Corbyn and his acolytes: Cheerleaders for the real forces of imperialism in the Middle East - by Lyn Julius

Arab and Muslim antisemitism did not begin with the creation of Israel. For 14 centuries of Muslim rule, Jews lived as a subjugated dhimmi minority with few rights. Israel’s Mizrahi citizens have long memories: they will fight to prevent a return to “colonised” dhimmi status in a Corbyn-approved majority-Arab state.

Lyn Julius..
The JC..
26 August '18..
Link: https://www.thejc.com/comment/comment/the-jewish-exodus-which-corbyn-ignores-jeremy-corbyn-anitsemitism-1.468886

Hardly a day goes by without another shocking revelation of Jeremy Corbyn’s association with antisemites. But while most of us recoil at Corbyn’s documented support for his “friends” Hamas and Hezbollah, his appearances on the Iranian-funded Press TV, and his tribute to the perpetrators of the Munich massacre, little has been said about the intellectual underpinnings of the ideological world-view that Corbyn has clung to for 40 years. It is time that they were debunked from a Sephardi or Mizrahi perspective.

I doubt whether Corbyn has heard of Mizrahi or Sephardi Jews. Did he know that 850,000 Jewish refugees fled Arab and Muslim antisemitism in a single generation?

Would it appall him that ancient communities once numbering many thousands of Jews — from Morocco in the West to Yemen in the East — were driven to extinction (barely 4,500 are left), their property stolen and their rich heritage erased? Maybe he will blame the Zionists — or say that the Jews left of their own free will.

The evidence of a forced Jewish exodus is incontrovertible, however. The Jews fled in larger numbers than the Palestinians from Israel. The majority of Jews were escaping harassment, intimidation, violence and persecution — ranging from arrests and imprisonment to execution on trumped-up charges. Theirs was the largest mass movement of non-Muslims until the post-2003 flight of Christians from Iraq.

Clearly, Corbyn’s revulsion for the state of Israel lies at the heart of his belief system. Many believe he has been reluctant to accept the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism so that he might continue to call the Jewish state “racist”and allow offensive comparisons between Zionists and Nazis. He insists on distinguishing between “good” anti-Zionist Jews and “bad” Jews — the great majority of whom identify with Israel.

Yet the bitter experiences of Middle Eastern and North African Jews teach us that the distinction between Jews and Zionists cannot be maintained for long.

(Excellent) The expulsion that backfired: When Iraq kicked out its Jews - by Edwin Black

Bent on destroying Israel, and gripped by vicious anti-Semitism, Baghdad ‘pauperized’ its Jews and forced them to leave for the nascent Jewish state in 1951-2. It believed Israel would collapse under the strain. But the immigrants ultimately helped Israel thrive, and it was Iraq that suffered

Edwin Black..
Times of Israel..
31 May '16..

After Adolf Hitler’s defeat in May 1945, many Nazis melted away from the Reich, smuggled out by such organizations as the infamous Odessa group and the lesser-known Catholic lay network Intermarium, as well as the CIA and KGB. They ensured the continuation of the Nazi legacy in the postwar Arab world.

Egypt was a prime destination for German Nazi relocation in the Arab world. Dr. Aribert Heim was notoriously known as “Dr. Death” for his grotesque pseudo-medical experiments on Jewish prisoners in the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen concentration camps. He was fond of surgical procedures including organ removals without anesthesia, injecting gasoline into prisoners to observe the manner of death, and decapitating Jews with healthy teeth so he could cook the skulls clean to make desk decorations. Dr. Heim converted to Islam and became “Uncle Tarek” Hussein Farid in Cairo, Egypt, where he lived a happy life as a medical doctor for the Egyptian police.

Two of Goebbels’s Nazi propagandists, Alfred Zingler and Dr. Johann von Leers, became Mahmoud Saleh and Omar Amin respectively, working in the Egyptian Information Department. In 1955, Zingler and von Leers helped establish the virulently anti-Semitic Institute for the Study of Zionism in Cairo. Hans Appler, another Goebbels propagandist, became Saleh Shafar who, in 1955, became an expert for an Egyptian unit specializing in anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist hate propaganda. Erich Altern, a Gestapo agent, Himmler coordinator in Poland, and expert in Jewish affairs, became Ali Bella, working as a military instructor in training camps for Palestinian terrorists. A German newspaper estimated there were fully 2,000 Nazis working openly and under state protection in Egypt.

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Egypt was hardly alone in reinventing the Nazi war against the Jews. German Nazis also took up postwar positions of influence in Syria, Lebanon, and Iran. But Iraq, long a Nazi Arab stronghold, was arguably among the most agitated in the Arab world.

