Haaretz carries a full report on the recently-held academic conference on Iraqi Jews at Tel-Aviv university by Vered Lee, herself of Iraqi extraction. The delegates discussed the nature of Iraqi-Jewish identity, but dismissed the expression 'Arab Jew' as one favoured by anti-Zionists and radical leftists: (With thanks: Sami)
"For six years, Idit Sharoni-Pinhas, curator of the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center, gathered textiles and embroideries, which she used to weave the story of the social changes that Jewish women experienced in Iraq.
"Their voice was not allowed to be heard; nonetheless, it did break through in the embroideries, and it reflected the transition from a conservative to a modern society," she says.
"The conference sessions were well-attended by people whose Iraqi Arabic was peppered with Hebrew words and who very much enjoyed the lectures. It was obvious that most of the audience, like most of the lecturers, were themselves Iraqi Jews.
"I read Iraqi literature but I feel that there is no in-depth research on Iraqi Arab Jewish culture and that this subject is not even given serious consideration," says Orna Mashiach, 36. "That is why I was so happy when I heard about this conference."
"One of the participants was Nurit Tzadok, 65, who came with her husband, 75, who immigrated to Israel from Yemen. "I arrived in Israel at age 8 from Iraq," she recalls. "I am now learning about Iraqi Jewry and I am full of admiration for that community and for those who write about it. Recently, I began learning belly dancing, and I am now interested in Iraqi Jewish songs as well.
"Like all the children of Iraqi immigrants, I went through the stage of silencing the radio when my father tried to hear Arabic music at home. Like them, I also felt ashamed for a long while of being Iraqi. But today, I am happy to report that I am proud of my Iraqi heritage."
"We want to publish the lectures in a book," says Prof. Somekh, who is very pleased that the conference was a success. "We are weighing the idea of holding the conference every two years so that research on the subject will get into the bones of the academic community. That way, there will not be the feeling that this gathering will have no follow-up and that it was organized merely out of respect for Iraqi Jews and out of a desire to demonstrate that, like Jews from other countries, they are also a nice bunch of people."
"The stormiest debate arose when most of the lecturers objected to the definition "Arab Jew." This term, commonly used by the members of the Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition and Sephardi Jewish intellectuals, angered many of the conference participants.
"Those who proclaim themselves 'Arab Jews' rather than Jews with an Arab background are doing so to be fashionable and to express a political stance," says Prof. Somekh. "I believe that there is a tendency to use the term 'Arab Jew' without thinking deeply enough about what it really means. For me, an Arab Jew is someone who was born into an Arabic-speaking Jewish family, who is a member of an Arabic-speaking Jewish community, who lives in an Arab-Muslim society and who is familiar with literary Arabic, which is the basis of Arab culture. By such criteria, everyone using the term 'Arab Jew' is doing so incorrectly, because they never learned Arabic, never spoke Arabic and cannot read Arabic."
"University of Haifa professor Reuven Snir, who teaches in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature, emphasized in his lecture that the Jews who wrote literary works in Arabic in the early 20th century felt no need to declare themselves Arabs.
"Dudi Busi, an intellectual who calls himself an Arab Jew, admits in the fine print of the introduction to his 'A Noble Savage' (Pere Atzil) that he was inspired by Sasson Somekh's book, 'Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew,'" he said. "That statement reinforces the feeling that an artificial Arab Jewish identity was created among intellectuals with a revolutionary turn of mind who want to weaken the Zionist foundations of Israeli society and who are protesting against its dominant Ashkenazi component."
"Is there an Iraqi-Israeli identity? Author Sami Michael says that 99 percent of the identities on the face of this planet are imposed identities.
"I hear from all sides that I am an Iraqi and therefore I accept this label," he told his audience with a laugh. "Mind you, I really am an Iraqi anyway."
"Michael says it is regrettable that Israeli society has turned the Iraqi Jewish collective memory into a sweet, sticky bit of nostalgia, and failed to adopt the unique wisdom that characterized the Jewish community in Iraq: The community transformed itself into an aristocracy in Iraq by virtue of its ability to negotiate with the Arab society in which it resided.
"That is the way to achieve stunning results. Results that are achieved not with a gun or with warfare, but rather through negotiations with the Arabs," he says.
"University of Haifa sociology professor Sammy Smooha said, "There is an Iraqi Israeli identity, but that is not the important point. The principal identity competing with our country of origin is still the Sephardi Jewish identity. And what determines the kind of life you lead and your fate is still the division of Israeli Jewish society into Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, or Sephardim.
"The social rift will only grow deeper and more severe," he said. "In Israel, when people make it in society, they lose their identity, which is what happened to the Iraqi Jews."
Smooha also expressed his objection to calling "Iraqi Jews" "Arab Jews," and generated loud applause when he proclaimed, "This term does not hold water. It is absolutely not a parallel to 'Arab Christian'; a Jew by religion cannot be part of the Arab nation or a member of the Arabic faith."
"Prof. Haviva Pedaya is a poet who teaches Judaism and culture in the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's Department of Jewish History. She made the following point: "The first thing that happens in a situation of oppression is that you declare that everyone is the same, in other words, that everyone is a Mizrahi or Sephardi Jew. The original approach of the Iraqi Jewish identity, as we see it expressed on this podium, is that it expressed several very different voices and channels. And it is impossible to say which is more Iraqi than the other."
"Gradually, the discussion shifted to what the audience had to say, and one person suggested this solution to the Iraqi-Jewish-Arab-Israeli conflict: "I always say that I am not Iraqi, but that I am from Iraq." Another person got up and requested the floor: "I was born in Prague," he said with a smile. "But I must admit that, after two days of this conference on Iraqi Jews, I myself feel a longing for Baghdad."
"The Israeli-born children of the Iraqi Jewish immigrants naturally have no memory of Baghdad, but instead create an imaginary Baghdad from the fragments of memory that they have gleaned from their parents. These fragments are, in turn, based on the literary works written by immigrant authors who have shaped our identity.
Like these children of immigrants, I swam with the immigrant authors in the Tigris River whose sources are literary, wandered through Baghdad's alleyways, drank coffee in the coffee shops along the river's banks, and saw the city from the roofs of Baghdad's houses. For a brief moment, in the lively discourse at the conference, a discourse that was so full of love and longing, I caught glimpses of the house of my childhood, the home that disintegrated with the death of my parents, who had immigrated to Israel from Iraq.
"For a few seconds, its walls once more joined together and my parents again hugged me. The Iraqi Arabic, which they used whenever they spoke to me (while I always replied in Hebrew), echoed from that house once more. How could I explain all this to the woman who asked me how I was connected to this conference and why I was covering it for Haaretz. She gave me an embarrassed smile as she apologized for not recognizing that I myself was also an Iraqi and she asked me why my surname was Lee and why I was crying."
Read article in full
English summary of Haaretz report in Hebrew
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Iraqi Jews at conference reject term 'Arab Jew'
Friday, May 16, 2008
At last, the Youtube nakba of the Arabic Jews
At last somebody has responded to the incessant 'nakba' propaganda of the Palestinians with a Youtube video on the ethnic cleansing of a million Jews from Arab countries and Iran, explained in a few moving frames. Click on the link (with thanks: a reader):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxKcFo_h5Eg&feature=related
Will long-lost Jewish neighbours want to return?
