Loolwa Khazzoom
Loolwa Khazzoom is an Iraqi-American Jewish feminist now living in
Israel. She is an editor, author and musician and director of the Jewish
MultiCultural Project.
When people around the world hear about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, they assume that Israelis are white European oppressors and Palestinians are indigenous people of colour being taken over and kicked out of their native home.
The familiar script of European racism and colonization thus plays out in people's minds. It is from this understanding and the accompanying desire for justice that many people across the globe feel outraged by even the very existence of Israel. With the backdrop of this global perception, Arab leaders are able to pull on the heartstrings of conscientious individuals, to put all the blame for regional strife squarely on the shoulders of Israel and to escape accountability for their own actions.
Ironically, Jewish leaders are the ones who created the perception of Jews as white. Arab leaders have merely exploited this perception to their own advantage.
Given the way Jewish heritage has been taught and presented for decades, when we say the word "Jews," the images that come to mind are not the black faces of Ethiopian Jews or the dark brown skin of Yemenite Jews. When we look for Jewish names, we don't look for names like Comerchero, Sarshar, or Mo'alem. When we think "Jewish," we think Poland, Germany, and Russia. We think bagels and cream cheese, Yiddish, and the Holocaust.
When the Jewish community itself renders invisible the faces and voices of Jews of colour, how is the world to know that Israel is not a white European nation yet again colonizing third world, native people of colour? How is the world to know that the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and their millions of children make up the majority of Jews in Israel?
The vicious anti-Israel hostility we witness today is the product of a cycle of misinformation, namely that all Jews are white Europeans, and, therefore, Israel is a white, European, colonizing nation, which, in turn, makes Israel a racist, apartheid state, which, in turn, means that Zionism is racism. And thus, anyone who is against racism must also stand against Israel.
Following this train of thought, progressive movements across the world are understandably anti-Zionist and anti-Israel.
But the reality is that Jews are a multi-racial, multi-ethnic people. Most importantly, for 50 years, the majority of Jews in Israel have been Mizrachim - Jews indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa. This community of Jews lived in the Middle East and North Africa since time immemorial. Until the mid-20th century, in the 4,000-year history of the Jewish people, Mizrachim never left the region.
Consider this: The majority of Israel's Jewish population never had anything to do with Europe. To the contrary, Mizrachim lived on the land of present-day Iraq, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, and Yemen before they were even called by these names, before there was such a thing as an Arab state.
Mizrachim lived there for 2,500 years - that's 1,200 years before the Islamic invasion of the region. Mizrachim have lived there since 586 BCE, when the Babylonian Empire destroyed ancient Israel and took the Israelites as captives to the land of present-day Iraq.
When Arab Muslims conquered the Middle East and North Africa, Jews were one of the few indigenous peoples that resisted conversion to Islam, the result being that the Jews were given the status of dhimmi. According to this status, Jews were a tolerated yet inferior people who should be forever punished for rejecting the vision of Mohammed. What this meant was that Jews suddenly lost the autonomy they had enjoyed from their non-Muslim neighbours.
Jews were commonly forced into ghettos, prohibited from owning land, prevented from entering numerous professions and forbidden from doing anything to physically or symbolically demonstrate equality with Arab Muslims. This basic attitude of contempt, oppression, and humiliation permeated the daily life of Jews. In addition, massacres were not uncommon, at times wiping out entire Jewish communities.
When dhimmi laws were lax and Jews were allowed to participate to a greater degree in their society, the Jewish community would flourish. Often, the response to that success would be a wave of harassment or massacres of Jews instigated by the government or the masses. Once disempowered and weak, the Jewish community would experience a period of relative quiet.
This dynamic meant that the Jews lived in a basic state of subservience. They could participate in the society around them, they could enjoy a certain degree of wealth and status and they could befriend their Arab Muslim neighbours, but they always had to know their place. The Arab-Israeli relationship and the current crisis occur in the larger context of a history in which Arab Muslims have oppressed Jews for 1,300 years.
Moreover, Palestinian leaders had a strong hand in the terrorization and expulsion of Jews throughout the Arab world, leading to 900,000 Jewish refugees fleeing from the region. In 1941, for example, numerous Palestinian leaders - most notably Hajj
Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem - arrived in Berlin, as guests of the Nazi regime.
Al-Husayni asked Hitler to apply the same methods against the Jews of the Middle East then being directed against Europe's Jews. Al-Husayni drafted a political declaration, which he presented to the Axis allies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, in the hope they would adopt it. In paragraph 7, he would have Germany and Italy "recognize the rights of Palestine and other Arab countries [to] resolve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and the other Arab countries in the same way as the problem was resolved in the Axis Countries" - that is, through genocide.
Furthermore, in a meeting between Hitler and al-Husayni on Nov. 28, 1941, Hitler promised the Palestinian leader that "[the] Fuhrer would offer the Arab world his personal assurance that the hour of liberation had struck. Thereafter, Germany's only remaining objective in the region would be limited to the annihilation of the Jews living under British protection in Arab lands."
With these assurances, al-Husayni voiced his hope for a "final solution" to the Jewish presence in the Middle East in a speech given at a rally in Berlin on Nov. 2, 1943. The speech was carried by Nazi Germany's official radio network, Radio Berlin.
"National Socialist Germany knows the Jews well and has decided to find a final solution for the Jewish danger which will end the evil in the world," al Husayni said. "The Arabs especially, and Muslims in general, are obliged to make this their goal, from which they will not stray and which they must reach with all their powers: it is the expulsion of all Jews from Arab and Muslim lands."
Not long after, severe anti-Jewish riots erupted throughout the Arab world. Jewish citizens were assaulted, tortured and murdered. In a few Arab countries, Jews were expelled outright. Throughout the region, Jewish property was confiscated and nationalized, forcing Jews to flee from places they had lived for thousands of years.
We do not hear about the Jewish refugee problem today, because Israel absorbed about 600,000 of these 900,000 refugees. For the past 50 years, they and their children have made up the majority of Israel's Jewish population. By contrast, Arab states did not absorb the Arab refugees from the Arab war against Israel in 1948. Instead, Arab states built squalid refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza - at the time controlled by Jordan and Egypt - and dumped innocent Arabs in them, Palestinians doomed to become political pawns.
Countries such as Lebanon and Syria continued funding assaults against Israel instead of funding basic medical and educational care for the Palestinian refugee families in these camps and elsewhere. In 1967, Israel inherited the Palestinian refugee problem through a defensive war. When Israel tried to build housing for the refugees in Gaza, Arab states led votes against it in United Nations resolutions, because absorption would change the status of the refugees. But wasn't that the moral objective? Israel went on to give more money to the Palestinian refugees than all but three of the Arab states combined prior to transferring responsibility of the territories to the Palestinian Authority in the mid-1990s.
Israel built hospitals and educational institutions for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Israel trained the Palestinian police force. And yet the 22 Arab states dominate both the land and the wealth of the region. So who is to blame for today's refugee problem?
Without an accurate and complete view of the history in the Middle East, government leaders and peace activists will continue to push the region into an unstable future that lacks integrity.
It is time that we all hold Arab leaders accountable for their actions against all the refugees of the region - Jewish and Arab. Until that happens, peace will remain an illusive dream.