Dr. Abdelilah Bouasria*
The oddly anti-Islamist “liberal” Moroccan Party for Authenticity and Modernity (PAM), whose head used to be-and to a certain extent still is- the king’s most powerful advisor Fouad Ali El Himma, was the first political party to introduce, on the first of August 2013, a bill of law criminalizing all forms of contact with Israel by Moroccan citizens or residents. Four other parties joined the bill: the “leftist” party USFP, the “communist” party PPS, the rusty right wing hoary Istiqlal party, and the Islamist government-ruling PJD. There were rumors that due to irregularities and breaches of the internal procedure for political bills inside the party, the PAM retracted its proposition after it had secured, on record, the approval of other parties that will go in Moroccan history as anti-Semitic.
　　　　More than a political aberration, this bill seriously violates international treaties of human rights signed by Morocco, anti-discrimination provisions of the Council of Europe, and the spirit of religious tolerance that the Moroccan leaders like to propagate. Bill 94, under revision, considers the “Palestine issue” a national problem and considers “the Israeli entity” a “murderous, racist and terrorist body,” and condemns any Moroccan entity, in Morocco or abroad, undertaking political, cultural, economic, athletic, artistic or any type of interaction, free or for a fee, by officials or laymen, directly or through intermediaries, with any entities carrying the Israeli citizenship or residing in Israel. The sentence, that applies as well to all “those acquiring the Israeli citizenship” ranges from two years to five years, and a fine up to 272 thousand dollars, in addition to any additional sanctions that the “court” deems necessary. The bill, if passed, will enter into effect upon its publication in the official bulletin.
　　　　The same party that introduced the anti-normalization with Israel draft law rushed to begin the process of starting a bill legalizing the cultivation of the commonly grown Moroccan Cannabis plant, Hashish. The same Mehdi Bensaid, senator of the PAM, who said about pot that “security policies aren’t solving the problem” was among the first parliamentarians who introduced the anti-Semitic bill, in a very bold security-laden legislation. Hakim Benchemas, the head of PAM, had rightly defended legalizing pot by claiming an end to societal hypocrisy on this matter. His party members do not seem to get the wink when it comes to conducting trade with Israel. Rumor has it that the PAM retracted its bill on Israel in order to taint the hands of the PJD into acquiescing to the controversial bill.
Some voices that oppose the normalization with Israel will point to the claim that many voices, within the United States, rally behind the anti-normalization flag. That claim is only partially true. Even when the National Council of the American Studies Association announced on Wednesday November 4, 2013 that it has unanimously validated a boycott of Israeli universities, it clearly limited it “to a refusal on the part of the Association in its official capacities to enter into formal collaborations with Israeli academic institutions” in solidarity with scholars and students “deprived of their academic freedom”. I wonder why this association, under the spell of Palestinian civil society, has taken a stand against Israel while it kept its mouth shut regarding other countries that lack the minimal academic freedom like Saudi Arabia, Gaza, Egypt or Iran, a proof of the Council’s preference of ideology over intellectual endeavor. The idiotic hypocrisy of such a stance, reminiscent of the 1920s boycott by the Ku Klux Klan against Greek-American merchants, commits the fallacy of looking at academia at-large through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and ignoring the authoritarian breach of freedom on the Palestinian side as it was obvious from the case of the award-winning Palestinian female journalist Majdoleen Hassouneh who has been forced to go into hiding 　　out of fear of being arrested by the Palestinian Authority security forces for covering a sit-in strike organized by families of Palestinians held in Palestinian jails in the West Bank. Furthermore, many Palestinians do not have any qualms about the so-called “normalization.” For instance, Mahmoud Mi’ari, a Peace studies researcher, had conducted a survey in 1994 of 270 students in Birzeit University and found out that the majority of Palestinian students back normalizing cultural relations with Israel. Furthermore, even the Palestinian authority president Mahmoud Abbas told reporters in South Africa that he backed the boycott of settlements and not of Israel, with which he clearly bragged about having healthy relations. Abbas clearly said: “No, we do not support the boycott of Israel.”