There are three good things about this Haaretz article by Sultan al-Qassemi of Abu Dhabi. The first is that he recognises that Jews are a Middle Eastern people who go back thousands of years. The second is that Jews made a huge contribution to Arab societies. The third is that he acknowledges that Jews were subject to assault and oppression at the hands of Arabs who caused them to flee.
In other respects the article is badly flawed. It assumes that European Jews and their 'Israel project' are the root of all evil. The ill-treatment of the Jews in Arab countries is an understandable 'reaction' to the 'injustice' of Israel. And in a patronising and naive way, it assumes that Jews' undying loyalty to their 'ancestral Arab homelands' will make them return to Arab countries, if only citizenship were restored to them. (With thanks: Lily)
"Unfortunately, many Muslim Arabs from across the region reacted violently to these developments and decided to reciprocate; as a result, Jews who were living among them were shunned and assaulted. In Iraq, for example, about 120,000 Jews were compelled to emigrate to Israel, the U.S. and Europe in just less than three years.
"The streets of Cairo, the historic neighborhoods of Syria, the mountainous terrain of Lebanon and the bustling markets of Baghdad were, for the first time in thousands of years, emptied of one of the most successful ethnic minorities living within their communities. Doctors, architects, businessmen, scientists, poets and writers started to pack up and leave, some with good reason and some to avoid the repercussions of the founding of the state of Israel.
"It wasn't all bad blood between the Arabs and the Jews; in fact, there were stories of heroism that have gone unreported and unnoticed in the Arab media. In the midst of the horrors of the Nazi occupation of France in the 1940s, the imam of the Paris Mosque saved the lives of scores of Jews by issuing certificates stating that they were Muslim. In Tunis, entire Jewish families were saved by a local hero, Khaled Abdelwahhab, who hid them in his farm at great risk to himself and his family; he was honored posthumously for his bravery by the Anti-Defamation League. As a result of such actions, fewer than 1 percent of the Jews of Arabia - who numbered in the hundreds of thousands - perished compared to more than 50 percent of the Jews of Europe*.
"Since then, there has been predominantly negative coverage of Judeo-Arab relations. Europe, after the Second World War, was able to turn the page almost immediately, yet many Arabs still paint all Jews with the same brush used for Israelis.
"In 1975, in the wake of the death of the Egyptian revolutionary leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, many countries in which he had financed and encouraged revolutions shed the burden of his pan-Arab nationalism and scaremongering and decided to take action in order to restore the social unity of their countries. The pre-Saddam Iraqi Revolution Command Council issued advertisements in The New York Times and elsewhere inviting Jews to return to their home countries and guaranteeing their rights. Anwar Sadat's Egypt and Hafez Al Assad's Syria also issued such statements.
"In recent history, only the two forward-thinking Middle Eastern kingdoms of Morocco and Bahrain have broken the mold of suspicion toward their Jewish citizens and integrated them into the social and political spheres. The former with the case of Andre Azoulay, an adviser to the previous and current kings; and the latter with the recent appointment of Huda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo as the new Bahraini ambassador to America.
"Today in New York City alone there are more than 75,000 Jews of Syrian origin, many of them educated in the best schools, who speak or understand Arabic and still have an affinity for Syria. Is it not possible to imagine that such persons have the right, if they so choose, to be full citizens of Syria?
"Is it not time to reassure the Jews of Arab origin that their ancestral homes are mature enough to welcome them back if they decide to invest, visit or even take up citizenship? If football players who spend a few months in the Middle East are given citizenship, shouldn't people who have a natural birthright, tremendous wealth, and valuable education and skills be accorded the same?"
Read article in full
*The only reason why more Jews were not killed in Arab lands was that the Nazi advance was halted - ed
An American Jew in Shiraz
Larry Beinhart from Brooklyn had never considered himself a 'practising' Jew. But as the token Jew in a group of Americans visiting Iran, he was unprepared for the emotions that were to engulf him as the group attended a Jewish service in Shiraz. From Alternet (with thanks: a reader):
"Once again, we entered a walled courtyard.
"It was winter, so the trees were bare. Past their trunks and branches, there was a two-story building. There were large windows along the entire side that faced out toward us. Inside, there was a Jewish service taking place.
"Then a remarkable thing happened to me.
"I was overcome with emotion. If I had been alone, I would have wept. But I was in public, and I'm a guy, and mentally I have my John Belushi shades on, so I don't cry in public. I moved into the shadows while I fought to control the tears that welled up inside, that wanted to pour forth and go wailing down my cheeks. These were my people. Here. Surrounded by these millions of others. My people, willing to publicly declare who they were, what their faith was and what group they belonged to. Though they were surrounded by all these others. Who sometimes tolerated them, sometimes were their friends and sometimes were not. This was not America. Where it was safe to be a Jew. Where it was fun to be a Jew. Where it was easy to be a Jew. Officially, as Khomeini's poster said, Jews are supposed to be a protected people in Islam."
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Abbas Shiblak blames Iraqi exodus on Zionism
Abbas Shiblak’ s book Iraqi Jews: a history of Mass Exodus (re-issued in 2005) tends to play down Arab responsibility for the Jewish exodus, but shows that ‘transfer’ schemes, exchanging Palestinian Arabs for Iraqi Jews, were being discussed at the time:
"If Israel had not been established nothing would have happened to the Iraqi Jews. They could have stayed as any other religious minority," says Meir Basri, the last leader of the Jewish community, quoted in Abbas Shiblak's book, Iraqi Jews: a history of mass Exodus. (re-issued in 2005)
But the thesis soon unravels if the Jews compare notes with the persecuted Christian Assyrians, or the Mandaeans, or the Yazidis, who had no Israel with which to enrage the Iraqi state.
Abbas Shiblak is an Oxford academic and a Palestinian refugee from Haifa. He is commended by Peter Sluglett in the book's preface for his empathy with the Iraqi Jews, fellow "victims of Zionism". I suppose that we should be grateful that Shiblak does not attempt to deny that Jews were forced to leave Iraq. But 'push' factors 'played a smaller role' in Iraq than in other Arab countries, he argues.
As 'Arabs of the Jewish faith', the Jews were an indigenous religious grouping, and identified with their fellow Iraqis rather than fellow Jews. But Shiblak likes to have it both ways: when Jewish leaders in 1919 asked the British High Commissioner for British citizenship, they were not speaking for the community as a whole, but when the Jewish leaders proclaimed their loyalty to Iraq and dislike of Zionism, Shiblak claims, they were speaking the truth.
On the other hand Shiblak can't help seeing the Jews as agents of colonialism. The Jews in Arab countries aided and abetted the British and the French, acquired foreign nationality, and were awarded special privileges under the Capitulation system. (Shiblak is not clear how Iraqi Jews, none of whom had foreign nationality, benefited from the Capitulation system.)
Shiblak will never condemn Arab conduct towards the Jews, he only finds excuses for it. The Jews 'must take some of the blame which this behaviour ( i.e finding varying degrees of special favour with their British and French masters) generated against them'. In other words, the Jews are are least partly to blame for their own oppression and murder. The 1941 Farhoud, which claimed at least 180 lives, was pay-back for Jewish profiteering out of the Arab masses and for showing 'too much joy' at the imminent arrival of the British. No, it was not an explosion of anti-Jewish hatred, just anti-British.
