Arabic TV pioneer Salim Fattal dies on Farhud anniversary

Point of No Return is deeply saddened to report the death of Salim Fattal in Israel at the age of 87. A writer, film director and pioneer of Arabic broadcasting in Israel, his passing comes 76 years to the day since the outbreak of the Farhud pogrom against the Jews of Iraq, an event he did so much to document.

Salim Fattal z''l: broke down while recalling murder of his uncle in the Farhud


Brought up by his widowed mother in the old Baghdad quarter of Tatran, Fattal provided a corrective in his memoir, In the Alleys of Baghdad, to the nostalgia of Jews from prosperous families. His autobiography  records a childhood of deprivation and tragedy. Fattal joined the Iraqi communist party but had to leave Iraq owing to persecution. In his later years, Fattal devoted much energy to fighting revisionist accounts of Jewish-Arab coexistence which downplayed antisemitism in Arab countries 'to flatter'.

 Fattal's uncle Meir, together with his business partner Nahum, were murdered on the first day of the pogrom on Shavuot 1941. Their bodies were never found.  Giving his testimony in 2016 on the 75th anniversary of the Farhud, Fattal choked back his tears when he recalled his mother's words:   Only when I arrived in Israel could I talk about Meir without crying."

In the 1960s Fattal interviewed 100 survivors for a TV documentary series he made on the Farhud.   In 2016 he recorded this clip for JIMENA on the causes of the 1941 Farhud.

One arrival in Israel, he found work as an Arabic-speaking radio announcer, but his communist past caught up with him and he lost the job. He tried several other career paths, and each time he was fired for his past political beliefs.

“I came to the conclusion it’s better to work in a laboratory with mice,” he told a Jewish News of northern California reporter.

In time he earned a degree in biology and a master’s degree in Islamic civilisation and Arabic literature. In 1962 he returned to Arabic-language broadcasting, first in radio and later in TV.

As director of Israel's Arabic broadcasting service, Fattal had to fill three hours of airtime a day. On Fridays, he instituted the Arabic movie, screening bootlegged copies of Egyptian films. The slot became extremely popular, not just among Arab viewers, but Jewish Israelis. In 1968 he created a show called “Sammy & Susu,” one of the  most watched Arabic children’s programmes of the time. He also acquired programs from the BBC and American networks, all subtitled in Hebrew and Arabic.

But the defining event of his life remained the Farhud, which he vividly recalled as a boy of 11 in his memoirs.  His family decided to bribe a policeman to protect them from the mob.

"We could see them right under our noses and if they had decided to attack us then, no one could have stopped them as it was very easy for the rioters to move from roof to roof. So we called our armed policeman from outside and begged him to fire a few bullets in the air to scare them away. Our policeman insisted on more payment and my Uncle Naim argued that we had already paid him generously. But our policeman kept repeating: 'How much will you pay?' while our situation was getting more and more threatening by the minute. Finally they agreed upon half a dinar per bullet. Had he refused, we would have taken his gun. The policeman fired two shots and paused and then two more shots, until he saw the rioters move away."

Salim Fattal's funeral will take place on 1 June at 13:00 Israel time at the Nes Harim cemetery. Israel 's Channel 10 will show episodes of Farhud Stories by Salim Fattal at 14.15 on 2 June,  on Motzae Shabbat on 3 June and on 10 June.