President Yasser Arafat,

Shalom.

‎ I write these lines in order to protest against a statement that I cannot ‎‎ignore.‎ ‎ In the weekly Palestinian paper, The Jerusalem Times, there ‎‎appeared on March 26 a short item reporting that you have viewed the ‎‎controversial film of Mel Gibson, "The Passion of the Christ". ‎‎Afterwards your advisor and close assistant, Nabil Abu-Rudeina, stated ‎‎that you found the film "moving and historical". Abu-Rudeina added that ‎‎"the Palestinians are still daily being exposed to the kind of pain Jesus ‎‎was exposed to during his crucifixion."

If the statement had not appeared in a Palestinian paper, I would have ‎‎believed that it was invented by Ariel Sharon's propaganda machine. It ‎‎is hard to imagine a sentence more capable of hurting the Palestinian ‎‎cause.

I hold Abu-Rudeina in very high esteem. I appreciate his loyalty to the ‎‎Palestinian cause and to you personally. He has remained at your side ‎‎throughout the siege of your compound, and - like you - he is now ‎‎risking his life there daily. But this statement should not have been ‎‎made.‎ ‎ I have not seen the film, nor do I intend to. I abhor cruelty, also in ‎‎films, and this film is full of cruel scenes, claiming to depict the New ‎‎Testament on screen. Obviously, there is a great difference between ‎‎reading a written text and seeing it all on the screen, with life-like ‎‎displays of atrocious acts and blood flowing like water.

But this is not the main thing.‎ ‎ As an Arab and a Muslim, you are not obliged to be aware of the ‎‎terrible impact that the description of the crucifixion has had on the life ‎‎of Jews over almost two thousand years of persecutions, pogroms and ‎‎torture by the Spanish inquisition, large-scale expulsions, mass and ‎‎individual murders, up to the Holocaust in which six million Jews ‎‎perished. All these were, directly or indirectly, caused, or at least made ‎‎possible, by this narrative.

The New Testament is sacred to its believers. But like our Bible (the ‎‎so-called Old Testament), it is not a history text. Religious truth and ‎‎historical truth are not one and the same. The descriptions of the ‎‎crucifixion in the four gospels were written down many decades after ‎‎the event, and the writers wrote what they wrote under the influence of ‎‎the circumstances of their time.

Let's take, for instance, the image of the Roman governor, Pontius ‎‎Pilate. The Romans described him as an unscrupulous, corrupt and ‎‎cruel procurator. In the New Testament, he is pictured as a humane ‎‎person, almost a philosopher, who did not want to execute Jesus but ‎‎gave in to the Jews. In Gibson's film, he is an attractive figure, who is ‎‎compelled by the disgusting Jews - disgusting even physically - to act ‎‎against his conscience.‎

Why this description? Simple: when the text was written, the ‎‎Christians were already trying to convert the Roman world to their ‎‎creed. It was convenient for them, therefore, to blame the Jews and ‎‎exonerate the Romans, reversing the realities of the times.. The Jews ‎‎then, like the Palestinians now, were an occupied people, and the ‎‎Romans were the occupiers. Crucifixion was a usual Roman ‎‎punishment, a kind of "targeted elimination" of that time (but after a ‎‎trial).

The writers of the gospels were bursting with hatred of the Jews. ‎‎That is not surprising, either. They were Jews themselves, as were ‎‎Jesus and all the people around him. But they belonged to a dissident ‎‎sect, which was considered by the Jewish establishment in Jerusalem ‎‎as heretical. The Christian Jews were cruelly persecuted. As usual in ‎‎such fratricidal struggles, this one, too, aroused burning hatred. This ‎‎hatred found its expression in the description of the crucifixion.

The Gospel According to Matthew (Chapter 27) puts it this way: ‎‎"Pilate said to them (the Jewish crowd assembled in front of his office): ‎‎'What then shall I do with Jesus, who is called Christ?' They all said to ‎‎him: 'Let him be crucified!' Then the governor said: 'Why, what has he ‎‎done?' But they cried all the more, saying: 'Let him be crucified!' When ‎‎Pilate saw that he could not prevail at all, but rather that a tumult was ‎‎rising, he took water and washed his hands before the multitude, ‎‎saying: 'I am innocent of the blood of this just Person. You see to it!' ‎‎And all the people answered and said: 'His blood be on us and on our ‎‎children'."

