Instead of equality, redistributing the Holocaust
On November 30 2014, the first anniversary of ‘The Arab Countries’ Refugee Day’, a new holiday concocted by the Zionist leadership, the Israeli Ministry of Finance announced gifts for all new members: ‘Iraqi, Moroccan and Algerian Jews will be compensated like Holocaust survivors’ (Haaretz, 4.12.2015). The Zionist historiography is clearly working overtime, adding imaginary details to the ever-changing Zionist narrative. According to the new narrative, the Nazi-like anti-Semitic Arabs expelled the Jews from their countries turning them into refugees that the State of Israel had to absorb. It is crucial that we understand what is behind this new lie and the untypical generosity by the State of Israel towards Jews from Arab countries who had been imported to Israel as cheap labour after the establishment of the state. Firstly, the government attempts to develop the Prime Minister’s plan when he resurrected the Mufti in order to create a parallel between the Nazis and the Arabs and present the conflict between a settler colonial movement and the indigenous nation as defence against annihilation. Thus instead of a conflict between settler colonialism and a dispossessed native people, the conflict is portrayed as an inevitable war against the ‘local Nazis’ defined as Islamic terrorists. Zionism had presented the conflict as the consequence of Islam for many years. However, Netanyahu is the first to make this claim explicit, with the full support of Jewish temple worshippers who dream about a Jewish kingdom and call for the destruction of Islam’s holy placesin Haram Al Sharif, while defining all Arabs as terrorists. Before I explore the reasons for the mediatised resurrection of the 'Mizrahi Holocaust’, let us outline the relationship between Zionism and Arab Jews. From its inception Zionism was essentially a European colonial movement, and did not consider the Jews of the Orient as appropriate ‘human material’ for the creation of a new European nation in the Arab Orient. During its first fifty years the Zionist movement had only once imported oriental (Yemeni) Jews as cheap labour. The reason, according to Zionist historian Alex Bein, was ‘the need to preserve the relatively high standard of living of the European Jew’. In his book The History of the Zionist Settlement (1976), Bein writes that ‘there was a need to assist the Jewish worker to be able, despite his relatively high living standard, to compete with the Arab fallah’. Therefore, Bein writes, ‘representatives of the Zionist movement in Palestine had asked Dr Tahon to write a report on the topic. The report, presented in October 1908, stated that ‘the human working material should come from two sources, firstly Zionist youth in the diaspora, especially Russia, and secondly the impoverished Jews of the orient, whose cultural level parallels that of the Fallahin (Palestinian peasants)’ (p. 96, my emphases, E. A). Bein explains the reason for this division of the ‘human material’ by quoting from the report: ’The Jewish population in Erez Israel (the Jews who lived in Palestine before Zionism, E. A.) is culturally and economically under-developed… If we wish to strengthen Erez Israel’s Ashkenazi Jews, it is doubtful that they would be capable of anything besides urban existence. By contrast, there is plenty of scope in agriculture for oriental, particularly Yemenite and Persian Jews, since their needs are modest. We can compare these Jews to the Arabs, and they can also compete with them’. The report goes on to say, ‘If we can bring Yemenite families to permanently settle in the Moshavot, we can also get the women and girls to work as domestic helps instead of Arab women who are working as maids in almost all the colonists’ households, for high fees’ (p. 98). Thirty years later, during World War II, the Jewish Agency had a surplus of 10,000 (British Mandate immigration) certificates, and because it was impossible to import Jews from Europe, Zionist emissaries were sent to Yemen to fill the quotas. Only when the Zionist leadership discovered the extent of the extermination of the Jews of Europe after World War II, was it forced to consider the possibility of importing a portion of the Orient’s Jews. After the 1948 war this possibility became an urgent need. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine left the government with millions of dunams of stolen agricultural lands, orchards, depopulated villages, workshops and factories, all of which necessitated labour to turn the stolen property into capital. This necessitated a Jewish working class to replace Palestinian workers, and a Jewish peasantry to provide vegetables and cereal crops hitherto produced by Palestinian peasants, who had been expelled. Holocaust survivors who were living in displaced persons camps in Europe and Cyprus were hurriedly transferred to Palestine and became the first proletarian wave to replace the dispossessed Palestinian proletariat. However, as petit bourgeois Europeans, they were closer to both the local Israeli-Jewish petite bourgeoisie and the political leadership of the newly established state, the Zionist leadership found it difficult to turn them into a solid proletariat or peasants and border guards of the Zionist territory. This is why the Zionist movement targeted Arab Jews whose position was shaken after the 1948 war when the Arab regimes blamed them for their defeat. The second wave of imported Jews in 1948-9 was Yemeni Jews. According to the official Israeli historiography, the establishment of the state of Israel made the entire Yemeni Jewish community rush to immigrate via state-organised flights. The Yemenites prefer the term ‘Eagle Wings’ to the term ‘Magic Carpet’ used by the Joint, the state of Israel and the international Jewish media to describe the operation that, according to myth, ‘saved’ Yemen’s Jews from their distant homeland. The shocking reality of that ‘operation‘ has been studied by Esther Meir-Glitzenstein (2012), who documents apathy, neglect, contempt and struggles for prestige by Jewish and Israeli politicians, leading to thousands of Yemeni Jews being taken to desert camps where they lived in appalling conditions for long months during the summer of 1949. Hundreds of people, mostly children and elderly, died of thirst, hunger and illness in the relentless summer of the southern Arabian Peninsula, while those responsible for their fate spent time in luxury hotels in Aden and Paris. The large population transfer had indeed brought a huge number of traumatised, sick, apathetic, confused and malnourished people to Palestine. This formed the background for the suspicious disappearance of scores of Yemeni babies, known as the ‘Yemenite children affair’. In addition, the Yemenite Jews were forced to leave their valuables, Jewellery, manuscripts and ancient holy artefacts behind prior to boarding the planes. These valuables were robbed by the immigration agents of the Joint and the Jewish Agency. The third wave – Iraq. The Iraqi Zionist movement was relatively weak. The Jewish youth was mostly attracted to the Iraqi communist party. The 150,000-strong Iraqi Jewish community had lived in Iraq for some 2,500 years and was much more developed than the Ashkenazi Jewish Zionist community that settled in Palestine. 