Arab racism prevents peace
Op-ed: Hebron house dispute highlights Arab desire for Middle East free of any Jewish presence
Giulio Meotti
The invisible headlines go beyond the settlers who
Not even Nazi Germany in the 1930s knew this level of anti-Jewish pathology.
Textbooks promote racism
In that sense, Hebron is a test: The only Palestinian city with a Jewish presence in its midst. It is a safe bet that the ordinary Israeli population will say that given a choice between a Jewish presence in Hebron and peace, they would, with little hesitation, choose the latter. But all the news from Hebron provide proof that no such choice exists. It’s an illusion.
The simple fact is that the Arabs consider everything in and around Hebron, as indeed they do everything in the land of Israel, to be sacred Muslim land. Jews had lived in Hebron as “dhimmis,” second-class residents, forbidden to pray in the Cave and humiliatingly confined to the seventh step leading into the building.
In December 2010, PA President Mahmoud Abbas said that “I will never allow a single Israeli to live among us on Palestinian land.” Such a state would be the first to prohibit Jews or any other faith since Nazi Germany.
This obsessive logic just drew Abbas to honor with a medal veteran White House Correspondent Helen Thomas, who has provoked a storm in the US after saying the Jews must “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Germany or Poland. However, this is racism that goes well beyond the Palestinians.
Laws hampering Jewish life in Arab countries are the customary condition, not the exception. Saudi Arabia doesn’t even permit Jewish visitors, let alone Jewish foreign employees. As a matter of policy, the Jordanians do not permit Jews to be domiciled in their country. This racist view, found Arab textbooks and taught in the schools of all Arab nations, is the ultimate bar to real peace in the area, not the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria.
In 1942, the Nazis gathered in a villa outside Berlin and adopted the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Back then, anti-Semites wanted to make the world “Judenrein” – Free of Jews. In 2012, anti-Semites want to make the world “Judenstaatrein” – Free of a Jewish state.
Giulio Meotti, a journalist with Il Foglio, is the author of the book A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism
