[lbo-talk] Smart brown people...

Jim Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Sun Sep 10 19:07:19 PDT 2006


On Sun, 10 Sep 2006 18:24:04 -0700 joanna <123hop at comcast.net> writes:
> Huh?
>
> The diaspora of Arab Jews back to Israel followed on the heels of 48
> and
> the disposession of the Palestinians. It is also the result of
> terrorist
> actions on the part of Israel to make Jews feel unsafe in the rest
> of
> the Middle East. This happened in Iraq for a fact.

Iraq used to have a very large and rather prosperous Jewish community. Around the time of the First World War, as much as one-third of the population of Baghdad was Jewish. And Jews were very well represented in Iraq's intellectual, professional and business elites.

Things started deterioating for Iraqi Jews by the time of the Second World War. During the war there was a pro-Axis coup led by Rashid Ali which led to the Farhud ("violent dispossession") pogrom of June 1 and 2, 1941, in Baghdad which resulted in at least 200 Jews being killed. Rashid Ali's government was subsequently overthrown when British troops entered into Baghdad. By the late 1940s, most of the politically engaged young Jews in Iraq tended to be either Communists or Zionists. The creation of Israel in 1948 was the beginning of the end for the Iraqi Jewish community.

The nature of the perpetrators of the bombings of Jewish insitutions in Iraq has long been source of controversy. Many Iraqi Jews in Israel have long blamed the Zionist underground in Iraq for those attacks, arguing that the Israeli government sought to panic Iraq Jews into coming to Israel. The Israeli government has of course vehemently denied this. On the other hand, the Lavon Affair in Egypt has given some credibility to the notion that Israeli intelligence might have launched a false flag operation in Iraq to force Jews out of Iraq.


>
> As for the Jews in the middle east, they were historically safer
> there
> than anywhere else in the world up till 48 except perhaps in the
> U.S.
>
> Joanna
>
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > On 9/10/06, Joel Schalit <managingeditor at tikkun.org> wrote:
> >
> >> Israel's political/economic elite is largely Ashkenazi, but the
> country
> >> is roughly 50% of non-European origin.
> >
> >
> > Yes, the Arabs (and Turks, and Iranians, too, but especially
> Arabs)
> > ought to remember that their countries were part of the problem:
> if
> > their countries had really cherished Jews as equal and patriotic
> > citizens, the Jewish population in Israel could have been half its
> > size today!
> >
> > Works by Yehouda Shenhav, Ella Shohat, and others ought to be
> > promoted. The less monolithic Israel's Jewish population is (in
> > reality, in the perception of Israelis, and in the perception of
> > Arabs, Iranians, and others), the better chances for peace the
> Middle
> > East will have.
>
>
>
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