Lyn Julius – www.israelhayom.com https://www.israelhayom.com israelhayom english website Thu, 29 Dec 2022 09:07:33 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.2 https://www.israelhayom.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/cropped-G_rTskDu_400x400-32x32.jpg Lyn Julius – www.israelhayom.com https://www.israelhayom.com 32 32 Making sense of the great Mizrahi exodus https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/making-sense-of-the-great-mizrahi-exodus/ Thu, 29 Dec 2022 09:07:33 +0000 https://www.israelhayom.com/?post_type=opinions&p=862703   Sixty years ago, Algeria declared its independence from France after a bloody war that is thought to have claimed over a million lives. In the course of throwing off the French colonial yoke, Algeria divested itself of 800,000 "white settlers" or pieds noirs. But along with the settlers went 130,000 native Algerian Jews. Follow […]

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Sixty years ago, Algeria declared its independence from France after a bloody war that is thought to have claimed over a million lives. In the course of throwing off the French colonial yoke, Algeria divested itself of 800,000 "white settlers" or pieds noirs. But along with the settlers went 130,000 native Algerian Jews.

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There was a reason for this: Within a year of independence, it was clear that there would be no place for non-Muslims in the new Algeria. Indeed, the country's constitution stipulated that only those with a Muslim father or grandfather could acquire Algerian citizenship.

The Jewish refugees, who held French citizenship, were "repatriated" to France, where they had never lived. One of them was Shmuel Trigano, then 14-years-old. Within two days and with two suitcases in hand, his life changed forever. Uprooted from the only home he had ever known, he was left permanently scarred.

However, it was only relatively recently, when he saw Palestinians brandishing the keys to homes they had left in 1948, that Trigano realized there was a political dimension to his trauma.

"We also had keys," he says of the 900,000 Jews forced to flee Arab countries. "But we were too modest. We did not make claims – and because we were silent, we allowed a false narrative to fill the vacuum."

In order to counter what he calls a massive distortion of the facts, Trigano set about applying the tools of his trade as a professor of sociology. He constructed a conceptual framework to make sense of the post-1940s Jewish exodus from 10 Arab countries over a period of 30 years.

As Trigano points out, the words we use to describe this event lack rigor. For example, the expression "forgotten exodus" is often employed to describe this cataclysmic displacement. But forgotten by whom? Certainly not by the people who were displaced. "Liquidation" or "ethnic cleansing" are more accurate than the passive term "exodus," Trigano suggests.

The history of this period has still not been properly written, but Trigano has made a start by editing a book, La fin du Judaïsme en terres d'Islam, that assembles data accumulated by 10 specialist historians.

For centuries, Jews were, along with Armenians and Greeks, a subject, second-class dhimmi people living under Muslim domination, principally in the Ottoman Empire. But after the Arab defeat in Israel's 1948 War of Independence, that oppression descended into outright ethnic cleansing.

This ethnic cleansing took two forms: Exclusion, a "softer" form of oppression, in places such as Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon; and expulsion from places like Egypt, Iraq and Libya.

Trigano identifies several factors that afflicted all of these Jewish communities at various times: Denationalization (denial or withdrawal of citizenship), isolation (denial of passports and travel bans), sequestration, legal discrimination (Arabization, the state takeover of Jewish communal bodies), socioeconomic discrimination (forced business partnerships with Muslims and boycotts), dispossession (extortion, freezing of bank accounts, ransoms and seizures) and violence (riots and arrests on spurious grounds). All these measures recalled the statut des juifs, the set of discriminatory laws imposed by the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in North Africa during World War II.

The antisemitic nature of the measures taken by Arab states is clear for all to see: Whatever their political opinions, all Jews were punished for the "crime" of Zionism. According to Trigano, this collective punishment was derived from the antisemitic myth of the individual Jew as someone who hides behind his own emancipation in order to exercise secret power and control.

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Although the Jews of then-Palestine suffered pogroms instigated by the Palestinian mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and were targeted for extermination in the 1948 war, the facts have been turned on their head to suggest that the losing Arab side was targeted for ethnic cleansing.

According to Professor Trigano, the problem is that Israel has failed to speak the truth, allowing free rein to historical distortion and propaganda, to the extent that a perverse resolution condemning Israel as an "apartheid" state has been proposed in the French parliament.

