Arab antisemitism and Israeli colonialism need careful examination

Concerning the oldest hatred in the world

Does this artwork depict typical relations between Arabs and Jews?

Woke Watch Canada is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber or making a one-time or recurring donation to show your support.

By

Hymie Rubenstein

It’s called the world’s oldest hatred for good reason because antisemitism goes back to the beginning of the 6th century with the birth of Islam in what is now Saudi Arabia.

That is why assertions by Arab commentators and their allies need to be questioned when they make false claims about the pernicious practice of Jew hatred.

Pro-Palestinian activists have repeatedly claimed that Palestinian education is a deliberate casualty of the Hamas/Israeli war, an antisemitic assertion because it distorts the facts on the ground.

Although it is clear that Israeli military actions have adversely affected Palestinian education in Gaza and the West Bank, as it does warfare in any urban area, blame for this lies entirely with the Palestinians and their beloved Hamas leadership who started this war with the approval of their people, as the following points show.

• As one commentator grudgingly acknowledges, “Israel claims that militant groups like Hamas use civilian infrastructure, including schools, to hide weapons, plan attacks, and launch rockets, effectively turning these locations into military targets.” This claim is factual because it is supported by abundant physical evidence. 

• This same Arab editorial writer says this destruction is widely termed “scholasticide,” meaning the deliberate destruction of educational opportunities, services, and infrastructure, an assertion easily contradicted by the generous funding by the Israeli government aimed at allowing Palestinian children to survive and thrive in a changing world including possible statehood

• Conversely, true scholasticide, unfettered to colonialism, has always existed in the chauvinistic Moslem world. Currently, girls in Afghanistan are banned from attending school past grade 6.

• Claiming that Israel is deliberately killing Gazan civilians, including schoolchildren, both by war and a policy of starvation has long been exposed as a lie. None of Israel’s attempts to defeat Hamas are meant “to deliberately impose conditions of life designed to lead to the group’s physical destruction, either in whole or in part,” as formalized in the 1948 United Nations legal definition of genocide. Instead, any hardships suffered by Palestinian students are an indirect result of Israel’s attempt to destroy Hamas, a vile militant group hell-bent on the genocidal extermination of all its Jewish people.

• If it is correct that Palestinians now have one of the highest literacy rates in the world, the large body of evidence showing that Palestinian people only began to thrive in livelihood and educational attainment following the migration of thousands of Zionists to their Promised Land beginning in the late-19^th century also needs to be acknowledged

• The contention that there has been a “concerted effort by Israel to control the curriculum taught in Palestinian schools” colonial-style cannot be taken seriously because the entire content of teaching is controlled by the local Palestinian Authority and includes copious amounts of anti-Jewish, anti-Israeli propaganda. Moreover, there is no Palestinian cultural suppression in the Palestinian educational system.

Neither is there any resemblance between the education of Palestinian children and what some commentators call the dark history of indigenous education at Indian Residential Schools in Canada.

Many elements of this “dark history” have been debunked here, here, here, here, and here). And there is no documented evidence that “police and school officials raided Indigenous villages and forcibly hauled children away to residential schools where a colonial system was imposed that stripped children of their ability to speak their languages and practice their cultures.” If this were true, there would be no indigenous cultures left.

More particularly, there is no equivalence between the voluntary Arabic language education of Palestinian children, whose aim is to create an exclusive and unique hegemonic Palestinian cultural identity to replace the former inclusive and traditional Moslem Arab one and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. Indeed, many indigenous activists strongly oppose such comparisons as false and offensive.

In an October 20, 2023, letter to Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly, a collection of “First Nations leaders” even urged the Trudeau government to reject any notion that the Hamas massacres of October 7 had anything to do with “decolonization.”

“There must never be an acceptance in a modern Canadian society of a justification for terror, violence, targeted civilian massacres, or kidnapping…. As Indigenous Peoples in Canada, we fundamentally reject the politically motivated adoption of our historic and ongoing relationship with the Crown by some Canadians to justify these evil actions by terrorists,” it read.

The most recent expression of this aversion to conflating the Palestinian cause with indigenous grievances in Canada comes from Karen Restoule, an Ojibwe woman from Dokis Indian Reserve, a senior fellow in Indigenous Affairs at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and vice-president of strategy at Crestview Associates. On October 7, the first anniversary of the heinous Hamas attack on Israel, Restoule wrote:

Over the past year, we’ve seen an alarming rise in the use of words like “colonizer,” “settler,” and “decolonize” here in Canada to justify the atrocities committed by Hamas and other terrorist groups funded by Iran’s Islamic regime on October 7 and beyond.

Shockingly, anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian activists were quick to use this “oppressor vs. oppressed” narrative to defend expressions of violence and terror. They have built a following by tapping into popular narratives of social justice warriors and Indigenous rights activists that resonate with many across university campuses and other progressive circles.

