In Jerusalem

To the contrary, the Arab states literally have gotten away with murder. How many people know of the daily terror Jews faced in Syria? How many people know that Arab countries such as Iraq invited Nazis to exterminate its Jewish communities communities that had been there 1,000-1,500 years prior to the Arab/Muslim invasion of the region? How many people know about the hundreds of miles of Jewish land and billions of dollars of Jewish property that were confiscated and nationalized by various Arab governments? Moreover, how many people know that 900,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries and their millions of children now make up the majority of the entire Israeli population? How many people care?

I believe anyone in the Middle East peace movement would find it absurd to discuss Arab-Israel relations without inviting Palestinians to the table. Yet I consistently have found Mizrahim absent from such discussions. I also believe anyone in the peace movement would find it unthinkable to ask Palestinians at the table to be silent about the oppression their families have suffered at the hands of Israel. Yet I have found Mizrahim unfailingly silenced by these same people, when trying to talk about the oppression our families faced at the hands of Arab governments. This silencing, I have found, is rooted in a complex mixture of and relationship between racism and Jew-hatred.

Arab governments and international Arab community leaders publicly have spoken of Jews as if all Jews are European; and they have spoken about Israel as if it were a European state colonializing third-world people. In fact, as I mentioned before, the majority of Israel’s population is Mizrahi, indigenous to the region and never having left it. More specifically, they are Jewish refugees from Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, and other countries under Arab control. They were forced to flee their homes of 3,000 years when Arab states either issued expulsion orders or otherwise forced them to leave, through intolerable conditions of oppression.

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A BIG PIECE IS MISSING IN THIS “PEACE”

http://www.loolwa.com/archive/articles/pgs/piece.html