Zionism is blamed for the plight of the Jews, and too many people believe in the myth of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs before the establishment of Israel. Unfortunately, there has also been a tendency among Jews to gloss over inconvenient facts or sugarcoat the history of relations between the two groups.

Have the Abraham Accords altered the situation? The Accords must be celebrated, Trigano says, but not at the expense of history and memory.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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To combat Holocaust denial, call out Arab antisemitism https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/to-combat-holocaust-denial-call-out-arab-antisemitism/ Thu, 22 Apr 2021 14:30:19 +0000 https://www.israelhayom.com/?post_type=opinions&p=616013   The walls of Holocaust denial are crumbling, wrote Washington Institute for Near East Policy executive director Robert Satloff earlier this month. We are seeing the green shoots begin to sprout that he personally had helped seed to combat Holocaust denial in the Arab world. Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter Since Satloff published […]

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The walls of Holocaust denial are crumbling, wrote Washington Institute for Near East Policy executive director Robert Satloff earlier this month. We are seeing the green shoots begin to sprout that he personally had helped seed to combat Holocaust denial in the Arab world.

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Since Satloff published his book Among the Righteous in 2006, calling for an awareness that Arabs were bystanders, perpetrators and also rescuers in the Holocaust in North Africa, there has been an explosion of academic research; Emiratis and Saudis have visited Auschwitz; and Holocaust denial has been condemned by Morocco.

Change may be painfully slow but is to be applauded and must give us hope for a better future.

On the same day that Satloff published the above blog, however, three broadcasts on official Palestinian Authority TV indicated that Holocaust distortion and denial are still very much alive. These shows charged that Jews had betrayed "the warm Palestinian welcome" given to them as refugees, called Hebron a Nazi-style ghetto and equated Israeli leaders with Nazis.

Despite Satloff's strenuous efforts to the contrary, his campaign still has the unfortunate side-effect of projecting the Holocaust as a European story. The complicity of key Arab figures in the Nazis' extermination project, such as "leader of the Arab world" Haj Amin al-Husseini, is barely touched upon in Among the Righteous.

The mufti broadcast virulent anti-Jewish propaganda from Berlin, where he and dozens of other Arab Nazis were Hitler's guests. He was a willing party to the "final solution." For political reasons, he was never tried for his war crimes, which entailed sending 20,000 Jews to their deaths, and massacres perpetrated in Yugoslavia by the SS units he established.

The Palestinian leadership has never repudiated the eliminationist antisemitism spearheaded by the wartime mufti, who concocted a deadly blend of Koranic anti-Jewish prejudice and antisemitic conspiracy theories imported from Europe. Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas himself wrote a PhD thesis minimizing the Holocaust.

Pan-Arabism attempted to coalesce the Arab world against Communism, the West and Zionism. In the 1930s, there arose Arab parties founded on the Nazi model and paramilitary "shirt" groups emulating the Nazi Brown and Black Shirts. When it looked like the Nazis would win the war, Arabs were not shy to show their overwhelming support for the Germans.

For two months in 1941, Iraq had a pro-Nazi government and declared war on the British. Virulent Nazi propaganda and incitement were an important factor in the massacre of hundreds of Jews known as the  Farhud. Yet Satloff views this event stripped of its Nazi significance, as just another pogrom among others that erupted from time to time in the Arab world.

Egged on by the mufti to declare war on the fledgling State of Israel, Abdul Rahman Azzam, the Arab League's first secretary-general, threatened that the establishment of a Jewish state would lead to a "war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades." A genocide would have been likely if the Arab side won.

After the war, Nazi war criminals escaped justice by fleeing to Syria and Egypt, and there continued the Nazis' antisemitic campaign. In spite of the signing of the Abraham Accords, antisemitism is rampant even in countries that have peace treaties with Israel. Egypt, for example, where Islamism – whose legacy of terrorism and anti-Jewish hatred goes back to the Nazi era – still has much support among the Arab rank and file.

