Arab Jews: The Hidden History | Ash Sarkar meets Avi Shlaim

Jews in Israel today are less safe than anywhere else in the world but it's it's much much worse than that because Israel generates anti-Semitism uh Israel is responsible for the upsurge of hostility towards Jews [Music] everywhere the Israeli state and its supporters have a clear narrative all Jews have a stake in Israel all Jews are represented by Israel and regardless of where they live or how they feel about Israel Israel is the ultimate guarantee of Jewish safety but this week's guest argues that this isn't and has never been true historian and author RV schlame was

born in Baghdad in 1945 his family had lived in Iraq for literally Millennia and they considered themselves just as Arab as their Muslim and Christian neighbors did the foundation of the state of Israel changed all that and in schams View for the worse we talk about how Israel has warped and reduced Jewish identity the hypocrisy of left-wing zionists and mad's secret bombing campaign against Iraqi Jews I learned a lot from this interview and I hope you you do to AI schlame thank you so much for joining us it's a pleasure to be here with you

Ash so my first question is before 1948 in Broad terms how would you describe the experience and culture of Arab Jews living in the Middle East uh before the emergence of the state of Israel in 19 48 there was a large number of Jews living in the Arab world uh something like 800,000 Jews uh and there were Jews in Lebanon in Syria in Egypt and Iraq where I come from in Iraq there were 135,000 Jews before the establishment of the state of Israel and then nearly all of them ended up in Israel uh reluctantly but

um uh though Jewish communities throughout the Arab world the Jewish community in Iraq was the most ancient going back to um two and a half Millennia ago uh it was the most prosperous the most successful and the best integrated into local uh Society uh so um this was something that completely changed the face of the Middle East today we have complete and Stark division there is Israel on one side and Arabs on the other side but before 48 um uh there were Jews throughout the Arab world uh and Muslim Jewish coexistence was not a distant

dream um it was the everyday reality and my book three worlds Memoirs of an Arab Jew has aroused a lot of interest in the Arab world because young Arabs not so young any Arabs born after 1948 would have no idea they would have a clue that the face of the Middle East was totally different the Jews and Arabs lived side by side until the arrival of Zionism and the establishment of the Jewish state which was a real um uh a point of real Division and polarization in area you talked about the coexistence between Muslims and

Jews in the Arab world before 1948 to make it tangible in terms of things like food socializing music even mixed relationships what was the kind of cultural glue holding people together the language was a glue a very important factor um my family and and I we were Arab Jews uh we spoke Arabic at home we only we didn't speak any other language our culture was Arab culture our food was the most delicious spicy midle EAS food it wasn't European food um my parents music was a very very nice blend of Jewish and Arabic music so

in every um uh sense of the word we were Arab Jews we were Iraqis whose religion happened to be Judaism and there were Iraqis whose religion was Muslim and there Iraqis whose religion um was Christian but we all Iraqis and we United by that furthermore we had much we Arab Jews had much more in common linguistically and culturally with non-jews around us we had much more in common with them than we had with Jews in Eastern Europe and when you say had a more in common with the non-jewish uh Neighbors in the Arab world versus

uh Eastern European Jews what were the differences culturally between Arab Jews and Eastern European Jews in Europe the Jews were the other in inverted comma the Jews stood out um Europe had a Jewish Problem Germany had a Jewish Problem Adolf Hitler thought he had a solution to the Jewish Problem um Iraq did not have a Jewish Problem Iraq had a lot of minorities it had uh uh Christians calines Assyrians Tans sherians Jews a lot of minorities and the Jews were one minority among many and they were no treated no better and no worse than the

other minorities and there was a long tradition uh of religious tolerance between the different minorities in Iraq the Jews did not live in ghettos they they lived everywhere with the rest of um uh Society uh and um anti-Semitism is a European malady anti-Semitism grew in Europe and from Europe it was exported to the Middle East and one proof of that claim is that there was no Arabic there was no literature in Arabic anti-semitic literature in Arabic so when there was um the uh when anti-Semitism took off in Iraq after the first World War uh anti-semitic

