August 26, 2006
In his latest speech, which infuriated so many people, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad uttered a sentence that deserves attention: "Every new Arab generation hates Israel more than the previous one."
Of all that has been said about the Second Lebanon War, these are perhaps the most important words.
The main product of this war is hatred. The pictures of death and destruction in Lebanon entered every Arab home, indeed every Muslim home from Indonesia to Morocco, from Yemen to the Muslim ghettos in London and Berlin. Not for an hour, not for a day, but for 33 successive days-day after day, hour after hour. The mangled bodies of babies, the women weeping over the ruins of their homes, Israeli children writing "greetings" on shells about to be fired at villages, Ehud Olmert blabbering about "the most moral army in the world" while the screen showed a heap of bodies.
Israelis ignored these sights; indeed they were scarcely shown on our TV. Of course, we could see them on Aljazeera and some Western channels, but Israelis were much too busy with the damage wrought in our Northern towns. Feelings of pity and empathy for non-Jews have been blunted here a long time ago.
But it is a terrible mistake to ignore this result of the war. It is far more important than the stationing of a few thousand European troops along our border, with the kind consent of Elizbullah. It may still be bothering generations of Israelis, when the names Olmert and Halutz have long been forgotten, and when even Nasrallah no longer remembers the name Amir Peretz.80
In order for the significance of Assad's words to become clear, they have to be viewed in a historical context.
The whole Zionist enterprise has been compared to the transplantation of an organ into the body of a human being. The natural immune system rises up against the foreign implant; the body mobilizes all its power to reject it. The doctors use a heavy dosage of medicines in order to overcome the rejection. That can go on for a long time, sometimes until the eventual death of the body itself, including the transplant.
(Of course, this analogy, like any other, should be treated cautiously. An analogy can help in understanding things, but no more than that.)
The Zionist Movement has planted a foreign body in this country, which was then a part of the Arab-Muslim space. The inhabitants of the country, and the entire Arab region, rejected the Zionist entity.