The Wisdom of Peter Beinart’s Grandmother - by Lyn Julius

The long history of oppression of Mizrahi Jews in the Arab Middle East is the key to understanding the main drivers of the conflict with Israel – an Arab and Muslim inability to tolerate difference, to co-exist with minorities, and an abhorrence for any exercise of Jewish power. Yet in the Western progressive mind, bound tight as it is by the postmodern conceptual straitjacket, only Palestinians can be victims. The Mizrahi Jews are airbrushed out of public discourse. In the current jargon, they are ‘cancelled’.

Lyn Julius..
Fathom Journal..
July '20..

At the beginning of July, Peter Beinart, bellwether of US Jewish liberalism, sent shockwaves rippling through the Jewish world when he penned a long essay disavowing Zionism and advocating, in place of Israel, a bi-national state where Palestinians and Israelis would enjoy ‘equal’ rights.

Many critics have pointed out that ‘Beinartistan’, as one described it, would soon become yet another Muslim Arab state with a vanishing Jewish minority. And if Islamic fundamentalists have their way, its Jews would swiftly find themselves reverting to the status of ‘dhimmis’, with few rights under Muslim religious law.

How come a liberal like Beinart has bought into such a ‘dangerous delusion? Because he has never needed Zionism and because he appears to have internalised today’s ‘woke’ categories, which see Jews as benefiting from ‘white privilege’. He seems to want to promote, in the words of Einat Wilf, ‘Jewish powerlessness in an effort to restore [Jewish] moral purity.’

In progressive Western circles, Zionism has become decidedly un-cool. Self-declared Zionists, like the writer Bari Weiss, complain of bullying at the New York Times. In the vogue for identity politics, Jews are framed as white oppressors.

This postmodern conceptual straightjacket perverts historical truths. It dictates that only ‘people of colour’ can be victims, while the oppression of one million Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of pre-Islamic Jewish communities, among other minorities, from the Arab Muslim world from the 1940s, the subject of my book Uprooted!, must be passed over in silence.

The long history of oppression of Mizrahi Jews in the Arab Middle East is the key to understanding the main drivers of the conflict with Israel – an Arab and Muslim inability to tolerate difference, to co-exist with minorities, and an abhorrence for any exercise of Jewish power.

Yet in the Western progressive mind, bound tight as it is by the postmodern conceptual straitjacket, only Palestinians can be victims. The Mizrahi Jews are airbrushed out of public discourse. In the current jargon, they are ‘cancelled’. In this topsy-turvy world, merely to draw attention to Arab and Muslim antisemitism invites accusations of racism or ‘Islamophobia’.

(Continue to Full Article)

Lyn Julius is the author of Uprooted: How 3000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight.

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. 

Read the incredible story of the IDF's Iraqi Arabic instructor - by Neta Bar

For years, Command Sgt. Maj. V.'s family lived in fear under the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and hid their Jewish identity. Eventually, they became the last Jews to arrive in Israel from Iraq, whose once-glorious Jewish community no longer exists.

Neta Bar..
Israel Hayom..
23 October '19..

Throughout the history of the Israel Defense Forces, the IDF has frequently drawn on the services of new immigrants to Israel. Many have been called to the colors before they were fully acclimated to the country or even spoke fluent Hebrew. Like so many others, Command Sgt. Maj. V. was still a new arrival when she was called on to serve, but unlike most, she received the call precisely because of her knowledge and experience from her previous life in the Diaspora.

Command Sgt. Maj. V. serves as an Arabic instructor in the IDF's Intelligence Corps. She is responsible for teaching Arab culture and mentality as well as the Arabic language to intelligence personnel, for whom the knowledge is vital.

According to what her comrades in her unit say, V. has become something of a legend, not only because she is admired as a teacher or because she spent a long time in an operational unit, but mostly because of her personal story. Her family was one of the last Jewish families in Iraq and finally made aliyah after years of living in fear.

Israel Hayom meets with V. on an IDF base in central Israel. She arrives in uniform and as we sit down, she takes me through her incredible story, step by step.

V. was born to a Jewish family in Iraq. At the time, Iraq's Jewish community was a shell of its former glory and only a few thousand out of a community that once numbered 120,000 remained in the country.

The Iraqi Ba'ath regime persecuted the Jews who remained and saw them as spies. A few were even hanged to death on suspicion of espionage. The authorities' behavior convinced the Jews that it was time to leave – including V.'s family. But then the ax fell.

(Continue to Full Story)

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. 