(Read Full Story)

Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling author of “IBM and the Holocaust,” and “The Farhud, Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust.” To commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the 1941 Farhud pogrom, Black will lead ceremonies with Jewish groups and senior Israeli diplomats featuring candle-lighting, shofar blowing, and liturgical lamentation starting at the House of Representatives in Washington, DC, May 31, continuing on in New York later that day, then in London on June 2, and finally in Jerusalem’s Knesset on June 6. For further information, go to www.thefarhud.com.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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An elite army of moral narcissists and the erasure of the Jewish Nakba

...What is especially painful is that Israel’s own elite army of moral narcissists, such as Professor Motzkin, collude with the purveyors of the ‘Palestinian Nakba‘ narrative, while wiping from memory a trauma that afflicted their own Jewish people. This can only pour fuel on the flames of hatred, while perpetuating a monopoly of Palestinian victimhood.

Lyn Julius..
Times of Israel..
31 August '15..

On Monday 7 September, the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute will be launching a book about the Holocaust and the Palestinian ‘Nakba’ titled “The Holocaust and the Nakba: Memory, National Identity, and Jewish-Arab Partnership.”

Already, the Institute has been fending off a torrent of accusations that the book, which emerged from seven years of collaboration between Arabs and Jews, is making an offensive and dangerous comparison between the systematic murder of a whole people by the Nazis, and the flight of 700,000 Palestinian Arab refugees in wartime.

To juxtapose the words Holocaust and ‘Nakba’ trivialises the Holocaust. It also de-contextualises the flight of the Arab refugees from Israel: the ‘Nakba’ was a catastrophe which the Arab leadership brought upon their people, by failing to inflict a catastrophic defeat on the Jews of Palestine. They would have shed few tears for the defeated Jews, had the 1948 war which they launched had a different outcome.

As yet few critics of the Van Leer initiative have drawn attention, except in a cursory way, to the galling absence from this distorted reading of history of the ethnic cleansing of a greater number of Jewish refugees – the Jewish ‘Nakba’. Almost a million Jews were driven out of their homes in Arab countries about the same time as the Palestinian Arab refugees fled Israel. If the Arabs lost their war against the new state of Israel, they decisively won their war against their innocent non-combatant civilians of the Jewish faith. Before a single Arab refugee had left what was to become Israel, the Arab League pre-meditated its war against ‘the Jewish minority of Palestine’, and drew up a Nuremberg-style plan of persecution.

Prof. Gabriel Motzkin, director of the Van Leer Institute and a professor emeritus of Philosophy at the Hebrew University, has said: “the real issue about the ‘Nakba’ is that Israeli society is “unwilling to understand the trauma that constitutes the identity of this other people.” But Professor Motzkin spares nary a thought for the trauma suffered by the Jewish refugees. Torture, imprisonment, arrest, murder, execution on trumped-up spying charges, dispossession and expulsion of a million Jews — all count for nothing in Professor Motzkin’s selective reading of the facts.

So what does the Jewish Nakba mean to you?

...Had the Arabs won the 1948 war, members of Zochrot, along with all the Jews of Israel, would surely have ended up at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea. And what did Zochrot think about the Jewish Nakba, I asked — the 870,000 Jewish refugees driven and dispossessed from Arab countries?

Lyn Julius..
Times of Israel..
04 May '15..

The merry month of May is upon us, and thoughts on the anti-Zionist lunatic fringe turn to Nakba Day on May 14. Time for the Zochrot organization to plan their annual stunt in memory of the ‘catastrophe’ or Nakba, of the flight of 600,000 Palestinian Arabs and the creation of Israel 67 years ago.

This year activists are organizing a ‘Public Apology Ceremony‘, funded by EU money and the lucre of earnest but misguided churches and NGOs, to commemorate the Nakba at the former site of the village of Lubya, near Tiberias. The organization says that the ceremony is to apologize for Israel planting trees in the area.

Last year they held a conference at Tel Aviv University, the putative site of the ruined Arab village of Sheikh Munis. There Zochrot laid out their ugly vision of what ‘the right of return’ for Palestinian Arabs to what is now Israel would mean. It was, in anybody’s book, a recipe for bloodshed and mayhem.

Zochrot have produced a short video clip to promote their mission: “So wait a moment, what is the Nakba?” Unsuspecting Israelis strolling on the Tel Aviv tayelet are quizzed on what the Nakba means to them.

I don’t know what is more worrying. The appalling ignorance of the Israeli public in this video — or the fact that Zochrot are asking the question in the first place.

