Our Journey to Israel and Palestine (4)
Published in the first of April
Authored by: Dr. Ahmed Subhy Mansour
Translated by: Ahmed Fathy
Pieces of advice addressed to Israel
Introduction:
1- The car which our son rented from the Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv had GPS that worked properly inside Israel; yet, once we entered into the road leading to Nablus, the GPS stopped working after warning us that we are heading towards zones that endanger the lives of Israelis; i.e., Nablus and the West Bank in general; we saw a signpost on the road mentioning the same warning. Later on, with sorrow in his voice, a Palestinian man told us the sad story of an unfortunate male Israeli youth who lost his way and entered into the Palestinian territories unintentionally; no one found him; he was killed by unknown Palestinians. Within Islam (i.e., the Quranic sharia laws), this male youth was a wayfarer/traveler who should be helped, fed, protected and treated peacefully; the opposite occurred as he was killed and his corpse was hidden as per the teachings of the Sunnite Wahabi religion and its sharia of Satan; this crime was committed as a direct result of the propaganda and intellectual war spread by Wahabis like the terrorist Hamas group and its likes.
2- When our own late mother (may God rest her soul) visited us in our house in VA, the USA, she met with our dearest, nearest friend, the noble Jewish lawyer Mr. Irving Spitzberg and his wife, who helped our person a lot on several occasions once we arrived to the USA as a political asylee and until now; both he and his wife are among the noblest persons we know; in fact, Mr. Spitzberg is the Chair of the board of our VA-based IQC, and we have appointed him in this position to express our infinite gratitude to him. Our mother returned to Egypt, feeling impressed and dazzled with what she saw inside the USA; when she talked about her experience there with an Egyptian female friend in our native village and mentioned the fact that Mr. Spitzberg is a Jew, the Egyptian female friend panicked; this sudden panic reflects the anti-Israel intellectual war and propaganda of the military regime of Egypt that has commenced since the 1950s, as Egyptians are fed with many similar falsehoods; such lies influenced our person temporarily until we have liberated our mind from many false political and religious notions that are still being glorified and idealized by the masses in Egypt.
3- On the other hand, the Israelis in their deep psyche have roots of unreasonable fear and exaggerated focus on security, because the Israeli and Jewish collective mind still remembers the ancient eras of being persecuted by the Egyptians, Babylonians, the Romans, the Europeans, and the Muhammadans during their eras of caliphates. Thus, since 1948, the Israeli Jews still currently have this unreasonable fear and distrust of all Palestinians indiscriminately.
4- We will not argue here about who has the right to own the land of Palestine; it is useless to tackle this issue; the state of Israel has been established as per the International Law and the resolutions of the UN. Israel now is the strongest, most powerful state in the Middle East; Arab leaders and rulers now seek to gratify and please Israel all the time. In politics, it is futile to talk about morality, as politics is the art of dealing with realities to gain the maximum benefit and serve one's interests. Bearing this in mind, we offer these pieces of advice to Israel; the Israeli interests entail that Israel should make peace with its Palestinian neighbors based on mutual interests; in other words, Israel should care about the interests of the Palestinians and this will serve Israeli interests in the long run. Of course, we do not mean corrupt Wahabi rulers/leaders in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; rather, we mean the ordinary Palestinian individuals (or the Palestinian nation) who, of course, have inalienable human rights as well as political rights to be enjoyed in the same way as Israeli citizens/individuals, regardless of the type of state they live in; i.e., when Israel and the Palestinian territories will be combined in one federal or confederal State or if the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will be two independent states which will be established by the help of Israel; the Israelis should realize that in both cases, this will serve their interests before anyone else's.
