For some reason I get emails on an almost daily basis from a guy named Ted Belman who writes for Israpundit, a right-wing pro-Israeli site. Most of the time I find his stuff loathsome, but he sent me an article today which is at least worthy of a read.
Because I am not Jewish, I don’t have an opinion on some of the finer points of what it means to be a Jew or what obligations a Jew has to his or her people, etc. I have no opinion on the proper interpretation of tikkun olam. But I do have an opinion on whether anti-Zionism is antisemitic. I think that is a ridiculous assertion. I also think it is possible to reject the philosophical and ethno-religious underpinnings of Zionism and still see the creation of Israeli as a fait accompli. I don’t recognize any right for the Jewish people to live in a state in their historic homeland, but I do recognize Israel as a state and recognize their right to exist on their original borders in peace and security.
Likewise, I do not recognize any right for Kurds to have a state in their historic homeland, but if they managed to create one and get international recognition for it, I would accept that state as legitimate and the defense of that state as likewise legitimate.
Of course, debates about Israel’s behavior rarely revolve around the legitimacy of their state or their right to defend it. Israel has been occupying land not granted to them for longer than I’ve been alive. The question is whether they have a right to basically permanently annex land that does not belong to them and to keep the populations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in a perpetual state of non-citizenship.
In any case, I thought this particular Belman article was interesting enough to offer an avenue for constructive conversation. I disagree with the vast majority of his argument. But there are points where I have some sympathy. For example, criticism of Israel for being and wishing to continue as a Jewish state is legitimately debatable, but often comes without much consideration of the status of religious minorities (particularly Jews) in much of the surrounding Muslim world.
Anyway, there’s plenty to discuss.
Israel will soon turn 61. Ultimately neither Israpundit’s racist ramblings nor Booman’s wasp bias are what matters. What matters is that it is increasingly clear that the Zionist State in Palestine will not live to be 100.
I agree with most of what you say here.
“I do recognize Israel as a state and recognize their right to exist on their original borders in peace and security.“
The question is what, specifically, ARE Israel’s original borders given that Israel has explicitly declined to ever declare borders. Ben Gurion made it clear why he would not name Israel’s borders after it became an independent state, and Israel’s actions have made that reason very, very clear by now, I would think.
“…criticism of Israel for being and wishing to continue as a Jewish state…often comes without much consideration of the status of religious minorities (particularly Jews) in much of the surrounding Muslim world.“
And it comes with exactly zero consideration of the status of the indigenous non-Jews who prior to the massive ethnic cleansing of 1947-49 were the overwhelming majority, in a state whose very identity and raison d’etre, not to mention every one of its national symbols, are specifically (European) Jewish, and 100% non-inclusive of its non-Jewish citizens. And then there are those pesky laws that, often explicitly, sometimes only implicitly, discriminate against non-Jews.
The status of religious minorities, principally Christians, in the surrounding Muslim countries is actually generally good, and in some cases excellent. And it is revealing to contrast the status of Jews in most of the Arab world before and after Israel’s creation and take into account the effect Zionism had on Arab Jews. There is no excuse for the discrimination against Jewish citizens of Arab countries that resulted from Zionism, but it is critical to understand the dynamic that lead to it.
There is even less excuse for the treatment by Israel of non-European Jews whom it brought, often on false pretenses or by means of what was called “cruel Zionism” to Israel. Among other sources, Israeli journalist Tom Segev’s book 1949 is revelatory of the treatment of Arab Jewish immigrants to Israel.
The subject of Arab Jews is complicated. Israel actually benefited from discrimination because it helped them attract citizens early on. In fact, it’s not clear that the Mossad didn’t encourage some discrimination for that specific purpose.
But, it also pays to note that if Arab Muslim discrimination of Arab Jews was a reaction to Zionism, Zionism was a reaction to the Holocaust and European antisemitism. Everything is a reaction to something.
Actually, Zionism began and was well on its way some time the Holocaust could even be conceived of. A better analogy to discrimination against Jews in Muslim countries as a reaction to Zionism is the treatment of Japanese-Americans as a reaction to WW II. Except Muslim countries did not intern their Jewish citizens, did they? The discrimination included travel restrictions, which were intended to keep the Jews from emigrating to an enemy country. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Iraqi Jews, among others, did not want to emigrate to Israel or anywhere else until the Zionist underground undertook a program of terrorism against Jewish targets, and other activities intended to create a hostile environment for Jews in Iraq.
“Israel actually benefited from discrimination because it helped them attract citizens early on.“
I am having trouble making sense of this. Perhaps you could clarify? How could discriminating against Arab Jews help Israel attract citizens?
And frankly, I don’t find the subject of Arab Jews in Israel terribly complicated at all. The Zionists were mainly assimilated European Jewish elites who envisioned a European Jewish state. From the very beginning they viewed non-European Jews with close to the same colonial racist contempt with which they, as Europeans, viewed other Arabs. The fact that Eastern Jews were integrated into their societies and were part of both the urban middle class and the intellectual, professional, artistic, and business elite in countries such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia, and that many were better educated than the majority of European Jews did not mean anything to the Zionists. The fact that they were Jews qualified them to be gathered up and brought to Israel en masse to provide “human material”. It did not qualify them to be viewed or treated as anything remotely close to equals. That is not more complicated than any other kind of national, racial or ethnic bias or bigotry.
I wasn’t referencing Israeli discrimination against Arab Jews, but Arab Muslim discrimination and expulsion of Arab Jews.
I remember reading a history of the Mossad (written by Israelis) that mentioned an effort to organize a spying ring in Baghdad in an intentional effort to anger the Iraqi government and nudge them into expelling the native Jewish population. The purpose was to collect Iraqi Jews as new citizens of Israel.
I never found a second source for that story, but it seemed plausible, if extraordinarily devious.
