Delinking the Palestinians

Israels Arab allies seek to diminish Palestinian claims over Jerusalem.

Faiz Abu RmelehActiveStills

Joseph Massad-22 December 2015

Since the more recent third Palestinian uprising started in early October, there has
been a rush by different Arab countries and intellectuals to legitimize their good
relations with, and their love for, Israel.
With the Palestinian uprising refusing to abate in November, panic set in among the
Arab anti-Palestinian camp, which has gained considerable ground across the Arab
world since the 1978 Egypt-Israel Camp David accords, precipitating a rush by Arab

governments and their pundits to delink Arabs and Muslims from the Palestinians.
On 1 November, the Egyptian government, in addition to being one of the two jailers of
1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza, voted openly and for the first time ever in favor of
Israel at the United Nations when it supported the latters bid for membership of the
UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
A few weeks later, on 24 November, the Kuwaiti pundit Saleh al-Shayeji published
an op-ed declaring that Israel is not our enemy.
On 27 November, the United Arab Emirates government approved the opening of an
Israeli diplomatic mission in Abu Dhabi.
Meanwhile, Saudi officials manifested their love for Israel by continuing their open
and secret meetings with its officials, who reciprocated with public declarations about
Israels warm relations with its Sunni Arab allies.
Normalization
Whereas the Palestinian national struggle against the Jewish settler-colony has been
thoroughly delegitimized in the eyes of many Arabs by the Palestine Liberation
Organizations surrender of the rights of the Palestinian people when it signed the
1993 Oslo accords, the question of Jerusalem has remained a sticking point for Arab
countries seeking to normalize with Israel.
While delinking the Palestinians from the interests of the Arab world and the Arab
peoples has proceeded steadily since the 1970s for Arab governments and elites alike
(including campaigns like Jordan First, Lebanon First and Egypt First), the
Islamist countercurrent that emerged at the same time has undercut this effort
considerably by insisting that Palestine remains a Muslim, if no longer, an Arab cause.
Here Jerusalem is not seen as a large Palestinian city whose lands and holy places are
being confiscated day by day for exclusive Jewish colonial use, and whose Palestinian
population Muslims and Christians alike is expelled, besieged, humiliated and
denationalized. Rather, Jerusalem is depicted as merely a religious symbol for
Christians and Muslims whose sanctuaries have fallen under the rule of Israel and
Jewish colonial settlers.
Jewish settler-colonialism in this Palestinian city has not abated since the 1880s with

the expulsion and ethnic cleansing of the first wave of Jerusalemites and
the occupation and ethnic cleansing of the western parts of their city concluded in
1948.
The remaining and oldest parts of Jerusalem, where its holy places are located, would
not become subject to Jewish colonial supremacy until after Israel occupied them in
1967.
The Hashemites of Jordan appointed themselves the custodians of the Muslim holy
places of Jerusalem as part of their peace treaty normalizing relations with Israel in
1994. Their mission has been less than successful in the last two decades.
Indeed, it has not stopped the encroachment of Israeli-government backed
groups intent on destroying the al-Aqsa mosque and replacing it with a Jewish temple.
Jordan did, however, recently agree with Israel to the installation of cameras inside the
holy places (but not outside where Israeli troops often shoot and kill Palestinians),
which Israels Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will undoubtedly use to monitor
and arrest Palestinians as part of the Israeli effort to suppress the ongoing uprising.
But while the Hashemites would never compromise on the sanctity of Jerusalem, the
Jordanian government successfully lobbied the Vatican beginning in the late 1990s to
change the designation of the site of the baptism of Jesus from the west bank of the
River Jordan, on the Palestinian side, where it had been traditionally, to the east bank
of the river on the Jordanian side.
The Vatican would add its stamp of approval during the 2009 visit of Pope Benedict
XVI to the country. It has since become an attraction for European and American
Christian tourists to the glee of Jordanian officials.
More recently, the Jordanians successfully lobbied the UN cultural body UNESCO to
support their contested claims. While the Jordanian project may be informed by plans
to promote tourism and compete with Palestine as the the birthplace of Christianity,
their actions intentionally or unintentionally serve the very same overall strategy of
desanctifying Palestines holy places.
Desanctifying Jerusalem
But if the site of Christs baptism can be changed so easily, why not change the very

character of the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem as well?