A familiar pattern of minimisation and whitewash emerges from Shiblak's book. For example, in the 1930s, there were no restrictions on Jewish student numbers in schools and colleges, although the preferential quotas for scientific and medical colleges 'may have' adversely affected Jewish chances of entering these colleges. He then quotes a source arguing that these quotas were never filled. There is nothing about the politicisation of schools in the 1930s to make them a vehicle for anti-Jewish indoctrination.
Shiblak says no evidence exists that 'serious harm' was done in May 1941 when the pro-Nazi Rashid Ali was in power, ' except for a few cases of harassment'. (As Violette Shamash in Memories of Eden explains, that harassment extended to rapes, pillage and murders). Even when the government started persecuting the Jews in earnest in 1948 - civil servants dismissed from their posts, education and travel bans, arrests, extortion, internment and hangings - Shiblak says that no specific official laws could be called discriminatory. The restrictions were temporary and aimed not only at Jews but at communists and democratic forces. They were not as bad as what the US government imposed on Japanese enemy aliens, but were 'tolerant and moderate'. The Prime Minister Nuri al-Said's threat to expel the Jews should not be taken seriously. It was only rhetoric.
Shiblak quotes Sir Henry Mack, the British ambassador to Iraq, as saying: "in the light of the new situation brought about by the state of Israel, it is fair to remark that the Iraqi government has shown tolerance in its dealings with Iraqi Jews." Nine months later, Sir Henry Mack wrote the exact opposite: Jews were being treated like negroes in the American Deep South. So which is it?
Shiblak portrays Zionism as an alien, manipulative, exploitative and colonialist movement that only saw the oriental Jews as a useful reserve of manpower and exaggerated the persecution to which Jews were subject in Arab countries. Shiblak's verdict is that the Iraqi Jews did not want to leave, until 'cruel Zionism' - the infamous bombs - forced them to.
What I found most interesting - particularly now that advocates of the Arab cause continually insist on treating the issue of the Palestinian refugees separately from that of the Jewish exodus from Arab countries, was Shiblak's description of the various 'transfer' schemes mooted after the flight of the Arabs from Palestine. Predictably, Shiblak claims that the Arabs never instigated such schemes. The driving force behind them were the British and the US. It is not hard to see why, as Shiblak tells it, the Israelis were reluctant to agree - not only were they expected to pay for the resettlement of the Arab refugees, they would have had to compensate the Iraqi Jews for their abandoned property.
It was only when it became apparent that following the denaturalisation law of March 1950 stripping emigrating Iraqi Jews of their nationality (followed a year later by the freezing of their property) most of the community had decided to leave, that Israel agreed to a linkage between the Iraqi Jews and the Palestinian Arabs. But even Shiblak admits there was never an official deal.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Islamists and nationalists threaten Turkey's Jews
Discrimination against non-Muslims is endemic in the Turkish system, claims a Turkish-Jewish business in this interview with Mustapha Akyol of the Turkish Daily News:
"Ishak Alaton is one of the most prominent names in Turkey’s tiny Jewish community. He, as the boss of the well-established Alarko Holding, is not just a very successful businessman, but also a man of intellect who comments on social and political problems.
"As a self-defined social democrat, Mr. Alaton believes in social responsibility – not as a public relations strategy, but as a value in itself.
"A few weeks ago, Mr. Alaton sent a letter to Eyüp Can, the editor-in-chief of Turkey’s up-and-coming business daily, Referans. On April 22, Mr. Can published the letter in his column. In it, the 81-year-old business guru was rightfully complaining about “this paranoia, this xenophobia, this enmity toward non-Muslims, this anti-Semitism” which pervades Turkey.
"Mr. Alaton was specifically referring to two examples: Israeli businessman Sammy Ofer, a zillionaire, wanted to invest in Turkey, but he was repelled by “the bureaucracy and the media which worked hand in hand against him… for simply that he was Jewish.” And, decades ago, an oil-rich Armenian businessman, Mr. Gülbenkyan, had tried to set up a museum in Istanbul, but was “forced back with sticks in hand by the ‘patriots’ in Ankara.”
"Thirdly Mr. Alaton was pointing to the recent decision by Turkey’s Constitutional Court, which made it illegal for foreigners to buy real estate in Turkey. (Our lovely Constitutional Court, when it is not busy with cracking down political parties, takes decisions that will keep Turkey isolated from the global economy.)
"After his letter in Referans, Mr. Alaton soon gave an interview to journalist Nagehan Alçı from daily Akşam. When asked about the origins of anti-Semitism in Turkey, Mr. Alaton went right back to the days of Atatürk and said this:
“I met Atatürk. We saw him when we were kids. There was no such discrimination at his time. At, least there was no such thing in his mind. But some of the people around Atatürk had a fierce reaction against us, i.e., the ‘others.’ That’s why special instructions were sent to governors in order to make our lives difficult. This, over time, turned in to a state policy.”
"Mr. Alaton did not go into details about what “the people around Atatürk” did to Turkey’s Jews, but one of their deeds, the Wealth Tax of 1942, is worth mentioning. The government of Şükrü Saracoğlu, a Kemalist, a Nazi sympathizer and a proud “Turkist,” issued this notorious law, which was an arbitrary levy imposed on wealthy non-Muslim minorities, and especially the Jews and Jewish converts. Those who were unable to pay were sent to a labor camp in Aşkale, a district of the Eastern city of Erzurum. The first and only Jewish labor camp in these lands, in other words, was established in the heydays of Kemalism, our untouchable state ideology.
"Let’s go back to Mr. Alaton’s interview. When asked about the current government, formed by the AKP (Justice and Development Party), he spoke positively and he said he trusts the “sincerity of Prime Minister Erdoğan” in his efforts to democratize Turkey. The problem is elsewhere, he noted. “Anti-Semitism is not in the neighborhood,” he emphasized. “It is in the system.”
"The term “neighborhood” might need explanation here. In the recent years, the word has become a token for conservative districts in which most women wear the headscarf and very few, if any, consume alcohol. In the secularist jargon, “the neighborhood” is the symbol of obscurantism, backwardness, and a pleasure-free life. There might be some truth in this perception, but it is also true that the rising fascism and xenophobia in Turkey is a product of not the conservative “neighborhood,” but the secular citadels."
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The Yemenite Jews who fled during World War ll
"Those were the days of World War II, when immigration permits (certificates) were not given out to Europe's Jews. Jewish Agency representatives and other Israeli officials urged Yemen's Jews to immigrate to Israel, in an effort to realize the allocation of immigration permits promised in the 1939 White Paper and bring as many Jews as possible to Israel. "Simultaneously, these elements appealed to the Yemeni imam, who accepted the appeal due to the hunger and distress which prevailed in Yemen at the time following drought years, and allowed the Jews to leave. Thousands of Jews began crossing the border towards Adan, a colony under British rule in southern Yemen. "Shlomo Yefet was born in Adan in 1921. In 1943, while he served as a teacher in Adan's Jewish community, he was asked by the community heads to help care for the refugees who had arrived from Yemen exhausted and poor. Yefet accepted the request immediately and helped manager the camp's storeroom and hand out food to the immigrants.
