The Oslo Disaster - By Prof. Efraim Karsh

The Oslo Disaster

By Prof. Efraim KarshSeptember 4, 2016

Mideast Security and Policy Studies No. 123

Prof. Efraim Karsh, the incoming director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, indicts the Oslo diplomatic process as “the starkest strategic blunder in Israel’s history” and as “one of the worst calamities ever to have afflicted Israelis and Palestinians.”

“Twenty three years after its euphoric launch on the White House lawn,” Karsh writes in this comprehensive study, “the Oslo ‘peace process’ has substantially worsened the position of both parties and made the prospects for peace and reconciliation ever more remote.”

“The process has led to establishment of an ineradicable terror entity on Israel’s doorstep, deepened Israel’s internal cleavages, destabilized its political system, and weakened its international standing.”

“It has been a disaster for West Bank and Gaza Palestinians too. It has brought about subjugation to corrupt and repressive PLO and Hamas regimes. These regimes have reversed the hesitant advent of civil society in these territories, shattered their socioeconomic wellbeing, and made the prospects for peace and reconciliation with Israel ever more remote.”

“This abject failure is a direct result of the Palestinian leadership’s perception of the process as a pathway not to a two-state solution – meaning Israel alongside a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza – but to the subversion of the State of Israel. They view Oslo not as a path to nation-building and state creation, but to the formation of a repressive terror entity that perpetuates conflict with Israel, while keeping its hapless constituents in constant and bewildered awe as Palestinian leaders line their pockets from the proceeds of this misery.”

Karsh details at length how the Oslo process has weakened Israel’s national security in several key respects.

On the strategic and military levels, it allowed the PLO to achieve in one fell swoop its strategic vision of transforming the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into terror hotbeds that would disrupt Israel’s way of life (to use Yasser Arafat’s words).

Politically and diplomatically, he says, Oslo instantaneously transformed the PLO (and, to a lesser extent, Hamas) into an internationally accepted political actor while upholding its commitment to Israel’s destruction, edging toward fully fledged statehood outside the Oslo framework, and steadily undermining Israel’s international standing.

The ending of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian population of the territories within three-and-a-half years from the onset of the process has gone totally unnoticed (due partly to Palestinian propaganda, partly to Israel’s failure to get this critical point across), with the Jewish state still subject to international opprobrium for the nonexistent “occupation.”

Domestically, Oslo radicalized Israel’s Arab minority, nipping in the bud its decades-long “Israelization” process and putting it on a collision course with Israel’s Jewish community. No less importantly, it made Israeli politics captive to the vicissitudes of Palestinian-Israeli relations, with the PLO and Hamas becoming the effective arbiters of Israel’s political discourse and electoral process.

“On the face of it,” Karsh writes, “Israel’s massive setbacks can be considered Palestinian gains. Yet one’s loss is not necessarily the other’s gain. The Palestinian leadership’s zero-sum approach and predication of Palestinian national identity on hatred of the ‘other,’ rather than on a distinct shared legacy, has resulted in decades of dispersal and statelessness.”

“Even if the PLO were to succeed in gaining international recognition of a fully fledged Palestinian state (with or without a formal peace treaty with Israel) and in preventing Hamas from seizing power, it would still be a failed entity in the worst tradition of Arab dictatorships, in permanent conflict with its Israeli neighbor while brutally repressing its unfortunate subjects.”

Karsh bemoans that fact that “there has been no real reckoning by the Oslo architects and their erstwhile ‘peace camp’ successors, both in Israel and abroad, of the worst blunder in Israel’s history, and no rethinking of its disastrously misconceived assumptions – let alone any public admission of guilt or show of remorse over its horrific costs.”

“Instead, they continue to willfully ignore the Palestinian leadership’s total lack of interest in the two-state solution and serial violation of contractual obligations. They continue to whitewash ongoing Palestinian violence, belittle the extent of Israeli suffering, and blame Jerusalem for the stalled process despite the public endorsement of the two-state solution by five successive Israeli prime ministers: Peres, Barak, Sharon, Olmert, and Netanyahu.”