I am not sure about that story you heard. It would be interesting to look into it some more. I used to know quite a few Jews in Iraq who could possibly shed some light on it, but lost touch with them some time ago and have no idea where they are now. It is plausible, including the deviousness which characterized to one degree or another most of the efforts to get Arab Jews to Israel, but it would have been working somewhat at cross purposes with the Zionist underground in Iraq, who were operating independently of the government, and who were using quite different tactics from what you describe.
The Iraqi government had imposed travel restrictions and a prohibition on emigration on Jews out of fear of losing a high percentage of them along with their skills and wealth, and having Iraqi citizens emigrating in large numbers to an enemy country (the Syrians did the same thing, but I know a great deal less about what happened and how it happened in Syria). During that period the Jewish underground did succeed in helping a small number of Iraqi Jews, mostly those who were living in poverty and were attracted by promises (not particularly realistic) of a better life in Israel, sneak out of the country to Israel, but few middle class or wealthy Jews were very interested in leaving. Zionism was not a Middle Eastern thing, the Jews of Iraq had been there since Babylonian times, most had good lives there, and many of them had a great deal at stake in their home country. The discrimination they were being subjected to was wrong and painful, but not onerous, and did not generally affect their relations with friends, neighbors, and colleagues, and they considered that things would go back to normal after the conflict in Palestine calmed down.
The Zionist underground negotiated with the Iraqi government and ultimately in 1950 got them to agree to lift the emigration ban on Jews for one year. The conditions of emigration were that they would be stripped of their Iraqi citizenship, and could only take a limited amount of money and property out of the country with them. This law did not only apply to Jews, but to any Iraqi who wanted to leave permanently, but it may have been passed specifically to deal with a possible large outflux of Jews to Israel, and quite possibly in the hope of discouraging their emigration.
There was not an immediate rush to sign up for emigration, and at the same time the Israelis were not enthusiastic about conducting a “rescue” operation that would bring a flood of Iraqi Arab Jews into the country, most of whom they perceived did not particularly need or want immediate “rescue”. They had enough on their hands taking care of all the truly desperate European Jews without bringing in large numbers of far less desirable Arabs whose situation they saw as far from desperate.
So, feeling their project was not succeeding, the Zionist underground in Iraq undertook a program of terrorist attacks against the Jewish community in an effort to 1) induce their flight, 2) convince the Israelis that the Iraqi Jews did indeed need rescuing.
The most famous of these attacks was the bombing at the Mas`uda Shem Tov synagogue in Baghdad, which killed a couple of Muslim passers-by and a twelve year old Jewish boy, and injured several Jews at the synagogue. All of this eventually came out very publicly in Israel in the ’70’s when some of the leading perpetrators admitted to it. One of the Jewish men, who was blinded in the synagogue bombing, spent much of his life and energy after that in a bitter battle over what his fellow Jews had done to him. Sorry, but I forgot his name at the moment.
In Egypt the Zionists used the tactic of staging incidents that caused public and government incitement against the Jews there, resulting in their being forced out of the country. Most people have at least heard of the Lavon affair, which is the most famous example. That sounds more like the kind of thing you read in that Mossad history. I did not remember that it was the Mossad involved in Egypt, though it could be that I forgot that detail. It is interesting that a large part of the Egyptian Jewish community were not of Arab origin, but of European ancestry, descended from European Jews who had migrated to Egypt in, as I recall, the 18th and 19th centuries (I could be off on the time, my memory is not clear on this now). I knew a woman in the U.S. who came from such a family and she is the one who made me aware of that. She told me they were very comfortable in Egypt and it hurt them deeply to be forced to leave. Her family were not interested at all in going to Israel, she told me.
Of course, these few paragraphs cannot tell the whole story of those events in all its layers and details. It is also true that there was a push to bring Arab Jews to Israel as what they called “human material” to raise the population and provide low-level labour. They were more interested, though, in bringing those Arab Jews whom they perceived to be in jeopardy in their home countries. They really were not in a position at that time to accommodate a huge influx of people, and yet they felt a need to get the population up quickly. It would be interesting to focus some study specifically on the tension between those two realities. I am sure someone somewhere has done that.
I don’t know anything about it, however, for some reason discussion of devious jewish plots increases my skepticism.
From Wiki:
Historian Moshe Gat argues that there was little direct connection between the bombings and exodus. He demonstrates that the frantic and massive Jewish registration for denaturalisation and departure was driven by knowledge that the denaturalisation law was due to expire in March 1951. He also notes the influence of further pressures including the property-freezing law, and continued anti-Jewish disturbances which raised the fear of large-scale pogroms. In addition, it is highly unlikely the Israelis would have taken such measures to accelerate the Jewish evacuation given that they were already struggling to cope with the existing level of Jewish immigration. Gat also raises serious doubts about the guilt of the alleged Jewish bombthrowers. Firstly, a Christian officer in the Iraqi army known for his anti-Jewish views, was arrested, but apparently not charged, with the offences. A number of explosive devices similar to those used in the attack on the Jewish synagogue were found in his home. In addition, there was a long history of anti-Jewish bomb-throwing incidents in Iraq. Secondly, the prosecution was not able to produce even one eyewitness who had seen the bombs thrown. Thirdly, the Jewish defendant Shalom Salah indicated in court that he had been severely tortured in order to procure a confession. It therefore remains an open question as to who was responsible for the bombings, although Gat suggests that the most likely perpetrators were members of the anti-Jewish Istiqlal Party. Certainly memories and interpretations of the events have further been influenced and distorted by the unfortunate discrimination which many Iraqi Jews experienced on their arrival in Israel.[13]
As long as we’re quoting Wiki articles about this time period.
Of course, the Lavon Affair was so disastrous that it may have led to a cessation of these types of false-flag operations, at least for a time. But events in Iraq took place before the Lavon Affair.
