Jihad and Jew-Hatred

Telos Press Publishing

Contents

Foreword by Jeffrey Herf................................................VIIPreface.................................................................XIXIntroduction............................................................11. The Muslim Brotherhood and Palestine.................................6The Islamist Vanguard...................................................8On the "Art of Death"...................................................14Anti-German Boycott.....................................................16Anti-Jewish Jihad.......................................................20The Muslim Brothers, the Mufti and the Nazis............................25The Mufti's Antisemitism................................................31Nashashibis versus Husseinis............................................37The Sanctuary of National Socialism.....................................43War against Israel......................................................482. Egyptian Islamism from Nasser to the present day.....................61The Humiliation.........................................................63Comrade Brother Nasser..................................................67Islamism under Sadat....................................................73Unity and Submission....................................................75Sayyid Qutb.............................................................80Jihad against the Muslims...............................................85Islamization under Mubarak..............................................913. The Jihad of Hamas...................................................103Islamist terror in Gaza.................................................104The Hamas Charter.......................................................107El-Husseini and Arafat..................................................112Mass Murder as Strategy.................................................1194. September 11 and Israel..............................................123Bin Laden and the Muslim Brothers.......................................124Hatred of America.......................................................128The Antisemitic Signal..................................................133New Alliances...........................................................141Epilogue: "... the Beginning of Complicity."............................151Bibliography............................................................162Index...................................................................174

Chapter One

On November 2, 1917 the British government, through its Foreign Minister, Lord Balfour, announced its support for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. The Balfour Declaration has since then been accepted as the starting point for the Jewish-Arab conflict.

This view, however, overlooks the fact that important representatives of the Arab world of the day supported the Zionist settlement process. They hoped that Jewish immigration would boost economic development thus bringing the Middle East closer to European levels. For example, Ziwar Pasha, later Egyptian Prime Minister, personally took part in the celebrations of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Five years later Ahmed Zaki, a former Egyptian cabinet minister, congratulated the Zionist Executive in Palestine on its progress: "The victory of the Zionist idea is the turning point for the fulfilment of an ideal which is so dear to me, the revival of the Orient." Two years later the Chairman of the Zionist Executive, Frederick H. Kisch, travelled to Cairo for talks with three high-ranking Egyptian officials on future relations. These officials "were equally emphatic in their pro-Zionist declarations", noted Kisch in his diary. All three "recognized that the progress of Zionism might help to secure the development of a new Eastern civilization." In 1925 the Egyptian Interior Minister Ismail Sidqi took action against a group of Palestinians protesting against the Balfour Declaration in Cairo. He was at the time on his way to Jerusalem to take part in the opening of the first Hebrew university.

Twenty years later scarcely anything remained of this benevolent attitude. In 1945 the worst anti-Jewish pogroms in Egypt's history were perpetrated in Cairo. On November 2, 1945, on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, demonstrators "broke into the Jewish quarter, plundered houses and shops, attacked non-Muslims, and devastated the adjacent Ashkenazi synagogue before finally setting it on fire." The event left some 400 people injured and a policeman dead. Meanwhile in Alexandria, at least five people were killed in the course of even more violent riots "which according to a British embassy official were clearly anti-Jewish and, to his relief, not directed against the British." A few weeks later Islamist newspapers "launched a frontal attack against Egypt's Jews as being Zionists, Communists, capitalists, bloodsuckers, traffickers in arms, white slave-traders and, more generally, a 'subversive element' in all states and societies", and called for a boycott of Jewish goods.

In the following sections, we shall look at the reasons why, between 1925 and 1945, a shift in direction was effected in Egypt from a rather neutral or pro-Jewish mood to a rabidly anti-Zionist or anti-Jewish one, a shift which changed the whole Arab world and affects it to this day. The driving force behind this development was the "Society of Muslim Brothers" (Gamiyyat alikhwan al-muslimin), founded in 1928. The significance of this organization goes far beyond Egypt. For today's global Islamist movement the Muslim Brothers are what the Bolsheviks were for the Communist movement of the 1920s: the ideological reference point and organizational core which decisively inspired all the subsequent tendencies and continues to do so to this day.

The Islamist Vanguard

The Egyptian situation in the 1920s was marked by multifaceted social changes. In the First World War, with British help, the Arab elites had defeated the Ottoman despotism. In 1924 the last Caliphate of Istanbul was abolished. European ideologies such as liberalism and nationalism met with a positive response in Egypt's leading circles, literature began to follow European models, scholarship began to open up to Western influences and Egyptian women took off their headscarves.

The independence which Britain had promised its former colony in 1922, had however, never been fully granted and relations were stretched to the breaking point. National resistance to British imperialism was further fuelled by social conflicts. The First World War had unleashed an industrial and employment boom, which collapsed with the war's end. Industrial action ensued in Cairo, Alexandria and the Canal Zone. The world economic crisis exacerbated the already tense situation. Between 1928 and 1931 the world price for cotton, Egypt's most important export, fell from 26 to 10 dollars per unit.

It was against this culturally, politically and socially agitated background that in March 1928 the charismatic preacher Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood with six employees of the Suez Canal Company. After a period of cadre training, the Brotherhood "grew from insignificance and mediocrity to the largest group in the whole of...