Confronting Mazin Qumsiyeh’s Indictment of Israel

Confronting Mazin Qumsiyeh’s Indictment of Israel

Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh is a West Bank Palestinian academic who campaigns tirelessly for a one-state solution and against Israel — both against its occupation of what most of the world views as Palestinian lands, and against its very existence as a sovereign country.  Two weeks ago, some members of our board discussed a long list of 28 alleged wrongs Dr. Qumsiyeh laid at the feet of Israel on his Facebook page on May 19, as “the only country in the world that….”

Mazin Qumsiyeh

Rather than go through all of them here (one can scroll down his Facebook page to May 19 to find the list), we should stipulate that a few are factual and have long been the focus of our concerns and protests.  Here are three that come readily to mind: Israel does not recognize a single Israeli nationality, but instead classifies its citizens’ nationality as Jewish, Arab, Druse, Circassian, etc.; it empowers “supra-national bodies” (such as the Jewish National Fund, the Jewish Agency for Israel, and the World Zionist Organization) for some purposes that are more properly functions of the state; there are “unrecognized villages” that are not accorded basic services by the state because its Bedouin residents insist on keeping lands that they claim to own and on maintaining their traditional pastoral way of life.    

But while this indictment is not entirely wrong, his long list is tendentious in the extreme.  He quotes nasty statements about Arabs and Palestinians by Zionist and Israeli authorities during specific historic circumstances of ethnic conflict, without any consideration of similarly nasty or bloodcurdling pronouncements by Arab leaders.  Even if one does not consider the appalling human rights record of many Arab and Muslim-majority countries in comparison, one has to keep in mind that his argument ignores Israel’s reality as a small country under violent threat for its entire history.  And even if we don’t look at the blood-soaked history of European countries, many of them even today favor their ethnic/religious majorities; Germany and Russia, for example, give automatic citizenship to those who can prove the appropriate ancestry.  This is not to mention the ethnic, religious and racially-charged conflicts going on within so much of Africa to this day.

We know that mentioning far worse wrongs being committed outside of Israel does not excuse Israel from needing to reform some practices and to work toward a more just society.  But Qumsiyeh’s basic argument that Israel is uniquely evil, deserving pariah status, is wrong on its face.

We consulted two friends specifically about Qumsiyeh’s indictment.  Here’s a brief paraphrase of the response from J.J. Goldberg, The Jewish Daily Forward’s editor-at-large: He notes that Qumsiyeh only regards Jews as a religious group and not as a historic people; Germany grants automatic citizenship and other rights to “returning” ethnic Germans and that 3.5 million ethnic Turks have long struggled for equal citizenship rights; Bosnia is among a number of other countries that privileges returning ethnic (Bosniac/Muslim) kin; Russia classifies people by “nationality” apart from their Russian citizenship; Israel has been so scrupulous about respecting Christian and Muslim religious rights and holy sites that it infuriates many Jews by restricting their access to the Temple Mount (Judaism’s holiest site) and respecting the Muslim authorities’ insistence that Jews not pray there.

This is the response from our colleague Hillel Schenker:

Along with the many points that J.J. refutes, Mazin shares a problem with many, perhaps most Palestinians, and Arabs in general, who have a difficulty understanding that there is not only a religion called Judaism, but also a Jewish people/nation.  They tend to see the Jews and Judaism as being parallel to Muslims and Islam.   When we discussed at the Policy Committee of the Israeli Peace NGO Forum the question of how to relate to Netanyahu’s insistence on Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, I emphasized the difficulty that Palestinians and Arabs have with this issue, and the whole concept of the Jewish right to national (not religious) self-determination.

The Palestinians, and the Arabs in general, have gone beyond accepting the Jews only as a minority in the Middle East.   After all, we have the Arab Peace Initiative, backed by the 22 Arab States and the 57 Muslim States, which is ready to recognize and make peace with the State of Israel and have normal relations, provided that we enable a Palestinian state to be established in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, and find agreed upon solutions for the refugees and Jerusalem.  Once you define Israel as “a Jewish state”, that raises another problem in their eyes (apart from the attitude towards the 20% of the Israeli citizens who are Arabs and the implications for the Palestinian refugees and a potential right of return).
Their problem is understanding that the Jews are a people/nation, and not just a religion.  That’s what creates the conflict with the fundamentalist Islamic perception that the Middle East is a Muslim region, and that others can only be minorities with the status of Dhimmi within an Islamic state, defined by its religious character. 
By | 2014-06-03T14:09:00-04:00 June 3rd, 2014|Blog|10 Comments

10 Comments

  1. Anonymous June 3, 2014 at 4:50 pm - Reply

    Sadly, as is all too frequently the case Partners commenters are confused, due to their lack of knowledge of basic facts about Palestinians.

    Hillel Schenker wrote this:

    “That’s what creates the conflict with the fundamentalist Islamic perception that the Middle East is a Muslim region, and that others can only be minorities with the status of Dhimmi within an Islamic state, defined by its religious character.”

    Mazin Qumsiyeh is a Palestinian Christian. He has no interest in anything other than equal rights for non-Muslims, and not some kind of Islamic State, with a separate category of rights for non-Muslims.

    Might be good to learn, and then make relevant arguments rather than creating strawmen.

