Recollections of a Young American GI in Egypt’s Long-Standing Love Affair With the Middle East

By Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal

Looking back retrospectively, having just recovered from a serious illness, I have been re-examining my long-standing love affair with the Middle East, which began with military service in Cairo in 1944.

I vividly recall the night Irving Berlin and the cast of “This Is the Army” performed at the old Cairo Opera House (which later burned down) and were greeted by an enthusiastic audience including myself and other GIs.

After the performance, I went out on the town until the wee hours of the morning and then folded in a small hotel, the Carlton, in the center of the city. I sneaked back to camp (Camp Huckstep) barely before reveille and thus narrowly escaped a court-martial.

While I subsequently went on to write “Israel’s Flag Is Not Mine” for the Reader’s Digest and my first book, What Price Israel?, the first and only time I cracked the iron hold that Zionism has had over The New York Times was the publication of the following letter to the editor on Oct. 7, 1970, in response to a published letter from Lord Rothschild. I believe that letter is still pertinent to the continuing debate over U.S.-Middle East policy:

“‘Genocide’ in Middle East”

To the Editor:

Lord Rothschild’s letter of Sept. 13, headed “Genocide Against Jews Feared,” fails to adduce a single iota of evidence that the Israelis would be threatened with certain liquidation if the Arabs of Palestine were restored to their homes and given full, equal rights in the land of their ancestors, now Israel.

Such a presumption of genocide purposely raises the ugly specter of Hitlerian anti-Semitism so as to prick the Christian conscience once again, but flies in the face of past and recent history.

What is known in the West as anti-Semitism has never existed in the Arab world. Moses and Abraham, as well as Jesus, are recognized as prophets by Islam, the faith of the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs. The Qur’an refers to Jews as “People of the Book.” The followers of Islam have invariably referred to and treated their Jewish neighbors as “the sons and daughters of our uncle,” an allusion to the Old Testament story of Ishmael and Isaac.

“What is known in the West as anti-Semitism has never existed in the Arab world.”

There has been relatively little of the racial or religious discrimination prevalent under the Nazi genocidal rule ever evident in the Arab world toward the Jewish minorities that lived so long in its midst. Dov Joseph, military governor of Jerusalem during the Arab-Israeli war, wrote in his account of the ’48 siege of that city: “I have never found among Muslims who made up the great majority of the Arabs of Palestine any trace of feeling against Jews comparable to anti-Semitism.”

What Arab hatred persists today is directed against Zionism, the nationalistic political movement, and against the state of Israel, not against Jews as Jews nor against Judaism, the universal faith. Had the Christian world’s treatment of Judaism and of Jews been a quarter as humane as the Arabs’, there would be no Israel, no present crisis.

If the word genocide can be applied anywhere, the shoe is definitely on the other foot. While the Arabs, including the Palestinians, in their use of exaggerated hyperbole forged by their over-rich language, have on occasion wildly threatened to drive the Israelis into the sea, it has been the Israelis who have come closest to carrying out any genocidal intent. Where Arabs have talked, Israelis have acted.

Deir Yassin (where 251 Arab men, women and children were killed by the Irgun under the command of Menachem Begin, until recently a member of the Israeli Cabinet); Kafr Kassim (where 49 Palestinian villagers were shot down for an alleged curfew violation); Kibya, Nahahlin, Qalqilya and Es-Samu are the names of only some of the Palestinian villages where the deaths of innocent victims brought censure upon Israel from the Security Council of the world.

The sole alternative to further killing and a possible Big Power confrontation is still the establishment of a democratic, secular, non-sectarian state in Palestine where Christians, Muslims and Jews can live, work and worship without discrimination.

If there is not room for all Israelis in such a re-formed Israel-Palestine state, certainly the doors of the Western world will not be closed this time as they were in the face of Hitler. Rather than Lord Rothschild’s presumption of Arab genocide, one must assume a reawakened Christian conscience which at long last will take responsibility for its own acts, for which to date the innocent Arab population of Palestine has alone been asked to atone.

Alfred M. Lilienthal, New York, Sept. 24, 1970

Time for Recognition

The Times, at the end of the letter, identified me as the editor of Middle East Perspectives (whose last issue, incidentally, was published in 1988) and a long-time advocate of the Arab cause.

While it is, indeed, too late to have a single Israel-Palestine state, as there ought to have been in 1945, it does now behoove Washington to support the recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinians through a two-state solution to the long-extant Middle East imbroglio by encouraging the immediate establishment of the state of Palestine. Such action on the part of the United States has been long overdue.

Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal, the long-time editor of Middle East Perspectives , is the author of five pioneering books about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and its repercussions in the United States. They are What Price Israel?,The Other Side of The Coin, There Goes the Middle East, The Zionist Connection and The Zionist Connection II. The latter is available from the AET Book Club.