The reverberation of the Arab hijackings has still not subsided either in Israel or elsewhere. It is not so much that few expect that they have seen the end to Arab kidnappings and plane seizures. What irritates a great many Israelis is the reaction of certain freed hostages and their public statements to the press.
Israelis were angry and downright disgusted at the incredible kudos thrown at the Arab terrorists by some of the prisoners – after they had been released. At a time when Israelis have been desperately trying to remind a bored world of the Arab threats of extermination, of the textbooks which fairly dripped venom, and the utter holocaust that faced Israel in 1967, a group of Jews, mostly young, were perfect grist for the Arab propaganda mill.
Thus, a first-year student at Yeshiva University and the son of a rabbi, at that, was quoted as saying: “I had always thought that the Arabs were like machines, fighting, fighting. I found out that they were warm, happy people. It’s just that they have a cause.”
A 16-year-old girl reportedly commented: “I must say I’m more sympathetic now that I’ve seen how they live in refugee camps.”
A New York News report quotes yet a third victim as saying: “We were treated as humanely as possible… I’m not bitter; I understand them.”
What infuriates Israelis so is not only the abject ignorance that underlies these statements but the fact that El Fatah and other Arab murderers have been trying for months now to make the world forget their psychotic hatred of June, 1967 and to swallow a new image of the terrorists as merely seeking a secular and democratic Palestine.
The Arabs and their leftist friends, no doubt, found a gold mine of propaganda in the loose and unthinking statements of these young Jews. Indeed, each of the above quotes and more were part of a letter to the editor of the Communist Daily World, Tuesday, October 6th. The letter began with the following words:
“The reactions on their return home to the U.S. of the Jewish hostages freed by the Arab guerrillas should not be passed over without comment in the Daily World. The matter is important in view of the campaign of vilification of the Arab guerrillas conducted by just about the entire U.S. press with Washington’s encouragement.”
Israeli women who sought cyanide pills from their doctors in the days preceding the June war and who remember the PLO leader, Ahmed Shukairy, stating over Amman Radio that he doubted that “a single Jew would be left alive;” Israelis who listened in grim silence to the terrorist and the Arab government broadcasts and who watched this month as the tortured and mutilated body of an Israeli pilot was returned; Israelis who picked up the pieces of the Israeli school bus smashed by terrorist bazookas with the loss of eight children and who remember that these same terrorists blew up a plane with more than 40 innocent people; all reacted with disgust at the utter ignorance and tastelessness of the remarks of the young American Jews.
If an 18-year-old yeshiva student is really that ignorant about human beings to assume that ANYONE, even a Nazi, does not have his warm, happy moments, he certainly should learn to stay home and not open his mouth until he has learned a great deal more about life. The sudden discovery by young Jews that Arabs are not monsters finds an unhappy parallel in similar “moments of truth” concerning Russians, North Vietnamese, and Communist Chinese. Indeed, Charles Lindbergh was similarly pleasantly impressed with residents of Hitler’s Germany and Adolf Eichmann was the very model of an innocuous civil servant.
The fact that Arabs are human and share the same emotions as Jews is hardly an earth-shaking discovery except for the very young and hardly changes a single fact in the Arab-Israel dispute. It was “nice” people who cheered Hitler and “warm” people who fought in his armies. It was these “happy” Arabs who vowed to wipe out Israel before there were any refugees to make the 16-year-old Jewish girl more “sympathetic.”
The Israeli irritation is more than justified and should give rise to deep concern. Our Jewish youth have an inexplicable tendency – or, perhaps, need – to love everyone, including their enemies. Their naivete and ignorance has, in the past, helped to destroy Jews and threatens to do so in the future once again. One would have to look far and wide to find a similar willingness on the part of Arab students to show a similar “brotherhood.”
In another form, this willingness to embrace the Jewish enemy is seen in the ability of Jewish students, who are undoubtedly pro-Zionist, to march with such groups as the Panthers and Student Mobilization Committee (SMC).
The latter, a creature of the Marxist/Trotskyite Young Socialist Alliance, has been in the forefront of the young American left drive against Israel. Not an issue of the YSA organ, Militant, fails to carry a significant number of articles against Israel and for the terrorists. SMC holds teach-ins against Israel and pushes literature of all kinds against the Jewish State.
Nevertheless, Jewish students, pro-Zionist and even some from religious institutions like Yeshiva University, are perfectly willing to go along with these groups on issues such as Vietnam, thus giving them prestige, power and funds, all to be used against Israel.
30 Tishri 5731 – October 30, 1970