Age-old question revived

Editorial

There is an old, if not particularly proud, tradition in Jewish history of responding to any political developments with the question "What does it mean for the Jews?" This question, partly rhetorical, partly based on the experience that any upheaval, however remote, might have profound consequences for the Jewish people, was uttered whenever a czar died, when economies burped and when almost anything of significance occurred in the world.

In modern times, this question tends to be viewed suspiciously, as though it is based on a worldview that sees the Jewish experience as self-centred and apart from – possibly even more important than – the experiences of the people among whom the Jews have lived over centuries of Diaspora. After all, is it really fair to respond to the news of a czar's death, for example, or the invasion of a neighboring state, with an attitude that essentially asks, "This affects me how?"

Well, yes. The world's most dramatic events inevitably reverberate for the Jews in a manner that is different from the way they affect others. Could there be a more blatant example than the current war in Iraq?

The Americans, the British and their allies originally framed this war in the explicit terms of a single country: the elimination of any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, a regime change in Iraq and the severing of any roots between the Iraqi regime and the tendrils of terrorism that reach American shores. An added bonus is what American officials call the liberation of Iraq. The Americans, in particular, explicitly rejected the construction of this battle as the West versus Islam.

Is this American interpretation of the current conflict accepted at face value by Arab states and other critics of the war? Of course not.

Depending on one's perspective, the Anglo-American-allied attack is variously an imperialist intervention on behalf of oil interests, a ruse to deflect attention from problems at home, the meddling of a superpower in the affairs of a small state, the unfinished business of a father being taken up by the son, and so on. These are the views of some of the critics of war in North America and Europe. Some critics in the Arab world boil it down to an even more simple essence.

To many in the Arab "street," Israel is nothing short of an American outpost in the Middle East and U.S. President George W. Bush and his allies are attempting to rewrite the regional playbook by deposing one of the foremost regional powers (who also happens to be a moral supporter and financial backer of murderous terrorists who explode Israeli civilians in the name of political discourse).

Like the Jews of the Middle Ages and later, Israel has become the scapegoat for events that are fully beyond its control. Even if Israel were not America's staunchest ally in the region, it is easy to imagine the radical Islamists of the world citing the "Zionist entity" as the source of all things evil, merely for daring to exist in a sea of Arab, Islamic states. Scapegoating the Jews is an old trick, limited neither to the Middle East nor, apparently, to antiquity.

The suicide bombing in Netanya on the weekend was declared a gift to the Iraqi people from the people of Palestine (though it was Islamic Jihad that signed the card). The fate of the Palestinian people is held up by Iraqis as a foreshadowing of what an Anglo-American-Zionist occupation of Iraq might resemble. The Arab world, as it has done so often in rhetoric and so seldom in practice, stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the Palestinian people as the victims of the very same enemies of Islam that Iraq now faces. Critics of the war around the world burn American and Israeli flags.

Unfortunately, Bush himself reinforced this terrible equation with his introduction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into the discussion of Mideast restructuring following the (presumably successful) war in Iraq.

We all want peace in Israel, of course, and that may be most likely to happen through the good offices of the presidency of the United States. If a post-war region is a safer place for Israel, so much the better.

Yet, by introducing Israel into the wartime mix, Bush has given complete legitimacy to those who claim that the battle in Iraq is absolutely intertwined with the fate of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. Todah rabbah.

Nobody is naive enough to think that the extremists in the Arab world would ignore Israel throughout this period of strife, but was it necessary for Bush to legitimize this perspective?

For months, Jews in Israel and around the world have asked ourselves, "What will an attack on Iraq mean for the Jews?" If any of us thought that question self-absorbed, time has absolved us. The war in Iraq is tied keenly to the situation in Israel, thanks to the rhetoric of the Arab street and, now, thanks to the intervention of G.W. Bush.

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