Farhud

Because I think, and that being the majority of people in Israel, I can't tell somebody that fact.

I have to bring somebody like Tal Oren, the traveling clot, right? Or Sahar, right? Like folks who have family who come from the Farhud or whatever, they migrated to Israel from Arab lands.

That identity exists and has its own flavor.

They didn't have a Haskalah.

I don't think that there's a very robust Jewish American history that is taught.

I also don't know how robust of Jewish global history is taught in the United States.

So just even beyond Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, I think when you were bringing up the Farhud, that's something that I didn't know about until I started researching it myself for my dissertation.

And it kind of- Same,

In the Middle East, the pattern is just as consistent.

In 1945, just four years after the Farhud massacre of over one hundred and fifty Jews in Baghdad, Iraq, incited by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni, an ally of Hitler and early opponent of Zionism, a Communist Party split off group called the Anti-Zionist League of Iraq came into being.

While the Communist Party had been outlawed by the Iraqi government, the same regime allowed the Anti-Zionist League of Iraq to function precisely because its Jewish tokens would be useful in their campaign, both against Zionism and in justifying their increasing repression and discrimination against Jews within Iraq.

In the group's pamphlet, Zionism Against Arabs and Jews, published in 1946, they wrote that, "It is critically important for anti-Zionist advocates to differentiate between Zionism and Judaism," a now familiar slogan that erases the way Jews define their own identities, as well as conceals anti-Zionism's own history of violence against Jews, regardless of what it claims to say about Judaism.

...

in 1941, seven years before you had Israel to blame, Jews were being hanged and massacred in the streets of Baghdad, in the Farhud.

Seven-

I'm so surprised.

I don't see it happening.

I don't see it because there have been bloodshed on both sides.

Um, and also because, um, looking at the Middle East and looking at Iraq where my family came from, they didn't live that peacefully with their neighbors before Octo- be- before 1941 on the Farhud.

They always li- they always lived as, as second class citizens.

And our former speaker of the Knesset, at the time he was a Mossad agent in this region, he warned the Sochnut, the Jewish agency, that after the massacre of Simel, they will commit another massacre on the Jews.

And it took only eight years in 1941, and they committed the Farhud massacre in Baghdad.

So it happened for both sides.

Now, by the time of Daesh, you know, the Daesh killed many Muslims as well.

In Hebron in nineteen twenty-nine, Jews who had lived in the ancient city for generations were attacked by their neighbors.

In Baghdad in nineteen forty-one, during the Farhud, Jews were murdered, raped, beaten, and looted in a city where Jewish life had existed for more than two thousand years.

Then came the Holocaust, so enormous that it sometimes obscures everything that came before it and everything that came after.

Six million Jews were murdered, not in some primitive ancient world, but in modern Europe, in countries of universities, orchestras, philosophers, scientists, courts, newspapers, and laws.