Both the Jews and the Arabs trace their origins to Abraham. The
former descend from his son Isaac, the latter from his son Ishmael.
Both the Jews and the Arabs originate in a father who bound his son
in order to offer him up as a sacrifice to God. In the Jewish
tradition, Abraham stood over Isaac to slaughter him. In the
Islamic tradition, Abraham stood over Ishmael to slaughter him.
Thus, according to the tradition, both peoples, Jewish and Arab,
have their genesis in the awesome posture of a father about to
sacri¬fice his son, and of the son, the intended
sacrifice.
What state of mind besets a person who offers his son (or any other
per¬son) to God as a sacrifice? It may be described as a pair
of interdependent opposites: aggrandizement and depreciation.
Self-aggrandizement, on the basis of what he perceives as a divine
decree, to exercise omnipotence over the life of others (his own
son or anyone else), and depreciation of the life and dignity of
others, to the extent of willingness to terminate their
lives.
What is the state of mind of the one sacrificed (the son or any
other per¬son)? It is both a sense of powerlessness vis-a-vis
the other, who has made himself omnipotent over his life, and a
state of rage, in which the victim seeks omnipotence over those who
offer him up as a sacrifice.
It is the fate of the victimizer and the victim, in a world where
sacrifice prevails, to exchange roles until the end of time, unless
both decide to extricate themselves from the early trap once and
for all.
The Theme of Sacrifice
The theme of sacrifice is deeply woven into both the Jewish and the
Muslim faiths. First, it is interwoven with worship. What was the
main feature of wor¬ship in the First and Second Temples?
Sacrifices. Since the destruction of the Second Temple, Jews no
longer practice ritual sacrifice. Muslims practice rit¬ual
sacrifice and celebrate a festival of sacrifice to this day. On an
altogether different level, many Muslims - although certainly not
all - still perceive blood vengeance as a supreme tribal and
religious decree, a decree sanctioned by the Koran (although in
every Muslim country, the modem state has deprived the individual
of the right to exact punishment for murder).
Second, the sacrificial mindset is woven into the historical
experience of both Jews and Arabs: Of the Jews - in the thousands
of years of suffering as a persecuted minority in the Diaspora,
from Pharaonic Egypt and Babylon to Christian Europe and Muslim
countries, a history of humilia¬tions, deprivations,
expulsions, and massacres culminating in the Holocaust; and of the
Arabs - in their history of intertribal warfare, cen¬turies of
colonial rule and their uprisings against it, the civil wars of our
generation (Yemen, Lebanon, Sudan, Saharan Morocco), and the
violent confrontation between Muslim fundamentalists and the state
(Syria, Algeria, Egypt). Even in the ultimate of Islamic shrines,
Mecca, there have twice occurred in the past decade serious clashes
that left hundreds dead - one an attempt to take control of the
holy places and the other in a violent demonstration by Shi'ites of
Iranian origin.
It is no wonder, then, that both the Jews, who have re-established
sovereignty in their homeland, and the Arabs - especially the
Palestinians, in their self-deception as victims of the Jewish
state - swiftly found them¬selves caught up in a vicious
circle of victimizer/victim. The latter, in their anger at the
Jews, whom they perceived - or still perceive - as foreign invaders
who robbed them of their land, therefore sought random victims for
their rage, on the sole condition that they were Jews. The former,
in their anger against the Arab murderers who had turned Jews into
sacrifices, made them into sacrifices at random, on the sole
condition that they were Arabs.
Thus, the long chapter of victimization began, each people with its
own catalogue of victims, which each side memorizes like a sacred
catechism. The Jewish side has the victims of Jaffa, Hebron, and
Safed in the 1920s, and the fallen of the 1936-39 Arab rebellion,
and in 1947/48, "the 35," Sheikh Jarrah, and the Etzion Bloc; the
victims of the 1950s infiltrators, the athletes at Munich, Ma'alot,
the coastal road bus, and the Tel Aviv-¬Jerusalem bus; the
Istanbul synagogue; and hundreds of terror victims in Israel and
abroad. The Palestinian side remembers the casualties of Deir
Yassin, Qibya, Gaza, and dozens of other places where reprisals
were staged; the casualties of Kafr Qassem, Land Day, and Sabra and
Shatila; the hundreds of Intifada victims; and the victims of the
Hebron massacre, when a Jewish murderer walked into Abraham's tomb,
daring to call him¬self his offspring, and sacrificed
Abraham's offspring - fathers, sons, brothers - merely because they
were Arabs.
