The Jew is Not My Enemy (26 page)

Cynics may scoff at the relevance of this movie’s popularity. Such melodramatic entertainment, they would argue, should not be seen as a reflection of people’s political or religious attitudes. To them I say, try showing
Yahudi ki Larki
in the Pakistan of today. Cinemas would be burned to the ground, such is the animosity towards Jews, fuelled by thirty years of anti-Semitism and financed by petrodollars. The fact that the original run of The Jew’s Daughter ended without incident, and that the Jew in the film was the victim, not the villain, is significant. It shows that irrespective of how Muslims in India and Pakistan felt about the Israel-Arab dispute, hatred towards the Jew had not yet
entered the consciousness of the man on the street, who still viewed the Jew in positive terms.

If, in the early twentieth century, Jews and Muslims lived as neighbours and friends in the Karachi of India and later in Pakistan, there is rich documentation of similar amity between the two peoples half a world away, in Algeria. Joëlle Bahloul, in her book
The Architecture of Memory
, documents the Jewish-Muslim neighbourhood of her grandparents in eastern Algeria between 1937 and 1962.

Bahloul’s study centres on Dar-Refayil, a multi-family house in the historical city of Setif, where her maternal grandfather Moushi Sennousi’s Jewish family had lived with Muslims not as separate families, but as one extended group. In the city itself, Bahloul writes, there were no Jewish or Muslim quarters. Both Jews and Muslims lived in mixed neighbourhoods, based on their social status, not religion.

However, the Algerian city was not free of anti-Semitism. Bahloul writes that Setif was a walled city before the French arrived in the nineteenth century. With the breaking of the walls came the Christian negative attitude towards Jews: “Virulent anti-Semitism produced a profound separation between Jews and their Christian compatriots and forced the Jews back to their native origins alongside the Muslim population.… In the Jewish memories of Dar-Refayil, Christian anti-Semitism in Algeria of the time contrasts with the cordiality of their relationships with local Muslims.”
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This is not to say that there were no tensions between the two communities, especially during the long and bitter struggle of the Algerian nationalists against France’s occupation, in which the Jewish community was viewed with suspicion because of its neutrality. Bahloul mentions a pogrom that broke out in the city of Constantine in the summer of 1934 in which twenty-five Jews died. Setif was again affected in early 1935, when rumours circulated that the policeman who had shot dead a local insurgent was Jewish. She writes of anti-Jewish slogans
being heard for the first time and of the distribution of an Arabic leaflet that told the Jews, “You were once our subjects.… We are asking you not to get involved in the current dispute between us and the colonial rulers.”

In the 1950s, Israel had already been born, but the Jewish community of Setif still considered itself Algerian, not Israeli. Bahloul writes about one of the local boys, Guy, joining Dror, a Zionist group with socialist leanings. When he informs his father about his membership, his father slaps him. In Guy’s words, “For my father, Israel did not exist.” The Jews of Setif were not too gung-ho about Israel. For them, going to Israel meant never coming back, and this was the reaction of most Jews of the Arab world at the time.

The turning point, when Jews and Muslims began to part company, evidently came after the 1956 Arab-Israel war, when Algeria’s struggle for independence gained momentum. Within years, the Jews of Setif moved to Algiers; following independence in 1962, they and most of the country’s 140,000 Jews, who had been granted French citizenship in 1870, left for France. They had little choice: the Algerian Nationality Code of 1963 excluded non-Muslims from acquiring citizenship.

Still, about ten thousand Jews stayed back and lived in the cities until the 1990s, when the civil war and threats by jihadi militants finally forced them to emigrate. In 1994, the Algerian synagogue was abandoned when the last of the Jews fled the area after a nearly 2,600-year presence in the Maghreb.