35 per cent of the 110,000 Jews imported from Iraq in 1950-1 were professionals, mostly high ranking civil servants, bank managers, railway managers, wealthy merchants, solicitors, doctors and accountants. In fact, the Jews constituted the economic and cultural elite of the Iraqi state. The first deal was struck between the Zionist leadership and Nuri Said’s government in March 1950, enabling Iraq’s Jews to leave if they give up their Iraqi citizenship, and some 30,000 people declared their intention to do so. However, the Israeli government was worried: if Iraq’s Jews were allowed to leave with their property most might have chosen to migrate to the west, not to Israel. So a new deal was struck according to which the Iraqi government would confiscate Jewish property in exchange for permission to fly them directly from Iraq to Israel. News of this deal reduced the numbers prepared to leave by 60 per cent, but in January 1951 the Mas’uda Shem Tov synagogue was attacked by grenades, and the ensuing panic brought about a large wave of immigration. Within one year 90,000 people were transferred in what became known as the Ali Baba Operation, when the robbers sharing the spoils were the Israeli government and the Iraqi royal house. Some time later those responsible for attacking the synagogue were discovered; they were two Jews who belonged to the Zionist underground, Shalom Saleh and Yosef Basri. Their trial and public hanging caused an increase in Jewish migration. In Israel Iraqi Jews, just like the Yemenites before them, were sequestrated in transit camps and allowed to only do forced municipal labour. Their Arab culture was suppressed and they became humiliated and despised ‘human dust’. Some became labourers and others were settled in new settlements built upon the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages. The fourth wave – Morocco. Morocco’s Jews were similarly imported, despite being a respected and important minority in the Moroccan kingdom. The Moroccan royal house opposed their migration, fearful it would cause huge damage to the kingdom’s economy. The Zionists did everything within their power to persuade the Moroccans that the loss could be offset. With the help of American Zionists, they told the king that the Jews were hugely influential in America and that they would see to it that Americans would invest in Morocco. The Mossad added its own influence as documented by Dr Yigal Bin Nun’s article ‘The Israeli media attack on Morocco after the drowning of the illegal immigrant boat Egoz’ (2009). Rather than further describing the importation of the Orient’s Jews to Israel, fixing their social status in the Jewish state (see Aminov, 2014 for further details), let us return to examining the motives of the State of Israel wishing to turn the imported Arab Jews into Holocaust survivors. In addition to the wish to equate the Arabs with the Nazis, the increasingly successful BDS campaign has rekindled the demand – relinquished by most Arab regimes – to re-activate the Palestinian right of return. Israel, accustomed to the West’s sympathy to its anti-return stance, has become worried about the loss of public support by democratic states. The labelling of settlement products in the EU, due to public pressure, is infuriating Israel, and worries that the refugee question is raised are beginning to bite. States that had ignored the refugee issue for years may adopt the Palestinians’ democratic demand. Therefore, Israel, which is responsible for two transfers – from Israel and into Israel – intends to juxtapose its fraudulent narrative and the Palestinians’ just demands. But beyond this, Zionism’s most crucial aim is to create a new historiography, vital for continuing to brainwash young Israeli Jews, who the Jewish state requires as cannon fodder. Young Israelis, who are beginning to internalise the fact that the regime is cynically using them for its own needs, are the main target of the new media spin. It aims to strengthen their sense of victimhood and erase any chance that they may question the Zionist narrative that keeps demanding them to sacrifice themselves. The new redistribution of the Holocaust to all of Israel’s Jews may, the government hopes, succeed in galvanising the Jewish nation. To end, one small, seemingly marginal, detail, but one that sheds new light on the topic discussed in this article. It seems that the compensation offered to Arab Jews reflects the real value the Jewish state accords – contrary its bombastic statement – to Iraqi, Moroccan and Algerian Jews. Although they may be reconstituted as Holocaust survivors, the real compensation offered to them is merely symbolic. At best they would receive 300 NIS (less than 70 Euro) per month, about a tenth of the monthly sum received by Holocaust survivors (many of whom live in abject poverty). Indeed, the sudden Zionist generosity is none other than an ugly trick, aimed at blinding an unsuspecting world. References Aminov, Eli. 2014. ‘Not Jewish refugees, but a double Zionist transfer’, Hagada Hasmalit, 7.12.2014 Bein, Alex. 1976. The History of the Zionist Settlement. Tel Aviv: Massada. (Hebrew) Bin Nun, Yigal. 2009. ‘The Israeli media attack on Morocco after the drowning of the illegal immigrant boat Egoz’. Kesher, no. 38, Spring. Meir-Glitzenstein, Esther. 2012. The Exodus of the Yemenite Jews: Failed Operation and Formative Myth Tel Aviv: Resling Publishers. (Hebrew)