With Jews Sovereign And Prospering, Mideast Arabs Struggle To Find People To Look Down On

The traditional paradigm cannot account for a not-under-anyone’s-boot Jew.

Petra, Jordan, August 21 – Generations of Muslim Arabs throughout the region long knew that no matter how low they sank on the social, economic, or political totem pole, at least they remained higher on it than the Jews, but the developments of the last century-plus have resulted in a successful, powerful, independent Jewish State right in the Levant, depriving the Jews’ neighbors of the one consolation they used to have when their own situation looked bleak.

Israel’s surprising survival after declaring statehood in 1948, followed by its lightning victory in 1967, shocked the Arab and Muslim worlds in particular, and the world at large, which had grown accustomed to seeing Jews – collectively and individually – as their host societies’ whipping boy, officially “protected” but effectively at the mercy of authorities willing to subject them to mob violence when times got tough. A Jewish entity no longer subject to non-Jewish potentates has proved difficult for the the Muslim world to assimilate, a world with sensibilities predicated on dominance of Jewish and Christian underclasses.

Adding insult to further insult, the ensuing decades saw the emergence in Israel of a booming, innovative economy that dwarfs that of its neighbors, along with a flourishing, vibrant democracy that allows freedoms unavailable in the wider region. The realization that the Jews of the Middle East – most of whom now live in Israel after expulsion from most Muslim-majority countries decades earlier – may forever occupy a higher social stratum than they do has plunged the collective Arab Muslim psyche into crisis, as it now must navigate the unfamiliar psychic territory of seeing Jews not as downtrodden victims unable – and in many cases forbidden – to defend themselves, but as sovereign, potent, and even dominant, a situation for which the traditional paradigm cannot account.

“I can disdain black Africans, but it’s not the same,” lamented Abdullah, an elderly Bedouin from southern Jordan. “We don’t get the same visceral sense of pleasure and dominance referring to them as ‘slave’ in common parlance as one gets from kicking a defenseless Jew. It’s hard to explain. As Bedouin we rank pretty low in Arab society so for a long time it was a relief to have a set population that we, in turn, could look down on as inferior. Now we don’t, but still feel we should, and it makes us feel angry, betrayed, and more than a little ashamed that the lowly Jews took that away from us. In earlier times we’d channel that rage into abusing and killing some Jews, but it’s not as easy at is used to be, and that’s a damn shame. It makes me want to kick a Jew in the…”

Abdullah shook his head upon realizing that completing the sentence would be as futile as acting upon it.

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