Thread by @MouinRabbani

THREAD: “First the Saturday People, then the Sunday People”. I first came across this phrase, which is often invoked by the Islamophobic far right and Israel flunkies (these are often one and the same) during the past year.

According to those who so eagerly disseminate it, it is a slogan/proverb that forms a key tenet of Islamist and particularly Jihadi ideology – to the extent, that is, that one is permitted to distinguish between Islam, Muslims, and political movements that seek to make Islam the dominant force in state and society.

For those unfamiliar with this phrase, “Saturday People” refers to Jews, and “Sunday People” to Christians. Simply stated, it is a Muslim vow that once they get rid of the Jews they’ll be coming for the Christians.

Unlike a particular fact-free far-right ideologue who lived in the Middle East for the first decade of his life, and who repeats this phrase at every opportunity suggesting it is a commonplace, I wasn’t born in the region. I did however live in it for more than two decades as an adult, and have also travelled extensively within the region, from Morocco to Muscat and much in-between. During this period and in these travels, I never once registered a reference to either Saturday or Sunday people.

It is of course entirely possible I simply missed the constant references, and that Muslims were expressing their determination to wipe out Jews and Christians and establish global domination sotto voce or in particularly challenging local dialects. It therefore seemed prudent to do a little research.

I’m as a rule wary of Wikipedia, and don’t rely on the information it provides unless it is properly corroborated. But it can be a useful place to start, particularly when entries have footnotes to authoritative sources that can be consulted to confirm they have been properly cited.

To my surprise, the Free Encyclopedia that is so often a source of errors and misinformation has an entry entitled “After Saturday comes Sunday”.

According to this entry the phrase in question, without “people” affixed to either day of the week, is a “classical Arabic proverb” that “appears to have been used in the sense of one's actions having inevitable future ramifications, the way that Sunday inevitably follows Saturday”. A different interpretation is offered by the Lebanese-American scholar Sania Hamady, for whom, Wikipedia notes, the proverb “illustrates a utilitarian view of Arabic reciprocity: one gives in the expectation of receiving”. In either case it has absolutely nothing to do with religion or ideology, and applies equally to Muslims, Christians, and Jews on every day of the week.

The Wikipedia entry also discusses the proverb in the manner it is presented by Islamophobic and Zionist ideologues, and this is where the story becomes increasingly interesting and bizarre in equal measure.

David Hirst, one of the finest foreign journalists to have reported from the Middle East and whose integrity is beyond reproach, is footnoted in Wikipedia as a source. The book in question, a study of modern Lebanon entitled Beware of Small States, does indeed include, on page 34, a single reference to the proverb in question. But curiously, Hirst refers to it not as a Muslim slogan expressing intent, but rather a Christian one reflecting fear.

Even more strangely, and despite having resided in Lebanon for many years, Hirst does not cite it as having been communicated to him by any of the numerous Christians he encountered over the decades. This would include that country’s brutal 1975-1990 civil war, during which Christian fear of Muslim domination was central to the ideology of the Maronite Phalangist Party, the Kata’ib, and during which Hirst lived in Beirut.

Rather, Hirst’s source is another book, and he duly footnotes My Enemy’s Enemy: Lebanon in the Early Zionist Imagination, 1900-1948, by Laura Zittrain Eisenberg. Eisenberg for her part indeed cites what she terms a “Lebanese Christian” proverb, also only once, on page 13 of her book. But she doesn’t provide a source.

Presumably extrapolating from Eisenberg, Wikipedia elaborates that the phrase in question was “a Lebanese Christian proverb in pro-Zionist Christian circles among the Maronite community”. Assuming this is indeed the case, this places the reference to Saturday and Sunday people in an entirely different light.

Rather than being a common saying utilised by Christian communities throughout the Middle East to reflect a perennial fear of religious persecution at the hands of their Muslim rulers and neighbours, it was an expressly political slogan concocted by a particular faction within a specific sect to promote a defined agenda. More to the point, it was utilised in order to promote the perception of common bonds with a foreign party in order to forge an alliance that would secure Maronite primacy within Lebanon.

