Nasser's Worst Mistake

In his latest attempt to prod me into action, Ali E sent me this link to a post from the Infidel Blogger Alliance. It’s a sad day when the opposition doesn’t have to reach anywhere for material, and this is such a day: while I haven’t independently confirmed the virulently anti-Jewish remarks of Egyptian TV host Sheikh Muhammad Sharaf ed-Din, I would not be at all surprised to find they were true. Anti-Jewish sentiment is so rampant in Egypt that using the word ‘rampant’ is almost redundant; it’s sufficient to say that anti-Jewish sentiment Is. With the exception of the rare self-educated individual, it’s difficult to find an Egyptian under the age of about sixty-five or seventy who does not openly pine for the days when Rommel sunned himself on the beaches of Alamein.

Over the age of sixty-five or seventy, the demographic changes. My late grandmother-in-law would only consent to see Jewish doctors; she delivered all 8 of her children with one. Her husband had a Jewish partner at the grocery store he ran. Chalk it up to exposure: when Giddu and Nana were young adults, there was a thriving, well-integrated Arab Jewish community in Egypt. Most Egyptians born after 1956, on the other hand, have never met a single Jew in their lives, making them vulnerable to whatever lies and distortions extremists choose to propagate. The reason for this strange and sudden shift in the religious makeup of Egypt is simple: in 1956, Gamal abdel Nasser, a revolutionary still celebrated by the secular left, expelled nearly every Jewish family north of the Second Cataract.

Nasser’s admirers cite the now-infamous campaign of disinformation and fear spread throughout the Arab world by early Israeli radicals to jump-start Jewish migration to the fledgling state as the primary reason for the expulsion. While I have no doubt that this played a significant role in Nasser’s decision, I can’t help but be skeptical of the sheer scope of its impact; in the modern US, where fear and anger against Muslims and Islam is at an arguably all-time high, there has been no mass expulsion of American Muslims. Yet Nasser, who came to power on an interfaith platform of justice for every Arab, didn’t scruple to rid his country of a community active in business, the arts and intellectual life. Neither was he alone. Similar moves were made by socialist Ba’ath regimes in Iraq and Syria during the same time period. Seen in this light, the claim that anti-Jewish sentiment in the Middle East is a direct result of Islam becomes highly problematic. There were plenty of earlier regimes in which Shari’a law ruled the day; why, then, did the Arab world wait for a wave of socialist leaders to expel Arab Jews? Could it be that economic factors—Nasser promised to return land and business interests to Egyptian peasants, most of whom were Muslim; most Jewish families were landholders and businesspeople—played as significant a role as religion in causing the current sectarian rift in the Middle East?

While the IBA post correctly observes that there is anti-Jewish sentiment in the Arab world (I doubt any but the most cloistered apologist would counter this claim) they oversimplify the underlying reasons for this sentiment until they communicate nothing useful or informative; making their remarks as excruciatingly racist as the remarks of the people they oppose. Rarely is the impact of socialist land and business reform and military rule, both of which have proven devastating to the cultural diversity and artistic vigor of the Middle East, ever cited as a causal factor in the rift between Jews and Muslims. Whether this is the result of ignorance or of willful oversight, I leave to you. But the fact remains that modern Islamic extremists are drawing on the complexities of very recent history to frame their anti-Jewish rhetoric—not on some ancient and disturbingly romanticized quarrel, and not from the whole-cloth of the Qur’an.