[JPost] Over the last week, fans from Arab states in Qatar have bullied and boycotted Israeli fans and journalists."The sea is the same sea and the Arabs are the same Arabs," former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir famously said in 1996, after the Oslo Accords, meant to bring peace with our neighbors, ended with a wave of Palestinian terrorism across Israel. The "sea" was a reference to a once-common trope of Arab leaders calling to drive the Jewish usurpers into the Mediterranean.
Twenty-six years later, a group of Israeli journalists are learning the same thing at the World Cup in Qatar, despite the sea change of the Abraham Accords with four Arab states in 2020.
Of course, it is not fair to paint all Arabs — or any ethnic or national group — with a broad brush as Shamir pithily did. And in this case, it’s the fact that there are Arab leaders and citizens of their country that bucked the trend that seem to have lulled some Israelis into complacency that Israel has somehow become beloved in the Middle East, when that simply is not the case.
The leaders of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan (a more complicated case because of the civil war), and before them, of Egypt and Jordan, had courage and the willingness to think outside the box into which the PLO continues to try to close the Arab League.
The specific motivations differed, and sometimes an American sweetener was needed, but they understood that their official state of war with Israel hasn’t benefitted their countries, nor has it pressured Israel into peace with the Palestinians. They chose, instead, to find ways to cooperate with the regional anomaly, the Jewish state.
These agreements have all been overwhelmingly popular in Israel, as well.
So maybe there’s a logic to how dumbfounded Israeli reporters at the World Cup in Qatar seem to have been over the past week as soccer fans from various Arab states refused to speak to them, harassed them and tried to intimidate them.
Raz Shechnik of Yediot Aharonot tweeted a video that is similar to those of his colleagues.
He approaches a man with a Palestinian flag who refuses to talk to him and says "there’s nothing called Israel; it’s just Palestine," and the sentiment is echoed by women in kefiyyehs.
When a group of Morocco fans figures out that he’s from Israel, they walk away. "New friend! We have peace," Shechnik said.
"Israel, no! Palestinians," the Morocco fans shouted back, from a distance.
"I was always a centrist, liberal and open with a will for peace before all," Shechnik tweeted. "I always thought the problem was governments...But in Qatar, I saw how much hatred there was among people in the street, how interested they are in erasing us from the earth, how everything connected to Israel arouses hatred in them."
Channel 12’s Palestinian Affairs Reporter Ohad Hemo, who regularly traipses around the West Bank to get the opinions of Palestinians on the street, many of whom are hostile, still seemed a bit thrown off by the reaction to him in Doha, which was basically identical to the videos of Shechnik.
"There are a lot of attempts by many people here, from all around the Arab world, to come out against us because we represent normalization," Hemo told anchor Yonit Levy.