From the perspective of its authors, it might be added, this pact between the Saturday people and Sunday people was expressly designed to establish domination over the Friday people. The hysteria being manufactured on this slogan’s behalf by professional bigots, it would appear, is entirely misplaced. But that is of course assuming the proverb exists in reality rather than in the imagination.

The above notwithstanding, the Wikipedia entry also examines how Muslims have purportedly deployed this proverb to convey their intentions towards Jews and particularly Christians. To put it mildly, this is where fantasy comes into its own.

According to the evidence provided, the chief culprit appears to be Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader during the British Mandate period – initially appointed by the British because he had accommodated himself to their rule – and who according to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is the one who persuaded a recalcitrant Adolf Hitler to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

Specifically, the proverb is presented as a popular slogan among his followers during the 1936-1939 Arab Rebellion in Palestine against the British and the Zionist movement.

Given that the British were the official sponsors of Zionism in Palestine, the claim appears to be plausible, although one would think that the British would first need to be expelled on Sunday in order to defeat the Zionists the following Saturday. But according to the available accounts, “Sunday” was a reference not to the British but rather to Palestinian Christians. In other words, it was not a Palestinian Arab rebellion against foreign domination, but a Muslim campaign against first the Jews, and then the Christians of Palestine rather than those from England. The Jewish immigrants would be sent back to Europe, and the Palestinian Christians to Poland?

It would of course help if we had testimony from Christian clerics, community leaders, or shopkeepers reporting such threats. Yet the only contemporary source provided by Wikipedia is a 1939 article from the Palestine Post, the Zionist English-language paper since renamed the Jerusalem Post. The article in question claims that Palestinian Christians were as fervently opposed as was the Zionist movement to the White Paper published that year by the British government, which placed restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine and proposed Palestinian independence within ten years.

Specifically, the article states, Christian Palestinians had been disproportionately favoured for government jobs and contracts by the British, and they feared losing this advantage if British rule was replaced by an independent Palestine dominated by Muslims. The purported Christian alignment with the Zionist position, adopted in order to preserve privilege, is in turn supposed to have provoked widespread Muslim hostility. “In fact,” the Post reports, “some Moslems have been tactless enough to point out to Christians that "after Saturday comes Sunday."

Yet it is a matter of record that the Palestinian leadership – with Husseini at the helm – had itself rejected the White Paper, and that deep mistrust of British intentions ensured that London’s belatedly revised policies on immigration and independence failed to generate significant popular support within the Muslim community. It is therefore somewhat of a mystery why Muslims would be threatening Christians for opposing an initiative they similarly rejected. Suffice it to say that the Post’s editorial standards haven’t particularly improved since the 1930s.

The Wikipedia entry also cites the leading Israeli historian Benny Morris as a source. In his 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, he asserts, on pp. 23-24, that during both the 1936-1939 Rebellion and again during the Palestine War of 1947-1949,

[BEGIN QUOTE] Muslims suspected Christians of collaborating with the "enemy" and secretly hoping for continued (Christian) British rule or even Zionist victory. These suspicions were expressed in slogans, popular during the revolt, such as "After Saturday, Sunday" - that is, that the Muslims would take care of the Christians after they had "sorted out" the Jews. This probably further alienated the Christians from Muslim political aspirations, though many, to be sure, kept up nationalist appearances.[END QUOTE]

Similarly, and again writing about the Nakba on page 25 of his The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Morris writes:

[BEGIN QUOTE] It is likely that the majority of Christians would have preferred the continuation of the British Mandate to independence under Husseini rule; some may even have preferred Jewish rule. All were aware of the popular Muslim mob chant: ‘After Saturday, Sunday’ (meaning, after we take care of the Jews, it will be the Christians’ turn).[END QUOTE]

Morris has established his reputation as a historian in significant part on the basis of a meticulous documentation of his sources. Yet in this case he doesn’t provide a source for either of these statements, despite the slogan’s stated popularity with the “Muslim mob”.

