The land is ours: Jews are dhimmis
My new book “The land is ours: Jews are dhimmi” is now in print. A Spanish edition, titled “La tierra es nuestra: Los judíos son dhimmis” is available as well. The audience for the book is students at K-12 schools taking an “Ethnic Studies” course (compulsory in my state California for 9th graders) or political and social studies courses at colleges and universities, where the Arab-Israeli conflict is discussed. Request teachers and professors to discuss my book in class: it presents the Jewish perspective of the conflict, a perspective that is usually suppressed in class.
The books can be downloaded for free from the ResearchGate website:
1) English edition
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/405240572_The_land_is_ours_Jews_are_dhimmis
2) Spanish edition
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/405253217_La_tierra_es_nuestra_Los_judios_son_dhimmis
The books are also available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions.
Below follows the Preface of the book:
Since the 7th century, as Arabs conquered vast lands in their expansion from Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, to the whole Middle East and the Mediterranean countries in Northern Africa – what in modern political science would be defined as military conquest and colonization, and the Arabs as the epitome of colonizers – a doctrine was developed whose basic tenet was, and still is: lands conquered by Muslims belong to the Umma (the Islamic Community) and cannot be surrendered. Never. Non-Muslim residents in these lands can, at best, achieve the status of “dhimmi”, if they are “people of the Book” (Christians and Jews). Otherwise, the options were only conversion to Islam or ethnic cleansing (expulsion or death.)
The “dhimmi” condition in the Islamic world was a state of constant legal, social and psychological submission. “Dhimmis” should be submissive, and social and legal frameworks were developed to ensure this condition. Dhimmis fulfilled useful economic functions, so they were “protected” as long as they were useful to those in power.
For a modern western urban intellectual, who spends his/her life between the walls of the university, and enjoys coffee at Starbucks with his/her social peers during the day, the “dhimmi condition” of the Jews, and the actual actions applied by the Muslim world to perpetuate it – are unimaginable. It does not fit his/her ideological biases and, hence, dismisses it. Or simply approves it: “the Jews deserve it”.
Think of the armchair intellectuals in Germany during the 1920’s and 1930’s, enjoying life, while watching the Jews being slowly but systematically separated from society, as the “undesirables”, being stripped from their jobs at the universities, their books being burned in the public squares, their shops and synagogues vandalized. Germans simply rationalized their behavior with a “the Jews deserve it.”
Think of the Southern states in the United States of America in the 19th and 20th century, with white people enjoying life during the day and seating around their nice fireplaces in the evenings enjoying tea and small talk, while outside their comfortable homes the negros lived under the “Jim Crow laws”. Negros fulfilled useful economic functions in the society, and they were “protected” subjects, as long as they obeyed the Law instituted by the whites. Whites rationalized, justified and supported these laws: Ultimately, for them, there was something wrong with the negros and the Law had been designed to protect the society as a whole.
For an outside observer, the Law could be seen as unfair to the negros, to say the least. But for many living their whole life inside this society, “this long experience of submission fashioned a form of alienation difficult to render clearly discernable to those very people who internalized it. It became necessary to learn to survive within the tight confines of a domination that was neither the Hell some claimed, nor the Paradise that others said it was. It was an ordinary world in which codified violence kept everyone in place, at the risk, otherwise, of bloodshed.”
No, the above paragraph is not a citation from some writings of a Black philosopher: it was written by a Tunisian Jew, Georges Bensoussan, describing the situation of the Jews in the Muslim countries.
Excellent books have been written about the “dhimmi condition” in the Muslim world, its long history, and the many laws that were enacted to justify, enforce and perpetuate this condition. I refer to the works by Bat Ye’or and Bensoussan for this matter. My book, on the other hand, is of a practical nature: How this subject applies to the actual modern conflict between the Arabs and the Jews (or, more precisely, between the Muslims and the Jews). In this sense, I follow the tradition in Physics, that divides the work between “Theoretical Physics” and “Applied Physics”. This book represents an “applied” side of “the dhimmi condition”, the description of a specific case of this condition: the Islamic world and the Arab states in their relation toward Israel.
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The book consists of 10 chapters and an Epilogue. The first three chapters are titled:
Chapter 1: The Islam doctrine and the Jews
Chapter 2: Why the State of Israel came into being: Zionism and the birth of Israel
Chapter 3: The Nakba
