Arabs hate Jews. That is the reality. There may be some exceptions to this rule but it IS the rule. And it seems to have been that way for decades, perhaps going back to the earliest days of Zionist enterprise in Israel. With the upcoming elections in Israel and the prospect of giving up more land to the Palestinians if as predicted, Kadima wins the elections I thought I would present my own overview of what the source of that hatred is. I do not claim this to be the quintessential truth of the situation nor will I provide any documentation. It is my own thinking on the issue based on a lifetime of observations, impressions, and analysis. I freely admit it may be flawed.
So, Why do they hate us? When I was a young man learning at HTC in 1969, I remember a statement made by my Rebbe, Rav Aaron Soloveichik during one of his Shiurim. I believe it was during a Blatt Shiur of the Gemarah in Gittin 2B that talks about the borders of Eretz Israel and the Tosphos there discussing Kedushas Eretz Israel, Kivush Yachid/Kivush Rabbim... and what is Kedusha L’Shaytah and what is Kedusha L’Asid Lavoh. The statement was as follows:
"If not for the Torah, the Arabs would be right!"
Remember that Rav Aharon was one of the biggest Kanoim for holding on to all the land captured in the six day war. He was a strident supporter of this view and held that it was Assur to give any land ever re-captured by the Jewish people. He was anti-Oslo and he was one of the few Gedolei HaDor who actually said Hallel on Yom HaAtzmaut.
This statement: “If not for the Torah, the Arabs would be right” has stayed with me all these years. I think that understanding the underlying premise of the statement would go a long way to understanding why the Arabs do indeed hate us.
The question is, why would the Arabs be right, if not for the Torah? Does the world recognize this statement? Why did the UN partition Palestine into 2 states in 1948? Was it because of the Torah? I don’t think so. If not then according to my Rebbe, the UN should have denied Israel its existence and there should be no support for Israel at all, for as RAS has said, without the Torah... the Arabs are right. To put it another way, the Arabs have a moral superiority in their claims if not for God clearly titling the land of Israel to His people.
This is indeed the crux of the belief by an Arab about the Jewish presence in what he considers his land. To an Arab, the State of Israel is nothing more than an imperialist presence by foreign invaders much the same as the Afrikaner was viewed by the indigenous population of South Africa. This is indeed the correct view. If one honestly looks at the situation one cannot have any other view.
The enmity predates the establishment of the State. By May of 1948 the Arabs long ago considered Jews to be the enemy.
Let us turn back the clock to the turn of the century and the very advent of modern Zionism. Herzl created a movement as a result of what he considered irreversible anti-Semitism ingrained in society. It was made painfully clear to him during the Alfred Dreyfus trial which he covered as an assimilated Jewish Viennese reporter. This was followed by British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour’s declaration viewing as favorable by His Majesty’s government, the right of return by all Jews to a homeland in Palestine.
If one goes back in time to pre-Zionist Palestine, one will likely not find any extraordinary anti-Jewish feelings on the part of the Arabs. The indigenous Palestinian Arabs at that time were nothing more than primitive nomadic Bedouins with virtually no concepts of nationhood. This was probably true about much of the Middle East. To the best of my knowledge there were no nation states like Jordan or Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait. These were Arabs... Muslims... with a primitive culture.
The Arabs of Palestine had no state then nor did they have any aspirations to Statehood. They were happy to live in their various environments or neighborhoods and were probably oblivious to the Yishuv HaYashan that the Talmidei HaGra and other religious non-Zionists were immigrating to. Everyone at that time, Jews and Arabs alike, lived in pretty primitive conditions. But they lived together, side by side without any anti-social attitudes toward each other. If anything, I would bet that the Arabs were at first very hospitable to Jews as that is the nature of their culture.
But... after the advent of political Zionism and the Balfour declaration, European Jews started making massive immigration to Palestine. A Jewish agency was formed and land was purchased and/or occupied on a massive scale. All of a sudden there was a large presence of foreigners, European Jews, who were involved in taking over... creating farms, and cities and the infrastructure of a modern nation. These new idealist immigrant Jews began the process of reclaiming Eretz Israel and in the process creating the new Zionist, modern secular State of Israel.
In the meantime Arabs were bewildered by all this new activity. Land was sold by wealthy Turkish landowners and other like-minded absentee owners, to the newly created Jewish Agency. Often land squatting Bedouin Arabs were in many cases evicted leaving them in a trail of dust.
What the Arabs then saw was a gradual usurpation of land they had lived on peacefully as Bedouins for many hundreds of years by a European imperialist Zionist entity which had absolutely no legitimacy in their eyes. They did not view the Abrahamic Covenant with any validity (any more than did the founding fathers of modern Zionism). The indigenous Arabs remained in relative poverty while these new immigrants were involved in bettering their lot, while building a new nation. The Arabs through no fault of their own due largely to their primitive status unwittingly and unwillingly became second class citizens even while their physical existence was improving. This improvement was in large part due to their improved economic circumstances as laborers in physically building the new Israeli nation. Their ignorant bliss was soon replaced with the cruel realization that a new power was usurping their land and dominating their people. This made them angry and resentful and culminated in a vengeful mob perpetrating the 1929 massacre in Chevron.
This anger has persisted to this very day and it seems to have grown exponentially. It is exacerbated by both religious and cultural ideals which are espoused on a daily basis by Muslim clerics and political leaders who use Palestinians as pawns.
It doesn’t matter that the Arab militants and terrorists of today were not alive at the advent of modern Zionism. The hate is passed on from generation to generation in increasing intensity. The hate is exploited by both the clerics and the secular despots. Suicide missions are looked upon as both a religious duty and/or a matter of Arabic honor. To the Arab mind, Jews are both the evil infidels and the colonialist occupier that has illegally occupied Arab Palestine.
The Arabs view greater Palestine as an historical and religious right that they are entitled to, but because of foreign meddling (mostly by the USA) they are denied from having. There are two mindsets and both... or either... can be present in the same person. The political mindset believes that they are being denied their dominant sphere of influence as Muslims and Arabs by the presence in the very heart of the region the Zionist entity known as the State of Israel. The religious mindset believes that Jews are infidel impediments to an ultimate pan-Arab Islamic society.
So there you have it. A century of enmity, combined with Israel’s need to protect itself which exacerbates the hatred. Will that hatred ever cease? I don’t know but maybe if Israel cuts off the population centers by ceding the land where those population centers are located we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. But then again maybe not. Maybe the point of no return has long passed.
