Whose Acre?

When the crusaders invaded, Muslims and Jews stood together against the cruel invader and were massacred together. In Haifa, the local Jews led the defense and were admired for their heroism, until they were slaughtered side by side with the Muslims.

By Uri Avnery
First Published 2009-08-16,
Last Updated 2009-08-16 10:40:09
Courtesy Of Middle-East-Online

THE ANCIENT port of Acre is now the object of a fierce battle. The Arab inhabitants of the town want the port to bear the name of an Arab hero, Issa al Awam, a general under Saladin, the Muslim leader who defeated the Crusaders. The municipality of Acre, which of course is dominated by the Jewish inhabitants, has decided to give the port the name of an Israeli functionary.

The Arab citizens set up a monument for their hero. The municipality declared it to be an “illegal structure” and decided to destroy it.

This could have been a small local conflict, one of many in this mixed and quarrelsome town, if it did not have such profound ideological and political implications.

I LOVE old Acre. For me, it is the most beautiful and interesting town in the country, after East Jerusalem.

It is one of the most ancient towns in the country, perhaps in the whole world. It is mentioned in the Bible In the first chapter of Judges (which, by the way, completely contradicts the genocidal Book of Joshua.) The chapter enumerates the Canaanite towns which were not conquered by the Children of Israel. It remained a Phoenician town, one of the port towns from which intrepid Hebrew-speaking sailors went forth and colonized the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, from Tyre to Carthage.

The fortunes of Acre reached their zenith during the times of the Crusaders. It was then the only port in the country that could be used during all the seasons of the year. The Crusaders succeeded in taking it after a stubborn defense. A hundred years later, when the great Salah-ad-Din (Saladin) put an end to the Crusaders’ rule in Jerusalem, he drove them out of Acre, too. The Knights of the Cross recaptured it, and for another hundred years it served as the capital of the reduced Crusader state. In 1291, when the remnants of the Crusader kingdom were wiped out, Acre was the last Crusader town to fall to the Muslims. The image of the last Crusaders and their women jumping from the quays of Acre has been engraved in the memory of the age and has given birth to the expression still current: “to throw into the sea”.

Later, too, the town had a checkered history. A Bedouin chieftain, Daher al-Omar, took it over and created a kind of independent semi-state of Galilee. Even Napoleon, one of the Great Captains of history, came from Egypt in 1799 and laid siege to it, but was roundly defeated by the Arabs, with the help of British sailors.

When the British became the lords of the land in 1917, they turned the imposing Crusader fortress of Acre into a prison, in which the leaders of the Hebrew underground organizations, among others, were incarcerated. In one of its most daring exploits, the Irgun broke into the fortress and freed its prisoners. In 1947, the Israeli army conquered the town, which was until then entirely Arab.

The ancient part of the town, with its beautiful minarets and Crusader fortifications, continued to be Arab. So did the port, which now serves fishermen. But around this quarter, Jewish neighborhoods have sprung up, faceless like many hundreds of such neighborhoods throughout Israel, and their inhabitants now constitute the majority. They do not like their Arab neighbors very much.

From time to time, quarrels break out between the two populations. The Arab inhabitants believe that Acre has been their town since ancient times and consider the Jews intruders. The Jews are convinced that the town belongs to them and that the Arabs are, at best, a tolerated minority that should shut up.

The current dispute can well turn violent.

IN EVERY conflict between Jews and Arabs in this country, the rather childish question arises: Who was here first?

The Arabs conquered the country, which they then called Jund Filistin (military district Palestine) in 635 AD, and since then it has been under Muslim rule (apart from the Crusader period) until the arrival of the British. They claim “We were first”.

The Zionist version is different. In Biblical times, most of the country belonged to the kingdoms of Judea and Israel, even though the coast belonged to the Phoenicians in the North and the Philistines in the South. (In spite of all the frantic efforts of a hundred years, no archaeological evidence has been found that there ever was an exodus from Egypt, a conquest of Canaan by the Children of Israel or a kingdom of David and Solomon.) Since the kingdom of Ahab, around 870 BC, Israel has been on the well-attested historical map. After the Babylonian exile, the Jews dominated parts of the country, with constantly changing borders, until Roman times. Ergo: “We were first”.

