How 7 October echoed the Farhud

JThis year has seen more articles than ever about the Farhud pogrom of 1941 because of its similarity with the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks.  There is no shame in admitting that Jonahan Shavit’s  paternal grandparents were refugees from Iraq, but it is wrong to blame Israel for pre-existing Arab antisemitism. Read his post in Times of Israel (with thanks: Carole)

Interview by Campaign Against Antisemitism with Jack Hikmet, who lived in Iraq until the 1970s

While there are several differences between the Farhud and October 7^th, such as the IDF, police officers and alert squads succeeding in repelling attacks and Jews being able to defend themselves, as opposed to the Farhud where Jews were left to their own devices, the atrocities committed by Hamas were an echo of the Farhud in many ways. Women were raped and gang raped, children were murdered, people were decapitated, people were tortured and corpses mutilated. The majority of casualties were Israeli civilians, just as Jewish civilians were targeted during the Farhud. In addition, Hamas even murdered Arab Israelis and foreign students and laborers, turning everyone on Israeli soil into a target. And horrifying examples such as Nir Oz, where terrorists could do as they pleased and had left before the IDF arrived, or the NOVA site were stark reminders of the Farhud, as well as pogroms in Eastern Europe. Moreover, the Farhud was one of the most notorious, but Lyn Julius points towards many pogroms taking place throughout the Arab world, countering the enduring image in the West that co-existence between Arabs and Jews was exemplary.

Certainly, there were periods of remarkable tolerance and Jews enjoying good relations with their neighbors. However, those who stress these examples would like to ignore other uncomfortable facts. Usually, you will still hear that Israel ruined everything, but that is a weak argument. First of all, communities that had dwelled in Arab countries for centuries, such as the Iraqi community, were scapegoated after 1948. As an example, Iraqi authorities turned Jews into a fifth column, regardless of how they felt. Stripping them of their rights and confiscating their property led to the pauperization of the Jewish community. While Israel’s pull factors are still stressed by many Arab supporters of the Palestinian cause, leading them even to have the audacity to vilify Israelis of Mizrahi and Sephardic descent as traitors, they conveniently ignore the dire push factors that led to Jews fleeing en masse, as was the case for Iraqi Jews.

There is no shame in saying this: my paternal grandparents were refugees, due to the fact that Iraq did its very best to get rid of its Jews. Moreover, as Julius, herself a British woman of Iraqi Jewish descent, stressed in her 2018 book Uprooted, how does one then explain the nineteenth century Damascus blood libel? Or pogroms in the Moroccan city of Fez, which took place in 1033, 1465, and 1912? What about a pogrom in Algeria in 1934? Or the Tunisian pogrom in Gabès in 1941? How about the Libyan anti-Jewish riots in 1945, which lasted three days? All of these took place before Israel was established. And, finally, if everything was an example of harmony in the Middle East and North Africa, how does one explain the influence of the eighth-century Pact of Umar and the ensuing dhimmi status for Jews or the jizya tax? Jews in Yemen were routinely subjected to massacres, degradations, and forced conversions to Shia Islam. What about the fact that as late as the 1890s Jewish women were sold into slavery in Morocco? Or the fact that long before Israel was established many Arabs used derogatory terms for Jews, calling them dogs and chiding donkeys for being “sons of Jews” – even today, Jews are animalized in many school textbooks in the Arab world, referring to them as descendants of pigs.

One can certainly point to history and stress periods of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs throughout the ages. It is good to do so, to show that peace is possible and continue to strive towards achieving this. But all too often this leads to a highly selective view of the region’s history, with the ultimate goal of blaming Israel for the deteriorated relationship between Arab countries and their own Jewish communities which vanished nearly overnight. Instead of protecting their Jews, Arab countries punished them. Though I, my little brother, my father or my family in Israel do not consider ourselves refugees, my paternal grandparents definitely were. They had to rebuild their lives from scratch, forced to flee Iraq, as the situation deteriorated rapidly. Push factors were very important.

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Anna Hakakian talks of her father ‘s memories of the Farhud in his book Last tango in Baghdad

The Farhud and the enduring legacy of Iraqi Jews