Summary
Egyptian Liberal Constitutionalist leader whose pre-partition warning at the United Nations — “If Arab blood is shed in Palestine, Jewish blood will necessarily be shed elsewhere in the Arab world” — stands as the epigraph of Chapter 3 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, where it is read as both a credible secular nationalist’s prediction and a veiled threat that inadvertently exposed the conditional status of Egypt’s Jews (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1128-1148).
Details
- As a leading member of the Liberal Constitutionalist Party, Haykal “could credibly present himself as a secular nationalist who regarded the Jewish citizens of Egypt as full members of the national community”; even in the midst of the 1936–39 Palestinian Arab Revolt, his party’s weekly al-Siyasa al-‘usbu’iyya had insisted on distinguishing between the Zionist settlers in Palestine and the Jews of Egypt, defended the loyalty of Egyptian Jews and affirmed their solidarity with the rest of the Egyptian public on the Palestine question (Chapter 3, note 5) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1144-1146).
- Nonetheless Haykal “correctly predicted that the Arab-Zionist conflict over Palestine would inexorably involve the Jews residing elsewhere in the Arab world,” and, in contrast to the Jewish and Israeli tendency to deny that relationship, adduced it as an argument against the partition of Palestine (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1144-1146).
- His statement of concern was also a veiled threat: pointing to their vulnerability “constituted an admission that the security and status of Jews were conditional and could be adversely affected by factors unrelated to their loyalty to the countries where they resided,” so Haykal “inadvertently revealed that the government’s official proclamations that Egypt did not discriminate against its Jews were as inadequate as the Zionist litany of horrors” in characterizing Jewish life in Egypt after 1948 (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 1146-1148).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Neo-dhimma