5- Our words here will not be admired or liked by the Palestinian leaders inside Hamas and the likes of Dahlan and Abbas; their ill-gotten money has exponentially increased by trading with the Palestinian blood and the Palestinian suffering in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. The Wahabi Sunnite MB-affiliated leaders of the terrorist Hamas group still trade with the Palestinian blood and they manipulate and control ordinary Palestinians in the Gaza Strip using the intellectual war; hence, Hamas leaders throw deluded, brainwashed Palestinian youths into the Israeli borders so that they force Israel to defend its borders, and the ensuing bloodshed results in nothing at all, as usual. The blood of the Palestinians is shed for no reason except serving the evil interests of Hamas. Hence, the interests of Hamas and the likes of M. Dahlan and Abbas will never be the same as the interests of ordinary Palestinians or the Palestinian nation in general. If the corrupt leaders of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were honest and nationalistic (as they claim about themselves) and better than the Israeli leadership, Arab Israelis should have left Israel in order to settle and relocate in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Of course, Arab Israelis since 1948 enjoy better life conditions when compared to millions of Arabs ruled by tyrants in all Arab countries. The leaders of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are never less corrupt, unjust, or tyrannical than leaders and rulers of all Arab countries.
6- Our words here will not be admired or liked by the Israeli hawks or extremists and fanatics who are blinded by the current Israeli military power and they cannot see the future that lies ahead for their children and grandchildren.
7- We are keen on offering these pieces of advice to Israel (and to the Palestinians in the next article) for the sake of allowing the Israeli children and the Palestinian ones to live in a peaceful, safe, and secure environment that they deserve.
Firstly: Israel is the strongest now in terms of military power, but it is the worst in the intellectual war:
Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East now, with its army, weaponry, and central intelligence. Despite the fact that Israel is in a state of war since 1948, this never affected its adherence to democracy; it never resorted to exceptional measures or emergency laws; Israeli ongoing wars never hindered its economic, scientific, and technological progress. Yet, the ongoing wars have negatively influenced Israel in the way it treats its Palestinian neighbors, who are deemed as 'eternal' enemies never to be dealt with except through logistic war; Israel disregards until now the vital need to address the Palestinians by launching an intellectual war serving Israeli interests, despite the following facts.
1- Worldwide, the Jews are unparalleled experts in the field of launching intellectual wars; they are the masters of media, show-business, and entertainment industry (movies, TV series, etc.).
2- The intellectual war certainly has long-lasting effect and it is less costly than any other types of war. Logistical wars involve military confrontation between two armies/enemies and each of them desire to vanquish and annihilate the other. In contrast, the intellectual war focuses on influencing the minds of individuals who might be either neutral people turned into friends or enemies turned into neutral people by this intellectual war. Hence, the intellectual war addressing minds of people to convince and influence them and control their thinking. Bullets and ammunitions within the logistical wars are used up eventually, whereas the power of words in the intellectual war never ends at all and its influence remains for longer duration; i.e., as long as there are people who read, watch, see, and hear.
3- Because of cyberspace culture and the advancement in telecommunications, the intellectual wars are more common now and they easily reach the minds of the targeted individuals.
4- Arabs, despite their military failures, excel in using the anti-Israel intellectual war, and the worst type of intellectual war is the one using the evil Wahabi Salafist Sunnite religion to brainwash Muslim nations. This wicked Sunnite Wahabi religion is the one behind suicide bombings and suicide terrorist operations as well as the evil tenet/notion of Wahabis/jihadists who assume they must massacre all Israelis or kill them off. Hence, instead of using the intellectual war for its real, sublime purposes (i.e., stopping bloodshed and restoring peace as well as winning foes/people to one's side or neutralizing them), it is misused by Wahabis who commit heinous crimes of terrorism that cause more bloodshed, and the deluded youths assume they will die and enter into Paradise to enjoy endless sex with houris!
5- With this intellectual war launched by Wahabi terrorists, the brainwashed youths are turned into time-bombs that will explode anytime and anywhere; thus, ordinary Muslim youths might be soon very 'religious' (by being deluded into adhering to the Wahabi ideology), and soon enough, they might turn into suicide attackers seeking Paradise now – as per Wahabi myths – by committing indiscriminate killings within streets, means of transportation, houses of worship, movie-theaters, discothèques, and nightclubs. Such transformation of deluded youths by Wahabism cannot be detected by any central intelligence of any country. Since worldwide media networks are filled with headlines and news of Wahabi terrorists, this is an undeniable proof of the success of the Wahabi intellectual war launched against the West countries and against Israel. Any military power or arsenal of arms and weapons will never be able to defeat those who decide to die as terrorist suicide attackers or suicide bombers. Yet, it is easy to save the lives of such brainwashed youths and to save the lives of their potential victims by psychological war and intellectual war; i.e., by convincing the deluded youths through Quranism (i.e., from within the religious culture of the Quran, the Book in which all Muslims believe) that the heinous crimes of terrorism they plan or are about to commit will make them disbelievers/polytheists before the sight of the Lord God and enemies of the Lord God and Muhammad on the Day of Resurrection.
