The controversy continues to make waves. President Mahmoud Abbas last Friday apologised for the ill-advised remarks he had made about Jews, but as the Palestinian leader later discovered, an apology is not always a good way to have the last word. Why apologise in the first place, as the English satirist P.G. Wodehouse declared at one time, when the right sort of people do not need apologies and the wrong sort take advantage of them?
But, satire aside, how we use words matters. But when these words are uttered by a political leader — with their impact thus amplified ten-fold — they manage the flow of public discourse, pinpoint context and define the fame of reference in social life. Even accomplished heads of state, no matter how adroit they think they are as public speakers, employ speech writers to compose their presentations, editors to polish them and fact-checkers to vet them before they are delivered at the podium. The unwritten rule: Speak off the cuff and you blunder.
President Abbas made his controversial comments about Jews on May 1 before a conference of the Palestine National Council in Ramallah, the West Bank, in which he claimed that the Jewish holocaust in Europe was not triggered by the genocidal hatred of the Nazis towards Jews but by the Jews’ own conduct, that is, their “function in society, related to banks and interest”.
That ill-judged observation seemed to suggest to everyone that the Palestinian leader was in fact resurrecting a nasty stereotype: The Jew who brings on himself whatever calamity befalls him.
That is — no matter how delicately I put it — is a lot of hokum. European Jews had been, since the 18th Century, in the vanguard of the Enlightenment, the cultural and philosophical movement that dominated the world of liberal ideas in Europe, a world that Nazis, who considered Semites and “people of colour” a lower species of men, saw as the antithesis of their own selves. They killed Jews, additionally, because without these folks’ contribution to the western intellectual tradition, western liberal culture would have been diminished.
The Palestinian president’s remarks on Jewish history — though uttered much in the manner of a man seemingly inviting us into his solemn confidence as a scholar — were reckless and, yes, wrong. The man’s subsequent apology (“If people were offended by my statement, especially people of the Jewish faith, I apologise to them ...”) was brusquely, not to mention ungraciously, rejected by every Israeli leader around. Words, especially when uttered by a head of state, I say, are like bullets — once fired they cannot be recalled.
That said, let’s not absolve these Israeli leaders of their own brazenly racist observations, often uttered with wanton abandon, about Arabs, or the pervasiveness of bigotry in Israeli society at large, much of which echoes (yes, it uncannily does) the 1930s Nazi rhetoric about Jews.
And it is scary because it is not just Israeli leaders who evince dreadful overt expressions of racism, but large segments of the population in Israeli society also do, a society that in recent years has become at once increasingly more insecure and intolerant — even of fellow-Jews with dissenting ideas — and imbued not just with fascist ideas but with bloodlust, hatred for the Gentile and an exclusivist vision of the ‘other’. This comprises a vision that alarmingly mirrors, I say, the one Nazis had embraced in their heydays.
How else, for example, would you describe these folks after reading news reports of Israeli snipers at the Gaza-Israel border, who let out loud whoops of merriment every time an unarmed Palestinian stone-throwing protester is felled by one of their bullets?
Why apologise indeed, to the wrong sort of people, who fiendishly take advantage of, instead of graciously accept, your expressions of penitence? And why is it that the victim of occupation should be obligated to apologise, at any time, for any reason, in any situation, to his occupier? Perish the thought that Palestinians should ever feel the need to do so.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