Point of No Return: The two faces of the Nakba

...The tragedy of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries remained almost only in the memories of the refugee families, it has been forgotten in public discourse and is missing from the history books. Jews from Arab countries were not financed like Palestinian Arab organizations by foreign governments to tell their tragedy and to support their claims for compensation for the property they left. The time has come for Israel to mark the legacy of our refugees, to get internationally recognized the human tragedy which the Palestinian Arabs, with the active assistance of the Arab countries, have caused.

Supporters of the Arab Nakba protest

Bataween..
Point of No Return..
04 May '15..

As 14 May approaches - the date which Arabs mark their Nakba Day 67 years since Israel declared its independence, Zvi Gabay writing in News 1 draws attention to the other Nakba - the Jewish flight and dispossession from Arab countries. Whereas EU governments and churches are happy to fund organisations which promote awareness of the Arab Nakba (and the Israeli public purse even funds the Nakba agitation by Arab MKs) no such finance is forthcoming for those groups representing Jews displaced from Arab countries.

While many Israelis celebrated the 67th year of independence of the country, which was bought with much blood, hundreds of Israeli Arabs, led by their leaders, came out to protest against the celebrations, namely to demonstrate against Israel. Including the Arab MKs' Joint List, they carried the slogan "your independence day (the Jews) is our Nakba (catastrophe)." NGOs such as Balada, Zochrot and Adalah financed by foreign governments, have adopted the Palestinian narrative that includes the "right of return" - that is, the destruction of Israel. It was amazing to hear the demonstrators crying out: "Nakba" - a disaster. The disaster was in 1948. Arabs, but also many Jews, paid with their lives. The two sides fought each other until they reached an impasse.

But who brought this disaster on the world?

Apparently, with the passage of time we have to go back and remind them that the sole culprits of the Palestinian Nakba are the predecessors of the current Arab leaders. They, who in 1947 rejected the UN proposal to divide the land of Israel, which was under British mandate into two states - Jewish and Arab. This is in contrast to the leaders of the Yishuv, who were willing to compromise and accept the division. Not only the Arab leaders rejected the proposed partition, they also misled their people into a bloody war against the Jewish community, in order to obtain all of Palestine. They harnessed the Arab states to the chariot of war, spread a conflagration throughout the Middle East, and eventually led to the permanent Arab refugee problem we see today.

Of Nakbas, fools and fingers by Lyn Julius

...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.”

Lyn Julius..
Times of Israel..
19 May '14..

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.

Tzipi Livni’s forgotten refugees

...And when they are uninformed and lack confidence, they also lack the ability to say things in the international arena and in negotiations. Because a clear Israeli position could remove the greatest obstacle to reaching an agreement.

Ben-Dror Yemini..
Times of Israel..
31 October '13..

A few days ago, at a meeting of the World Jewish Congress, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni was asked if negotiations with the Palestinians would also deal with the Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Her answer was: “Yes, but there is no connection between the Jews and Palestinians refugee problem. The connection is with the Arab countries.”

There is something irritating about the fact that Israeli diplomats, even the most senior representatives of Israel, do not say things clearly and precisely on the issue of refugees – whether Jews, Arabs and others.

The issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries was neglected and abandoned for decades by all Israeli governments. Palestinians, however, inflated the refugee issue and managed to fix the label “crime against humanity“ on Israel. The results are clear.

Israel’s diplomats find it difficult to say that even if people were driven out, the exchange of populations in those years was acceptable and normative.

They find it difficult to say that successive Arab leaders, including Jordan’s King Abdullah, Nuri al-Said, Iraqi Prime Minister, Husni Zaim, the Syrian ruler, and prominent leaders of the Arabs of Palestine, supported the idea of ​​transfer and exchange of population.

They find it difficult to say that out of tens of millions of refugees, from the 40s, no one is a refugee today, except the Palestinians.

They find it difficult to say that not one of those tens of millions of people displaced has a “right of return.”

They find it difficult to say that the Jews were expelled from Arab countries, through no fault of their own, and in greater numbers than Arabs in Palestine.

They find it difficult to say that Jews’ right to compensation are tenfold that of the Palestinians.

They find it difficult to say recalcitrant Arabs created the refugee problem.

They find it difficult to say that international law does not recognize the right to recover one’s original property and certainly not a ‘right of return.’

And when they are uninformed and lack confidence, they also lack the ability to say things in the international arena and in negotiations. Because a clear Israeli position could remove the greatest obstacle to reaching an agreement.

Dear Maysoon, Throw Away That Rusty Key

Lyn Julius..
The Daily Beast..
20 May '13..





