FRENCH JEW'S WRITINGS ABOUT ANTI-SEMITISM

A Frenchman for Israel By Nidra Poller
Daniel Sibony explores anti-Semitism from the origins of Judaism to the present day in his latest work, L’énigme antisémite. In the place of the mush of “Abrahamic faiths” we learn volumes about the sources and mechanisms of anti-Semitism generated by Christianity and Islam, the two major offshoots of Judaism, an anti-Semitism that is, according to Sibony, inextricably connected to Muslim scripture. The Qur’an is composed of selected excerpts from the Bible, with a penchant for passages in which God and the prophets scold the Jews. Jewish prophets, like Catholic saints, are not honored in the Qur’an; they are expropriated. They become Muslims. And the Jewish God is replaced by Allah, a divinity who wants nothing to do with God’s chosen people or, more exactly, the people who chose God.

The ingathering of the Jewish people with the rebirth of the State of Israel is a frontal shock for the Arab world but, says Sibony, it can be the mechanism for its deliverance. The Jews, who were kicked out of their sacred text by the Qur’an, return in flesh and blood as a sovereign nation that has resisted all military and terrorist attempts to destroy it. The people of a Bible that is always scolding them confronts the people of a Qur’an that tells them that they are the One and the Only and no Other has a right to live.

Sibony wryly admits that if the accusations made against the Jews and the State of Israel were only true, the problem could be solved by the elimination of this small nation that, according to some surveys in Europe and some professors at Columbia University, is the Absolute Troublemaker in international affairs. However, it is not true, and the disappearance of the Jews would not solve anyone’s problem. Acceptance of the Jews as a sovereign nation reestablished in their homeland in the State of Israel would go a long way to curing Islam of its impossible cohabitation with Others. An impossibility, Sibony hastens to add, that weighs heavily on the majority of Muslims who would never act on the murderous injunctions of a text that they often ignore but are unable to modify or truly reject.

When public opinion, Arab powers, and European foreign policy encourage the Palestinians in their suicidal terrorist strategies, the day of reconciliation is constantly retarded, and days of reckoning rain down with tragic monotony. This interpretation helps us understand the absurdity of accusations made against the Jewish State while offering a more intelligent and ultimately hopeful way of understanding Palestinian suffering. If the Palestinians are being used by the Arab world to express its rejection of the sovereignty of a dhimmi people, the solution is not for the civilized world to gang up on Israel, force the Jews back into dhimmitude, and restore the Middle East to its untainted dar al Islam purity. The solution is to say “all of us Others refuse the sacrifice of Palestinians on the altar of a theological impasse.”

It is hardly surprising to note the increasingly virulent irredentism on American college campuses, precisely when the death of Yasser Arafat has opened a window of opportunity for some kind of peaceful coexistence, temporary, fragile, and in many ways ill-conceived but perhaps a breathing space that could allow for one small step in the direction of a hopeful reconfiguration of the conflict. “Pro-Palestinian” movements on campus (U. of Wisconsin, Brown, UCI, Columbia, etc.) are coming out squarely for the one-state solution, pushing for divestment, planning Palestinian “solidarity” conferences. These apologists for terrorism have integrated the refusal of the Jews which, far from being a peripheral, accidental, borrowed detail of Islam and its history, is the fatal flaw that is threatening it with self-destruction.