As a result of Palestinians' failure to defeat Israel militarily or through terrorism, their intention to commit genocide has morphed into politicide, through the demand of the "right of return" of Palestinian "refugees" to Israel proper, "lawfare"' to delegitimize Israel in international fora and the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

Satloff's strategy has been to create empathy among Arabs by attempting to find Muslims who saved Jews. But this approach has its pitfalls: Holocaust education has been manipulated to confirm Palestinians in their victimhood. Spurious, morally equivalent comparisons are made between the Nazi victimization of the Jews and the "Nazi-like" behavior of Israelis towards Palestinians.

A Holocaust museum set up in Nazareth by Khaled Mahamed, an Arab Israeli, was initially praised by Yad Vashem until he displayed a Palestinian flag, photos and posters of the so-called nakba, the  "catastrophe" of the exodus of Palestinian refugees from Israel in 1948. Yad Vashem condemned Mahamed for "conflating the Holocaust with other events and contributing to the misappropriation of the Holocaust as a tool against Israel."

The Anti-Defamation League spokesman in Israel pronounced himself "troubled" that Palestinians were said to be paying the price for European guilt over the Holocaust.

Professor Mohammed Dajani won praise as one of the few Palestinians to campaign against Holocaust denial. He led a group of students from Al-Quds University on a visit to Auschwitz in 2014. Consequently, he found himself in hot water with his own people, and promptly lost his job; he went to work for Satloff at the Washington Institute.

On a previous visit to Auschwitz, however, he had said: "We do not compare the nakba and the Holocaust as if the atrocities that occurred are on the same level." But he made just such a comparison when he stated: "I feel we must have empathy for each other, in the sense that I, as a Palestinian, must understand what the Holocaust meant to a Jew and a Jew must understand what the nakba is to a Palestinian."

The best way to prevent distortion and manipulation is to raise awareness of antisemitism in the Arabs' own backyard – eliminationism against Israel and the Jewish nakba of almost a million Jews from the Arab world, who now comprise more than half of Israel's Jewish population. The Jewish nakba has been thought of as collateral damage of the Arab failure to destroy Israel, yet we know that the Arab League drafted a plan to persecute and dispossess their Jewish citizens before a single Palestinian refugee had fled Israel.

The League states applied Nuremberg-style laws, criminalizing Zionism, freezing Jewish bank accounts, instituting quotas and imposing restrictions on jobs and movement.

The path to true reconciliation surely lies in a balanced view of history, where Jewish victims of Arab antisemitism are allowed to tell their stories, and Arab states are called to account for their own actions.

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Restoring synagogues means never having to say you're sorry https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/restoring-synagogues-means-never-having-to-say-youre-sorry/ Thu, 16 Jan 2020 07:05:11 +0000 https://www.israelhayom.com/?post_type=opinions&p=457243 To much fanfare last week, the largest synagogue in the Middle East was reopened in Alexandria, Egypt. Some 300 guests, including Egyptian Antiquities and Tourism Minister Khaled al-Anany, were on hand for the festive occasion. The event made headlines from the United Kingdom to China – but only The Jerusalem Post pointed out that only […]

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To much fanfare last week, the largest synagogue in the Middle East was reopened in Alexandria, Egypt. Some 300 guests, including Egyptian Antiquities and Tourism Minister Khaled al-Anany, were on hand for the festive occasion.

The event made headlines from the United Kingdom to China – but only The Jerusalem Post pointed out that only three Jews were in attendance.

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Eight Jews now live in a country that once boasted 80,000 to 100,000. (Egyptian-born Jews and Israeli diplomats are planning their own celebration next month, but these visitors will be returning to their homes in Israel, Europe and the United States after the party.)

The Eliyahu Hanavi synagogue will never again host Jewish weddings or bar mitzvahs, nor will it ever muster a minyan. It will be no more than a museum to an extinct community and a perfunctory tourist stop.

The media coverage of the event was typical of a trend hailing the restoration of Jewish buildings in countries with no more than a handful of Jews as somehow indicative of pluralism and tolerance in the Arab world.

Even Jews fall for the fantasy, grateful for the slightest acknowledgment that members of the Tribe once lived in these countries.

"I'm very proud of what my country has done, and it symbolizes living together – today, there is no difference between Egyptian Muslim, Christian, and Egyptian Jew," gushed Magda Haroun, leader of the Cairo "community" of two Jews. "It is a recognition that we have always been here and that we have contributed to a lot of things, just like any other Egyptians. "

No journalist covering the restoration story bothered to ask why a once-glorious community has been reduced to eight souls in Cairo and Alexandria, the youngest of whom (Magda herself) is 67.