Every single week for the past year, these activists have taken to the streets in cities across Canada to openly glorify acts of terror against Israel and Jews in the diaspora.

I’ve been very clear on my position: as a First Nations woman, I fundamentally reject this politically motivated attempt by these activists to co-opt our relationship with the Crown and appropriate Indigenous identity to justify these horrors.

Extremism must never be tolerated or justified in any form, at home or abroad.

Leaders like Restoule well recognize that mischaracterizing Israel as a colonialist, white supremacist enterprise is profoundly inaccurate: most Israeli Jews are not “white” in the sense of having exclusive European ancestry and share the privileged status taken by Gentile Europeans in the regions they have conquered. Instead, most of Israel’s Jews are “people of colour” – Mizrahim  – or Sephardim who have always lived in the Middle East and North Africa, among the Arab, Turkish, Persian, Ethiopian, and other populations of the region.

The long history of Jewish residence in the Middle East also negates the common assertion that Arabs are not inherently antisemitic and that there has been no conflict with Jews for centuries, a misconception endlessly repeated by Arab activists and their supporters.

This does not mean it is incorrect to deny that Judaism and Zionism are synonymous. Indeed, some Jews in Canada and elsewhere, including Israel, are not Zionists, while many Western Gentiles are its most assertive supporters. But this does not negate that although modern Zionism originated in eastern and central Europe in the latter part of the 19th century, its core motive was bolstered by the ancient Biblical attachment of the Jews and Judaism to the ancient historical region called Eretz Israel, the Promised Land of Israel. 

More particularly, there is a need to challenge the view that antisemitism began as a “European malady… born in Europe in the Middle Ages” and that “There was no tradition of antisemitism in the Arab world. It was exported from Europe to the Middle East … There was no antisemitic literature, so antisemitic literature had to be translated from European languages to Arabic.”

On the contrary, antisemitism is an ancient ideology nearly as old as Judaism itself. It’s a combined racial, religious, and ethnic prejudice, though well-documented in Christian societies, as is well known, is today much more prevalent in the Muslim world. In the Middle East, it is focused on the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel based on beliefs much deeper than regional territorial disputes having to do with the Palestinians, contrary to the attribution of this to Zionism by many writers.

A deeply rooted antisemitic hatred that dwarfs the Palestinian statehood and land claims is featured in sacred Muslim texts that invite hostility against Jews. The Koran and the Hadiths (a collection of sayings attributed to the Prophet Mohammad) can be interpreted in ways that suggest Muslims and Jews are enemies, that Jews will be killed at the end of times, that Jews falsified scripture, and that Jews tried to kill Mohammed.

Hamas’s 1988 Charter directs the killing of Jews, drawing on the Hadith saying: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’”

The fact that Mohammed killed and enslaved the Jews in Medina has also been used to incite violence against Jews.

In the early 20th century, the growing movement of political Islam saw Christians and Jews as waging war against Muslims and for being responsible for the alleged decay and Westernization of Islamic societies. Sayyid Qutb, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and one of the movement’s most influential thinkers, wrote a widely disseminated pamphlet entitled Our Struggle with the Jews, where he drew parallels between contemporary developments and Mohammed’s struggle with the Jews.

Qutb also saw the return of Jews to Palestine as an evil that demanded punishment. 

“Let Allah bring down upon the Jews people who will mete out to them the worst kind of punishment, as a confirmation of His unequivocal promise: ‘If you return, then We return,’” he wrote.

As well, Articles 22 and 25 of the updated Hamas 2017 Charter state:

“The liberation of Palestine is the duty of the Palestinian people …. Resisting the occupation with all means and methods is a legitimate right guaranteed by divine laws and by international norms and laws. At the heart of these lies armed resistance, which is regarded as the strategic choice for protecting the principles and the rights of the Palestinian people.”

These “divine laws” may be found in the Koran and the Hadiths written centuries before the modern Zionist movement.

The October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel was only the latest expression of these divine beliefs based on Hamas’s continuing support by a large majority of Palestinians.

Accordingly, focusing mainly on the importation of European antisemitism and a chronic land claim dispute as explaining the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack to the exclusion of age-old Islamic chauvinism is perversely short-sighted.

In sum, Moslem Arab antisemitism is no myth.

(This is a much longer version of a Western Standard opinion piece found here).

Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology, University of Manitoba. He is co-author of Positive Stories About Indian Residential Schools Must Also Be Heard for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, where he is a senior fellow.

---

Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read The peddling of Canada’s Indigenous mass grave and genocide libels

Follow Woke Watch Canada on X - @WokeWatchCanada

Support Woke Watch Canada by upgrading to a paid membership:

Or, by contributing to our Donor Box: