Why Jews Don’t Hate Muslims that Hate Them*

Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Have you ever wondered why many Jews in Israel live in denial about Arab hatred? Have you been puzzled by their inability to face the obvious fact that the Arabs want to destroy them? I’ll limit myself to only reasons: (1) Israel’s failure to understand Islam’s love of death; and (2) Israel’s own love of life.

That Islam loves death was evident in the Iranian-Iraqi war, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent tens of thousands of Iranian children to death by having them walk across Iraqi minefields. This necrophilia infects Palestinians who use children as human bombs.

Israel’s love of life generates Hesed or kindliness. An excess of kindliness, however, leads to foolishness and even self-righteousness. Israelis can’t fathom the depth of Arab hatred. “Why should Arabs hate us? We’re so generous. Look what we did for them in the ‘West Bank.’ We established a system of primary and secondary schools that greatly multiplied the number of Arab children attending classes. We built their first universities. We established new hospitals and nursing schools for them. Infant mortality was greatly reduced, and their standard of health was improved beyond recognition. And don’t forget how we constructed roads as well as water and electric power facilities and introduced modern methods of agriculture. Thanks to us, their income far exceeded their kinsmen in the Arab world. So why should they hate us?”

The self-righteousness or feeling of moral superiority of so many Jews has stupefied them. They simply don’t understand that hatred comes natural to Arabs—it’s a cultural phenomenon. Ehud Barak offered Arafat 97% of Judea and Samaria, including eastern Jerusalem, but the Arabs said NO! Arab hatred of Jews trumped Arab statehood. Did this change Barak’s attitude toward the Arabs? Not a bit. Did it affect Sharon or Olmert or Livni or Peres or Netanyahu on the issue of a Palestinian state? Not at all. These patronizing and benighted Jews think like capitalists: “Make the Arabs wealthy and they’ll junk jihad and become peace-loving bourgeoisie like us.”

Peres once said we can learn nothing from history. So this genius doesn’t remember the British Peel Commission report of 1937, which concluded that, "Although the Arabs have benefited from the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration, this has had no conciliatory effect. On the contrary, improvement in the economic situation in Palestine has meant the deterioration of the political situation.” Arab hatred of Jews trumps Arab prosperity.

Leon Uris understood this. In his novel, The Haj, Uris has the famous Orde Wingate say:

The Arabs will never love you for what good you’ve brought them. They don’t know how to really love. But hate! Oh God, can they hate! And they have a deep, deep, deep resentment because you [Jews] have jolted them from their delusion of grandeur and shown them for what they are—a decadent, savage people controlled by a religion that has stripped them of all human ambition ... except for the few cruel enough and arrogant enough to command them as one commands a mob of sheep. You [Jews] are dealing with a mad society and you’d better learn how to control it.

The novel’s central character Haj Ibrahim says this to a Jewish friend:

You [Jews] do not know how to deal with us. For years, decades, we may seem to be at peace with you, but always in the back of our minds we keep up the hope of vengeance. No dispute is ever really settled in our world. The Jews give us a special reason to continue warring.

Uris has the cultured Dr. Mudhil elaborate:

We [Arabs] do not have leave to love one another and we have long ago lost the ability. It was so written twelve hundred years earlier. Hate is our overpowering legacy and we have regenerated ourselves by hatred from decade to decade, generation to generation, century to century. The return of the Jews has unleashed that hatred, exploding it wildly ... In ten, twenty, thirty years the world of Islam will begin to consume itself in madness. We cannot live with ourselves ... we never have. We are incapable of change.

Later in the novel, Dr. Mudhil remarks: “Islam is unable to live at peace with anyone.... One day our oil will be gone, along with our ability to blackmail. We have contributed nothing to human betterment in centuries, unless you consider the assassin and the terrorist as human gifts.”

Some pundits may call Uris a “racist.” They lack the novelist’s clear-headed understanding of Arab culture. Unlike apologists, Uris appreciates the tragedy of a few insightful Arabs who know they are trapped in the decadence of “a culture of hate.” Hate incites murder. In all the lands Islam conquered, Muslims replaced indigenous places of worship—Christian, Jewish, Persian, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Hindu—with Mosques. This could not be done without enormous bloodshed—estimated at 270 million victims! Those who speak of Islam as a religion of peace are either ignoramuses or on the Saudi payroll.

What happens to a culture in which hate is a chronic principle? When that principle gains ascendancy, as it has in Islam, it tends to close the Muslim’s mind. It breeds intolerance. It precludes self-criticism and undermines any incentive to understand and learn from non-Muslims. And of course it leads to murder.

Contrast Judaism. Hesed or kindliness is a fundamental Jewish principle. Kindliness prompts the Jew not only to help but also to understand and learn from non-Jews. (In the Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 94b, Rabbi Judah the Prince, compiler of the Mishna, unhesitatingly declares in favor of a Gentile astronomical theory over that of the wise men of Israel.) The kindliness of the Jew enlarges his mind and makes him tolerant toward others. Accordingly, whereas Jews speak of righteous Gentiles whose place in heaven is assured, Muslims designate as evil everything that is not Islam and consign all infidels to hell.

But the kindliness of Jews can be as irrational as Arab hatred. This was evident among several Jews in Gush Katif. They showered with kindness the robotic Jews that had come to destroy their homes. The Sages warn us not to carry the Hesed too far.

The irrational kindness of many Jews is symptomatic of a national disorder quite evident among Israel’s ruling elites—their inability to hate with passion Israel’s genocidal enemies. Contrast another kind of Jew. In The Kuzari, Judah Halevi quotes King David: “I hate them, O God, that hate you” (Psalms 129:21). The haters of God, the Kuzari explains, refers to “those who hate God’s people, God’s covenant, or God’s Torah …”

Hatred, however, is futile if it does not issue in action. In Psalm 18:38-43, Israel’s greatest king writes: “I pursued my enemies and overtook them, and returned not until they were destroyed. I crushed them so that they are not able to rise; ... I pulverized them like dust in the face of the storm...”

The Sages teach: “There is a time to kill, in the time of war, and a time to heal, in the time of peace.… There is a time to love, in the time of peace, and a time to hate, in the time of war” (Kohelet Rabbah 3:1). Consider the verse, “When you go forth to battle against your enemies” (Deut. 20:1). The Sages ask: “What is meant by ‘against your enemies’”? They answer: “God said, ‘Confront them as enemies. Just as they show you no mercy, so should you not show them any mercy’” (Tanchuma, Shoftim 15).

Consider the mercy the Israel Defense Forces showed the Arabs in Operation Cast Lead, warning them to leave their targeted homes where arms were stored. Colonel Richard Kemp (the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan), said: "From my knowledge of the IDF and from the extent to which I have been following the current operation, I do not think there has ever been a time in the history of warfare when an army has made more efforts to reduce civil casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF … in Gaza."

Israel was nonetheless denounced in the world’s media and accused of committing war crimes by the UN Human Rights Council. Now Hamas is rearming, regrouping, and receiving billions from democratic America and Europe, champions of humanism.

By failing to hate Israel’s implacable enemies and to act accordingly, self-righteous and merciful Jews unwittingly become the cruel enemies of their own people.

__________________

*Transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, November 2, 2009.

Also see how the depth of Arab-Moslem hatred contributed and still contributes to the murder of Jews at "Kill the Jews, Wherever You Find Them!" and why too many Jews refuse to see Islam as the murder-machine it is at Why Jews Would Rather Die Than Face Islam's Jew-Hatred.
__________________

Also check out . . .

A LARGE SAMPLE OF WHAT ISLAM SAYS ABOUT JEWS