Most people don’t know that there is a community of 100 Jewish families living on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
In my first year of living in Ma’aleh Hazeitim – in the mostly Arab neighborhood of Ras el-Amud – I tried to shop in the nearby Arab stores in the hopes of fostering relationships.
I grew up in Haifa in a mixed Jewish- Arab neighborhood where I played with Arab boys and where my mother used to send me to the Arab store to buy coffee or sugar before I even attended kindergarten. However, my new neighborhood was not Haifa of the ’80s but eastern Jerusalem of 2012, and instead of warm coexistence I was rebuffed by the shop owners, who gave me an unambiguous sense that I was not welcome.
Some of them were anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. Others were not, but were simply afraid of what the Arab society around them would say.
Being an Arab is hard business nowadays because it means living in an extremely judgmental society. When I shake hands with an Arab neighbor, his eyes begin to dart around to check out who has seen him because, around here, fraternizing with a Jew (especially a “settler”) is tantamount to treason.
The dominant local Arab organizations, Fatah and Hamas, promote the idea that Israelis are foreigners, stealing Arab lands, and have no redeeming human value. Everyone must toe the line even though in private some will tell you they don’t agree.
However, I have had some success.
Not with making friends or inroads, sadly, but rather with pushing back on the toxic dehumanizing rhetoric that my Arab neighbors are propagandized with. How have I countered the idea that Israel is a foreign interloper and that the Jews are land thieves? I talk to God.
One time, I was jogging on the Mount of Olives and stopped to pray the afternoon minha prayer in a park overlooking the Temple Mount, close to the Brigham Young University campus.
While standing in a secluded place, in the middle of the silent meditation, two Arab youths menacingly approached me and disrupted my prayer, telling my that I had no business being there.
It was a dangerous situation, they outnumbered me, we were alone, and their body language intimated violence. But having been around Arabs for much of my youth, I decided to dialogue. I told them that this was municipal Jerusalem, a public park, and I had a right to pray here as I wished. They begrudgingly conceded that point but told me that I was not allowed to pray in the direction of the Temple Mount since it is a Muslim site. I responded by telling them that Muslims pray towards Mecca, while the Haram is the historic place of two Jewish temples and the focal point for all Jewish prayer. Angrily, they asked me whether I was planning to kill Arabs in order to build the Third Temple. I told them that we Jews are not in the business of killing Arabs, and that if they wanted to witness mass Arab killings they would have to visit a local Arab country like Syria. This last point unnerved them and I realized that now it was time to go on the offensive.
“You know, Allah loves you!” I told the now perplexed teenagers. “Allah has given you 22 Arab countries, and black oil oozing from the ground. Allah must love you! And just as He has given you all those lands, so too, He has given us Israel and Jerusalem. How else can you explain all this?” I pointed west at the beautiful panorama of Jerusalem with its many cranes building for the next generation. “How were we able to build all this? Are we, Jews, better than you? More numerous than you? Stronger than your six Arab armies? Are we wealthier than you? We are nothing! ‘Kullu min Allah!’ It is the will of God that we Jews are on this land in spite of the rest of the world. Allah gave you much, but Al-Quds [Jerusalem] He gave to us!” This had an amazing effect on my Arab interlocutors. Their faces transformed from the initial contortion of anger and aggression into placid baby-face-like expressions. Without a word they turned and left.
I have since made this same argument to other Arabs, all with similar reactions. Why? Because instead of taking a macho stand, where Israel is militarily superior to inferior Arab armies, I utilized a deep-seated Muslim theological premise – submission to Allah’s will. Not the Holocaust, not history, not international law, but only Allah’s will. Furthermore, and what may come as a surprise, is that there was yet another deep-seated Muslim premise in my argument which cracked my cousins’ uncompromising facade, namely, Koranic Zionism.
If you can accept that US President Barack Obama’s half-brother is a pro-Israel Jew, and that US Secretary of State John Kerry’s brother converted and married an Orthodox Jew, then it might not be so hard to also accept that the Koran contains strong elements of Zionism.
At least four verses in the Koran mention the idea that the Jewish people will be gathered into the Land of Israel at the “end of times.” Like chapter 17, verse 104: “And thereafter We [Allah] said to the Children of Israel: ‘Dwell securely in the Promised Land. And when the last warning will come to pass, We shall bring you as a crowd gathered out of various nations… ” One can find a long Wikipedia entry called “Muslim supporters of Israel” with links to thinkers and clerics in the Muslim world who read these verses literally. Here are a few quotes: Tawfik Hadid is an Egyptian doctor who advocates a peaceful, understanding Islam, and he authored an article titled “Why I loved Israel based on the Koran” in which he argues that according to the Koran God gave the Israelites the Land of Israel as their promised land.
Khaleel Mohammed is associate professor of religion at San Diego State University and a core faculty member of SDSU’s Center for Islamic and Arabic Studies. Mohammed points to Sura 5 verse 21 to prove that Israel belongs to the Jews. “[Moses said]: ‘O my people, enter the holy land that God has decreed for you, and do not rebel, lest you become losers.’” Abdul Hadi Palazzi is the secretary-general of the Italian Muslim Assembly, and the Khalifah for Europe of the Qadiri Sufi Order. He is a co-founder and a co-chairman of the Islam-Israel Fellowship and he writes: “The Koran specifies that the Land of Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people, that God Himself gave that Land to them as a heritage and ordered them to live therein. It also announces that – before the end of time – the Jewish people will come from many different countries to retake possession of that heritage of theirs. Whoever denies this actually denies the Koran itself.”
These voices are certainly few and far between, but they do signal that Israel and Islam may be not as incompatible as today’s Iranian and Saudi clerics make them out to be. (In fact, in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Chaim Weizmann and Emir Faisal, son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca and future king of Iraq, signed a letter of understanding that Jews would support Arab independence and Arabs would support a Jewish Israel in Palestine!) Now, I am not advocating going soft on jihad. Not at all. However, if Israeli spokesmen would memorize these Koranic verses and employ the Arab value of submission to Allah, they would have a powerful tool with which to make headway with Arab masses, negotiators and diplomats, as well as empower Muslim intellectuals and clerics to start speaking out in favor of Muslim acceptance of Israel. After all, it’s in the Koran.
However, to talk about submission to Allah’s will effectively, one must actually believe that God did, in fact, give the land to the Jews.
Alas, most Israeli statesmen are not comfortable with that idea. They are locked into a secular Western mind-set and therefore leave theology out of their political discourse. That’s too bad, because theology is the lingua franca of the Middle East and by staying silent on the issue it leaves the jihadists free to interpret God and to co-opt Him to their cause, and sadly, their Allah is no Zionist.
In the meantime, with or without Muslim or world approval, Jews are living, once again, in Israel and Jerusalem and when I hear the minaret across the street blare out “Allahu akbar,” I put my hand over my eyes and simultaneously say “Shema Yisrael.”
