Are we witnessing a new vogue in restoring Jewish sites in the Middle East? The renovated Maimonides synagogue in Cairo will be officially inaugurated in March to much fanfare. The Maghen Avraham Synagogue in the heart of Beirut is being rebuilt. Across Morocco and Tunisia, holy sites and synagogues are getting a facelift.

What is going on?

Nobody can pretend that these restored sites are ever going to be working synagogues. Like Hitler's project for a Jewish Museum in Prague, they are monuments, perhaps not to an extinct race - most Jews escaped from these countries with their lives - but an extinct Jewish civilisation and way of life in Arab countries, predating Islam by a thousand years. Once spruced up, these synagogues will be nothing more than symbols. They will never again become the beating heart of a revived Jewish community. Fewer than 50 Jews live in the whole of Egypt; mostly old ladies married to Muslims or Christians. Ditto in Lebanon, the home of Hezbollah and Bourj al-Barajneh, where anyone openly identifying as a Jew risks life and limb.

There are two main reasons why Arab countries might suddenly show an interest in their Jewish heritage.

First, synagogues are good public relations for the regime in power. The unsuccessful candidate to head UNESCO, Egyptian culture minister Farouk Hosni, played on the restoration of the Maimonides synagogue to distract from his antisemitic slips-of-the-tongue about burning 'Israeli' books.

No matter if the country has no more Jews, a synagogue restoration project advertises 'Arab tolerance' and pays lip service to pluralism. "Look, we even have Jews here!" it proclaims. "Tolerance of Jewish cultural remains can be exchanged for Western goodwill and aid without necessitating any messy engagement with actual Israelis," as one journalist puts it.

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Criticism of European anti-Semitism always neglects its context. That is, it mistakes its object, frequently construed as being Israel, for being more important than what it has in common with other continental racisms. It is always a criticism of the Jewish right to statehood, to political freedom, never an acknowledgment of a larger prejudicial impulse towards towards persons of Mideast descent, which attaches itself to different European Semitic communities at different times.

Indeed, contemporary accounts of anti-Jewish racism bear little to no difference from descriptions of the phenomenon in the 1930s, when Jews were the primary representatives of ethnic difference in Europe. This should come as no surprise. Anti-Jewish racism is an ancient prejudice, one whose roots go back over two millennia. Its age guarantees a sense of continuity, of feeling as though nothing has changed, that when it comes to European Jewry, history always remains at a standstill.

The problem is that it never does, that time moves on irrespective of how it favors us. Take, for example, the fact that for nearly sixty years, Europe has been, comparatively speaking, 'Jew-free', even though in countries such as Germany, Jewish populations have begun to grow. Most significantly, during this time Muslim migrants have begun calling the continent their home. Frequently hailing from Arab countries and from Turkey, as well as east Africa and south Asia, Muslims have come to bear the same kind of difference for Europeans as Jews.

The irony of this change is its timing. Taking place at precisely the same moment that European Jewry was formally reestablishing itself in the Mideast, these migrants came to live in a Europe that had only recently emerged from the Holocaust, and was disengaging itself from its colonial holdings in many of these immigrants own home countries. Living in the shadow of both of these events, their European presence has always been a challenge, in turn creating relations between Muslims and Jews different than those impacted by the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Reading the mountain of Jewish-authored op-eds last week about the Aftonbladet affair, I could not help but wonder why, if we were really dealing with a case of anti-Semitism, not a single charge ever sought to place itself within the context of greater trends in contemporary European xenophobia. Was it because of the political persuasions of the persons making the claims, who, even if they are not sympathetic to Arabs, cannot see the similar ideological mechanism that substitutes Muslim for Jew, and vice versa?

Or was it because the  critique of anti-Semitism took form before the advent of large scale Muslim immigration to Europe, and never had the opportunity to redefine itself to include both peoples? I’m inclined to believe the latter, especially considering the degree to which the critique of anti-Jewish racism became problematized in left circles following the Six Day War. ‘Anti-anti-Semitism’, as it is often called, came to be considered an ideology masking Israeli transgressions against Palestinians, not a critique of anti-Jewish racism.

