One-stop blog on Jews from Arab and Muslim countries
and the forgotten MENA Jewish refugees

Month: June 2023

Kuntzel questions myth of ‘antisemitic backlash’ in the Arab world

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It is commonly assumed –  in fact it has become dogma in academic and political circles –  that antisemitism in Arab countries was a backlash to the creation of Israel. Now in his new book Nazis, Islamic antisemitism and the Middle East,  the German political scientist Matthias Kuntzel produces  new evidence that the 1948 war against Israel was a consequence of widespread Nazi propaganda in the Arab world. For the first time, the 1937  pamphlet Islam and Judaism constructed  a link between Muhammed’s confrontation with the Jews of Medina and the conflict in Palestine. This, coupled with six years of poisonous anti-Jewish Nazi radio propaganda beamed to the Arab world, and the rising influence of the Nazi-inspired Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, created a continuity between the Nazi war against the Jews and the Arab war against Israel. See his article in Fathom: 

Mattthias Kuntzel

Why then is the role of Nazi propaganda and Nazi policies largely ignored in debates on the roots of antisemitism in the Middle East? A plausible hypothesis is that this pattern of omission reflects a desire to protect a proposition that is accepted as dogma in many academic circles: the idea that Israel, i.e. Jews, bears sole responsibility not only for the war in 1948, but also the antisemitism in the region. Claims such as ‘The spread of antisemitism in the Arab-Islamic world is the consequence of the Palestine conflict’ are widespread.

From this paradigm, numerous Middle East experts derive mitigating circumstances for Arab antisemitism. ‘Is the fantasy-based hatred of the Jews that was and still is typical of European racists … the equivalent of the hatred felt by Arabs enraged by the occupation and/or destruction of Arab lands?’, is the rhetorical question of the British-Lebanese anti-Zionist Gilbert Achcar. ‘Arab antisemitism, in contrast to European anti-Semitism, is at least  based on a real problem, namely the marginalization of the Palestinians,’ insists German Islam researcher Jochen Müller.

This paradigm, which distinguishes between a Nazi-like European antisemitism and an ‘at least’ understandable hatred of Jews in the Middle East, hides the Nazi influence on the image of Jews held by many Muslims in the Middle East. And it has political consequences: the basic assumption that antisemitism in the Arab-Islamic world is merely a response to Israel and can therefore be downplayed as a kind of local custom is one of the foundations of German and European Middle East policy and may be one of the reasons why the latter refuses to decisively combat the Jew-hatred of, for example, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime.

It is, however, necessary to understand how strongly modern Middle East history is shaped by the aftermath of National Socialism. Only then will we be able to properly understand and adequately counter the antisemitism in this region and its echo among Muslims in Europe and address the political realities of the Middle East realistically and effectively.

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More about Matthias Kuntzel

Harif lecture by Matthias Kuntzel

 

Sandy Rashty: Pogroms and executions caused my family to flee Iraq

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Most Iraqi Jews left for Israel in the 1950s, but a few thousand still remained in the 1960s. Sandy Rashty’s family was among them, until vicious antisemitism, including the hanging of nine Jews in Baghdad’s public square, forced them to leave. Today Iraqi Jews thrive in Israel, which has always offered a safe haven. Sandy Rashty’s piece in The Spectator serves as a rebuttal to a review of Avi Shlaim’s book, alleging that ‘the Zionists’ forced the Iraqi Jews out.

Sandy Rashty: connection to Israel is strong

The country’s remaining Jews, like my family’s, held out for as long as they could until a life anywhere else – even if it meant giving up their assets, learning a new language and entering the unknown – had to be better.

With my grandfather under watch, my grandparents made the decision to keep their three youngest children with them but send the three eldest (my mum was just 13 at the time) to Israel via Turkey in 1973. For the next five years, my mum lived in a boarding school in Jerusalem, with many other children from the Middle East and north Africa. On weekends, she would visit her uncles who fled Iraq as teenagers, but now had families and jobs as businessmen, lawyers, and judges in Israel. She remembers struggling with the new language and seeing snow for the first time, all the while wondering what had happened to her parents and siblings back in Iraq.

When Holland granted Iraqi Jews refugee status, my grandparents made their way to Amsterdam with just a small suitcase. My mother moved there to be with them just before her 18th birthday, though her elder two sisters decided to stay in Israel – where they still live with my cousins, and their young Israeli families.