“Not only has the same terror-tainted Palestinian leadership come to be universally viewed as the prospective government of a future Palestinian state, but its goal of having this state established without negotiating with Israel, or even recognizing its right to exist, seems to be gaining ever wider currency.  This soft racism – asking nothing of the Palestinians as if they are too dim or too primitive to be held accountable for their own words and actions – is an assured recipe for disaster.”

“For so long as not a single Palestinian leader evinces genuine acceptance of the two-state solution or acts in a way signifying an unqualified embrace of the idea, there can be no true or lasting reconciliation with Israel. And so long as the territories continue to be governed by the PLO’s and Hamas’s rule of the jungle, no Palestinian civil society, let alone a viable state, can develop.”

“Just as the creation of free and democratic societies in Germany and Japan after World War II necessitated a comprehensive sociopolitical and educational transformation, so it will only be when Palestinian society undergoes a real ‘spring’ that the century-long conflict between Arabs and Jews can at long last be resolved and a semi-functioning Palestinian state come into being. This requires sweeping the corrupt and oppressive PLO and Hamas rulers from power, eliminating endemic violence from political and social life, and teaching the virtues of coexistence with Israeli neighbors.”

“Sadly, the possibility of a Palestinian spring, which seemed to be in the offing in 1993 when the PLO hovered on the verge of extinction and West Bank and Gaza leadership appeared eager to strike a historic deal within the framework of the Washington peace negotiations, has been destroyed for the foreseeable future by the Oslo ‘peace process’.”

A renowned authority on Middle Eastern history and politics, Prof. Karsh has authored over 100 scholarly articles and sixteen books, and is editor of the Middle East Quarterly and Israel Affairs academic journals.

He taught for 25 years at King’s College London, where he founded and directed the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Program (currently the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies). In 2013 he joined Bar-Ilan University as professor of political science. In November 2016 he will succeed Prof. Efraim Inbar as director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

Prof. Karsh will lecture (in Hebrew) on his conclusions this Wednesday September 7, 2016 at 5 pm (BESA Center, building 203, room 131, Bar-Ilan University).

Arab/Palestinian Settler-Colonialism

By Dr. Alex JoffeSeptember 3, 2017

The entrance of Caliph Umar (581-644) into Jerusalem, 19th century colored engraving, via Wikipedia

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 577, September 3, 2017

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The concept of “settler colonialism” has been applied with almost unique vehemence against Israel. But the fact that Jews are the indigenous population of the Southern Levant can be proved with ease. In contrast, historical and genealogical evidence shows Palestinians descend primarily from three primary groups: Muslim invaders, Arab immigrants, and local converts to Islam. The Muslim conquest of Byzantine Palestine in the 7th century CE is a textbook example of settler-colonialism, as is subsequent immigration, particularly during the 19th and 20th centuries under the Ottoman and British Empires. The application of the concept to Jews and Zionism by Palestinians is both ironic and unhelpful.

One of the mainstays of the modern university is the idea of settler-colonialism. This argues that certain societies are birthed by settlers implanted in a foreign territory, either directly by or with the consent of an imperial power. These colonists then dominate and eradicate the indigenous population. They develop bellicose cultures that eliminate the natives from historical, literary, and other narratives. Primary examples often cited are the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and Rhodesia, and Israel.

The settler-colonial argument against Israel posits that Zionism was an imperial tool of Britain (or, alternatively, that Zionism manipulated the British Empire); that Jews represent an alien population implanted into Palestine to usurp the land and displace the people; and that Israel has subjected Palestinians to “genocide,” real, figurative, and cultural.

According to this argument, Israel’s “settler colonialism” is a “structure, not an event,” and is accompanied by a “legacy of foundational violence” that extends back to the First Zionist Congress in 1897 or even before. With Zionism thus imbued with two forms of ineradicable original sin, violent opposition to Israel is legitimized and any forms of compromise, even negotiation, are “misguided and disingenuous because ‘dialogue’ does not tackle the asymmetrical status quo.”

But Middle Eastern history is not amenable to these formulations. Among the many concepts abused and perverted by the Palestinians, accusations of Israeli “genocide” rank the highest for blatant audacity, and for twinned calumny and odiousness. The settler-colonial idea deserves attention for three reasons: its comparatively recent adoption by Palestinians and their advocates; its broader currency in the academy; and its obvious and ironic falsity.