To the post-1967 progressive mind, we had become Europeans, when, until Israel's independence, we were considered neither fully white nor adequately oriental, even though it was not uncommon for Jews to be derided as 'Muslim'. The problem is that the contemporary judgment of the left, committed as it is to the colonial critique of Zionism, oversimplifies this history, forgetting it, impeding the Arab connection. It also fails to acknowledge any other Jewish ethnicity than Ashkenazi, further severing any ties between Jews and the Levant. 

Anti-Arab racism had to unnecessarily get segregated, independent of European Muslims’ experience of the same basic prejudices as the continent’s former Jewish population. There would be no concentration camps, but there would be facsimiles of practically everything else: specifically a combination of ghettoization and integration. Muslims would be similarly treated as 'outsiders within the bourgeoisie', as Max Horkheimer once described Europe’s Jews, as well as icons of the global south, as perennially itinerant migrant laborers.

This is why the obsession over medieval blood libels and the like, in the case of Swedish allegations of organ harvesting, is so troubling. Its historic specificity repeats this act of segregating European racisms towards Jews and Arabs by unnecessarily privileging the archaic quality of the charge, in certain instances, contending that is also a product of outside influences, i.e. Arab agitation, if not representative of a coalescing of left-wing anti-Semitism and Palestinian-Muslim interests.

What if the accusation isn't reflective of such influences, but, rather, is an attempt to harness the distress of the Mideast conflict for the purposes of staging anti-Semitic prejudices, writ large? Might we not see it as equally exploitative of the Palestinian victim alleged to be the embodiment of this macabre crime, that he is also being exploited in a racist fashion, just like we are? What would that teach us about the kind of prejudice being exercised here, particularly the company Jews and Arabs are forced to keep by it?

It is not that identification of the resurfacing of the blood libel narrative is wrong, though, in my view, there is an uncomfortably narcissistic quality to its emphasis. The problem is that the charge of blood libel is not tied to anything else, that it is decontextualized. That this might be, perchance, a reflection of the way that the Arab-Israeli conflict has determined how we talk about racism, such that we could misconstrue its breadth. Or for that matter, discourage us from asking why Europeans would indulge it now, in such a highly complex manner.

Joel Schalit is Zeek's online editor. His next book, Israel vs. Utopia, will be published this October by New York's Akashic Books. Schalit lives and works in Milan, Italy.

The rise of the Israel Beiteinu (Israel is Our Home) Party in this Israeli election cycle has finally made it to the pages of the New York Times:

In 1978, when he was 20, Mr. Lieberman immigrated to Israel from Moldova, then a Soviet republic, and he lives in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. Popular with the country's so-called Russian vote, he is vocal about the threat from Iran and advocates swapping areas of Israel that are heavily populated by Arab citizens for parts of the West Bank that are populated by Israeli Jews.

A timely appearance as Lieberman and his colleagues, according to all polls, are now the hottest political commodity in Israel's politics. But while Lieberman's policies and their impact on Israel and its relations with its neighbors are now extensively discussed in Israel and beyond, there's also a "Jewish angle" to be taken into account. That is -- Lieberman as the "great alienator". His rise might give even more credence to claims that Israeli Jews and American Jews are growing apart, and might help accelerate trends already in play in these complicated Israel-Diaspora relations.

It is an open secret that liberal American Jews have turned their attention in growing numbers to the plight of Israeli Arabs, and are now contributing more than ever to causes related to the advancement of this minority within Israel. Almost two years ago, I wrote about dilemmas emanating from this strange alliance of American Jews and Israeli Arabs:

Thirty percent of the money the NIF distributes is channeled to activities aimed at promoting the Arabs of Israel, to raise them to an equal status. This is a central part of the important objective of "a Jewish and democratic state." This is also a significant matter for the American Jewish community, which is a minority itself. 

