Those Who Forget the Past (57 page)

If you can write that it's time to “do teshuva [repentance] by reexamining the ways in which we speak and teach about Israel and by reconsidering our often unconditional support for the state,” then we're not cut from the same national cloth. If that's how you feel, especially in these days, then it's a struggle for me to feel that we're part of the same people. “The state”? How neutral can someone get, Jill?

Be honest, Jill, you and your colleagues say it, but you don't mean that you love Israel. You might wish you loved Israel, or you might believe that you're supposed to love Israel, or you might love the myth of Israel on which so many of us were raised. But that's not what counts. You don't love the real Israel. That's where the American Jewish left has failed. It reminds me exactly of what Gershom Scholem wrote almost one-half century ago in response to Hannah Arendt on Eichmann. He accused her correctly, not of getting the facts wrong, but of lacking “ahavat Yisrael” (“the love of Israel”), that is, of the Jewish people as a whole and of its unique experience. Nothing's changed, has it?

As for me, I don't know how to think about the Jewish people today without Israel in some way at the core. That's not to say that every Jew ought to live here, or that Israel's perfect, or that criticism of Israel—by Jews or non-Jews—is always unacceptable. I don't believe any of those things.

But most of us know when someone loves us. We know it not just because of what they say, but because of what they choose not to say, and when they choose not to say it. We know they love us because of how they say what they say. We know they love us because they feel our pain, first and foremost, before they see our faults. That's what makes love real.

You're just not there. Take off your masks. You really don't love us. And because of that, you feel about us the way I feel about Rwandans. You're saddened and appalled when we're killed, but for too many of you, it's an intellectual thing, not a visceral, emotional, immediate one. We're other, removed, distant. So at a time when we need the partnership and support of all segments of American Jewish life more than ever, we have to admit that it's just not there to be had.

For the future of the Jewish people, Jill, that is about as sad as anything I could imagine.

I hope that your Purim in New York is a joyous one. Here in Jerusalem, we'll tell our kids that they can't wear their costume masks outside, even as we dust off their gas masks and get our sealed rooms ready. And if the siren goes off in the next few days or weeks and we have to go into those rooms while Scuds from Iraq or Katyushas from Hezbollah enclaves rain down, and we have to hold our kids on our laps and comfort them, I hope you'll forgive us if we don't have them read your D'var Torah.

You see, Jill, concern for the people trying to kill them is a luxury I suspect even our uncorrupted children won't have.

Purim Same'ach,
Daniel

PART ELEVEN

MUSLIMS

JEFFREY GOLDBERG

Behind Mubarak

THE MOHANDESSIN SECTION of Cairo is a fashionable district on the west bank of the Nile that contains a number of embassies, boutiques, and American fast-food restaurants. It also houses the Mustafa Mahmoud Mosque, which is named after a physician and Islamic television personality who founded it, twenty years ago. On Friday, September 21, I arrived at the mosque just as the first worshippers were making their way there, and the egalitarianism that is one of the great virtues of the Muslim prayer service was evident: they were dark-skinned and light, rich and poor; one man drove up in a blue Jaguar; others, wearing grease-stained
galabiya
s and crude sandals, came on foot, or by donkey cart. (Women, as is customary, prayed apart, in another, smaller hall.) I had arranged to meet the mosque's imam, Sheikh Nasser Abdelrazi. A slight, anxious man, he preemptively offered up the observation that “Muslims are gentle and Islam is peace.”

Many in Cairo are on the defensive in the wake of the terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Greater Cairo, a city of sixteen million people, is the intellectual capital of the Arab world—home to its moviemakers, many of its great writers, and some of its most respected interpreters of Islam. Muslim leaders here are sensitive to the image of their faith— especially now, because Egyptians are among those allegedly involved in the attacks. Muhammad Atta, who is believed to have flown one of the hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, is the son of a middle-class Cairo lawyer. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a former leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist group that sought to turn Egypt into an Islamic state, is said to be second-in-command to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile who is suspected of directing the attacks.

I did not dispute the Imam's assertion, but the speaker at the service that Friday, Ahmed Youssef—an elderly, bespectacled professor at Cairo University, who joined us before the service got under way—did. “Look, what happened in New York is the work of a gangster mentality, but America must learn not to take the side of the aggressor,” he said. “I hope America learns from this mistake before it makes another mistake.”

In his view, the aggressor is Israel, which signed a peace agreement with Egypt almost twenty-three years ago. This historical fact is not immediately noticeable in Cairo, where the public obsession with Israel is overwhelming. Youssef said that the nineteen terrorists who on September 11 committed mass suicide in the course of committing mass murder engaged in an un-Islamic act. They killed civilians, which is
haram,
or forbidden, and they killed themselves, which is also
haram
. Only against Israel is it permissible to engage in a “martyrdom attack,” he said, and this is because it is “only the Jews who kill innocent people.” He added, “There are no Israeli civilians, only soldiers, so this is a legitimate tactic.”