Obviously, this is not a historical description. An entire people, or a ‎‎great multitude, does not talk like one single person. The words "His ‎‎blood be…on our children" are unreasonable and were put there in ‎‎order to justify taking revenge on generations to come. And indeed, ‎‎many generations of rabble-rousers used these words in order to incite ‎‎against the god-killers.

Adolf Hitler, of course, was no Christian fanatic. Quite the contrary, ‎‎some of his followers tried to bring back pagan Germanic rites. But ‎‎Hitler and the perpetrators of the Holocaust learned the New Testament ‎‎in school, and no one can say how much of the text they unconsciously ‎‎absorbed. And many simple fundamentalists accepted the Holocaust or ‎‎took part in it because of this.

I do not intend to lay the collective blame on the entire Christian ‎‎world throughout the centuries. Far from it. Many of the greatest ‎‎humanists throughout history were Christians, some of them very ‎‎devout. Not only the perpetrators of the Holocaust were Christians, so ‎‎were the Righteous Ones, those who saved Jews. Christian monasteries ‎‎in many places took in Jews and saved their lives.

Jesus preached love, and the new Testament pictures him as an ‎‎immensely attractive person, righteous, merciful and tolerant. How ‎‎terrible that so many atrocities in history were perpetrated by persons ‎‎and institutions claiming to act in his name.

You, Mr. President, as an Arab and a Muslim, are proud of the fact ‎‎that for more than a thousand years the Muslim world was a model of ‎‎tolerance, toward both Jews and Christians. The Muslim world has ‎‎never known mass expulsions and pogroms, that were a regular feature ‎‎in Christendom, not to mention the terrible Holocaust.‎

The blood-bond between Muslims and Jews runs through history. ‎‎One of the darkest chapters in the history of this country, which we both ‎‎love, is the story of the crusades. Even before the reached the Holy ‎‎Land, the crusaders committed genocide against the Jews of Germany. ‎‎When they breached the walls of Jerusalem, they killed the entire ‎‎population of the city, men and women, old people and babes in arms. ‎‎One of them proudly described how they waded in blood up to their ‎‎knees. It was the blood of Muslims and Jews, butchered together, their ‎‎last prayers intertwined on their way to heaven.

After the fall of Jerusalem, Haifa still held out against the crusaders. ‎‎Most of its inhabitants were Jews, who fought side by side with the ‎‎Egyptian garrison. The Muslims provided them with arms, and ‎‎according to a Christian chronicler, the Jews fought valiantly. When the ‎‎town fell, the crusaders butchered the remaining Jews and Muslims ‎‎together.

Four hundred years later, when the Christians finished the ‎‎re-conquest of Spain from the Muslims, they expelled the Jews and the ‎‎Muslims together. After the Golden Age, the wonderful cultural ‎‎symbiosis of Muslims and Jews in medieval Muslim Spain, Muslims and ‎‎Jews suffered a common fate. Almost all the expelled Jews settled in ‎‎Muslim or Muslim-ruled countries.

Let us not allow the present bitter conflict between our two peoples, ‎‎with all its cruelty, to overshadow the past, because that is the basis for ‎‎our common future.‎

The present sufferings of the Palestinian people - which we, as ‎‎Israelis and Jews, oppose and fight against - have no connection with ‎‎what happened - or not - some 1973 years ago.

If there is any connection at all, it is the other way round. Without ‎‎modern Christian anti-Semitism, the Zionist movement would not have ‎‎been born at all. As I have mentioned before, the founder of the Zionist ‎‎movement, Theodor Herzl, explicitly stated his belief that the founding ‎‎of a Jewish State was the only way of saving the European Jews. ‎‎Anti-Semitism was and is the force that drives the Jews to Palestine.

Without anti-Semitism, the Zionist vision would have remained an ‎‎abstract idea. From the pogrom of Kishinev, through the Holocaust to ‎‎the anti-Semitism in Russia that has recently driven more than a million ‎‎Jews to Israel - anti-Semitism was and remains the most dangerous ‎‎enemy of the Palestinian people. There is much truth in the saying that ‎‎the Palestinians are "the victims of the victims".

On top of all the moral reasons, this is an additional argument ‎‎against a statement about the crucifixion that can be construed by ‎‎anti-Semites as an encouragement for their cause.

When peace comes, we shall all meet in Jerusalem, Jews, Christians ‎‎and Muslims.

I know that you dream of it, as do I.

Let us hope that we ‎‎shall both see it with our own eyes.‎