Few are familiar with the immigration story of 4,267 Yemeni Jews to the Land of Israel during World War II. Shlomo Yefet, a teacher at the Adan (Aden) community, was recruited to help and documented life in the immigration camps; he later immigrated to Israel himself. Ynet News has the story and photos:
"In 1944, Shlomo received the longed-for certificate and also arrived in Israel as an immigrant in a long journey which crossed sea and land, through Sudan, Suez, Ein Moussa, Sinai and the final destination – the "Shaar Ha'aliyah" camp near Haifa. In Israel, Shlomo volunteered in the Etzel national military organization and joined the Israel Defense Forces upon the State of Israel's establishment.
"Most of us are familiar with the story of the "On Eagle's Wings" campaign to bring Yemen's Jews to Israel in 1949-1950, but little has been told about the immigration of 4,267 Yemeni Jews to the Land of Israel in 1943-1944.
"Fayush and Mehzabin were run by a British crew hired by the Adan government. Later, a doctor and three nurses were sent to the camps from Israel in a bid to ease the harsh conditions.
Read article in full
Monday, May 12, 2008
Coke urged to compensate Egyptian-Jewish family
Justice still has not been done to the Bigio family, whose assets were seized by the Egyptian government and then taken over by Coca-Cola, Canadian Jewish News reports:
MONTREAL — The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) held a protest outside the Coca- Cola Company’s recent annual shareholders’ meeting in Wilmington, Del., calling on the multi-billion dollar company to compensate the Bigio family of Montreal, Egyptian Jewish refugees whose land and factories were expropriated by the Egyptian government during an anti-Semitic campaign in the 1960s.
In 1994, Coke bought a minority interest in the El Nasr Bottling Company (ENBC), the Egyptian firm that took over the Bigios’ seized property. Three years later, the family sued Coke for trespass in federal district court in New York.
“Coca-Cola continues to violate its own code of business conduct,” said Leonard Getz, a national vice-president of ZOA and a Coca-Cola shareholder.
“First the company refuses to acknowledge that it is profiting from stolen property, and now it reneges on its promise to engage in good faith settlement discussions with the Bigios. What will it take for Coke to do the right thing?”
Last year, Getz submitted a shareholder proposal for consideration at Coca-Cola’s annual shareholders’ meeting, proposing that Coca-Cola be required to fairly compensate the Bigios for their loss. He said the company agreed at that time to negotiate with the Bigios.
This year, Getz was outside the shareholders’ meeting, along with several dozen other protesters, displaying signs that read, “Who’s Benefiting from Anti-Semitism? Coke is it!,” “Coke Trespasses on Stolen Jewish Property,” and Christians and Jews United for Justice Ask ‘The Real Thing’ To Do The Right Thing.”
“The ZOA called off a demonstration last year after Coca-Cola promised to discuss settlement terms with the Bigio family. But after several meetings held during the past year, it is now abundantly clear that Coca-Cola has no intention of offering the Bigios a fair settlement,” said ZOA national president Morton Klein.
In the 1960s, the Egyptian regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser expropriated the Bigio family’s land and factories near Cairo without compensating them. The ZOA claims the only reason was that the Bigios were Jewish.
The Bigios had owned the property since the early 1900s. Coca-Cola had leased the land and a factory from the Bigios since the 1940s. The Bigios had a longstanding business relationship with Coca-Cola in Egypt, supplying bottle caps and other products to the company.
The New York federal district court dismissed the Bigios’ case at Coca-Cola’s request, concluding that Egypt was a more appropriate forum to decide their claims. The Bigios appealed, asking the ZOA to submit an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief on their behalf.
The ZOA’s brief showed that the Bigios would not get a fair trial in Egypt because hatred of Jews is deeply ingrained in Egyptian society, and that this hatred is still fostered today, even by the government-sponsored media.
The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the federal district court ruling last year, and decided that the Bigios’ case could proceed in an American court, saying, “It was perfectly reasonable under these circumstances for the plaintiffs to bring their action against Coca-Cola, the only U.S. company involved, in the United States.”
The ZOA has been actively supporting the Bigios’ cause and has called for a boycott of Coca-Cola products until the company makes a fair settlement with the Bigio family.
“Despite its self-image and promise to act with honesty and integrity in all matters, Coca-Cola has been unfairly and immorally benefiting from the campaign of anti-Semitism against the Bigios,” said Susan Tuchman, director of the ZOA’s Centre for Law and Justice.
The Bigios are represented by Washington, D.C., attorneys Nathan and Alyza Lewin, who successfully argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that the Bigios were entitled to proceed with their claims in an American court.
Raphael Bigio, 63, speaking on behalf of his family, said he is deeply grateful for the ZOA’s assistance. He hopes that Jews and other “fair-minded” people will stop buying Coke products.
“As Coca-Cola well knows, my family owns these valuable assets in Egypt, and they were stolen from us. You can’t go and buy stolen assets and then reap the benefits. It is only right that my family be compensated because of Coca-Cola’s using and benefiting from my family’s property in Egypt.”
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Update: The Economist relents
Point of No Return was perhaps too hasty in condemning the Economist for failing to provide an opportunity to refute the distortions in its article 'Let there be justice for all' (April 12). In its May 9 issue, it printed this letter from JIMENA co-founder Joseph Abdel Wahed :
A refugee's tale
SIR – Resolutions that recognise the plight of Jews forced to flee from the Arab world when Israel was founded are not primarily about compensation (“Let there be justice for all”, April 12th). What we want most of all is to tell our side of the story. For 60 years the focus has been on the Palestinians, with nothing much said on the brutal expulsion of nearly 1m Jews from the Arab world and Iran. No trial; no jury; no justice. Human-rights organisations did not call attention to this crime against humanity. The United Nations did not convene the Security Council to censure the Arab countries. British academics did not seek to divest from these countries.
“Who is fighting for my rights?” I asked in 1948 when I was 12 years old and living in Cairo. This was when the Arab League likened its “war of extermination...to the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades” and after the Mufti of Jerusalem exhorted Palestinian Arabs to kill Jews “wherever you find them”. The Middle East conflict created not one, but two refugee populations.
Joseph Abdel Wahed
Moraga, California
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Hunting for kosher chicken in Marrakesh
It's been the talk of the town all week. The popular BBC TV show The Apprentice flew two rival teams of aspiring young men and women to Morocco and let them loose on the Marrakesh souk. Their task was to find a number of items in the shortest time and at the cheapest price. On their shopping list was a green mosque alarm clock, a fruit juicer, a branded tagine pot - and a kosher chicken.
Haaretz has the hilarious details, highlighting the embarrassing ignorance of the cream of entrepreneurial British youth. Team member Michael, a self-declared 'Jewish ' boy - did not know the meaning of the word 'kosher' and settled for a halal chicken 'blessed' by the butcher who obligingly intoned, 'Allah, allah!'
Michael's team-mate Claire, had earlier remarked: "am I stupid or what, but is kosher chicken Jewish, and this is a Muslim country?" Like most non-Jewish Britons Claire had assumed that Jews do not live in Muslim countries, or perhaps were as common in Arab countries as aliens from Mars.
But the winning team did find what was left of the Marrakesh Jewish quarter. They found a kosher butcher who sold them a kosher chicken. And seven million BBC viewers learned something new: there is Jewish life in Arab countries.
The not-so forgotten Jews of Marrakesh
Death knell sounding for Jews of Marrakesh
Friday, May 09, 2008
What really happened to the Middle East's Jews?