    Thank you,

    Ted

  2. Ralph Seliger June 3, 2014 at 5:37 pm - Reply

    My reading is that Hillel was making a wider point about Arabs and Palestinians in general. Hillel knows Qumsiyeh somewhat, so my guess is that he’s aware that he’s a Christian. But what he as a Palestinian Christian has in common with Muslims is a lack of understanding of what constitutes Jewish identity for most Israelis.

  3. Hillel Schenker June 4, 2014 at 7:45 am - Reply

    Prof. Irad Malkin, a specialist in ancient history at Tel Aviv U., made a very astute comment in a recent interview in Haaretz (can’t find it at the moment) in which he noted that one of the problems is that the name Jewish is used for both the religion and the nation, the only case where you have such a dual use of the same name, which causes a tremendous amount of confusion and misunderstanding. Malkin writes that when he was growing up in the 50’s and 60s, he remembers that the emphasis was on the Hebrew nation – which he as a secular Israeli identified with.
    The trouble with Mazin Qumsiyeh’s well-intentioned critique, is that there is simply no readiness in Israel for the type of one-state solution that he envisions, and as a Christian Palestinian, he is downplaying the unfortunate role of religion in the conflict. In addition, there are many specific problems with his critique (which I won’t go into here), though he also points out many clear problems and Israeli abuses and violations of Palestinian rights, which should be struggled against and rectified.

  4. Anonymous June 4, 2014 at 1:55 pm - Reply

    It’s funny that you expect people who are having their land taken from them, being stopped and held at gunpoint and deprived of their basic rights to very carefully parse, plus care about the subtle differences between whether all the people and soldiers who are oppressing them see themselves as doing so in the name of Judaism or the name of “the Jewish people!” Moreso when it is not clear that Israelis and Jews have a clear idea themselves about which it is.

    Also good to know that Hillel Schenker is convinced he’s better at identifying the role of religion (presumably among Palestinians) in the conflict than Mazin is. Mazin perhaps get that mixed up due to his knowledge of and life within a community of too many actual Palestinians in the West Bank.

    Thank you,

    Ted

  5. Ralph Seliger June 4, 2014 at 3:29 pm - Reply

    We always appreciate Ted for his civil tone and respectful reading of views he disagrees with. Obviously, Hillel’s years of working with Palestinians at the Palestine-Israel Journal, not to mention his decades of peace activism, hardly qualifies him to comment on how Palestinians and Israeli Jews regard each other.

  6. Anonymous June 4, 2014 at 7:47 pm - Reply

    I think it is great for Ted to comment but his memory is so poor as to be useless. The land taken from them was taken because they lost a war which they started.

    Maybe they are into golf and want a Mulligan?

  7. Anonymous June 4, 2014 at 11:45 pm - Reply

    Dear Ralph,

    My more snarky comment was not really necessary, but this is a serious comment following on Hillel’s response that I think is worth thinking about:

    “It’s funny that you expect people who are having their land taken from them, being stopped and held at gunpoint and deprived of their basic rights to very carefully parse, plus care about the subtle differences between whether all the people and soldiers who are oppressing them see themselves as doing so in the name of Judaism or the name of “the Jewish people!” Moreso when it is not clear that Israelis and Jews have a clear idea themselves about which it is.”

    Ted

  8. Ralph Seliger June 6, 2014 at 8:19 pm - Reply

    I understand Ted’s frustration, but snark undermines dialogue. I believe that it would be constructive if Palestinians accepted that most Jews (especially most Israeli Jews) see themselves as a historical people with national rights and interests, and not simply as a religious group; this recognition would reassure Israelis that Palestinians truly accept a two-state solution and thereby encourage Israel to make concessions on the ground.

    But we — both progressive Zionists here and progressive & moderate Israelis like Hillel — want to resolve the conflict peacefully and equitably regardless of how Palestinians see us.

  9. bruce May 17, 2015 at 2:53 pm - Reply

    one of the unique things about the jewish people is that they were not a state/nation per se altho they/we were/are an ethnographically identifiable “people” independent of their/our religion … a stateless people … a little like gypsies … members of many diverse nation states and simultaneously gypsy/jewish/tribal but not a nation as such. the advent of zionism, the notion of an ethnically identified jewish state (designed to protect jews from centuries of abuse) changed that. i go back and forth on this issue, sometimes thinking jews would be better off without a state — hoping israel and palestine merge as one state for all its people — and alternately accepting the presence of a jewish national state. but to accept the later (for me) requires that there be a safe, just, and equitable state for the palestinian people as well … and at the moment that seems to be as unlikely an outcome as a just and equitable state for all the people of Palestine … regardless of the good faith efforts of the pope.

  10. John Wilmerding May 18, 2015 at 9:58 am - Reply

    I have known Mazin Qumsiyeh for many years and believe some of the criticisms here are unwarranted. I believe he is essentially a peacemaker. Peacemaking processes can be engineered which engage peoples with different narratives in processes of forging elements of common narrative. It seems useless to me to comment that Mazin persists in telling or relating to his own people’s narrative but doggedly refuses to recognize some of the Jewish people’s narratives. That is not peacemaking; rather, it is defining a problem. Define the problem too much and too often, with no movements toward solving it, and the problem merely becomes more entrenched.

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