It had to be a joke. An Egyptian lawyer, the Israeli newspaper
Ma’ariv recently reported, is planning to sue “every
Jew in the world” for the “theft” of 1,125 trillion tons of
Egyptian gold during the Exodus 3,000 years ago.
“This was the greatest act of collective deception in history,”
explained the lawyer, Nabil Hilmi. He graciously
offered to spread the repayment term over the next 1,000
years — with interest, of course.
But this is the Middle East, and it’s no joke. Nor is
Hilmi a crackpot: He happens to be the dean of a law
school in Cairo. And he’s assembled a team of 15
Egyptian lawyers to pursue the case before an international
court. All in the name of justice.
The surrealistic suit says much about the quality of
moral discourse in the Arab world today. That the Jews
were slaves — to a Pharaoh whom the Koran itself calls
evil — is as irrelevant to Hilmi as the fact that the current
war of suicide bombings was launched after Israel offered
the Palestinians a state with east Jerusalem as its capital. In
the culture of self-pity that has gripped the Arab world,
justice and grievance belongs to its side alone.
Still, there is, potentially, good news in this deeply
depressing story. By
intending to sue “every
Jew in the world” for
the theft of Pharaoh’s
gold, Hilmi is acknowledging
that Jews are the
legitimate descendants
of the children of Israel.
That is by no means
a given in the anti-
Jewish discourse in
much of the Arab world, which is currently engaged in
a massive rewriting of Jewish history. According to
Arab revisionism, the Jews have no roots in the land of
Israel. Instead, they are an impostor people who
expropriated the biblical story, just as they stole
Palestine.
One highly popular Arab notion is that the Jews are
descended from the Khazhars, the Asiatic Russian tribe
that converted to Judaism in the ninth century. (As if that
would matter: Membership in the people of Israel is
determined by conversion as well as birth.)
remember the favors that God bestowed on you when he
appointed apostles from among you, and made you kings
and gave you what had never been given to any one in the
world. Enter then, my people, the Holy Land that God has
ordained for you.'”
I once asked a journalist from Israel’s fundamentalist
Islamic Movement what he made of those verses, and he
replied with a knowing smile, “Do the Jews in Tel Aviv follow
God’s word? Are the Jews today Moses’ people?”
Hilmi, for one, would have to answer that they were. If
Jews can be sued for the gold of the Exodus, then surely
they are heirs to the Koran’s promise that the Holy Land
would belong to the people of Moses. Perhaps, when
Zionists base their claims on Scripture, they should cite
not just the Bible but the Koran, too.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a contributing editor and Israel
correspondent for The New Republic. He is author of “At the
Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew’s Search for God with
Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land.” The column previously
appeared in The Jerusalem Post.