The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #69772 Message #1187037
Posted By: CarolC
17-May-04 - 12:23 AM
Thread Name: BS: Arafat: Terrorize your enemy.
Subject: RE: BS: Arafat: Terrorize your enemy.
Honest Gentile (?), that's a fabrication and you know it. If you don't know it, it's because you haven't read the contents of the links I've been posting.
The beliefs of the Iraqi Jew that you extensively quote have little currency among the overwhelming members of the Israeli and diaspora communities of Jews who have been forced out of Iraq in the past 56 years.
--Smarty Jones Chomsky
I've been doing a lot of digging around about that. I haven't checked out any of the verifiable assertions in Naeim Giladi's article yet, but I have been checking out what other Mizrahim (Arabic Jews) have to say on the subject. There seems to be a pretty clear consensus among them that they were living in good circumstances in countries like Iraq prior to the influence of Zionism in the region, that Zionism is the cause of the problems that resulted in their having to leave their home countries, and that they are horribly discriminated against by the Ashkenazim in Israel. Here's what some of them have to say about it:
"The Jewish community within Iraq was not Zionist-oriented, as the emissaries soon discovered. As an overwhelmingly bourgeois community, the Iraqi Jews understood the danger that Zionism posed to their political, social and economic status. Those Jews who did leave the country generally settled in Europe, India, Iran and North America - as well as Palestine.
By 1947, however, Iraqi Jews found themselves in an increasingly untenable position. The aggressive activities of the Zionist movement, followed by the birth of Israel, led many Arabs to associate all Jews with Zionism. At the same time, nationalism was on the rise in Iraq, marked by a distinct anti-Zionism."
"As far as the "pre-Israel" history of Middle Eastern Jews is concerned, Zionists present it as a history of oppression and religious prejudice within the Arab world from time immemorial. After establishing this ludicrous (a)historical fable, Zionists usually move on to stress the (alleged) ideological commitment of Middle Eastern-Jews to Zionism.
Writers with an Arab orientation, on the other hand, tend to present this period somewhat idealistically, as nearly flawless in terms of inter-religious relationships. They therefore conceptualise the (politically engineered) emigration of Middle Eastern Jews as the exclusive end result of Zionist activities and propaganda.
Zionists present this as a component of the "happy ingathering of the exiles." On those rare occasions when they discuss the sharp divisions in Israeli society along ethnic and class lines, their terminology is duplicitous. Thus one finds that Middle Eastern Jews "suffer" from an "inferiority complex" and "culture shock", or that they "came" from "primitive" Arab societies, which thus explains "the gap". In short, Zionists never employ any of the terms needed to account for the Jewish ethnic split, namely: racism, orientalism, oppression, exploitation, internal colonialism and Ashkenazi anti-Semitic tendencies."