Martin Kramer adds a different perspective to my description of the anti-Semite as doomed by his illness to failure. In Muftis of Morningside Heights he discusses the upcoming Columbia University "Edward Said Conference" on November 7-8, with the title "1948-1978: Orientalism from the Standpoint of its Victims." Martin Kramer notes that the Arabs of Palestine in 1948 projected their won incompetence and cowardice onto the Jews and thereby underestimated the enemies they assumed would offer minimal resistance:
What the audience on Morningside Heights likely will not hear is the extent to which the Palestinians were victims of their own Orientalist-like prejudices. A prime piece of evidence can be found in the testimony of the late Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Palestinian academic and native of Jaffa (whose daughter Lila will be a participant in the Columbia conference). Abu-Lughod fled his native Jaffa in 1948, and left an important account of the mood among the city's Arab inhabitants on the eve of the war:
Now, when I think of those days, I am inclined to think that the inhabitants of Jaffa in general believed—like most of their fellow Palestinians throughout the land—that the Palestinian was braver than the Jew and more capable of standing hardship. They thought that, as the country belonged to the Arabs, they were the ones who would defend their homeland with zeal and patriotism, which the Jews—being of many scattered countries and tongues, and moreover being divided into Ashkenazi and Sephardic—would inevitably lack. In short, there was a belief that the Jews were generally cowards.
This set of familiar prejudices, when directed against Jews, is generally known as anti-Semitism. It is why the Palestinians failed to assess the real strength of their Jewish adversaries in 1948. It also explains why they refused to accept the partition plan—the internationally sanctioned solution for Palestine adopted by the United Nations in 1947. Why concede any of the country to a motley mob of cowardly Jews? And so the Palestinians did become victims—of their own anti-Semitism, which imbued them with a baseless conceit. The people of Jaffa, Abu-Lughod goes on to say, believed that "if they made ready a bit... then they were sure to emerge victorious."
...
This long legacy of underestimating the Israelis because they are Jews continues to warp the judgment of many Palestinians, including some of the participants at Columbia's conference. Once again, the myth is spreading that the Israelis are weak of resolve, and so could be compelled to give up their crowning achievement, the State of Israel, and subsume themselves in a binational state—the so-called "one-state solution." This is the product of an anti-Semitic delusion: that the rootless Jews, unlike all other peoples, will not defend their sovereignty to the hilt. Reject accommodation with Israel, urge the Palestinian extremists who clamor for "one state," because ultimately the Jews are too cowardly to fight for their state.
The anti-Semite reserves his greatest creativity for finding ways to destroy himself. He idealizes and devalues the hated Jew and is blinded by his hate. Yet another reason to Pity the Poor Anti-Semite.
Recent Comments