Similarly, my father and his family also found refuge in Holland – though some of his elder siblings had already moved to Israel. My dad fled Iraq on his 15th birthday to Iran. It was from Tehran that he found refuge in Amsterdam.

My parents had grown up together as children in Baghdad, attending the Frank Iny Jewish school in the capital. But it was in London – where both families later relocated – that they married in 1988, having me one year later.

It is impossible to separate the story of Arab Jews from the story of Israel. Where they were once discriminated against, they now thrive in Israeli society. Today, more than half of Israel’s population is made up of people of Arab Jewish descent. Yet there are those that are trying to rewrite that history. In a new book, Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab Jew, the academic Avi Shlaim, an Iraqi-born critic of Israel, claims to have uncovered evidence that Zionist groups were responsible for bombings of Jewish sites around 1950-1. It’s widely documented that Iraqi nationalist groups carried out these attacks – but either way, I have never heard anyone in the Iraqi Jewish community say it was because of these attacks they left. Instead it was the pogrom, executions, lootings and discriminatory laws that led them to believe they had to flee.

For me, the connection to Israel is strong. I have travelled there regularly since I was a child, often staying with family in the Ramat Gan (affectionately known as ‘Ramat Iraqi’) near Tel Aviv. On both sides, I have aunts, uncles and cousins who studied in Israel, raised their families, served in the Israel Defense Forces, and lost loved ones in wars and terror attacks. Their success and their pain are shared by many in the Jewish diaspora, because had our parents left at a different time or sought refuge in Israel rather than Europe or America, we would have also been ‘Israeli’.

Despite being a British Jew with a very Arab identity (especially when it comes to food, music, and my eyebrows), I am heavily invested in the future of Israel. Like my parents, who crave the protection and security it offers its Jewish people, I know that should our community ever again be threatened, there is always somewhere safe to go: a Jewish homeland.

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More about Avi Shlaim

Why won’t Tunisia normalise with Israel?

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Tunisia would appear to be a natural candidate for normalisation with Israel. However, it has witnessed a rise in antisemitic terrorism. in recent years. The Ennahda Islamist party is still very influential and the current president, Kais Saied, has made inflammatory statements about Jews and Israel. A fourth, underrated factor is that Algeria, seeking a bulwark against Moroccan claims in Western Sahara,  gives much-needed aid to Tunisia. Illuminating article by Cdr David Levy for the BESA Center (with thanks: Laurence) :

The Bardo Museum, attacked by terrorists in 2015

In the parliamentary elections of 2014, Ennahda came in second and joined a unity government led by the secular Nidaa Tounes party. As Tunisian society liberalized, the nation also saw a rise in terrorism. The Bardo Museum in Tunis and a beach resort in Sousse suffered attacks in 2015 by gunmen affiliated with the Islamic State (IS). The Tunisian Jewish community was the target of several attacks, with the el-Ghriba synagogue in Djerba targeted several times. In 2002, an Al-Qaeda operative drove a natural gas truck fitted with explosives into the synagogue, killing 19, including 16 German and French tourists. It was al-Qaeda’s first successful international attack after the September 11, 2001, attacks. The most recent attack was earlier this year when a national guard member opened fire at the synagogue, killing three of his fellow guards and two civilians.

Algerian opposition: The normalizing of relations between Maghreb states and Israel is perceived by Algiers as a threat to Algerian national security. Algeria was aligned with the Soviet Union in the Cold War while Morocco was and remains friendly with Washington. This rivalry has manifested itself in the question of the sovereignty of Western Sahara. Since 1973, Algeria has backed the Moscow-supported Polisario Front, a Western Sahara independence movement, while Rabat has claimed the territory as part of Morocco. In November of last year, Washington recognized Morocco’s claim over Western Sahara as part of a quid pro quo for Rabat’s normalization of relations with Jerusalem. If Tunisia were to normalize relations with Israel as well, Algeria would be encircled by antagonistic states that have gained access to some of the world’s best military training and hardware, an outcome greatly alarming to Algiers. As a result of these events, Algeria severed diplomatic ties with Morocco in 2021.

