Syrian journalist: Jews ‘make miracles out of the impossible’

The Qatar-based Al-Jazeera network recently hosted a debate about Israel and the Arab countries.

Syrian journalist Thaer Al-Nashef, who took part in the debate, said that the claim that Israel is thwarting democracy in the Arab countries is completely unfounded, arguing that all of the dictatorial and authoritarian Arab rulers had been a product of their own Arab societies.

Al-Nashef mocked the conspiracy theories that Israel grooms Arab citizens to become leaders of their countries, and said that Israel is not responsible for the progress or backwardness of Arab societies. Rather, he said that Arabs are responsible for their own development and that they might learn something from the Jews and their ability to “make miracles out of the impossible.”

Furthermore, Al-Nashef said that the often-repeated claim that Israel’s goal is to expand from the Nile River to the Euphrates River is false, and that the two blue stripes on the Israeli flag represent the Jewish prayer shawl, and not these two rivers.

Another participant in the discussion, Sati’ Muhammad Al-Hajj, the Political Secretary of the Nasserist Unionist Party of Sudan, rebutted that Israel’s goal to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates is not a myth because it is clearly mentioned in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The debate aired on February 11, 2020 and was translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

Last year, MEMRI posted a video showing Syrian opposition activist and writer Issam Zeitoun who also spoke on Al-Jazeera.

In that debate, Zeitoun criticized the Arabs for not accepting the 1947 Partition Plan and said that the notion that Israel is a tyrannical, arrogant, expansionist, and racist state is a lie.

He said that the idea that Israel wants to expand from the Euphrates River to the Nile is also a fabrication that no Israeli has ever actually said. In addition, Zeitoun said that Israel would have never fought the Arabs if they had never attacked it.

Saying that Iran is much more dangerous than Israel, Zeitoun stated that an alliance with Israel is absolutely better than the current situation.

Last week, Al-Jazeera analyst Faisal al-Qassem raised a storm after he wrote on Twitter that “the Zionist enterprise has succeeded, unlike the failed Arab enterprises.”

Al-Qassem, a Syrian Druze, is not a supporter of Israel, but he has criticized Arab governments. On his talk show, The Opposite Direction, he attempts to rile up participants until they begin shouting at each other.