The idea of Jews as “settler-colonialists” is easily disproved. A wealth of evidence demonstrates that Jews are the indigenous population of the Southern Levant; historical and now genetic documentation places Jews there over 2,000 years ago, and there is indisputable evidence of continual residence of Jews in the region. Data showing the cultural and genetic continuity of local and global Jewish communities is equally ample. The evidence was so copious and so incontrovertible, even to historians of antiquity and writers of religious texts, some of whom were Judeophobes, that disconnecting Jews from the Southern Levant was simply not conceived of. Jews are the indigenous population.

As for imperial support, the Zionist movement began during the Ottoman Empire, which was at best diffident towards Jews and uncomfortable with the idea of Jewish sovereignty. For its part, the British Empire initially offered support in the form of the Balfour Declaration, but during its Mandatory rule (1920-48) support for Zionism vacillated. The construction of infrastructure aided the Yishuv immensely, but political support for Jewish immigration and development, as stipulated by the League of Nations mandate, waxed and waned until, as is well known, it was withdrawn on the eve of World War II. This is hardly “settler-colonialism.”

Ironically, the same cannot be said for the Palestinian Arabs. A recent analysis by Pinhas Inbari reviewed the history of Palestine (derived from the Roman term Palaestina, applied in 135 CE as a punishment to a Jewish revolt). Most notably, he examines the origin traditions of Palestinian tribes, which continue even today to see themselves as immigrants from other countries. Inbari’s review, along with many additional sources of information he did not address, demonstrates that modern Palestinians are, in fact, derived from two primary streams: converts from indigenous pre-modern Jews and Christians who submitted to Islam, and Arab tribes originating across the Middle East who migrated to the Southern Levant between late antiquity and the 1940s. The best documented episodes were the Islamic conquests of the 7th century and its aftermath, and the periods of the late Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate.

Even notable examples like Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, who ludicrously claimed that “I am the proud son of the Canaanites who were there 5,500 years before Joshua bin Nun burned down the town of Jericho,” traces his real family lineage to the Huwaitat tribe, which migrated from Arabia to Jordan. The rare admission by Hamas minister Fathi Ḥammad that “half the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis” is more honest.

Echoing Inbari, it is not to be argued here that “there are no Palestinians” who thus do not deserve political rights, including self-rule and a state. To do so would be both logically and morally wrong. Palestinians have the right to define themselves as they see fit, and they must be negotiated with in good faith by Israelis. What Palestinians cannot claim, however, is that they are Palestine’s indigenous population and the Jews are settler-colonialists.

Palestinian genealogies that show their own tribes originating outside the Southern Levant are prima facie evidence of Arab settler-colonialism. And while narratives of the Arab conquests of Byzantine Palestine and North Africa cannot be taken at face value, they are pure ideological expressions of settler-colonialism. In 634-37 CE, Muslim armies commanded by the Caliph Umar conquered the entirety of the Levant before invading Armenia and Anatolia in 638 and Cyprus in 639.

The subsequent Islamization and Arabization of the Levant was a long and complex imperial process that entailed reorganizing the region into administrative provinces, instituting new social categories for the purposes of taxation and control, implanting settlers and reapportioning lands as estates, and encouraging conversion to Islam. Over the centuries, other settlers migrated and were intentionally implanted, including, in the 19th century alone, Egyptians fleeing from and imported by Muhammad Ali from the late 1820s to the 1840s, as well as Chechens, Circassians, and Turkmen relocated by the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s after its wars with Russia. Tribes of Bedouins, Algerians, Yemenis, and many others also immigrated during that century.

As for modern immigration, Inbari could well have pointed to the well-documented increases in Palestinian census numbers from 1922 to 1931, produced by illegal immigration spurred by the development of the region’s infrastructure and economy. One estimate sees some 37% of the increase in Palestinian population between 1922 and 1931, over 60,000 persons, having been the result of illegal immigration. Another study found that from 1932 to 1946, another 60,000 illegal male immigrants entered the country, with uncounted females imported as brides. These were in addition to the great influx of Arab workers from 1940 to 1945 in connection with the war effort.