Algeria’s significant aid to Tunisia is often seen as an attempt to keep Tunis away from the influence of Morocco and the American-led partnership. Although Russia sympathizes with Algeria’s position and sells it weapons, it is unlikely to jeopardize its good relationship with Morocco for Algeria’s sake. Similarly, despite its recent drone sale to Algeria, China’s burgeoning partnership with Morocco may limit its support for Algerian interests. Tunisia’s joining with Morocco on normalization would only exacerbate Algiers’ isolation.

Despite Algeria’s concerns, economic desperation might force Tunisia to consider joining the Abraham Accords. Plagued as it is by severe economic problems, Tunisia needs foreign aid, and joining the Accords might attract loans from the US, the Gulf States, or others. However, such a move could have serious internal and regional implications. For now, the potential political costs and risks seem to outweigh the perceived benefits of normalization, leading Tunisian officials to deny claims that Tunisia is on the verge of joining the Abraham Accords.

President Kais Saied: Kais Saied, a political outsider, was elected president of Tunisia in a landslide in 2019. He proceeded to suspend parliament and dismiss the prime minister on the claim that he was saving the country from a corrupt and incompetent political elite. However, his detractors have denounced his actions as a coup that violated the democratically adopted constitution. Since then, Saied has consolidated his one-man rule. In early 2022, he dissolved the Supreme Judicial Council, ending judicial independence, and imposed a new constitution that gave him absolute authority. Saied has succeeded in strangling the Arab world’s only democracy.

As president, Saied has regularly made inflammatory statements about Jews and Israel, such as blaming them for the country’s economic and social problems, calling for a boycott of Israeli products, and praising Palestinian resistance. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that in response to a question about the deadly Djerba synagogue attack, Saied replied that Palestinians “are killed every day” and “no one talks about it.”

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Arab media spread antisemitism to the West

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Much antisemitism promoted  in Arab and Palestinian Authority media outlets has found its way onto Arabic language websites of Western news outlets, media watchdogs have affirmed. Report by Rachel Abraham in JNS News:

Joelle Maroun. Source: LinkedIn.
France 24 reporter Joelle Maroun ‘ a huge fan of Adolph Hitler’

“For example (says an Arabic media analyst for CAMERA), the Arabic branch of the British Independent published a theater critic about a Beirut play where Anne Frank was portrayed as a vicious Zionist who came to take a Palestinian home from its original owner. The play is called ‘A Letter to Anne Frank.’ It is still there. It has the Independent logo on it. If you did not know that the Independent in Arabic is a Saudi-owned subsidiary, you would think that this is content that the British Independent promotes. Obviously, they are irresponsible about their own content,” the analyst said.

According to him, many antisemites have been given positions in the Arabic language websites of Western news channels. One of them was Joelle Maroun, the Beirut correspondent of France 24, a publicly funded corporation.

“Their correspondent is a huge fan of Adolf Hitler. She publicly praised Hitler for over 10 years and nothing was done. There was no background check. Nothing of the sort. Only when CAMERA Arabic called her out, she got fired. Unfortunately, other correspondents who did likewise only got suspended for a month and they went back to work. You can still see them on the screen.”

A Palestinian-Israeli Arab expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict, who also asked that his name be withheld, stressed that the hateful sentiments mentioned above do “not represent me, my family, my friends, and they do not represent any Palestinian that I personally know. It does not mean that they do not exist. We obviously see them. But this is not the full story for who the Palestinian people are.

“I was brought up on an Islam where Judaism was part of Islam. The Koran itself incorporates the Jewish faith, incorporates the story of Judaism. Joseph, Moses and anyone else within the Jewish history and heritage is also in our teachings. I think that one of the ways we should be looking to fight antisemitism is to find the connections and correlations that we have between the two faiths, for they are closer than they are apart.”

According to the expert, “We have more things in common between Islam and Judaism than we have things that separate them. If we look at the religious interfaith [contacts] as a tool to fighting antisemitism, this is something we should be encouraging and looking for the religious authorities who could help to push forward integration and more of an understanding of each other. This comes with education. Education is the key for everything.”

Sadly, he noted that today, “There is not only a lack of education, but a lack of interest in learning [about the other].”

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Three famous rabbis’ tombs discovered in Tetuan

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The tombs of three famous 18th century rabbis have been discovered in the Jewish cemetery of Tetuan. Adafina, which researches Jewish geneaology in Morocco, is undertaking a fundraiser to restore them.

