A blog about Zionism, Jewish identity, and antisemitism.
© 2023 Michael Jacobson. All rights reserved.
A blog about Zionism, Jewish identity, and antisemitism.
© 2023 Michael Jacobson. All rights reserved.
Jews and Arabs, by Albert Memmi.
On November 24. 1973, one month after the end of the Yom Kippur War, in a discussion organized by four major European newspapers, Libya’s Colonel Kadhafi generously suggested to Jews from Arab countries that they could help solve the Middle Eastern conflict if they would “go back home”; that is, return to their countries of origin. One of the participants in that discussion (who declined the Colonel’s offer) is the author of this book. He hits hard at a variety of myths that have obscured the relations of Jews and Arabs, of which Kadhafi’s suggestion is one expression.
Albert Memmi is an Arab Jew and a left‐wing Zionist, a supporter of Arab nationalism and of democratic socialism. His restatement of the Zionist case represents no reconciliation of conflicting commitments but rather the author’s belief in their fundamental consistency. Here Memmi focuses the insights of his earlier “The Colonizer and the Colonized,” “Portrait of a Jew,” and “Dominated Man” in a fresh interpretation of the dispute between two oppressed peoples.
In a sense, this book is the nonfiction counterpart to his early novel, “Pillar of Salt,” which describes Memmi’s youth in a Tunisian ghetto, and is, like all his writing, highly autobiographical. Comparing this to his earlier work, one senses an unfolding rather than a fluctuating view with regard to a reality that remains basically unchanged over time. That is why “Jews and Arabs,” although a collection of essays spanning a period of some 20 years, nevertheless reads like an up‐to‐date reply to the latest anti-Zionist broadside in the United Nations.
The novelty of this book is derived from the author’s special vantage point. A Jew born and raised in an Arab country. Memmi is well equipped to explode the myth of the supposedly idyllic life led by Jews in Arab lands. Anti‐Jewish discrimination, persecution and violence, the author demonstrates, was never an exclusively European phenomenon. The Jewish communities that fled en masse from the rising tide of Arab nationalism were driven by fears based on the experience of generations. Their hopes for a more secure future — expressed in Zionism, their own movement for national liberation — brought many of them to Israel.
Today Jews from Arab countries and their progeny are a solid majority in the Zionist state. If the Arabs did not want the Jews to settle in Israel, why did they cause them to flee from the countries of their birth in the Arab world, Memmi asks. The author regards their dislocation greater than that suffered by Palestinian Arab refugees, even when measured quantitatively by the distance both groups have been obliged to traverse.
Memmi points out that both the Jewish and the Arab movements of national liberation are products of the age of decolonization. Both claim his support as equally valid expressions of mankind’s struggle for freedom. The quarrel between them he regards as a conflict, not a contradiction, and therefore susceptible to compromise.
It is clear that for Memmi Zionism has origins predating both Herzl and Auschwitz, origins rooted in the condition of the Jewish people, independent of the ebb and flow of Western expansionism in the Middle East. Indeed, he regards Zionism even more natural for Arab Jews than for Europeans. In Particular, for the North African Jew, unable to assimilate to the European colonizers and fearful of his fate at the hands of the non‐Jewish colonized, only one solution remains. While European Jews may cling to other political and social frameworks, “[f]or the North African Jew … who [just like other colonized people] has never had a nationality or a history of his own, Judaism once again becomes everything, provides the answer to everything: tradition and religion, culture and politics.” Thus Memmi disposes of the Crusader myth: that Israel is a facet of the Western imperialist incursion into the Arab world, destined to disappear with the recession of Western influence.
Neither is Memmi prepared to accept the argument that the failure to achieve social ideals in Israel somehow places in question Israel’s right to exist. True, he is critical of much that he finds in today’s Israel. In particular, he attacks the favored position of religion, the continued gap between Jews of European and non-European origin, and the failure to assimilate the non‐Jewish minority. However, he points out that Israel, for all its faults, is far in advance of its Arab enemies in achieving political democracy and social justice. Too often the demand on Israel from the Left, “Be perfect!” masks the implicit injunction “Don’t make it!”
This is the nub of the issue. If Israel has a special mission, who hasn’t? Memmi insists that Israel must be judged by standards applicable to all nations. The continued application of a special (and more exacting) standard to Israel is proof that the normalization of Jewish national existence, the ultimate aim of the movement for national liberation, has yet to achieve recognition.
It is an irony of history that Arab terrorist attacks in Israel have been aimed primarily at development towns such as Kiryat Shmoneh, Ma’alot and Beisan, mainly populated by Jews from Middle Eastern countries. Arab Jews have been prominent as victims of the continuing conflict. They have seldom stood out as speakers. In Albert Memmi they have found their voice.