To this latter task, the half-British Iraqi Orientalist Kanan Makiya, who lobbied the US
government to invade and bomb Iraq in 19901991 and again in 2003 and predicted
that Iraqis would welcome their American invaders with sweets and flowers, would
step up to make the case.
Makiya, who has received honorary doctorates from Israeli universities (to cover up
the fact that he never earned a real doctorate from anywhere else), published a book in
2002 that was stillborn despite attempts to market it by some in the Western press,
including the anti-Palestinian American left Zionist magazine The Nation, in which I
published a response at the time.
The book, titled The Rock, argued that the Dome of the Rock was in fact not a
monument conceived and built by Arab Muslims but rather by a Jewish convert to
Islam, Kaab al-Ahbar, who conceived it and pressed for its construction.
The not-so-subtle objective of the anti-Palestinian Makiya was to rob Palestinians and
Muslims of their patrimony over the Muslim religious sites of Jerusalem and
strengthen Zionist colonial claims to the land and holy places of the Palestinians. His
charlatanism would remain a relatively lonely effort among Arab intellectuals until
recently.
It would be a third-rate Egyptian novelist and chauvinist, one Youssef Ziedan, who
would provide the new arguments. The pro-Mubarak Ziedan, who in November 2009
joined the campaign launched by the sons ofHosni Mubarak against Algeria when its
national football team beat Egypt at a World Cup qualifying playoff match in
Sudan, assailed the Algerians as living in a country that is a desert that extends
everywhere, including to the souls of its people.
He added that all the Algerian students he knew in graduate school were exemplary in
their stupidity, internal violence, and absolute fanaticism, indeed that they exhibited
the kind of cowardice characteristic of desert dwellers, and whose country has never
experienced the breeze of civilization. Algerians, he added, were a bunch of criminals,
desert Bedouins who acquired a country and began to think of themselves as equal to
Egyptians.

In his defense of Mubaraks plan to bequeath his rule to his son Gamal, Ziedan
chastised the Algerian government for criticizing Mubarak, insisting that Egyptians
know what is best for them, and admonished Algeria for imposing taxes on the
businesses of Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawires. Ziedans Nazi-like diatribe against
the Algerians was part of a campaign joined by a large segment of Egyptian
intellectuals and media at the time. He ended his screed by calling on the Mubarak
regime to cut off relations with the Algerians.
As the Palestinians were delinked from Egyptian concerns through a
renewed campaign of hate that the pro-Mubarak and pro-Sisi Egyptian media have not
stopped spreading in the last four years, Ziedan was recently resurrected by the Sisi
media to join the campaign against the Palestinian people by helping to delink
Muslims in general, and not only Egyptian Muslims, from Jerusalem. Ziedan
alleged, in a recent discussion with journalists, with the flimsy evidence of a
propaganda upstart, that the place to which the Prophet Muhammad ascended as per
the Quranic story was not Jerusalem, but, contrary to the beliefs of Muslims in the last
14 centuries, was in the Arabian Peninsula, near Taif in the Hijaz.
In the tradition of Zionist propagandists who insist that since the Quran does not
mention Jerusalem by name, the city is not holy to Muslims or to Islam, Ziedan hoped
to de-sanctify the city in line with the ongoing anti-Palestinian policies of the regime
and media of Egyptian ruler Abdelfattah al-Sisi.
Israeli propagandists are often reminded that Mecca was mentioned but once in the
Quran. Should Mecca too be considered unimportant for Muslims?
Endangering Egypts Christians
The attempts to desanctify Jerusalem for Muslims, however, have been supplemented
by rehabilitating the city for Egyptian Christians. As Israel has continued to murder
Palestinian men, women and children with increased intensity since the start of
October, the new Egyptian Pope Tawadros II, who came of age during the Sadat era,
embarked on a trip to Jerusalem contravening the Coptic Churchs standing policy
banning under penalty of ex-communication any Egyptian Christian from visiting the
occupied city until its liberation from Israeli settler-colonialism.
Whereas Arab Christians who went on pilgrimage to the city stopped being able to do
so after its fall to Israeli settler-colonialism, Egyptian Christians could in principle
have resumed their pilgrimages after the Camp David accords, were it not for Coptic
Pope Cyril VI who issued the decree banning Christian pilgrimage to the city following

its fall in 1967.