literature had to be translated from European languages to Arabic uh Literature Like Adolf Hitler's mine uh Camp so that's the difference that we felt at home we were treated as locals in the Arab world whereas uh in Europe the Jews were always um a separate class of people uh and a problematic class and it it took Europe much much longer than the Arab world to start treating the Jews as co-citizens and even uh before the Jews got full rights in the Arab world at least there were citizens there were um second class citizens but it

was much much better than uh this status of the Jews uh in Europe uh and it took Europe much much longer to come to terms with the fact that Jews are ordinary human beings with who deserve equal rights can I play devil's advocate for a second there are people who had listened to this and would maybe say aren't you looking back with rose tinted glasses there's anti-Semitism in Islamic texts there's anti-Semitism which is you know core to the Muslim identity I don't think that I'm Muslim but many would say that in particular Israel's Advocates how

would you respond to that accusation I would respond by saying that you can always find quotations to support your point of view uh and you can always pick uh some uh lines in the Quran uh and say this is proof of anti-Semitism but uh to counter that there are so many um quotations in the Quran that are not only not anti-semitic but the opposite and in general in Islam the Jews are treated with respect theab they are the people of the book and so are Christians incidentally they're also the people of the book and they're

treated with great um uh respect so you you can always find selective quotations to argue whatever you like another variant of this argument for which you play Devil's Advocate is that uh Islam is incompatible with democracy and you can find quotations to suggest that uh but if you look serious ious LLY and objectively um at um uh Islamic scriptures uh at the Quran uh you'll have to conclude that there is nothing in Islam which is incompatible uh with democracy and this is if you look at it objectively and I Define objectivity as uncritical acceptance of

My Views is that so funny that's how I Define objectivity too um when my wife defines objectivity as male subjectivity I think she's right um when did the status of Arab Jews begin to change was it with the emergence of Zionism in Europe was it the Arab Revolt or was it the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel it's a gradual process and it's difficult to put your finger on one particular date but in the aftermath of the first world war Britain sponsored uh the Zionist movement uh and so one key date is the Bal

for Declaration of 1917 in which Britain pledge support for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine this was a classic Colonial document which completely disregarded the rights and aspirations of the local people in 1917 um the Arabs were 90% of the population the Jews were 10% and the Jews owned 2% of the land and yet Britain the colonial power chose to privilege the Jews over uh the Arabs and uh I've written a lot about the history of the British mandate in Palestine from 1920 to 1948 but I can summarize it

for uh your listeners in one sentence which is that Britain stole Palestine from the Palestinians and gave it to the Zionist that's why uh resentment of the Zionist movement started to build up not just in Palestine where the the Arabs were being displaced by the Zionist project but throughout the Arab world there was real Sympathy for the Palestinians and there is still strong Sympathy for the Palestinians throughout the Arab world today and I'm not talking about governments I'm talking about uh um people so that was one factor that change and uh the Jews in Iraq

were associated with Britain the colonial power and because Britain was responsible for the displacement of the Palestinians from Palestine by the Zionist um uh that fed into hostility towards the local Jews um then the other turning point is 1948 the establishment of the state of Israel and the first Arab Israeli War um this is when ethnic cleansing happened this is when Israel expelled 34s of a million uh Arabs um they became refugees more than half more than half the Palestinian population became refugees and the name Palestine was wiped off the map this is the LBA

it had repercussions throughout uh the region the Iraqi Army fought in the War for Palestine at the end of the war Israel signed Army dis agreements with all its neighbors these are the um the only internationally recognized borders that Israel has ever had and they are the only borders that I recognize as legitimate this is a pre-1967 uh borders the Iraq Iraq did not sign an army agreement with Israel the Iraqi Army withdrew from Palestine and Iraq is still officially at War uh with Israel it's in the aftermath of this War uh that there was

an upsurge of hostility towards the local Jews in Iraq uh and elsewhere throughout the Arab world and there was popular hostility towards the zionists but also there was hostility at the um official level the Iraqi government began persecuting the Jews in Iraq the whole climate change um uh uh Jews were expelled were fired from government service restrictions were placed on the activities of Jewish merchants and Jewish financiers quotas were imposed on the number of Jews who could go to universities and medical schools um so this was uh a real turning point in Muslim Jewish relations

in Iraq in a way you stop being Iraqi and you start becoming Israelis who are living in Iraq in the eyes of the government th this is this is absolutely right in a nutshell and I have a remote um uh relative he was a a writer it's Moshe uh he moved to Israel he in Israel he wrote 10 books all in Arabic and one of them is called Al Min alq The Exodus or the departure from Iraq and he says we left Iraq um uh as Jew and we arrived in Israel as Iraqis but it's

