Muslims, Jews not a case of “us versus them”

Editor’s Note:  Following is a response to “Muslims, Jews See the World Differently,” a column by Professor Ira Sharkansky that ran on San Diego Jewish World on February 24, 2014:

By Jacob Bender

PHILADELPHIA — The essence of xenophobia is to extend to an entire group the actions of the few. Based upon the financial dealings of Messrs. Madoff, Milken, Boesky, et. al., the anti-Semite concludes that Jews are good in business, but not to be trusted. Looking at the American prison population, on the one hand, and the NBA on the other, the racist concludes that African Americans are criminal by nature, but natural jumpers.

Prof. Ira Sharkansky of Hebrew University, in his article “Muslims, Jews, See the World Differently” (San Diego Jewish World, Feb. 24) follows this simplistic and bigoted line of discourse to conclude that valuing “human life” and opposing “bloodshed as a means of settling disputes” are just not “Muslim ways or perspectives.”

Sharkansky’s evidence for this bigoted conclusion rests solely upon the good professor’s views about the Israel-Palestine Conflict. It is dumbfounding that an emeritus professor of political science would make such a broad generalization about the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, who live in 49 Muslim-majority nations, and in dozens more around the world, and under vastly different social systems, and exhibiting a vast diversity of clearly visible political, religious, and cultural perspectives. The inherent prejudice in Sharkansky’s article is ample proof that earning a PhD is no guarantee of rationalism.

Sharkansky’s article furthermore ignores the long history of Jewish-Muslim relations, and is therefore ignorant of the fact that in the 9th through the 12th centuries CE, the vast majority of World Jewry lived in Muslim-ruled societies. During this time, Arabic was, for hundreds of years, the language of the Jewish People, and Jews were thoroughly integrated into Muslim society. Anyone who knows anything about the hundreds of Arabic and Judeo-Arabic documents found in the Cairo Geniza can hardly conclude otherwise. The great Maimonides’ both halakhic and philosophical writings, almost all written in Arabic, are furthermore replete with references to numerous Muslim thinkers, such as Ibn Sina, Al-Farabi, and Ibn Rushd. Even the greatest achievement of the medieval Hebrew language, the poems of Spanish Jewry, is unthinkable without the borrowings of poetic structure and imagination from the Arabic poets of the same time. This extensive Judeao-Islamic cross-fertilization makes a mockery of Sharkansky’s statement that there are “centuries of religious rivalry focused on Jerusalem and its hinterlands” between Jews and Muslims.

Leaving history aside for the moment, even Sharkansky’s view of the Israel-Palestine Conflict is simplistic in the extreme, reducing a complex history to a Manichaean “us versus them,” “good versus evil” narrative. It is, of course, quite morally comforting for Israeli and Diaspora Jews to continue to promulgate the myth of Israel’s “purity of arms” (Tohar HaNeshek in Hebrew). But this self-portrait is at odds with the actual history of the State of Israel, replete as it is with ethnic cleansings, institutionalized discrimination, torture, official assassinations, and violations of international law, all courageously catalogued by Israeli human rights groups like Peace Now, B’Tselem, and Israeli Rabbis for Human Rights. As my own teacher, and Sharkansky’s Hebrew University colleague, the late Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz argued, already in June of 1967, the occupation of the Palestinian territories captured in that war will lead to the death of Israeli democracy. The occupation of another nation is itself an act of violence and terrorism, maintained only by superior force of arms.

The question that those on the Jewish Right, the settler movement, and the “Israel right of wrong” crowd of the ADL, AJC, and AIPAC, never answer is “What do you propose to do with the millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem?” If, like the settler movement, which endorses an outright Israeli annexation of the West Bank, are these Jews willing to see a vast institutionalized apartheid system in a biblically-based “Greater Israel” and risk universal international censure and sanctions? If, like the Jewish defense organizations listed above, they continue to advance the lie that Israel and PM Netanyahu really support a “two-state solution,” why have they, like Sharkansky’s article, been silent about the continuing expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank which makes impossible a viable State of Palestine? Indeed, many Israelis themselves argue that the possibility of the “two-state solution” has passed, and that other creative solutions to the conflict must now be countenanced, such as transforming Israel from “the nation-state of the Jewish People” into a “state of its citizens.”

Lest Readers conclude that I am a Sonay Yisroel and a “self-hating” Jew, they should know that I have a degree in Jewish Studies from UCLA, and lived in Jerusalem for five years, during which time I worked as an educator at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and the Israeli Ministry of Education. I have produced communications projects for many Jewish organizations, such as the Los Angeles Board of Jewish Education, Yeshiva University, and the Union of Reform Judaism.

I am now honored to be working as the Executive Director of the Philadelphia Chapter of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s preeminent Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization with 30 chapters across the US. While I have been warmly welcomed by Philadelphia’s Muslim community and by the CAIR organization, there have been some Jews who have viciously attacked me on the internet in the most vile and personal way, comparing me to those Jews who collaborated with the Nazis. Based upon Prof. Sharkansky’s article, he would, no doubt, be one of these. I, on the other hand, will continue to work for Tikkun Ha-Olam, Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, and for greater interfaith understanding between Jews and Muslims, as obligated by words of the tradition I hold sacred: Hine(y) ma tov u’ma-nayim, Shevet ach-im gam ya-cha. (“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers and sisters to dwell together in unity!” Psalm 133.)

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Jacob Bender is the Executive Director of the Philadelphia Chapter of CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the Director/Producer of Out of Cordoba, an award-winning documentary film about Maimonides.

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A response from editor Donald H. Harrison: While we would contest even on the basis of the Ira Sharkansky column in question that our columnist is xenophobic, our long familiarity with the corpus of his work assures us and his regular readers that the reverse is true. Rather than being guided by ideology, Ira Sharkansky observes the world in which he lives from a detached perspective, accepting none of the “common truths”  offered to us by any side, but instead forming his own reasoned hypotheses based on empirical evidence.

We do not know the totality of Mr. Bender’s work  well enough to comment, but when he uses such phrases as “ethnic cleansings, institutionalized discrimination, torture, official assassinations, and violations of international law” to describe Israel, but ascribes not even an iota of wrongdoing to the other side in the dispute, then we wonder whether his purpose in writing this letter simply was polemical.

How much more valuable it might have been if Mr. Bender, as a Jewish officer within a predominantly Muslim organization, had chosen to facilitate discussion that moves beyond simple name-calling, and indeed promotes reconciliation.  Perhaps such steps may be taken in the future?  In the meantime, should Prof. Sharkansky choose to respond to Mr. Bender, we shall, of course, bring his thoughts to our readers.