ISRAELI HISTORIAN REMEMBERS LIFE OF JEWS IN THE ARAB WORLD BEFORE 1948
BY
ALLAN C.BROWNFELD
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In
an important new memoir, “Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jew” (One
World Publications), one of Israel’s “New Historians,” a group of
scholars who put forward critical interpretations of the history of
Zionism and Israel, tells a story with which few are now familiar. In
July, 1950, Shlaim, aged five, and his family were forced into exile,
fleeing their beloved Iraq for the new state of Israel.
Shlaim
was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Baghdad in 1945. He notes
that, “We were Iraqis whose religion happened to be Jewish…Baghdad was
known as ‘the city of peace’ and Iraq was a land of pluralism and
coexistence. We in the Jewish community had much more in common with
our Iraqi compatriots, linguistically and culturally, than with our
European co-religionists. We did not feel any affinity with the Zionist
movement , and we experienced no inner impulse to abandon our homeland
and to go and live in Israel.”
The
mother of Avi Shlaim died in Israel at the age of 96 in 2021. He
recalls that, “She often talked about the many close Muslim family
friends who used to come to our house in Baghdad. One day, when she was
over ninety, I asked her whether we had any Zionist friends. She gave
me a look that implied this was an odd question, and then said
emphatically, “No! Zionism is an Ashkenazi (European Jewish) thing. It
had nothing to do with us!’ This, in essence, had been my elders’ view
of Zionism, before we were catapulted into Israel.”
For
Shlaim’s family, which had lived peacefully in Iraq for generations,
“Our migration to Zion was one of necessity, not an ideological choice.
It is no exaggeration to say we were conscripted into the Zionist
project. Moreover, migration to Israel is usually described as Aliyah
or ascent. In our case the move from Iraq to Israel was a Yeridah, a
descent down the social and economic ladder.”
Shlaim
notes that, “My family did not move from Iraq to Israel because of a
clash of cultures or religious intolerance. Our universe did not
collapse because we could not get along with our Muslim neighbors. The
driver of our displacement was political, not religious or cultural. We
became entangled in the conflict between Zionism and Arab nationalism,
two rival secular ideologies. We were also caught in the crossfire of
the conflict between Jews and Arabs over Palestine…In 1948 the Iraqi
army participated in the Arab war against the Jews throughout the Arab
world. Zionism was one of the primary causes of this backlash against
Jews throughout the Arab world. It gave the Jews a territorial base for
the first time in over two thousand years. This made it easier for
Islamic fundamentalists and Arab nationalists to identify the Jews in
their countries with the hated Zionist enemy and to call for their
extrusion. What had been a pillar of Iraqi society was increasingly
perceived as a sinister fifth column.”
In
Iraq, there was a long history of religious tolerance and, Shlaim
points out, “the Jewish connection to Babylon goes back to the time of
Abraham the Patriarch…Jews lived in Babylon since 586 BC…Babylon became
the spiritual center of the Jewish Diaspora…It was there that the
Babylonian Talmud was compiled…The Jews were thus firmly settled in
Babylon long before the rise of Islam.”
Zionism,
Shlaim argues, had two major victims: “…the creation of Israel
involved a monumental injustice to the native population. Palestinians
are the main victims of the Zionist project. More than half of their
number became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map.
But there was another category of victims…the Jews of the Arab lands…My
memoir is about the second category of the victims of the Zionist
movement as reflected in the history of my family. We were Arab-Jews.”
Zionists
did their best to intimidate Iraqi Jews to leave their homeland.
Shlaim notes that, “The most serious charge leveled against the Zionist
movement and Israel…is that they actually instigated the bombing of
Jewish targets in Baghdad in a bid to spark a mass flight of Iraqi Jews
to Israel…The most famous incident occurred in 14 January 1951 when a
hand grenade was lobbed into the forecourt of the Mas’uda Shemtob
synagogue, killing four Jews and wounding twenty others.”