The monarchy and the logic of two-level games
Robert Putnam brought up the concept of two-level games whereby governments face domestic groups putting pressure on them to adopt certain policies (level 1) while negotiating in an international setting (level 2) where the chief negotiator seeks to increase his political resources domestically while saving face internationally. One tactic of the Moroccan palace here is to signal to Israel that it should better make a deal with the king, rather than the Islamists or the Amazigh parties, because the alternative is worse. Mohamed Daadaoui, Associate professor of Political Science at Oklahoma City University, calls this law “absurd political pandering” and thinks that “the king will intervene and block it.” The same narrative that ascribes to the Moroccan monarch a savior’s role was held by Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s Director of International Relations Dr. Shimon Samuels who invoked King Mohammed VI’s “sovereign might to defend the constitution and ensure that this unconstitutional and damaging draft law remains a draft.” A young Moroccan researcher, close to the PJD, opined the opposite: “It is the PAM that started this bill and then other parties followed. This party, led by Ilyas el Omari, has tried in the last months to widen its foreign policy and met several Palestinians before creating the world meeting of Jerusalem.” This young researcher is quick to point to the fact that “there are other Arab countries that passed similar laws like Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and others.” Jacob Cohen, an anti-Zionist Jewish Moroccan agrees with such a law: “no matter what the details of the law are, I am against all forms of dialogue with a state that continues to oppress the Palestinians.”
Moroccan Jews cannot be depicted as either with or against the Moroccan monarchy, since some of them, like Andre Azoulay and Serge Berdugo, dance to monarchical tunes, while others like Abraham Serfaty or Simon Levy, are more comfortable clapping into the dissident melody. Both camps adopt their positions more out of environmental survival than grounded faith, and assuming that THE Jews or THE Monarchy are Zionists or anti-Semitic is simply falling into a simplifying character assassination or mischaracterization. The Moroccan monarchy, while careful about branding itself as the savior of its Jewish “subjects,” is extremely frightened about relinquishing mobilizing ground to its islamist legitimacy competitors, that it had encouraged, in a now-defunct, maybe re-enacted, cold war logic, and is constantly polling out its center of gravities about whether it is coming out as too “Jewbvious.” In fact, Hassan II, as Abraham Serfaty told me in a previous interview, made a deal with Israel, which paid 50 to 250 dollars per Jewish immigrant to facilitate their exodus to Israel, where they will come to live, for reasons related to both our own underdevelopment as a society and Eurocentric biases in Israeli society, as second-class citizens.
The no-strings-attached position vis-à-vis the Jewish/Israeli issue in Morocco should be a genuine search for peaceful cooperation with healthy criticism, without an essentialist construction of the monarchy as patron or hero. If it is true that Morocco’s current Alaoui dynasty had welcomed the dismissed Andalusian Jews in Morocco and King Mohammed V protected his Jewish “subjects” from the Vichy Nazi 　regime, and that Israel participated largely in the construction of the Sahara Security defense wall, it is equally true that it was King Mohamed V who signed the anti-Semitic Vichy laws through his 1940 and 1941 royal decrees. Hassan II, as Abraham Serfaty had articulated to me in an interview, had sold the Moroccan Jews, hastening their migration to Eretz Israel, like in the case of David Littman’s “Operation Mural.” Moreover, it was King Mohammed VI who cautioned, in his capacity of chairman of Al-Quds Committee, two days after the visit of Benjamin Netanyahu to the Vatican, Pope Francis against the negative side of a possible unilateral agreement with Israel regarding the properties of the Catholic Church in Jerusalem. Ali Bourequat, a French-Moroccan writer and ex-courtier, exiled in the US after being held 18 years in the inhuman Tazmamart Gulag, believes this bill to “divert the public opinion especially when king Mohamed VI’s grandfather, Mohamed V was the son of a Jewish lady, daughter of Abraham Sasson, who was identified in the palace as Lalla Yaqout, whose maternal uncle was Haim Abitbol, and who died in some disgraceful oblivion before getting a decent burial in the Muslim Cemetery in Fes by Sultan Ibn Arafa whom the French put in Mohammed V’s place after they exiled him to Madagascar.”
