A belief nurtured by Zionist propaganda is that Arabs and Jews don’t mingle with each other. Zionism, a movement which targeted Palestine for a Jewish homeland, in fact took root before the Holocaust. It was European anti-Semitism which fuelled the Zionists and provided the impetus for Jewish emigration to the Holy Land. However, judging by the Zionist-influenced media, Arabs are being used as scapegoats, held up as anti-Semites who persecuted Jews down the ages. Perhaps putting the blame onto the Arab world for Jewish suffering goes some way to removing the guilt of those who took the land now called Israel by force brutally displacing the Palestinian Arabs.
The reality is very different. Jews had lived in peace and prosperity throughout the Middle East and North Africa since time immemorial and were treated by Muslims with respect as fellow ‘People of the Book’. Jewish distress in Arab lands did not stem from racism, intolerance or anti-Semitism but by the mistreatment of Palestinians at the hands of their co-religionists. In short, the divide between Arab and Jew is political, not personal and certainly not racist.
IRAQ
Those who have been indoctrinated by Zionist propaganda may be surprised to learn that during the American invasion of Iraq Muslims and Christians protected Baghdad’s Jewish community centre from looters. They defended the synagogues like their own places of worship and did not let the vandals touch them.
Jews in Iraq have lived for the last 2,500 years and formed part of the most successful communities in Jewish history. The early 19th century was a golden era for Iraqi Jewry when prominent Jewish mercantile families began establishing trading posts in India and the Far East and sending money back to Iraq.
Jews had wonderful times then. There was always coexistence, cooperation, and tolerance. But things began to change after 1941. Resentment began to creep in. The harrowing accounts of what happened since then make one wonder what was the real version of what was actually going on. Most of Iraq’s Jews emigrated to the U.S., Britain, Israel and South America during the years between World War Two and just after the 1967 Middle East war due to the dividing influence of Zionism and the political fall-out, which ensued after the birth of the Jewish state.
While Jews in Iraq had faced some persecution and confiscation of property over the years, former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had made sure they were not harmed. Interestingly, when Israel chartered a plane to fly Iraq’s known remaining Jews to Israel, only around 20 per cent, consisting of mainly the elderly were airlifted but the rest decided to stay on despite Saddam Hussein’s ousting even amid their fears of an Islamic resurgence.
MOROCCO
Morocco’s 6,000-strong Jewish community is protected by royal decree. The New York Jewish Museum’s “Morocco: Jews and Art in a Moslem Land” explored the multi-cultural art and traditions of Morocco and 2,000 years of Jewish life there. More astonishingly, it was the first time an exhibit at a Jewish museum had an Arab leader, the King of Morocco, as its patron.
Jews have long lived harmoniously alongside their Arab neighbours in Morocco as illustrated by the answer given by King Mohammed V to a Nazi commander when asked for a list of all Jews in his kingdom: “We have no Jews in Morocco, only Moroccan citizens”.
There are synagogues, care homes for the elderly and kosher restaurants in the various cities. Casablanca is home to four Jewish schools which benefit from government funding. Every year on special dates thousands of Jews from around the world flock to Morocco to visit the tombs of their holy men. Muslims protect such religious sites.
TUNISIA
In 1948, there were 105,000 Jews in Tunisia while today there are about 2,000. Most left after the country gained its independence in 1956 and by 1967 Tunisia’s Jews numbered around 20,000. Former Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba apologised to Tunisia’s Chief Rabbi when violence flared up against his country’s Jewish community in 1967 and he appealed for the Jews to stay.
Today the Tunisian government assures freedom of worship for the Jewish community and cooperates with a Jewish council known as The Jewish Committee of Tunisia. The community benefits from five officiating rabbis, several kosher restaurants and a number of Jewish schools and kindergartens.
EGYPT
During the centuries preceding 1948, Egypt’s Jews were prosperous and prominent members of society. From 640 until the late 900s, there were Jewish institutes of learning, Jewish judges and Jewish politicians. The 15th century witnessed the mass emigration of Jews from Spain to Egypt where they were welcomed by the Ottoman rulers and awarded high government posts.
The Jews of Egypt suffered at the hands of Napoleon who imposed heavy taxation upon them and destroyed their places of worship but after the French retreat in 1801 a legislation was introduced which provided Jews with a privileged status, including tax exemptions and legal protection as foreign nationals.
The late 19th century saw the Jews, then numbering around 60,000, prospering as never before. With wealth accrued from their proprietorship of cotton processing plants, textile factories, jewellery stores, they constructed synagogues, schools, colleges and fine mansions.
Jews began to leave Egypt when violence flared after the birth of Pan-Arabism triggered by wars with Israel. In Alexandria there are now just a handful of Jews remaining, several of whom are caretakers of the city’s remaining synagogue, well guarded by Egyptian security forces.
YEMEN
The Jewish community in Yemen is one of the oldest and at peace with its Arab neighbours. It numbers only around 300 nowadays, some 43,000 having been airlifted out of Aden secretly by Israel during “Operation Flying Carpet” which took place between 1949 and 1950. Many of those who remained say that they “do not want to leave the homeland of our parents and ancestors”. Some maintain the Israeli leaders are “very far from the real Judaism and Torah”.
The official tally shows there are around 400 Jews in Yemen, but other estimates put the total at 1,500, mainly based in Raydah, a town 45 kilometers north of the capital Sana’a. Jews live in peace with the Yemeni tribes and are not subjected to annoyance or harassment. When Israeli tanks and bulldozers rolled into Jenin in Palestine, Yemeni Jews donated both money and blood to aid the Palestinian people, some eager to fight against Sharon’s troops.
Yemeni Jews in Israel often suffer from a sense of isolation and are discriminated against to the point where recent emigrant Jewish families asked the Israeli government to send them back to Yemen due to their inability to adapt to life in Israel. Israeli culture, which is dominated by European Jews, seeks to obliterate the history and traditions of Jews from Arab lands. Arab Jews’ cultural creativity in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic is hardly studied in Israeli schools and it is getting difficult to convince their children that they actually did exist there, and that some of them are still there in Iraq, Morocco, Yemen and Iran.
Jews and their cousins, the Arabs, both descendants of Prophet Abraham (peace of Allah be with him), are, indeed enemies, a sad state derived mainly by the confiscation of Palestinian lands and the misery suffered by Palestinians as a result of Zionist policies. Few Israelis will admit this fact, preferring to label Arabs as anti-Semitic, while conveniently forgetting that Arabs are Semites too.
Zionist history books and websites have vastly detailed history to suit their own agenda. They want people to forget the Spanish inquisition when Jews and Muslims were faced with conversion to Christianity or death. They want the masses to overlook the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe while using the Holocaust as the reason for a Jewish state called Israel. They want us to ignore the fact that when Jews first began migrating to Palestine, they were often welcomed by the local Muslim population, then blissfully unaware of the devastating effect the waves of Jewish immigrants would have on their own lives.
Blaming Arab Muslims for injustices wrought upon the Jews by Europeans is dishonest on the part of Zionist Jews. The Palestinian Muslims have suffered for the sins of people on another continent and it’s time that wrongs were set right and history objectively re-written.