The Jewish world’s dangerous amnesia about Mizrahi history
I am no longer the stateless 20-year-old Egyptian-Iraqi Mizrahi Jewish immigrant who arrived in America confused at being unseen, expected to assimilate into the exclusively mainstream Ashkenazi Jewish story.
It is different today. Much has changed in America regarding awareness of the Middle East. American Jews, predominantly Ashkenazi, are far more aware now than in previous decades that half the Jewish population of Israel is Mizrahi, Jews from Arab lands, and that we exist. It’s been a while since I’ve been asked if I “missed my grandparents’ Yiddish,” although I miss my family’s Judeo-Arabic every day.
What has not changed and what is critical today is the continued lack of integration in the Jewish world of the Mizrahi story and what it has to teach about Jewish survival in the face of Islamic ideology today.
There is also the additional resistance in progressive circles, where our history disrupts the prevailing narrative that Jews in Arab lands had a blessed life under Islam, and worse, that we are somehow “Islamophobic” when we speak about our lived history.
Another issue is the comparison of how Jews fared so much better under Islam versus the European experience of the Holocaust – way too low a bar. Jews in Arab lands had good times and very bad times, never equal times. It was no paradise, despite the nostalgia with which some people speak of it.
Mizrahim suffered persecution, were afraid all the time, and were subject to massacres. When Hitler rose, these countries were excited: at last, a final solution.
My mom, Katie (Khatoun) Sharbani, and my dad, Maurice (Moussa) Wahba, were Iraqi and Egyptian Jews. They were Arabic-speaking and deeply culturally rooted in the Middle East. They knew what it was to live in countries where they would always be the lesser, the Jew, the sinner infidel who refused Islam and deserved to be subjugated, punished societally, emotionally, and financially for our intransigence.
It is critical to understand, hard as it may be for those who grew up free outside the Middle East and North Africa, that Jews being sovereign in what is considered “their region” ever since the Muslim conquest, is haram, a sin, unnatural.
There was a time in Persia in which when it started to rain, Jewish shopkeepers shuttered up their shops as quickly as they could and ran home. No, not because they were scared of the rain, but because they could be killed if a raindrop hit them: The rain that touched the Jew would pollute the earth.
For American Jews to imagine this reality is a stretch. It wasn’t a stretch for my mother, who watched the Shia date merchant wash his hands to cleanse himself after doing business with the Jew, her father, in Basra when she was a little girl. As a Jew, she was subject to demeaning slurs and threats every day on the streets of Baghdad on her way home from school.
There are no Jews left in my parents’ native lands. There was an equal number of displaced Jews from Arab lands as Arabs displaced from Israel in 1948. This should be common knowledge. We did not remain “refugees” after we were forced out, kicked out, ethnically cleansed from all over the Middle East and North Africa. We struggled in a new Israel, run by Western Jews. It was not easy. Racism was rife; we were the “primitive” Arab Jews to Ashkenazim wanting Israel to be Austria, while Arab nations waged one war after another.
There was plenty of land in the Arab world to allow displaced people a home. There was one reason not to, and to keep these people indoctrinated to hate Jews in refugee camps. One reason to create generations of a stateless population, from whom massive funds are denied and are used instead for war against the Jews.
It is the same reason Hamas has cynically told us with utmost cruelty how it works for them: The more Palestinians that suffer and die, the sooner the world will turn against Jews, and the sooner Israel will be destroyed. It’s not complicated. Wage war on Israel, have Israel fight for her survival in terrible wars, and have the world turn on Israel.
The anti-Israel crowd goosesteps towards Islamist goals, and somehow doesn’t have the bandwidth to ask what the hell is going on as Hamas, Iran’s proxy, goes genocidally wild, and the Islamic regime of Iran slaughters tens of thousands of feminists and poets and people who want to be free.
There is something very wrong with Jews who think being anti-Zionist is a badge of honor, who want to be loved by friends who feel sexy wrapped in keffiyehs. Jews who march on the streets all over the West with their non-Jewish “anti-Zionists” blabbing Palestinianism, the death cult ideology/religion that is based on genocide of Jews, are obscene.
But of course, if we don’t know the history, and identify with how “from the River to the Sea Palestine will be free” rhymes, as if it’s some chant from the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, we are an easy mark for anti-West ideologies and Islamists who know exactly what they are doing.
As Jews, we cannot afford ignorance. If we cannot be the strongest advocate for ourselves, no one on earth can. The stakes are high; the other side is bent on us being a stateless People again.
We don’t remember the lack of self-esteem and precariousness our people, Jews, suffered as a stateless people. We should, but we don’t.
Anti-Zionists suffer from a combination of stunning blindness as they insult Mizrahi and Jewish suffering. Ignorance, arrogance, and privilege allow them to ignore not only our history but also how Palestinian leadership consistently refuses to coexist with Jews.
Instead of pretending the Palestinians are our victims, we have to open our eyes to see how Palestinians are victims of their leadership – beginning with the Arab states that could not stomach Israel in their midst and created and nurtured a miserable refugee culture, and now perpetrated by Palestinian radical entities like Hamas with their Jihadi ideology.
Hamas and company are willing to sacrifice their own for a Jew Free Middle East = Genocide in Israel, and Jews as a stateless people in the world. Period.
Historically, Mizrahim have been seen by Jews as “exotic.” Peripheral. Optional. The omission deprives us Jews as a people of a vitally critical historical lens when we look at current events.
The ignorance, the gap, also serves to divide Jews into Zionists and “anti-Zionists,” which is obscene. What people want themselves destroyed? Zionist Jews understand the importance of Israel for us as a People and fight for its existence. “Anti-Zionists” imagine they can disavow Israel, the heart of the Jewish Nation and assimilate out.
Understand this; Jews under Islam were tolerated, subordinated, taxed, humiliated, and abandoned when times turned bad. Dhimmi status meant “protected” — until it didn’t. Massacres followed instability. Equality never existed.
It is vital to understand the lived experience of Jews under Islam to understand what Israel faces as a Jewish country in the Middle East.
Jews lived in the Middle East since Biblical times, for over two thousand years, before Islam, before Muhammad, before the Arab conquests. Like other non-Muslim minorities, we were punished for refusing conversion once they colonized the region.
In the past seventy years, after living precarious lives, Jews were ethnically cleansed from nearly every Arab country.
A people that does not know its own history is easily manipulated. Some of us are lulled into believing we don’t need Israel when it is our backbone.
Ignorance allows Israel to be cast as a “white colonial project” instead of what it is: the return of Jews. An indigenous, multi-ethnic people, half of whom fled Arab and Muslim lands, to sovereignty.
Islamist ideology is devoted to the reversal of Jewish sovereignty in Israel and the return of Jews as a stateless people. Back to being dhimmis at their mercy.
October 7th showed us, in the most brutal of ways, that “being nice to your neighbors” does not work when they are indoctrinated to hate us. The ideology has to change.
This history is not optional knowledge. It is essential to understanding Israel, antisemitism, and the Islamist goal of dismantling Jewish sovereignty.
Understanding Mizrahi history is about Jewish survival. We must never be stateless again.
