Placing the Colonial Boot on the Arab Foot. By Lyn Julius. NJBR, September 11, 2013. With related articles.
Julius (Of Nakbas):
Nakba week is over. The
demonstrators have gone home. The Palestinian Authority have delivered their
speeches and sounded their sirens. The Arab and “liberal” western press and
media have duly commiserated.
But
while Palestinians marked the 66th anniversary of the “catastrophic” mass
flight of Arab refugees from Israel in 1948, the French historian Georges
Bensoussan, on a visit to London, was focusing on a different nakba. He was asking a packed audience the rhetorical question: why do people, even when
presented with incontrovertible proof, persist in their denial of the mass
post-war exodus of Jews?
It was
at the height of the second intifada in 2002, when two Jews a day were being
beaten up on the streets of France, that Bensoussan decided to write about Jews
from Arab countries. The antisemitism sweeping France then, as now, was being
blamed on the Arab-Israel conflict. But Bensoussan, who left Morocco with his
family as a six-year-old, had a nagging feeling that the problem had deeper
root-causes.
Bensoussan
spent ten years researching his 900-page book on the 850,000 Jews driven out of
Arab lands in a single generation (Juifs en pays arabes: le grand deracinement 1850 – 1975). He chose not to base
himself on unreliable memoirs, but on solid archival evidence.
The
condition of Jews in Arab lands is not one of harmonious coexistence between
Jews and Arab, shattered by the arrival of Zionism. Nor is it purely a
lachrymose tale of woe. Yes, Iraqi Jews experienced the Farhud pogrom in 1941 – but next to the Ukraine, Iraq was paradise,
Bensoussan contended. For 14 centuries, however, Jewish-Arab coexistence was
laced with contempt: Muslims kept their non-Muslim minorities in a state of
degradation and humiliation as dhimmis.
Dhimmitude was most rigorously applied those parts of the Muslim world most
remote from Ottoman influence – Yemen, Morocco, and Shi’a Iran. With western
colonisation, the Arab world lashed out at its minorities. The word “fear”
keeps cropping up in the archives in association with the Jews.
Jews
were not uprooted from their 2,500-year existence in Arab countries by a few
Zionist emissaries. Nor did their exodus begin after WW2. Jews were already
leaving Morocco in the 19th century to found communities in Portugal, Brazil
and Venezuela. Jews migrated from Iraq to India and China. (On the other hand,
the Jewish population increased in Egypt).
Bensoussan
traces the fault-line between Jews and their Arab neighbours to the onset of
19th century modernity and emancipation. The anti-Zionist Alliance Israelite Universelle schools network, paradoxically, “created a Jewish people and
prepared it for Zionism.”
Whereas
Ashkenazim chose between Judaism and secular Zionism, Sephardi/ Mizrahi Jews
saw a continuity between the two, in spite of the initial weakness of the
Zionist movement in Arab countries. But from 1929, Zionism also made Jews in
Arab countries vulnerable to the repercussions of the conflict in Palestine.
After 1948, Jewish communities were held hostage by Arab states.
Another
cause of the mass exodus was the blood-and-soil nationalism which prevented
Jews from becoming accepted as citizens of independent Arab states. The Arab
world eagerly embraced Fascist youth movements and Black Shirts; the influence
of the pro-Nazi sympathies of the Mufti of Jerusalem is well-known. His
virulent radio propaganda broadcasts spread anti-Jewish hatred. And the Mufti
was not the only pro-Nazi Arab leader.
But the
key reason for the Jewish Nakba – not
the only one but an essential factor – was a matter not of historical fact but
deep-seated cultural mentality.
As dhimmis, Jews were despised as half-persons.
They were feminised in the Muslim imagination. Like women, they were not
allowed to carry daggers. Like women, they had to ride side-saddle.
“The
more I studied the question, the more I understood that there was no solution
to the Arab-Israeli conflict,” said Georges Bensoussan.
The
truth is that the colonised can also be a coloniser, the victim of racism can
himself be a racist, and the martyr an executioner.
Like
intellectuals blinded to the Soviet regime’s crimes, people today cannot see
the truth before their very eyes. There’s a Chinese proverb that says, “When
the sage points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger.”
