The British academic Jacqueline Rose has made a name for herself in recent months as one of the grievously misguided and damaging ranks of anti-Israel Jews. A correspondent on Harry’s Place furnishes a revealing little cameo:

Jacqueline Rose spoke last week on her book the Question of Zion, where she takes a Freudian approach. She prescribes a process of recognition by Jews and Israelis of the pain they have caused the Palestinians, (fair enough- and already many do) which she knows will be painful as they have suppressed this knowledge all along, but really it will be very therapeutic. Sure enough, she referred anon to the Palestinian Other. She also made the point that the hostility to the Jews who came to establish the Jewish state was not against them as Jews, but was hostility to Europeans coming to create a European colony. I commented that her whole analysis was Eurocentric and ignored a huge component of this Arab Jew psychic drama she had described- ie the effect on both players of 1000 years of dhimmitude. She had not recognised the Arab objection not just to a European state, or a Jewish state, but to the fact that it was a dhimmi state. The audience applauded and she looked blank and slightly panicked, asking ‘a what state?’ from which I deduced that this term, the big Other, the dhimmi, had no resonance for her at all.

I had said that this suppressed history needed recognising, even more so than that of the Palestinians- meaning that there was already some recognition by Jews of the suffering of the Palestinians (whatever the contention over causality) whereas there was still almost total flat denial of the history and true nature of the dhimmi regime among Arab historians. She misunderstood and began berating me heatedly for valuing Jewish suffering above that of Palestinians, and calling shame on the audience for applauding my points. I approached her after the session ended to explain my point about the suppression of dhimmi history. If that were the case, she said (indicating thereby this was not something she knew about) then it should be spoken of, but not, she emphasised vehemently, at the expense of the Palestinians. Which means again she has not understood why it is important for her to understand the whole history and dynamic for a proper context, before pontificating on the remedy for healing this great guilt trauma on the Jewish psyche, let alone writing a book on Zionism.

We have previously clashed on the pages of the LRB [London Review of Books] when I pointed out, and she conceded, that she had repeated without checking, a factually inaccurate account of a particular incident in mandate Palestine which traduced Jewish attitudes during the struggle.

Posted by ami at January 2, 2006 06:23 PM

Staggering ignorance indeed; terrifying; and absolutely par for the course. The history of Islam, Muslim relations with the Jews and the Middle East impasse simply cannot be understood without grasping the centrality to Islamic thinking of dhimmi status, whereby those infidels who are not slaughtered are allowed to live under Islamic jurisdiction only as second class citizens — taxed as such, demarcated as such and variously humiliated and otherwise oppressed as such. That is why those -- like Rose herself -- who have wanted to see, rather than a Jewish state, a binational state composed of Arabs and Jews sharing power equally have only ever been Jews, not Muslims -- for whom such an arrangement would be unthinkable.

A small but telling current example. As Sandro Magister writes in Chiesa, Hamas intends to impose the special tax called the jeziya — which through Islamic history was applied to dhimmi peoples — upon all non-Muslim residents in the Palestinian territories. In an interview with Karby Legget, published in the December 23-26 edition of ‘The Wall Street Journal,’ Masalmeh, the leader of the Hamas contingent at the municipal council of Bethlehem, confirmed: ‘We in Hamas intend to implement this tax someday. We say it openly – we welcome everyone to Palestine but only if they agree to live under our rules.’

Those who have been trying for years to point out the harsh truths of dhimmitude have been reviled and traduced as ‘Islamophobes’. As a result, it is not just the useful idiots of the western intelligentsia who are lethally ignorant of the true nature of the Middle East impasse but the populations over whom they exercise such irresponsible but profound influence.