To reiterate, these arguments do not devolve to arguing “a land without a people for a people without a land,” or that Ottoman Palestine was “empty” when the Zionist movement began. It was indeed populated, albeit unevenly, but those populations had immigrated into the land over the previous centuries, a process that accelerated precisely because of the Zionist movement and the British Mandate. Palestinian settler-colonialism took place, ironically, under the aegis of both a Muslim and a Christian empire.

Finally, there is the matter of a separate Palestinian ethno-national consciousness and its relationship to settler-colonialism. Claims to find a separate Palestinian ethnic identity as far back as the 17th century are unpersuasive. Instead, the idea developed as an elite concept in the years immediately before and especially after World War I, vying with far deeper and more resilient tribal and religious identities. The nationalization of the masses occurred gradually over the next few decades, propelled in part by tragedies largely foisted on them by their leaders, notably the “Arab Revolt” of 1936-39, the rejection of partition in 1947, the Israeli War of Independence of 1948-49, and the subsequent, rather local, dispersal of refugees into the 1950s. Palestinian nationalism and identity are largely reactive and secondary, pointing to the fact that settler-colonial identity was primarily tribal and religious, the latter imperial by definition.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, a mythology of the “timeless” Palestinians took root. During the earlier period, this was a European Orientalist trope: the Palestinians as living “fossils” who reflected the lifeways of the Bible. It was later adopted for strategic reasons by the Palestinians themselves as a political and cultural retort to the Zionist return to the land. That usage was perhaps understandable, if ironic; but it reaches a reductio ad absurdum in Erekat’s claim to have had Upper Paleolithic ancestors.

It is, then, the Palestinians who are the settler-colonialists, not the Jews or even the Zionists. Does this realization change anything? Does removing a term from the rejectionist toolbox bring the cause of negotiation and peace any closer? This seems unlikely. But in the longer term, facing certain truths will be necessary for Palestinians and Israelis alike. One is that rejection of Israel, at its core, is not a function of Palestinian nationalism and local identity but Islamic religious opposition to Jewish autonomy and sovereignty. Another is that tendentious categories like “settler-colonialism,” which ironically undermine Palestinian claims to indigenous status, should be dispensed with in favor of honest appraisals of history.

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Alex Joffe is an archaeologist and historian. He is a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family

The History of the Land Is Jewish, Not Arab/Palestinian

By Dr. Yechiel ShabiyFebruary 23, 2020

Ancient synagogue in Gamla in the Golan Heights, built during the Second Temple period in the first century CE, photo via Wikimedia Commons

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,455, February 23, 2020

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The claim by the elected representatives of the Israeli Arab public that they are the original owners of the land while the Jewish citizens of Israel (and, by implication, the State of Israel itself) are “colonialist invaders” is a complete inversion of historical reality. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s declaration about the legality of the West Bank’s Jewish communities, along with President Trump’s peace plan based on that principle, offers a unique opportunity to correct that mistaken notion by applying sovereignty to all Israeli West Bank communities.

The elected representatives of Israel’s Arab community claim that the Palestinians are the original owners of the land—an indigenous minority disinherited by foreign invaders. According to this notion, which is aimed at undermining the Zionist narrative about the Jewish people’s return to its historical homeland, the Arabs of the Land of Israel—like the Indians in America, the aborigines in Australia, and the Zulu tribes in South Africa—are victims of European imperialism/colonialism, which turned them into a disenfranchised and oppressed minority in their own land. From this standpoint, Zionism is a crude perversion of Judaism because the Jews do not constitute a people but only a religious community with no national attributes or aspirations, let alone any right to a state of their own in even a tiny part of the Islamic-Arab-Palestinian patrimony.

That thesis is not only baseless but a complete inversion of the historical truth.

It was Arab/Muslim invaders who came to the Land of Israel as an ascendant imperialist force in the decade after the Prophet Muhammad’s death and laid the groundwork for the colonization of this land by a long string of Muslim empires up to the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI. During this lengthy era, the non-Jewish and non-Christian residents of the land identified themselves as Muslims—not as Arabs, and certainly not as Palestinians—until WWI, when the idea of Arab nationalism gathered steam with the help of British imperialism.