And while there were some setbacks along the way, allocating money to better the relations of Jewish and Muslim citizens of Israel has remained one of the more popular causes for American Jewish funders. It is also an issue many American Jews identify as a moral cause, and has the potential of making them less comfortable with Israel's society and culture.

Enter Lieberman: if polls are correct, what American Jews will see in Israel is the growing power of a party seen by most of them -- rightly or wrongly -- as racist toward Arab citizens. Lieberma's platform, of course, is more nuanced and complicated than just being "racist" (which he claims it isn't). Nevertheless, I can hardly envision a narrative that will not make Lieberma's political achievement a nuisance and an embarrassment to the average American Jew. Thus, the stage is set for yet another show of differences:

American Jews will wonder about the nature and the morality of the "Jewish state".

Israeli Jews -- if they even notice American reluctance -- will look at their American brothers thinking that their simplistic naiveté makes prevents them from understanding Israel's tough reality.

Nagla Al-Imam, an Egyptian lawyer, recently gave vent on Al-Arabiya TV to the idea that one form of "resistance" for Arabs to pursue against Israelis is sexual harassment:

Most Arab countries... With the exception of three or four Arab countries, which I don’t think allow Israeli women to enter anyway, most Arab countries do not have sexual harassment laws. Therefore, if [Arab women] are fair game for Arab men, there is nothing wrong with Israeli women being fair game as well.

[...]

Sexual harassment... In my view, the [Israeli women] do not have any right to respond. The resistance fighters would not initiate such a thing, because their moral values are much loftier than that. However if such a thing did happen to them, the [Israeli women] have no right to make any demands, because this would put us on equal terms – leave the land so we won't rape you. These two things are equal.

You can watch the video of the charming Ms. Al-Imam here.

Affirmative Action: or reverse discrimination?Home Center, an Israeli home wares chain, has been offering  a secret discount to Arabs. When customer Eli Chai discovered and reported this last week, a Home Center spokesperson explained, “Home Center offers a wide range of attractive discounts throughout the year. As part of a plan to target specific communities, the chain offers different discounts for different sectors from time to time.”

The situation does seem pretty odd, but not altogether uncalled for. I wouldn’t be surprised if Arabs do more than 70% of the construction in Israel, and thus end up spending the most money at those sorts of stores. Why wouldn’t Home Center capitalize on that customer base by offering a good deal?

Of course, that’s not how it’s being framed in Israel. Chai is quoted as saying, “I didn't expect to get a discount, but I was appalled when I realized that had I been Arab I would have received one. I tried to think what would happen if it was a discount only for Jews, or Sephardim, or Ashkenazim.”

There's plenty of discrimination against Arabs in Israel, and Chai isn’t bothered by that. But when Arabs are favored, it’s a grave in justice!  It may feel inappropriate to offer a discount based on ethnicity, but it’s hardly shocking in a society that’s so clearly divided along those lines.

Unless you are a fan of Tex-Mex, truck with balls, scorching heat, and museums commemorating George W. Bush, there are very few reasons to spend the summer in southeast Texas. But I happen to be here visiting someone, and so I’ve taken the opportunity to sit in on his Texas A&M University class on contemporary world literature, where the focus is literature and terrorism.

For today, we read Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack (2007). Khadra (his real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul) is a former Algerian army officer turned novelist, and this novel, despite its unsophisticated writing style, does a pretty good job of getting college students to think and talk about terrorism in an unfiltered way. The only problem is that the book is so severely biased against Israelis and Jews that one wonders how unfiltered the discussion can truly be.

The storyline goes something like this: Arab-Israeli surgeon is called to the hospital where he learns his wife has been killed in a restaurant bombing. He later finds out that his wife was in fact the suicide bomber. The rest of the book, with all of its undeveloped plot threads, is about his attempts to uncover her secret life and come to grips with what he sees as her betrayal of him. The important thing to note is that it’s not that he needs to come to grips with what his wife has done to innocent men, women, and children in a crowded restaurant, but with what he sees as her personal betrayal of him.How to Spot a Jew: Is this the lesson Khadra wants to teach?