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Matti Friedman Interview: Spies of No Country. Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel

People still tell the story of Israel as: When the Jews of the Islamic world moved to Israel they joined the story of the Ashkenazim – so the story of Israel is the story of the Jews of Europe. But having thought about this, and having lived here for 23 years, it is clear to me that what actually happened is much closer to the opposite. The remnants of the Jews of Europe come to the Middle East and inserted themselves into the story of the Jews of the Islamic world. The State of Israel is shaped by our contact with Islam and Jews who have lived here for centuries. The dominant narrative of the European Jews is wrong. Looking ahead, telling Israel’s story in the 21st century will have a lot less to do with the Warsaw Ghetto than it will with Kurdistan and Aleppo.

Matti Friedman..
Fathom Journal..
February '19..
H/T to Point of No Return

FRAMING A 21ST CENTURY ZIONIST STORY

Calev Ben-Dor (CB-D): Your new book Spies of No Country tells the story of four young Jewish men from the Arab world who form the beginnings of Israel’s spy network. What drove you to focus on this?

Matti Friedman (MF): The book follows four of Israel’s first spies through the 1948 War of Independence. The main characters are young men on the margins of the Zionist project who are recruited by a small, ad-hoc intelligence outfit within the Palmach called the Arab Section, which encourages Arabic-speaking Jews to cross enemy lines and gather intelligence in the Arab world. They actually don’t call themselves agents, but Mistarvim, which means ‘ones who become like Arabs’ and it’s a term used today, made famous by the TV hit Fauda. At its height at the onset of the war, the section was no more than 20 agents, only half of whom survive. Their mission expanded to attempted assassinations of Arab leaders, and in Haifa they carried out a pre-emptive attack on a garage where the Arab militia was preparing a car bomb in the spring of 1948. And then when Haifa fell to the Haganah in 1948 and the Arabs begun to flee, the people in charge of the Arab Section realised that they have an opportunity to insert their agents into the Arab world by disguising them as refugees. They ran away to Lebanon and spent the first two years of Israel’s existence as Palestinian refugees, so the way they experienced the birth of the state is radically different to most of the stories people have heard about at that time.

For many years, I have had the feeling that the stories we tell about Israel no longer explain the country; nor are they useful as a map for navigating the country in 2019. Israel has always told its story in a very European way, about socialism, Theodor Herzl, the Holocaust, the Kibbutzim. That is very important if you want to understand how the country was founded, but it doesn’t explain the society that we live in. So I was looking for other stories that would explain the state of now, particularly from the Middle Eastern perspective, which reflects the fact that half of Israelis today actually come from the Islamic world rather than from Europe. In 2011 I met a 90-year-old former spy, Isaac Shoshan, who lives in a small working class suburb of Tel Aviv with whom I had a series of fascinating conversations. Isaac told me a story about the founding of the state that I hadn’t heard before. He experienced 1948 as a Palestinian refugee, which was his job as part of the very small, embryonic intelligence outfit that as part of the Jewish military underground and that story struck me as worth telling.

(Continue to Full Interview)

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. 

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Jewish Voice for Peace confuses submission (and massacres) with peace - by Lyn Julius

...JVP begins its history lesson with the Ottomans. Jews paid a poll tax so that the Ottoman empire might protect them, and violence against them was “unusual.” Two falsehoods in one sentence. The dhimmi system was a Mafia-style protection racket built on extortion and humiliation: Jews were granted few rights. Pre-1948 massacres against the Jews were not unusual.

Lyn Julius..
JNS.org..
28 January '19..

It has been said that the group Jewish Voice for Peace is neither representative of Jews, nor is it pro-peace. Its voice on the far-left edge of the U.S. Jewish community has been rather shrill since the organization was founded in 1996.

Now, however, with the publication of its Jews of the Middle East worksheet and its document “Our approach to Middle East Peace,” JVP is employing a new tactic: to co-opt Mizrahi Jews into its anti-Zionist struggle.

More than 30 Sephardi and Mizrahi organizations have already responded angrily, calling for JVP to remove all reference to Mizrahi and Sephardi history in their literature.

Drawing on the revisionism of the academics Zvi Ben-Dror Benite, Yehouda Shenhav and Ella Shohat, JVP begins by falsifying the history of Middle Eastern and North African Jews. We are not told that these Jews were settled in the region since biblical times—predating Islam by 1,000 years—lest we are led to believe that Jews are other than white “colonial settlers.” JVP begins its history lesson with the Ottomans. Jews paid a poll tax so that the Ottoman empire might protect them, and violence against them was “unusual.”

