Muslims & Jews: what they don't want you to know

Bataween
Point of No Return
01 December '10

The oppression throughout history of Jews in Arab countries has long been an embarrassment to leftists and western opinion-formers, writes E Green in his review of a must-read compilation of essays edited by Malka Hillel Shulevitz: The Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands {Cassell, 2001 (2nd ed.)} Although Green's review was published a few years ago, his analysis, and Shulewitz's book, remain as pertinent as ever:

Some of the most important events and historical processes get the least attention. In the oceans of ink spilled over the Arab-Israeli conflict relatively little attention has been given (in Israel too) to the historical background of the Jewish immigration --or flight-- to Israel from Arab countries. Partisans of the Arab cause tended to either falsify reality or ignore it. This has included Communists and leftists as well as spokesmen for Western interests in the Middle East. This whole subject has been an area where Communist ideology and practice converged with Western moral and political prejudices and interests.

The existence of oppressed Jewish (and other) minorities in Arab lands has long been an embarassment to certain Western journalists and policy-makers, as well as to Communist ideologues. The mainstream of American journalism in the 1940s and 1950s typically portrayed the Arab world as a region where people were kind, where toleration of Jews and other minorities was the rule, and where only Israel's presence spoiled the longing of the naturally anti-Communist Arab Muslims to join the Baghdad Pact. Soviet propaganda likewise advocated Arab unity, although in behalf of "anti-imperialist" and "progressive" goals and under Soviet rather than Western sponsorship.

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