EDITORIAL December 6 - December 19, 2002
Portraying Jews as 'White Europeans' Feeds Anti-Israel Agenda
By LOOLWA KHAZZOOM
Loolwa Khazzoom (http:// www.loolwa.com), an Iraqi-American Jewish woman now living in Israel, is the Director of the Jewish MultiCultural Project (http://www.jmcpon line.org), editor of Behind the Veil of Silence: North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Women Speak Out (Seal Press, 2003), and author of Consequence: Beyond Resisting Rape (Pearl In A Million Press, 2001).
When much of the world thinks about the conflict between Israelis
and Palestinians, it sees Jews of European origin confronting indigenous
people of color who have been banished from their homeland. This enables
Arab leaders to portray Israel as a white colonizing nation. http://www.jimena-justice.org/
Visitors since
The
reality is that Jews are a multi-racial, multi-ethnic people. For about 50
years, the majority of the Jewish population of Israel has been Mizrahim -
Jews indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa. Moreover, this
community of Jews has lived in the Middle East and North Africa since time
immemorial. Until the mid-twentieth century, in the 4,000-year history of
the Jewish people, Mizrahim never left the region.
Ironically,
Jewish leaders are the ones who created the perception of Jews as white.
Arab leaders have merely turned this perception to their own advantage.
Given the way Jewish heritage has been taught and presented for decades,
when we use the word "Jews," the vision that pops into our mind is not the
black faces of Ethiopian Jews or the dark brown skin of Yemenite Jews.
When we look for Jewish names, we don't look for names like Comerchero,
Sarshar, or Mo'alem. When we think "Jewish," we think Poland, Germany, and
Russia. We think bagels and cream cheese, Yiddish, and the
Holocaust.
Mizrahim lived on the land of present-day Iraq, Egypt,
Syria, Morocco, and Yemen before they were called by these names, before
there was such a thing as an Arab state. Mizrahim lived there for 2,500
years - that's 1,200 years before the Islamic invasion of the region.
Their presence dates from 586 BCE, when the Babylonian Empire destroyed
ancient Israel and took the Israelites as captives to the land of
present-day Iraq.
When Arab Muslims conquered the Middle East and
North Africa, Jews were one of the few indigenous peoples that resisted
conversion to Islam, the result being that the Jews were given the status
of dhimmi. According to this status, Jews were a tolerated yet inferior
people, who should be forever punished for rejecting the vision of
Muhammed. What this meant was that suddenly Jews lost the autonomy they
had enjoyed with their non-Muslim neighbors.
Jews were commonly
forced into ghettos, prohibited from owning land, prevented from entering
numerous professions, and forbidden from doing anything to physically or
symbolically demonstrate equality with Arab Muslims. This basic attitude
of contempt, oppression, and humiliation permeated the daily life of Jews.
In addition, massacres were not uncommon, at times wiping out entire
Jewish communities.
When dhimmi laws were lax, and Jews were
allowed to participate to a greater degree in their society, the Jewish
community would flourish. Often, the response to that success would be a
wave of harassment or massacre of Jews, instigated by the government or
the masses. Once disempowered and weak, the Jewish community would have a
period of relative quiet.
For the most part, Jews lived in a basic
state of subservience. They could participate in the society around them,
they could enjoy a certain degree of wealth and status, and they could
befriend their Arab Muslim neighbors, but they always had to know their
place. The Arab-Israel relationship and the current crisis occur in the
context of a history in which Arab Muslims oppressed Jews for 1,300
years.
In the 20th Centruy, Palestinian leadership had a strong
hand in terrorizing and expelling Jews throughout the Arab world, leading
to 900,000 Jewish refugees fleeing the region. In 1941, for example, Hajj
Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem went to Berlin as a guest of the
Nazi regime. He drafted a political declaration asking Germany and Italy
to “recognize the rights of Palestine and other Arab countries (to)
resolve the problem of the Jewish elements in Palestine and the other Arab
countries in the same was as the probelm was resolved in the Axis
countries: i.e., through genocide.
In a speech at a rally in
Berlin Nov. 2, 1943, al-Husayni voiced his hope for a "final
solution" to the Jewish presence in the Middle East. Not long after,
anti-Jewish riots erupted throughout the Arab world. Jewish citizens were
assaulted, tortured, and murdered. In a few Arab countries, Jews were
outright expelled. Throughout the region, Jewish property was confiscated
and nationalized, forcing Jews to flee from their homes of thousands of
years.
We do not hear about the Jewish refugee problem today,
because Israel absorbed about 600,000 of these 900,000 refugees. In
contrast, Arab states did not absorb the Arab refugees from the Arab war
against Israel in 1948. Instead, they built squalid refugee camps in the
West Bank and Gaza at the time controlled by Jordan and Egypt and
dumped innocent Arabs in them Palestinians doomed to become political
pawns. Countries such as Lebanon and Syria continued funding assaults
against Israel instead of funding basic medical and educational care for
the Palestinian refugee families.
In 1967, Israel inherited the
Palestinian refugee problem, through a defensive war. When Israel tried to
build housing for the refugees in Gaza, Arab states led votes against it
in UN resolutions, because absorption would change the status of the
refugees. Israel went on to give more money to the Palestinian refugees
than all but three of the Arab states combined, prior to transferring
responsibility of the territories to the Palestinian Authority in the
mid-1990s. Israel built hospitals and educational institutions for
Palestinians in the territories. Israel trained the Palestinian police
force. And yet the 22 Arab states dominate both the land and the wealth of
the region. So who is to blame for today's refugee problem?
Without
an accurate and complete view of the history in the Middle East,
government leaders and peace activists will continue to push the region
into an unstable future that lacks integrity. It is high time that we all
hold Arab leadership accountable for their actions against all the
refugees of the region - Jewish and Arab. Until that happens, peace
will remain an illusive dream.Islam
March 2002
