A man with no name coined this proverb: “Where there is no great hatred, there is no great love.” The problem, as Leon Uris realized, is that sometimes great hate prevents love.

Leon Uris and the Arab mind

In his 1985 novel The Haj, Leon Uris has the famous Orde Wingate say:

… every last Arab is a total prisoner of his society. The Jews will eventually have to face up to what you’re dealing with here. The Arabs will never love you for what good you’ve brought them. They don’t know how to really love. But hate! Oh God, can they hate! And they have a deep, deep, deep resentment because you [Jews] have jolted them from their delusion of grandeur and shown them for what they are—a decadent, savage people controlled by a religion that has stripped them of all human ambition … except for the few cruel enough and arrogant enough to command them as one commands a mob of sheep. You [Jews] are dealing with a mad society and you’d better learn how to control it.

The novel’s central character Haj Ibrahim confides to a Jewish friend:

During the summer heat my people become frazzled…. They are pent up. They must explode. Nothing directs their frustration like Islam. Hatred is holy in this part of the world. It is also eternal…. You [Jews] do not know how to deal with us. For years, decades, we may seem to be at peace with you, but always in the back of our minds we keep up the hope of vengeance. No dispute is ever really settled in our world. The Jews give us a special reason to continue warring.

Overwhelming hate

Uris has the cultured Dr. Mudhil elaborate:

We [Arabs] do not have leave to love one another and we have long ago lost the ability. It was so written twelve hundred years earlier. Hate is our overpowering legacy and we have regenerated ourselves by hatred from decade to decade, generation to generation, century to century. The return of the Jews has unleashed that hatred, exploding it wildly … In ten, twenty, thirty years the world of Islam will begin to consume itself in madness. We cannot live with ourselves … we never have. We are incapable of change.

Later in the novel (as if he were commenting on what Genesis 16:12 says of the descendents of Ishmael) Mudhil remarks: “Islam is unable to live at peace with anyone…. One day our oil will be gone, along with our ability to blackmail. We have contributed nothing to human betterment in centuries, unless you consider the assassin and the terrorist as human gifts.”

A culture of hate

Some pundits may call Uris a “racist.” They lack the novelist’s sensitive but clear-headed understanding of Arab culture. Unlike apologists, Uris appreciates the tragedy of a few insightful Arabs who know they are trapped in the decadence of a savage culture which Bat Yo’er calls “A Culture of Hate.”

Hate incites murder. In all the lands it conquered, Islam replaced indigenous places of worship – Christian, Jewish, Persian, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Hindu – with Mosques. Muslims could not have done this without enormous bloodshed. The notion of Islam as a religion of peace is cowardly nonsense.

But what happens to a culture animated by overweening hate? When hate gains ascendancy, as it does in Islam, it closes the Muslim’s mind. It breeds intolerance. It undermines self-criticism and crushes any incentive to understand and learn from non-Muslims.

Kindness v. hate

In contrast, kindness (Hesed) is a fundamental Jewish principle. Kindness prompts the Jew not only to help others, but also to understand and learn from non-Jews. (In the Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 94b, Rabbi Judah the Prince, compiler of the Mishna, unhesitatingly declares in favor of a Gentile astronomical theory over that of the wise men of Israel.) The kindliness of the Jew enlarges his mind and makes him tolerant toward others. Accordingly, whereas Jews speak of righteous Gentiles, Muslims designate as evil everything non-Muslim and consigns all infidels to hell.

It should be noted, however, the kindliness of Jews can be as irrational as Arab hatred. The inability of Jewish leaders to hate Israel’s Arab enemies is symptomatic of a sickness. In The Kuzari, Judah Halevi quotes King David: “I hate them, O God, that hate you” (Psalms 129:21). The haters of God, the Kuzari explains, refers to those who hate God’s people and God’s Torah.

A time to fight

Hatred, however, is futile if it does not issue in action. In Psalms 18:38-43, Israel’s greatest king writes: “I pursued my enemies and overtook them, and returned not until they were destroyed. I crushed them so that they are not able to rise; … I pulverized them like dust in the face of the storm…”

The Sages teach: “There is a time to kill, in the time of war, and a time to heal, in the time of peace.… There is a time to love, in the time of peace, and a time to hate, in the time of war” (Kohelet Rabbah 3:1). Consider the verse, “When you go forth to battle against your enemies” (Deut. 20:1). The Sages ask: “What is meant by ‘against your enemies’”? They answer: “God said, ‘Confront them as enemies. Just as they show you no mercy, so should you not show them any mercy’” (Tanchuma, Shoftim 15). But Israel’s ruling elites ignored this teaching, in consequence of which the Palestinian (terrorist) Authority murdered or mutilated thousands of Jewish women, men, and children with impunity.

Because Israel’s ruling elites do not hate Israel’s enemies, they do not truly love Jews and the Holy Land. They only know how to shrink and play possum. Israel needs a Prime Minister animated by the ambition to expand the Land of Israel, and make it so Jewish as to induce Israel’s enemies to leave the Land in droves.☼