What do Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, and Muammar
Qaddafi have in common?
All of them write for the New York Times op-ed
page.
Qaddafi, who made his debut on the page in January, has been
Libya’s dictator since 1969, when, as a 27-year-old army captain,
he led a coup that toppled the monarchy. He later became a colonel,
but he was too modest to accept promotion to general—although not
too modest to style himself “Guide of the First of September Great
Revolution of the Arab Libyan Popular and Socialist Jamahiriya.”
His full title being perhaps a bit unwieldy, the Times’s
author bio blandly stated, “Muammar Qaddafi is the leader of
Libya.”
The subject of Qaddafi’s article was the territory formerly
known as Palestine, now divided between the nation of Israel and
the disputed West Bank and Gaza Strip. The disputed territories
were occupied by Jordan and Egypt, respectively, after the Arabs
rejected a 1947 UN resolution calling for Jewish and Arab states in
Palestine. They came under Israeli occupation after the Six-Day War
in 1967.
The common view is that the ultimate resolution of the conflict
is a “two-state solution,” in which Israel would cede all or most
of the disputed territories to a new Arab nation called Palestine.
It seems reasonable, even obvious, but there are practical
impediments. One is the asymmetry of Arab demands for a “right of
return”—i.e., that Palestinian Arabs whose ancestors lived in what
is now Israel be allowed to resettle there. By contrast, no one
talks about a Jewish “right of return” to Arab countries, including
the prospective Palestine, and Arabs demand that Jews who have
settled in the disputed territories be expelled. There is also a
question of whether the Palestinian Arabs and their leaders, or the
regimes that rule other Arab countries, really want a Palestinian
state as opposed to the destruction of Israel, or at least an
excuse to continue using the Jewish state as a scapegoat.
In any case, Qaddafi has a different idea. In his Times
op-ed, he proposes a one-state solution, “an ‘Isratine’
that would allow the people in each party to feel that they live in
all of the disputed land and they are not deprived of any one part
of it”:
Assimilation is already a fact of life in Israel. There are more
than one million Muslim Arabs in Israel; they possess Israeli
nationality and take part in political life with the Jews, forming
political parties. On the other side, there are Israeli settlements
in the West Bank. Israeli factories depend on Palestinian labor,
and goods and services are exchanged. This successful assimilation
can be a model for Isratine. If the present interdependence and the
historical fact of Jewish-Palestinian coexistence guide their
leaders, and if they can see beyond the horizon of the recent
violence and thirst for revenge toward a long-term solution, then
these two peoples will come to realize, I hope sooner rather than
later, that living under one roof is the only option for a lasting
peace.
Is he serious? Journalist Claudia Rosett doubts it. In her
Pajamas Media blog, Rosett quotes an e-mail from Youssef Ibrahim, a
Dubai-based consultant and onetime Times correspondent,
who argues that Qaddafi’s proposal was meant as a joke:
Youssef explains that in Arabic, “tine” means “mud,” or, “in
more evident colloquial Arabic a piece of excrement, dirt, garbage,
refuse.”…
And while the Times may have missed the sick joke in its own
Op-ed columns, the Arab media did not. Apparently it’s a retread
from Qaddafi’s repertoire. Youssef notes that Qaddafi has used the
“tine” suffix before, attaching it as a dismissive insult to
various other words (“socialism-tine,” “capitalism-tine”) and that
“Isratine” first came up a couple of years ago. It has been widely
commented upon—as comedy—by Arab pundits.
Let’s give Qaddafi’s editors at the Times the benefit
of the doubt and assume that they took his proposal seriously. Did
it not occur to them how fanciful it is? Even assuming that
Israel’s democratic institutions remained intact in form after the
imagined merger, “Isratine’s” Jews would soon be outnumbered by
Arabs, given demographic trends and the “right of return,” which
Qaddafi endorses.
In theory there is no reason an Arab majority in a democracy
could not respect the rights of a Jewish minority. In practice,
however, the Arab track record in this regard is dismal, and the
Palestinians of the disputed territories have been indoctrinated
for generations in Nazi-style Jew hatred. An actual “Isratine”
would likely soon become another backward Arab-dominated regime,
with Jews subjugated or worse. Israeli Arabs would be far less free
than they are today; Palestinian Arabs, probably not much better
off.
Qaddafi’s Times article includes a glaring falsehood
that bears on the impracticality of his proposal, and that gives
further reason to doubt his good faith in offering it. By way of
conceding a point, he writes:
The basis for the modern State of Israel is the persecution of
the Jewish people, which is undeniable. The Jews have been held
captive, massacred, disadvantaged in every possible fashion by the
Egyptians, the Romans, the English, the Russians, the Babylonians,
the Canaanites and, most recently, the Germans under Hitler. The
Jewish people want and deserve their homeland.
In fact, the Nazis were not the most recent persecutors of Jews.
Many Israeli Jews are refugees from persecution in Arab countries
since World War II (and Iran since 1979). Aside from Morocco, no
Arab land has more than a handful of Jews left—and that includes
Libya.
Vivienne Roumani-Denn, director of the 2007 documentary The
Last Jews of Libya, recounts on her web page the fate
of Libya’s Jews:
By 1941, the Jews accounted for a quarter of the population of
Tripoli and maintained 44 synagogues. In 1942 the Germans occupied
the Jewish quarter of Benghazi, plundered shops, and deported more
than 2,000 Jews across the desert, where more than one-fifth of
them perished. Many Jews from Tripoli were also sent to forced
labor camps. Conditions did not greatly improve following the
liberation. During the British occupation, there was a series of
pogroms, the worst of which, in 1945, resulted in the deaths of
more than 100 Jews in Tripoli and other towns and the destruction
of five synagogues.
A growing sense of insecurity, coupled with the establishment of
the State of Israel, led many Jews to leave the country. Although
emigration was illegal, more than 3,000 Jews succeeded in leaving,
and many went to Israel. When the British legalized emigration in
1949, more than 30,000 Jews fled Libya.
At the time of Colonel Qaddafi’s coup in 1969, some 500 Jews
remained in Libya. Qaddafi subsequently confiscated all Jewish
property and cancelled all debts owed to Jews. By 1974 there were
no more than 20 Jews, and it is believed that the Jewish presence
has passed out of existence.
In fairness to Qaddafi, he did not begin the persecution of
Libyan Jews. But isn’t there some rule of journalistic ethics that
should have compelled the Times to disclose to its readers
that its author is the man who, in his own country, finished what
Hitler started?