A bit self-absorbed, no?

It’s not that the novel doesn’t tell a good story or address timely issues. It definitely kept me reading, but perhaps that was also because of the all but latent anti-Semitism that kept jumping out at me. Like many people, I tend to like to stare at things that repulse me. Although I run the risk of sounding like an anti-Semitic ambulance chaser, it is difficult not to read between the lines when nearly every time Khadra’s narrator introduces a new Jewish character, he refers to his “unattractive nostrils” or depicts him looking down his “nose” at the narrator. Or, in the absence of the description of a character’s unflattering nose, he depicts them as fat, selfish, and always gobbling things up.

Those nasty Jews—always gobbling things up and looking down their unattractive noses at everyone else. I’m not quite sure how the reviewers who suggested this book depicts both sides of the Arab/Israeli conflict missed this aspect of the book. But I’m sure it’s not the author’s main point.

The main point, actually, seems to be one long, whining “what about me?” Once you sift through the rambling prose, the narrator seems to say little more than: “Why didn’t my wife think about the trouble her suicide bombing would cause me? Why do Israeli Jews stop me at checkpoints because of the way I look? Why do the Jews keep talking about their problems when it’s really the Arabs who’ve suffered?”

The narrator visits an old Israeli Jew who goes on and on and on about surviving the Holocaust, only to say, finally, “I talk too much . . . I’ll never understand why the survivors of a tragedy feel compelled to make people believe they’re more to be pitied than the ones who didn’t make it.”

Take that, you blabbering large-nosed Jewish survivor. It’s MY turn to suffer, the narrator seems to say. Everybody wants to talk about their suffering.

The point the author makes seems to be the question of why Jews are still talking about the Holocaust when Palestinians are being subjected to the same kind of evils in Israel. But the problem isn’t that the author draws attention (justifiably) to Palestinian pain. The problem is in the comparison.

Suffering is suffering. It does no good to compare one group of people’s suffering to another, or to minimize one in favor of another. I cannot blame the Palestinian boy who sees his family home bulldozed by Israeli soldiers and vows to take revenge any less than I blame the Holocaust survivor for finding it impossible to stop talking about his experience.The Prosthetic Pregnancy: A must-have for all female suicide bombers.

They have both earned the right to hate. And we are all responsible for acknowledging both perspectives. But even the right to such hate does not justify a lashing out that takes innocent lives, though this novel seems to suggest otherwise in its villainization of Israeli Jews.

The narrator says, “All too aware of the stereotypes that mark me out in the public square, I strive to overcome them, one by one, by doing the best I can do and putting up with the incivilities of my Jewish comrades.” Words of wisdom from the narrator who can’t stop himself from seeing Jews only through negative stereotypes. (Then again, note above my own heinous Texas stereotyping.)

But the person teaching the literature class tells me that while the narrator is indeed despicable when it comes to Jewish stereotyping, we are also supposed to see in him a critique of male Arab culture. The narrator’s preoccupation with his male ego and his anger over his wife’s betrayal of him on a personal level may reveal (from the author’s point of view) some of the problems of Arab male-female relationships. Indeed, at one point he goes nuts thinking that his wife may have cheated on him with another man, and suggests that such an act is worse than the suicide bombing.

The narrator, my friend suggests, cannot escape from the stereotypical Arab masculinity that forces him to see Jews with big noses and gluttonous appetites, and to see women as his private property. But sometimes he has a breakthrough: “Every Jew in Palestine is a bit of an Arab, and no Arab in Israel can deny that he’s a little Jewish.”

It’s unclear what we’re supposed to think in regard to this character. I find him to be pathetic, self-absorbed, and downright despicable. But students in the class tended to be more sympathetic toward him. And I guess that is the danger of this novel—if the author meant to critique Arab culture’s own biases, it’s not altogether clear. My fear is that this novel does more to reinforce negative stereotypes than critique them.