Funny, from my perspective what stands out is not that a nation’s security service would organize a stupid and immoral stunt like that, for an American who has just lived through the Bush regime to affect innocence on such a topic would be feeble indeed, but that the Egyptian government would retaliate against its own citizens for the crime of being Jewish.
well, for the purposes of this discussion, a question arises about a hidden motive that isn’t discussed. Setting off bombs in Arab capitals had the effect, intended or not, of encouraging Arab leaders to expel their Jewish citizens. And that was much to the liking of the post-creation Aliyah B intelligence operation. Aliyah B is usually thought of as a pre-creation outfit that coordinated illegal immigration to Palestine, but it was not disbanded (absorbed into another agency actually) until 1952. It was active during the period of Jewish expulsion for Iraq.
What they did, among other things, is allow the the Iraqi Prime Minister, who owned Iraqi Tours, to have the contract for flying Jews to Israel. They also let the Prime Minister’s main political opponent, Nuri al-Said, had the airline maintenence contract (for his nephew).
This led them to pass a law allowing for legal Jewish immigration. But at first the Jews did not want to leave in significant numbers. So, when bombing began it had the effect of moving things along, and that is why the suspicion lingers. Of course, with the highest levels of Iraqi government incentivized to have as many flights as possible, they could have done it, too.
So Iraqi jews were wealthy, respected, integrated into society, but a few bombs planted by shadowy jewish plotters (for which there is no evidence) convinced them to flee to squalid camps in Israel where they could experience the joys of being poor and treated badly by racist European zionists?
That’s the story? There was no discrimination? No fear of pograms – except in reaction to these bombings? Wow, those Israelis were all powerful in 1950.
It was a pretty powerful move anyway you look at it.
Iraq initially banned emigration to Israel for a variety of reasons including that they didn’t recognize Israel and didn’t want to empower it. The Israelis solved this problem by buying off the Prime Minister and his main political opponent. This allowed for legal immigration.
Is that not a pretty ‘powerful’ move?
The rest of it is controversial. Who did the bombings, and why?
As you can see, Iraqi Jews did not leave willingly for the most part, and they didn’t expect to be treated terribly upon arrival (at least, initially).
But as this extract makes clear, Iraqi Jews faced a hostile situation in Iraq – they were being arrested, fired, attacked. And much of this has to do with the collapse of the Hashemite puppet government in Iraq which managed to destroy its economy by fighting the war against Israel and losing 1/2 of its pipeline capability. It’s bizzare to pretend that this situation could have been created by the shadowy plotters.
Let’s review: Iraq escaped Ottaman domination only in the 1920s and was placed under British power after a bloody war that installed the Hashemites on the throne and the British oil companies in the oil fields. There was a great deal of ethnic disputes – including a major Kurdish rebellion. There was an upsurge of anti-jewish activity. Then the King brought Iraq to destroy the newly created Israel and totaled the economy. No matter what the plotters said or did, this was a unsustainable situation.
Without question, the very creation of Israel created a hostile environment for Jews living in Muslim countries. This was most acutely felt in Arab nations. I won’t dispute that at all. You could probably argue that sooner or later Iraq would have become inhospitable to its native Jewish population with or without Israeli connivance. But don’t beg the question.
Why are we even discussing this? Isn’t it to debate whether or not Israel was a willing participant in the expulsion of Arab Jewry from Muslim countries?
Look at it from a policy setting point of view. Newly founded Israel obviously wants it to be legal for Jews to immigrate to their country, and Iraq has a law forbidding it. They want the law changed so they bribe the Iraqi government to change the law. The only point of controversy is whether Israel wanted Iraqi Jews to be free to choose (granting them rights) or if they wanted them to be expelled (stripping them of rights).
Depending on where you come down on that issue, you will draw different conclusions about what likely happened in Baghdad in 1950. As I stated, once the Iraqi leadership stood to gain from the flights, they had an incentive to create as many flights as possible. The program could have taken a logic of its own that wasn’t intended at the outset.
Without question, the very creation of Israel created a hostile environment for Jews living in Muslim countries. This was most acutely felt in Arab nations.
That really overstates it and I think suffers from one of the common historical errors in these discussions. Israel’s birth was not “the destablizing event”, since there was no stability to begin with. There was a massively unstable situation involving the Arab rebellion against the Turks, the invasion of Brits and French, the discovery of oil, the rise of Arab and Kurdish and other nationalisms, the organization of the various semi-socialist Arab nationalist parties, the spread of the Hashemite monarchy under British patronage, and so on. All was chaos. And exacerbating religious/communal tensions was a standard tactic of the British government. In fact, there was a far more massive and vastly bloodier ethnic war and migration involving Muslims over British drawn borders at the same time in Pakistan/India. So when we see these explanations of the migration of the Iraqi Jewish community as being caused by the devious plotting of the zionists, I call b.s.
I don’t think it overstates it at all, nor, I think, would many Jews who were around at that time.
And you are exaggerating shamelessly by claiming that “all was chaos”. If you think all was chaos during that time, then you have not seen real chaos (I hope you never do). Furthermore, there was a great deal of positive energy in the Middle East during that period. Interesting that you seem to view the expressions of nationalist sentiments in the Middle East and the connected struggles during that time as a negative force. I don’t think that most of those who were involved in those struggles would agree with you.
Hmmmm. I wonder whether you view Jewish nationalism – aka Zionism – as negatively as you seem to view “Arab, Kurdish, and other nationalisms”.
Probably the best way to look at this is from the point of view of perverse incentives.
The Holocaust had just proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jews were not safe in the Christian nations of Europe. The British had stymied efforts at legal immigration to Palestine for years, including during the Holocaust. It should have been a high priority to maintain safe havens for Jews in the Muslim world, where they had fared much better than in Europe. But those havens were lost, and quite quickly. I would think that this would be seen as a clear catastrophe, but it was at least partially welcomed for the boon in Israeli immigration that it caused.
That’s some seriously short-term thinking, if you ask me. But the whole process unfolded in a period of severe crisis and trauma. Much can and should be forgiven of those that made mistakes.
Well, I suppose that the anti-jewish riots in Palestine in 1920s would have been a consideration as well.
I wonder, given the fact that Zionism had been in existence since before the turn of the century, whether the first waves of immigrant Zionists, proclaiming thier belief that “this is the Land of the Jews, we will either buy it from you or drive you out” hadn’t been bringing anti-Semiticism upon themselves for some years prior to the outbreak of the first newsworthy incidents.