Morris’s perspective reflects a deeper problem, likely also derived from his sources in the Israeli archives, of assuming that identity politics reigned supreme not only among Zionist Jews but also everyone else. Thus, every dispute or conflict involving a Muslim and Christian is transformed, irrespective of its nature, into a sectarian issue motivated by sectarian differences.

Additionally, as the above citations reflect, Morris presents Palestinian nationalism as a fundamentally Muslim if not Islamist project, one from which Christians were not only alienated but terrified, to the extent that their collective preference was for a continuation of British rule and, failing that, a victory for the Zionist movement that ethnically cleansed them from their homes and homeland and robbed them of their property.

In Morris’s telling the nationalism of Palestinian Christians was – the documentary record be damned – fundamentally fake and performative, mere political theatre to keep up “nationalist appearances” in order to ensure the Muslim hordes did not have them for Sunday brunch.

In the same paragraph of Birth Revisited cited above, Morris goes so far as to acknowledge that Palestinian Christians were “prominent” in the leadership of the national movement during the Mandate and “express[ed] devotion to the Palestinian national cause”, but then perfunctorily dismisses all this as “compensation” – i.e. a consciously deceitful act required to persuade the “Muslims mob” they weren’t all closet Zionists.

Morris in fact extends the observation to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) which emerged during the late 1960s, suggesting the actual reason this secular Marxist movement engaged in high-profile operations like airplane hijackings was so that the Christians prominent in its founding leadership could impress their Muslim compatriots – or should that be sectarian rivals? – with their nationalist credentials. Because it is apparently an article of faith among Palestinian Muslims – who are Muslims first and last – that Palestinian Christians – whose faith similarly defines them – are by definition disloyal, neither real Arabs nor real Palestinians. The primary importance of sweeping away the Saturday people, it seems, is to clear a path towards the destruction of the more perfidious Sunday people.

Among the multiple problems with this interpretation is that Morris too fails to provide a credible or indeed any source for the existence of a slogan he insists was all the rage among the majority of the population.

Sherene Seikaly (@shereneseikaly), an internationally-recognized specialist on Palestinian politics and society during the Mandate at the University of California Santa Barbara, was, like so many others I contacted in the course of my research for this essay, unfamiliar with the ostensibly popular proverb, and never encountered it in her own research. She adds:

[BEGIN QUOTE] The historical record speaks for itself. There was cross-confessional unity around fighting both the British and the Zionists. The Arab Higher Committee [which Husseini led] was a cross-confessional affair and not a Muslim organization. Twentieth century Palestine was a time of intense social, economic, and political change. This included labour organizing, a women’s movement, new political parties, a nascent capitalist class, and unprecedented youth organizing. Each of these collectives was cross-confessional. The primary schism within Palestinian society, and the one that mattered more than any other, was that between elites and the general population. Each of these too was cross-confessional.[END QUOTE]

@shereneseikaly Seikaly, for the record, knows Arabic and reads Arabic-language sources in the original. Morris, to the best of my knowledge, does not and would have learned of this alleged phenomenon from Hebrew-language sources in the Israeli archives.

The Palestine Post and Benny Morris are not the only sources featured in Wikipedia to insist that this proverb is real, was wildly popular among Muslims, and was continuously flung at Christians. Fast forward to 1967 and the journalist Royce Jones, in an article composed for the Daily Torygraph the day after the end of the June War and published on 12 June 1967, writes:

@shereneseikaly [BEGIN QUOTE] On the eve of the six-day the slogan in Jordan was: ‘Sunday comes after Saturday. On Saturday we murder the Jews; the next day the Christians.’ That was plainly understood to mean what it said.[END QUOTE]

Wikipedia cites a further reference in this regard, a 1973 book by Yonah Alexander and Nicholas N. Kittrie entitled Crescent and Star: Arab & Israeli Perspectives on the Middle East Conflict. Yet upon consulting this source it turns out to be an edited volume, and the author in question is in fact Yosef Tekoah, an Israeli career diplomat who at the time served as Israel’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations.

