Reading Mas’ud Khan’s account of his recent exchange with Melanie Phillips ([1], [2], [3]), I noticed that he had mentioned Neturei Karta to her, asking her whether she regarded them as “self-hating Jews”. NK, for anyone who’s never heard of them, are the men in black coats and top hats who you might find at pro-Palestinian demonstrations: they are strictly orthodox Jews who oppose Zionism. They are not the only group of Jews who oppose Israel or Zionism, but most others are secular leftists and not religious. I am sure some Muslims think that their presence demonstrates that we are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semites; in fact, we do not need them there to prove that.
NK are a highly unrepresentative, extremist fringe group, even among strictly religious Jews. It is a commonly heard claim that real religious Jews do not support Zionism or Israel, something that may have been true when there were several million Jews living in eastern Europe whose situation was gradually improving, and saw no justification, either religious or material, to relocate to Palestine, even if they prayed for restoration to their “real home”. The Holocaust, even though it was perpetrated by an invader, and various atrocities committed by Poles after the war, and probably the threat of a return to Russian domination (Imperial Russia was notorious for persecuting Jews) and communism, changed all that. The centres of Jewish settlement simply shifted over the course of about fifty years from eastern Europe and the Arab world to Israel and the English-speaking world, so the attitude of rabbis to the state of Israel would have shifted as a state called Israel changed from a political idea to a political reality. The fact that two generations have been born in Israel and call no other country home would have undoubtedly changed attitudes also.
To date, one particular group of religious Jews remains opposed to Zionism, namely the Satmar Hassidim, which originate in a part of north-west Romania (which was, when they lived there, part of Hungary). However, you will not find large numbers of Satmars on pro-Palestinian demonstrations; you will only find a handful of NK activists. Satmars mostly live quietly in north London and New York, and a few other places. They are not anti-Zionist because of particular concern for Palestinians; they have those beliefs for their own religious reasons. NK are not particularly well-respected among their own people, not only because of their anti-Zionist stance, but because of the extremes to which they go with it, even turning up at a Holocaust denial conference in Iran. Most Muslims would baulk at that. Can anyone imagine how Jews see it?
We cannot rely on telling Jews what their religion says about Zionism based on what a small minority tells us. Perhaps we should not compare the NK rabbis to someone like Abdul-Hadi Palazzi, who is not a real shaikh, but we should remember how much credibility our scholars lose when they are seen to be cosying up to not only powerful non-Muslims, but also to the rulers of Muslim countries (the various Egyptian state muftis are a classic example). We should remember the scorn heaped upon Nasir al-Albani because of his fatwa that Muslims evacuate Palestine on the grounds of it being “dar al-harb”, or the scholars who signed the fatwa authorising the American presence in Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War. Why would a rabbi who was seen as telling the Iranians and the Muslim Brotherhood what they want to hear have any credibility among Jews?
Besides, we are Muslims, not Jews, and we have our own reasons for opposing the foreign colonisation of one of our lands, whether it be Palestine or eastern Turkestan and whether the invaders are Jewish Zionists, French and German Crusaders, Chinese communists or whoever. Whenever the Muslim lands have been invaded, Muslims have fought, regardless of whether the invaders’ religion sanctioned it (usually, it did, or at least their leaders claimed it did). We did not oppose Zionism because of anti-Semitism or because our heads were full of Nazi propaganda, as some Jews have ludicrously claimed recently. Islam is clear on the status of other religions: they are superseded by Islam, and their scriptures, such as they remain, are no longer valid, which is why we see no problem with Muslim control of Jerusalem and its environs, under which Christian and Jewish places of worship and pilgrimage survived a whole lot better than Islamic and Christian places have under Israeli rule, during which some of them have been demolished, even cemeteries, to make way for car parks and luxury hotels.
There are also secular reasons to oppose the existence of Israel, let alone its dominance of the whole of former Mandate Palestine. The right of refugees to settle elsewhere to avoid persecution, let alone mass murder, is not in dispute, and if some of them put down roots in their new country, there is no problem with them staying. This does not entitle them to a state of their own at the expense of another people, particularly when that people were not their persecutors, otherwise we would have turned over chunks of south-east London to Somalia and Nigeria. I cannot think of any other incident in history of a persecuted people being given a state elsewhere after the persecution had abated, or of a large group of people being allowed to “return” to where their ancestors lived 2,000 years ago at the expense of the present inhabitants; anti-Semitism in Europe was on the decline and Jews were increasingly being accepted as normal citizens until the Nazis came to power. Of course, the bad faith of many of the western powers, which among other things took steps to prevent Jews coming in and sent them back to Europe, cannot be forgotten in all of this.