Barry Rubin of the Gloria Research Center makes the very important point that, on the rare occasions when Jewish refugees of the Middle East are mentioned as in this Reuters piece, the treatment they suffered is rationalised as an 'understandable backlash' to Israel's creation. In fact, had Israel never existed, Jews and Christians would still have been 'ethnically cleansed' from Arab countries (with thanks: Jerusalem Posts) :
"Uh-oh! It's Israel's sixtieth birthday and that means articles on Israel in the news media and, in turn, that may often mean something between inaccuracy and slander.
I've been conditioned by now to know what to expect. Let's try a test. Read the following headline from a Reuters story, and guess the theme. Ready? Here we go:
"Israel's Advent Altered Outlook For Middle East Jews."
My assumption was that the headline implied a story saying: everything was fine for Jews in the Arab world and Iran until Israel was created and that fact was responsible for forcing them to leave. The article itself isn't that bad, does include material to the contrary, and doesn't directly blame the destruction of these communities on Israel's creation. Yet still this is an implication, no doubt, that many readers will take away from the text. Consider this formulation. The article states: "The 1948 war at Israel's creation, which forced some 700,000 Palestinians to flee their homeland, hardened Arab attitudes to deep-rooted Jewish minorities across the Middle East."
Get it? First the Palestinians flee and then the Arabs get angry at the Jews. Up to then the Jewish minorities are "deep-rooted" which implies they were well accepted and secure.
A couple of paragraphs down the article continues:
"Israeli statistics show more than 760,000 Middle Eastern Jews had moved to Israel by 2006, with more than 40 percent arriving in the first three years of the state's existence."
So let's summarize:
Step 1: Palestinians become refugees
Step 2: Arabs are angry. (Can you blame them?)
Step 3: They take it out on the Jews or at least these Jews "moved," a word used for when you get a new job, load up the U-Haul and head across town.
In other words, the sins of Israel's creation include both Palestinian Arabs and Middle Eastern Jews becoming refugees, rather than it involving a de facto population transfer with an equal cost to both sides, and in which only the deliberate creation of permanent refugee status for Palestinians by their own leaders and Arab states produced prosperity on one side and ongoing problems for the other.
What this concept also leaves out, at least in part, is:
- Centuries'-long discrimination against Jews, ranging from the mild to the violent, including forced conversions at times, a problem Moses Maimonides was dealing with nine hundred years ago. Of course, as in Europe, there were long periods (certainly in Iraq and Egypt, for example) in which Jews fared very well. This is not to say that all Jews lived terribly among their Arab neighbors but clearly this was a major factor in their lives. A strong current of anti-Semitism in Islam long preceded the origin of Zionism.
To be fair the article does say:
"In the past, Moroccan Jews were considered subordinate to Muslims and discrimination was widespread. Every city has its Mellah, the poorest quarter to which Jews were once confined. Their residents were the first to leave when they could." And it mentions that "Over 120,000 [Iraqi Jews] were flown to Israel after 1948 when government persecution intensified.
- Rising Arab nationalism which was not all or mostly, in contrast to what the article seems to argue, due to Zionism or Israel's creation. Even the secular nationalist movements had a strong tinge of Islam also, certainly so in North Africa, which made it hard to believe that Jews would be welcome in the future regardless of Israel.
- No mention of major violent incidents like the 1941 pogrom in Baghdad or a massacre a few years later in Yemen. Nor does it mention that Yemeni Jews had to flee their homes a few weeks ago to avoid being murdered or kidnapped. Or is there the story of how Jews tried to escape Syria, Iran, and other places, sometimes at the cost of their lives. Nor does it include the executions of Jews in Iraq, a trauma which shattered the remaining post-1948 community there.
- The stress of being a dhimmi, meaning the need to shut your mouth and keep a low profile, again parallel to the deformations of Jewish life in Europe. But the article quotes Jews in Morocco (no anti-Semitism) and Iran (everyone is treated ok) who clearly cannot speak honestly.
It should be noted that Christians, too, have been pushed out of the Arab world and often treated badly, though their treatment varies widely among different countries. Indeed, leaving aside Egypt, the proportion of Christian emigration approaches that of Jewish emigration. There is a serious problem with intolerance in Arabic-speaking countries and a dominant "secular" nationalism (with some exception for Syria and Lebanon) that in fact discriminates against non-Muslims. Even if Israel had never been created, a high proportion of Jews would certainly have left or been forced to leave.
For example, in Iran several Jews were arrested as spies without evidence and tortured while some historic synagogues were recently bulldozed out of existence. Don't these people really feel scared? Of course, these interviews are like asking people in Iraq a decade ago what they thought of Saddam or finding out that everyone was just delighted with Stalinist Russia, things journalists in those times actually did do.
Now to be fair the article, as I said I've seen much worse, does state: "Hundreds of thousands of Jews were displaced. Some migrated voluntarily from mainly Muslim countries to the newly proclaimed Jewish homeland. Others were forced out by dispossession, discrimination or violence. Thousands stayed on."
Clearly, the great majority, however, were forced out. What percentage stayed on? Less than one-tenth.
A key problem with the currently accepted narrative on Middle East history can be seen in a little two-line statement of fact:
"Conflict in Palestine in the 1930s made life harder for Egyptian Jews, as militant nationalist groups became active."
This relates the rise of militant nationalism to the conflict. Certainly, this was a factor (I wrote a whole book on it, The Arab States and the Palestine Conflict), but militant nationalism was due to far more than just the Palestine conflict. And this doesn't even mention the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s, seeking to transform Egypt into an Islamist state. It was first and foremost a response to conditions at home and to the kind of society that Arab activists wanted to build. As such, it is parallel to revolutionary, Communist, fascist, and nationalist movements in Europe and other places, all of which existed without Israel as a catalyst.
Those two lines are a very powerful theme today: everything Arabs or Muslims do is merely a response to what Israel (or the West) does and not an expression of their own beliefs and goals. This robs others of their history, under the guise of humanitarian egalitarianism, and puts the blame on others for everything that happens.
Here's another example:
"Jewish emigration accelerated after Israel attacked Egypt in 1956 and economic pressures mounted at home."
While there is some truth in the statement the "economic pressures" was the fact that the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser expelled all non-Egyptians, not only Jews but large numbers of Greeks and others, due to xenophobia and militant nationalism.
Even in tiny phrasing choices--admittedly a matter of judgment but the judgments almost always go in the same direction--are certain assumptions present. Consider this phrase: "Iran, seen by Israel as its deadliest foe...." But since the issue here is Iranian Jews why not write: "Iran, which views Israel as its deadliest foe...." From which direction, after all, does the aggressive view come?
The article could easily have drawn a parallel between the Middle Eastern Jews and Palestinians. Both were refugees but the Jews rebuilt their lives rather than nursing grievances and pursing violence for decades. Moreover, one could say that their sufferings and claims balance those of the Palestinian Arabs. None of these arguments--very commonplace in discussion of these issues among Middle East-origin Jews--are presented.
Again, I don't mean to exaggerate the problems with this article, which does at least present the issue and some of the points that should be made. But it also shows weaknesses in dealing with Israel, some of the assumptions on which the contemporary hostile narrative is based.
Also published in Global Politician
'Baghdad twist' recalls family's hair-raising escape
Montreal filmmaker Joe Balass has an unusual Mother's Day gift for his mom: Baghdad Twist, a bittersweet memoir of her family's tumultuous times in Iraq. The Montreal Gazette reports that the film tells the story of the family's hair-raising escape through the mountains of Kurdistan:
These are times Valentine Balass would sooner forget, but it does provide her son with some fascinating, if not harrowing, insights into a previously dark chapter in his family's history.