Israel that made all the difference because Zionism gave the Jews uh a territorial dimension for the first time in two Millennia now Zionism created a Jewish state in Palestine anyone in the Arab world who didn't like Jews anyone like the eal party the right-wing party in Iraq which was very anti-jewish and um any anti-site could say to the Jews you don't belong here you're not from here um um you are alien and um you why don't you go and join your brothers in in Palestine so the whole attitude towards the local Jews um change and

the Jewish community in um Iraq which had contributed to nation building at every level change or the perception of this community change and from being a constructive pillar of Iraqi Society it was viewed increasingly as a fifth column how was the NABA understood by Jews living in the diaspora particularly in the Arab world how did they think about it 1948 was a very very anxious time for the Jews in the diaspora and in the Arab world because whatever they felt about Zionism they were now seen as implicit implicated in what was going on um in

Palestine and um Zionism was a movement by European Jews for European Jews um which had very little appeal to Arab Jews and the Zionist movement never had the Zionist leaders had no interest in the Jews of the Arab countries they tended to look down on them as no better than Arabs as as primitive as backward what changed it was the Holocaust the Holocaust removed the main reservoir for um uh Jews for the Jewish state to be and it's only then that Zionist leaders began to look for Jews from all four corners of the earth including

the Arab world uh so the attitude of the zist movement towards Arab uh Jews change uh and now Arab Jews who had no interest in Israel um were felt un unwelcome unsafe and many of them ended up in Israel my mother used to wax lyrical about the wonderful Muslim friends um that we had in Baghdad and one day I said to her did we have any Zionist friends and she looked at me as if this was a very peculiar question and she said to me no um Zionism is an ashkanazi thing it's nothing to do

with us and so that ethnic stratification of Jews so safic Jews ashkanazi Jews Mahi Jews what kind of impact does that have in contemporary Israeli Society because I don't think all of these terms will be that familiar to our audience ashkanazi Jews are the Jews of Europe and um North America by and large and Safar Jews are the Jews of the Middle East North Africa and the Middle East and some countries in Eastern Europe like Bulgaria as well uh the name Safar comes Safar from sarad which is Spain and the name sefarin comes from the

Jews who expelled from uh Spain and Portugal um in 1942 and from Spain and Portugal sorry 1492 14 1492 going be like Christopher Columbus in 1942 I didn't do a history GCS well done thank you for the correction U so the Jews were expelled in 1492 from the Iberian Peninsula and they wandered um uh they settled down in North Africa and and in in the Middle East and they are called saarim now uh Israel was created in 1948 and all the Jews from Arab countries who ended up in Israel are called misraim MRA in Hebrew

means East so Eastern Jews uh and that's a collective term from Jews wherever they came from in the Arab world Morocco Tunisia uh Egypt Lebanon wherever uh and this is a common term misraim for all Jews of um Arab Origins because um jabotinsky who as I understand it was an early Zionist he wrote We Jews have nothing in common with what is denoted the East and we thank God for that when the image of the Zionist Jew is completely antithetical to what it means to be Arab even if you're an Arab Jew what did that

mean for Arab Jews in Israel so jabotinski was the spiritual father of um um uh of the Israeli right and in 192 three he wrote uh an article the Iron Wall we and the Arabs um and this is the Bible of Zionist foreign policy it was in two parts an analysis of the problem and a solution the problem was that uh the Zionist wanted to establish a Jewish state in Palestine javatini said the Arabs are not a Rabel they are a people no people in history has ever willingly made way for another people to come