Tekoah does no more than quote Royce’s above 1967 article before going on to assure his readers that Palestinian Christians in the newly-occupied territories were nothing less than euphoric about Israel’s occupation of their lands. Were Tekoah still among the living, he would no doubt assure us that their co-religionists currently besieged in Gaza City’s Church of Saint Porphyrius, the third oldest church in the world where at least a dozen have been killed as a result of Israeli bombings since October 2023, are still celebrating.

The doyen of scholarly Zionism, Bernard Lewis, is also referenced by Wikipedia. In one of his more influential articles, “The Return of Islam”, published in the January 1976 emanation of the extremist Zionist journal Commentary, he writes: “In the period immediately preceding the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967, an ominous phrase was sometimes heard, ‘First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people’.” Given that both Lewis and Commentary are revered by Israel flunkies, As’ad AbuKhalil (@asadabukhalil) of the University of California Stanislaus correctly points out that it was Lewis who popularized the proverb.

I had initially approached AbuKhalil because of his deep knowledge of Arabic-language sources, which he tends to give pride of place in his research to a greater extent than many of his peers at Western universities who study the contemporary Arab world. He has also published extensively about al-Qaeda and other jihadi movements, and I assumed he could help me trace the origins of this elusive proverb. Alas, he proved to be of no use. Like the others I consulted he had never come across it, emphasising that “I am only familiar with it from Zionist literature”.

Lewis, unlike Morris, mastered Arabic and travelled extensively in the Middle East. In other words, he could not but have been aware that the famous “proverb” is fiction, yet he chose to lend it credence for transparently political-ideological motives. In this last endeavour he appears to have been extremely successful; most people who communicate this pearl of genocidal Muslim wisdom use the wording chosen by Lewis, which pointedly inserts “people” after “Saturday” and “Sunday”.

Another noteworthy observation is that this phrase tends to re-appear in full force whenever Israel is at war. Not to emphasise the danger to Israelis, but to Christians. Unlike that other hasbara favourite, “Throw the Jews into the sea”, the main victims here are the Sunday people, who will be eradicated if the Saturday people are defeated. In other words, “Support us. Because if we lose, you’re finished”. As German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz would say, “Israel is doing the dirty work for all of us.”

What is particularly bizarre about Lewis, Tekoah, and Royce is the context of their statements. The 1967 June War pitted Israel against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, secular regimes which included Christians in their political and military leaderships as well as their general population. There was never so much as a suggestion that the war would expand beyond the Middle East, or that Arab Christians were somehow aligned with Israel so it could rob them of even more of their rights.

Yet Muslims were allegedly pre-occupied with a perceived threat from their Christian neighbours and preparing to finish them off once and for all. One would at least have expected to see mob violence against local Christians after the war, since they presented the perfect scapegoat for the shattering defeat for those already wanting them dead before the war. Yet nothing of the sort transpired.

The next major event where this slogan makes a prominent appearance is, rather predictably, the 1987-1993 Palestinian uprising, or intifada. The zeal for definitively settling accounts with both Saturday and Sunday is of course everywhere, and Wikipedia informs its readers that this “Islamic slogan” was “daubed on walls or putatively on the Palestinian flag” during this period.

The sources provided are: Mordechai Nisan, an Israeli academic and acolyte of the raving Islamophobe Gisèle Littman, better known by her nom de plume Bat Ye’or; Mario Apostolov, who cites as his source Daphne Tsimhoni of the Hebrew University, whose Christian Communities in Jerusalem and the West Bank Since 1948 in turn claims this “common motto” is recited by the “Christian elders of the Bethlehem area”, provides no substantiation for her assertion, but on this basis nevertheless concludes that Palestinian Christians prefer a continuation of Israeli rule; and Lela Gilbert, a Christian Zionist who wrote an entire book entitled Saturday People, Sunday People: Israel Through the Eyes of a Christian Sojourner.