In conclusion, we should emphasise our own reasons for the Muslim claim to Palestine as an Islamic country inhabited by its own native people, the Palestinian Arabs, Muslim and Christian. We should not emphasise the Jewish religious claim that Israel (under whatever name) is only to be re-established by the Messiah, as we do not believe that, Christians do not believe that, and the Jews who believe that are a small minority.
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That was a very clear summary. Many thanks for that.
dominance of the whole of former Mandate Palestine..
What rubbish. Compare the size of Israel with that of Jordan.
OP: Jordan is mostly desert, and it had been hived off long before 1948 (i.e. it was no longer part of Palestine). It is preposterous to expect all the Palestinian Arabs to settle in Jordan, because it is not sufficiently watered and fertile.
In the case of religious jews it is probably true that many of them do not support Israel per se but that they do support it from fear for or sympathy with their fellow-jews living there. http://www.pnas.org/content/104/18/7357.full has some interesting points. It looks rather as though people with religious claims to land - whether jewish or muslim- are as concerned with their “ethical” right to possess it being recognised as with the utilitarian aspects of actually being there.
Isn’t anti-Zionism essentially futile, given Israel’s nuclear arsenal?
I expect that in 50 years time, Israel will be the “North Korea” of the Middle East - a pariah state which relies on MAD to keep its neighbours from wiping it out.
I expect it will also have expelled or exterminated the Palestinians (they’ll do it once the demographic threat becomes so great that they’re no longer scared of becoming a pariah state)
Jordan is mostly desert
As was Israel before the Jews made the desert bloom.
Making the desert bloom is a simple matter of applying water to it, something that’s difficult to do however if there’s not much there, as is the case with large chunks of Jordan. Somehow the Palestinians had managed to grow oranges and olives, among other things, in Palestine before the Jews got there to show them how to farm.
I entirely appreciate what you’re saying, but I think that you’re missing the point just a little bit. Neuterei Karta went to the Iranian holocaust conference to make a point about the way in which the holocaust has been used to defend Israel’s indefensible behaviors of oppression and genocide. Neuterei Karta is pretty upfront and clear and speaks rather eloquently about the way that Judaism has been used to promote and defend Zionism, and that real Judaism, in their eyes, makes no claim to that narrow strip of land by the Dead Sea. Unlike most Israelis and Zionists, it’s my feeling that Neuterei Karta’s rhetoric has moved forward since the late 19th century.
What “Palestinians”? Jews have lived in what is now Israel for thousands of years. Since when has there been a “Palestinian” people of just Arabs? Since 1967, when it was politically expedient.
As for those olives etc - precious little. It was only when the Jews moved in and put the land to work that most of the Arabs came to this pretty barren area.
Quoted from blog post:
“even turning up at a Holocaust denial conference in Iran. Most Muslims would baulk at that. Can anyone imagine how Jews see it?”
Firstly. it was called “International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust”, and it was not a “Holocaust denial” conference.
Secondly, here are excerpts of what Neturei Karta had to say about it:
Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss “I mean somebody has to be, I think, either very very embittered or a person who doesn’t want to open his mind to study, to say that the Jewish people weren’t exterminated. The fact is that there were millions and millions of Jewish people living in Europe before World War II. Poland, the statistics say around 3 million, and Hungary there was over half a million, maybe close to a million and you go through Slovakia, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Ukraine, they were all full of Jewish people, full of Jewish communities and today they don’t exist. And almost nobody tries to refute that. It would be ridiculous to refute it because the fact is, the Jewish people were there and now they are not there.
Rabbi Aharon Cohen: “There is no doubt whatsoever, that during World War II there developed a terrible and catastrophic policy and action of genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany against the Jewish People, confirmed by innumerable eyewitness survivors and fully documented again and again. I personally was spared the worst effects of the War because I was living in England which thankfully was not occupied by Nazi Germany. However, I and many many others lost countless friends and relatives who perished under the Nazi rule by intentional murder and genocide. Three million Jews in Poland, more than half a million in Hungary, many tens or hundreds of thousands in Russia, Slovakia, France, Belgium, Holland and more. The figure of six million is regularly quoted. One may wish to dispute this actual figure, but the crime was just as dreadful whether the millions (and there were millions) of victims numbered six million, five million or four million. The method of murder is also irrelevant, whether it was by gas chamber (and there were eyewitnesses to this), firing squads or whatever. The evil was the same. It would be a terrible affront to the memory of those who perished to belittle the guilt of the crime in any way.”