and build a state on their land and therefore Arab opposition to Zionism is inevitable and inescapable so what do you do his answer was to build an iron wall of Jewish military strength the Arabs would knock the head against the rampa eventually they'll give up the hope of defeating the Jews the zanis on the battlefield and then will come the time for negotiations um with the local Arabs about the rights and status in Palestine so that was jabotinski a strategy for in two stages F first build up military force and then negotiations from strength with

the Arabs the trouble with Netanyahu and the people like him and the more extreme right-wing Zionist in Israel and the religious Zionist in Israel today is that they only understood the first part of the strategy building up military force in order to subdue the Arabs inde defend in indefinitely rather than negotiate from strength as a political solution to what is a political problem so um there there's one other uh point about jabotinski and all the other Zionist founding fathers Theodore Herzel um K vitman uh and and it was the orientation on the west they all

didn't saw the Jews as not being part of the of the Middle East and they didn't want to integrate into the region they saw Israel they saw the Jewish State as an outpost of Western colonialism and uh jabotinski is a classic example of that he said we have nothing in common with the Arabs and thank God for that but he also said we um we will man the ramparts the of the West against Eastern barbarism and that tells you something about the Zionist movement and its geopolitics that it uh the emphasis was not on F

finding uh modus vendi with the local Arabs the emphasis was always on having the support of the great Powers so first the British Empire and now the American Empire has there ever been a strain within Israeli politics who have wanted to turn away from the great powers of the West and remake Israel as something which is more integrated with its Arab neighbors or does that just not really exist as a distinct political Trend it was a distinct Jewish school of political thought about the conflict but this was the big issue um uh this was the

big question that uh in the land of as of the aspirations of the Zionist and other people already lived so what do you do uh about them um uh jabotinski had one solution build up military force and squeeze them out but there was uh a moderate strand in Jewish political thought in Palestine which uh advocated coexistence in a bational state the president of the Hebrew University Dr Juda Magnus uh was one leader the philosopher Martin bbo was another leader of a movement which was called uh IUD Unity which advocated a bational state but this was

overturn overtaken taken by events in 1948 when Israel Used military force very effectively to cut through the guardian um not and after that we don't see uh it's only a marginal group of canites who uh are not Israeli nationalists who want to go back to the original land of Kanan and Define their cultural identity as canite but this is not a significant political movement is there a sort of double-faced to the way in which the Zionist project has positioned and thought of Arab Jews because on the one hand it's very ashkanazi as you said but

on the other hand Arab Jews and the cultural identity of Arab juice whether that's food whether that's names it lends a kind of igenity to the Zionist project so Arab Jews might be looked down upon but also at the same time they're seen as a very authentic expression of what it means to be an Israeli indeed and one positive recent trend is that Arab Jews or the descendants of Arab Jews are very proud of the Arab Heritage and of the folklore and culture um and I say the descendants of Arab Jews because um all Israelis

born since 1948 are not strictly speaking Arab Jews I I am an Arab Jew because I lived in Baghdad before Israel was established but uh um the the misraim the descendants of the Arab Jews are more than half the population in Israel but most of the elites the political the the military the cult certainly the cultural leads they overwhelmingly Ashkenazi and there is still um uh uh there is still a tendency among the elite to look down on the mizraim in Israel and I would have liked Israel to become part of its environment to integrate

into the region and therefore I had hopes that the Arab Jews would become a bridge between Israel and uh the Arab world but the ashkanazi elite never wanted a bridge to um uh the Arab world and therefore the Arab Jews never the misraim never fulfilled that um function in Israeli Society isn't there also a problem of trying to see the MIM as a bridge between Israel and the Arab world when Palestinians are denied their political rights their right to self-determination the right to land the right of return because you can't both be um I guess

proud of of an Arab identity integrated with your Arab neighbors if at the same time you believe in a project of Jewish Supremacy on a territory that Palestinians also have the right to call home uh that is a very very real problem for uh Arab Jews um and the great majority of mizraim resolve it by becoming Israelis uh by overcompensating by becoming uh more uh right-wing uh more Arab spurning than uh most um ashkenazim it's sort of like the more English than the English thing more English than the English uh or um in America the

equivalent would be poor white uh people who become American Nationalist and look down uh on the the Arab so that is true of the MIM in Israel to find to establish their credentials as um Israeli Patriots they adopt strong anti-arab positions but that's isn't true of all mizraim the leftwing mizraim who identify with the Palestinians the um Iraqi Jewish writers in his Israel who uh Drew parallels between their displacement in 1948 their nakba and our displacement from our uh Homeland um El shart uh who is a very eminent cultural critic at uh the University of