Pope Shenouda. who assumed the papacy in 1971, had the Holy Synod of the Coptic
Orthodox Church of Alexandria and the See of St. Mark reiterate the decree in 1980.
Pope Shenouda famously declared: from the Arab national perspective, we should not
abandon our Palestinian brothers and our Arab brothers by normalizing our relations
with the Jews From the churchs perspective, Copts who go to Jerusalem betray
their church in the case of al-Sultan monastery that Israel refuses to return to the
Copts.
Pope Shenoudas defiance of the deal at Camp David and his refusal to accompany
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on his 1977 visit to occupied Jerusalem, not to
mention his protests against the sectarian current that grew in the shadow of Sadats
rule and which led to massacres of Egyptian Christians, would lead Sadat to exile him
to a desert monastery in Wadi al-Natrun.
Shenoudas Sadatist and Sisi-esque successor Tawadros II, by contrast, understood the
benefits he could obtain by undoing the defiance and cooperating with Sadats and
Mubaraks heir on the Egyptian throne.
In doing so, Tawadros II seems oblivious to the dangers he has brought to the entire
Egyptian Christian community, which is being tarred by Salafist and non-Salafist
Muslim sectarian chauvinists as a sellout community to Israel on account of the popes
actions.
Like most Egyptian Muslims, most Egyptian Christians are poor and rural and have no
stakes in this game, which is spearheaded by the Christian business class and the
Coptic pope, yet they will be the ones to fall victim to sectarian violence as a result.
In this context, contrast the silence of Tawadros on Palestinian suffering with
Shenoudas declaration in 2001 that he would not visit Jerusalem except with a
Palestinian visa and accompanied by the head of al-Azhar, the renowned 1000-yearold center of Islamic learning in Cairo, and my Arab brethren, which would only take
place after the end of the occupation of Jerusalem.
It is curious that as of April 2014, Tawadros upheld Shenoudas ban on pilgrimage to

Jerusalem but saw fit to visit the city during the ongoing Israeli carnage of the
Palestinians.
It is worth recalling here that Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and his
former prime ministerSalam Fayyad have in recent years encouraged Arab Muslims
and Christians, especially leaders of Muslim-majority countries, to visit Jerusalem, as
part of the PAs ongoing collaboration with Israeli strategy.
Indeed, despite the refusal of most Muslims and their leaderships to heed the PA call,
Egypts Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa took the PA up on its invitation and visited the al-Aqsa
mosque in 2012.
To further the delinking between Palestinians and Muslims, Israeli military
contractors and American Islamophobes have been aggressively organizing and
funding junkets to occupied Jerusalem for American Muslim leaders.
These self-appointed leaders continue to go on these visits in defiance of Palestinian
boycott calls, and then return home expressing their new-found admiration for
Zionism.
There seem to be several complementary strategies aiming to remove the last obstacle
standing in the way of normalizing with Israel, including removing the taboo for
Muslims and Christians to visit Jerusalem while under occupation, or in case this
strategy fails (and its failure has indeed become a fact), to remove the sanctity of
Jerusalem and that of the other holy places in Palestine altogether, transferring what
can be transferred of them to neighboring countries.
The fear harbored by anti-Palestinian Arabs that a third Palestinian uprising could
renew the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle and in the process inspire those in the
Arab world whose uprisings were suppressed by Saudi-sponsored counter-revolutions
to rise up again, is the motivation behind the rush to normalize with Israel and do
away with the question of the Jewish colonization of Jerusalem as a matter that should
be of concern for Muslims and Christians in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Since Saudi Arabia has declared Iran and Shiites as the main enemy of all Sunni
Muslims, any reminder that Israel has always been their enemy is unwelcome to the
Saudi authorities and their Arab, and especially Egyptian, allies.

In a post-coup Egypt drowning in a sea of nationalist chauvinism against all its

neighbors Sudan, Palestinians in Gaza (let alone the rest of the Palestinians), Syria,
Ethiopia and Libya except for Israel, the anti-Palestinian campaign is strongest. But
it is also being echoed across Gulf countries whose insistence that Iran and not Israel is
the enemy of the oil sheikhdoms would get a further push if the question of Palestine
were dissolved once and for all.
Joseph Massad is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at
Columbia University. He is the author most recently of Islam in Liberalism (University
of Chicago Press, 2015).
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