Gilbert variously refers to this “Muslim slogan”, “Islamist slogan”, “oft-repeated slogan of radical Muslims”, “familiar slogan”, and “repeated chant”, yet never manages to encounter a single individual, Muslim or Christian, who chants it in her presence. Perhaps by way of compensation, and in order to ensure she doesn’t leave the region completely empty-handed, her attentive Israeli hosts provide her with a picture of a Palestinian flag that bears the inscription, “On Saturday we kill the Jews, on Sunday we kill the Christians”. The hapless Gilbert fell for it so hard she reproduces it on the first page of her book.

Gilbert’s magnum opus, a paean to everything Israel including its heroic military, is propaganda of the most transparent kind, dutifully including an encounter with a South African who “helped me see the absurdity of the apartheid accusations against Israel” and similar nonsense. On a more humorous note, Gilbert is a fellow with the conservative Hudson Institute whose founder, the Cold Warrior Herman Kahn, served as a template for the movie Dr. Strangelove.

In the Wikipedia entry the extremist Islamophobe Mordechai Nisan, introduced above, is also cited as claiming that Gilbert’s cherished flag was raised during a 1989 Christmas visit to Bethlehem by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The Free Encyclopedia also footnotes a 25 December 1989 New York Times article by Alan Cowell, “Peace in Bethlehem, Little Goodwill”, that would lead the reader to believe it corroborates Nisan’s assertion. Yet this is what Cowell actually wrote:

[BEGIN QUOTE] Apparently restrained by the presence of the Archbishop and other Christian dignitaries from Jerusalem, the soldiers made no move to break up the crowd. That produced the unusual sight of Israeli troops standing close to Palestinians chanting slogans in favor of the Palestine Liberation Organization or waving small P.L.O. flags - actions that usually bring retribution.[END QUOTE]

@shereneseikaly Speaking of South Africans and Israeli apartheid, Cowell also wrote the following:

[BEGIN QUOTE] But he [Tutu] again drew indirect parallels between the plight of the South African black majority living in a discriminatory society and the position of Palestinians living under Israeli rule. Describing the conditions that frame life in South Africa's segregated black townships, he listed a shabby environment, danger, killings and many educational problems for young people - an environment familiar to residents of many Palestinian refugee camps. Then, he paused and reminded his audience, ''I'm talking about South Africa.'' People laughed knowing laughs.[END QUOTE]

@shereneseikaly Returning to Wikipedia, the entry notes:

@shereneseikaly [BEGIN QUOTE] Many Christian Zionists have cited this [slogan] as a Palestinian graffito that highlights the putative threat of Muslim extremists to Christians, arguing that it means Israel is only the first step for an Islamic war on Christianity.[END QUOTE]

@shereneseikaly The source for this statement, Stephen Spector’s book Evangelicals and Israel: The Story of American Christian Zionism, on the appointed page merely reports that:

[BEGIN QUOTE] many Christian Zionists … cite the Palestinian graffito “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people” to illustrate the global danger that extremist Muslims pose: jihadists, they assert, plan to conquer Israel and the Jews first, then the Christians.[END QUOTE]

In other words, Spector does not even pretend to be interested in examining the existence of such graffiti, and is merely reporting what Christian Zionists believe. Given the legendary difficulty Americans experience mastering foreign languages, we can also safely assume the closest any of these Christian Zionists got to the phrase was Bernard Lewis’s assurances in Commentary rather than a fading, hastily spray-painted slogan on a wall.

The writer André Aciman – he of Call Me by Your Name fame – does according to Wikipedia “mention a sighting” of the slogan on a wall in the predominantly Christian town of Beit Sahour just outside Bethlehem. The reader could be forgiven for concluding that Aciman read it himself. Given that he was born in Alexandria, Egypt to a Jewish family of Turkish and Italian origin, and speaks Arabic, this would appear to finally provide confirmation that the proverb is real.

Well, not exactly. Writing on 24 December 1995 in The New York Times Magazine, with his article given the ominous title, “Manger Square: The Muslim City of Bethlehem”, Aciman writes: “A few years ago, a graffito in Beit Zahur (sic), nearby, proclaimed, "First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.”