New York University is of Iraqi Origins she's Israeli and she has written a a really important book called um on Palestine sorry on the Arab Jew Palestine and Arab displacements and she makes an explicit parallel between the displacement of the Palestinians from Palestine what we were talking about earlier the nakba the expulsion of 3/4 of a million Arabs and something like 800,000 Jews left the Arab world to go to Israel they went to Israel because they had no choice they couldn't go anywhere else but there is a difference um there is the theory of the

double Exodus that it was a population exchange but it wasn't because the Palestinians were driven out by force by the Zionist movement we were not mistreated we were not pushed out life became uncomfortable and safe for us and therefore we moved uh to Israel but there are parallels and Israeli Communists for example always made a common cause with the Palestinians who remained inside inside Israel I want to just quickly come back to jabotinsky because it was the first time I ever read that Iron Wall was in preparation for this interview and what was striking to

me is that I obviously disagree with his morality but he was very clear sighted and in a way humanized the Arabs when he said look It's Perfectly Natural they're going to resist our attempt to build a Jewish State on top of them I think it's morally Justified to do that but they're not a they're not a Rabel and what he also didn't say is that they'd be motivated by anti-Semitism of any kind he just said no this is settler Colonial relations explicitly called uh the Zionist project to settler Colonial project now not only is that

unsayable within political circles it's also seen as anti-semitic to say it's a settler Colonial project or that maybe it's natural for Palestinians to want to resist their displacement the ongoing occupation how do you account for that change or that cognitive dissonance among zionists that the early leaders spiritual leaders the you know founding thinkers were saying yes this is a settler Colonial project and now Israel's Advocates will come down like a ton of bricks on you if you make that suggestion public I'm glad you said that about um jabotinski because I'm leftwing he was very right-wing

but I respect him because he was honest because he admitted that there is a problem that we're trying to take over somebody else's land and the only way to do it is by force and he had a lot of labor party labor zis who criticized him and they said no no no this is immoral and he wrote a second article on the morality of the um Iron Wall I think he called them vegetarians vegetarians that's right um and uh because they recalled from the use of force they said we are completely defensive we we we

wouldn't use military force um and he said but there is no other way and uh so he called a spade a spade whereas the labor zanis were hypocritical they refus to admit that there was a problem and they refused to admit that their aim was to take over the land and its resources and and to ethnically cleanse the local uh population so there was always a huge gap between the lofty rhetoric of the Zionist movement and the reality of how the Zionist treated the Arabs on the ground and Zionist leaders from that time until today

fill this Gap with hypocrisy and hug but I I exempt jabotinski from this charge of hypocrisy I applied mostly to labor Zionist I let's move on a little bit um it's often said by zionists even non-jewish zionists that without Israel there's no safety for Jews am I right in suggesting that your thinking is the opposite that Israel has made the Jewish diaspora a lot less safe yes that is my view and that is the reality if you look around you uh Israel today is the less least safe place for Jews uh in the world and

uh since the beginning of the war in Gaza 8 months ago 300,000 Israelis have been displaced some internally but many of them have left the country because it's unsafe and it's unsafe on two fronts in the South because of the war in Gaza but also in the north because the border war between Israel and his balah um so there's no question that Jews in Israel today are less safe than anywhere else in the world but it's it's much much worse than that it's much worse than that because Israel generates anti-Semitism uh Israel is responsible for