One need only look at common family names among the Palestinians to see their colonialist origins: Hijazi, from the Hijaz in the Arabian Peninsula, from which the original invaders came; Bosniak, from Bosnia; Turk, from Turkey; Halabi, from Syria; Hindi, from India; Yemeni, from Yemen; Masarwa/Masri, from Egypt; Mughrabi, from the Maghreb, and so on.

In contrast, countless place names in the Land of Israel testify to a Jewish presence over thousands of years. Take, for example, the Narbeta River in northern Samaria. Narbeta, which is the Aramaic pronunciation of Arubot, the biblical city in which one of King Solomon’s 12 governors lived, ruled the whole region of northern Samaria. In Narbeta, as Yosef ben Matityahu (Josephus) recounts, the Romans slaughtered thousands of Jews during the Great Revolt (66-73 CE). The area teems with archaeological relics from the Second Temple, Mishnaic, and Talmudic eras.

The Jewish population did not take to Roman-Byzantine rule and over the centuries rebelled against it repeatedly. The Great Revolt considerably depleted the Jewish population, but it was the Bar Kochba Revolt (132-35) and the subsequent religious and economic decrees that devastated the population, particularly in the Judea region. Harsh taxes were levied on the owners of Jewish estates and on farmers, and those who were struggling sought respite in nearby lands, especially Syria.

Concerned about the Jewish character and demography of the Land of Israel, the sages promised life in the next world to those who dwelt in the land and even for those who simply walked four cubits in it. In the words of Rabbi Meir: “Whoever raises his children in the Land of Israel is promised a place in the World to Come.” Settlement flourished, particularly in the Galilee, Samaria, and the South Hebron Hills. Dozens of communities developed, among them Tiberias, Baram, Gush Halav, Yota, Eshtemoa, Halhoul, Kfar Kanna, Arraba, and Sakhni.

With the Christian conquest of the Roman Empire, the Jews’ lot worsened. Whole populations of Jews and non-Jews converted to Christianity and the Jewish presence dwindled greatly. Not for nothing did the Jews of the Land of Israel play a major role in helping the Persian conquerors in 614.

In 628, Byzantine Emperor Heraclius defeated the Persians. Though he had promised the Jews and their leader Benjamin of Tiberias that if they laid down their arms nothing would befall them, he quickly broke his promise and murdered thousands of Jews.

Less than a decade later the Muslims conquered the land, with the help of the Jewish population. Although, during Muslim rule, the agricultural and urban Jewish population remained in good condition, it was hit hard by the Crusader conquest and the subsequent Mamluk conquest.

As evidenced by descriptions of Jewish and Christian pilgrims, Jews lived in Jewish villages in the Galilee such as Kfar Hanania, Parod, Baram, Alma, Ein Zeitim, Kfar Kanna, and others until the 18th and 19th centuries. It was the Ottoman Turks who forced the Jewish villagers to leave their homes, either by expelling them, discriminating against them, persecuting them, or increasing their taxes, causing Jews to migrate to the cities of Safed, Tiberias, Acre, Haifa, and even Tyre and Sidon.

In the northern Samaria region, Jews lived in Anin, near Umm al-Fahm, growing citrons for trade, until the Turks settled Yemenite Arabs there. In addition, the community of Bitra (Bitron in Aramaic) became Barta’a. In this village and its vicinity the large Kaba clan, a branch of the Banu-Hilal tribe of Saudi Arabia, came to settle, as did the Masarwa clan from Egypt.

The northern Samarian mountains are strewn with thousands of relics of winepresses and of terraces that served as vineyards for the Jewish and Samaritan residents of the region. As the Muslim population took over, the wine industry collapsed and was replaced by olive and carob cultivation.

