al-Andalus: The Promised Land

by Aron Trauring

As I look back on this weblog, which I have been maintaining for five months, I see a long string of very sad articles about conflict and despair. By my nature, I am a very optimistic person. And despite all the sadness and death, I still have hope for the future. This article lays out my own vision of hope.

Ari Shavit is the Christopher Hitchens of the Israeli left. A few years ago he became enamored of Bibi Netanyahu and his policies, and since then he has "switched." You need to understand that before reading the two parts of this article, which just appeared in Ha'aretz weekend magazine. It's a long article, but well worth the read.

With remarkable restraint, Shavit let's his friend Mohammed Dahla speak for himself. Shavit's point is to prove his current world view: "Even the so-called 'good' Arabs want us out of here. So we need to be ready for endless war. There is no possibility for compromise."

Of course, Jabotinsky would have told Shavit that it was his arrogance that blinded him in the first place. How could he think that the Arabs would want to give up their home? They are not savages. But Shavit is still not really hearing what Dahla is saying. Dahla offers friendship, but all Shavit and Israeli society offer in return is an Iron Wall.

Read the articles. An analysis follows:

[Part I]
[Part II]

Mohammed's main argument is as follows. This country belonged to the Arabs for hundreds of years. They became the indigenous people. The fact that two thousand years ago the Jews once owned it is irrelevant. There is and was a people who are the owners. "The only right [the Jews] had was the right of distress."

This in fact parallel's Isaac Deutscher's argument. Yes the plight of Eastern European Jewry needed a solution. And the Jewish Holocaust just proved that. But the solution to Jewish distress came on the back of the Palestinian Arabs.

Had the Jews acted differently to the Arabs, things might have turned out differently. If the Jews hadn't insisted on their absolute cultural rights, had they pursued a path of bi-nationalism instead of colonial conquest, perhaps the Arabs would have reconciled themselves to let the Jews live among them, out of pity for their plight.

But even in the 1920s, the Arab nationalists saw where Jewish nationalism was leading. As the Arab editor Jabotinsky approvingly quotes says:

"In this way the Jews will, little by little, become a majority and, ipso facto, a Jewish state will be formed and the fate of the Arab minority will depend on the goodwill of the Jews. But was it not the Jews themselves who told us how ‘pleasant’ being a minority was?"

Sadly this prophetic statement became true. When the Jewish state was founded, the Jews proceeded to act like masters. They began to eradicate all traces of the natives hold on the land. They rubbed the Arabs' face in their defeat with supreme arrogance. They humiliated the Arabs and treated them with indifference at best, with contempt and violence at worse.

Indeed, this is Mohammed Dahla greatest complaint. And yet, despite all this, he and the rest of the Palestinian Arabs were still willing to reach an historical compromise with the Jewish colony.

"...when the Oslo accords were signed, in September 1993, Dahla was persuaded that the only viable solution was that of two states."

So what went wrong?

"A few months before the Camp David summit of July 2000, Dahla already understood that there was no hope for the Oslo process. That what was called the "peace process" was actually the submission of the Palestinian people, a sophisticated stratagem to "launder" the occupation. But after Camp David, he was totally convinced: The Israeli nation is not ripe for a historic conciliation. The Israelis are not yet ready to give the Palestinians minimal historic justice. Consequently, he reached the conclusion that there is no avoiding a struggle; that there is no choice but to shake up the Israeli society. To make them understand that in the end, the solution will take a binational form - one state, democratic, between the river and the sea. A state in which the Jewish Law of Return will be complemented by a Palestinian right of return. A state in which the settlers in Hebron will be able to stay in their homes just as it will allow the refugees of the devastated villages to return to the ruins of their homes."

In his commentaries, and others of the right, Shavit claims that the Arab's aim is the destruction of the Jews. But that is not at all what Dahla wants. He is not even asking to abolish the Jewish right to emigrate to Israel. He wants a bi-national democratic society.

As Dahla points out (and as others have as well) demography guarantees that ethnically the Jews can never be a majority in Palestine. So Shavit, following Jabotinsky, would say that conceding to bi-nationalism means the end of the "Jewish state." Jabotinsky argues the Jews have an absolute moral right to this land, so bi-nationalism is a defeatist approach. And besides, haven't we Jews learned "how ‘pleasant’ being a minority was?" Why should we agree to be a minority in our own land? What guarantees will we have that the Arabs, when they are the majority, won't treat us even worse than we treated them? The Jewish right sees the current state of Israel as the period of the "third temple." As such it must be an exclusively Jewish enclave. This model guarantees perpetual cultural war between us and the Arabs.

Looking back on the past, one can only despair. Why couldn't the Jews, in 1967, at the height of victory, followed Deutscher or Leibowitz and reached out to the Palestinians in compassion and reconciliation? Why have we continued to be so blinded by our distress, that we can't open our hearts in compassion to the distress of the Palestinians? And now, after all that we have done, is it too late? Is all hope of reconciliation gone?

Dahla talks alot about his Arabic and Islamic heritage. He also talks about the fact that the Arabs have the mentality of a majority while the Jews have the mentality of a minority. I am currently reading a book called "The Ornament of the World," by Maria Rosa Menocal. It is about al-Andalus, the Islamic civilization in Spain that lasted for over 700 years. Reading this book, I believe the past can bring us hope as well.

Since we have irrevocably moved the conflict to a cultural plane, we must be reminded of a culture, a Muslim Arab culture, where Arab rulers let Jewish and Christian culture flourish. It is in fact a jewel in human history, something perhaps unique - a culture that did not promote superficial "multi-culturalism" but allowed quite separate cultures to live side by side. al-Andalus was not a "tolerant" society, which implies passive acceptance. Rather, it actively encouraged and promoted the highest levels of intellectual and artistic pursuit in a both separate and shared culture of language, art, science and music.

When the victorious Christian rulers declared the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 from Spain, the leader of the Jewish community, Abravanel, asked that the date of expulsion be postponed, so that it falls on the Ninth of the Jewish month of Ab - the traditional date marking the destruction of the Jewish temples.

"Abravanel engineered it so that at least history would understand the depth and breadth of the loss, by recalling the date of this second diaspora when commemorating the first. Abravanel wanted it to remain forever clear that the expulsion from Spain, called Sefared, marked the catclysmic end of a long sojourn in a promised land."

Menocal notes the extreme poignancy of these Jewish exiles writing their laments while living in Safed, Israel! How ironic that the greatest pre-modern Jewish community saw an Arab Muslim polity as "the promised land."

I should note that al-Andalus was founded by the Ummayad caliph Abd-al-Rahman, who fled Syria from the usurping Abbasids. al-Andalus was established as a refuge for exiles. I should also note that Israel/Palestine was historically part of Syria during the many centuries of Arab rule. When al-Andalus was destroyed by the Christians, it marked another exile for both Arabs and Jews.

In our current bloody and sad cultural war, it is time to renew the "ornament of the world." The cultural notion of "the promised land" in Jewish history has been flexible, as the Abravanel story shows. The establishment of a bi-national state can end these many exiles for both Jews and Arabs. The re-establishment in Palestine/Israel of al-Andalus, solves the refugee problem for both peoples. Equally important, it can heal the wounds of the past, and bring with it a promise of hope and cultural renewal.