"Nearly all left after the founding of Israel in 1948 and during subsequent conflicts between the two countries," The London Times reported. (Yet Egypt also divested itself of other non-Egyptians: Greeks, Italians, Maltese, Armenians.)

Not a word about the proximate causes of the Jewish exodus: bombings of Cairo's Jewish quarter, overnight expulsions, months and years spent in putrid jails for no other crime than being Jewish, torture and rape of Jews taken prisoner in 1967 as "Israeli POWs."

The Egyptian restorers did a magnificent job at Eliyahu Hanavi, even laying a glass floor over the remains of an earlier synagogue they discovered during their work. The Antiquities and Tourism Ministry undertook the $4 million project following the collapse of part of the women's gallery and a staircase three years ago.

Recently Egyptian President Abdul Fattah el-Sisi declared his intention to spend $71 million on restoring Jewish sites, but the brief was hurriedly redefined to incorporate the repair of Coptic, Islamic, Pharaonic and Roman, as well as Jewish sites, lest anyone ask why so many of this country's scarce resources be funneled into preserving the heritage of its erstwhile enemies.

It is surely better to preserve Jewish heritage sites in Arab lands than to let them crumble into disuse or be converted to other purposes, as has happened right across the Arab world. But el-Sisi wants to show that he is in control. He turned down outside offers of help and funding from Jewish individuals and organizations. If Jews come back to live in Egypt, he has promised, Egypt will build synagogues for them.

Jewish communal property in Egypt is viewed as part of the national heritage. The Egyptian government alone is responsible, as it is for the preservation of Tutankhamen's tomb. No longer will Jews have any input, and Egypt's last links with its exiled Jews will be severed.

This policy of nationalization extends to the creeping appropriation of movable property more than a century old, such as Torah scrolls and libraries. These are now being registered as "protected."

But no Jewish scribe or archivist remains in Egypt to curate and maintain these treasures. Most galling of all, the communal records, essential to establishing a Jew's identity wherever he may be in the world, have been declared antiquities. They remain out of reach; Egyptian Jews are not even able to get photocopies.

Four million dollars is a small price to pay for ethnic cleansing. There is never any need to apologize. Restore a few buildings abandoned by their owners and pocket the tourist revenues. It's a win-win situation.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org

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Arab states are claiming the heritage of their expelled Jews https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/arab-states-are-claiming-the-heritage-of-their-expelled-jews/ Sun, 01 Dec 2019 09:14:51 +0000 https://www.israelhayom.com/?post_type=opinions&p=439983 On or around Nov. 30, Jewish communities around the world will be holding events to remember the mass exodus of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and Iran. Almost a million people were displaced in the past 50 years, leaving billions of dollars' worth of property behind. Not only have Arab governments never compensated Jews for […]

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On or around Nov. 30, Jewish communities around the world will be holding events to remember the mass exodus of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and Iran. Almost a million people were displaced in the past 50 years, leaving billions of dollars' worth of property behind.

Not only have Arab governments never compensated Jews for their stolen homes and businesses, they are waging a pernicious campaign to claim communal property and Jewish heritage as their national patrimony.

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Synagogues can't be moved and clearly, it is better for Arab states to preserve them as memorials to an extinct community than not at all. However, these states are also declaring Torah scrolls, communal archives and books to be part of their cultural heritage.

For instance, the Egyptian government claims that all Torah scrolls and Jewish archives, libraries, communal registers and any movable property over 100 years old are "Egyptian antiquities." However, Jews consider Torah scrolls their exclusive property. It is forbidden to buy or sell them. Fleeing Jews have often prioritized scrolls and books over their personal possessions.

What does international law have to say? The Hague Convention of 1954 "protecting cultural property in conflict" was brought in to stop the massive looting that has always occurred in war and specifically during World War II. There is also the postcolonial understanding that the new states that emerged in the 20th century have ownership of their own cultural heritage; the days when Britain could ship the Elgin Marbles from Greece, or Napoleon could plunder ancient Egyptian obelisks as "war booty," are over.