Secondly: what about the future if the Israeli policies remain the same?:
1- If Israel would depend all the time solely on its military power and disregard the intellectual war of ideas, it will inadvertently prepare a holocaust for the next generations of Israeli citizens, and this holocaust will be indeed ten times worse than the one committed by the cursed, crazy leader named Hitler. In fact, Hitler the cursed, crazy leader had no justification to commit the crime of the holocaust against millions of innocent Jews (men, women and children); in contrast, the coming holocaust – and we implore the Almighty Lord God that it will never take place – would be justified by the Israeli insistence to go on with its hostile policies against the Palestinians without even a single try to get nearer to them and to win them to the side of Israel by serving mutual interests.
2- The future will bring very bad news for Israel if it continues its hostile policies against the Palestinians.
2/1: Israel now is the strongest country in the Middle East in terms of military power and technological progress; there is a huge gap between Israel and all Arabs in terms of military power. Yet, this gap is expected to be bridged anytime in our modern era of swift exchange of information, science, and technology and the swifter development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD); moreover, it is very easy now to acquire simple types of nuclear weapons. Within the dangerous, hostile climate and mutual hatred between Israel and Arabs/Palestinians, what would ensure the security of Israel in the near future against any military operation/attack that would aim to massacre millions of Israelis?
2/2: The Israelis now are less than 9 million citizens facing hundreds of millions of Arabs. The population growth rate inside Israel is very low, unlike the ever-increasing population growth rates in the Arab world. This means that in the future, the population growth rates of Arabs (and Palestinians) will engulf the Israeli citizens. Within the hostile climate and mutual hatred between Israelis and Arabs/Palestinians, we shudder at the prospect of such Arab population acquiring immense military power one day.
2/3: The Holy Land had its many conquerors and invaders before and after the Arab conquest of the Levant. Each of the invaders/conquerors remained there for a while before leaving, and as they were conquering, settling, and leaving the Levantine region, bloodbaths occurred. This applies to all invaders of the Levant in the past: the Babylonians, the Persians, the Romans, the Arabs, the Seljuks, the Ayyubids, the Mamelukes, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, and the British. The common element was the simple, unsophisticated weapons used during these eras which made soldiers kill others within face-to-face combats; in today's world, there are modern WMD, which are not owned by the Palestinians – until now; yet, what about the very near future? Within the hostile climate and mutual hatred between Israelis and Arabs/Palestinians, what will be the situation of the Israeli citizens, especially as the Wahabi intellectual war incites suicide terrorist operations? What will occur to the Israeli citizens, especially within the Wahabi culture of Hamas (and other similar terrorist groups) that never care to preserve the lives of Palestinians and Arabs (let alone the lives of Israelis) and they still trade with ordinary people's lives in order to serve political and economic interests?
Thirdly: the Israeli policies must change by working hard to win the Palestinians to the side of Israel:
1- The confrontations between Israel and the Wahabi terrorist Hamas group prove the fact that Israel is more keen on preserving the lives of Palestinians more than Hamas; in fact, Hamas members never care about the lives of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip; when Hamas members launch their rockets against Israel, they typically hide in the densely populated city of Gaza (within its buildings, mosques, and hospitals) and take its people as human shields as per Salafist/Wahabi evil notions in times of fighting. In contrast, Israel does its best using technology to hunt down criminals and offenders only; we have mentioned this in our previous political articles. Thus, Israel, like the West democracies, respect human rights that include the right to live and protecting/preserving human life (by the way, Israel does not apply the capital punishment despite the fact that the Torah or the Old Testament entails putting murders to death), and this is in contrast to the evil Salafist Wahabi tenet of massacring others and depriving them of their lives. In fact, there are many positive points in how Israel deals with Arab Israelis; the conditions of Arab Israelis are great and better when compared to (1) all Arab nations that suffer from the oppression of Arab tyrants and to (2) the despicable conditions of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Yet, the Arab Israelis are less fortunate when their status is compared to the one of Israeli Jews inside Israel and the human rights of citizens inside the West countries. Therefore, the Israeli policies of how to deal with Palestinians must change as per the following two interrelated ways.
