Well, well. So Mahmoud Abbas doesn’t like the idea of a “Jewish” state, that is, a state connected to a particular people or a particular religion. Or sometimes to a particular people and a particular religion. Mahmoud Abbas, you see, rejects that idea, and so he must object to the belief of so many Arab Muslims that what should count for Arabs are only two things: Islam and, within Islam, as a vehicle for Arab linguistic, cultural, and other forms of imperialism, the supremacy of those who possess ‘Uruba, or Arabness. He’s apparently all for “diversity” and the universal rights of man, and so on. Or is he? Let’s see.
Let’s start with a few questions.
What does Mahmoud Abbas think of the official title of the country we call Egypt – that is, “The Arab Republic of Egypt”? What does he think of the Christian Copts, the original Egyptians, who were there long before the Muslim Arabs arrived? And when they did arrive, they killed, or forcibly converted, or converted over time through inexorable and sometimes unbearable pressure, many of the indigenous Copts, even making them take Arabic names and think that they were Arabs, forgetting their own Coptic identity.
And what does Mahmoud Abbas think of the country we in the West call Syria, but that is actually -- and this is important for the Arabs -- the Syrian Arab Republic. Why put that word “Arab” in? Are there not hundreds of thousands of Armenians in Haleb (Aleppo)? Are there not some Maronites and other Christians who, in the Middle East, are prior in time to the Muslims? And why was it, do you think, when Egypt and Syria briefly joined, until irreconcilable differences between the rulers of Syria and Nasser of Egypt caused a split, was that conjoined country known by the name The United Arab Republic?
Then there is Jordan. That’s what we call it. But it’s not what the Arabs call it. No, they call it “The Arab Kingdom of Jordan.” Not the Kingdom of Jordan, but The Arab Kingdom of Jordan.
In the Gulf itself the richest of the sheikdoms -- seven of them have joined to form one country -- are known as the United Arab Emirates. And the largest and richest country on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf is Saudi Arabia, in case anyone were tempted to forget who the people in the peninsula are.
Over in North Africa, there are millions and millions of Berbers, but you wouldn’t know it by the outward aspect of the countries where Arabs have everywhere subdued the Berbers, everywhere made it hard to study and use the Berber language or to preserve Berber culture that predates the arrival of the Arabs and Islam. And some countries put into their own names the assertion of an Arab identity. There’s Libya, for example. You read about Libya in the papers. You hear our policymakers prate about Libya. But Libya is more than just Libya. Libya is, officially, the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
All over what is so inaccurately, and so unfairly, called “the Arab world,” there are non-Arabs: not only those Berbers mainly in Morocco and Algeria, but also Kurds in Iraq, black Africans in the Sudan, and there are non-Muslims too: Maronites, Copts, Chaldo-Assyrians, even Samaritans, Yazidis, Armenian Christians, Greek Orthodox, Melkites, and others. But we are presented, and our leaders appear to believe, that there is just this “Arab World” and then, quite out of place, Israel. How wrong they are not to see through time and space, what North Africa, and the Middle East, contain.
By the way, does anyone remember the Ta’if Accord? In it, Saudi Arabia forced down the throats of the Lebanese Christians -- with a State Department representative, David somebody or other, there as a passive observer who had no idea of the significance of what was being demanded -- in the second clause of that agreement, the requirement that Lebanon, that is, Lebanon’s Christians, who had for centuries regarded the fastnesses of Lebanon as their redoubt against the Muslims who in the Middle East seemed to surround them, be called an “Arab” country. Here’s that clause B, the significance of which has entirely escaped the State Department, but which all Arabs, and all those Christians in Lebanon who use Arabic and may even have Arab names but are not Arabs , understand: "B. Lebanon is Arab in belonging and identity. It is an active and founding member of the Arab League and is committed to the league's charter." That was a blow to the Maronites and, to a lesser extent, other Christians. But the malevolent Saudis were there to dictate terms, not to satisfy any Christians, Lebanese or otherwise.
Then, of course, all the Muslim countries in which Arabs are a majority, or if not a majority at least the dominant power, are members of the Arab League. There is Arab this, and there is Arab that. But Mahmoud Abbas? He’s worried about the Jewish commonwealth that was re-established on a strip of land one-one-thousandth, or even less, of the total land area of the countries that compose the Arab League. He thinks it’s terrible for Israelis to think there ought to be one place in the world where Jews have political expression as Jews, and that that place ought to be where ancient Israel existed and where Jews have lived continuously, through the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Turks, and the British, and to which Jews everywhere, as we all know, continued to express a longing -- the one to be found in that allusion to “next year in Jerusalem” or “in Zion and Jerusalem."
So choose sides. Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide. Are you with Mahmoud Abbas, who was for decades Arafat’s loyal henchman in the most vicious activities, and who now presents himself, suit-and-tied, as a Fayyad type, a no-one-here-but-us-accountants type -- please forget his Holocaust-denying thesis at good old Moscow U. -- the kind of man who is just so sweet-reasonable compared to, say, Benjamin Netanyahu or Avigdor Lieberman? But Lieberman and Netanyahu do not want to wipe out the Arabs, or destroy every last Arab country. They simply want to ensure that Israel survives. That’s it. They don’t have a book that inculcates the idea that the entire world belongs to them, that they must engage in a “struggle” or Jihad to ensure that all obstacles to the spread and dominance of Judaism are removed.
Israel's survival, or the satisfaction of the likes of Mahmoud Abbas. Israel’s survival, or the State of Palestine, the Arab State of Palestine.
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