad Serraj.
"How could Israel believe we want to make peace when we talk about them in
such a negative way and only make them more paranoid?" asked Serraj, one of
Gaza's most widely respected intellectuals. "When you're so frightened, you
only believe in the use of force to protect yourself. Israel is a culture of
fear fed by Arab demagoguery, by Arabs' hateful slogans. Violence feeds
violence. We know that from psychiatry. You cannot treat paranoia with guns,
with any form of force."
But do Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the other extremist Islamic group, really
want to kill all the Jews?
"Yes, of course, absolutely," he said. "But not because they are Jews."
Over and over, the same Gazans who fluently spoke the language of

European-style anti-Semitism also insisted that they hated the Jews only as
occupiers. They hated the British and the Turks when they occupied Palestine,
people said, and they would hate Poles or Pygmies if they happened to be the
ones taking Palestinian land.
To Serraj, anti-Semitism came to the Muslim world only in response to the
arrival about a century ago in Palestine of the first Zionists from Europe and
Russia. They were invaders who happened to be Jews, he said. The Jews who had
lived for centuries in Palestine as a minority coexisted largely in peace and
neighborly cooperation with the majority Arabs.
There appears to be a relatively broad consensus among scholars of Muslim
anti-Semitism on this point: that it is largely a language and mind-set
imported to the Middle East by British and French authorities who controlled
much of the region in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
"Some of the more obvious anti-Semitic stereotypes you hear in the mouths
of Palestinians and Arabs have clearly come from Europe," said professor Robert
Wistrich, the director of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study
of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
What troubles scholars like Wistrich, and many other Jews and Israelis, is
this: To what extent have Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims taken on board the
essence of that European anti-Semitism, and not just its form?
"I don't think the sort of psychosis which existed in Europe that saw the
Jews as if they belong to a different species, I don't think that is the norm
among Arabs," Wistrich said. "But the danger is that you don't need a majority
of people to feel that way now."
Wistrich knows that from experience: On July 31, 2002, he missed being
present at a Hamas suicide bomber's attack in the Hebrew University cafeteria
only because he hadn't found a seat in the packed dining room. Nine people died
in the attack.

'WE KNEW EXACTLY WHAT HE MEANT'

The question of the intent within the rhetoric of Islamic anti-Semitism is
shared by European Jews now experiencing a wave of Muslim-led anti-Semitism in
Europe. In France, where that wave has been highest, a Jewish school recently
was burned down. Graves have been vandalized; Jews have been assaulted.
France's chief rabbi recently advised French Jews to wear baseball caps over
their yarmulkes in public and to generally hide their Jewishness. Most attacks,
observers agree, are the work of Muslim immigrants from North Africa.
Dozens of Jews interviewed in Europe and the Middle East in recent months

voice a sense that the histories and politics of Jewry in the two regions have
never before been so closely entangled.
It was mid-December, early in the morning, and southern Poland was dusted
in snow, pelted by sleet. With each step through freezing rain, Michael Drucker
walked closer to the ruins of the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
The rail tracks next to Drucker ran straight through the camp's main gate,
past the chimney stacks that rise where the prisoners' wooden barracks stood,
to the gassing area. At least 1 1/2 million people, most of them Jews, died
there.
Now the camp was empty but for Drucker's group of Jewish schoolchildren who
had come from London the day before to begin a tour of Poland and its Jewish
history.
Amid the Nazis' intricately planned machinery of killing, Drucker dwelt on
another place, another time: Israel, now.
"If a suicide bomber had the railway, had this technology, what would that
person do?" he asked, gazing through the mist and smokestacks.
Visiting the concentration camps is for many Jewish teenagers a rite of
passage crucial to their understanding of who they are and how they came to
survive as a people. Many kids, especially those from Israel, drape Israeli
flags over their shoulders as they walk around a place that was closed down
even before the founding of Israel. It is a confirmation of survival but also
an act of defiance in the face of what many believe to be a contemporary threat
almost as significant as that posed by the Nazis in the 1930s.
In Poland, the children's teachers, guides and security guards often tell
them to conceal their Israeli flags and yarmulkes from local residents. "We
were driving past one kid and he looked at our bus and saw the flags and he
heiled Hitler," recalled Vered Hugi, 17, a recent Israeli visitor to Poland.
"He was pointing at the flags, and we knew exactly what he meant."