1/1: Stopping the ongoing process of building Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories, not only to conform to the UN resolutions, but also to get nearer to the Palestinians to win them to the side of Israel. Laws must be issued along with administrative decisions to allow the Palestinians the right to visit their land and build houses in the pieces of land they own without restrictions, which are the same rights enjoyed by Israeli citizens. Israel should make sure that the Palestinians would enjoy all the human rights enjoyed by Israeli citizens; hence, the Palestinians will see their security and rights protected and ensured by the Israeli authorities and not by the corrupt, tyrannical Palestinian authority men.
1/2: Launching the intellectual war of ideas addressing the minds of the Palestinians within all media to win them to the side of Israel as friends and to remove all the negative influence, remnants, and results of the Salafist brainwash and Wahabi intellectual war that transform some deluded Palestinian youths into time-bombs that will explode anytime and anywhere.
2- This peaceful, intellectual war of ideas will take time to bear fruit; it should have started decades ago; it is of vital importance that it will begin right now to preserve the right to live for the Israeli children and the Palestinian ones on equal footing.
Lastly:
We never care at all to please both sides (i.e., the Israelis and the Palestinians); we care only about human rights: peace, justice, freedom, human dignity, and the right to live. These are the Quranic values of Islam; as per the Quran, God has sent Muhammad with the Quranic message as a mercy to the humankind (see 21:107), and not to massacre and terrorize the humankind.
COMMENTS:
(1) Saeed Ali: This great article must be translated into English and into Hebrew and other languages; in fact, the Israelis who brag of their military power and the U.S. support forget about the Palestinian minds which are shackled with Salafism/Wahabism and suffer Zionist oppression. I sincerely hope these series of articles would reach the Israeli/Jewish minds.
(2) Hisham Saeedi: I do not think that the Israelis would take heed of the words of Dr. Mansour at all. I feel destruction is bound to occur to the whole of Palestine sooner or later. Israel does not understand anything but the language of might; peace for it means total submission of Arabs to its dictates; yet, since Palestinians have been evicted from their homes and land by force and by aggression, revenge against the aggressors is bound to occur one day as per the celestial law.
(3) Adel Bin Ahmad: This is really a great article; I always admire the political analyses of you, dear Dr. Mansour; they are always correct; your predictions before 2010 about the Arab world came true later on. May God allow your words to reach all decision-makers in Israel and in the bleak Middle East.
(4) Lotfiya Saeed: The pieces of advice provided by Dr. Mansour are great; Arabs/Muslims must stop fearing and hating Jews/Israelis; Jews/Israelis must stop fearing and hating Arabs/Muslims. There is no time for extremism, empty slogans and speeches, or mutual distrust; both Arabs and the Israelis must adhere to patience while reforming mutual misconceptions spread through the past decades. Israel should prove its good intentions by stopping the process of building settlements. Arabs/Palestinians should trust Israel if peace is the desired aim of all Palestinian and Israeli citizens. God says in the Quran: "Good and evil are not equal. Repel evil with good, and the person who was your enemy becomes like an intimate friend. But none will attain it except those who persevere, and none will attain it except the very fortunate." (41:34-35).