The land speaks Hebrew. The names of the communities have a linguistic meaning in Hebrew: Jaffa = yafeh (beautiful), Haifa = hofa shel ihr (shore of a city), Shikmona = shkamim (sycamores), Nazareth = notzeret/shomeret (guardian), Beit Guvrin = ihr hag’varim/hat’kifim (city of the strong), and so on. When the Arabs conquered these places, they pronounced the names in their own way, distorting them and changing their meaning: thus Shfaram (meaning “a people whose luck has improved”) became Shfa’amr, Ganim became Jenin, Bitra became Barta’a, Ashdod became Isdud, Tur Karem (meaning “mountain of the vineyards”) became Tulkarem, and Jordan became Urdan—names with no linguistic meaning in Arabic.

As Israeli military and political leader Yigal Allon said, a people that does not know its past has a meager present and an unknown future. When Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab member of Knesset, protested to President Reuven Rivlin that the Arabs of the Land of Israel are the land’s indigenous residents and hence its masters, the president should have answered him appropriately, as in the dictum of the Jewish sages: know how to answer an ignoramus.

Today the wineries and vineyards have returned to the mountains of Samaria, and on the holiday of Tu Bishvat more and more grapevines will be planted. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s declaration about the legality of Jewish communities in the West Bank, along with President Trump’s peace plan based on that principle, offers a unique opportunity to apply sovereignty to all of the Israeli West Bank communities, including those in northern Samaria where the Narbeta River flows.

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Dr. Yechiel Shabiy is a researcher at the BESA Center and a political science lecturer at Bar-Ilan University.

Hear from Iraqi Jews – Personal Stories

Hear from Iraqi Jews – Personal Stories

A collection of personal stories and blog entries written by Iraqi Jews reflecting on their experiences in Iraq and what the archive means to them.

Surviving Saddam 

By Saeed Herdoon, JIMENA Iraqi Experience. Published April, 2014

“Passover, 1969; it was a usual day in the office, centrally located in the business district in Baghdad. I was working as an importer/exporter of fabrics as I do now with my brother-in-law and several other men. Suddenly, without warning, three of Saddam Hussein’s men (who would later become his personal republic guards in the Ba’ath party) entered the office, and shut the main doors. The elder of the three, apparently the leader, told the two younger men to collect the identification cards of everyone in the office.”

My Iraqi Jewish heritage: What’s left? 

By Robert Fattal, Jerusalem Post. December 4th, 2013 

“Last month the National Archives in Washington unveiled an exhibit showcasing Iraqi Jewish artifacts recovered from Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters.

The controversy surrounding the find and whether the US should live up to its commitment and return the historic materials to Iraq has made me reflect on my own identity. Or rather, I should say, on my lack of any true Iraqi Jewish identity..”

Raiders of the lost archive

By Sara Ahroni, Jerusalem Post. October 23, 2013 

“In 2003, a team of 16 American soldiers in Baghdad stumbled upon a lost treasure trove of thousands of documents belonging to Iraq’s Jewish community.

These rare materials, thought to have been stored originally in synagogues and private Jewish homes, were sitting in a moldy, flooded basement of the muhkabarat, Saddam Hussein’s feared secret police.”

Baghdad casts a giant shadow

By Lyn Julius, Times of Israel. October 18th, 2013

“Now that the US government shutdown is over, normal service is being resumed. Iraq is coming to the National Archives building in Washington DC – or more precisely, an exhibition of 24 Iraqi-Jewish artifacts, Discovery and Recovery.  

I will not dwell on the controversy surrounding the ‘Jewish archive’, which the US military salvaged from a sewage-filled basement in Baghdad in 2003.”

Conjuring the Memory of Iraq

By Linda Menuhin, Jerusalem Post. September 17, 2013

“More than 40 years have passed since I fled Iraq, yet Iraq has never left me. Time and again I earnestly tried to bury my past, without much success. This year on Yom Kippur I honored my father’s memory with a sense of fulfillment.

On the eve of Yom Kippur in 1972 my father, a distinguished lawyer in Iraq, disappeared. He was the first Jewish person to disappear during the Ba’athist regime’s years in power.”

Does Iraq deserve the return of its Jewish archive?

By Ben Cohen, JNS.org. September 15, 2013

“A few years ago, in response to a Palestinian critic who made a disparaging remark about the fact that I don’t speak Arabic, I felt compelled to write an article explaining why that is the case. I said that under different circumstances, I could have been born in an Arab country and grown up speaking Arabic. My father’s family had been settled in Iraq for generations, but they fled to England in 1941—the same year that Baghdad’s Jews were convulsed by a June pogrom known as the farhud—presaging a much larger exodus of Iraqi Jews over the next decade.”