At this, Sheikh Abdelrazi blanched. “He is not speaking for the mosque,” he whispered. The mosque, like all mosques in Egypt, ostensibly comes under the supervision of the government, whose position on suicide attacks against Israeli civilians is ambiguous. When I asked President Hosni Mubarak's chief spokesman, Nabil Osman, if his government condemns such attacks, he would say only, “One cannot condemn these acts without condemning the acts of the occupier.”

I asked Sheikh Abdelrazi and Youssef if they believed that the Palestinian cause was the motivating factor in Muhammad Atta's alleged act.

“I don't know what happened in New York,” Youssef said. “I don't have the answer.”

The mosque's muezzin began calling the faithful to prayer. “God is Greater,” he chanted, his voice carried by speakers across Arab League Street, beside the mosque. “I bear witness that there is no God but God. I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God.”

Some of the men who went to pray asked if I was a man of the Book; Christians and Jews, as monotheists, however flawed, still hold a certain status in Islam, and I was invited to perform the ablutions that would purify me for the prayer service. As we stepped outside to the fountain, where a great number of Muslims were already washing, an old man, sallow-skinned and stooped, moved our way, surrounded by courtiers.

“
He
has the answer,” Sheikh Abdelrazi said, pointing to the mosque's founder, Mustafa Mahmoud himself. But Mahmoud hobbled into the mosque; the answer would wait until after prayers.

By now, two thousand or so worshippers had assembled. The Friday service was short, and the sermon lasted only a few minutes. In it, Youssef acknowledged that an injustice had been done in the United States but cautioned America to stay its hand. “Don't say that one should not kill civilians and then kill civilians yourself.”

After prayer, Youssef found me and gave his interpretation of the differing outlooks of Christianity and Islam.

“In Islam, if I slap your cheek”—he slapped my cheek— “you should slap my other cheek. But in Christianity, Jesus says turn the other cheek. The U.S. is Christian, so why doesn't it turn the other cheek?”

The discussion was curtailed by the announcement that Mustafa Mahmoud was ready to meet with me. I made my way to an austere office where Mahmoud, who is eighty, was already sitting. “I understand you want the answer,” Mahmoud said.

I said yes.

“Waco,” he said. At my silent surprise, he went on, “The Branch Davidians attacked the World Trade Center, the McVeigh people. The Mossad gave them help. Did you know that the Israelis who work at the World Trade Center were told to stay home that day?”

He had learned this, he said, from research on the Internet.

“It is impossible for Osama bin Laden to do this,” Mahmoud continued. “No Arab could have done this.”

For moral reasons? I asked.

“No!” he said. “For technical reasons. Arabs are always late! They aren't coordinated enough to do this, all at once on four airplanes. What does Osama bin Laden know about American air travel, anyway? He lives in Afghanistan.”

Mustafa Mahmoud is not a marginal figure in Egyptian society. He is an eminent surgeon and onetime Marxist who found religion; his popular television show,
Science and Faith,
explores the connections between religion and reason; a charitable organization that bears his name runs several clinics and hospitals in Cairo, including an eye institute that is reputed to be one of the most advanced in the Middle East.

Mahmoud told me that he is not sorry about the destruction of the World Trade Center. “Even Rome was a great empire once,” he said. “This was an attack on American arrogance.”

He said I could read more about his beliefs in a newspaper column that would appear the next day. In addition to his other achievements, Mahmoud regularly contributes articles to
Al-Ahram,
which is the largest and most respected daily newspaper in Egypt.

I later found, on the Internet, a translation of one of Mahmoud's columns, from late June. Its headline was ISRAEL—THE PLAGUE OF OUR TIME AND A TERRORIST STATE. Much of the column is taken up with a recounting of the main points of the notorious turn-of-the-century tsarist forgery “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” “What exactly do the Jews want?” he wrote on June 23. “Read what the Ninth Protocol of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' says: ‘We have limitless ambitions, inexhaustible greed, merciless vengeance and hatred beyond imagination. We are a secret army whose plans are impossible to understand by using honest methods.' ”

The image of Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin joyously clasping hands with Jimmy Carter at the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord is indelible but misleading, because it did not herald a true peace between two peoples. It has been a cold peace, particularly on the Egyptian side. Israelis have visited Egypt by the thousands, but the Egyptian government has long discouraged its citizens from visiting Israel or doing business with Israelis. And since the latest outbreak of the Palestinian uprising, a year ago, and the attendant photographs of Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinian rock throwers, the relationship has turned frigid. Mubarak supports the peace treaty signed by his predecessor, Sadat—an American-aid package of two billion dollars a year fairly demands this of him—but he has discouraged the normalization of relations between the two states.

It is in the domain of the press that Mubarak's position is most evident.
Al-Ahram
is often described in the American press as a “semi-official” daily newspaper, but this may be an understatement. Its editor, two government officials told me, is chosen by President Mubarak, who also chooses the editors of other government newspapers and magazines. Even supposedly independent or opposition newspapers are said never to criticize the President. The one area in which they are given especially wide latitude is in criticizing Israel and, to a lesser extent, America.