Two falsehoods in one sentence. The dhimmi system was a Mafia-style protection racket built on extortion and humiliation: Jews were granted few rights. Pre-1948 massacres against the Jews were not unusual.

If Zionism was a European movement, so was Arab nationalism. In fact, the latter was predicated on a myth: that a common language was enough to glue disparate tribes together. Arab nationalism turned out to be a dismal failure—a recipe for tyranny and internecine conflict, while Israel, despite never knowing a minute of peace, has been an outstanding success.

(Continue to Full Column)

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. 

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The importance and necessity of teaching Mizrahi history

...The popular view is that Arab rejectionism is just bluster obscuring the "fact" that they only want to provide to the Palestinians what is their due and that this bluster would disappear once the Palestinians do receive their "due." However, an alternate view would be that the Arabs are irredentist for the social order that existed prior to the emergence of Zionism. Mizrahi history provides the details of the social order for which they are irredentist.

Sar Shalom..
Israel Thrives..
07 June '15..

At Israel Hayom, Edy Cohen has an article about the need to include the Farhud and other aspects of Mizrahi history in Israel's curriculum. Cohen is right that it is long overdue to teach about the history of the Mizrahim and appalling that European Jewish history is treated as though it is synonymous with Jewish history and that the half of Israel's Jewish population from the Middle East deserves to have its history taught. However, Cohen misses another reason why it is critical to teach Mizrahi history.

One of the memes that our enemies spread is that even if we have an ancient history in the Levant and even if we built a state there recently producing so much of value to the world, in between we have abandoned and forgotten that region. Further, they acknowledge the horrible things that Europe has done to its Jews, with the Holocaust merely being the worst of a long chain of atrocities, but turn around and complain that the "innocent" Palestinians are paying the price to expiate Europe's guilt. This meme is critical for their claim that we "stole" the land from the Palestinians because if the Jews both have an ancient history on the land and maintained a continuous connection to the land between that ancient history and modern times, then there would be no pretense under which to say that the Arabs were anything other than an imperial power over the centuries.

The most ancient of indigenous Middle Eastern peoples vs. the colonialist myth

...We must re-assert that Jews are the most ancient of indigenous Middle Eastern peoples, with a history of continuous residence in what is now known as the Arab world going back 3,000 years. Moreover, the colonial relationship between Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews and the Arab Muslim conquerors is the exact opposite of what reporters and western observers believe: the Jews of the region are the colonised and the Muslims the colonisers. For fourteen centuries, Jews survived at the beck and sufferance of their Muslim rulers.

Lyn Julius..
Times of Israel..
15 September '14..

This summer’s Gaza war has highlighted the role of the media and opinion formers in shaping a hostile view of Israel and a more favourable understanding of Hamas. Two journalists, formerly staffers with mainstream media, Matti Friedman and Tom Gross, have called the biased reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict a ‘political weapon – with which they arm one side in the conflict.’

There are many reasons why journalists have become accessories to Hamas’s propaganda war, behaving as activists rather than reporters. They relay a picture of Palestinian victimhood and Israeli extremism and intransigeance, suppressing any facts that make a nonsense of this narrative. Tom Gross identifies one reason:

” …Many have a kind of guilt about being white and Western, and the history of their own colonization. Israel is perceived as a white country and the Palestinians are perceived as non-white, even though in fact many Palestinians have lighter skin than some Israelis. Many Western journalists abroad have barely heard of the fact that there are Sephardi or Mizrahi Jews.”

This is a key reason why organisations like mine, Harif, have been trying to raise awareness that Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews constitue over 50 percent of Israel’s population.

We want people to ask why these Jews ended up in Israel. They did not move to Israel only out of Zionism, although this was a factor : the majority fled their countries as refugees – out of fear, to escape harassment, violence and death.

They fled the same conditions of intolerance and bigotry that are now forcing the other non-Muslim minorities of the Middle East to choose between extinction or exodus.

Suppress Mizrahi history? Why it can be ‘cool’.

Lyn Julius..
Times of Israel..
07 October '12..

Arriving at Ben Gurion airport last month, I sat next to a pleasant young American Jew on the sherut bus to Jerusalem. “What are you here for?” the young man asked. When I told him I was attending a conference on Jewish refugees from Arab countries, he thought for a moment.” You mean, about the discrimination the oriental (Mizrahi) Jews encountered when they first arrived in Israel?”

Well, not exactly, I explained. Deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon was about to launch a campaign demanding justice for Jews expelled and dispossessed from the Arab world. From Jerusalem, Ayalon would be taking the issue to the UN in New York.