If the Israelites were here before the Muslims, who was here before the Israelites? The Canaanites, of course. “They were first”. But who represents them?

I once wrote a satirical piece about the “First Canaanite Congress” which takes place somewhere in the world. The participants declare that they are the descendents of the original inhabitants of the country and claim it for themselves.

That is not entirely a joke. In the first years of the last century Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who was to become the second president of Israel, tried to harness the Canaanites to Zionism. He researched and found that the population of this country has not really changed from the earliest times. The Canaanites mixed with the Israelites, became Jews and Hellenists, and when the Byzantine empire, which then ruled this country, adopted Christianity, they too became Christians. After the Muslim conquest, they gradually became Arabs.

In other words, the same village was Canaanite, became Israelite, passed through all the stages and in the end, became Arab. Nowadays it is Palestinian, unless it was wiped out in 1948 and replaced by an Israeli settlement. Throughout, the population did not really change. Many of the place names did not change either. Every new conqueror brought with him a new set of beliefs and a new elite, but the population itself did not change much. No conqueror was interested in driving out the inhabitants, who provided him with food and revenue. In the opinion of Ben-Zvi, the Palestinian Arabs are really the descendents of the ancient Israelites. But when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict gathered momentum, this theory was forgotten.

Recently, some Palestinians adopted a rather similar theory. By the same historical logic, they claim that the Palestinian Arabs are the descendents of the ancient Canaanites, and therefore “they were first”, even before the Children of Israel of Biblical times. It was only the Zionist conquest that, for the first time in history, radically changed the composition of the population.

The Canaanites and the ancient Israelites spoke different dialects of the same Semitic language, which is nowadays called Hebrew. Later on, Aramaic became the language of the country, and later on Arabic. Last week, new research was published, showing that the vernacular Syrian-Palestinian Arabic dialect includes many words that have their origin in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic, and which do not appear in the dialect of other Arab countries. Clearly, they were absorbed by the native Arab dialect many centuries ago. They are mainly day-to-day agricultural words, and it is logical to assume that they entered the Arabic language from the Aramaic that it replaced.

WHY IS that important? How does it affect the Acre dispute?

Many years ago I read a book by the late American-Arab scholar, Philip Hitti, a Maronite Christian from Lebanon, entitled “History of Syria”. According to the Arab historical view, Syria (a-Sham in classical Arabic) includes today’s Syria as well as well as present-day Lebanon. Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The book made a lasting impression on me. It recounts the history of this country from prehistoric times to the present, with all its stages, as one continuous story, which includes Canaanites and Israelites, Phoenicians and Philistines, Aramaeans and Arabs, Crusaders and Mamluks, Turks and Britons, Muslims, Christians and Jews. They all belong to the history of the country, all of them contributed to its culture, language and architecture, palaces and fortresses, synagogues and churches, mosques and cemeteries.

Anyone thinking about peace and reconciliation should absorb this picture.

WHAT KIND of history is taught now in the schools of the two peoples? Both have a mobile history which is wandering about the landscape.

Jewish history starts with “Abraham Our Father” in present-day Iraq and the exodus from Egypt, the receiving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai in present-day Egypt, the Conquest of Canaan, King David and the other legends of the Bible, which are taught as actual history. It continues in the country until the destruction of the Temple by Titus and the Bar Kokhba rebellion against the Romans, when it goes into “exile”, concentrating on the chain of expulsions and persecutions, only returning to the country with the early Zionist settlers.

This history ignores not only all that happened in the country before the Israelite era, but also everything that happened during the 1747 years between the Bar Kokhba uprising in 135 AD and the start of the pre-Zionist settlement in 1882. An alumnus of the Israeli education system knows next to nothing about the country during these eras.

