More Arabs believe Jews are a 'foreign imprint'

With thanks: Lily

Yasser Qashlaq, do me, and yourself, a favour. Become a follower of my blog. It might correct a few misapprehensions you have about the Jewish people - notably that the Jews all come from Europe.

Qashlaq is the Lebanese businessman who has called to throw the Jews “back to their true countries.”

In a recent interview on the Hizbullah terror group's Al-Manar television network which was translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Qashlaq, a journalist who also heads the Free Palestine Movement, said: “The natural place for [Ehud] Barak is Poland, and the natural place for that idiot, Netanyahu, is Moscow, while the natural place for me is Safed [Tzfat -ed.].”

Apart from the fact that he looks too young to remember Safed, whose Arab population fled in 1948, Qashlaq is one of the new generation of 'denial merchants' who reject the 3,000-year old ties of the Jewish people with the Middle East. He and his ilk refuse to believe that Jews are the only people who have had a sovereign country in that sliver of land they call Eretz Yisrael.

It is a source of concern, moreover, that a majority of those Arabs who live with Jews in Israel now believe the propaganda that Jews are not indigenous to the Middle East.

The 2010 Arab Jewish Relations Survey, compiled by Prof. Sami Smoocha in collaboration with the Jewish-Arab Center at the University of Haifa, 'presents what its authors describe as a worrying decline in relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel over the past decade.'

Over 62 percent of the Arab citizens of Israel believe Jews are a foreign imprint on the Middle East and are destined to be replaced by Palestinians, and a similar proportion believe that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state, according to a nationwide survey.

As a matter of urgency, Israel needs to educate Arabs that half of its Jewish population never left the Middle East. It needs to say to Arabs and Muslims that Jews now live in Israel because they and their parents were driven out by Arab and Muslim antisemitism. At the same time, Israel is their legitimate ancestral homeland.

It is the Arabs who are the 'interlopers and colonialists'. As the great Iraqi-Jewish author Naim Kattan says, one thing an Arab could never tell a Jew was to go back to where he came from: he had been there well before the Arabs conquered the region in the name of Islam.

Qashlaq 's venomous hatred - his rant seems even to elicit embarrassed giggles from the other studio guests - is mixed in with traditional contempt: how could the despised Jews - and so few of them - have humiliated the Arabs in Palestine?

“I would like to say to Ben-Gurion: You little boy, tomorrow, my little son will stomp on your grave. He will deport your remains to your true country in Europe, and we will return. “Like Imam Khomeini said, back in the day, if each of us were to spit, we would drown out all five million of them,” he continues. “The number of Jews – those human pieces of filth – in my land equals one third of the people of the Nasr City neighborhood in Cairo."

What also rankles with Quashlaq is that a dhimmi population has violated the natural order of things. Jews must always submit to their Muslim superiors, never the other way around.

The myth of Jewish colonialism