Compared to the blank stare from the (Israeli) airport security girl that greeted Congressman Jerrold Nadler on his way to the same conference, I should have been grateful that my sherut companion had actually heard of Jews in Arab countries.

Nevertheless it is disturbing that the mere mention of Jews from Arab countries triggers an association with ‘discrimination’ at the hands of their Ashkenazi brethren. To be sure, discrimination loomed large in the 1950s, but it is no longer a serious issue today. The systematic persecution and violence one million Jews encountered in Arab countries just because they were Jews, on the other hand, does not seem to figure nearly as prominently. A possible explanation is the Eurocentricism that has prevailed in Israel for so long in the media, in schools, in politics. In the interests of social cohesion, successive Israeli governments have suppressed the unhappy history of Jews in Arab lands before Zionism or glossed over the human rights abuses experienced by these Jews.

During the Oslo years, Jewish refugees became viewed as a ‘stumbling block’ to peace. It was never the right time to raise their issue. If you didn’t know any better, the only people with a justifiable claim to justice appeared to be the Palestinians.

(Video) Did the Israelis steal hummus from the Arabs?

LOTL..
15 June '12..

... But with the Israelis selling Falafel is another thing: they claim that Falafel and other Palestinian and Arab dishes are their national dishes, which is yet another theft. In Europe and the US many conceive not only Falafel, but Hummus as well, as Israeli traditional dishes. My Palestine

Corey Gil Shuster takes to the streets and asks the hard questions. Corey was born and raised in Ottawa, Canada and became an Israeli citizen in 1995. After spending many years in Israel, he wanted to make sense of the patterns of behaviour that he observed living with Israelis related to the Israeli-Arab conflict. Please visit his YouTube Page and watch other fantastic interviews.


Published on Jun 1, 2012 by JewTribe

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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Mizrachi Jews and new sorties in the "War of Ideas in the Middle East"

Soccer Dad
06 September '10

As you may know, Martin Gilbert has just published a book called "In Ishmael's House, a history of Jews living in Muslim lands." The book includes what happened to the Mizrachi Jewry after 1948 and Gilbert joins the not terribly large group of historians who have tackled this important subject in any detail. (The Jews of Islam by Bernard Lewis, if I remember correctly, deals with its subject in very general terms.) MondoWeiss excerpts the final four paragraphs from a review of the book by New Historian Avi Shlaim:

Nowhere is Gilbert more strikingly one-sided than in his account of the consequences of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. In the course of this war, the name Palestine was wiped off the map and 726,000 Palestinians became refugees. In its wake, around 850,000 Jews left the Arab world, mostly to start a new life in the newborn State of Israel. For Gilbert, these Jews are simply the other half of the "double exodus" and he persistently refers to them as "refugees." With few exceptions, however, these Jews left their native lands not as a result of officially sanctioned policies of persecution but because they felt threatened by the rising tide of Arab nationalism. Zionist agents actively encouraged the Jews to leave their ancestral homes because the fledgling State of Israel was desperately short of manpower. Iraq exemplified this trend. The Iraqi army participated in the War for Palestine, and the Arab defeat provoked a backlash against the Jews back home. Out of a population of 138,000, roughly 120,000 left in 1950-51 in an atmosphere of panic and peril.

(Read full post)

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What about Mizrahi Jews, Helen Thomas?

Bataween
Point of No Return
11June '10

Ignorant and hurtful: those two adjectives just about sum up Helen Thomas's notorious remarks. Has she ever heard of Mizrahi Jews? Read my post on Comment is Free Watch.

If you still haven’t heard of Helen Thomas, you have not been reading The Guardian. Ever since the grande dame of the Washington DC press corps told Jews to ‘get the hell out of Palestine’ and ‘back home to Germany and Poland’ our favourite newspaper has run no less than seven pieces or blogs about her.

With an exquisite sense of timing, the veteran journalist made her ignorant and hurtful remarks to a rabbi with a video camera at a reception hosted by President Obama to celebrate Jewish Heritage Day.

We are told that Helen Thomas, who will soon be 90, shares a birthday with President Obama. Let’s hope he also does not share her antisemitic views. Although Thomas, the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, did apologise, she was forced to resign her post with Hearst Newspapers. Critics were particularly stung at her reference to Germany and Poland. She could not have picked two places where Jews have suffered more in Europe. (Besides, as Richard Cohen pointed out in the Washington Post, 1,500 Jews did try to ‘go home’ to Poland after the Second World War, only to be murdered.)

