Jewish Ideas Daily: The fate of Muslim moderates

Particularly vulnerable are those who advocate coexistence with Israel, and most vulnerable of all are Palestinians inclined in that direction.

By ELLIOT JAGER
Killing in name of Islam 311 (photo credit: Reuters)
Killing in name of Islam 311
(photo credit: Reuters)
The recent uprisings in the Middle East seemed, at least at first, to send a reassuring signal to Western observers: Not only did genuinely moderate Muslims exist, and not only were they capable of finding a political voice, but there was reason to hope that, given time to organize, they might succeed in winning out against the voices of repression and Islamist extremism.
As events have unfolded, this early optimism has faded. There is still cause for hope, but clearly the struggle will be long and hard. And then there are also the lessons of history, and of contemporary experience, to consider.
One such lesson, a bitter one, concerns the fate of all too many freethinkers in the Arab and Muslim world. Quite apart from the mass-casualty suicide bombings carried out by Muslims against their fellow Muslims – now obscenely routine in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan – pinpoint assassinations intended to snuff out individual moderates have exercised a no-less devastating impact on political reality.
The list of such assassinations is long, and the targets include any number of figures in positions of power. The most recent such victim may have been Salman Taseer, the cosmopolitan governor of Punjab province in Pakistan, whose murder in January was the most significant since the 2007 killing of former premier Benazir Bhutto. (Taseer was followed to the grave in early March by still another moderate Pakistani politician, Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian.)
Obliterated Muslim heads of state include Jordan’s King Abdullah, shot at al-Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem in 1951 on suspicion of willingness to make peace with Israel, and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, murdered in 1981 for having actually done so. Algerian president Muhammad Boudiaf was shot dead in 1992 by an Islamist bodyguard, and Lebanon’s Sunni prime minister Rafik Hariri was killed in 2005 by Hezbollah. (Lebanon’s president Bashir Gemayel, another Christian, was assassinated in 1982 for meeting with premier Menachem Begin.) Tehran, too, has a bloody history of wiping out its moderate leaders, including former premier Shapour Bakhtiar in 1991.
Particularly vulnerable, as the list suggests, are those who advocate coexistence with Israel, and most vulnerable of all are Palestinians inclined in that direction.
HISTORICALLY, THE leadership of Palestinian society was divided between fanatics led by the former mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and relative moderates whose ranks included notable families like the Nashashibis. The moderates reluctantly concluded that the Zionists could not be defeated, and that coexistence was thus in the Palestinian interest.
But by the 1920s and ’30s, efforts were already under way to radicalize village leaders and incite violence against “collaborators.” The story, told by the researcher Hillel Cohen in Army of Shadows, culminated in a succession of murderous riots that, by the time Israel was established in 1948, had taken the lives of hundreds of Palestinian moderates.
The pattern continued after 1948. Twenty-five years ago this month, Zafer al-Masri, the 44- year-old mayor of Nablus, was assassinated on the doorsteps of city hall on the supposition that he – said to have close ties to Jordan – was planning to negotiate with Israel under its auspices. The same intransigent political culture that regarded contact with Israel as an act of treason punishable by summary death would ultimately spawn not only Fatah and Hamas, but also the allegedly moderate officials running the West Bank today.
One such is Saeb Erekat, among the most accommodating figures in the PLO hierarchy. Speaking confidentially, Erekat has assured Western diplomats that the Palestinians are prepared to compromise on the issue of refugees. Publicly, however, he has continued to insist on the “right of return” of “7 million” refugees and their descendants. Whatever the motivation for his duplicitous statements, the net effect has been that the masses remain unprepared for compromise – which is to say, unprepared for peace.
The consistent, systematic slaughter of genuine moderates, instead of giving pause to Western commentators, has instead led them to “define moderation down.”
Only by that inverted yardstick can an obdurate Mahmoud Abbas, now two years into his boycott of negotiations, be labeled a moderate. As for the genuine moderates speaking out against the Hobbesian state of their existence in Arab lands, they all too often have found life to be not only solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish, but tragically short.
The writer is a former Jerusalem Post editorial page editor, and is now contributing editor to Jewish Ideas Daily (www.jewishideasdaily.com), where this article was first published and is reprinted with permission.