Balass's documentary Baghdad Twist, opening Mother's Day at the NFB Cinema, will also be quite an eye-opener for others in the dark about life in one of the world's most troubled regions. Using vintage Super 8 footage and faded stills from the mid-1960s, Balass has his mother, off-camera, recount a hair-raising odyssey that brought their family to Montreal from Baghdad.
Making life much more dicey for the Balass clan in Baghdad was the fact they were Jewish. She recalls that the Jewish community of Iraq had been thriving up until the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. But what was once a community of 180,000 had dwindled down to 10,000 to 12,000 by the early 1950s, due in large part to a climate of accusations implying Iraq's Jews were traitors and, as a result, fear of arrest and worse among the Jews.
By the 1960s, the Jewish population of Iraq had fallen off significantly more, yet the Balass family tried to maintain a sense of normalcy: "Because you can't live all your life in mourning," Valentine reasons.
That attempt at normalcy is depicted in footage from a wedding reception, where guests don their smartest duds and their bravest faces and attempt to do the dance craze sweeping the rest of the world at the time: the twist.
Not exactly giddy times, however, and they were soon to get much worse. Following the Six Day War of 1967 - pitting Israel against Syria, Jordan and Egypt - Iraq's Jews were more targeted than ever.
There were arrests, based on trumped-up charges of spying, and there were public hangings of Jews in the streets of Baghdad. Valentine remembers that people were in a state of jubilation, singing and dancing while the executions were being carried out.
Balass's dad was detained three times for no specific reason, but after he was let out on bail following the last arrest, Valentine was taking no chances. She took charge and made plans to bolt Baghdad quickly with her husband, three kids and other family members.
Leaving everything in their Baghdad home intact, so as not to arouse any suspicion, this group of 12 fled, at enormous risk, to the Kurdish north of Iraq. From there, they slipped into Iran, then made their way to Israel before ending up in Montreal in 1970 - with pretty much only the clothes on their backs.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Squaring up to a fight over the 'other refugees'
Moroccan-born Sephardi community activist Sylvain Abitbol from Montreal is up to the challenge of putting the case for the Jewish refugees from Arab countries, he tells David Suissa in the Jewish Journal of LA (with thanks: Sabby):
"To this day, Arab countries and the world community have refused to acknowledge these human rights violations or provide compensation to the hundreds of thousands of Jews forced to abandon their homes, businesses and possessions as they fled those countries.
"But activists like Abitbol are fighting back, all the way to the White House and the U.S. Congress. Abitbol, the first Sephardic Jew to lead the local Jewish Federation in Montreal and now co-president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, connected with this movement a year ago when he joined the board of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC). Together with other organizations like the American Sephardi Federation (ASF) and the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC), the movement, which is officially called the International Rights and Redress Campaign, toiled for years in obscurity.
"A few weeks ago, they hit the jackpot. That's when the U.S. Congress overwhelmingly passed the first-ever resolution to grant recognition as refugees to Jews from Arab and Muslim countries. House Resolution 185 affirms that all victims of the Arab-Israeli conflict must be treated equally, which means it will now be official U.S. policy to mention "Jewish refugees" whenever there is mention of Palestinian refugees in any official document.
"It's a huge victory, but only a beginning. The United Nations and the world media are the next fronts in this battle for Jewish justice. Abitbol, a sophisticated man in his mid-50s who's fluent in French, English, Arabic, Hebrew and Spanish, has no illusions about Israel's precarious image in the world. But he's far from being a cynic. He's passionate about fighting for the rights of Jewish victims, and he is also a Jewish refugee (from Morocco). Yet he hardly acts like either a refugee or a victim.
"Over tea at my mother's house, he reflected on the major influences of his life. One of the things that stuck with me was something Abitbol said he learned early in his career, when he was in sales. Abitbol, who has two engineering degrees and is chairman of an innovative software company called uMind, calls the technique "listen and adapt:" You adapt your strategy and your communication to the values of your audience.
He gave me a fascinating example. While in Dubai recently on business, an Arab businessman confronted him on the situation in Israel. Abitbol, seeing that the man was a devout Muslim who believed that everything comes from God, gently explained -- in Arabic -- that if Israel has survived so many wars over 60 years, maybe it's because it is "Inshallah" (God's will). Abitbol got the other man's attention.
Same thing when he spoke recently at a United Nations conference in Geneva on the subject of Jewish refugees. Directly facing representatives of Arab countries, he used the language of indignation and human rights that Arabs have used so successfully against Israel for so many decades, only this time it was on behalf of Jews.
Of course, he added that there is one major difference: Jews didn't put their 850,000 refugees in squalid camps so they could have a powerful image on the evening news. They helped them resettle, so that one day, one of them would learn five languages and fly to Geneva to speak up on their behalf.
Read article in full
How Iraq went to war on its Jews
Read this unusual first-hand account of Iraq's 1948 war on its Jews by John Ough, a Canadian serviceman, in the National Post:
"When Israel was born in 1948, the government of Iraq decided things looked safe enough to go to war. A small war. And I was there to watch it happen.
"Protected from the newborn Zionist enemy to the west by an expanse of wild, roadless desert, the Iraqis looked around for closer, more convenient, foes to fight. They found them behind the commercial counters of Iraq's financial institutions, administration offices and other places of business — the harmless, peaceful, Jewish business clerks who kept the wheels of Iraq's national commerce turning in efficient fashion. In a gesture of pan-Arab solidarity, Iraq's government decided to banish these Jews and their families to the newly established State of Israel — which, itself, the Iraqi army was planning to help obliterate, eventually.
"At once, the airport in Basra — Iraq's second city — became the scene of bewildered Jewish innocents lined up with the single suitcase each was allowed to carry. They watched Iraqi customs officers examine their few belongings during a rough search, usually ending with the contents of any jars, bottles or toothpaste tubes being squirted over the whole jumbled-up mess. Then they were piled onto Israel-bound planes and told never to come back.
"They were the lucky ones.
"The more unlucky ones, those with large amounts of money, had their fortunes confiscated. To forestall any possibility of later arguments, they were publicly hanged in the city centre in front of thousands of cheering onlookers and clicking cameras.
"During the following months, business and bank transactions became a comedy of errors, owing to Iraq having so few capable employees left. But the operation was nevertheless declared a complete success. To prove it, for a dinar or two, one could buy a set of photographs of the hangings, including close-ups of still strung-up moldering faces of dead millionaires.
"Having won that battle, the Iraqis then decided to send an armed expeditionary force in the general direction of Israel, so that they might at least arrive in time to tag along behind the soon-to-be triumphant Egyptian and Syrian troops and share in the glory of the planned victory parades in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
"As troop transport was limited, it was decided the bulk of the rank and file would have to march bravely along the constantly shifting desert tracks that crossed the then roadless miles between Baghdad and Damascus.
"The trouble was the rank and file weren't too good at marching. Or even walking. Few had ever worn heavy footwear before. And certainly not the old, ill-fitting, secondhand army boots with which the recruits were outfitted from hopelessly jumbled-up piles cast off by who knows what colonial force. Many a poor date-palm lad answered the call to duty, only to be handed either two left-foot or two right-foot boots --or, if lucky enough to get one right and one left, would probably find they were of differing sizes.