During Purim 2023, the tombs of Rabbis Jacob Marrache, Hasdai Almosnino and Jacob Benmalka were discovered in the Jewish cemetery of Tetuan.

Tombstone restoration is underway in the cemetery, a World Heritage site. It is believed to be the largest Jewish cemetery in Morocco. The number of tombs is estimated to be between 10,000 and 35,000. Only 3,000 have inscriptions. Unique to the cemetery is the number of anthropomorphic stones, carrying symbols such as Stars of David or the Flower of Life.

Few of the graves are named.  Except when a woman or man died childless, it was the responsibility of the family to remember where their loved one was buried. The location of the three Rabbis’ tombs was known until the community dwindled in the 1960s and was confirmed to visitors, although it is not known which tomb belongs to which rabbi.

Adafina has raised over £2,000 of its goal of £8,500 to restore the tombs. You can donate here: https://gofund.me/7dfcc137

 

Shlaim’s ‘bombshell’ recalls Corbyn’s antisemitism

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The latest to join the chorus of disapproval of professor Avi Shlaim’s contention, contained in his childhood memoir,Three Worlds,  that Zionist agents forced the Jews of  Iraq to flee is Joe Mintz, wring in the Jewish Chronicle.  Mintz argues that  this  is antisemitism pure and simple, no different from the antisemitism of  one-time UK party leader Jeremy Corbyn, whom Shaim admires.

Mass grave of the victims of the Farhud of 1941

Shlaim focuses on the well-worn accusation that a series of bombings in 1950 and 1951 in Baghdad (which caused one fatality overall) were in fact a plot orchestrated by Israel to make the Jews leave. It’s a ludicrous proposition that has never had any proof behind it. It has echoes of Ken Loach and Ken Livingstone’s pernicious proposition that the Zionists were in cahoots with the Nazis. It’s the kind of thing antisemites love to come up with: it’s the Jews who are really to blame for their own fate, rather than the centuries of Arab persecution.

The fact that for centuries they had status as second-class “dhimmi” who, if they looked at a Muslim the wrong way, could be murdered for it, had nothing to do with it. The 1941 Nazi-inspired Farhud antisemitic pogrom, when 180 Jews were murdered, was of no consequence. The arrests, confiscations and worse in the wake of 1948 had no impact. The Arabs loved the Jews and it was all the fault of Zionism.

Except it wasn’t. One hundred and twenty thousand Jews left Iraq for Israel between 1950 and 1952. As Shlaim points out, life in Israel for these refugees was deprived and difficult. Many who had arrived told their friends and relatives still in Baghdad that they should not come.

Yet mostly they still did. Not because of an illusory non-existent plot by Israel but because their fellow citizens had just murdered 180 of their community, following on from a long history of persecution and second-class citizenship, and they realised, perhaps, that to be safe they needed to be somewhere else. Somewhere that would take them in, like the Jewish state. They did not need “Eurocentric Zionism” to make this clear.

Those who stayed had in store for them the hangings of nine Jews in Baghdad in 1969 and other atrocities in revenge for the defeat of the Arab armies 1967.

By 1972, there were hardly any Jews left in Iraq. My children’s grandparents were two of the last ones, leaving in 1971. Just like all the Jews who fled Iraq, they left with virtually nothing, their property and worldly goods stolen by the Iraqi state and given away to others. Yet in the eyes of Shlaim and others with his worldview, it was their own fault.

Isn’t holding Jews directly accountable for what happens in Israel antisemitism? It is now and it was then.

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Review of  Avi Shlaim’s Three Worlds by David Collier (with thanks: Ed; Lily)

More  about Avi Shlaim

 

