In May 1291, exactly 710 years ago, the last of the Crusaders were thrown from the sea-wall ofAcre into the sea. Yitzhak Shamir might have said: “The Muslims are the same Muslims, theCrusaders are the same Crusaders and the sea is the same sea.”*
Paraphrasing Shamir’s famous saying: “The Arabs are the same Arabs, the Jews are the same Jews and the sea is the same sea.” – meaning that it is the unwavering aim of the Arabs to throw the Jews into the sea.
Among the Christians were eighth generation Sabras, the Crusaders’ presence in the countryhad lasted for almost 200 years. There were many reasons for the eventual downfall of theirenterprise. One of them was the problem of the new immigrants.
The participants in the First Crusade were adventurers imbued with religious zeal, and theyconquered the country with blood and fire – much blood and much fire. But gradually theyadopted the easy-going Eastern life-style, learned the geo-politics of their new homeland,made treaties with Arab rulers and began to integrate themselves into the region.
And then a new wave of immigrants arrived, again adventurers imbued with religious zeal. Theywere outraged when they saw the Christians wearing oriental dress and entertaining Arabnobles. The new immigrants destroyed the fabric of co-existence, which had begun to emerge,and started a new war against the Arabs. This happened time and again, in every generation,until the Crusaders succeeded in uniting the whole Arab world against them, engendering aMuslim religious fanaticism which had not existed previously. It all ended on the sea-wall ofAcre…
I was reminded of this historical example last week when I saw the chapter on the recent Russianimmigration in Haim Yavin’s TV series on the election upheavals in Israel. According toYavin, the almost all the “Russians” are unbridled nationalists, born Arab-haters. They aresure that the whole of Eretz-Israel “belongs to the Jews”, that we, the old-timers, havebecome tired and weak, and that they, the immigrants from Russia, must save Israel fromperdition and the gas chambers of a second Auschwitz.
This did not surprise me at all. Ten years ago, when I visited Russia several times in the courseof writing my book “Lenin Does Not Live Here Anymore” (published only in Hebrew), I wasastonished by the anti-Muslim, anti-Armenian and anti-Georgian racism I encounteredeverywhere in Moscow. At the time I wrote that with the evaporation of Marxism, nothing wasleft of Bolshevism but an extreme, totalitarian, racist and anti-democratic nationalism. Icoined a formula: “Bolshevism minus Marxism equals Fascism”.
(By the way, 70 years of Communist indoctrination in Soviet schools disappeared withoutleaving a trace. It might be worthwhile for Education Minister Limor Livnat and all the otherBolsheviks in our government, who believe that the schools can “instill ideologicalvalues”, to ponder this fact.)
The million immigrants from the former Soviet Union are a part of this Russia. Like all newimmigrants, they bring with them the world-view that they have absorbed in their formerhomeland and apply it automatically in their new surroundings. Greater Israel instead ofGreat Russia, Arabs instead of Uzbeks and Tartars – everything is the same.
At meetings of the far right, these Russian meet American settlers, who come with myths of theWild West. In their eyes, the Arabs equal the Red Indians and the settlers are the whitepioneers. For them, too – everything is the same.
Trouble is, the “Russians” may decide the fate of the nation in future elections as theyalready have in the past.
However, nationalism is not the only component of the “Russian soul”. There is also a profoundlonging for peace (“mir”), born of the memories of the murderous Nazi invasion, and perhaps ofthe Napoleonic war. There is also a deep antipathy to religious coercion, especially on thepart of the hundreds of thousands of Christians who came here under the “Law of Return”. Allthese tendencies are fighting each other in the hearts of the new immigrants, and the IsraeliNew Left can influence the outcome.
The Israeli cocktail contains a million religious people of all shades, almost all of them,right-wing. There are a million Arab citizens, almost all of them left-wing. We must not,under any circumstances, resign ourselves to the addition of a million “Russians” to therightist camp. We must battle for their souls.
The sea is the same sea, but we are not condemned to be the new Crusaders, creating the situationfor the appearance of a new Saladin.