Arab Street's Changing Attitudes

One of the most positive strategic developments for Israel of the past few years has been its marked improvement in relations with significant parts of the Arab world. Three years ago, for instance, the most cockeyed optimist wouldn’t have predicted a letter like Israel received recently from a senior official of the Free Syrian Army, who congratulated it on its 67th anniversary and voiced hope that next year, Israel’s Independence Day would be celebrated at an Israeli embassy in Damascus. Full report at http://tinyurl.com/owuut6n  

Yet many analysts have cautioned that anti-Israel hostility in the “Arab street” had not abated. However a new poll shows this, too, is changing.

The ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller Arab Youth Survey, which has been conducted annually for the last seven years, polls 3,500 Arabs aged 18 to 24 from 16 Arab countries in face-to-face interviews. One of the standard questions is “What do you believe is the biggest obstacle facing the Middle East?”

This year, defying a long tradition of blaming all the Arab world’s problems on Israel,

a)  only 23 percent of respondents (27% in 2012) cited the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the region’s main obstacle., this in spite of last summer’s war in Gaza.

b)  In fact, the conflict came in fourth, trailing ISIS (37 percent), terrorism (32 percent) and unemployment (29 percent).

The poll also highlights another encouraging fact: The issues young Arabs do see as their top concerns  a) ISIS, b) terrorism, and c) unemployment–are all issues on which cooperation with Israel could be beneficial, and in some cases, it’s already taking place.

For instance, Israeli-Egyptian cooperation on counterterrorism is closer than it’s been in years–not only against Hamas, but also against the ISIS branch in Sinai, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis.

Israel and Jordan cooperate closely on counterterrorism as well, and it’s a safe bet that quiet cooperation is also occurring with certain other Arab states that officially have no relations with Israel.

Egypt and Israel have also ramped up economic cooperation, even manning a joint booth at a major trade fair earlier this year.

In short, the issues currently of greatest concern to young Arabs are precisely the issues most conducive to a further thawing of Israeli-Arab relations.


What the poll shows, in a nutshell, is that young Arabs have reached the same conclusion Arab leaders made glaringly evident at the last year’s inaugural session of the Abu Dhabi Strategic Debate: Israel simply isn’t one of the Arab world’s major problems anymore, if it ever was. Now all Israel needs is for the West to finally come to the same realization.

Why does the world target Israel?

All of us that are involved in advocating for Israel ask ourselves this question. Kasim Hafeez is an interesting character - see a biography at the end of the article below.
This op-ed states that by singling out Israel, human rights activists abandon those who really suffer from apartheid

Kasim Hafeez

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4347381,00.html 

Genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid; if you've ever had the pleasure of speaking with some of the more zealous haters of Israel you'll hear these phrases at some point, normally yelled at you by a delightful middle class keffiyeh-wearing student.

I guess to some extent, sadly, we have become slightly accustomed to these libels. The hypocrisy of those claiming to be pro-Palestinian and champions of human rights and their obsessive hatred of Israel has led to the abandonment of those who suffer true apartheid, genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Detractors will undoubtedly be quick to ask why supporters of Israel point to other regimes to exonerate Israel. But this is not really what I'm doing. Israel needs no exoneration as, fortunately, Israelis are able to protest, challenge and choose their governments. That's democracy folks. But, just for the sake of argument, let us say all the malicious lies have some truth to them. Still the question remains: Why is Israel singled out for protests and global marches lauded by the 'enlightened' regimes in Tehran and Damascus, yet some of the world's human rights catastrophes carry on daily, completely ignored, by the same holier than thou activists?

For me, a particular source of pain and anger is the situation of minorities and women in my parents' homeland. In Pakistan, not a week goes by without a story of rape, murder, humiliation and torture. In this Islamic country, terms such as Jesus Christ are banned in text messages and a young girl is shot for demanding basic education. Yet apart from the attempted murder of Malala Yusufzai, these stories rarely make it to the press. The brutally oppressed Christian minority suffers at the hands of an archaic blasphemy law, yet, apart from small-scale protests held by Pakistani Christian groups, there were no calls to boycott Pakistan and no flotillas were planned. I guess murdered Pakistani Christians maybe not a trendy enough cause. I wonder if a British newspaper would publish a cartoon of a Pakistani mullah murdering minorities to pave the way for a Sharia state. Our journalists love freedom and liberty, but the love their lives a little bit more.

Obsessed with destruction of Israel

The House of Saud promotes religious apartheid, destroys history and spreads wahhabism, yet the world remains silent. Maybe the cause isn't cool enough. Or maybe we should just allow people to suffer and dismiss it as a cultural phenomenon; maybe we should say this is how things are in that part of the world and focus on the need to stop 'apartheid Israel,' which just elected another Knesset member of Ethiopian descent.

Remember when a handful of Darfur nationals and real human rights activists protested outside the UN Human Rights Commission against the atrocities in the region? Well, the instigator of the ethnic cleansing, Sudan, sat on the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

Once again, so many of our activists remained silent because Israel was not involved. It is interesting to note that some of Israel's fiercest enemies like Syria, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain dismissed the UN report on Darfur, penned by Nobel laureate Jody Wolfe, and acted to protect Sudan at the UN.

Why are the self-appointed defenders of Palestinian rights silent while Palestinians are being massacred in Syria by Assad's regime? And why do they remain silent when a Palestinian girl is murdered in the name of honor? Where were they when Hamas fired rockets from inside a school in Gaza? Oh, I forgot, they were outside the nearest Israeli embassy chanting slogans in support of Hamas.