What Avi Shlaim gets wrong about persecuted Iraqi Jews

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In his Spectator review of Avi Shlaim’s memoir Three Worlds, Justin Marozzi refers to the author’s claims about the 1950-51 terrorist bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad: ‘Shlaim’s bombshell is to uncover what he terms “undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks”, which helped terminate the millennial presence of Jews in Babylon’. Now Hannah Gal adds to the rebuttals here and here with her column in The Spectator: (with thanks Lily, Tom)
Avi Shlaim
Marozzi calls these claims ‘controversial’ but he doesn’t delve into just how controversial. The charge is that Zionists attacked Iraqi Jews in order to encourage them to flee to Israel.
There are several problems with this theory. As the investigative journalist David Collier has argued, ‘these explosions did not cause the exodus…the Iraqi Jews were persecuted, were offered a window to leave, and despite the fact they had to leave everything behind, they almost all left…’.
Nothing short of war would make an entire civilian population leave, Collier argues, not a few violent incidents.
Take France, for example, where a number of deadly attacks have taken place over the past ten years. Yet the French Jewish population has not been uprooted — just 33,000 left for Israel over the ten year period, only about 8 per cent. And, as Collier points out, ‘this is a situation where unlike those forced out in Iraq, French Jews could take everything with them.’
Furthermore, contemporary news reports in 1950-1951, including Jewish press, show very few references to these attacks. ‘Nobody was talking about them as a factor,’ says Collier. ‘If it were a ‘Zionist plot’ – why is there no reference to the fear factor blamed on these bombings? It is therefore far more likely that the importance of these bombs was exaggerated years later – and only because they became useful tools for antisemites and anti-Zionist propaganda.’
According to Marozzi’s piece ‘although Israel has consistently denied any involvement in these attacks, suspicion has hung over the clandestine activities of Zionist agents tasked with persuading the Jewish community to flee Iraq and settle in Israel.’
They needed no such persuading. The Jews of Iraq had been subjected to persecution for years. In 1941 they suffered the horrific Farhud pogroms: over 180 Jews were murdered, hundreds injured and hundreds of Jewish homes destroyed. But even before the Farhud, Jews were targeted: 1938 saw a documented bombing campaign against Jews in Iraq ‘that cannot be explained away on ‘Zionist agents’; and in 1947 a Jewish man was lynched for ‘giving kids poisoned candy’ and the Jewish quarter of Fallujah was ransacked.’
Before the partition vote, the Iraqi foreign minister threatened the expulsion of Iraqi Jews, and by 1948, on the hearsay of two Muslims, any Jew could be thrown into jail for years as a ‘Zionist’. Throughout the land, Jewish banking rights were restricted, Jews were banned from most civil service positions, Jewish businesses were boycotted and countless Jews were arrested and dispossessed. Also in 1948, Iraq’s richest Jew, Shafiq Ades, was executed after being found guilty of selling weapons to Israel without evidence and refused a defence. Such levels of anti-semitism are not dissimilar to what happened in the early phases of Nazi Germany.
By the time of the 1951 bombings, most Iraqi Jews had already registered to leave, yet according to Esther Meir-Glitzenstein’s Zionism in an Arab Country, ‘Israel had only managed to evacuate some of them, which meant 10,000s of Jews were already trapped in no-mans-land’.
By September 1950, only 10,000 Jews had left; 60,000 of the 70,000 registrants were still in Iraq. By mid November the backlog was 65,0000. Why – even leaving aside the moral monstrosity of the process by which Shlaim alleges it did so – would Israel seek to speed up a flow of immigrants it was already struggling to process?
Shlaim describes how his father, by then in his fifties and unable to speak Hebrew, was completely undone by the move to Israel. His vivacious mother was forced to exchange ‘the gilded life of a society hostess in Baghdad, for a mundane job as a telephonist in Ramat Gan.’
What Shlaim describes is likely Israel’s Maabarot – make-shift housing, set up by Ben Gurion to process the tsunami of incomers, many of them Holocaust survivors, to the new state. Many thousands of Jews arriving in Israel during the 50s stayed there. Both Mizrahi (Sephardim) and Ashkenazi Jews lived under these conditions. Shlaim’s family was not unique in its misfortune and physical hardship. Very few spoke Hebrew.
In any case, Israel was just two years old in 1950, a struggling, poor state at the very start of a trying journey. The harsh conditions were seen by immigrants as a necessary compromise worth making in exchange for safety, after centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust.

Abraham Accords ‘deteriorating’ as Negev summit postponed

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The Abraham Accords are faltering with the announcement by Morocco that it has cancelled its plans to host the Negev Forum. The main reason cited in this JNS report is the Israeli government’s authorisation of more settlement building, but there are other reasons: Israel’s envoy to Rabat, David Govrin, is returning to Morocco after an investigation into alleged sexual misconduct with Moroccan women. Israel has also been hesitating to recognise Morocco’s sovereignty over western Sahara, the main prize for Morocco signing the Abraham Accords, although several secondary agreements have been signed with Israel in recent days. But the main obstacle is likely that the US administration under President Joe Biden does not have the same commitment as the Trump administration to the Abraham Accords.