"It was especially painful for the young rural folk of the Shatt-al-Arab region, where generations of treading the extremely soft mud of the river banks had led to the evolution of splayed feet. Suddenly, these poor recruits were ordered to cram their flat feet into warped, ill-fitting boots and march toward Israel with a military gait."
Happy Birthday all round!
Today Israel is celebrating its 60th anniversary. It's a magnificent achievement. Israel has grown from nothing to be a leader in so many fields. For the Jews of the Middle East, Israel was their refuge, the country which gave many of them full citizens' rights for the first time.
Point of No Return is also celebrating. It's been three years since this blog was set up (with the help of Joseph Alexander Norland) and we have clocked up almost 107,000 hits - 50,000 in the last six months. In the last five years, thanks to the Herculean efforts of the Justice for Jews from Arab Countries campaign, awareness has grown - especially among Israel's friends - of the plight of the Jews from Arab countries and Iran, and our story has penetrated the mainstream US media such as The New York Times. At the beginning of April, the US Congress adopted a resolution calling for Jewish refugees to be treated equally with Palestinian refugees. This was a major breakthrough.
In Europe it is a different story. The political and academic elites remain ignorant or in thrall to propaganda. Press and media coverage of Israel's 60 years has been distorted by the juxtaposition of the Palestinian 'nakba' alongside the story of Israel's miraculous birth - as if Israel was created at the expense of Palestinians.
Almost nothing has been said or written about the 'nakba' of almost one million Jews of the Middle East, 'ethnically cleansed' by state-sanctioned anti-Jewish decrees and their ancient communities destroyed. Tales of 'native' Palestinians evicted from their homes are invariably contrasted with the stories of Israeli 'interlopers' from Europe. Sometimes the Israelis profiled on the BBC 'came' from Yemen or Morocco, but, while no effort is usually spared to describe in graphic detail how Palestinians were expelled, there is no hint that the grandparents of Israeli Jews of Arab origin fled for their lives while the mob screamed 'Ytbah al-yahud'.
It is unfair that Israel’s quiet absorption of 600,000 of these refugees should not be news, while the grievances of an equal number of Palestinians –whose ‘refugee’ status in defiance of precedent and morality remains unquestioned 60 years on – have been kept alive and are given undue prominence.
In England, advocates of Israel's case have promoted the rights of Palestinians, in the belief - bolstered by opinion polls - that if Israel treated the Palestinians more fairly, Israel would be viewed in a more positive light. But this strategy is itself based on a one-sided and distorted understanding of the Middle East conflict in which the suffering and rights of half of Israel's Jews - victims of Arab Muslim antisemitism - are overlooked. Such distortions confirm Arab opinion in its sense of victimhood, and the prospects of peace and reconciliation recede even further.
So on this anniversary, we celebrate that much has been done, but much still remains to be done, in the name of truth and justice.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
An Iraqi Muslim at a Passover seder
An Iraqi Muslim taking part in a Passover seder in the USA finds it stirs in him memories of how Jews were regarded in his Baghdad childhood. Sarmad Ali writes in The Wall St Journal:
"A few weeks ago, I flew to Michigan to join my close friend’s family in celebrating the Jewish holiday of Passover. It was my second time going to a Seder and it again stirred memories of how Jews were regarded in Iraq in my childhood.
"The first night we had a fairly big table with a dozen people or more. My friend’s grandfather sat at the head of the table and led the readings, asking others, including me, to recite some passages from a Passover booklet. When a reference to the Euphrates River came up, I leaned over to point it out to my friend. “These are my people,” I whispered, chuckling. The reading was punctuated with jokes and questions as we went around the table telling the story of how the Jews were slaves and then left Egypt. I found that part interesting. (...)
"Before coming to New York in the summer of 2004, I had never heard of any Jewish holidays, nor had I met any Jewish people. By the time I was born, there were no Jews left in sight in Baghdad. The handful of elderly Iraqi Jews who surfaced in Baghdad after the U.S. invasion, whose stories were reported in Western media, seem to have survived in Iraq all those years either by hiding their identity or by being just too old or secular for Saddam’s government to worry about.
"The only mental images of Jews that I could think of growing up in Baghdad came from Egyptian movies; for example, about an Egyptian-trained intelligence agent who infiltrated Israel during former Egyptian president Jamal Abdel Al-Nasser’s era, or a television series that showed a synagogue with black-clad rabbis that depicted prophet Mohammed’s era in the Arab peninsula surrounded by Jews hatching conspiracies against Islam.
"When I was in college in Baghdad, my concept of Jews narrowed to Israeli soldiers carrying machine guns as shown on Iraqi news channels. During the Palestinian intifada or uprising, the Iraqi channels showed footage of Israelis killing Arabs and destroying Arab villages. Some of the footage accompanied patriotic songs about liberating Jerusalem. The Jews were portrayed as vicious people who were behind every war and catastrophe in the Middle East. Even the word yehudi, which in Iraqi dialect means a Jew, came to most frequently describe a mean and vicious person.
"In the old part of Baghdad, where I spent 25 years, my grandparents sometimes talked about how in the old times in Iraq Jews and Muslims like themselves co-existed. By “old times” they meant way before the Baath Party took power in Iraq and before the Jews were forced to leave.
"My grandfather was especially nostalgic about those old days, when people from different religious backgrounds co-existed peacefully in Iraq. He used to tell me stories about how the store around the corner from my house used to be owned by Jews or how that neighborhood’s houses with heavy old wooden doors and basements were inhabited by Jewish families before they were expelled from Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, my grandfather, who died in the mid-1990s, always referred to some neighborhoods by their old names, the ones he grew up with during the British mandate. Those names were less familiar to me and my generation. For instance, he used to say that, “so and so happened today in the Christian Quarter,” or he would ask me to go buy him cigarettes “from the Jewish Quarter.” I had no context for those names and had to ask him where they were in relation to other things.
"In Saddam’s Iraq, where I grew up and spent most of my life, even whispering words such as “Jew” or “Israel,” if not used in a derogatory way, could get a person in trouble. In fact, the only times people pronounced words such as “Jew,” “Jewish” or “Zionist” were in a demeaning sense."
Arabic website launched: The origins of the Jews
An Arabic-language website on the origins of the Jews has just been launched by the American Jewish Committee. Daniel Pipes welcomes this much needed innovation:
The website offers information about Jewish lifecycle events, holidays and religious practice. The website also contains a timeline of Jewish history, audio and graphic components, and a special section for users to submit questions. An Asl Al-Yahud staff member will answer the questions, in Arabic, allowing users to comfortably interact in their native tongue. The content was created originally in Arabic by Ephraim Gabbai, a descendent of the Iraqi Jewish community. The site is visually authentic to Middle Eastern design and highlights cultural practices shared by Muslims and Jews from Arabic-speaking nations around the globe.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Why Jewish refugees are key to Israel's legitimacy
Israel's 60th anniversary has been the occasion for special media attention but also, regrettably, the dissemination of distortions and libels. The press is guilty by omission of suppressing and inverting the truth: rather than Israel 'ethnically cleansing' the Palestinians, it is Arab states which have 'ethnically cleansed' the indigenous Jews of the Middle East.
The forgotten Jewish refugees are key to dispelling several widespread myths. These are eloquently tackled in recent articles by Barry Rubin, Maurice Harris and Ami Isseroff.