On the Arab side, things are no better. The Palestinian-Arab historical picture starts in the Arab peninsula with the advent of the Prophet Mohammad, mentioning the era of Jahiliyah (“ignorance”) before that, and comes to Palestine with the Muslim conquerors. What happened here before 635 AD does not interest it.

The pupils of these two education systems – the Jewish-Israeli and the Palestinian-Arab – grow up with two entirely different historical narratives.

I DREAM of the day when in every school in this country, in Israel and in Palestine, Jews and Arabs will learn not only these two histories, but also the complete history of the country which includes all the periods and cultures.

They will learn, for example, that when the crusaders invaded the country, Muslims and Jews stood together against the cruel invader and were massacred together. They will learn that in Haifa, the local Jews led the defense and were admired for their heroism, until they were slaughtered side by side with the Muslims. Such identification with the history of the country can serve as a solid basis for a reconciliation between the peoples.

A dozen years ago, inspired by the unforgettable Feisal al-Husseini, I drew up a Manifesto on Jerusalem for Gush Shalom. One of its paragraphs reads: “Our Jerusalem is a mosaic of all the cultures, all the religions and all the periods that enriched the city, from earliest antiquity to this very day – Canaanites and Jebusites and Israelites, Jews and Hellenes, Romans and Byzantines, Christians and Muslims, Arabs and Mamluks, Ottomans and Britons, Palestinians and Israelis. They and all the others who made their contribution to the city have a place in the spiritual and physical landscape of Jerusalem.”

In this list, the Crusaders are missing, and not by mistake. They were in our original text. But when I asked the renowned Arab-Israeli writer Emil Habibi to be the first to sign, he exclaimed: “I shall not sign any document that mentions these abominable murderers!”

Almost everything that can be said about Jerusalem is true for Acre, too. Its history is also continuous from prehistoric times until today, and the Arab general Issa al Awam belongs to it as much as the English Crusader Richard the Lionheart and the Etzel fighters who broke the prison walls.

Uri Avnery, an Israeli writer and peace activist, founded the Gush Shalom movement. He had served three terms as an MP at the Knesset. This article was published by Gush Shalom.

Can Israel Last?

No Happy Ending

By Fred Reed
January 30, 2009
Courtesy Of Lew Rockwell

The practical question regarding Israel’s recent invasion of Gaza is not “Who is right?” but “Can Israel last?”

As I write, Israel is using a military designed to fight hostile countries, to fight a hostile population. In the modern world, this has seldom worked. To defeat a country you destroy its military and capture its territory. But Gaza has little military to destroy, no tanks or aircraft, and Israel already owns its territory. The IDF can invade but, afterward, the population will still be there, and still be hostile. Stabbing jello doesn’t buy you much.

Israel remains a small state in a region that intensely doesn’t want it. The rights and wrongs change nothing. Again and again, Israel lashes out, lashes out, against enemies that can be defeated but never decisively. And so the bombs fall on Gaza, on Syria, on Beirut, perhaps on Iran. Each war guarantees the next: 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, 2009, world without end.

Israel today is not the country once dreamed, in which Heidelberg professors escaped from Europe would work the soil with their hands on kibbutzim and play chess and the violin at night. It looks more like what the professors fled. Brutal conflicts breed brutal people. Atrocities engender counter-atrocities, extremists come to the fore, and military solutions seem the only solutions.

Where is this going? How long can it continue? Another fifty years? A hundred? Say I, either the country finds peace with its neighbors or it goes the way of the Crusader Kingdom. We can stipulate that the Israelis are the world’s best people, or the worst. It doesn’t matter. You can die in the right as easily as in the wrong.

The Israelis appear to be trapping themselves in their own policies. They continue their annexation of the West Bank. The settlements are now so numerous and so populous that dismantling them is probably politically impossible for any Israeli government, which rules out a two-state solution. To control a large hostile population, you need harsh methods, which keep the population hostile. Arabs outbreed the Israelis, so that a proportionately declining number of Israelis rule a slowly rising tide of Arabs. Think: South Africa. How is this going to work? For how long?