the the upsurge of hostility towards Jews everywhere in the world and we see it very acutely in in Britain today the community security trust which is a Jewish organization collects data and it its data shows that every time Israel has launched a military offensive in Gaza there's been an upsurge of anti-Semitic in idents uh in this country so there is a direct correlation between Israel's actions against the Palestinians and uh Rising hostility towards the Jews uh in this country and elsewhere and it's undeniable that there is anti-Semitism uh in this country it's it's a serious

problem and it's a growing problem but what causes this we have to ask ourselves what is the reason for the increase uh of anti-Semitic incidents in this country and the answer is that Israel is responsible um for the upsurge of anti semitism and British Jews are in a dilemma because Israel is a central component of their identity so they identify uh with Israel and they find it difficult to acknowledge that Israel is responsible for the um uh for the Hostile increasingly hostile climate that they face uh in this country and my advice to uh uh

British Jews is that the they British they don't have to identify with Israel they don't have to support Israel they don't have to cling to to the attitude of my country uh right or wrong and Jews are not collectively responsible for Israel's actions and a growing number of um Jews in this country and in America and elsewhere are dissociating uh themselves from Israel uh I belong to a number of these groups um independent Jewish voices Jews for justice for Palestinians uh the uh Jewish voice for Labor uh in the laor party free speech on Israel

and all of these people are saying not in our name Israel doesn't represent us we are Jews uh and Israel is a country which is doing terrible things today it's some uh carrying out genocide in in Gaza so it's really really important to distinguish between Jews on the one hand the people uh in Israel which is a country so Devil's Advocate again I've seen anti-zionist Jews being accused of being self-hating Jews that there is some guilt there's some shame and you reject a core part of your identity how do you respond to that accusation it's

complete rubbish and I'm not going to respond to this um the the anti-zionists uh give uh rational uh reasons evidence-based reasons for the criticism of Israel so why attribute very honest um well-grounded uh comments and criticisms on of what Israel is doing uh with self-hating uh I a Jew and I'm not a self-hating Jew I'm a student of the Arab Israeli conflict and I try to be honest about what is going on uh and Israel is definitely uh in the wrong so really this view this notion of self-hating Jews is beneath contempt well I'll I'll

let certain journalists on Twitter know um just moving on a bit in your book three worlds which really is fascinating ating because at first I thought I was reading an autobiography and a personal history and then as I continued I realized I was reading a social history in this book you uncover evidence that suggests that the Israeli mosad used certain methods to motivate Jews to leave Iraq what was the evidence that you uncovered and how did they motivate Jews to leave Iraq between 1948 and the 1950s big picture first uh in 1950 there were 135,000

Jews in Iraq by the end of 1952 there only about 10,000 Jews left in Iraq the whole Community had been wiped out two years in two years and 25,000 Jews ended up in Israel uh in March 1950 the Iraqi government passed the law with said the Iraqi parliament passed the law it said any Jew who wants to leave the country is free to do so they have a year to register to leave on a one-way Visa um oneway Visa um and not many Jews registered to leave and in the next year five bombs exploded in

Jewish premises in Baghdad and that created a panic uh and that helped to precipitate The Exodus to uh Israel and there are always rumors that the m was involved in the bombs I was always fascinated by this question since I was a boy and now when researching this book I found two sources of evidence that point to Mad connection one is that I interviewed a very elderly um friend of my mothers in Ramadan uh Yakov kuki who was in the Zionist underground in Baghdad and he told me about their actions what they did how they

organized illegal immigration and then after the law I just mentioned legal immigration to Israel how they Forge documents how they paid bribes but most importantly he told me that one of his colleagues yov no sorry um Yosef basri 28 28 yearold lawyer and an anden Zionist he was a member of the underground and he was responsible for three out of the five bombs and uh in my research I established that one bomb was lobed one hand grenade was lobbed by a young activist in the eal party which wanted to expel the Jews from Iraq and

confiscate the uh properties and another bomb was another hand grenade was lobed into the masud Shmo synagogue and there four people uh were killed and he was a criminal who had a grudge against the Jews and it had nothing to do with the mad but three other bombs um uh the Zionist activists uh especially specifically Yosef basri were responsible for them uh and the um controller of basri was um an Israeli intelligence officer called um max benett he gave him the orders he gave him the TNT um um basri was called tried uh proper trial

