The Arab-Israeli conflict in the words of Albert Memmi

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is delivering today his vision of Israel and the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict in a joint session of the US Congress, it is worth remembering Albert Memmi’s take of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its resolution.

Albert Memmi (1920-2020), was a prolific Jewish writer and philosopher born in Tunisia, North Africa. His best-known nonfiction work is “The Colonizer and the Colonized”, originally published in French in 1957, with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Albert Memmi was, in his own words, an Arab Jew. And this is what he wrote 50 years ago, in the introduction to his book “Jews and Arabs”:

As I put the finishing touches on this book, I realize that I am what may be called an Arab Jew and a left-wing Zionist. At the same time, I discover that our testimony, as Jews born in the Arab countries, has gone virtually unheard.

Now, that testimony is of capital importance. Not only because we have been and still are the neighbors, the brothers, of the Moslem Arabs, but because we have the most serious of accounts to settle with them.

This is why we are amused, or irritated, when we hear: “Israel must be integrated into the Middle East”, “Zionism must be Levantized”, etcetera.

What about us? [the Jews from the Arab countries]

Ever since I’ve been in Europe, I’ve had the strange feeling that the whole matter has become unfamiliar to me. I even used to say to myself, jokingly: “Another trick pulled by the Europeans! Even when it comes to Sephardi-Mizrahi Jewish misfortune, it is ignored to emphasize the misfortune of the Ashkenazi Jews.” As if there were only a Moslem East, and only a Western [Ashkenazi] Diaspora! As if there were only an Arab-Moslem set of claims, by contrast with a West represented by the [Ashkenazi] Jews!

The Moslem masses have been among the poorest on the whole planet. But what about ours, the Jews of the Arab countries? Who has visited one of our ghettos and not felt frightened? Why shouldn’t we too submit our reckoning to the world? The Arabs were colonized, it is true. But weren’t we? What have we been for centuries if not dominated, humiliated, threatened, and periodically massacred? And by whom? It is time our answer was heeded: by the Moslem Arabs! And to such an extent that – how many people fully realize this? – the colonization by the French, the English, and the Italians, which the majority of Jewish intellectuals condemned for the sake of political ethics, was received by our own [Jewish] masses in the Arab countries as a guarantee of survival.

The same with claims to nationhood. Happily, the world has recognized the legitimate rights of the Moslem Arabs. Why does it so delicately overlook ours? I know very well why: because in a Manichaean world, our rights seem to get in the way of those of the Moslem Arabs. But simply because the Moslem Arabs were the victims of European colonizers, must we be eternally resigned to being their victims? Must we accept the hangings of Jews in Baghdad, the prisons and the fires in Cairo, the looting and economic strangling in the Maghreb, and, at the very least, the Jewish exodus from the Arab countries?

Here there is a second myth to be dispelled: “these exactions are the consequences of Zionism”, claim the Moslem Arab propagandists (and their ignorant European supporters stupidly repeat it). This is historically absurd: it is not Zionism that has caused Arab antisemitism, but the other way around, just us in Europe. Israel is a rejoinder to the oppression suffered by Jews the world over, including our own oppression as Arab Jews. From the time my friends and I were twelve years old, long before the suffering of the European Jews, we dreamed, amid an Arab world that had always been hostile, for the construction of a Jewish state.

The truth is that for the first time in centuries, the Jews, including the Arab Jews, are trying to parry the blows, and that is called Zionism. For the first time since the destruction of the Jewish state by the Romans, the Jews are using the nation-as-response, and that is called Israel.

I have said it in writing again and again: I am not an enthusiast of the nation-as-response. I hate violence, and not just other people’s violence, my own people’s too! I am against any philosophy based on force. Only you cannot, unless you are a hypocrite, ask any being, whether singular or collective, to refuse to defend itself if it is threatened. I would like the conditions of violence to disappear, and I work tirelessly to that end. But I cannot call for less than what I never ceased to demand for the Moslem Arabs: I approve and continue to approve of the liberation and the national development of the Arabs. Why should I not wish the same things for my own people? If that is what being a Zionist means, then I am indeed a Zionist.

However, I have said that I consider myself a left-wing Zionist. That means that I want justice for my people without injustice for the others. This includes those who are called Palestinians, even though, like ourselves, they often came from somewhere else: another historical truth. They also have the right to perfect their existence as a nation – just as we do. Both of us have been and still are victims of human history. Our experiences are strangely similar, even the myths we have derived from them.

Are our interests irreconcilable? It is true that they are not easy to harmonize. But luckily, they are not contradictory, provided there is a courageous decision to abandon all apocalyptic visions and accept the compromises and mutual sacrifices. We have certainly accepted them! Nearly all of our communities have disappeared from most of the countries with Moslem-Arab majorities.

Do I have something specific in mind? Yes, of course. This requires an overall view of the situation. The drama we are living through has not two partners but four: the already constituted Arab nations, the Palestinians, the Jewish Diaspora, and the Israelis, well over 50 percent of whom were born in the region. Well, at the risk of bucking some stubborn illusions, let’s dare to say: a de facto exchange of populations has come about. Part of the Palestinians have gone to the Arab nations, and part of the Jews from those nations have gone to Israel. Naturally, this is only a generalization; it must be methodically reexamined and remedies for it must be made to measure. What is needed is to reclassify some of them, compensate others, welcome some of them, or, on the contrary, sometimes even accentuate the population shift. In other words, what is needed is to bargain! The same applies to the soil. We constantly hear of “Arab lands” and “Zionist enclave.” But by what mystical geography are we not at home there too, we who descend from the same indigenous populations since the first human settlements were made? Why should only the converts to Islam be the sole proprietors of our common soil? Is it not time to deal the cards just a little differently?

In any event, all that can be done is to improve and legitimize these population exchanges; otherwise, violence and death will continue to reign. Have we forgotten our common genius for bargaining to such an extent that we see reciprocal destruction as the only way out?

[Excerpt from the introduction to the book “Jews and Arabs”, by Albert Memmi, 1975]