In Egypt, registers of births, marriages and deaths of Jews from Alexandria and Cairo dating back to the middle of the 19th century were once kept in the two main synagogues in each city. But in 2016, government officials took away the registers to be stored in the Egyptian National Archives.

Egyptian Jews living abroad cannot even obtain photocopies of certificates, often the only formal Jewish identification Egyptian Jews have to prove lineage or identity for burial or marriage. Repeated efforts since 2005 to intercede with the Egyptian authorities have come to nothing.

Egyptian government policy has been backed by the tiny remnant of the country's Jewish community. Its leader, Magda Haroun, intends to leave the community's assets to the government. She has even suggested that two paintings in the Louvre once owned by an Egyptian Jew should find their way back to Egypt.

Under the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, thousands of books, manuscripts, and other documents were seized from Jewish homes, schools and synagogues and stored at the headquarters of Iraq's secret service in Baghdad. In 2003, the archive was discovered in the flooded basement after the building was bombed by the United States.

The Americans shipped the archive to Washington, DC, for restoration and hastily signed a diplomatic agreement promising to return the material to the Iraqi government. The United States spent over $3 million to restore and digitize the archive, which has since been exhibited across the country. The collection includes a Hebrew Bible with commentaries from 1568, a Babylonian Talmud from 1793 and an 1815 version of the Jewish mystical text Zohar, as well as more mundane objects such as school reports and a Baghdad telephone book.

Although tens of thousands of Iraqi documents were shipped to the United States, the Iraqi government has only formalized its claim to the 2,700 books and 30,000 documents of the water-stained archive, which it claims are the country's "precious cultural heritage," a last emotional link with its ancient Jewish community and a reminder of Iraq's former diversity.

The Iraqi Jewish community in exile has been waging a bitter battle to recover the collection and prevent it from being sent back to Iraq. They say that to return the archive, which was seized from Jewish community offices, schools and synagogues would be like returning property looted by the Nazis to Germany.

The Iraqi and Egyptian cases are symptomatic of a larger problem. Since 2004, the United States has been bound by law to impose import restrictions on archaeological and ethnological material that constitutes a country's cultural heritage and has signed Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) to this effect with Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and Libya. In January 2018, the International Council of Museums released a "Red List" for Yemen aimed at protecting Hebrew manuscripts and Torah finials from leaving the country. All but 50 Jews have fled the country, taking what possessions they could, but even these ultimately could be returned to Yemen.

"These MOUs claim to be about [stopping] looting, but their broad scope and limited evidence of success suggests their real impact is providing a legal vehicle to legitimize foreign confiscations and wrongful ownership claims. … The MOUs are based on a flawed premise. It is the heritage and patrimony of 850,000 indigenous Jews who fled their homes and property under duress," said Sarah Levin of the California-based Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA).

It is understandable that the international community should wish to prevent the looting and smuggling of ancient artifacts and their sale on the international art market. That is how Islamic State financed much of its conquest of northern Iraq and Syria. But there is a distinction between theft for financial gain, and legitimate salvage of Torah scrolls or books taken by fleeing Jews to be used for prayer.

Eight Sumerian artifacts sold to the British Museum were recently sent back to Baghdad. But the Iraqi Jewish archive does not belong to some long-extinct civilization – some of the owners are still alive.

International law is based on the outmoded assumption of territorial sovereignty. It needs updating, specifically to resolve the tug-of-war between minority and national heritage, where the minority has been persecuted and displaced.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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The myth of the 'Arab Jew' https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/the-myth-of-the-arab-jew/ Tue, 27 Aug 2019 05:17:11 +0000 https://www.israelhayom.com/?post_type=opinions&p=409977 Anyone who keeps abreast of the growing academic field of Mizrahi/Sephardic studies (Mizrahi: oriental, from the Middle East; Sephardic: originating in pre-Inquisition Spain) cannot help noticing that the vast majority of papers focus on the purported "discrimination" or "racism" of the Ashkenazi establishment. Typical is this paper by one Sarah Louden, "Israeli Nationalism: the Constructs […]

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Anyone who keeps abreast of the growing academic field of Mizrahi/Sephardic studies (Mizrahi: oriental, from the Middle East; Sephardic: originating in pre-Inquisition Spain) cannot help noticing that the vast majority of papers focus on the purported "discrimination" or "racism" of the Ashkenazi establishment.

