To some, it might seem xenophobic or nationalistic to utter statements delineating the stark cultural and moral differences between nations.
To say, for example, that Israel and Saudi Arabia are essentially, fundamentally, different on cultural and moral scales will no doubt raise for some the specter of Islamophobia or of one religious tradition claiming superiority over another.
After all, aren’t Israel and Saudi Arabia on the same page when it comes to many of the important geopolitical issues in the complex and troubled region both nations share? Do not both nations oppose ISIS and al-Qaida, not to mention Iran? Aren’t both nations on record in opposing Bashar al-Assad’s reign of terror and death in Syria? Don’t both nations call for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict?
The answer to all these questions is yes, amazingly enough, considering the enmity that has long dominated relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
But a handful of similarities do not a fundamental similarity make.
On a wide range of issues — the dominance of religious law, women’s rights, freedom of religion, free expression, democracy itself — Israel and Saudi Arabia are anything but similar.
On one issue alone — capital punishment — the difference between the two nations is graphically obvious. So far in 2015, according to Amnesty International, Saudi Arabia has executed 44 human beings, most of them in the form of public beheadings. That averages out to more than four a week.
About half of those executions were for drug-related crimes — non-violent offenses, in other words.
Questioned about its fondness for capital punishment, Saudi Arabia has told the UN Human Rights Council that it carries out the death penalty “for only the most serious crimes.”
Drug offenses? Really?
The grand total of executed prisoners in Israel so far in 2015 is zero. Israel doesn’t inflict capital punishment unless the condemned individual is a Nazi perpetrator of the Holocaust. Since Israel was founded in 1948, it has executed exactly one person — Adolf Eichmann.
Does that make Israel culturally or morally superior to Saudi Arabia? That depends on one’s perspective, one’s cultural and national background, perhaps on one’s religion.
But it cannot be disputed that it makes Israel and Saudi Arabia different, and that the difference is fundamental, just as it is between Israel and virtually every other Muslim nation on the planet.
That difference should be kept very much in mind, not only by Israel, but by the US and Europe whenever the prospect of peace negotiations, territorial compromise or nuclear disarmament is raised.
Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News
