Considering how rare it is to read/hear common sense in the Israeli media, I was pleasantly surprised to read such common sense in the Arab media. When I replied to my friend to thank her, I wondered "out loud" about the future of the writer. "I hope they don't kill him."
OK, enough with the suspense.
Arab Spring and the Israeli enemy by Abdulateef Al-Mulhim is a very thoughtful article in the "Arab News," which is a Saudi Arabian news site. The basic theme of Abdulateef Al-Mulhim's article is that although Israel is always considered the worst enemy of the Arab world, more deaths and cruelty to Arabs is by their fellow Arabs.
The common thing among all what I saw is that the destruction and the atrocities are not done by an outside enemy. The starvation, the killings and the destruction in these Arab countries are done by the same hands that are supposed to protect and build the unity of these countries and safeguard the people of these countries. So, the question now is that who is the real enemy of the Arab world?
The Arab world wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and lost tens of thousands of innocent lives fighting Israel, which they considered is their sworn enemy, an enemy whose existence they never recognized. The Arab world has many enemies and Israel should have been at the bottom of the list. The real enemies of the Arab world are corruption, lack of good education, lack of good health care, lack of freedom, lack of respect for the human lives and finally, the Arab world had many dictators who used the Arab-Israeli conflict to suppress their own people.
These dictators’ atrocities against their own people are far worse than all the full-scale Arab-Israeli wars.
That's true, isn't it?
Remember that Al-Mulhim is only one voice among a total population of 400 million Arabs, Wikipedia's count. So, this article doesn't mean that peace is around the corner. It's more accurate to say that it's still very lost in an enormous maze.
3 comments:
I think that the main problem of the Arab world is that they never psychologically and socially got out of the Middle Ages. Once upon a time in Christian Europe it was the same way, monolithic. Maybe someone thought something different, but nobody asked them and they had no way of expressing it publicly. Today, despite mass media, many Arabs are afraid of retaliation if they don't go along with the extended family, national or pan-Arab interests. Now and then an individual steps out of the lockstep and is either threatened, beaten up, robbed, murdered, or, if he has enough of a tribe of his own behind him or some kind of western backing, gets away with it. Will Mecca have to go down like the Berlin Wall before that can change, or will it happen some other way? Nobody knows.
After the hullabaloo about Elinor Joseph, there came testimonies that this wonderful girl was certainly not the first "Arab" girl to get a teudat lokhem in the IDF. Just the first one to do it "out of the closet".
I am really beginning to dislike the word "Arab" because it confuses issues of language, religion, and ethnicity beyond any meaningful Zionist use. Who does more to preserve the Hebrew Shilton in Eretz Yisrael.... a sabra girl from a ChristianArab family in Haifa serving in Caracal..... or a Beis Yakov girl who never leaves Long Island?
I've studied more than a "a bissel" of European history; I can't think of any era of time when the area was "monolithic". David ha-Melekh had his trade representatives in the British Isles, long before anyone in Rome was even speaking Latin - to bring in the tin needed to turn Timna's copper into weapons-grade bronze. Shlomo was directly importing amber from the Baltic countries on vessels bearing his Civil Ensign (like Zim Lines does today). There were expatriate-Hebrew communities as far away as what is today Vietnam, trading back-and-forth to EztionGeber. The Israelites and the "Phoenicians" were more tightly economically & culturally intertwined than USA & Canada are today. Look up the size of the cargo vessels that the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians (Hebrew-speaking societies, both of them) were running routinely. Massive. We know that Dan & Asher were maritime tribes. The glory of past has been suppressed by Hebrew-hating GrecoRoman-centric historians
good points, guys
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