The anti-Jewish riots in Palestine were a direct result of Zionist activity, which had a negative impact on Palestinians in a variety of areas, including but hardly limited to forcing large numbers of Palestinians off of land they had live on and farmed for generations, simultaneously taking away their homes and their livelihood.
It was in the 1920’s that the intent of the Zionists and the impact Zionism was to have on them was becoming clear to the Palestinians.
In general, I’m dubious about conspiracies. Not because I doubt that they happen, but because I don’t see major historical changes as things that a few devious plotters can change even if they are Jewish, I mean, Zionist. The Shephardic Jews were expelled formally or not from all over the Arab world in 1950 or so. Could it have been that sneaky Jewish (I mean Zionist) plotters changed society from Tunisia to Yemen, but somehow not so much in Iran, by devious plotting and a few bombs?
How am I supposed to respond to that?
I just told you two facts.
A conspiracy theory is about something unproven, but a conspiracy that is a matter of public record is not a theory. I have no idea whether Israeli intelligence was behind the Baghdad bombing of Synagogues in the early 1950’s. I only know that they bombed U.S. and British targets in Cairo around the same time and that they were seeking to attract immigrants from Iraq and the bombings facilitated that process.
I’m not going beyond what I know, here. I’m telling you what I don’t know.
But the question is not whether there was a plot, but whether the plot could have been the cause of the flight to Israel. And it’s pretty obvious that the situation of Iraqi jews was unpleasant to impossible, plot or not.
The immediate causes of the expulsion were:
We’re debating the degree of complicity in those two situations of Israeli intelligence operations at the time. We know how the law got created (1) but we don’t know about the bombings (2).
Complicity is kind of a weird concept here. Unless the precarious situation of the Iraqi Jews was caused by the Israelis, something that seems implausible, then what they were complicit in was bribing officials of the British puppet state to let members of the persecuted Jewish minority flee persecution.
Put yourself in the position of an Israeli official of the time. Hitler is dead 5 years, the British Army has reluctantly left, you’ve just won a war against mostly the Hashemite puppet governments the Brits set up, and there are riots and show trials of tortured Jewish Iraqis going on – wouldn’t you find it important to “be complicit” in allowing them to flee?
Please! Iraqi Jews were not persecuted.
Booman, it is pretty well understood that Israeli intelligence was not involved in the Zionist underground activities in Baghdad. In fact, there was tension between the Zionist underground in Iraq and the Israeli establishment, as I discussed before. According to members of the Zionist underground one of the purposes of the bombings and other anti-Jewish actions they committed in Iraq was to persuade the Israeli government that Iraqi Jews were, indeed, in peril so that they would assist with their evacuation. It eventually worked.
And for the record, I object to the use of the term expulsion in reference to the exodus of Iraqi Jews. Unlike the Egyptian Jews, Iraqi Jews were not expelled. Most were induced to leave largely as a result of the machinations of the Zionist underground and its direct and indirect consequences, but they were not expelled, and several thousand did stay.
Iraqi Jews in Israel were enraged when it came out that it was Zionists who were behind the bombings and other things that led to their flight. Many of them regret to this day having left their lives in Iraq for second-class citizenship in Iraq. Many left Israel as soon as they could after their status there became clear.
Most Iraqi Jews still feel a strong connection with Iraq. Even many Iraqi Jews born in Israel feel connected to Iraq, and to their Iraqiness. Several Israeli-Iraqi Jews with whom I am acquainted have expressed to me that sense of connection.
There is a very interesting documentary called Forget Baghdad. It was made by a young Iraqi who traveled to Israel to try to connect with Jewish former friends and comrades of his father’s when they were all members of the Iraqi Communist party. I first saw it at the Arab Film Festival, and now I own a copy of it. I have not watched it in a long time, and should watch it again to refresh my memory. I believe Netflix has it.
And speaking of the Communist party, Jews were prominent and very active in the Iraqi Communist party, which was the cause of a great many of their problems in Iraq both before and after their mass exit.
I don’t see the matter as settled. If you can find any links to people supposedly involved, that would be helpful.
Israeli intelligence was obviously involved at the highest levels since they arranged for Near East Transport Corporation to subcontract out to al-Sawidi’s Iraqi Tours for the flights and arranged for as-Said’s son (Sabah, owner of Iraqi Airlines) to get the flight maintenance contract.
Finally, this was an expulsion, plain and simple. Leaving a couple thousand people behind doesn’t change what happened and why it happened. The Iraqi Jews were forced out though intimidation and their money was confiscated.
Sorry, but by definition it was not expulsion. It was not the government who intimidated the Iraqi Jews, nor did the government drive them out, force them out, or compel them to leave. The Egyptian Jews were clearly expelled, but not the Iraqi Jews.
For the most part I, too, tend to doubt conspiracies. However, the activities of the Zionist underground in Iraq have been well-documented, and admitted to by some of the perpetrators. There was, in fact, a series of articles in the Israeli press (I believe it was Ma’ariv, but my memory could be faulty on this detail) in which members of the Zionist underground in Iraq were interviewed.
The facts of the Lavon affair are not in doubt.
Moshe Gat is less credible on this subject than are the members of the Zionist underground who have described their activities, and the evidence of Iraqi officials of their complicity.
Actually, Zionism began and was well on its way some time the Holocaust could even be conceived of.
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Not really. The impetus to the development of Zionism was the realization that post-enlightenment Europe was still a grim place for the Jews and things looked to be getting worse – particularly in the East. However, even German Jews came under increasing attack in the 1840s.
The impetus for the origination of Zionism was the Dreyfuss affair. The Zionists had accomplished a great deal, including the Balfour Declaration, and the Zionist colonization of Palestine was well underway by the time the Nazis came into power.
My point is that although the details and perhaps the extent of the Holocaust might have not been imagined, 1000 years of massacres in Europe and an accelerating trend in the 1840s were seen by the Zionist founders as signs of things to come.
