A Jew and a Muslim praying by a Jewish Israeli ambulance: Test your visual literacy
By: Rima Najjar
Tags: Pandemic, Muslim, Jewish, Palestine, Israel

Image: “Jewish paramedic Avraham Mintz faces Jerusalem, his prayer shawl hanging off his shoulders. Muslim paramedic Zoher Abu Jama kneels facing Mecca, his prayer rug unfurled before him.”

CNN’s story extolling the image above of a Muslim and a Jew praying in opposite directions (one toward Mecca and one toward Jerusalem) beside an ambulance marked with the Star of David and portraying the action as “one of many inspiring moments in the coronavirus crisis” would have made more sense to me in what it is trying to project had it shown, instead, an Evangelical Christian praying alongside a Muslim.

To Evangelical Christians, the ultimate “other” through which to understand all difference has always been the Muslim and/or Arab. Not so to the Jews of the Middle East, Arabs themselves.

In historic Palestine until the violent and, to Palestinians, traumatic advent of the state of Israel on the scene, Muslims, Jews and Christians all prayed peacefully alongside one another for centuries. It was the norm, not something upon which to remark.

“For the colleagues, the joint prayer was nothing new. For others, it was an inspiring image,” say Oren Liebermann (a CNN correspondent based in Jerusalem) and Michael Schwartz

The CNN story is written by two Jewish reporters, Oren Liebermann (a CNN correspondent based in Jerusalem) and Michael Schwartz, and was published on March 26, 2020. Its ostensible message is to commend the efforts of rescue services in Israel. As tweets commenting on the image (which had gone viral before the CNN report) put it: “It doesn’t matter from what community or religion.” And “One fight! One victory! Let’s unite.”

“In a just world, Avraham Mintz (the Jewish paramedic in the photo) would be facing an Arab Jerusalem revered by all three Abrahamic religions.”

It does matter. What matters in the photo, though, is not Judaism vs. Islam, Jew vs. Palestinian Arab, but rather what Zionism has made of Judaism. That’s what’s being covered up by the two CNN reporters, who are bent on whitewashing, legitimizing and normalizing Zionist Israel at the same time as they conflate it with Judaism.

The ongoing tragedy of the Nakba, the establishment of the Jewish state on 78 % of Palestine in 1948, and the discord it continues to foment in the Middle East, has never been about Judaism and Islam. It’s always been about Zionist colonization of Palestine by atheist East European Jews who turned millions of Jews and Judaism itself into an enemy of indigenous Palestinian Arabs — Christian and Muslim both.

“The Muslim paramedic faces Mecca to pray, but he has no claim on Saudi Arabia as the embodiment of his nationality. The Jewish paramedic, likewise, is not entitled to Jerusalem as his ‘nation.’”

It’s also been about the West’s Arabophobia and Islamophobia and the evangelical doctrine for the Judaization of Jerusalem.

Let’s remember that Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem is illegal, a fact that continues to be internationally recognized. In a just world, Avraham Mintz (the Jewish paramedic in the photo) would be facing an Arab Jerusalem revered by all three Abrahamic religions, or at the very least, a Jerusalem under a Special International Regime, not one under the rule of an apartheid Jewish state with its boot on the necks of Palestinians denying them self-determination in and return to their own homeland.

The Muslim paramedic faces Mecca to pray, but he has no claim on Saudi Arabia as the embodiment of his nationality. The Jewish paramedic, likewise, is not entitled to Jerusalem and Palestine as his “nation state.”

A more accurate reporting on the pandemic and Israel than the deceptive CNN story mentioned above is reflected in the following headline: Israeli minister orders not to vaccinate Palestinian [political] prisoners: This is new proof about Israel’s discrimination against Palestinians, even those who are enduring harsh living conditions inside its prisons. (Dec 27,2020)

That CNN and other mainstream media continue to whitewash Israel’s brutality and crimes against the Palestinian people is an ongoing travesty of our times. To me, the image itself is clearly staged, as no Muslim would be actually praying wearing shoes that might have impurity on them.

As Executive Director of B’Tselem Hagai El-Ad put it in this year’s donation appeal letter:

for the millions of Palestinian subjects living under Israeli control, there is currently no process, no queue and no vaccinations — just the certainty that their lives are less valued. And in March 2021, they will — for the fourth time in the last two years — witness the elections in which those who have political rights decide both their own fate, as well as the fate of the Palestinian disenfranchised subjects who live under control of the Israeli government.

We must look beyond Israel’s hasbara machine. Many books about Israel swallow Zionist propaganda hook, line and sinker.

Many books about Israel, not just news reports, swallow Zionist propaganda hook, line and sinker. We must look beyond Israel’s hasbara machine that extends to CNN and all other media, and we must not look away after we truly see what we are looking at.

What is hasbara? The word means “explanation” in Hebrew. But, according to The Hasbara Buster, a blog that confronts “false analogy and other Zionist devices,”

in actual English usage, it refers to the efforts by the Israeli government, pro-Israel pundits and a considerable bunch of useful idiots (mostly bloggers) to justify Israel’s behavior and slander the Palestinians, the Arabs in general, and, if necessary, the 1.3 billion followers of the Muslim faith.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.