In January 2014, drought had found its way into the kingdom’s fields, and the Moroccan king Mohammed VI requested prayers for rain from Jewish rabbis and chiefs of synagogues in the country. The Council of Israelite Communities in Morocco (CCIM), representing the few thousands Moroccan Jews who have not been expelled by the Istiqlal party or the luring Aliyat call, issued a statement inviting “worshippers to pray in all the synagogues of the kingdom.” According to the logic of the nostalgic Baathist Panarab Moroccan leaders, is the king committing here a faux-pas? Even Abdelbari Zemzmi, a traditional Moroccan religious scholar, famous for his “odd” fatwas like that of female masturbation with fruits and veggies, described the anti-normalization law as “useless nonsense.” Furthermore, Hassan Aourid, the former 　spokesperson of the Moroccan palace and a famous Moroccan writer, close to the Amazigh movement, criticized this project of law as hypocritical when Morocco normalizes right and left with representatives of causes that it has deemed historically as inimical to its territorial integrity. Fouad Abdelmoumni, a human rights Moroccan activist, also criticized the law in his interviews with the Moroccan press on January 2014 on the premise that “Morocco also is accused of violating human rights in the Sahara and using systematic violence, so how can we give lessons to the others?”
Re-enactment of old Moroccan scenarios
This spurious law draws from an existing repertoire of political moves in Moroccan history. In 1958, Moroccan Jews were forbidden to continue any relation with Israel, which created a movement of clandestine immigration to Israel. In the time of Mohammed V, the Jews were protected but the king forbade them from becoming Israeli. However, the ex-minister of Foreign Affairs Ahmed Balafrej (1955-1958) himself had a long friendship with Jo Golan, advisor of Nahum Goldman, the then president of the Jewish world Congress, to whom he had complained in 1959 about the solicitation of Israeli help, through Mossad’s Isser Harel right hand Yaaqov Caroz, by opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka, kidnapped in France in 1965, in his quest for regime change in Morocco. According to some analysts, Ben Barka had traveled secretly to Israel and used to receive money from The World Jewish Council, and his assassination is not foreign to Israeli officials according to others. It is ironic that both the Istiqlal and USFP parties, who claim Ben Barka as their emblem, would rush into drafting such an anti-Israeli law.
The scenario of a political party initiating a very bold anti-Semitic move is an old Moroccan trick. Allal El Fassi, the then-Minister of Religious Affairs in Morocco, attacked vehemently Morocco’s few Bahai converts and the court issued death sentences against them.
　　　　Ahmed Reda Guedira, the brain among Hassan II’s royal advisors, fought the sentence against the Bahai partly because he was aware of its international opinion costs, and somewhat, according to Agnes Ben Simon, because he financed his newspaper from the dues of “Operation Mural.” When in New York, Hassan II told the journalists that he would use his pardon privileges if the Supreme Court sentenced the Moroccan Bahai converts to death. Any follower of Moroccan politics knows that an independent judiciary was not trendy then. The fact that after the royal grace, Allal El Fassi resigned from his position as minister of religious affairs for a humiliating interference shows that the Bahai affair was a proxy war between palace wingman Guedira and the then-monarchy rival Istiqlal party. Does the current anti-normalization bill carry much of the Bahai genes with a slight change in actors and décor?
In a context of zero-sum games, where the Moroccan palace assigns payoffs in prioritizing its survival moves through a logic of divisive rivalry, a Moroccan Jew who decided to stay in the Morocco of a bullying victimizing student of Allal El Fassi, and who opted for a duel with the king who owns pretty much the whole country, had to adopt leftist anti-normalization positions in order to survive. I remember when Driss Basri angrily blamed me, when I interviewed him after his disgraced fall, for interviewing Abraham Serfaty and asking him his opinion of Basri, based on the erroneous premise that the Moroccan Jewish communist was a “Jewish Zionist.” In a separate interview, Robert Asserraf had told me that he did not consider Serfaty a Jew. The excommunication posture towards Morocco’s Jews can adopt several flavors and overtones, including by members of the Jewish community itself, and no once claims copyright to it.
The Moroccan politicians, who are eager to maintain the embargo on Israel, act more out of a desire to preserve the “Arab integrity” of Morocco. Ironically, the Palestinians themselves, like Munib Masri, a Palestinian leader who leads “breaking the impasse” initiative, deal　normally with Israeli business and political leaders. Pretending to be more Palestinian than the Palestinians is politically a twisted act of pan Arab goodwill. Even close friends, such as Yasser Arafat and Khalid Al-Hasan, PLO leaders, disagreed with each other after Arafat legitimized Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Al Hasan, a Kuwaiti citizenship before being stripped of it who opposed military means, settled in Morocco to frolic with its left, and influence its discourse.