@shereneseikaly Aciman, repeating Lewis verbatim, doesn’t claim he actually saw the offending slogan, nor indicate he had visited Beit Sahour “a few years ago”. For all we know, it is hearsay by way of Commentary.

@shereneseikaly Aciman’s anecdote is additionally relevant because a decade earlier he wrote an award-winning memoir, Out of Egypt, that chronicles three generations of his family in Alexandria. Its 340 pages mention the slogan on precisely zero occasions.

Wikipedia also invokes a profile of Hanan Ashrawi (@DrHananAshrawi ) by Israel Amrani in the March/April 1993 issue of Mother Jones. But it’s yet another damp squib. Although Amrani refers to the slogan as “a famous Muslim saying”, that’s his opinion rather than hers. Ashrawi never mentions it.

@shereneseikaly @DrHananAshrawi Finally, Wikipedia invokes the authority of a historian, Paul Charles Merkley, who assures us that “the slogan [was] often seen on the walls in Gaza and the West Bank, and in Muslim-Arab sections of Jerusalem and Bethlehem” during the intifada.

Speaking from personal experience, I spent a lot more time in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, including the “Muslim-Arabs sections of Jerusalem and Bethlehem” during the years in question than did Merkley. I never encountered such graffiti, nor did anyone – Muslim, Christian, or Jewish – ever mention its existence to me.

This is relevant because when Hamas first appeared several months after the eruption of the uprising, it did not participate in the United National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU), formed in early December 1987 as a coordinating body by the various factions of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Islamic Jihad. Every week UNLU would disseminate a communique which, among other things, proclaimed the days on which Palestinians would observe a general strike. Hamas began publishing separate communiques in which it would announced different days for general strikes.

Ever keen to sow division in the name of the time-honoured principle of Divide and Conquer, the Israeli military made it a point to enforce Hamas general strikes in Christian towns or those identified with the Christian population, such as Bethlehem, Beit Sahour, and Beit Jala. Israeli operatives would also daub provocative Islamic slogans on walls in such locations, which were easily identified because they habitually made spelling and/or grammatical errors, like putting a dot above the Arabic letter haa which made it a kha. Yet to the best of my knowledge they never threatened Christians with the most famous slogan of them all, presumably because they knew no one would recognize it.

In a final, desperate attempt to find someone who had personal experience with this elusive proverb I reached out to Jonathan A.C. Brown (@JonathanACBrown ) of Georgetown University, a specialist in Islamic history who is fluent in Arabic; an Arab Jew from North Africa; and my sixteen co-editors at Jadaliyya, whose origins span the region and many of its religions and sects.

@shereneseikaly @DrHananAshrawi @JonathanACBrown Brown responded, “I have never heard of it until now”. Sufficiently intrigued by this issue to look into it further, he followed up several days later with this message:

@shereneseikaly @DrHananAshrawi @JonathanACBrown [BEGIN QUOTE] I also checked an encyclopedia of different Arabic sayings and found nothing. Same for the Persian period. I searched in a bunch of medieval Amthal books [collections of parables] but did not find anything.[END QUOTE]

Brown also forwarded to me two short video clips in Arabic in which a man speaking with a Gulf dialect and a woman speaking in the Lebanese dialect explain the meaning of the proverb to their respective viewers. Neither mentions Muslims, Jews, Christians, or for that matter religion.

The closest either gets to invoking the divine is Abdulrahman from the Gulf, who rather poetically interprets the proverb along the lines of, “Give and ye shall receive”. He admonishes his audience to always be generous with others, to understand that “your treatment of others affects you more than it affects them, because simple matters determine who you are”, and to not be disappointed if good deeds are not reciprocated because “if you offer goodness to others and they do not see it, know it is seen by the Lord of Mankind”.

@shereneseikaly @DrHananAshrawi @JonathanACBrown My North African acquaintance concurred with Brown, stating, “I haven’t encountered it at any point”.