A God of Vengeance
Thus, both among Jews and among Arabs, there are those who believe
that their religion and nation sanctify the sacrificer or the
sacrifice itself, pro¬vided that they belong to one's own
religion and nationality. In this fash¬ion, Jewish and Arab
believers have fashioned a god in their own image and likeness - a
murderous god of vengeance. Thus, on the Jewish side too, religious
believers who praise the perpetrator of the Hebron massacre are the
"soul brothers" of secularists such as Rafael Eitan and his party.
Similarly, the Hamas and Hizbullah fundamentalists who murder Jews
for being Jews are spiritual partners, in their murderous
prescriptions, to the rejectionist organizations headquartered in
Damascus, with their secular leaders, such as George Habash, Naif
Hawatmeh, and Ahmad Jibril. Mutual massacres have prevented the
development of neither Israeli nor Palestinian national
aspirations.
Victims Creating Victims
This, then, is the harsh obstacle that obstructs the process of
making peace between the two peoples. As long as a sizeable
percentage of Palestinians and a sizeable percentage of Jews are
caught up in the vicious circle of vic¬tims who wish to create
their own victims, it will be a victim-intensive peace. After all,
there will always be a few who derive their strength for the
sacrificial act from the explicit or tacit support of the many.
(According to a survey published in Shishi on 11 March, 1994, six
percent of Jews justi¬fied the Hebron massacre and another 30
percent condemned "but under¬stood," compared with 63 percent
who condemned it categorically.) A 1994 survey of public opinion
among Palestinians in the West Bank revealed that, at the time,
more than 50 percent supported terrorist attacks against
Israelis.
Are Israel's leaders capable of standing up and stating: "We have
not cast off our exile, in which we were the victims of others,
merely in order to reverse roles and make the others our victims.
Therefore, peace is not only an end to war; it is also an end to
the era of sacrifices"?
'I am a Citizen'
Words alone, of course, will not change reality. The most profound
need of Israel's highly ramified society is to develop a dynamic of
civic ethos shared by all: men and women, Orthodox and secularists,
Jews and Arabs, immigrants and native-born. This ethos is rooted in
the dignity of humankind, in the need to respect every person for
what he or she is. The subject of the civic ethos is the citizen;
and the statement "I am a citizen" signifies real entitlement to an
impressive package of rights, but also of obligations. In
comparison to powerful concepts such as "I am a Jew," or "I am an
Arab," the citizen concept, as one shared by all, is still
weak.
Can we look forward to the development of a corresponding civic
ethos among Palestinians? Can one expect the ascent of Palestinian
leaders who will address their people as follows: "No more
sacrifice between Palestinians and Jews, nor between Palestinians
and Palestinians, nor between men and women, nor between adults and
children?" Is there any possibility whatsoever of the emergence of
such a leadership in a society that Palestinian scholar Hisham
Sharabi terms "neo-patriarchal," i.e., an authoritarian society of
the superior and the inferior, of rulers and subjects, of the
privileged and underprivileged? There is a young generation of
Palestinian leaders with whom to revise these models radically and
facili¬tate the progress of Palestinian society as a
democratic, civil society. Will they be able to bring about such a
profound and difficult change, free of victimizers and of
victims?
Our reply, in the words of the Sages, is: "All is foreseen, but
freedom of choice is given." All is foreseen, because as long as a
sizeable portion of Israeli society, albeit not a majority, and as
long as Palestinian society, again not a majority, accept the path
of sacrifice, the vicious circle will con¬tinue to spin.
But freedom of choice is granted to both peoples, singly and
jointly, to bring about the greatest turning point in their
history: the emergence from the era of sacrifice into one where,
instead of superiors and inferiors, one finds human beings and
citizens who respect all people as people and as citizens,
irrespective of their national language, faith or opinions.
If leaders emerge for whom the end of the age of sacrifice is the
highest pri¬ority, the threshold of such an era may be even
nearer than we dare believe.