The steering committee of the Negev Forum meets in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Jan. 9, 2023. Credit: UAE Foreign Ministry.
The steering committee of the Negev Forum meets in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Jan. 9, 2023. (Photo: UAE Foreign Ministry.)

“It is another sign in the deterioration of the Abraham Accords,” Professor Eytan Gilboa, an expert on U.S.-Israel relations at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan and a senior fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, told JNS.

The Morocco event was originally planned for March, but the North African country’s government postponed it four times before canceling it completely. The U.S. official said that a date had not been finalized but had been “pretty locked up” for mid-July.

According to the official, two announcements regarding Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria had derailed the summit.

On Sunday, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced the approval of more than 4,500 new housing units for residents of Judea and Samaria. Hours later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet passed a resolution handing Smotrich near-full control over planning approval for existing Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria.

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’50 percent of Moroccan youth support normalisation with Israel ‘(Morocco World News)

 

Why is Avi Shlaim recycling ‘Baghdad bombings’ theory?

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Why is Oxford professor Avi Shlaim blaming Zionist agents for forcing the Jews out of Iraq with a series of bombings? The answer lies in his new childhood memoir, argues Lyn Julius in The Jewish Chronicle:

Avi Shlaim, a professor of history at Oxford, has been no stranger to controversy, attracting criticism from his fellow academics.

Benny Morris has called Shlaim “sloppy”, and slammed his work for “one-sidedness and plain unfairness.”

Now in retirement, Shlaim has just published Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew. This is a personal account of his childhood and teenage years straddling three worlds: Iraq, where he was born, Israel where his family resettled, and the UK, where he has lived since 1966.

Aged five, his was a brutal uprooting from a comfortable Baghdad mansion with servants. At a time of rising antisemitism during the 1948 war with Israel, the family fled Iraq to begin new lives in Israel. His father, a prosperous importer of building materials with influential Muslim friends, was completely undone by the move and his much younger wife, once a society hostess, was forced to work as a telephonist.

The marriage broke down. Young Avi brought his emotional baggage to his Jewish school in London, where a friend testifies to the fact he smuggled in non-kosher burgers to spite the headmaster.

During his academic career, Shlaim became more and more stridently anti-Israel. Today he calls it a “colonial settler state”, even though Mizrahi Jewish communities, now comprising over half of Israel’s Jews, predated the Arab conquest and Islam by 1,000 years or more.

The “Arab-Jew” of the title will raise a few eyebrows: the expression is used by some anti-Zionists who deny Jews from Arab countries a separate identity.

But the plaudits have been flowing from reviewers’ pens for Avi Shlaim’s new book. Eugene Rogan, author of “The Arabs” called it the best book he had read all year.

Max Hastings had this to say in the Sunday Times: “This remarkable upside-down tale… A personal story, not a polemic… provocative… His personal odyssey confers on Shlaim an exceptional authority for his words; he can say things that others of us cannot… his thesis deserves to be considered with respect.”

The thesis in question is that “the Zionists” planted bombs in Baghdad to help eradicate the presence of Jews in Iraq. “The shocking truth about the Baghdad bombings of 1950 -51” blares the title of a review by Justin Marozzi in The Spectator.

But Shlaim’s theory is far from conclusive. The only fatal bombing took place in January 1951 (six weeks before the deadline for legal Jewish emigration from Iraq was due to expire) in the Massouda Shemtob synagogue, then being used by “the Zionists” as a registration centre for departing Jews. Three of the five bombs were planted three months after the emigration deadline had passed and caused no casualties.

It is a mystery why “the Zionists” might have thought it necessary to bomb the synagogue when, by late 1950 a backlog of 80,000 Jews, who had already registered to leave for Israel, were stranded in Iraq. Indeed, the Iraqi government toyed with the idea of dumping these Jews on Israel’s border with Jordan or in the Kuwaiti desert because Israel was not shipping them out fast enough.