(5) Ben Levante: In order to be just and fair, one must analyze the roots of the conflict regarding the historical land called Palestine. Not all Jews support Zionism; Zionists aimed to establish the Hebrew State or Der Judenstaat; they used in their propaganda the false motto of providing a homeland without a nation to a nation without a homeland. They expelled and transferred so many Palestinians (about 750000 persons) out of their land before 1948 and many of them fled in fear. Palestine had its people/nation for thousands of years; it was not a homeland without a nation. Another falsehood is the term "Promised Land"; this divine promise in the Old Testament was accomplished and has ended (after the era of David and Solomon); other human races settled in Palestine or Canaan and it was conquered many times by the Israelites, the Arabs, the Romans, the Pharaohs, the Babylonians, and the Persians. Thus, those expelled Palestinians who have no right to return were unjustly evicted from their homes. The same policy of evicting more Palestinians is adopted by Israel in the West Bank by expropriating more stretches of land to build settlements; the crisis of settlements is not ending any time soon. The Israelis must stop annexing bits and pieces of land from the West Bank; Israel never responds to any peace initiative coming from the leaders of the PLO, Egypt, or even the USA. Israel expects to be an all-powerful party who dictates to the weak party (i.e., Palestinians) what to do. I do believe that Israel will never pay attention to this series of articles by Dr. Mansour.
(6) Hisham Saeedi: I urge all Quranists to read articles and news about the Land Day events of 30th of March, 2018.
(7) Mustafa Ismail Hammad: I thank Mr. Ben Levante for his comment which has made me sober up from my stupor and trust again my mental faculties that have been temporarily shaken and numbed by this series of articles written by Dr. Mansour; we must not forget the many Jews have black history of treachery and moneylending; some Egyptian Jews who used to live in my native village had immense wealth because of usury that caused the bankruptcy of many peasants; Dr. Mansour knows about them because both he and I belong to the same rural area. To me, there is no difference at all between Judaism and Zionism; the Jews hate all the non-Jews or the gentiles/goyim and the book of Ezekiel shows hatred and racism thousand years before the rise and emergence of European Zionism. I urge Dr. Mansour to return to history references, since he is a historian. In fact, the Jews are partially or wholly behind many calamities, catastrophes, and crises in the world, past and present. This verse may apply to Jews who hate all gentiles: "There you are, you love them, but they do not love you, and you believe in the entire scripture. And when they meet you, they say, "We believe;" but when they are alone, they bite their fingers in rage at you. Say, "Die in your rage; God knows what is within the hearts."" (3:119). As always, God says nothing but the Absolute Truth.
(8) Dr. A. S. Mansour: Dear fellow Quranists, we beg of you to allow our person to assert the following: in the early 1990s in Cairo, Egypt, we have been delivering eloquent speeches in many forums against normalization with Israel; we adhered to this stance in conferences outside Egypt as well. Yet, we realized suddenly that this stance disregards reality and insists on imaginary steps that should be taken but will never be taken at all. As we constantly review our political, intellectual, and religious views/stances, we have realized that politics has nothing to do with what should be done; those entities and countries who paid money to hold conferences against Egyptian normalization with Israel hold close ties with Israel in secret. We have realized that nothing great or good might be done within a country owned by its tyrannical ruler (i.e., Mubarak at the time). The Arab tyrants in the Middle East are the real plague and source of all evil. When we were a student at an Azharite secondary school, we remember at one time that cars owned by the regime of Gamal Abdel-Nasser carried some students (including our person) after convincing them to join a march to protest against Saudi Arabia, and after chanting slogans against it and other slogans to support Nasser, we were surprised to see that the regime men who carried the students in cars to bring them at this location are the same men who dispersed the march by force and they had beaten the students! The State media brought the news of 'troublemakers' among students who chanted slogans against Saudi Arabia and how the police anti-riot forces controlled the situation! Thus, the Nasser regime men have manipulated the gullible students to serve a certain bad scheme. Thus, tyrannical rulers brainwash their nations with propaganda and make them hate an eternal enemy (e.g., Israel and the USA) to channel their frustration and fury away from tyrants. In politics, one must deal with realities and the fait accompli. The era of meaningless slogans has ended when Nasser died in 1970; his wrong policies has resulted in making Israel the greater force in the Middle East. Let us assure all Quranists that we respect the right of everyone to hold different views from our own; one day, you will realize where the truth is. When we have realized that our former stance against Israel is wrong, we have changed our stance soon enough in the mid-1990s; this series of articles atone for our past mistake and misunderstanding. Let us narrate another story from our personal history: we were among the candidates to lead the anti-normalization trend in Egypt after writing an article attacking Yasser Arafat, after his signing the Oslo Accords and thus letting down Arabs regarding the Palestinian land, in Al-Ahaly independent newspaper owned by the Marxist party in Cairo, Egypt. Arafat complained to the head of the party at the time, Khaled Mohei-Eddine, who reproached our person for our harsh style of writing. When we realize at any time that we have been in the wrong, we are never shy to admit our mistake and make amends after changing our view. We thank all commentators for expressing their views here.