THE HOLOCAUST'S SHADOW

The political language of Israel, especially as it faces ongoing
Palestinian attacks, has long been suffused with the language of the Holocaust.
"In no other country I have ever visited is it so common to hear someone
call his countryman 'Nazi,' writes Time magazine Jerusalem bureau chief Matt
Rees in a forthcoming book on conflicts within and between Palestinian and
Israeli societies.

Visitors fresh to Israel are often shocked by the way Israelis speak to
each other in terms that would be taboo in any other country.
Israel's legislators sometimes denounce each other as anti-Semites in
debates of the Knesset. As the anti-Semitism scholar Yehuda Bauer grimly
acknowledged, Israelis stopped for speeding readily call police officers
members of the Gestapo or the SS.
Many Israelis fear that the memory and legacy of the Holocaust is degraded
by such language, that some of the ways the Israeli government and
intelligentsia have drawn the Holocaust so close to the core of Israel's
identity is, in the long term, counterproductive for the state.
That's one reason Ruth Firer went alone to Auschwitz, where much of her
family perished. Firer, a professor of peace studies at the Hebrew University,
long has spoken disapprovingly about how Holocaust education in Israel has been
used "to enhance Zionist patriotic zeal of the student," something she
considers a "kind of indoctrination."
Passionately patriotic and Zionist, Firer says what she calls the "power
center" of Israel too often uses the Holocaust for political ends. So she took
herself to Poland and wandered through Auschwitz on her own. No Israeli flags,
no national anthems, no group sobbing.
"I don't think the situation with the Palestinians is handled properly and
I don't think the problems in Israel are handled properly," she said. "I'm not
going to let the power center use the tragedy of my family to enhance their
position."
A former soldier with two sons in the army, Firer says Israelis have fully
learned the lesson of survival from the Holocaust, but not sufficiently what
she considers the moral lesson - to respect all human rights.
"Perhaps it is natural that when people are concerned with their own
physical being they do not focus on their moral being," she said. "But I'm
saying, they should. Sooner or later it will be the end of the state of Israel
if we do not mark the second lesson."

THE JEW IN PALESTINE

In Rafah, there is a Jew among the Palestinians.
"I love my religion this much," said Laura Gordon, 21, stretching her arms
wide. They were covered in the traditional robe of an observant Muslim
Palestinian woman. She wears the robe, and a tightly wound head scarf, out of
respect for the conservative society where she lives.

Gordon has been working in Rafah for nine months as a peace activist,
trying to protect the Palestinian residents from the Israeli army, which
patrols the border with Egypt at the camp's edge. She is short, smiles a lot
and is a walking example to her neighbors of how, after all, Jews can be as
caring and warm as anyone else in the world. She is so loved in the camp that
Palestinian parents often try to get her to marry their sons, even though they
know she is a Jew.
She could be seen as a one-woman intersection for the historical and
political currents of the Middle East and Europe: Her great uncle survived the
Holocaust in Poland; she once worked for an Israeli group that looks after
victims of terrorism; she has learned Arabic; she has faced anti-Semitic slurs
in Gaza; she is anti-Zionist; she says that when Israeli soldiers shoot into
Rafah, she feels it is her brothers who are shooting.
To some, Gordon could be seen as evidence that even the most radical
Palestinians do not, after all, want to kill all the Jews. Rafah is full of
Hamas activists who could make an easy kill of her but have not done so.
To others, Gordon might be seen as a self-hating Jew whose presence in the
camp only bolsters Palestinian propaganda about the evils of the Israeli
occupation. Perhaps she's an irrelevant anomaly. Or perhaps her nine months and
her unique perspective have allowed her some insight into how people will so
often place their own suffering ahead of anyone else's.
"The Palestinians say the occupation is the single most violent thing that
has ever been done at all," she said, during a discussion of the Holocaust.
"That's just the way anybody in a lot of pain [feels] a lot of the time when
hearing of another's pain."

QUOTES:
1) 'The Islamic religion encourages us to respect the Jewish religion as one
revealed from heaven. It's possible that there are good Jews outside [Israel],
but they're not in the majority.' - Emad Hamed, 15, left, with friend
Wael Siam, 14
2) 'I don't think the sort of psychosis which existed in Europe that saw the
Jews as if they belong to a different species, I don't think that is the norm
among Arabs. But the danger is that you don't need a majority of people to feel
that way now.' - Robert Wistrich
3) 'How could Israel believe we want to make peace when we talk about them in
such a negative way and only make them more paranoid?' - Eyad Serraj, left