All the evidence for the bombings points to the nationalist Istiqlal party as the culprit. An Istiqlal member confessed to an Iraqi historian, Shamel Abdul Kader, that he planted the first bomb in April 1950. The Israeli new historian Tom Segev produced evidence blaming the synagogue bombing on Iraqi nationalists.

Iraqi Jews already had reason enough to seek a haven in Israel – rising pro-Nazi sentiment, the memory of a vicious Baghdad pogrom in 1941, the execution of the wealthy non-Zionist Shafik Ades in 1948, arrests, extortion, racist laws persecuting and dispossessing them. A vibrant community of 150,000 is now reduced to three Jews.

But Shlaim claims there was no antisemitism in Iraq until the Iraqis ‘turned on the Jews’ for their alleged complicity with the British invasion of 1941 and the foundation of Israel.

It is a travesty that Shlaim should not only fail to blame Arab regimes for the mass ethnic cleansing of their Jewish citizens, but that his reputation as an Oxford academic should lend ‘exceptional authority’ and respectability to these highly controversial claims,

What lies behind Shlaim’s anti-Zionism? In reviewing ‘Israel and Palestine’ Benny Morris pronounced himself puzzled.

“Many intellectuals, in Israel as in the West, have been moved by the Palestinians’ history and their plight, but at the same time they have remained sympathetic to Israel’s predicament…. In Israel and Palestine, by contrast, there is no sign of any such complex sympathy.

“For Shlaim, Israel and its leaders can do no right. It all begins to seem very personal. What is the source of this bias and this resentment? ‘

It appears that Shlaim’s memoir holds the answer. Israel is responsible for his unhappy childhood, his family’s impoverishment and his broken home.

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More about Avi Shlaim

Seventy Years since the Departure of Iraqi Jews - <span lang="fr">Ella Shohat</span>

Israel is divided beween ‘somewheres’ and ‘nowheres’

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As the controversy over judicial reform in Israel  grinds on, the British commentator and journalist Melanie Phillips produces this incisive analysis of the country’s social cleavages (with thanks: Michelle):

Protests against the judicial reform in Tel Aviv, May 6, 2023. (photo credit: AVSHALOM SASSONI/MAARIV)
Demonstrations against judicial reform have been held weekly

As in Britain and America, these elite groups in Israel view with contempt the lower social classes who have socially conservative views — sometimes characterised as “faith, family and flag”. In America, someone once termed them the “deplorables”. In Britain, this division has been characterised by the writer David Goodhart as between the lower-class “somewheres”, for whom their nation and its particular culture are everything, and the upper-class “nowheres”, who view themselves as citizens of the world and whose values are deemed universal.

In Israel, this division is sharpened by race and religion. The universalist elites are white-skinned, European-origin Ashkenazim; the people they disdain tend to be dark-skinned Mizrahim from Arab and other eastern countries, who have socially conservative views and also believe in the right of the Israelis to all the land, including the disputed territories. So while the Ashkenazi elites accuse the “deplorable” lower classes of racism, that charge is actually more applicable to the elites themselves.

The further crime committed by the Mizrahim — which puts them beyond the pale altogether in liberal eyes — is that they tend to be religiously observant.

Israeli liberals are uncomfortably aware that they are steadily losing power to the Mizrahim and other religious conservatives, who are all growing in number. Liberals have lost political power through the ballot box, as the result of their persistent attachment to a “two-state solution” in which other Israelis long ago lost all confidence because of Palestinian Arab rejectionism. Yet liberals have been able to resist the conservatives’ agenda through the judges of the supreme court, who since 1993 have increasingly set themselves above laws passed by the Knesset in pursuit of supposedly higher universal ideals.

These liberals are now terrified that judicial reform will deprive them of that power. This fear has been brought to boiling point by the fact that Israel now has a governing coalition composed entirely of religiously observant ministers except for Netanyahu, who ironically — since he is reviled by hysterical liberals as a proto-fascist — is now seen as the liberal in the government.

And it is religion that terrifies secular liberals above all. Their deepest desire, as they acknowledge, is to be just like other secular western countries. They want Israel, they say, to be a “normal” society.

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This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, of the Middle East and North Africa, documenting the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution.

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Jewish Refugees from Arab and Muslim Countries

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forgotten Jewish refugees - updated daily.