TorontoSusan

Avi Shlaim, an Oxford professor, says Israel “made it impossible” for Jews to keep living in Baghdad. My mother’s family is from Baghdad. Here is what he left out: Jewish life under Arab rule was never equal. For centuries Jews lived as dhimmis, a “protected” minority, and the protection came with rules: • A Jew could not testify against a Muslim in court. • A synagogue could not stand taller than a mosque. • Jews could not ride horses or carry weapons. • Jews paid a special tax for the right to exist. • Jews wore identifying marks on their clothes, a thousand years before the Nazis. Then in June 1941 a mob in Baghdad killed almost 200 Jews in two days. My grandmother hid in the back of a café while a man shot a mother’s seven children in front of her. Israel did not exist yet. In 1948 Iraq made Zionism a crime punishable by death. In 1950 it let Jews leave only if they gave up their citizenship. In 1951 it froze their bank accounts and took their homes. My grandparents arrived in Israel that year with nothing. In 1969 it hanged nine Jews in a public square and invited crowds to celebrate. None of that was Israel. That was Iraq, doing it to its own citizens. Shlaim knows all of this. He is one voice in a bigger project, and the project has a purpose. If you can convince people that Jews lived happily in Arab lands until Zionism, then 850,000 Jewish refugees stop being refugees. They become people who left for no reason. The Arab governments that robbed and expelled them get a clean record. And Israel, a country where most Jews come from the Middle East, can be sold as a European colony that has no business existing there. Even though ALL JEWS are indigenous to this land, no matter where in the diaspora we lived. That is the point of the trend. Erase the Mizrahi story and there is only one refugee story left in the region, and only one side with a grievance. It takes a Jew with an Oxford title to make that erasure respectable. There is a market for it, and he is not the only one selling. Share this with someone who has never heard the word Farhud.