The dark side of Abe Hayeem, Iraqi Jew

Over at The Guardian, Abe Hayeem, an architect and member of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, has been busy taking the glitz off the celebrations for Tel Aviv's hundreth anniversary by rewriting its history as a dark tale of colonialism and conquest.

He disingenuously omits a key reason for the founding and growth of Tel Aviv: Jews wished to escape the predominantly Arab city of Jaffa. Nowhere does he refer to the Jaffa Riots, when an Arab mob killed dozens of Jaffa's Jewish residents. Thereafter many Jews left Jaffa for Tel Aviv.

The irony that Abe Hayeem comes from a family of Iraq Jews, themselves, 'ethnically cleansed' from their homeland, has not escaped commenters:

Cynosarge:

Perhaps next week you will write an article condemning the mistreatment and expropriation of the Jews of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt ....

And perhaps pigs might fly.

If the Arab regimes had not driven out their Jewish populations, then there might not have been the same need for Israel to house them all.

And Tom Wonacott comments:

Having noted that you are a Jew from Iraq which numbered in 1948 about 120,000, would you care to discuss why the Arabs in Iraq (and everywhere else in the Middle East) chose to persecute, harass and evict the Jews? Today, fewer than 100 Jews remain in Iraq. What had the Jews in Iraq done to deserve being run off from their homes, and their possessions confiscated? Did any Arab take the time to ask these Jews even if they were Zionist? I know that this is off topic to a "peace activist" interested in the "occupation", but you are the one discussing the "dark secrets" of Tel Aviv. What about the dark secrets of the Arab world? How about your own family? Certainly, your family history would be interesting on this subject. The Arabs held all Jews at "gunpoint" to discourage the creation of a Jewish state as the quotes below so obviously show. Maybe as a non Zionist(?) Jew, you feel that the Arabs had every right to blame all Jews for the creation of Israel?:

November 24, 1947 In a key address to the Political Committee of the U.N. General Assembly on the morning of November 24, 1947, just five days before that body voted on the partician plan for Palestine, Heykal Pasha, an Egyptian delegate, made the following statement: The United Nations ... should not lose sight of the fact that the proposed solution might endanger a million Jews living in the Moslem countries. ... If the United Nations decided to partition Palestine they might be responsible for very grave disorders and for the massacre of a large number of Jews.

November 24, 1947 In an afternoon session of the Political Committee of the U.N. General Assembly on November 24, 1947, the Palestinian delegate to the UN, Jamal Husseini, representing the Arab Higher Committee of Palestine to the UN General Assembly, made the following threat:

"It should be remembered that there were as many Jews in the Arab world as there are in Palestine whose positions might become very precarious. November 28, 1947 Iraq's Foreign Minister Fadil Jamali, at the 126th Plenary Meeting of the UN General Assembly stated: "Not only the uprising of the Arabs in Palestine is to be expected but the masses in the Arab world cannot be restrained. The Arab-Jewish relationship in the Arab world will greatly deteriorate.

I would be interested in your comments on this subject.

Sadly, Abe Hayeem's reply betrays a woeful ignorance of why his own family was forced out of Iraq, recycling the old propaganda myths that the community was forced out by Zionist bombs, and quoting Rachel Shabi's theory that Jews and Muslims coexisted in perfect harmony until those evil European colonialists forced the Iraqi Jews to live under their yoke in Israel. Both myths have been debunked here and here. See also here.