It’s Not Fair That We Palestinians Don’t Get To Lord It Over Jews As Our Ancestors Did

By Issa Amro, human rights activist

Hebron, August 12 – Progress comes in many forms. The adoption of human rights principles has advanced civilization, and the Palestinian cause in particular, to places it never would have achieved absent those universal tenets. But not all change brings positive outcomes, and here I refer to the longstanding second-class status that Muslims of previous generations assigned to Jews under their dominion, a status that, with the establishment of Israel, effectively disappeared from the Muslim world, and now we Muslims, Palestinians in particular, have no one we can look at and think, “Hey, I might be poor, unhealthy, powerless, and otherwise miserable, but at least I’m a societal rung above that.”

We Muslim Arabs, Palestinians in particular, have long nurtured an inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West: Islamic society once boasted the most glorious medieval bastions of scholarship, philosophy, mathematics, poetry, and other noble disciplines, preserving as it did the classical works that Christian Europe neglected in all but isolated pockets. But since then Dar-al-Islam has seen steady decline in lasting temporal power and leadership in those intellectual pursuits. But we still insist that we embody the most enlightened and righteous culture, for unlike those infidels, we represent Allah, and Allah would not relegate His True Prophet’s followers to anything below the summit of human achievement!

Frustration with the brutal reality of foreign technological, cultural, and political superiority to our own culture has long manifested in attempts to preserve what superiority we do have, specifically our local dominance over Jews and other religious or ethnic minorities. Bans on construction of new synagogues; prohibitions barring Jews from riding horses; limits on the heights of Jewish structures, lest they grow taller than a mosque; discriminatory taxes; bans on holding weapons; and just general legal inferiority that invited abuse – all those remnants of Islamic superiority to the Jewish infidel have all but disappeared from our lives now that Jews have a country of their own and an army to defend them from our righteous pillage and killing sprees. Our dignity demands the restoration of the societal status quo ante of Islamic rule over Jews!

Without the Jews over whom to lord over, Palestinians face the unwelcome status of being the dregs of Levantine society, and everyone knows that only Jews can occupy that stratum! Considerations of human dignity, a cornerstone of the human rights movement, militate for undoing the Zionist enterprise and once again subjecting the Jews to our domination, in order that even as we wallow in poverty, government corruption, political limbo, gang violence, and barbaric cultural norms, we can still have someone upon whom to look down as lesser, and thus to maintain our positive self-image.

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