Mick Hartley

Lyn Julius, at the JC, responds to the familiar self-pitying tales of the Arab nakba, the exodus of some 700,000 Palestinian refugees at the founding of the state of Israel. What about the Jewish "nakba"? – the expulsion of as many as 870,000 Jews from Arab lands.

Why should we take only the Palestinian refugee cause seriously, while dismissing the Jewish refugees? Why are Jews so quick to empathise with our enemies, while failing to defend our own rights? Furthermore, no credible and lasting peace settlement could be reached if the grievances of more than half the Jews of Israel — refugees from Muslim lands or their descendants — are ignored.

Recognising the Jewish nakba, the mass displacement and dispossession of ancient Middle Eastern Jewish communities, is central to achieving reconciliation. It would mean acknowledging that an irreversible exchange of refugees took place, similar to exchanges which occurred as a result of other 20th Century nationalist conflicts.

One cannot teach about the Arab nakba without also teaching about its root cause: Arab rejectionism. Today, such rejectionism has religious overtones. The Israel-Palestine conflict cannot be divorced from the eliminationist intentions of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian ayatollahs and Islamist groups generally. These do not even bother to camouflage their genocidal aims in terms acceptable to western ears, such as “occupation”, “settlements” and “Palestinian human rights”.

Diaspora Jews do not make the right counter-arguments because our approach to Israel is frustratingly “Ashkenormative”. The tragedy of the Mizrahi (eastern) communities is not known to the majority of Ashkenazi Jews. Consequently, we don’t adequately make the case for Jews in general.

Israel is the vindication of an aboriginal Middle Eastern people’s aspirations for self-determination. Over half its Jewish population — Mizrahim from the Muslim world — never left the region and pre-dated the Arab conquest by 1,000 years or more. (The long sojourn of Ashkenazim in Europe does not make them any less Middle Eastern in origin, culture and identity.) Why should Arabs have 22 states, while other indigenous victims of Arab imperialism such as the Amazigh (Berbers) or the Kurds — 99 per cent of whom have voted for an independent state — have no political rights? To the latter, Israel is an inspiration.

Moreover, far from being a “white colonial settler” state, Israel is the native response to a long history of subjugation to Muslim antisemitism. The creation of Israel marked the final deliverance of Jews from a form of historic, but resurgent, Muslim colonialism towards non-Muslims which gave them “dhimmi” status. Like women, whose purpose is to serve Muslim men — witness their treatment today by the Taliban — dhimmi Jews and Christians under sharia law occupied the penultimate rung on the social ladder, just above slaves. They lived in the Muslim world under sufferance, not as of right.

Our children ought to see the Jews of Israel as a “people of colour” who have thrown off the yoke of submission.