World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [117]
16 Like whites in South Africa or Chinese in Indonesia, Israeli Jews are feared as much as they are hated. Every Arab in the Middle East is conscious that Israel has the backing of the most powerful nation in the world and that between 1948 and 1973 Israel won four wars, humiliating Arab forces that outnumbered them twenty to one.
Further, although the Arab countries generally are not democratizing, the ruling elites in these countries routinely engage in populist demagoguery, deliberately fomenting anti-Israeli sentiment, both to deflect criticism from themselves and to keep their frustrated populations united against a common enemy. At the same time, nonruling demagogues, including many highly influential Islamic clerics, also engage in anti-Israel baiting, whether out of sincere zealotry or for more instrumental reasons. Meanwhile, in Arab newspapers Jews are routinely referred to as “terrorists” and perpetrators of “genocide”: “Cartoons depicting Israelis and other Jews with Nazi-style uniforms and swastikas have now become standard,” writes Lewis. “These complement the Nazi-era hooked noses and blood-dripping jagged teeth.”
17 The increasingly influential Al-Jazeera, unusual in the Arab world for its journalistic independence, is simultaneously anti-Israel and “pan-Arabist,” observes Fouad Ajami. “These are reporters with a mission.”
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As a result, although there has been minimal democratization in the Arab Middle East, an intense, majority-based Arab ethnonationalism, along with tremendous hostility against Israeli Jews, nevertheless exists throughout the region. Although it is certainly not clear that fundamentalism is supported by a majority of Arabs—sentiment on the “Arab Street” varies considerably from country to country—there is no question that if popular elections were held throughout the Arab world, Israel would be a common whipping boy among vote-seeking politicians.
Today very few Arab states even formally recognize Israel’s “right to exist.” Worse, many Arabs in the Middle East seem committed to the policy, officially renounced by the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1993, of destroying Israel and “driving Israelis into the sea.” As David Remnick recently wrote: “Forget Hamas and Islamic Jihad and their culture of martyrdom and absolute victory. Last year, Faisal Husseini, a decided moderate among Yasar Arafat’s leadership ranks, gave an interview not long before he died in which he compared [the Oslo Accords of 1993] to a Trojan horse, an intermediate, tactical step leading to the elimination of Israel. He said, ‘If you are asking me as a Pan-Arab nationalist what are the Palestinian borders according to the higher strategy, I will immediately reply: From the river to the sea’”—that is, with no Israel on the map. Meanwhile in Iran, former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, speaking in a Tehran stadium shortly after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, “called for Israel’s nuclear destruction. A single nuclear bomb would be sufficient to destroy Israel, he said, whereas any Israeli counterstrike could do only limited damage.”
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Thus, despite its ancient roots and unique status as the crucible of religious strife, the conflict in the Middle East is also a striking manifestation of an intense majority-supported movement aimed at eliminating a despised