　　　　Acceding to only the monarchy’s point of view about Israel and Moroccan Jewry will kill Israel’s chances to achieve peace with those Moroccan civil society entities that chose not to be anti-Israel without necessarily licking the boots of the courtiers. Tel Aviv should work with each Moroccan camp to identify mutual gains and avenues of cooperation, far from the drumming frenzy of both unsecure sultans and ambitious populists.
The self-exiled Moroccan activist Kacem El Ghazzali, who lives in Switzerland and who flew Morocco for religious discrimination did not hide his disdain for such a law: “I have amicable respectful relations with Israeli friends, and I refuse that anyone prevents me from traveling or monitors my private interactions, and this call for the criminalization of normalization is a call to kill all attempts at peace and coexistence.” When asked about the reason why it was PAM that initiated such a bill, Kacem said it was “perhaps an attempt to embarrass the government of Benkirane while playing the tune of Arab nationalism and the Palestinian plight in order to achieve political gains.” On the same line, Mounir Kejji, a Moroccan Berber activist, affirmed that this law “pushed by a bunch of Baathist Panarabist charlatans” will not pass because “there is a strong Jewish lobby in Israel and in the U.S. against it and Morocco has political and economic interests with Israel and thousands of Moroccan tourists visit Israel each year and the same with Israelis.” Mounir Kejji was quick to dismiss any “invisible hand” of the Moroccan Palace in “burning” Benkirane through this bill by demonization: “I do not think that the palace intervenes in such matters. Those are merely residues of Pan Arab and Islamist alliances.”
　　　　Morocco’s civil society members, from all ideological spectrums on the monarchy radar, have established several contacts with Israeli organizations and citizens. The Moroccan filmmaker Nabil Ayouch, who used to believe in the boycott argument, saw the benefit of producing, in 2010, the documentary “My Land,” which points to the necessity of understanding the Israeli society beyond stereotypes of the unknown, while criticizing what it perceives as Israel’s humiliating policies like check points. One needs to put the “natural” debate blossoming suddenly, like a thunder storm, from the Moroccan political sky in the context of the political rivalry between Morocco and Algeria and Egypt over the Al Quds committee, whose president is the Moroccan king. The latter has clearly stated, in his 17 January 2014 inaugural address of the Jerusalem committee in Marrakech, which the protection of Jerusalem and its Muslim character is a duty that Morocco puts at the same level as his southern territories. The king’s words are a coded message to the Algerians who had requested in May 2013 that Morocco activate this “dormant” committee while issuing criticisms against what they saw as the dormancy of the Moroccan premier. The Egyptian Muslim brotherhood had also voiced similar concerns, through its figure Essam El Eryan who said that the committee did not do anything to the Palestinians “despite the presidency of Morocco’s king.”
　Will the Moroccan Islamists bow more to the universal Muslim brotherhood Leviathan, or will they be kosher and recruit as they have promised before a Moroccan Jew? It appears that this issue is one of those gifts that the Moroccan ruling dynasty has been accustomed to bestow upon its subjects/annoying competitors and by which no matter what the decision is, it is a losing strategy.
People who defend this law, like Jamai, Ouihmane and Khaled Soufiani, need also to call for boycotting Saudi Arabia, one of　Morocco’s “pimps,” for having a honeymoon with what these leftists call “the Zionist entity.” Didn’t Bandar Ben Sultan meet in New York the Jewish diaspora in Tsevi Shalom’s house in which he approved of Israel’s policy in the occupied territories and also rejected a Paestinian state? Isn’t it a fact that in the last five years the Saudi-Israeli business projects skyrocketed by 30%? Didn’t the King Abdulaziz Bin Saoud write to British officials in the thirties that he gives his green light to giving Palestine to Poor Jews?
　　　　Diplomacy and Politics is an art of conducting war by other peaceful means, and it is a skill of tricksters and deceivers who should always leave a wiggle room. Activism and Political crusading is, on the other hand, a terrain mined with principles and empty pockets. Our Moroccan dwarfs and gnomes need to decide where they want to be, and if they pick the road less traveled, getting rich through pleasing glutton-filthy godfathers, Arabian or other, cannot be their goodwill if they are to keep credibility.

*Dr. Abdelilah Bouasria teaches comparative politics at George Mason University, VA. He is the author of two books and several articles in Arabic, French, English and Spanish.