The video below is making the rounds, with all manner of collar-loosening guilt expressed at the American Prospect about our nation's celluloid Orientalism. Hollywood, see, never depicts the cool Arab i-banker who fronts a Guster cover band. It's reel-to-reel swarthy leches, self-immolating nincompoops, and genie-pilfering megalomaniacs, isn't it?

Leave aside the fact that the following was sent to Steve Clemons by an Al Jazeera journalist, whose employers's rendering of Middle Eastern Jewry is always cool and collected. Ross Douthat has already pointed out that the most recent films depicted herein are at least fifteen years old. I'd add that despite what the 200 pounds of bad veal calling itself a narrator in this documentary will tell you, Aladdin and True Lies are not quite as culturally paradigmatic as all that. If Jafar merits a Saidian dissertation, then perhaps I can enjoin a Caribbean scholar of stereotypes to explain the Rasta rock lobster who told Ariel how to land her man in The Little Mermaid?

Also, the only suicide-bomber I spot below played the greasy right-hand-man to a Colombian drug lord in Crocodile Dundee II, and thank you, I didn't need Al Jazeera to tell me that brown skin is still eminently fungible in American popular culture.

Douthat's also right to say that since 9/11, the only movies to come out depicting Arabs in a negative light were The Kingdom (and really, it was more the Wahhabists what done it, as Stephen Schwartz argued in these pages), and United 93, which, you'll admit, at least aimed at verisimilitude.

It's long been a cause of minor consternation among my British friends that American filmmakers cannot make a schlocky science-fiction epic without casting the sons and daughters of Albion as imperial assholes. Check out the accents on the Death Star personnel sometime.

I don't mean to sound like a white Stanley Crouch (well, okay, maybe a little), but as for the narrator's claim that we got over vilifying blacks in cinema a long time ago, so why can't we do the same for Arabs, he clearly has yet to take in the latest Ice Cube/Tracy Morgan vehicle.

A welcome JTA article on the peaceful coexistence of Zionist Jews and Palestine-supporting Arabs in Panama:

Inside the stores here -- wholesale distribution centers for Asian goods seeking Latin American importers -- businesses run by Orthodox Jews and Arab Muslims operate side by side with nary a hint of conflict. In some cases, businesses are co-owned by Jews and Arabs.

Nightclubs are packed with young Jews and Arabs more concerned about partying the night away than the faith of their fellow partygoers.

Both religions are thriving in this small Caribbean country. Disregard the "ever-growing flocks" condescension of making these people sound like sheep:

With three Jewish congregations -- two Orthodox and one Reform -- and thousands of kosher and Sabbath-observant Jews, Panama stands out in Latin America as having one of the most devout and practicing Jewish populations. Muslims are as practicing as their Jewish counterparts here; synagogues and mosques are under construction to attend to the ever-growing flocks.

The New York Sun reports on a conference of Arab lesbians that was held in Haifa yesterday:

Many of the attendees said they were sad that the only place safe enough to hold a conference for gay Arab women was in a Jewish area of Haifa, which has a mixed Arab-Jewish population. Israel's Jewish majority is generally tolerant of homosexuality

"This conference is being held, somehow, in exile, even though it's our country," said Yussef Abu Warda, a playwright.

Driven deep underground for the most part, only 10 to 20 Arab lesbians attended the conference, organizers said. Most blended in with Israeli lesbians and heterosexual Arab female supporters without making their presence known.

"We'd like all women to come out of the closet — that's our role. We work for them," said Samira, 31, a conference organizer who came with her Jewish Israeli girlfriend. Samira agreed to be identified only by her first name for fear of reprisals.

[...]Homosexuality, which is strictly forbidden by Islam, is considered taboo among most of Israel's Arab citizens, who make up 20% of the country's population.

Most enchanting Arabophilic YouTube of the day.

The moneyquote, to be filed under "Alarming Compliments":

I can spot an Arab from like ten miles away! And I'm like, GAWWWD, look, an ARAB! I swear to God, I can spot an Arab like...like that!

Israeli liberal activists have been known to carry placards announcing "Yes! I fuck an Arab!" Now we understand.

Hat tip KABOBfest!