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camps in Cyprus came to its shores, along with hundreds of thousands
of Jews who were uprooted from their homes in Arab countries.
In the triangular arena, the return of the Jewish people to the Land of
Israel demanded a theological and mythic revolution from the Muslim
nations, a recognition of both the right of the Jewish people to return and
establish itself as a political entity (beyond its status as a protected com–
munity, a "dimmi," under Muslim rule) and its right
to
reestablish a state
in a place that, since the Muslim conquest in the eighth century, had
become a "land of jihad," where there is no place
to
establish a "state of
infidels," either Jewish or Christian. (This is beyond the understandable
fear of a massive immigration of foreigners.) The mythic revolution did
not take place and did not produce the processes that would enable a
profound Muslim-Arab recognition of the right of the State of Israel to
exist. Instead, the destruction of the Jewish settlement in the Land of
Israel under the Muslim conquest in the eighth century and the expulsion
of the Crusader Kingdom by Salah-ah-Din, still fresh in Muslim memory
at a mythic level, allowed Zionism and the establishment of the State of
Israel to be perceived as a new Christian-Jewish attack on the soil of
Islam. (The Balfour Declaration of the British Mandate, which came
about at the fall of the Ottoman Empire, was a crucial incentive for the
establishment of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel.) The Jews are
seen alternately as agents of Christian expansion in its modern form
(colonialism, capitalism, global economics) or as an "export" of the Jew–
ish-Christian problem to the damaged and exploited Arab world that
now has to pay the price of European guilt (while repressing the emigra–
tion of Jews from Arab countries). Beginning with the invasion of the
armies of seven Arab states right after the State of Israel was declared in
I948-and with the rejection of the UN partition plan of I947-the
Arab states have conducted most of the military struggle against Israel. .
In that struggle, the Palestinians turned into the tip of a spear.
But beyond the demographic and territorial struggle, identifying Jews
as victims in the Western Christian post-Holocaust discussion constituted
a new kind of ethical and religious threat
to
the demands of the Pales–
tinians. In the mythic triangle, they tried to oust Jews from the role of the
victim, competing for it themselves. Hence, the systematic and prolonged
denial of the Holocaust in the Arab world, and the metamorphosis of the
war of 1947-1949 into a substitute Holocaust (in its Arabic name,
Nakba,
destruction). Beyond the trauma of destruction and uprooting,
Palestinians were cast as the real victim
(verus martyr)
of the real Holo–
caust, ostracized and holy pariah. This role is at the root of the tragedy.