I imagine that Jews (aught to) see it as representative of the voice of History.
References: http://www.nkusa.org/activitie.....ACohen.cfm http://www.nkusa.org/activitie.....Speech.cfm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I....._Holocaust
Yusuf, I disagree with this post.
I agree it is no concern of any community or group to impose on the other what they should believe or practice.
At the same time, NK do indeed represent the opinion of Europe’s religious Jewry’s on Zionism at its advent, this includes all shades of orthodoxy. NK document the opinion of prominent Rabbis on this issue.
That being said, opinions change with social and political context and now many Jews, for whatever reason, have accepted to live with Zionism or at least accept its presence, for the cultural and even economic backing of their religious institutions and schools. At the end, Zionism struck a middle deal with the religious element, who were at first at odds with Zionism, similarly how other secular movements have struck a deal with religious elements in the Arab world. The state sponsorship of cultural Islamic schools and madrasas in countries such as Egypt and Syria, has ensured the support of the religious circles. However, if you go back to the fall of the Ottoman state, many of the religious considered these secular developments as blasphemy. See for example the opinions of Shaikh-ul-Islam Mustafa Sabri in his Arabic writings, they were damning of the cultural movements and ideas that circulated in his time, but by today’s standards these very same ideas are accepted socially and no one would blink an eye.
Hoever the point remains, judging by traditional scholarship much of the opinions of Yusuf Al-Qaradawi and other Azharites would be viewed as a heresy by medievel standards, just as was the case with Rasheed Rida and Muhammad Abdu in their time.
When Palestine was colonised in 1948, the scholars of Palestine declared anyone who makes peace over any part of Palestine as an apostate. Today the ‘Ulama of Palestine are part of a Wakf funded by the PA and good as sanctioned and funded by them, at the same time.
Religious attitudes may change, but by tradition NK are authentic to orthodox Judaism. Numbers don’t count. Didn’t one of the early Muslims say that the community of truth can be one, if you were upon it?
@ Old Pickler
Ottoman Palestine may have been underutilized wasteland, but it wasn’t a desert in climatic terms (except for the Negev, which is still desert even today).
The Ottomans probably neglected Palestine (along with the other Arab lands) because their empire’s centre of gravity was in the same place as that of its Byzantine predecessor — in the Balkans and Anatolia.
As for the Palestinian people, before 1948 they would have identified themselves as Muslims (or Christians as the case may be), or by their home city. They would have been unlikely to identify themselves by region, but if they had, they would have regarded themselves as “Southern Syrians”.
Palestinian nationalism was born out of the resistance to Zionism, and without Israel there wouldn’t be a Palestinian nation. Similarly, German nationalism would have been far weaker without Napoleon, and Zionism itself would not have become so militaristic were it not for the Holocaust.
“Ottoman Palestine may have been underutilized wasteland”
George, Palestine was no wasteland at all, there was a vibrant Palestinian Arab population, including Jews (who were classified as a religion), Christians and Muslims. In fact, Al-Jazeera ran a documentary a few days ago about Haifa in the 1920s and it covered the cultural movement in Palestine, including poets, writers and newspapers. Beirut was also a centre of Arabic literature, a well developed press and the home of many different movements and ideas. Same was the case in Syria. The Sham (the Levant) region was vibrant. OP hasn’t a clue, because, well, she is a small Englander, and hears snippets here and there and then reaches an opinion. You know what they say about a little knowledge. It would be similar to an Arab, in Beirut, pontificating how London was in the 1920s, while not knowing a word of English or opening a book of English literature. In other words, she is prejudiced.
I don’t think you’re a native English speaker Polycarp - the phrase is “little Englander” :)
GC: under Ottoman rule, northern Palestine was part of Jerusalem governorate (wilayat), while the central and southern parts formed the district (sanjak) of Jerusalem, which was directly subject to central government in Istanbul.
Most Jews look at Neturei Karta in the same way as how most Muslims would look at Walid Shoebat.
No, it isn’t clear if Walid Shoebat was ever a Muslim.
Abdul-Hadi Palazzi’s Italian Muslim Association would be more accurate inverse of Neturei Karta.
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