Myth: The flip-side of the creation of Israel is the dispossession of the Palestinians.
Professor Barry Rubin writes in Global Politician about an AP report by Karin Laub: "This is the modern equivalent of the blood libel, which held that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood for the Passover matzoh. But if that myth is too exotic for people remember that its “secular” equivalent was responsible for even more anti-Semitic persecution. That was the idea that any Jewish prosperity was based on the blood-sucking of Christian peasants or of society at large.
In this case, Israel is said to have murdered, ethnically cleansed and otherwise persecuted the Palestinians. Therefore, nothing it does can be good, no achievement of itself counts, and it has no right to self-defense. Obviously, such claims are often greatly diluted but nonetheless rest on this basis.
"The Laub article is a systematic restatement of this thesis. To begin with, it is extraordinarily long for an AP article, 1,724 words. If this isn’t a record for an AP dispatch, it must be up near the top. Obviously, this is a message that the AP editors are especially eager to convey: that everything Israel has is at Palestinian expense.
"That this is a lie can be explained on many levels but at least two must be presented here. First, why is this measure applied only to Israel , and certainly only to Israel on an existential basis? It is well-known, certainly, that Germany has taken responsibility for Nazi crimes, and also there are applications for reimbursement of Jewish property seized in eastern Europe during the Nazi period.
"Yet most countries are founded on expropriation, often of Jewish property. For example, Oxford University , where recently debates were conducted calling for Israel’s destruction, was started on property stolen from Jews expelled in 1290. Far more recently, many Arab states received a huge infusion of capital from the expropriation of Jewish property after Israel ’s creation. Does France ’s or Britain ’s or Belgium ’s independence day require discussion of colonial depredations? We don’t read articles that Japan ’s independence day is blighted by Chinese or Korean suffering, though the Japanese did engage in mass murder of those people. What about the fact that every country in the Western Hemisphere is based on the suffering of the indigenous natives? Or even in the case of Russia, given Czarist and Soviet behavior? In no case, however, is far worse behavior said to have poisoned any other country’s very existence."
Myth: The only fair solution is one secular, democratic state.
Maurice Harris, a Jew of Moroccan origin and a 'progressive', writes in Register- Guard (A place to call Home - registration required):
"In recent years, however, the progressive rallying cry has shifted from “End the occupation” to “Dismantle Israel,” and that’s disturbing. Often I encounter people who argue that the best solution to the conflict is for Israel to cease to exist as a Jewish homeland, and for it to be replaced by a single, secular democratic state in all of Palestine. Why would anyone be opposed to a multi-ethnic democracy, after all?
"This solution is unjust because it upholds only one set of human rights — the rights of the individual — but it denies the right of small and vulnerable peoples to safety and self-determination.
"Ask the Kosovars if they’d like to reunite with Serbia, or the Pakistanis if they’d like to return to the status of being a religious minority in a greater India. Justice for human beings involves two sets of rights: the right of the individual to be accorded full citizenship within his or her country under the rule of law, and the right of peoples — especially small and vulnerable peoples — to self-determination through collective autonomy.
"The “one-state solution” would turn the clock back to before World War II, when Jews were condemned to always be a minority group wherever they lived, and when democratic states failed to save them from mass murder.
"It’s also worth noting that the kind of multireligious secular democracy that these advocates want to see replace Israel is a type of state that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the Middle East. Their solution would create a secular democracy in the one part of the Middle East where there is a concentration of Jews, thus disempowering Jews as a group, while leaving more than 20 other states throughout the region that officially enfranchise Islam or Arab national identity as part of their constitutions."
I should add that the fall of the Ottoman empire empowered largely Sunni Muslim Arab elites, while the political rights of non-Arab Kurds, Assyrians and Berbers were ignored.
Maurice Harris continues: "This argument ignores the fact that a large percentage of the world’s Jews are not European at all. Mizrahi, or “Eastern” Jews, have lived in large numbers as minority members of Middle Eastern countries for centuries, and until recently, Mizrahi Jews made up the majority of Israel’s Jewish population. Many progressives I’ve spoken with were totally unaware that Mizrahi Jews even existed, or that most Mizrahi Jews are people of color.
"I sometimes hear the comment made that Mizrahi Jews were doing just fine under Islamic rule and had no need of a state of their own. The truth is that while Jews fared better overall historically under Islamic rule than Christian rule, they still faced periodic pogroms, expulsions, special taxes, and other forms of religious humiliation and persecution under Islam.
"And like their European brethren, Mizrahi Jews also faced potential annihilation during World War II. For example, when the Nazis conquered Morocco, they deported several thousand Jews to rural concentration camps. Had the Allied invasion of Morocco taken place later than it did, Moroccan Jews may not have survived. And in 1941, the Mufti of Jerusalem, a key Palestinian leader, signed an agreement with Mussolini planning for the extermination of the Jews living in Palestine should the Axis forces defeat the British there.
"In fairness, there were also heroic Muslims who took great risks to protect Jews from the Nazis. But the overall condition of Mizrahi Jews was precarious and disempowered. As in Christian Europe, Jewish safety and survival under Muslim rule ultimately depended on the good will of the leaders of the moment. After 1948, Islamic governments began persecuting Mizrahi Jews sharply, and most of them fled. More than 800,000 Jews, including my grandparents and mother, became refugees, most resettling in Israel. These refugees are rarely mentioned in the Israeli-Palestinian debate."
So Jews deserve a homeland. Why does it have to be in Palestine?"Jews are not a foreign infection in the Middle East," writes Maurice Harris. " Jews are an unusual people in that we’ve been spread out thinly in many parts of the world, where we’ve lived continuously for centuries. The Mizrahi part of our population is indigenous to the Middle East, and the rest of our people have deep roots there. Except for deserted places, every place in the world is somebody’s home, so sending Jews to have a homeland outside of Palestine would still have created issues of conflict and compromise with some native population. Palestine was the only part of the world where Jews had an historical connection.
Myth: The Palestinian refugee problem can only be solved when the Arab-Israeli conflict is solved.
Ami Isseroff of the Zionation blog sets the Palestinian refugees issue in context: "Along with about 700,000 Arab Palestinian refugees, the war instigated by the Arab states in 1948 eventually created about a million Jewish refugees. A few were Palestinian refugees thrown out of Jerusalem and Hebron and Kfar Etzion. The others were Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim countries. Yet there is no Jewish refugee problem, because all those refugees were absorbed into Israel or the United States or other countries. They did not wait for a solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict, the coming of the Messiah, the perfection of the unified field theory, the demonstration of the Higgs boson or any other such wished-for but unlikely event.
"Likewise, there is no problem of Indian or Pakistani refugees any more, though the creation of India and Pakistan in 1947 generated millions of refugees. In fact, there is no conflict that has generated permanent refugees. The reluctance of the Arab states to seek a humanitarian solution for the Palestinian Arab refugee problem is understandable. They want to use the problem, and the misery of the refugees, as a weapon in the war against Israel. That does not explain the silence of everyone else, from Israeli government spokespersons, to those with genuine humanitarian concerns for the refugees, to peace groups like the J Street lobby, to US presidential hopefuls. All of the economic aid that the quartet is showering on the Palestinian Authority will avail nothing, as long as the horrendous pockets of misery in the camps are sustained."