(Read full article)

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The most Ashkenazi elite is Israel's radical left

Gideon Levy

Bataween
Point of No Return
17 May '10

If Moroccan royal adviser Andre Azoulay came to Israel tomorrow, the best he could expect would be to sit on the local council in Dimona, Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy has alleged (seemingly dismissing such Moroccan high-achievers as David Levy and Shlomo Ben-Ami). Reading Alexander Jacobson's riposte to Gideon Levy's accusation that Israel has failed to integrate Mizrahi Jews into its elites, one can't help a frisson of satisfaction: the most Ashkenazi elite of all, Jacobson claims, is the radical left, of which the vuzvuz (yekke, noch!) Gideon Levy is a prime example. (With thanks: Independent Observer)

The elites vary enormously in integration of Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews. The elite that is apparently the most Ashkenazi of all is that of the radical left. Gideon Levy raises an important issue: the incorporation of Mizrahi Jews into the elites of Israeli society. The picture he draws is depressing: "Our entire political, economic, legal, academic and even military leadership is made up of Ashkenazim, with a smattering of Sephardim as the exceptions that so remarkably prove the rule." ("And what happens in our community?" May 2 )

This picture is only partially true. The elites vary enormously in this matter. Some are more integrated, while others less so. The elite that is apparently the most Ashkenazi of all is that of the radical left.

In recent decades we have had ministers of defense, foreign affairs and finance who were Mizrahim. We have had chiefs of staff who were Mizrahim, GOCs, heads of Military Intelligence, commanders of the air force and Sayeret Matkal special operations force, attorneys general, directors general and senior officials at the Finance Ministry, heads of the Histadrut labor federation, and business tycoons. Even the Labor Party, a regular target for criticism in this respect, has twice elected a Mizrahi head, and the current Histadrut secretary general is far from being a "pet Mizrahi."

However, the elites calling for an international boycott of Israel, and the Israeli participants in Israeli Apartheid Week in cities around the world, and in general all those who tend to portray Israel as a despicable and failed state, solely responsible for the conflict - this indeed is an Ashkenazi elite "with a smattering of Mizrahim." It would be appropriate for the members of this elite, who excel at preaching morality, to show a little more humility and learn a lesson from Israel's business, political and defense elites on how to integrate Mizrahim.

(Read full article)

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Obama's Victimization of Jewish Refugees from Muslim Countries

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
23 March '10

One of the unreported aspects of Obama's manufactured insult over an Israeli housing project in Jerusalem is the way in which the administration has targeted Jewish refugees from Muslim countries.

While media reports frequently denounced Interior Minister Eli Yishai, as a "Right Wing Extremist", for approving one stage of the planned housing project-- what they did not report was the larger story. Eli Yishai is the head of the Shas party, one of Israel's largest political parties, which represents the interests of Sefardi and Mizrahi Jews from Muslim countries. And the housing project would have benefited Jerusalem's sizable population of Jews from Muslim countries.

In the 20th century a vast exodus took place in which as many as a million Jews from Muslim countries fled or otherwise departed, often leaving behind homes and valuables. Some came to America and Europe. Many more came to Israel instead. Today three million Mizrahi Jews live in Israel, indeed the majority of Israeli Jews are not the "immigrants from Brooklyn" derisively referred to by Israel-bashing pundits, but Jews whose families came to Israel from Muslim countries, or who spent many centuries living in Jerusalem under Muslim dominion.

They came from Yemen, Turkey, Libya, Syria, Morocco, Iran, Egypt, Iraq and Algeria. Some were driven out by enraged Muslim mobs. Others had their children stolen and their property seized by the government. Others remained behind "sand curtains", unable to leave. The ways in which some of these Jews were smuggled out of the country through a virtual "Underground Railroad" is unknown to most. And this is a story that continues today.

Consider the story of one woman who successfully helped smuggle out thousands of Syrian Jews by bribing Syrian government officials. And though she describes the work in terms of the Holocaust, "How do you negotiate the price of human lives? I was breaking up children from their parents. It was like the 1940s – they were desperate to get their children out", in fact the last family she saved was in 2001.

This is what a million Jews from Muslim countries escaped to begin their lives again in Israel. They left behind life in Muslim countries where they were Dhimmis, legally treated as second class citizens under Islamic law. They thought that they had turned their backs on a state of affairs where Muslims could dictate that synagogues should be built no taller than mosques, where their lives were worth less than a Muslim's and were paid for with blood money and forced to live in ghettos. That is until Obama decided to be gravely insulted because they had decided to live in a place that he thought they had no right to live.

(Read full article)
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