Tragedy and Promise

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For those Palestinians and Arabs cheering Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah as the latest champion of the Islamic and pan-Arab cause, last night’s murderous attack on Haifa, in which at least three people were killed and more than a hundred wounded, should have gone far to dispel any such illusion. For Haifa isn’t merely Israel’s third largest city, the country’s primary port, and a major industrial and tourist center. It is a model of multiethnic and multi-denominational coexistence, a city where Jews and Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Bahais and Druze live side by side in peace and harmony. They study together, share the same working places, belong to the same clubs, ride the same buses, shop in the same malls, and eat in the same restaurants. As starkly demonstrated by yesterday’s attack, Hezbollah’s salvos are as callously mindless of the wellbeing of the city’s non-Jewish population as of its “Zionist” residents.

The Haifa coexistence dates back to the 1920s and the early 1930s, when the steep rise in the city’s prosperity owing to the influx of Jewish immigration and capital triggered a mass Arab migration in an attempt to share the material benefits of this development. In the span of a decade, Haifa’s Arab population nearly doubled, compared with a slight increase, or even a decrease, in purely Arab towns such as Nablus, Hebron, and Gaza. As a British Royal Commission of Inquiry, appointed in 1936 to study the Palestine problem, put it in its final report: “The general beneficent effect of Jewish immigration on Arab welfare is illustrated by the fact that the increase in the Arab population is most marked in urban areas affected by Jewish development.”

This idyllic reality was cruelly shattered by the 1948 war, when most of Haifa’s Arab residents were driven to exile by their national leadership despite pleas by their Jewish neighbors to stay put. With tears in his eyes, the city’s Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levy, pleaded with his Arab counterparts, most of whom were his personal acquaintances, to reconsider their decision, saying that they were committing “a cruel crime against their own people.” The Haifa representative of the Hagana, the Jewish community’s main Jewish underground organization during the mandate years, assured the Arab leaders that he had the instructions of the commander of the zone that if they stayed on they would enjoy equality and peace, and that the Jews, were interested in their staying on and the maintenance of harmonious relations. While these reassurances failed to prevent the Arab mass exodus, those who stayed behind were incorporated into the fabric of the nascent Jewish state as equal citizens and with the passage of time have largely regained their vibrant role in the city’s social, economic, and cultural life.

As a native of Haifa who spent his childhood in a mixed Jewish-Arab neighborhood, I had a first hand experience of this unique phenomenon. As children we hardly differentiated between Arab and Jew, forming groupings and friendships across the ethnic and religious divides and remaining largely oblivious to the wider problems besetting the region. This was no doubt an exceptional pattern to the otherwise unsavory relationship between Arabs and Jews, an offshoot of bygone days that preceded the mutual hardening of positions in the post-1967 era. Yet as a constant visitor of my hometown, where many of my family members and schoolmates live to this very day, I have little doubt that Haifa is still the oasis of tolerant coexistence it has always been.

Indeed, when on October 4, 2003, Hanadi Jaradat, a 29-year-old lawyer from Jenin, stepped into a bustling Haifa restaurant on a peaceful Saturday afternoon and blew herself up among the diners, murdering 21 people and wounding another 60, the establishment chosen for the heinous crime was of joint Arab-Jewish ownership, and the victims — both Jewish and Arabs.

But then, it is far easier to unite people through a common hatred than through a shared loyalty, and Islamists and pan-Arabists have never had the slightest inhibition about massacring their compatriots and coreligionists in the name of the ideals they have supposedly been championing. Just as Osama bin Laden didn’t give a second thought to the Muslims killed by the September 11 attacks, so the Algerian Islamists had no more qualms about slaughtering tens of thousands of their compatriots during the 1990s than the Iraqi insurgents have about the ongoing bloodletting in the country. And so on and so forth.

When sirens went off in Israel in the early morning hours of June 5, 1967, schoolchildren throughout the country were led to shelters by their teachers. There we sat together, in the city of Haifa, Jewish and Arab kids, anxiously awaiting the aerial bombardments promised by the Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the self-styled champion of the Arab imperial dream, who had vowed to obliterate the “Zionist Entity” and to restore Palestine to the pan-Arab fold. In the event, the attack didn’t materialize as Israel famously destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground within hours from the outbreak of hostilities. But 39 years later, Jews and Arabs in Haifa find themselves yet again victimized by the latest preacher of hate, who has hijacked the Palestinians’ cause (not to mention Lebanon’s national interest) to his ulterior motives, and who seeks to destroy the tolerant and harmonious fabric they have been nurturing for decades.

Professor Karsh is head of Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, University of London, and author most recently of “Islamic Imperialism: A History,” available from Yale University Press.


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