Why is it that a few Arab voices of moderation are out there, while Western far-leftists, in alliance with Islamists, almost all espouse extremist positions or traffic lies about Israel or Jews? Lyn Julius writes in JNS News:
“As a Palestinian who refuses to parrot our leadership’s lies, I have to say it bluntly: Telling Mizrahi Jews – Jews from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and the rest of the Arab world, that they are doing “ethnic cleansing” to us is the gaslight of the century.”
These words come not from a Jew, but from Ahmed al-Khalidi. He is a self-described “pragmatic Palestinian,” in a posting on X in mid-October that got 692,500 views.
Khalidi states bluntly what so many ‘useful idiots’ in the West ignore – that Jews did not come from Europe. Writing on ‘X’ he reminds us that communities in Babylon, Damascus and San’a’ existed for 2,500 years – or longer. They lived in the Middle East well before the Arab conquest, long before Islam. They spoke a Middle Eastern language and prayed towards Jerusalem. For millennia, Judaism has been embedded in the local culture, spawning its daughter religions of Christianity and Islam.
An Arab-Israeli influencer called Nuseir Yassin also told his five million followers on his Nas Daily Instagram page : you never hear that almost one million Jews were kicked out of Arab lands. (His message was slightly marred by the fact he called them Arabs). An AI video he made on the subject got 80,000 likes and 7.3 comments. ‘Finally someone speaking out on this taboo subject by Arab nations,’ one said.
It is Nas’s position that ‘two truths can exist at the same time’ – Palestinians were driven out of their homes – but so too were Arabic-speaking Jews forced out of their communities.
“They (the Mizrahi Jews) are as indigenous as the olive trees,” Khalidi writes. “How dare Arab leaders call them colonisers?”
“The same families who were driven from Baghdad, Aleppo and Tripoli, their homes looted, their businesses seized, citizenship revoked, synagogues burnt, fled to Israel with nothing. Yet they are “accused of committing the same crime that was done to them.”
Jews are not settler colonials from Europe, yet liberal elites, university students and the media besotted with the Palestinian cause all appear convinced that they are. Decades of indoctrination, with little pushback from Israel, have entrenched such falsehoods.
Khalidi is not afraid to state that the real colonists are the Arabs; their occupation was ‘one of the biggest and longest in history’.
Jews are amongst the indigenous peoples of the MENA colonised by the Arabs – together with Kurds, Berbers, Yazidis, Mandaeans, Assyrians and Copts. In the seventh century, Arabs overran the Byzantine and the Persian empires, expanding across north Africa and as far as Spain and even southern France. At its height, according to Khalidi, the Arab Caliphate ruled 13 million square kilometers – larger than Rome ever dreamed of.
Persians, Berbers, Copts, Arameans, Jews, Greeks, and others came under Arab rule; languages and faiths were pushed aside as Arabic became the dominant tongue and Islam the dominant faith.
Khalidi concludes: “That was not liberation – it was occupation on a scale that reshaped entire continents.”
In fact Israel is the only de-colonisation project in the Middle East, an indigenous people which has managed to throw off the yoke of Arab and Ottoman dominance. And yet many people assume that political rights only belong to Arab Muslims.
Indeed there were high hopes at the end of WWI, with the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire, that indigenous Christian and other minorities would be given enclaves affording them special protection. The Assyrians and Kurds both expected to have autonomy, if not a homeland of their own. But only the Balfour Declaration, with its commitment for a home for the Jews, was endorsed at the 1920 San Remo conference and written into the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.
For Ahmed Khalidi the settler colonial lie is “ not just hypocrisy; it’s historical amnesia. If we truly want justice, we have to stop gaslighting our neighbors and start acknowledging that their story is Middle Eastern too. Our liberation won’t come from denying theirs.”
Why is it that there are a few Arab voices of moderation out there, while western far-leftists, in alliance with Islamists, almost all espouse extremist positions, or traffic lies about Israel or Jews?
They erase the fact that most Israeli Jews – 53 percent – are either born in Israel or were ethnically cleansed as Jewish refugees, or their descendants, from Arab or Muslim countries, and their ancient communities destroyed. This does not make Ashkenazi Jews any less ‘people of colour’. These were reviled as aliens and swarthy Levantines during their long sojourn in Europe.
The smear that Israel is a white colonial settler state relies on two false premises: it severs Jews from their Middle Eastern ethno-religious roots. It also denies that Jews are a people distinct from the diaspora in which they spent 2,000 years. Israelophobes brand Judaism a matter of faith like Christianity or Islam. They refuse to believe that Jews are distinct genetically, culturally, linguistically and historically from the populations they lived amongst.
In order to depict Zionism as a European imposter, the anti-Zionists date the rise of modern Zionism to 1882, the arrival of the Russian Jews of the first aliya. In truth, Jews never left, and through the centuries returned, albeit in small numbers and for spiritual reasons, to Eretz Israel.
It is to keep alive the memory of 850,000 Jews forced to leave Arab countries and Iran in the 20th century that organisations such as JIMENA and HARIF and synagogues and community groups around the world will be observing ‘Mizrahi Heritage Month’ this November. The Israeli Knesset designated an official day in the calendar – 30 November, it being the day after the UN Partition Plan for Palestine was passed in 1947, triggering riots across Arab countries.
History matters and we must not let the truth be drowned out by crude and dishonest sloganeering. We must keep repeating the facts. And any help from Arab members of society is welcome.
Harif’s Commemoration of the Departure and Exodus of Jews from Arab Countries and Iran will be held at JW3 in London on 20 November at 7 pm in person and online.
Jewish Moroccan activist and 