Dear Maysoon,

I was moved to read your piece commemorating the flight of your husband from a village near Jerusalem in 1948. He has kept the rusty iron key to his home. Yours was one of hundreds of articles in the global media, together with demonstrations and marches, marking your Nakba—the flight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs in 1948.

A picture dated February 10, 2009 shows the entrance of an abandoned Jewish synagogue with a removed Star of David from the wall in Fallujah, west of Baghdad. (Saddam Hussein / AFP / Getty Images)

But let me tell you a little known-fact: as your husband's family was fleeing their village, a greater number of Jewish refugees were streaming out of the Arab world with one suitcase—in the opposite direction.

Over 800,000 Jewish refugees fled in the years immediately following 1948. This is the Jewish Nakba—a forgotten tragedy shrouded in silence. One of those refugee families was mine. We lived in a comfortable house in a riverside Jewish neighbourhood in Baghdad.

"There is no place like home," as you say. Iraq was home to Jews for 2,600 years. A third of Baghdad was Jewish. But in 1948, persecution became so intolerable that my parents, along with 90 percent of Iraq's Jews, had no choice but to flee. The Jews lost everything—citizenship, homes, lands, businesses, synagogues, schools, hospitals and heritage. The same story repeated itself across the Arab world, as dispossessed Jews fled discrimination, abuse, riots and executions. Of a million Jews, only 4,000 remain.

You complain that there are Jews who deny the Arab Nakba. But plenty of Arabs and their supporters deny that Jews were ever refugees—let alone suffered a monumental injustice. They claim that Jews left the Arab world "of their own free will." Or they blame the Zionists—although a third of us resettled in the West.

If you are tempted to blame the Jewish exodus on Israel’s creation, let me assure you that Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism did not begin in 1948: If you then ask, what has the injustice against the Jewish refugees who fled Arab countries got to do with you Palestinians? The answer is: everything.

(Video) The Forgotten Refugees - Remembering The Jewish Nakba

LOTL..
14 May '13





The Forgotten Refugees: A film about the mass exodus of up to one million Jews from Arab countries

In 1945, up to one million Jews lived in the Middle East outside of the Palestine Mandate and in North Africa. Within a few years, only a few thousand remained.

This is the story of the thousands who fled their homes, who endured in refugee camps, and who today quietly carry the memory of a destroyed civilization.

The Forgotten Refugees explores the history and destruction of Middle Eastern Jewish communities, some of which had existed for over 2,500 years. Featuring testimony from Jews who fled Egypt, Libya, Iraq and Yemen, these personal stories of refugees are interspersed with dramatic archival footage, including rescue missions of Yemenite and Iraqi Jews.


ada4567   Posted on Aug 23, 2012

"The Forgotten Refugees" was aired on PBS in California, KQED; PBS in Virginia, WHRO-TV, RTVi, Israel Channel 1,...

The film was also screened at the US Congress in July 2007 and at the UN in March 2008.

"The Forgotten Refugees" won the Award for Best Documentary Film at Marbella Film Festival in 2007.

Film Director: Michael Grynszpan

Executive Producer: Ralph Avi Goldwasser

49 min., Color, Copyrights 2007

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook.

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Jewish refugees from Arab countries - Justice delayed is justice denied

Irwin Cotler..
Op-Ed Contributor/JPost..
06 September '12..

This November will mark the 65th anniversary of the UN Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947. It is sometimes forgotten – and often not even known – that this was the first-ever blueprint for an Israeli-Palestinian “two states for two peoples” solution. Regrettably, while Jewish leaders accepted the resolution, Arab and Palestinian leaders did not, and by their own acknowledgment, declared war on the nascent Jewish state while also targeting the Jewish nationals living in their respective countries.

Indeed, had the UN Partition Resolution been accepted, there would have been no 1948 Arab- Israeli war, no refugees, and none of the pain and suffering of these past 65 years. The annual November 29 UN-organized International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People might well have been a day commemorating a Middle East peace, and the establishment of both the State of Israel and the State of Palestine.

Yet the revisionist Middle East narrative – prejudicial to authentic reconciliation and peace between peoples as well as between states – continues to hold that there was only one victim population, Palestinian refugees, and that Israel was responsible for the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe) of 1948.

The result is that the pain and plight of 850,000 Jews uprooted and displaced from Arab countries – the forgotten exodus – has been both expunged and eclipsed from both the Middle East peace and justice narratives these past 65 years.

Indeed, the upcoming United Nations commemoration of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People – celebrated on the anniversary of the Partition Resolution – will likely ignore, yet again, the plight of Jewish refugees, thereby indulging and encouraging this Middle East revisionism.

