'The Arab Case for Israel': Explaining the conflict between Jews and Arabs - review

His meticulous examination and exhaustively footnoted presentation of historical facts challenge the foundational yet fictional or ignorant narratives that dominate Arab and Western progressive discussions of Israel. Anyone could dig up this information, but few bother to do so.

This extraordinary work is not just a debunker of decades of damaging propaganda.

The author makes two compelling overall observations: that the Jewish state is good for the Arabs; and that the Arabs have never articulated a cogent alternative, dwelling on an imagined past rather than an imagined future.

“Palestinians have always wanted to rewind the clock, but to what time, exactly?… The problem for Palestinians has been that no matter which period in history they chose, they would never find a time when the Arabs of Palestine were sovereign over the land,” he writes.

“Throughout history, the only locals to have ever been sovereign over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea were… the Jews.”

And, “Palestinians have never admitted their inability to imagine a future modern Palestine, or their failure to build a single modern institution in their history, let alone to build and manage a functioning state that is not the kind of medieval Islamist emirate that Hamas constructed in Gaza after 2007.”

Arabs should seek peace with Israel, he writes, not “out of despair or fear, but out of a conviction that – as a friend and an ally – the State of Israel is much more valuable to the Arabs than ejecting it and constructing in its stead a Palestine that would, at best, be a mediocre state.”

When Abdul-Hussain arrived in the United States in 2004, he studied Hebrew until he was fluent enough to read and listen to Israelis debating in their native language.

“My biggest surprise was that, unlike most Arabs and I had thought, the Israelis were not obsessed with killing Arabs. The Jews around the world had a story of their own, one that made sense,” he writes.

His research revealed that “when the PLO was founded in 1964, its primary motive was to join Egyptian Nasser’s United Arab Republic, which had lost Syria in 1961 and failed to annex Yemen after 1962. Palestine was a Nasser project, both to exact revenge on his rivals  Jordan and Saudi Arabia – who obstructed his annexation of Yemen, and to compensate for losing Syria and Yemen in his union. So much Nasserism was behind the declaration of the PLO and Palestine that Saudi Arabia voted against the creation of Palestine at the Arab League at the time.”

Abdul-Hussain observes, “Since the time Muslims gained power over Jews and others in the region, they had treated them the same way they treated one another: coercion by violence. Originally, this was typical for empires subjugating those they colonized. But since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, it took on nationalistic characteristics, and this was when the story of Palestine was honed, evolving into the imagined nationality that we see today: the one that claims to have unfairly lost its sovereignty to the Jewish state, despite never having existed as a sovereign state.”

Concerning the explosive topic of Jerusalem, he discovered that “In over two millennia, since the Arabic language first started taking shape, there was never an Arab or Muslim dynasty that considered Jerusalem to be its capital.”

These and many other revelations led him to believe that “Perhaps if the Arabs, including Palestinians, realize that their national identity is not as ancient and fixed as they think, they will find it easier to trade it for more useful advantages, such as a higher standard of living.”

Abdul-Hussain calls for Arab introspection and a substantial adjustment of their viewpoint “not only to let Jews live in peace, but for the sake of a better future for the Palestinians and all the Arabs.”

If they ever choose to “prioritize measurable higher living standards over unquantifiable, manufactured, and manipulative concepts of pride, dignity, and national sovereignty, they will realize that peace with Israel, rather than defeating it, is their actual victory.”

As if acknowledging how naïve that all sounds, the author bluntly outlines the high cultural hurdles blocking such a radical change.

“It is Palestinians that need to be liberated, not Palestine,” he declares.

“Arab society is perhaps one of the most violent on the planet today … whether in the form of militias, bandits, secret police, thugs, honor crimes, and domestic abuse. Yet now, since the theory of ‘decolonization’ has become all the rage in Western academia, inadequate Islamic traditions that should be replaced with modern ideals are being praised as indigenous.”

Nor is Abdul-Hussain naïve about the likely reaction to his writings. “I have no illusion about the insults, invective, or worse that the thesis I present in this book will bring upon me,” he writes.

The book also considers a host of related angles, including ever-evolving geopolitical obstacles to peace (“Qatar with its soft power, and Islamist Iran with its militias in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen”); the sickly government-to-government Egyptian-Jordanian model of peace vs. the healthy people-to-people model of the Abraham Accords; and “the destructive politics Islamization has brought with it to the American scene.”

A comprehensive section on the history of the region, up to the present day, should be required reading in every American institution of higher education. It’s been well documented that students and faculty attending anti-Israel demonstrations know little about Israel or its neighbors and how the conflict has shapeshifted over time. I consider myself fairly well informed, but I learned much from this section, especially regarding the inner politics driving Israel’s neighbors.

“The Iranians imported from the Egyptians the idea that Islam was not only a religion, but a comprehensive social and political code that was superior to all other global creeds.”

“Hezbollah was not founded to liberate Lebanon, or Palestine for that matter. It was created as one of the arms of Islamist Iran in its global fight against America and the West.”

“Activist Arab- and Muslim-Americans clearly endorse Islamism as a system superior to democracy and Western ideals. … The war on Israel, a liberal democracy, is one of their fronts … [and] is, for the Arab Islamists who are leading the fight against the West inside Western countries, just a stepping stone to their vision of destroying Western civilization as a whole.”

Though much of the book may leave readers hopeless of any possibility of getting past the complex web of hatred, intrigue, and politics to the ideal of mutual understanding and peace in the Middle East, there are some glimmers of positivity within the pages, too.

In the chapter on the Abraham Accords, Abdel-Hussain writes, “Hundreds of thousands of Arabs, whose countries have no ties with Israel, live in the UAE, and many of them are now getting the chance to see Israelis up close, as regular people, just like them. Such experiences have humanized Israelis and Israel in the eyes of many of my friends and family who live in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.”

Abdel-Hussain acknowledges that his observations on emerging issues, such as post-Assad Syria, will necessarily be incomplete or obsolete, given the rapidly evolving events buffeting the world. The book was issued on February 26, and by the following week the chapter on Iran already could have used a major update. Nevertheless, the history and insider insights the author provides to frame these issues remain instructive and valuable.