Ignoring Israel

The mis-education of the Middle East

By Toby Frankenstein
From the February 2004 Print Edition

The tragedy of the massive earthquake in Iran last month showcased how the world can put aside political differences during times of human suffering. Even the United States, a country that has dubbed Iran part of an “axis of evil,” immediately offered assistance and aid to the disaster-stricken country. Yet something about Iran´s appeal for international aid for was barely noticed in our media, but is critical to understanding the current crisis between Israel and the Arabs. Days after the earthquake, the New York Times reported that, “Iran announced it would accept aid from all nations except Israel.”

It is ironic that Iran refused emergency aid from Israel, especially given the fact that Israel has some of the world’s most sophisticated disaster-relief techniques, but Iran’s precondition of aid from all but Israel is indicative of a larger problem in the Middle East.

This kind of virulent anti-Israel (and perhaps one could even say anti-Semitic) sentiment goes, for the most part, undocumented in our media. Yet to truly understand the conflict between Israel and her Arab neighbors, including the Palestinians, one must frame the lack of progress towards peace in the Middle East through the lens of the intense anti-Israel and anti-Western rhetoric spewed by the autocratic Arab regimes of this part of the world.

Anti-Israel rhetoric is nothing new, but in a post-9/11 environment, the world, in particular the United States, is becoming keenly aware of what the Arab media has to say about the Israel and the U.S. organizations such as the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) have pioneered the way for us to better understand what is going on in the Middle East. MEMRI follows and translates Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew news programs and publications and makes them available to the general public. In reading what the state-run news agencies of Syria or Saudi Arabia or the Palestinian Authority, for example, have to say about Israel, however, it comes as no surprise why there is so little progress between Israel and her neighbors.

Examples from MEMRI of the powerful anti-Israel attitude in the Arab Middle East include Palestinian school text books simply omitting that the State of Israel even exists, or the often-repeated claim in an Egyptian newspaper that Jews use the blood of Palestinians to prepare bread for holidays. One of the more serious (albeit amusing) examples of this hatred is that Israel is planning a covert take-over of the world´s media and financial institutions. The examples could go on for pages.

Why do these countries promote so much hate and disgust towards Israel?

It is fascinating to note that such hatred emanates from corrupt, totalitarian kingdoms and dictatorships. The governments that promote this abhorrence towards Israel continue to fail their people in every way. According to a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report, Yasser Arafat has personally pilfered over $900 million in aid to the Palestinians over the last five years (he claims he does not know where the money has gone). Syria, Egypt, and a number of other Arab countries have terrible economies and tremendous underemployment, primarily because of poor and useless leadership. In all of these examples, not one of these governments is democratically-elected or popularly-supported.

Given these facts, it begs the question of why there is so much hatred of Israel instead of legitimate movements to dislodge these corrupt dictators from power. The answer: so long as these Arab autocrats continue to blame Israel as the primary cause of their problems, they do not have to be real leaders and deal with real problems, such as economic development, the rule of law, civil rights, education, and more. In essence, so long as they can distract their public with hatred of Israel, they do not have to answer to the questions of corruption and ineptitude from within their own societies.

Every dictator in history has used a scapegoat to garner support for their causes. The Palestinians and the Arabs continue to scapegoat Israel for their own incompetent and dishonest leaders.

While Israel must do everything in its power to achieve peace with its neighbors, one would hope that Iran´s concern for their own people would override their continued hatred of Israel. Yet as the Iranian government demonstrated, they hate Israel more than they love their own people. Former Prime Minister of Israel Golda Meier said, “Israel will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.” There will be peace in the Middle East, including a free and democratic Palestine, when the Arabs abandon scapegoatist ideology and embrace leaders who focus on their own people’s needs and development.

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