With thanks: Hilary, Michelle and Lily
Calling all Maserati Jews.
Tomorrow night the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Committee (SPSC) will be telling the truth about you – Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
(Maserati Jews? That’s how Annie Robbins, editor-at-large of the anti-Zionist blog Mondoweiss, in her infinite wisdom, calls Mizrahi Jews. Or does she mean Masorti Jews? Or a combination of the two. Anyway, you know who you are. You’ re not the Aston Martin and Ferrari Jews! Despite all your valiant attempts to keep up flashy appearances, you’re the ‘marginalised and invisible Jews of colour’).
The SPSC is visibly rattled by an episode that took place last May and is striving to do something about it. According to (another SPSC activist) Mick Napier:
“Scottish Government Minister Humza Yousaf
spoke to a meeting in Glasgow in May of this year. The Jewish Telegraph
reported that Zionists ‘informed’ him that “Israel’s War of Independence
had created around 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries”
and that “Mr Yousaf…admitted that he had been unaware that there were
so many Jewish refugees in 1948”.
Napier goes on:
“The Zionist claim conceals what Ben
Gurion called “cruel Zionism”, the violent effort by the Zionist
underground in Iraq and Egypt to force the exodus of Jews who were
proving resistant to the lure of Zionism. Thirty five years after Marion
Woolfson treated this subject, Zionists still make strenuous efforts to
keep the history inaccessible. This will be one of the themes discussed
in Glasgow on Wednesday night at the Commemorationof Marion Woolfson’s
life and work, dedicated to the debunking of perncious (sic) Zionist myths.
Come along.”
Marion Woolfson, who died exactly two years ago, wrote a book called Prophets of Babylon: Jews in the Arab World.
Point of No Return sought a copy of Woolfson’s magnum opus, but was not willing to shell out over £2,000 for the only new copy still available on this planet at Amazon.
We can guess the gist of it. In her book Woolfson blames Zionism itself for causing the mass exodus of Jews from Arab countries. Until Zionism brutally intervened, Jews were happily and peacefully coexisting with Muslims.
Marion Woolfson is in good anti-Zionist company. In his book The Gun & the Olive Branch, David Hirst describes
in detail covert Israeli operations to scare Iraqi and Egyptian Jews
into fleeing their homes for the “sanctuary” of Israel. Wilbur Crane
Eveland, a former CIA operative, wrote about the ‘Zionist crimes’
against Arab Jews in Iraq (Feuerlicht, The Fate of the Jews, 231).
The late Marion Woolfson
The writings of the disaffected Iraqi Jew Naeem Giladiare frequently invoked to support this myth.
The
Egyptian bombs of 1954 were indeed the work of a pro-Zionist group, but
there is no causal link with the exodus of 25,000 Jews two years
later.
In the Iraqi case no one will ever know for certain who planted
bombs in 1950 -51, but three of the five episodes occurred after the
vast majority of the Jews had already left or were leaving – and caused
no casualties. The Israeli ‘new’ historian Tom Segev has produced evidence blaming the only fatal bombing on Iraqi nationalists. In his book Une si longue presence,
Nathan Weinstock makes the point that only the Iraqi police possessed
the no. 36 high potential grenades used in the bombings. Besides, the
two Zionist ‘culprits’ executed in January 1952, whose confessions were
extracted under torture, were never accused of the fatal bombing of 14
January 1951.
In any case undue focus on the ‘bombs’ distracts from
the overwhelming evidence of official antisemitism in Arab countries,
and does not explain the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Jews from Yemen,
Syria, Libya and other countries.
If any of you Maserati Jews happen to live in Glasgow, please attend the SPSC event tomorrow night. Don’t make the history inaccessible. This is your chance to acquaint the audience with the truth. You might mention the Farhud, the 1941 pogrom in which almost 200 Iraqi Jews were murdered. You might utter the word dhimmi. You might refer to the Arab League plan to persecute their Jewish citizens before the establishment of Israel. Or you might direct your listeners to this blog….