Don’t Return the Iraqi Jewish Archive

By Joe Samuels, Times of Israel. September 10, 2013

“My Arabic name is Yusuf Sasson Shumail. I was born in Taht Al Takia, in the old city of Baghdad, Iraq on December 31,1930. In 1941, I survived the anti-Jewish pogrom, known as the Farhud.  During the Farhud, which happened during the holy Jewish holiday of Shavuot, Baghdad’s Jewish population came under the attack of vicious mobs.”

Iraqi Jewish Artifacts – Ownership?

By Rachel Wahba, Times of Israel. September 3, 2013

“After a presence of over 2,500 years, the ancient Jewish community of Iraq was destroyed in the early 1950’s.  A community of less than 6,000 Jews remained until 1967 when it became intolerable and terrifying to stay put.”

Reflections on the Archive by an Iraqi Jew

By Sasson Azoory, Jerusalem Post. September 3, 2013

“My name is Sasson Azoory and I left Baghdad, Iraq in 1959 to study in the United Kingdom. When I left, Iraqi General Abd al-Karim Qasim was in the midst of his three-year rein. During this small window of time Iraqi Jews were granted freedom of movement and I am one of the few Jews who was able to leave the country using my Iraqi passport.”

The Jewish archive must not go back

By Lyn Julius, Times of Israel. August 28, 2013

“One day in 1984, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein sent his henchmen to Bataween synagogue, one of the last working houses of Jewish prayer in Baghdad. The men carted off a trove of books and documents retrieved from Jewish homes, schools and synagogues. The material had been deposited for safe keeping in the ladies’ gallery.”

Iraqi past trails former frat boy to Israel, LA and Saddam’s former palace

By Tracy Frydberg, Times of Israel. January 6, 2013

“Half a century after his family fled, Elan Carr flew into Iraq as a major in the US army. Although he calls his subsequent tenure in Baghdad “a twist of fate that could not have been envisioned,” his path to that moment would make Carr’s arrival, in October 2003, seem more like destiny than coincidence.”

From Baghdad with Love

By Avram Piha, Times of Israel. July 13, 2012

“I spent Sunday morning with my landlord ensuring we were leaving his apartment in good shape. When he confirmed all was ok, I handed over the keys and asked him if he had time to tell me a little bit about his life. Eli had on numerous occasions mentioned his childhood memories of Iraq, and the difficulty of being a refugee in Israel in the 1950s, but we had never had the chance to sit down and really talk about it. We both decided there was no better time than the present, so we sat down on a bench and got to it”

Claiming Babylon’s stolen treasures

By Ronen Tal, YNET News. May 29, 2006

“David Nawi still remembers his grandma’s home in Baghdad. “It was a huge house with many rooms. Sometimes all the family members lived there,” he recalls. Fifty-five years ago his family left Iraq and immigrated to Israel, leaving all of their assets behind. He was only eight years old”

Joe Shamash, JIMENA Iraqi Experience

“I remember camels coming up to our front door with huge sacks of salt,” says Joseph Shamash. Vendors would come in through the high walls of his family’s home just two blocks away from the King’s Palace in Baghdad.”

Semha Alwaya, JIMENA Iraqi Experience

“In discussions about refugees in the Middle East, a major piece of the narrative is routinely omitted, and my life is part of the tapestry of what’s missing. I am a Jew, and I, too, am a refugee. Some of my childhood was spent in a refugee camp in Israel (yes, Israel). And I am far from being alone.”

Rachel Somkeh, Recipes by Rachel

“Rachelle was born to Kedourie and Rosa Ani on Feb 23rd, 1922 in an upper class neighborhood in the southern port city of Basra. Her father, Kedourie Ani, was a notable tea merchant involved in the lucrative trade circuit between India and Great Britain.”

Iraqi Community Organizations

• Babylonian Heritage Center
• A. A. Society, Inc.
• Congregation Kahal Joseph
• Congregation Bene Naharayim