not a show trial and convicted and hanged um and so that's one source of evidence oral evidence which is we all know is not totally reliable the other source of evidence is um a a Baghdad police report one page from from the investigation of basri and his colleagues which names names and says specifically what basri said in the inter interrogation uh and so I now have written evidence as well as oral evidence that uh Israeli intelligence officers were involved in the planting of um bombs in Baghdad on Jewish sides now my Zionist critics said uh

that even if I was right even if all this is true the main reason for The Exodus was not the bombs it was persecution by the government and I concede that it's not part of my argument that the bombs were the main reason for the liquidation of this community but my answer to my Zionist critics is even if I knew for certain that not a single Iraqi Jew left Iraq to go to Israel because of the bombs I would still think this is a real indictment of the state of Israel because Israel was created to

provide a safe haven for Jews not to be harassing and threatening Jews in other countries when presented with this kind of evidence how have Israeli Jews in your experience engaged with the idea that mosad you know intelligence agents had a role in making Jews feel afraid for their lives in other countries when I was a boy in Israel there were persistent rumors uh that um mosad had a hand in the bombs um and these rumors were persist recently denied by the government and there are two commissions of inquiry um that exonerated Israel totally but the

rumors persisted um and this belief right or wrong that Israel had a hand in uprooting them fed their hostility to the state of Israel especially because they didn't have a very warm welcome on arrival they arrived and um uh at the airport they were sprayed with DDT with pesticide they're treated like animals so just try and imagine the experience of a Jew from an Arab country who arrives at the um promised land and the first thing he experiences is beating being sprayed with DDT it's a profound betrayal uh and a cultural um um uh aggression

in your face really uh it's treating uh Arab Jews with contempt on arrival so that's the formative experience and then they are taken to uh Transit camps and in fness to Israel this is the early 50s very poor country um limited resources trying to recover from the trauma of the the 1948 War uh but all the same uh these Jews were taken into um Transit camps uh maabarot and everything is difficult for them they've lost everything they arrived in Israel with one suitcase and 50 dins that's all so they are pennyless and they have no

way out because they don't have a passport the only place they could go to is um is Israel and the managers of the transit camps are Ashkenazi Jews they have no idea about the history of these people their achievements their status in other in the uh uh or countries of origin and they think they should be grateful for what they are getting so it wasn't a very happy beginning for uh the Jews of the Arab lands who arrived in in Israel in the 19 um uh in the early 1950s individual experiences differed some Jews did

better than others uh but for the Iraqi Community as a whole the experience was like that of a tree being pulled up by the roots it was a very traumatic experience can zionists ever reconcile their belief in the need for a state of Israel with the existence of a thriving culturally distinct and vibrant Jewish diaspora outside of Israel in theory this should be perfectly possible because Israel is the country of uh this the country of its citizens and a quarter sorry a fifth of the citizens happen to be Arab but Israel is the country of

all its citizens whereas the Jews in the diaspora are not Israelis if the British Jews the British citizens if the French Jews the French um uh citizens the problem is that Israel claims to be this not to be the state of the Jews Israel claims to speak on behalf of um all Jews everywhere and as I was saying earlier more and more Jews are saying no not in our name we are we are not part of of our Israel so it's Israel which is the problem with its claim to represent all Jews and to speak

on behalf of Jews it doesn't have such um right and there is another problem and that is uh Israel um uh be the worst anti-sites around the world like Victor Oran in um in hungry is a is a good uh example and this goes back to what Herzel said that the anti-semites would be among our strongest supporters Benjamin Netanyahu gets on really well with anti-semites like Orban like the Christian Evangel LS in America with people like um um Donald Trump who is anti-Semitic he gets on really well with them as long as they pro-israeli he