Israel also has a large internal minority of Arabs. These also outbreed the Jews. If this continues and the internal Arabs can vote, Israel will one day become an Islamic state. Sooner or later, the question will be: Democratic, or Jewish?

America killed its indigenous population, the Spanish married theirs, but Israel can do neither. Now what?

Since Israelis do not yearn to get in touch with their inner Moslem, the choices will be disenfranchisement or ethnic cleansing. Disenfranchisement would, again, leave a diminishing proportion of Jews ruling more and more Moslems. Think: Alabama in 1930.

Disenfranchisement apparently is starting. Israel just banned its Arab parties from voting in the upcoming elections, and then the courts unbanned them.

Ethnic cleansing? Rounding up a large minority and expelling it would require horrendous brutality. This is the least moral but perhaps most practical solution. It is barely possible that Congress would balk but, I suspect, not until it was too late to matter. If Israel nuked Chicago, Congress would approve.

The long-term indicators point downward. Israel’s military position is not as good as one might think. It has, or had when I last covered such things, a splendid air force, a good militia army, nuclear weapons, and inferior enemies. None of these is particularly useful against angry populations.

It seems probable that Islamic countries will eventually have nuclear weapons. The danger is not that a Moslem country would spontaneously launch them against Israel, as this would constitute national suicide. But you don’t have to use nuclear weapons for them to be effective.

Today, the Bomb is Israel’s trump card. If, say, Syria attacked and (improbably) began to win, its cities would turn to green glass, and Damascus knows it. Thus Israel is in exactly zero danger of conventional defeat. But if Arab countries had nuclear weapons, the trump card would lose its value. You have to be very careful about bombing countries that can vaporize your cities.

Further, Israel depends entirely on a foreign country, namely America, for its survival. The US provides the weaponry, the financial aid, the vetoes in the UN, and the last-resort military support that comes when Israel is in trouble (1973, for example). Without this support, Israel could not last. Small countries without oil cannot support massive militaries.

If I were an Israeli, I would be uneasy about this. American support depends crucially, if not entirely, on the Israeli lobbies. Should these falter, so will Israel. It is not that the US seethes with repressed anti-Semitism awaiting its chance. It doesn’t. But Americans don’t much care about the outside world, know little of history and less of geography. Congress is loyal only to itself.

Today one reads of the recent overwhelming vote in Congress in support of Israel, but the number is highly artificial. The rub is that today is today, but there is always tomorrow. Congress supports whoever pays it or intimidates it, and today the Lobby can exact a heavy price for opposition. If the winds blow another way, Congress will sway in another direction. What might constitute a sufficient wind? I don’t know. I note that Israel has no oil, its enemies do, and world demand is growing fast. Think: Taiwan.

Further, I doubt that public support for Israel is nearly as strong as we are told it is. Among conservatives, no small group, there is considerable mild hostility to Jews and a far stronger dislike of Israel. I’m not sure how serious the antagonism is. To be annoyed is one thing, but to want to see the country fall with the nearly assured hideous results is another. But people seldom think that far. Many, if they could, would shrug and say, “Whatever. It’s their problem.” A national shrug would end Israel.

Methinks a faint smell of doom hangs over Tel Aviv. American power appears to be on the decline, the outcome of its Islamic wars in doubt, its control over its Moslem client states uncertain. Nothing Israel is likely to do looks workable in the long run. The demographics are terrible, regional Arab hostility assured, the military balance only able to deteriorate, the whole enterprise hanging by a lobby. I remember thinking about the Soviet Union, “This can’t last.” I couldn’t see how it could stop lasting either. It did stop. Unless something changes, and I don’t have any bright ideas, I don’t see a happy ending.

Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well and the just-published A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be. Visit his blog.

Copyright © 2009 Fred Reed