Moreover, this revisionist narrative has not only eclipsed – and erased – the forgotten exodus from memory and remembrance, but it also denies that it was a forced exodus, and one that resulted from both double rejectionism and double aggression. This is the real nakba – the real double catastrophe.

Simply put, the Arab countries not only rejected a proposed Palestinian state and went to war to extinguish the nascent Jewish state, but also targeted the Jewish nationals living in their respective countries, thereby creating two refugee populations – the Palestinian refugee population resulting from the Arab war against Israel, and the Jewish refugees resulting from the Arab war against its own Jewish nationals.

(Video) Silent Exodus - The Jewish Nakbah

www.pierrerehov.com







Silent Exodus was selected at the International Human Rights Film Festival of Paris (2004) and presented at the UN Geneva Human Rights Annual Convention (2004)

In 1948 nearly one million Jews lived in Arab lands. But In barely twenty years, they have become forgotten fugitives, expelled from their native lands, forgotten by history and where the victims themselves have hidden their fate under a cloak of silence.

A people whom legend have always associated with "wandering" many of these Jews from Arab lands had lived there for thousands of years and accepted their fate, through good times and bad times.

But 1948, the beginning of their exodus, also saw the birth of the State of Israel.


Uploaded by constructivereconcil on May 24, 2011

And, while the Arab armies were preparing to invade the young refugee-country, the survivors of the Shoah were piling up in rickety boats. Meanwhile a few hundred thousand Arabs from Palestine were getting ready to flee their homes, convinced that they would return as winners and conquerors.

Soon - by a terrible twist of fate they, as well, began to fill up refugee camps and passed on their refugee status to new generations.

The Jews, however, did not receive refugee status.

They had just rediscovered the land of their birthright.

And if they came from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq or from Yemen, if they had lost everything, even their relatives and their cemeteries, they were ready to rebuild their lives in the West and for many - in Israel - and try to forget their past.

Without ever asking for compensation or the right of return, or even wishing that their story be told...

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A Moroccan 'marrano' comes 'home'

Bataween
Point of No Return
17 May '10

Ten days ago, slipping a prayer between the ancient stones of the Western wall in Jerusalem, Said Sayagh felt he had come home.

In his head Sayagh, 54, had long rehearsed his journey to Jerusalem - but the path had not been an easy one. A Moroccan writer and professor of Arabic from Meknes living in France, Sayagh put out his first timid feelers, inquiring into the origins of his surname on the Moroccan Jewish website Dafina in 2004. Yes, he was told, sayagh meant metalsmith in Arabic, an overwhelmingly Jewish profession. In some parts of Morocco it was considered demeaning for Muslims to deal in metalwork.

His grandmother Fatima on his father's side had been a Cohen. She had been converted to Islam, but how and why, Said could only speculate.

We will never know how many Jews converted to Islam over the centuries in Morocco, although this book may provide a few clues. Said Sayagh is one of the few 'Moroccan Marranos' to have 'come out'. He feels his Jewish identity has been forcibly torn asunder, just as the Jews in general have been torn from Morocco. How many more descendants of forced converts are there out there, frightened to reveal the lost component of their Jewish identity?

(Read full story)

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The 'nakba' of Morocco's Jews

Bataween
Point of No Return
29 April '10

Timed to coincide with the Palestinians' imminent 'Nakba' day, Lela Gilbert's piece for the Jerusalem Post is a sobering reminder of the sufferings which Jews of Morocco endured. Since February, however, Moroccan-born Dina Gabay's's rights to compensation, like those of all Jewish refugees from Arab lands and Iran, have been enshrined in Israeli law:

Imagine a frightened six-year-old girl trying to catch her balance in the stifling and cramped hold of a violently tossing ship. She is not alone on the turbulent sea – her parents and sibling are nearby. But fear is in the air, along with the sight and smell of terrible sickness. The child understands little about her circumstances. She is aware that she is going to a place called Israel, where three of her brothers now live. She realizes that she is saying good-bye forever to her Morocco home. But that’s all she knows about her journey.

Meanwhile her present misery, and that of her beloved family, eclipses all else. The girl’s name is Dina Gabay. The year is 1955. Dina, her parents – Avraham and Rachel – and the family are fleeing ever-increasing dangers in their town of Sefrou, near Fez.

Only in later years did Dina come to appreciate the constant pressure her parents had endured before their departure. There were small things—insults and ceaseless intimidation. For example, her father, who owned a large and successful butcher shop, was at the mercy of local thieves, who sometimes simply walked into his business and demanded that he give them whatever they wanted – at no cost. “Not once and not twice,” Dina explains, “but whenever they wanted something. These were our good Muslim neighbors, you know?”

(Read full story)

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