Yes, I agree with this. And what a terrible, terrible crime it is that Palestinians have been forced to pay for the anti-Semitism of Europeans.
You are right that Zionism was propelled by the Dreyfuss Affair, but that isn’t the important thing.
Prior to the Holocaust, Zionism was highly controversial in the Jewish community and not accepted by most religious leaders. The Holocaust fundamentally changed the dynamics of Jewish thinking. Reams of papers have been written about these topics and we don’t need to rehash them here.
Suffice to say that the debate was largely settled in favor of the need for a Jewish homeland after the trauma of the Holocaust. Even many Jews that were strongly opposed to the secular component of Zionism were willing to concede the need for a Jewish state.
So, it doesn’t matter when the first Zionist arrived on the scene. What matters is why they eventually won the debate.
actually, even after the Holocaust, the surviving members of the superstitionist sects hated Israel and Zionism and even to this day, the mention of Tel Aviv and Dizengoff street to jewish religious nuts gets the reaction that San Francisco and Castro get from American Christianists.
The famous Rav Kook was one of the few prominent Rabbis who supported the new Israel and he was a hippie vegetarian disdained by the more orthodox.
Yes, I agree with you here too. The Holocaust did bring Zionism into the mainstream. It is a terrible, terrible thing, but the Holocaust is what allowed Zionism to succeed up to and beyond the wildest dreams of the earlier Zionists. In fact, Zionists have been vilified for exploiting the Holocaust, and even collaborating with the Nazis, but under the circumstances I do not find that terribly condemnable any more than I find condemnable the Arabs’ siding with the Germans in order to get out from under the British thumb. Both are quite understandable considering the conditions, whether we like it or not.
Let me clarify that what I do not find particularly condemnable is the Zionist exploitation of the Holocaust and and collaboration with the Nazis at the time the Holocaust was going on and in the immediate period afterward. Exploitation of the Holocaust that continues until today, particularly as it is used to justify Israel’s criminal actions since 1948, and particularly during and since 1967, is quite another thing.
Additional note: Jews who left Iraq and other Arab countries to Israel were generally required to give up their citizenship in their home countries, and leave most of their property and wealth behind. The former is completely understandable. What country would allow its citizens to emigrate to an enemy country and retain their original citizenship at the same time?
The latter, while completely unacceptable, is also understandable on several levels as a matter of national interest. Jews held a great deal of the wealth in some Arab countries such as Iraq, and the country could not afford to have so much wealth taken out of the country, nor could they accept wealth taken out of the country to be taken into and used for the benefit of an enemy country. On a human rights level it is utterly wrong, and I believe that restitution is appropriate, but it is important to understand that they did not do it out of anti-Jewish sentiment, but for reasons of perceived national interest. In fact, many countries limit the amount of money, gold, etc. that any citizen is allowed to take with them when they emigrate.
And for those who want to condition rights of return and/or restitution/reparations for Palestinians on restitution for Arab Jews, the Palestinians did not cause the Arab Jews’ troubles, and their rights should not be held hostage to the rights of Arab Jews, nor should the rights of Arab Jews be held hostage to the rights of Palestinians.
But I guess I am going a bit far afield of the topic now, so forgive me please.
Actually the status of Jews in the Arab world varied from ok to terrible in the 1920-1940 period. The Jews in Yemen lived like dogs – of course, Moslem Yemenis were not exactly living free either. And clearly the position of the Copts in Egypt shows that the existence of an antagonistic religious state is not a necessary condition for poor treatment of religious minorities in Islamic nations.
In any event, in this case history does not offer any obvious solutions for people alive today.
The status of most Jews in Arab countries varied generally from tolerable to very good, and as expected did tend to vary with overall human rights and conditions in any given country. Yemeni Jews did not ever have a good situation, but as you pointed out, neither did any Yemenis. Compared to much of the Arab world, Yemen was a very backward, isolated country whose rulers were not exactly enlightened (Oman was as well, and it is astonishing what 30 years of even semi-enlightened rule has done for that country). Nevertheless, the Zionists reportedly did not have an easy time convincing Yemeni Jews that they needed to be rescued, and ended up tricking many of them into getting onto the planes headed for Israel. Many if not most of them got onto those planes having no real idea where they were going or why except that it was a golden land where their lives would be wonderful. It did not turn out quite that way for most of them.
The status of Jews in Iraq varied quite a bit during that period as well, but was not onerous except for one very bad period in 1941 during which the government was taken over for a few weeks by an Arab nationalist group led by Rashid `Ali Al Gailani that was somewhat allied with the Germans (Arabs tended to ally with the Germans in the belief that if the Germans won the war they would free the Arabs from British colonial rule).
When the Gailani government collapsed and most of its members fled the country there was a three-day power vacuum during which there were riots in the streets, and 250-300 people, mostly Jews, were killed. To really understand this incident and what led up to it it is necessary to go into more detail than I can here, but it was a singular incident that really shook the Jewish community, and shocked Iraqis in general. The fact that some Muslims and Christians were killed, injured, or seriously threatened protecting their Jewish neighbors and colleagues is revealing. When the monarchy was restored things returned to normal, the Jewish community regained its confidence, and continued to invest in its institutions and businesses in Iraq.
The general viewpoint of Iraqi Jews has been that the source of their problems was Zionism and Israel, not Arab nationalism. That is what the Jews I knew in Iraq indicated to me, especially during the build-up to the 1967 war. Me’ir Basri, one of the Iraqi Jewish leaders, has said that if Israel had not been established, nothing would have happened to the Iraqi Jews, and they could have stayed in Iraq as any other religious minority. This belief is widely held by Iraqi Jews. It is what I believe as well.
That is what the Jews I knew in Iraq indicated to me, especially during the build-up to the 1967 war. Me’ir Basri, one of the Iraqi Jewish leaders, has said that if Israel had not been established, nothing would have happened to the Iraqi Jews, and they could have stayed in Iraq as any other religious minority. This belief is widely held by Iraqi Jews. It is what I believe as well.