It
is Shlaim’s view, based on what he says is “potentially credible
evidence,” that the Mossad l’Aliyah Bet (the Yishuv’s unit that handled
illegal immigration to Palestine) and the Zionist underground in Iraq
were behind the Baghdad bombings. He declares that, “The person
responsible for three of the bombs was Yusef Ibrahim Basri…a lawyer by
profession and an ardent Jewish nationalist…His purpose was not to kill
but to frighten hesitant Jews to prod them to register to cancel their
Iraqi citizenship.”
Once
his family emigrated to Israel, Shlaim, as a schoolboy, felt the
contempt in which Israelis held Jews from Arab countries: “What I
experienced..was what Iraqi Jews experienced all over Israel:
disrespect for our Iraqi provenance; ignorance of our history; disdain
for our culture; denigration of our language; and social engineering to
make us fit into the new European-Zionist-Israeli mold..The unstated
aims of the official policy for schools were to undermine our
Arab-Jewish identity and to turn us into loyal citizens of the new
Israeli nation.”
Shlaim
grew up in Ramat Gan and left Israel for England at the age of 16 to
study at a Jewish school. He returned to Israel in 1964 to serve in
the Israel Defense Forces and then moved back to England to read history
at Jesus College, Cambridge. He married the great granddaughter of
David Lloyd George, who was British Prime Minister at the time of the
Balfour Declaration, and became a fellow of St.Antony’s College, Oxford
in 1987. In “Three Worlds” he unveils what he calls “undeniable proof
of Zionist involvement in the terrorist attacks” against Jewish targets
in Baghdad. This memoir brings a lost world back to life and casts a
light upon Zionism’s negative impact not only upon Palestinians but upon
Arab-Jews such as himself.
This
memoir, Shlaim argues, “is a revisionist tract, a transgressive
document, an alternative history, a challenge to the widely accepted
Zionist narrative about the Jews of the Arab lands, who after the mass
emigration to Israel in the 1950s became collectively known as
Mizrahim. I argue that the history of the Mizrahim has been
deliberately distorted in the service of Zionist propaganda.”
Under
the Ottoman Empire which had ruled the region for the previous five
centuries, Shlaim points out, the Jews had the legal status of ahl al-
dhimma, a “protected people: They were subjected to a host of
discriminatory regulations, including an annual poll tax, but in return
they enjoyed the protection of the central government. The Ottoman
policy was despotic…but it had one redeeming feature, namely, the
autonomy it afforded its various religious and ethnic minorities to run
their own affairs. The empire was Muslim, but it guaranteed in law the
religious and cultural autonomy of all its minorities. Under the millet
system, each confessional community was allowed to govern itself in
accordance with its own laws: the laws of Muslim Sharia, Christian
Canon law or Jewish Halacha. The First World War brought a sudden end
to Ottoman rule in the region.”
Shlaim
points to the fact that, “By delving into the history of my family in
Iraq, I gained a better understanding of the nature and global impact of
Zionism….The big picture was of a settler-colonialist movement that
proceeded ruthlessly toward its goal of building the Jewish state in
Palestine even if it involved, as it was bound to, the dispossession of
the native population. …the creation of the State of Israel involved a
monumental injustice to the Palestinians. In the course of the 1948
war, Israel carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Three
quarters of a million Palestinians , more than half of the total, became
refugees. And as the ‘new historians,’ notably Benny Morris, have
demonstrated the Palestinians did not leave of their own free will—-they
were pushed out.”
For
the future, Shlaim calls for “one democratic state between the River
Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea with equal rights for all its citizens
regardless of ethnicity or religion. This is the democratic one-state
solution…For Israeli Jews…one state would have the great merit of
preserving their democracy and preventing them from going further down
the road of apartheid South Africa. As Bishop Tutu pointed out,
everyone was liberated, white people included, when apartheid ended in
South Africa. Like the whites in South Africa, Israelis too can
liberate themselves from the burden of apartheid by ending their
coercive rule over five million Palestinians and granting genuine
equality to the 1.8 million Palestinians who live in their midst. One
democratic state is a noble vision of justice, equality and freedom for
all.”
Those interested in achieving a just and peaceful future for the Middle East would do well to read Avi Shlaim’s important book.
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Allan
C.Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and is editor of
ISSUES, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.