HISTORY THEN AND NOW
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Economic Community. What would the future State of Israel be like
in
that
case? It would, of course, be physically secure, but would the "Jewish experi–
ence" survive once the external pressure of the Muslim world ceases to exist?
Robert Wistrich:
The optimist might answer you by invoking Muslim
Spain-I am referring to the great Judeo-Arab Muslim civilization that
developed there, in the middle ages. That cultural symbiosis has often been
seen as one of the high points ofJewish his tory. Indeed in ninteenth-centu–
ry
Christian Europe, Muslim Spain and the achievements of Sephardic Jews
served as an example to Gentiles and Jews alike, concerning the benefits of
Jewish emancipation. So, the optimists could say that in the twenty-first cen–
tury we might have a Judeo-Arab economic pact which would make the
Middle East a flourishing region again. A new civilization could emerge.
There would be no more emphasis on Islam's hostility to the Jews, instead
we would be talking about the many affinities that have always existed
between Jews and Muslims, which run deeper than all the political and
mil–
itary strife of the twentieth century. I doubt that this rosy vision is about to
be fulfilled in the next five to ten years, though it is not quite as utopian as
many people imagine. The pessimists-or perhaps we should call them real–
ists-point to the deep and well-founded Israeli distrust of the Palestinians
and surrounding Arab nations, to hard-line Islamic rejection of Israel with
its total opposition to any Jewish state on what is seen as Muslim soil. In this
context, peace is only a tactic, a temporary truce until the moment of weak–
ness, when Israeli defenses are down or when Muslim Arab strength has
sufficiently risen. In between those views is the more probable emergence
of a pragmatic calculation that peace might bring mutual benefits. There is
no doubt that cooperation is preferable to confrontation, even if it is only
limited and gradual to begin with. In that case, what would be the meaning
of Israel's integration into the Middle East? For instance, could you ever have
significant interm.arriage for Jews and Arabs inside Israel or in the neighbor–
ing communities? It's unlikely but not beyond the bounds of possibility in
fifty years' time. There are however serious resistances to it even in the most
optimal conditions, which have their roots in both Judaism and Islam. On
the other hand, secular Arabs, like Israelis, are also drawn to Western culture
and although there is an anti-Western current in the Arab world, it may not
be so overwhelmingly strong as we might think. There might in the future
be a basis for some kind of cultural interaction as well as economic collabo–
ration. There is, after all, a certain Middle Eastern flavor in Israeli society
itself, not only among the Sephardic population, but simply as a result of liv–
ing in the region. I think cultural problems of identity and belonging will
increasingly be on the Israeli Jewish agenda, because I cannot imagine the
Middle East continuing in the state of conflict that has existed for the last
fifty years without a catastrophic outcome.