Maybe. “all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed”
The negro critics of those unruly SNCC kids in the Southern US said the similar things about the position of the african-american community in the south.
The impression that most Iraqi Jews had of their lives in Iraq prior to the creation of Israel is significantly at variance with the impression that you and others attempt to convey. I knew a number of Iraqi Jews in Iraq, and saw with my own eyes how they lived. I heard their accounts and opinions of their own lives, and have studied this subject quite a bit, mostly from the point of view of Iraqi Jews themselves. I give more credibility to the way Iraqi Jews themselves perceived their lives and what caused their situation to change than I do to the stories used by Zionists who have never even been to Iraq to justify what happened to them.
So the 1000 a month smuggled out were kidnapped?
Come on! Can we please try to treat this like a serious discussion among serious people, and avoid getting silly?
As I said in an earlier comment, during the ban on emigration the Zionist underground succeeded in assisting a number of Iraqi Jews to sneak out of the country to Israel. According to all the accounts I have seen these Jews fell mainly into one or both of two groups. There was a relatively small number of Iraqi Jews who left for ideological reasons. Whether they were persuaded by the Zionist underground to adopt a Zionist ideology, or whether those sentiments were pre-existing I have not been able to discover. Another, probably larger group were living in poverty and had little or nothing to lose by leaving Iraq, and the Zionists were very good at hyping the idea that a wonderful life awaited them in Israel. Middle class and wealthy elite Jews were far harder to convince because their lives were generally tolerable to very good, and they had a great deal to lose buy abandoning them.
I am not claiming that no Jews left Iraq because of discrimination or harrassment, but by all credible accounts they were not very many, and very few of them were among the middle class and elite.
I am not at all convinced that the 1,000 per month number is not a serious overestimate, but I have seen no actual evidence either way, so cannot really say whether it is realistic or not. My sense is that the Zionists have hyped this number considerably, much as the perpetrators of Deir Yassin seriously hyped the number of people they had murdered when they met with the press right after the massacre. Their claims of 250-300 stuck and were virtually universally accepted for many years – until the late 1990’s, in fact.
Thanks in part to my research and that of a few others, and a long, often painful struggle on our part during which we were publicly and privately vilified for trying to minimize the event, the more accurate number of 108 is now generally accepted.
The fact is that there was a massive emigration of the mizrachi out of every Arab nation in the 1950s. Some of it was caused by persecution, some by salesmanship, some by religious belief, some by a wish for a better life. And there was a different combination in all states. But the universal nature of this, from Tunisia to Yemen, indicates that explanations based on sneaky plots are missing something.
And of course wealthy Iraqi Jews resented Israel – they had a good deal and the mess of the Israeli war seemed to exacerbate problems. Because, Jews, like Islamic Arabs, are not a single block, they have different ideological and class and ethnic and national interests. In fact, there are many Israeli Yemini Jews who hate secular Israel because “their” women are less obedient than in good old medieval Yemen. And Iraqi Jews in Israel are overwhelmingly members of far right parties.
But a kind of reverse Bernard Lewisism, where one fantasizes a mid 20th century period like that of the peak of Islamic Spain is also wrong. The Jews in the middle east were second class citizens in many places. They Jewish community in Iraq had reason to be fearful after riots, after the disturbance of the Kurdish war, and as the new state run by British puppets spiraled into corruption and collapse – the Baath took power just a decade later. The whole situation was a tragedy and I don’t see how postulating the magical effect of Zionist Super Villans adds much to the understanding of the period. Otherwise, one ends up like the wretched Serbians, debating outcomes of battles from the 12th century.
“sneaky plots”, no … “evangelism” or “salesmanship”, probably yes.
An appeal to religious identity & the promise that, at last, you will have the opportunity for a prosperous life free from any discrimination real or imagined that might be holding you back.
I’ve seen the Mormons make converts like this & I don’t think they are unique in the world.
casting this as a discussion of ‘super Zionist villains’ does violence to the whole debate.
You’re trying to score points by casting this as some kind of typical anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that ascribes superpowers to Jews.
That’s grossly unfair, as no one else has made any allegation of the type.
In fact, the allegation is straightforward. The Israelis succeeded in winning a year-long window for legal Iraqi emigration by allowing Iraqi leaders to get rich off the transport. Then a serious of events took place that had the effect of intimidating the Iraqi Jewish population into fleeing their country and surrendering all their belongings. The biggest part of those events was a series of bombings targeting (mostly) Jewish targets. There have been allegations dating from that time that either native Iraqi Zionists or Israeli intelligence officers (or both) were behind the bombings.
Nothing in this whole debate involves superpowers. It is a debate about history that has no antisemitic component and doesn’t trade in any typical antisemitic tropes.
First, get the sequence of events correct: the big riot that scared everyone was BEFORE the bombings.
Second, if you are discounting the obvious and simple explanation or even insisting that some other explanation is important, it seems like you should have more solid evidence. The Jews of every Arab nation left. So it would have been anomalous if the Iraqi Jews had not left. The obvious explanation is that a mixture of insecurity and discrimination was the basis.
Finally:
I remember reading a history of the Mossad (written by Israelis) that mentioned an effort to organize a spying ring in Baghdad in an intentional effort to anger the Iraqi government and nudge them into expelling the native Jewish population. The purpose was to collect Iraqi Jews as new citizens of Israel.
I never found a second source for that story, but it seemed plausible, if extraordinarily devious.
I’m sure I’ve overreacted, but use “extraordinarily devious” kind of set my teeth on edge.
The riot that scared everyone was in 1942. As I said earlier, it was a singular event that badly shook the Jewish community, and shocked non-Jewish Iraqis. However, the Jewish community quickly recovered, invested heavily in their institutions and business in the years following. This was not the behaviour of a community that was inclined to leave.
It would be enlightening to look at the 1942 riot – called farhud, or breakdown in order – and what led up to it in more detail. Unfortunately, I do not have time now to do it justice.