@shereneseikaly @DrHananAshrawi @JonathanACBrown Most unhelpful of all were my Jadaliyya (@jadaliyya ) colleagues. Not one of this group of historians, poets, sociologists, journalists, anthropologists, and political scientists, all fluent in Arabic, had any direct knowledge of this most famous of slogans.

So how did this become a thing, to the extent that it generated a Wikipedia entry all its own? “After Saturday comes Sunday” is indeed an Arab proverb, although it has absolutely nothing to do with religion, let alone with wiping out two of them. I am now speculating, but it is possible that at some point a foreign missionary or Biblical scholar, insufficiently versed in local languages and customs, but seeing religious significance in everything encountered, made assumptions about what it might mean, in the process ignoring the dictum that “when you assume you make an ass out of u and me”.

What is certain is that at some point the Hasbara Symphony Orchestra’s musical director recognized the utility of wilfully distorting the proverb in order to emphasise that the ultimate objective of its enemies is the wholesale elimination of Christianity once the Jews have been exterminated.

We’re talking Protocols of the Elders of Zion-level fabrication, produced for essentially similar purposes. Bernard Lewis, Gad Saad (the fact-free far-right ideologue I referenced in the introduction to this post), and their partners in bigotry are essentially contributing authors to its equally counterfeit sequel, The Protocols of the Elders of Mecca.

Israel, in this scheme of things, functions as what Theodor Herzl describes as an “outpost of civilization against barbarism”, Ehud Barak’s “villa in the jungle” doing Mertz’s “dirty work”. As far as justifications for foreign support go, “If we lose, you’re finished” is hard to beat. It is worth recalling that the slogan is ultimately directed at Christians rather than Jews, while making the point that the only thing standing between Christianity and the Muslim hordes is the Israeli military.

It's also worked rather well. In addition to Gilbert’s Saturday People, Sunday People, at least two other books reflecting this theme have deployed the slogan in their titles: Elizabeth Kendal, After Saturday Comes Sunday: Understanding the Christian Crisis in the Middle East, and Susan Adelman, After Saturday Comes Sunday. It is the equivalent of cracking open a book entitled How to Prepare for Passover and being accosted with invented recipes for matzo made with the blood of Christian children.

There is an additional reason this fake and non-existent slogan has been so frequently invoked since 2023. As Ryan Grim (@ryangrim ) recently reported for Dropsite News (@DropSiteNews ), polling commissioned by Israel’s foreign ministry in the US and four European countries confirms a collapse in public support for Israel, a transformation of historic proportions. The only bright spot for Israel is Islamophobia. “Israel’s best tactic to combat this [loss of public support], according to the study, is to foment fear of ‘Radical Islam’ and ‘Jihadism,’ which remain high, the research finds.” All the more reason to present the Palestinian people as Muslim jihadis, and suggest Palestinian Christians are allies rather than enemies being bombed and starved to death.

The above should also serve as a cautionary tale regarding the uses and risks of Wikipedia. The entry in question, “After Saturday Comes Sunday”, does not once suggests the proverb, in the form and with the meaning given it by Lewis, Saad, and other Israel groupies, simply does not exist.

Last year I participated in a debate with a streamer who has a lot of opinions about the Middle East but knows less than nothing about the region. His preparation for the encounter consisted almost exclusively of reading and discussing Wikipedia entries, and the results were predictably painful. While opinion was divided on which perspective was the more persuasive, there was a near-consensus this particular grifter was hopelessly out of his depth and had no business being in the room. Not just because he’s an imbecile, but because his blind trust in Wikipedia demonstrates he is incapable of being serious.

@shereneseikaly @DrHananAshrawi @JonathanACBrown @jadaliyya @ryangrim @DropSiteNews END. Also available as a single text on my Substack ()mouinrabbani.substack.com

@shereneseikaly @DrHananAshrawi @JonathanACBrown @jadaliyya @ryangrim @DropSiteNews CORRECTION: @asadabukhalil , mentioned above, teaches at California State University Stanislaus. My apologies for the error.