Typical is this paper by one Sarah Louden, "Israeli Nationalism: the Constructs of Zionism and its Effect on Inter-Jewish Racism, Politics, and Radical Discourse." It has 455 views, more than any other paper in its genre. It pulls no punches in attacking the "racism" of Zionism. Its sources are almost entirely Mizrahi anti-Zionists like Ella Shohat.

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Shohat, a professor at New York University, made her name by applying Edward Said's theory of Orientalism to Israel, claiming that both Mizrahi Jews and the Arabs are victims of the West (Ashkenazim).

Mizrahi Jews and Arabs are assumed to have more in common with each other than Jews from the East have with Jews from the West. The former, Shohat and her ilk contend, were "torn away" from their comfortable "Arab" environment by Zionism and colonialism and turned into involuntary enemies.

These academics widely assume that Mizrahi Jews in Israel support the Likud and right-wing parties to "get their own back" against the Labor-dominated Ashkenazi establishment.

But Louden and those like her hardly ever mention the elephant in the room: The subliminal memory of Arab and Muslim persecution suffered by parents and grandparents driven from the Arab world.

Is it not plausible that Mizrahi Jews view the rocket attacks and bombings afflicting Israel as just the latest chapter in a long history of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism? That they vote Likud because they believe that only the Right can deliver the necessary tough response?

Furthermore, Western academics almost invariably use the expression "Arab Jew." The term figures in the title of a book by Professor Sasson Somekh: "The Last Arab Jew."

Somekh died last week. Far-left media sites proceeded to mourn him as an "Arab Jew."

Born in Baghdad in 1933, Somekh published two autobiographies. The first, "Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew," was about his life in Iraq, and the second, "Life After Baghdad: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew in Israel," about his life in the Jewish state.

Somekh was the guru of Arabic literature studies at Tel Aviv University and spent two years in Cairo, where he became a close friend of the Egyptian author and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, whose work Somekh claimed to have introduced to a wider audience.

Some of Somekh's disciples in the Arabic Literature Department of Tel Aviv University were anti-Zionists in the Shohat mold, but Somekh never thought of himself as an Arab Jew in their terms.

He told Almog Behar, one of his former students: "The tendency among leading Mizrahi intellectuals of the younger generation to speak of themselves as Arab Jews is first and foremost a political position, that is, their desire to protest sharply against the sense of discrimination that they feel has been directed at Mizrahim. They are, in fact, seeking to highlight their reluctance to be part of the Zionist existence of the state. I do not have a problem with these positions, but for me, this is not how the Arab Jewish identity is defined."

For Somekh, "Arab Jew" is a "cultural definition of a Jew who speaks Arabic and grew up in a Muslim environment." He wanted to emphasize that "his identity stemmed from his point of view as a person who grew up in an Arab culture and continues to engage with that culture."

Iraq was one of the few Arab countries where Jews took a leading role in the Arabic cultural and literary renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s.

"I am the last Arab Jew," Somekh said. "That is why I wrote 'Baghdad, Yesterday' to document the life of a Jewish Arab child. Anyone who defines himself as an Arab Jew to attack others but who does not speak Arabic … does not count as such. While I do not define myself as a Zionist, if being Zionist means all Jews should come here, I am an Israeli patriot."

In other words, Somekh saw himself not of Arab ethnicity, but as an Israeli Jew with an affinity for Arab culture.

Another professor of Iraqi origin, Reuven Snir of Haifa University, concurred: Jews who wrote literary works in Arabic in the early 20th century felt no need to declare themselves Arabs, he said.

A conference held some 10 years ago among Iraqi Jews resoundingly rejected the expression "Arab Jew" as a badge of identity. The vast majority of Jews from the Arab world have not historically identified as Arabs – in fact, many would be offended to be so labeled.