The fact that Iraqi Jews did not head en masse for the border as soon as the government legalized emigration suggests that the farhud was not a major factor, and that the bombings and other actions committed by the Zionist underground precipitated Jewish flight. That is confirmed by a number of Iraqi Jews.
Correction:
“The riot that scared everyone was in 1942.” should be in quotes in my comment above.
Clarification: I do not mean to suggest that the farhud was not a factor at all in the decision of many Iraqis to leave Iraq. There were, in fact, a number of factors, but they were clearly not singly or collectively sufficient to induce most Jews to leave the country. The bombs appear to have been the last straw. It IS interesting, though, that thousands of Jews felt confident enough to stay in the country.
Remember that holding Zionist beliefs was against the law at the time, so there was initially a suspicion that registering to emigrate to Israel would be used against Jews as evidence of Zionist sympathies. It’s a complicated topic and hard to reduce to clean categories of motivation.
Agreed, but I don’t think it is a coincidence that increases in people signing up to emigrate followed the bombings, or that most Jews did not sign up until close to the year of open emigration, or that the worst bombings occurred toward the end of the year, or that most Jews signed up after the worst of the bombings. I really wish I could locate my Jewish Iraqi friends to get their take on it, but as I said we lost touch some time ago, and I do not know where they are now. Wherever they are I hope they are safe and doing well.
Actually, the Farhud took place in 1941.
I have problems with this guy’s credibility because he obviously has a gigantic ax to grind, but he at least was a member of the Iraq Zionist underground and has some firsthand accounts of their activities. Take it with a grain of salt.
I have studied Giladi’s book. Much of what he says in the linked article and in the book is confirmed by other sources, and he has some interesting documents. However, in his case I take anything that is not consistent with know facts and/or with other accounts, and/or is not confirmed by other sources with a grain of salt. He clearly does have an axe to grind. As a sole source or even a main source I do not find him altogether convincing.
Much of his account of his experience in Israel and his regret over making the choice to go there, and his longing to return to Iraq is, however, very common among Iraqi Jews.
Here’s more recent information that is partly exculpatory but ultimately inconclusive.
I am not convinced by this at all. I find an exculpatory report by the Mossad about as convincing as a report by the Council of Foxes that concludes that no foxes were involved in last nights hen house raid. Ditto Tager’s claim of innocence and finger-pointing at the Muslim Brotherhood. The logic here: “if a bomb was thrown while we were in prison, it would have proved that it was not us who bombed the Masuda Shemtov” is, of course, deeply flawed on its face, and to conclude from it that it was members of the Muslim Brotherhood that threw the bomb is ridiculous.
When I first heard the allegations that the Zionist underground had used terrorism against Iraqi Jews I considered them quite outlandish. I remained skeptical for years, and it took me a long time and a lot of study and discussion to conclude that the allegations are correct. It’s going to take a lot more than self-interested exculpatory reports and claims of innocence to convince me otherwise.
When all else fails, drag out the anti-Semitism card, right?
I don’t think I accused anyone of anti-semitism. But if I did, please point out to me where I did it.
The “extraordinary deviousness” of Israel seems to me to be a strange charge. We’re talking of a period 10 years after the British were dropping poison gas bombs on Iraqi tribes and 5 years after the Second World War ended, and 5 years before the Americans and British overthrew Mossadeq.
The facts of the Lavon affair are not in question. If that plot was not extraordinarily devious, I am not sure what would be. And it seems to me that the Zionist actions in Israel were also extraordinarily devious, even if you do not accept as fact that they were behind the bombings.
I do not understand your reference to Britain’s use of poison bombs, and the second world war. There is nothing devious about either that I can see. As for the overthrow of Mossadeq, I would call that also extraordinarily devious, but it does not make the Lavon affair or the actions in Iraq any less devious.
Extraordinarily means, you know, out of the ordinary. If you think the Lavon affair is particularly devious for a national spook agency, pick up a copy of the Church report or Phil Ageees book or read Le Carre’s recent essay about the British spys or consider the utter ludicrous career of Angleton or the radiation poinsoning of that poor russian guy or the recent murder of the chechen in Dubai or … Over the top stupid is not out of the ordinary
And note the Lavon affair was not only no more devious than trying to put LSD in Castro’s scuba equipment, but it was equally brilliant – obviously things didn’t work out as the devious masterminds of the Lavon affair had hoped.
It is a source of constant wonder to me how people keep being shocked when the Israelis just act like every other fucked up stupid state in the world. As Bakunin said, “for reason of state” is the excuse for the worst crimes in human history.
Now we are arguing semantics. Not very interesting really.
Nor is the argument that what Israel does is not worse than what the worst of the worst do. Race to the bottom, anyone?
To me it’s a critical point in understanding- not semantics or “race to the bottom” justification. I had the same reaction reading Bernard Lewis’ bullshit on the Arab nations. If you want to start by pretending that the “normal” of the US and Europe is an approximation to moral state conduct, you can then wax eloquent about the moral failures of the grubby arbas/jews/indians/whatevers.
“of course wealthy Iraqi Jews resented Israel – they had a good deal and the mess of the Israeli war seemed to exacerbate problems.“
Except that it was not only wealthy Iraqi Jews who resented Israel. I knew wealthy elite Jews in Iraq, but many of the Jews I knew there were middle class Iraqis, and not wealthy at all. They all resented Israel, particularly when Israel acted up.
And many of the Iraqi Jews who resented and continue to resent Israel were middle and working class Jews who went to Israel and for the first time in their lives felt like second class citizens.
And yes, in some places, such as Yemen, Jews were second class citizens. In other places, such as Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon, they were among the elite, and every prominent in the growing middle class. It makes sense, then, that it was much harder to get Iraqi, Egyptian, Syria, and Lebanese Jews to go to Israel.