I know there are many people who genuinely care about Palestinians and want to see them live in peace with their neighbors, but there are too many modern-day Jean-Paul Marats who are full of fiery rhetoric and demand blood. People have become obsessed with the destruction of Israel. These people should be ashamed of themselves, emulating the Nazis by urging boycotts of Jewish businesses while murder, rape and humiliation are rampant in so many nations. Real apartheid, genocide and ethnic cleansing are occurring on our watch, yet these people have become so obsessed with the end of Zionism that the suffering of others had become a side show.

Protest the oppression of women in Saudi Arabia and you'll have my respect. Protesting against an Israeli theater group is pathetic.

Numerous Middle East countries consistently violate human rights, yet the UN vilifies Israel. Is it just me or is something deeply wrong with our moral compass?

Kasim Hafeez was born in a British Muslim household of Pakistani origin. As a result of the constant indoctrination at home and in his circle of friends, he became both anti-Israeli and antisemitic. After reading Alan Dershowitz's 'The Case for Israel' in 2007, he began to doubt his own beliefs, researched the issue and visited Israel. After his return to the UK, he became convinced that he had to take a stand by speaking out about Israel and against Islamist radicalization.

The Greatest Misconception

http://fresnozionism.org/2012/08/the-greatest-misconception/


The single greatest misconception about the conflict between Israel and its neighbors is that it's about the Palestinians. A corollary to this is the idea that creating a Palestinian state would be a step toward peace.

Focusing on the relations between Israel and the Palestinians turns the conflict inside out. In fact it is driven by the absolute rejection of a Jewish state in the Middle East by all the Muslim nations in the region, which dates back to the beginning of Zionism, before the founding of the state of Israel, before the development of specifically Palestinian nationalism, and long before the 1967 war.

This rejection was founded on religious principles and ethnic hatred, and has been aggressively nurtured over the years by various parties - Muslim leaders, the Nazis, British colonialists and the Soviets - and has developed a mythical history whose consequence is that the honor of the Muslim nations and the purity of the land can only be regained by extirpating Jewish sovereignty.

A huge amount of anti-Israel propaganda and psychological warfare, much of which was guided by the Soviet KGB, amplified the conflict. In the Arab world, such things as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the idea that Israel or international Jewry perpetrated 9/11 (in order to blame it on Arabs), and numerous accusations that Westerners would call 'crazy', are accepted as non-controversial truths.

Since 1967, the international Left - especially including Jewish and Israeli leftists - has adopted the Palestinian cause and accepted the historical myth about Israel's creation as ethnic cleansing of a Palestinian nation. While not as gullible as the Arabs, the Left is prepared to believe almost any accusation about Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians, including stories about massacres, murders of Palestinian children, etc.

Both Muslims and the Left have been sufficiently impacted by anti-Jewish and anti-Israel brainwashing to the point that they are not able to evaluate information inputs about the subject rationally. Israel, for them, is the Devil.

For those of us who still have open minds, the explanatory power of the idea that the basis of the conflict is the existence of a Jewish state and not the lack of a Palestinian one, is obvious.

The Arab states have been historically unfriendly to the Palestinian Arabs. During the War of Independence, they encouraged the flight of Arabs from Israeli-held territory. After the war they repressed Palestinian nationalism in their territories except insofar as guerrillas could be used against Israel. Egyptian rule in Gaza was particularly brutal and oppressive. Arab nations except Jordan never gave Palestinians citizenship, and in some cases (e.g., Lebanon and Saudi Arabia), placed restrictions on residence, employment and education that can only be called apartheid. Jordan and Lebanon fought mini-wars against the PLO, and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia expelled Palestinians after the Gulf War.

If the Arab nations had wanted a Palestinian state in the territories, they could have established one in 1948-67. But that was (almost) the last thing they wanted! Instead, they fought every initiative to integrate Palestinian refugees, so that they could be used as a weapon against Israel.

Even the Palestinian leadership itself famously turned down the possibility of sovereignty in 1938, 1947, 2000-1, and 2008. They tell us that the offers weren't good enough - they lied about the content of the Camp David offer, according to US negotiator Dennis Ross - but one would think that a people thirsting for a state would take an offer, even if it was initially less than what they hoped for (the Jews did).

These facts are mystifying if you think that the conflict is based on the 'need' for a Palestinian state. But the mystery vanishes when you understand that it is all about the existence of a Jewish state.

No technocratic compromise which would create a Palestinian state while keeping a Jewish one has ever been acceptable to the Palestinians. Currently, they keep coming up with preconditions which prevent negotiations from taking place. Why? Because they know that Israel will not agree to commit suicide. Better to get what they can unilaterally from the UN.

Today the military forces poised against Israel come primarily from Iran and its proxy Hizballah, as well as a Syrian regime that is more and more propped up by Iran. Iranian propaganda, of course, pays lip service to the Palestinians, but is mainly focused on the idea that Zionism must be destroyed, and not that Palestine should be established. It goes without saying that if Iran launches its threatened missile war against Israel, Palestinian Arabs on both sides of the Green Line will be in harm's way.

If a Palestinian state were created in the territories, neither the Arab nations and Iran or the Palestinians would be satisfied. Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has said that in that case he would press further claims against Israel - for right of return, etc. - in the UN and international courts. Proponents of Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) have also made it clear that only right of return and the de-Zionisation of Israel would be a reason to call off their actions. And Hizballah claims that Israel is still 'occupying' Lebanese territory even after the UN carefully delimited the border.