But post- and anti- Zionist academics continue to turn a deaf ear to what most Jews raised in Arab countries themselves say and feel, as long as "discrimination" against Mizrahim can serve as a useful stick with which to bash Zionism.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Challenging the myth of 'white, colonial' Israel https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/challenging-the-myth-of-white-colonial-israel/ Thu, 23 May 2019 13:34:10 +0000 https://www.israelhayom.com/?post_type=opinions&p=371171 According to the late Israeli author Amos Oz, when his father was growing up in eastern Europe, the graffiti on the walls read "Jews go back to Palestine." For centuries, Jews were considered swarthy aliens in Europe. This trend reached its tragic nadir with the mass Nazi extermination of the Jews as racial untermenschen. Nowadays, […]

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According to the late Israeli author Amos Oz, when his father was growing up in eastern Europe, the graffiti on the walls read "Jews go back to Palestine." For centuries, Jews were considered swarthy aliens in Europe. This trend reached its tragic nadir with the mass Nazi extermination of the Jews as racial untermenschen.

Nowadays, the inverse message is in evidence – not so much on walls, but in the media, on campus and in the writings of academics and journalists obsessed with identity politics. Jews are portrayed as members of a privileged and powerful elite – white Westerners who came to colonize and steal land from the "native" Palestinian people. As a result, Jews are excluded from "intersectionality" – the idea that oppressed social groups, especially in the United States, stand up for each other.

This anti-Zionist, postcolonial trend, in which Jews can never be the victims, has lately been insinuating itself into the ideology of the radical Left of the Democratic Party. Positioning Israel as a white European colonialist aggressor delegitimizes Ashkenazi Jews as interlopers. This canard denies the Levantine origin, genes, culture, religion and language of Jews from Europe and the Americas.

The sin is compounded by the erasure from the narrative of Mizrahi Jews (Jews from Arab and Muslim countries), who now form the majority of Israeli Jews. These Jews are from now-extinct communities founded long before the Arab Muslim imperialist conquest subjugated indigenous peoples to Arabization and Islam. In the 20th century, a million Mizrahi Jews were dispossessed and forced to flee as refugees.

Hen Mazzig, an Israeli activist and writer whose parents are Jews from Iraq and Tunisia, has been taking up the cudgels against this pernicious trend.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, he accuses the likes of Women's March activist Tamika Mallory, Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill and, more recently, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) of misrepresenting Israel.

The reaction from Hill was swift (his tweet has since been deleted, but is still visible on Mazzig's Facebook page). In it, he claims to be "baffled as to the basis" for Mazzig's statement that Hill has "ignored Mizrahis or the racial diversity of Israel." He then goes on to state that, "What [Mazzig] ignores, however is the racial and political project that transformed Palestinian Jews (who lived peacefully with other Palestinians) into the 20th century identity category of 'Mizrahi' as a means of detaching them from Palestinian identity."

The misconceptions lurking behind Hill's tweet merit unpacking. By clumsily referring to Mizrahim as a false Jewish component of "Palestinian" identity (it is no longer necessary to talk about the "Arab-Israeli" conflict), Lamont-Hill is purveying the notion that Mizrahim are Jewish Arabs.

It is fashionable in far-left circles to push the line that Mizrahim have been torn away from their Arab brethren by Zionism, which has prevented them from making common cause with the Palestinians. The Mizrahim allegedly suffer from a "false consciousness," alienated from their true, "Arab" selves.

Radical leftists align themselves with anti-Zionists who argue on behalf of an "Arab Jewish" identity as a way of repudiating Jewish nationalism. They presuppose that Jews were just another faith group in the Arab world, that Arabs and Mizrahi Jews are natural allies and that both are postcolonial victims of the Ashkenazim, who lured Mizrahim to Israel under false pretenses as a reservoir of cheap labor.

Israel is thus delegitimized, and to blame for ruining the harmonious relationship which supposedly prevailed between local Jews and Arabs.

The myth is easily debunked – as Mazzig points out, Jews were always inferiors in Muslim society, never equal and ever more marginalized in the post-Ottoman Arab successor states. Sporadic outbreaks of mob violence, such as the 1941 Farhud in Iraq, meant that Jewish citizens were never going to be assured of the security they deserved.

Mizrahi Jews are loyal and fervent Zionists, taking a full part in building and defending their ancestral homeland. They have stamped an unmistakably Middle Eastern identity on the Jewish state. Israel is the free and democratic expression of the self-determination of an indigenous Middle Eastern people after centuries of Arab and Muslim subjugation and colonization.

This is what social justice warriors in the West ought to be celebrating and fighting for.

This article is reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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