The question that remains unanswered is this: What happened that changed the city of Peshawar from being home to Jews in a city of a million Muslims to a place where no Jew can be found today? How did Dar-Refayil, where Jew and Muslim had lived in the same household,
become a place where no Jews can survive? The knee-jerk answer in contemporary Muslim narrative is to point the finger at the state of Israel. That may partly be true, but I believe the innate hatred towards Jews in the Muslim world has a lot to do with the year 1973, when two events unfolded that changed the attitudes of many Muslims and shifted the balance of power in the Muslim world.

Up until 1973, the price of Saudi light crude oil stayed under five dollars per barrel. Although this gave the desert kingdom enough liquidity that the king and his five-thousand-strong royal family could have a fabulously lavish lifestyle and maintain an iron grip on the country, Saudi Arabia had neither the resources nor the inclination to export any commodity other than the oil it produced in surplus – jihadi Islam and the harsh doctrine of Wahhabism stayed at home. Saudi oil wealth was sufficient to place its royalty in lavish yachts and casinos, but not enough to buy them the credibility and respect of the Muslim masses. An ayatollah from Qom, a sheikh in Al-Azhar, and a mufti at a seminary in Pakistan had more of a following than their Saudi cousins. Most of the Muslim world looked up to the likes of Sukarno, Bhutto, Nasser, Boumedienne, Ismet Inonu, or their nationalist and left-wing opposition. The bearded clergy was good enough for supervising the rites of circumcision, performing wedding ceremonies, leading the Friday prayers, and being the butt of jokes, but little else.

Pakistan’s pre-eminent intellectual and one of South Asia’s leading nuclear physicists, Pervez Hoodbhoy put it best when he was asked to comment on the role played by Islamic clerics in shaping Muslim society. He told the
Middle East Quarterly:

If the mullahs were on the periphery of Muslim society and were “ridiculed in private,” all of this was about to change in 1973. The Yom Kippur War would result in the metamorphosis of Saudi Arabia from a dusty desert kingdom named after a bandit to a power that could finance worldwide jihad.

On October 6, 1973, as Israelis observed Yom Kippur and the Muslim world fasted for the month of Ramadan, Syria and Egypt launched an attack on the Jewish state in an effort to recapture territories they had lost after the Six Day War of 1967. The Egyptians shocked the world as they began an amphibious assault and crossed the Suez Canal. The Israelis were taken by surprise and were forced to fall back. Muslims rejoiced as Egypt’s tanks smashed through Israeli defence lines on all
fronts. Not since the thirteenth century had an Arab army seen success on the battlefield.

In 1973, I was the producer of the English news bulletin at Pakistan’s state-owned
PTV
network. I vividly remember getting the breaking story on the Reuters teleprinter in the newsroom. It was just a single line: “Egyptian armour crosses Suez. Breaks through Israeli defence lines.” I tore the paper off the printer and raced to the studio, where the evening English bulletin was on-air. In a move unprecedented at the time, I walked into the studio and placed the raw copy smack in front of the newscaster. He froze for a second, startled by my presence, peered at the piece of paper, and then beamed at the camera. “I have good news. Egyptian tanks have crossed the Suez Canal and defeated the Israelis.” Then improvising, he added, “Our tanks are heading towards Tel Aviv.” There was a joyous roar in the control room, and in countless newsrooms, cafés, schools, and homes around the world, Muslims viewed the Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel as victory itself.

Our jubilation was short lived. The pundits who were predicting the celebration of the festival of Eid al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan in “liberated” Jerusalem would on that day cry more tears of humiliation. By the time the guns fell silent, not only were the Arab armies comprehensively defeated but both Cairo and Damascus stood in the gunsights of Israeli tanks.

In the first week of the war, as fighting raged in the Sinai and the Golan Heights, two superpowers entered the fray on opposite sides. The U.S.S.R. started airlifting arms to both Syria and Egypt, while President Richard Nixon authorized an airlift to deliver weapons and supplies to Israel, reportedly right into the battle zone, as the Jewish state struggled to survive. Within a week, however, the Israelis managed to halt the Egyptian advance, which had lost momentum as Egyptian generals dithered, not knowing how to press home their advantage.