(9) Ben Levante: I assert to Mr. Mustafa Ismail Hammad that there is a huge difference between Judaism and Zionism; the former is a religion/faith and the latter is a nationalistic ideology. Nationalistic ideologies might be secular (as in Europe) or depending on a certain religion (as in Iran). It is wrong to generalize about a certain nation or race; people differ in many things and not everyone is the same. We have to bear in mind that there are many Jews who defend rights of the Palestinians more than some Arabs who use their political life to earn some money. Jews are not the same as individuals; e.g., secular, communist Jews (who might or might not deny God's existence) differ from religious Jews and also from fanatic/extremist Jews. There are Arab/Palestinian Jews who refuse to obtain the Israeli nationality. The Quran mentions that some of the People of the Book (i.e., Jews + Christians) were good, monotheistic believers; not all of them were polytheists. Dr. Mansour deals with the issues within a Quranist vision and the perspective of human rights; we, as Arabs, must deal with realities around us in a reasonable manner and never be blinded by hatred and empty slogans. Thank you.
(10) Dr. A. S. Mansour: We beg Mr. Mustafa Ismail Hammad who lives in a village near our native village to tell us the information he remembers about the Egyptian Jewish doctor who used to live in our village; his name was Youssef Menasha; he had a very good reputation since the 1940s and he cured and healed poor villagers and peasants for free and for very little money; this noble Jew refused to live in Cairo or any other city. This noble Jew had performed a surgery to our late honored father and to one of our elderly relatives as well. This noble Jew refused to leave his homeland, Egypt, despite the persecution of the Nasser regime against him and his family members who immigrated to France or Israel. Could Mr. Hammad tell us more about this noble Jew and what happened to him and if he died in Egypt or not? God says in the Quran: "Is the reward of goodness anything but goodness?" (55:60).
(11) Mustafa Ismail Hammad: Dear Dr. Mansour, the elderly family members in my village and other elderly people outside my family still fondly remember Dr. Youssef Menasha and how he examined poor peasants and cured them without taking money from them; this noble Jew had excellent expertise and he sometimes used herbs to help cure his patients. In fact, he performed many surgeries to the people in my village in return for very little money. Everyone loved him; he remained in Egypt until 1957 when the tyrant Nasser confiscated the assets of his family members; my grandfather and the elderly people in my village say that news came to them that Dr. Menasha died out of grief one year later when he left Egypt for good. Of course, I never generalize and I never say that all Jews are bad; people in Egypt used to listen to male and female Jewish Egyptian singers. The evil Jews are the Zionists who hate Arabs and consider them as insects to be killed and who hold close ties with tyrants like Mubarak.
(12) Dr. A. S. Mansour: We thank Mustafa Ismail Hammad for the pieces of information he wrote above about the great, noble Egyptian Jew who was loved by the Egyptian peasants. Mustafa Ismail Hammad is indeed a great friend of ours; may God gather all of us in Paradise with His mercy.
(13) Adel Bin Ahmad: The same story is repeated in my village in Algeria; decades ago, an Arab Jewish doctor used to even buy medicine to impecunious patients and orphans; when he died, all Muslims and Christians of the village attended his funeral and mourned his death; the only Jew left in our village now is a lawyer whose good reputation precedes him and he is loved by everyone.
(14) Dr. A. S. Mansour: We thank Mr. Adel Bin Ahmad and we would like to rebuke him for never writing comments and articles except on rare occasions; at one point in time, years ago, we needed to contact him but we do not have his cellular number. We urge him and all Quranists to keep in touch with our person via Facebook and WhatsApp; our cellular number is as follows: 7039620874. We typically publish links of our writings and their translations on our Facebook account. We hope our beloved Quranists would keep in touch with our person. Thank you all.