doesn't care and the Israel Lobby in America Funds extreme right-wing Republicans even if they're anti-Semitic as long as they support Israel so here you have another example in which there is a real um difference and um between Israel on the one hand and diaspora Jews on the other hand and Israel um now in the by perpet perpetrating the genocide in Gaza Israel is doing lasting harm to the Jews of of the world harm that would last for two generations because Israel is killing children and killing children is unforgivable how does it feel as a Jewish

person when you see the footage coming out of Gaza and what you hear from Netanyahu or even Joe Biden is that this is being done in the name of keeping Jews safe I think it's an absolutely Preposterous argument because Hamas attacked Israel on the 7th of October it was a murderous uh attack uh but Israel's response has been uh completely Beyond outside the scale and Israel its response had to be uh within the limits of international humanitarian law but the Israeli response has violated every item in international humanitarian law so as a Jew I feel

deeply ashamed and angry about what Israel is doing uh and I'm appalled that they um speak uh as Jews particularly the religious nationalists the religious zist within the government like betsalel smotri and itamar Ben they see themselves as Jews and they speak in the name of Jews but they have nothing in common with me and I I'm I'm not a practicing Jew but I'm proud of my Jewish Heritage and I'm equally proud of my Heritage and I know that the four core values of Judaism are altruism truth justice and peace and the the Israeli government

today is the antithesis of these core values the core of of Judaism is nonviolence and look how violent this uh government is and this the by my count this is the eighth Israeli military offensive in Gaza the first one was castled in 2008 this is the eth but it's out of all proportion to what has gone on uh before because the aim is the destruction of Gaza making Gaza unable um and the displacement of the people in Gaza which is forceable displacement which is a war war crime so Israel is committing War crime uh every

day the aim is to depopulate Gaza and there is a plan to depopulate uh Gaza but now Israel is gone beyond ethnic cleansing to perpetrating genocide and Israel has become a paria in the last eight months a real International Pariah the whole of the global South uh is up in arms about what Israel is doing and not only Israel is the victim of its own crimes but the so-called rule-based International order uh America and Britain claim to stand for the rule of law and for um uh the rule-based international order but their hypocrisy is exposed

for all everyone body to see Britain and America continue to supply weapons to Israel and they continue to give diplomatic immunity to Israel so Israel because of its Western allies and um support uncritical support is able to continue with their genocide and some people hesitate to use the word genocide I used to but no longer and the Clincher for me is that Israel is stopping in international Aid humanitarian aid from reaching the starving uh people of Gaza Israel is using starvation as a weapon of War um that is genocide I suppose I've got one final

question and it's about the possibilities of hybrid identity because listening to you talk you see most excited by the possibilities of jewishness when it's combined with arabness or britishness and all these other kinds of ethnic cultural and religious expression and it seems to me that part of your criticism of Israel is that it flattens jewishness into just one thing am I right in saying that that the thing that really excites you about jewishness is its possibility to sit within a hybrid of lots of different kinds of identity yes and that is the main message of

my Memoirs I try to recreate um a unique Jewish civilization of the near East which flourished for Generations but was um wiped out by the W C Winds of nationalism in the 20 th uh Century so that world no longer exists um and the real uh villain in of of this story is nationalism because nationalism is a very uh negative and it's a very divisive and destructive force patriotism is different patriotism is love of your country but for nationalism you need an enemy and is marene Monroe wrote in her scrap book The Trouble with nationalism

is that it stops US thinking it stops US relating to one another as human beings and look at Israel and the Z the religious Zionist in charge of Israel they don't regard Arabs as human beings not just the the the people in Gaza but any Palestinians they and they increasingly they call them Nazis and they um um uh demonize a whole people um and uh the trouble with demonizing people is that it paves the way to genocide which is what is happening in front of our eyes so I had the privilege of living in an

Arab country I know I can relate to Arabs not just as the enemy but as human beings uh and in the epilogue to my book and the narrative only goes up to when I was 18 but the epilogue traces the evolution of my thinking on Israel Palestine up to the present and I used to support a two-state solution but Israel killed it and therefore um the solution that I advocate today is one Democratic state from the river to the sea with equal rights for all the people who live it live there regardless of religion and

ethnicity thank you so much ay schlame thank you it's been a pleasure to talk to you [Music]