The tide soon turned in what had started as a war aimed at the swift destruction of Israel. Israeli paratroopers and armour launched a daring counteroffensive at a single section of the Suez Canal, captured a crucial bridge, and had soon trapped the entire Egyptian Third Army in the Sinai, cutting it off from logistical support. Instead of Tel Aviv falling to the Egyptians, within two weeks of fighting, it was Cairo that was in the sight of Israeli tanks, while Egyptian soldiers languished, desperate for food and water.

In Karachi, the daily current affairs show
Rozanama
devoted much airtime to the war. Veteran journalist Muhammad Mian, a Marxist who spoke Arabic, Persian, and German as fluently as his native Urdu, described the Golan Heights as if it was his backyard. He had been there, and he was passionate about the Palestinian cause; in 1970, he had covered the Black September uprising of the plo against King Hussein of Jordan. Using detailed maps, he explained the daily developments. One day after the show, he said to me that he did not want to come in the next day. “It is all over, Tarek – the Arabs have blown it one more time.” He said his Arab sources had confessed that the Syrian assault had been blunted and the Israelis had destroyed the last of the tanks that had managed to cross the ceasefire line. (In 2008, I visited this site and saw the hulk of the burnt-out Syrian tank, which the Israelis have kept to show how far the Syrians had advanced inside Israel before being beaten back.)

The Arab world was in shock. What had started as a war to restore Arab pride had quickly turned into the familiar rout. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries now entered the fray to pressure the West not to back Israel. On October 16, opec increased the price of oil by 70 per cent, to $5.11 a barrel, in order to put pressure on the United States to not back Israel. When this had no effect, Arab oil-producing countries announced an embargo, starting with a 5 per cent cut in production, with further cuts threatened in 5 per cent increments.
If the Arab countries thought such blackmail would make the United States more partial to the Arab position, they were badly mistaken. Three days later, Nixon asked Congress to give $2.2 billion in emergency aid to Israel, including $1.5 billion in outright grants. The next day, Libya announced it would embargo all oil shipments to the United States; soon, the rest of the Arab oil-producing states announced curbs on their exports to various countries and a total embargo on oil to the United States.

The price of oil immediately shot up from three dollars a barrel to twelve dollars, triggering a recession and high inflation in the West that persisted until the early 1980s. While the economy of the West took ten years to recover from the oil shock, Saudi Arabia basked in the petrodollar bonanza that spilled from its coffers straight into the hands of the kingdom’s theological custodians and radical jihadi clerics.

From the smouldering ashes of defeat in the Sinai, a new Arab force emerged in the east that would relegate Egypt to the backwaters. Saudi financial might that today flexes its muscle in Harvard University and Citibank has its roots in the aftermath of 1973. Equipped with billions, the Saudis would work to impede all intellectual progress in the Muslim world, financing the spread of repressive and reactionary fascist ideologies that would turn Muslims against their own cultures and hark back to a fictitious medieval era of Islamic supremacy. In the next decades the Saudi exercise in funding radical ideologues would produce the likes of Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.

The kingdom became the Comintern of the world Islamist movement; its clerics as well as leading members of the royal family were the commissars who spread out to expand their realm without crossing any borders. Islamism was born in Egypt in the 1930s, but its practical manifestation was facilitated by Saudi money that simultaneously funded jihadis and bought influence around the world, including the United States, Canada, Britain, and France.

The humiliation of another defeat at the hands of the kuffar was explained by the Saudi clerics as Allah’s way of punishing Muslims who had supposedly wavered from the true path of Islam, which, according to them, was Wahhabi Salafism and submission to the doctrine of armed jihad. The sheiks argued, as they still do, that while the land ruled by the Wahhabis came out of the crisis as the world’s wealthiest nation, with Allah rewarding its citizens with billions, those who did not follow the oath of radical jihadi Islam had been punished. The clerics maintained that Allah had spoken; Arab defeats were proof of Allah’s will.