This article, by Ari Shavit, appeared in the Friday Magazine section of Ha'aretz. The post that follows comes from the raw depths of my gut that reading this thing slashed open. I've allowed it to ferment overnight. And, believe it or not, I've toned it down some. My thoughts:Look at the road signs, Dahla says. Most of them are in Hebrew and English, without Arabic. Because what you want, after all, is for a tourist from the moon to be able to come and wander around the country and believe that it really is a Jewish country. That there really is a Jewish state here. But I'm in your way. I and a million other Arabs are in your way.
This is a lie. All over Israel, road signs are in Arabic as well as English and Hebrew. Sometimes, they're just in Hebrew and Arabic. And sometimes in just one or the other. But the image he's describing here is false. Where is this place he's talking about? In his imagination. In the imagination of his agenda.Does the idea of a Jewish state truly lack all justification? Don't the Jews have the right to self-determination within the boundaries of June 4, 1967? Mohammed says that the Jewish public now living in the country has the right to self-determination. But one can understand why the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan in 1947. And one must understand that there is no balance of rights here. There is no balance of our right v. your right. And that is because at the point of departure, the young lawyer Dahla says, the Jews had neither legal right, nor historical right, nor religious right. The only right they had was the right of distress. But the right of distress cannot justify 78 percent [of Mandatory Palestine becoming Israel]. It cannot justify the fact that the guests became the masters.
How can Shavit ask this question of this man, this person who, he knows, has nothing but contempt for Jews, who believes that we have no "rights?" What could he be hoping to accomplish? The question, posed as it is here, is itself revolting. Of course "there is no balance of rights here." Not in the mind of an individual such as this Dahla, who can't permit himself to distinguish between truth and fiction, between real and make believe, even when it is staring him in the face. "Guests?" Whose "guests" were the Jews in "Palestine?" The only "guests" there were the tenant farmers, the Arabs who lived on land owned by others far away, at the whim of those others, at their discretion, who farmed the land they lived on as they needed for their own personal survival but didn't ever possess it, who never had any "rights" and who could and would have been uprooted instantaneously at the mere caprice of some fat cat in Damascus or Beirut or Riyadh. As for this ridiculous "78 percent" fiction, we've been through that time and again. 78 percent of Mandatory Palestine is today called Jordan. These are facts. They can be verified. This man is a lawyer. He's not an idiot. He cannot believe a word he says. He believes that with his false words he can create a new reality. He's wrong. We visited the Jewish community of Katzir, in connection with which each of us had a certain part in the High Court of Justice case about whether an Arab could purchase a home there (at the time, Mohammed entered one of the houses in the community and conducted fake negotiations to purchase it, taking pleasure in watching the owner squirm in a web of contradictions involving the sale of her house at an exorbitant price to a Muslim).
This is the generosity, the humanity of this Dahla. He "takes pleasure" in the discomfort of Jews who are constrained by their government from implementing racist housing policies. Or perhaps the constraint is due to their own ambivalence in the face of the competing values of equality and community. This little anecdote makes me want to spit. It's sour, dirty. It has the smell of a man bragging about a rape. I'm embarrassed for both Dahlan and Shavit. I'm disgusted.We also visited the city of Umm al-Fahm, charred in the wake of the flames. We visited Sheikh Raad Salah, leader of the Islamic Movement (he received us with eyes beaming and talked about the abandoned mosques in the ruined villages throughout the country and about the danger looming to the Al-Aqsa mosque, and about how the Jews had no right to Al-Aqsa. You know, he said, even according to the Israeli historians, even according to Ha'aretz Magazine, the Jews have no right to Al-Aqsa: The whole story of the Temple Mount never happened).
According to whom? Oh, yes. According to "the Israeli historians." Like Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappé. According to Ha'aretz Magazine and its fawning leftist journalists. Like Gideon Levy and (sometimes) Ari Shavit. More fiction. More lies. "Never happened." Make it so.Even though Mohammed Dahla himself is not a devout Muslim, even though he has been exposed to the West and has adopted many of its values, he says that Sheikh Salah is a central pillar of his identity. Whereas what you claim about 3,000 years in Jerusalem is a fiction, Sheikh Salah represents 1,400 years of Islamic existence in this country. There is something captivating about that, Mohammed says; there is something deeply human about this continuity. When I look at the sheikh's eyes, he says, it's as though I am being connected through a time tunnel to the Caliphate of Omar al-Khatib, for whom my son is named. I connect with the greatness of Islam. That imbues me with a profound stillness that you don't have. A feeling of self-confidence.
The "you" in this speech is Ari Shavit. And of course he has no sense of continuity, no feeling of self-confidence. Or, rather, of course Dahla would be unable to detect such strengths in a Jew. Shavit considers this Dahla a "friend" because they have fought in the trenches together, for Arab rights, for Arab dignity. Shavit has fought for these things at the side of a man who would never raise an eyebrow, let alone a finger, for Jewish rights, for Jewish dignity. Because in his mind there is no such thing. Our history, Jewish history, is "a fiction." Our 3,000 years in Jerusalem don't exist, because Mohammed Dahla says so. That's all that's required. Lies. Enough lies to strangle an entire nation. So they hope. So they hope.Beit Rimon, a religious kibbutz, sits atop the Turan ridge, its rounded outcropping overhanging the village below, where Mohammed Dahla was born and where his father and grandfather and great-grandfather were born, too. We have been here for hundreds of years, Mohammed says. From time immemorial.
Another lie. Or a myth. Or both. I simply don't care. My father and my grandfather were born in Pittsburgh, as was I. So what? There are precious few places in the world where a Jew can say, "I was born here, my father and his father and his father or mother were born here." Jews have never been permitted to settle anywhere long enough to say that. Because of people like this Dahla. Except in the Land of Israel. In Eretz Yisrael, there are Jews who can say that. Perhaps several generations lived in a few other places as well, but it never lasted. There is nowhere else that Jews have always lived, nowhere else at all.
But to end at the beginning, which is the most frightful part of this article, especially once you've read the rest of it.So talk to me, attorney Mohammed Dahla will say to me. Talk to me, give me your hand, make me a partner. Because, like it or not, you are a minority in the Middle East. And even if your country takes part in the Eurovision song contest and plays basketball in Europe, if you open an atlas and look at the map for a minute, this is what you will see: 300 million Arabs all around, a billion-and-a-half Muslims. . . . Your only guarantee is me; your only way to survive in the Arab-Muslim world is to strike an alliance with me. Because if you don't do it, tomorrow will be too late. When you become a minority, you will look for me, but you won't be able to find me.
Dahla, as Shavit carefully explains, doesn't believe in a "two-state solution." Dahla requires one country, "Palestine," from the river to the sea. He's a generous man. He's willing to permit a Jewish minority to live as Dhimmis in "his Palestine." ("The whole idea of a minority is foreign to Islam," he says. "It is appropriate to Judaism but foreign to Islam.") But it's a limited time offer. Take it now or (he shrugs) it's out of his hands. We'll look for him, but we won't be able to find him. We'll be left to our fate, the one he doesn't quite threaten. But the word is there, peeping shyly from under his generous hospitality. Extermination.
Please read this article. Read all of it. Read "Conversation on the Beach," as well. They're telling us something important, these young "moderate" Arabs. They're deliberately showing us the future - the future they have every intention of creating. First with words. They have confidence in the power of their words to transform the past, the present and the future into the mold they have chosen for it. But behind the words, always the threat. Submit, or die. Extermination.