And finally, as I have said earlier, the facts of the Lavon affair are not in question and have not been for some time. We know who did it, we know what they did, and we know why they did it.
the treatment of the mizrahi jews in israel was and is terrible, so that’s no surprise. and all emigrants/refugees are prone to believing that the water tasted like honey back home – I know people from many countries who believe that here in the US and in Europe. But that doesn’t mean they were tricked into emigrating or they did not face insurmountable problems in the old country.
But we know that at least in many cases they WERE tricked into immigrating, and we do know, based on some objective criteria, that in most cases they WERE better off back home. And their own perceptions that they were better off back home are not insignificant, and are far more important in evaluating their conditions both back home and in Israel than your rather nebulous argument is.
One thing we know for sure is that most Jews who stayed in Iraq were much better off in most respects than their fellow Jews who went to Israel. When Israel acted up, as in 1967, things did get a bit dicey for Jews in Iraq, and they felt a need to keep a low profile for a while, but on the whole their lives and livelihoods were comfortable and secure, they were not harassed by the government and they enjoyed neutral to good relations with their fellow Iraqis.
As a matter of fact, it is generally not possible to distinguish a Jewish Iraqi from any other Iraqi by appearance, speech, dress, or conduct, and you could not always tell by the name. You could know someone was Jewish if they told you they were, if you knew they observed Sabbath on Saturday or attended a synagogue, or if they had the name of a prominent Jewish family (but not always because sometimes Jewish family names were shared by non-Jewish families), or if they had an exclusively Jewish given name, which was not always the case. So, in your day-to-day dealings with someone you might not know whether you were dealing with a Sunni, a Shi`a, a Christian, a Kurd, a Jew, a Sabaean, or what. Nor did most people care.
In any case, the loss of the Iraqi Jewish community is huge, and a deeply shameful thing for Iraq and Iraqis. Despite my arguments here, and despite my insistence that the Jews were not expelled, I do not at all hold the Iraqi government blameless for the mass exodus of 1950-51 nor for the loss of the remaining Jews over the years of Saddam’s disastrous rule, though I do blame George Bush for creating the conditions that led to the loss of the fifty or so Jews who managed to stick with Iraq through the terrible times of the devastating 1991 war and sanctions. The Jews were there since Babylonian times, and their importance to Iraqi history, society, and culture cannot be overestimated. Furthermore, they were as deeply Iraqi as any Iraqi has ever been, and by losing the Jews Iraq lost a huge and very important piece of itself.
And don’t even get me started on what has happened to Iraq’s other ancient minorities since 2003. It is one of the largely unnoticed consequences of George Bush’s crimes against humanity.
In any case, the loss of the Iraqi Jewish community is huge, and a deeply shameful thing for Iraq and Iraqis. Despite my arguments here, and despite my insistence that the Jews were not expelled, I do not at all hold the Iraqi government blameless for the mass exodus of 1950-51 nor for the loss of the remaining Jews over the years of Saddam’s disastrous rule
You have to remember that “the Iraqi government” of the time was a British puppet foreign monarchy. Strangely enough during the same period, an even greater upsurge of communal violence and forced emigration was taking place under another British installed army in Pakistan – and a matching one in India. The long period of relative toleration of ethnic minorities in the ME came to an end, not coincidently, when the Turks were crushed and replaced by colonial powers that routinely exacerbated communal tensions for their “divide and rule” strategy.
You definitely have a point, although I don’t agree with 100% of your take on it.
I’ll come back and fill in more details later. I am a bit busy at work at the moment.
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/04/06/opinion/1194839255168/op-ed-last-jew-in-afghanistan.html
PS You seem to view very cavalierly the terrible treatment by Israel of Mizrahi Jews whom they lured there usually by false promises and worse. You seem to be saying, so what if Israel treated Mizrahi Jews horribly?
I’m not cavilier about it at all. Aside from the shamefulness of the racism in itself, the mistreatment of the mizrahim helped create reactionary parties like Shas which are contributing to the general misery.
Thanks for clarifying that, and I agree with you.
I originally read the thread title on my new iPhone as Instapundit. LOL.
Article title: “If I am not for myself who will be for me?”
This only half of an old Hebrew proverb that I first read in a work by Martin Buber, perhaps “I and Thou”:
If you are not for yourself, who will be?
If you are just for yourself, what are you?
You can take its full meaning from there.
In discussing Israel’s right to occupy, ethnically cleanse, colonize, exploit the resources of and permanently annex land not granted to it, keeping what is left of its population in a perpetual state of non-citizenship, let us never forget the most flagrant example of this, namely the Golan Heights, which is clearly and legitimately the sovereign territory of another state.
And let us also never forget that the Golan Heights was Israel’s most successful ethnic cleansing effort so far in that they succeeded in expelling 95% of the population, and destroying 96% of the villages and small towns, and, of course, utterly destroying an entire city, Quneitra, when they were forced to withdraw from it.
And while speaking of ethnic cleansing, most people do not know that in 1967 Israel engaged in a program of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and parts of the West Bank in which they forced several hundred thousand Palestinians across the borders of Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. They actually transported tens and tens of thousands of Palestinians to the banks of the Jordan river, and forced them to cross on foot with whatever belongings they could manage to carry, sometimes “encouraging” them with gunfire.
“…but I do recognize Israel as a state and recognize their right to exist on their original borders in peace and security. “
On what basis do you “recognize their right to exist”?
Mainly this.
And if that resolution were based on demonstrably false premises, then what?
Your comment is intriguing, but I have lost track of something here. To what resolution are you referring? Sorry for being dense.
my comment above was meant to be a reply to Booman’s reference to the UN Resolution 273, in response to my other comment.
If that is his basis for recognizing Israel as a state and recognizing their “right to exist”, then I think it is pretty weak tea.
On topic.
Interesting and encouraging.
I learned a long time ago not to get too concerned about motivations when someone does the right thing. Regardless of why they did it in the first place, if they receive positiver reinforcement for it, they are likely to continue doing it.
So, Booman, what’s all this about a “WASP bias” of which you are accused?
I dunno. I am white, Protestant, and partly-Anglo. Maybe it has biased me. People will say anything.