The fatal flaw of Melanie Phillips 'moderate Muslim test.'

I will happily admit that I’m not the greatest fan of Melanie Phillips rants in the Daily Mail, but then again, I’m not a huge fan of the paper in question itself, so it’s understandable that I might instinctively recoil against the often simplistic and tired arguments contained within.

But I recoil even further when I read the title of her article, ‘My Moderate Muslim test.’ Her use of the pronoun suggests that her ‘moderate Muslim test,’ would adhere solely to the values of what she herself terms as a moderate Muslim. Furthermore, she implies that the extremist attitudes demonstrated by groups such as Al Qaeda and Hamas are solely directed by the teachings of their faith.

Phillips continues to define the tidemark between moderate and extremist behaviour as the point at which the individual Muslim’s opinion regarding Israel comes into question. I find this somewhat confusing, and to be honest also a little absurd. Whilst I would in no way condone the violent acts committed against Israel in recent years, I would also strongly argue that an antipathy towards the Israeli state cannot be interpreted as an automatic prescription of the individual into the ranks of the extremists. This point has seemingly been already put to Phillips by several individuals, including Dr Azzam Tamimi and Ed Husain, whose assertions Phillips dismisses as an absurd caricature.

Unfortunately Melanie, it does not seem that absurd to believe Tamimi’s suggestion that you would only consider a Muslim to be moderate if they were Likud supporting when in the subsequent paragraph you deem ‘that the absence of hostility towards Israel and by extension, the Jewish people.’

I myself am Jewish, I was lucky enough to spend some months living in Israel in my early teens as part of the well-known JFS Yemin Orde project (now sadly replaced.) Despite this I would not consider myself an Israeli and I would also firmly argue that any reference to Israel is not automatically an anti-semetic diatribe.

Prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, the Islamic and Jewish worlds enjoyed a fairly untroubled relationship. Islam encouraged tolerance towards Jews through its concept of the ‘people of the book.’ In Al-Andalus (medieval Spain under Muslim rule) Jews enjoyed comparative freedom compared with their fellows in nearby Christian kingdoms. This freedom ended with the signing of the treaty of Granada in 1491. King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella were then free to expose the Jews of what had previously been Muslim territories to all the rigours of the Spanish Inqusition. The state of Israel is the issue which has revolutionized and galvanized Muslim opinion towards Jews. Jews are no longer perceived as scholars and spiritual guides. Instead, the role has been recast as hawkish warmongerers. This change in perception is almost solely down to the events of the nakba, the forced eviction of many thousands of Palestinians alongside the 1948 war of independence. Interestingly, nakba is a word that bears remarkable similarity in tone and context to the hebrew word shoah.

The word shoah refers to a calamity, one which we as a people, are still reeling from. Nakba refers to a great catastrophe. Irregardless of which people suffered more from their respective tragedies, both peoples in those periods suffered vast upheavals from their previous ways of life. In both situations forced evictions removed millions of families from centuries-old homes. If Phillips can understand the impact of the Holocaust on subsequent Jewish generations then surely she can also understand why her own perception of Israel might differ from the associations made by others when they hear the name of the Jewish state. To Jews, Israel is a symbol of redemption, new beginnings, community, culture and kinship. Palestinians associate its name with massacres, ethnic cleansing and robbery. The claim that a Muslim’s political stance can be unlocked through analysis of their opinion regarding Israel is therefore twisted beyond comprehension. As a symbol, Israel represents entirely different things to Jew and Muslim. In the same way that the shoah encouraged Jews to realize the potential danger of state-sponsored xenophobia and thereby take a stance against racism in the following generations, (see Jewish involvement in the American civil rights movement.) The effects of the nakba were to cement a new sense of Palestinian nationalism and cause subsequent generations to revolt against the new Israeli state which had been superimposed over their land. Ms Phillips should understand that opposing such oppression is not the same as being a bigot!

I realize these opinions may be unpopular amongst the more Conservative elements of the JC readership and it is a lot easier to go along with the oversimplified explanations offered by Phillips and others, however the fact is that the actions taken in the establishment of the state of Israel have tarnished the name of Jews worldwide. Palestinian nationalists are not fighting against Judaism itself, they are fighting against oppression and in accordance with their own family memories of loss and subjugation. This was the same drive that drove the fighters in the Warsaw ghetto uprising and the Jewish partisan groups of the second world war and we would not term them as extremist Jews. Instead they are regarded as heroes, fighting against an unsympathetic regime merely for the right to exist as free men and women. Like Jews, Palestinians feel a responsibility to remember and uphold the sacrifices of previous generations. This is an innately human drive, and not one reserved for extremists. For us to conveniently forget what happened in the nakba and the resulting, ongoing problems caused by it is a devious and wholly unjewish idea.

At Passover, we are instructed that ‘in every generation a person is obligated to regard himself as if he personally had come out from Egypt.’ This obligation surely seems to have been forgotten or Jews and Israelis would realize that Israel, far from being the beacon of brotherhood, adhering to the ideals by which it was established, has instead transfigured into a house of bondage for many thousands of people.

I personally have always believed the Exodus from Egypt to be one of the formative moments of the Jewish psyche. This narrative that describes a transition from oppression to freedom embodies one of the great human instincts. A conscious awareness of this tale has granted Jews the lessons needed to survive millennia of persecution as it invokes a permanent ideal of hope through its closing phrase, ‘next year in Jerusalem.’ However, now that we have Jerusalem, why do we still say the phrase? This is because Jerusalem is an ideal of redemption, not merely a city. Jerusalem represents the notion of all of mankind becoming free and along those lines, we still have a vast amount of work to do. I do not condone the actions of any who would actively employ violence to achieve their ends, but unlike Ms Phillips, I find it easy to understand why people would choose to employ such techniques, and can recognize how a nation that Jews might perceive as an incredibly positive symbol could equally represent a torrent of bad memory to those whose human rights have been so readily trampled upon.