One day last week, I visited the offices of the newspaper
Al-Usbu,
an independent weekly that is distinctly anti-Israel and critical of ministers in the Mubarak government—though not, of course, of Mubarak himself. Its editor, Mustafa Bakri, who is in his forties, was in his office, watching Al-Jazeera, the Pan-Arabic cable channel. He was impeccably dressed, polite and deferential. I had wanted to meet him for some time, ever since I read a translation of a column in which he described a dream. The dream began with his appointment as one of Ariel Sharon's bodyguards, assigned to protect the Israeli Prime Minister at Cairo's airport, and in the column, which appeared in February, he wrote:

The pig landed; his face was diabolical, a murderer; his hands soiled with the blood of women and children. A criminal who should be executed in the town square. Should I remain silent as many others did? Should I guard this butcher on my homeland's soil? All of a sudden, I forgot everything: the past and the future, my wife and my children and I decided to do it. I pulled my gun and aimed it at the cowardly pig's head. I emptied all the bullets and screamed. . . . The murderer collapsed under my feet. I breathed a sigh of relief. I realized the meaning of virility, and of self-sacrifice. The criminal died. I stepped on the pig's head with my shoes and screamed from the bottom of my heart: Long live Egypt, long live Palestine, Jerusalem will never die and never will the honor of the nation be lost.

Bakri offered me an orange soda, and talked of the attack on the World Trade Center. He spoke in terms that, in the current shorthand, are considered Nasserist, after Gamal Abdel Nasser, the revolutionary leader and Egypt's first President. Nasserism today combines populism, Pan-Arab socialism, and opposition to all relations with Israel. Nasserists also resent American economic influence.

“The new globalists want to impose American thinking on the Arabs,” Bakri said. “This is a reaction to their thinking.” Bakri blamed the September 11 attacks on the American right wing, with help from the Mossad. “Five Israelis were arrested the day before the attack outside the World Trade Center for taking pictures,” he said, and added that he knew this from reading American newspapers. If America responds militarily to the attacks, he continued, “American targets will be legitimate targets of Arab anger.”

I also went to the offices of
Al-Ahram
to talk about this phenomenon. I met with Abdel Monem Said Aly, the director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a respected moderate think tank attached to the newspaper. I asked him about the many anti-Israel and anti-American articles published in the official Egyptian press in the year leading up to the terror attacks. He himself has not disseminated anti-American ideas, and has fought the spread of conspiracy theories in Egyptian life.

“We have anti-Semitic papers and fanatics, yes, but these are garbage magazines,” he said. “
Al-Ahram,
Al-Akhbar,
these are very moderate newspapers. Sometimes they are highly critical of the U.S., but that does not mean that they're anti-American.”

Nevertheless,
Al-Akhbar
this year has run opinion pieces defending Hitler. I found one of them translated on the Web site of the Middle East Media Research Institute, a watchdog organization based in Washington. “Thanks to Hitler, of blessed memory, who on behalf of the Palestinians took revenge in advance, against the most vile criminals on the face of the Earth,” the
Al-Akhbar
columnist Ahmad Ragab wrote in April. “Although we do have a complaint against him, for his revenge was not enough.”

Holocaust denial is a regular feature of
Al-Gomhuriya,
another government daily. Its deputy chief editor, Lotfi Nasif, sat with me in his windowless office in downtown Cairo last week and explained that the Holocaust is “an exaggeration” and that gas chambers are a product of the “Jewish imagination.” He told me, “The crimes of the Zionists against the Palestinians far outweigh any of the crimes committed by the Nazis.”

Colin Powell has frequently been denounced in the government press, sometimes in racial terms, and, shortly before the attacks in New York and in Washington, the
Al-Akhbar
columnist Mahmoud Abd Al-Munim Murad wrote, “The Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor must be destroyed because of . . . the idiotic American policy that goes from disgrace to disgrace in the swamp of bias and blind fanaticism.” He also declared that “the age of the American collapse has begun.” This is a not uncommon theme among members of the Egyptian intellectual class.

On one subject of international controversy—the use of suicide bombers against Israel—there is near unanimity: despite slight shades of difference, as seen at the Mustafa Mahmoud Mosque, most people agree that it is sometimes allowable. Some Islamic moderates believe that suicide attacks are doctrinally permissible only against Israeli soldiers; a more extremist position holds that all Israelis are legitimate targets.

Before September 11, American officials who worked closely with Egypt tried to downplay the role of anti-Israel and anti-American incitement in the local press. One of the few incidents that provoked a public American response came in 1998, when the newly appointed American Ambassador in Cairo, an Orthodox Jew named Daniel Kurtzer (who is now the Ambassador to Israel), was attacked in anti-Semitic terms in the Egyptian press.