Remember the Farhud

It is maddening that “Nakba Day” was observed at the UN, during which Mahmoud Abbas invited the world to share his grief, and that of all Palestinians, at the failure of the Arabs to destroy the nascent state of Israel. That, of course, is not how he put it. But it’s what he meant. A great part of his lament focused on the Arabs of Palestine who, in the version the Arabs have been spreading ever since the 1948 war, were forcibly “expelled” by the Jews. The truth is that almost all or the Arabs who left Mandatory Palestine, and then, after May 14, 1948, the state of Israel, did so because they were encouraged to leave by Arab broadcasts from abroad. Those broadcasts told the Palestine Arabs to “get out of the way” of the onslaught by Arab armies; they were urged to seek refuge in neighboring Arab countries, and assured that they would soon be returning to their homes after the Arab forces had expelled or killed all the Jews in Israel. It is truer to say that the Arabs “left “Israel rather than that they were “expelled.”

But there was a mass expulsion in the Middle East at the same time as the “Nakba” that gets far too little attention. This was the expulsion of 850,000 Jews from Arab countries, where those Jews had lived for centuries, and even, sometimes, for millennia. The Arab war on Israel, the fleeing of Arabs from Palestine, and the humiliating defeat of the Arabs by the Jews, all contributed to increasing the already existent Arab murderous hostility toward the Jews, a hostility that in the decades before the 1948 war, had resulted in attacks on Jews all over the Arab world. But even before the 1948 war, Jews were being attacked, robbed, and murdered in Arab lands, for the crime of being Jews. The UN is not, as a body, going to observe a day devoted to remembering these unprovoked and murderous attacks on Jews by Arabs, but fortunately there is a vast world outside the anti-Israel kangaroo court of the UN. I suggest we start our consciousness-raising with one particular massacre of Jews by Arabs, that took place in Baghdad and Basra, on June 1 and 2, 1941.This is what Iraqi Jews refer to as the “Farhud.” In Arabic, that word means “violent dispossession.” More on this terrible event can be found in a Jerusalem Post editorial here: “Don’t forget, remember the Farhud – editorial,” Jerusalem Post, June 2, 2023:

…There is, however, a gap in both knowledge and acknowledgment when it comes to the history of Jewish refugees from Arab lands. More than 850,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab and Muslim lands in 1948, upon Israel’s establishment as a state. But this did not come out of the blue.

“Remember the Farhud” should be made as well known, and with much greater reason, than “Remember Nakba Day.”

One of the horrific incidents that preceded this mass flight of Jews is often overlooked. It is the Farhud – the onslaught or violent dispossession – which took place in Iraq on June 1 and 2, 1941, coinciding with the Shavuot festival. It was a pogrom in every sense. 179 Jews of all ages were killed in the two-day rampage, which was concentrated in Baghdad and Basra. They were slaughtered in their homes and on the streets – wherever they were found by the murderous gangs, whipped up by Nazi propaganda and the pro-German Iraqi leadership.

The lethal attacks, rapes, killing, looting and desecration of synagogues affected the entire community. It is estimated that more than 2,000 Jews were wounded and the property of more than 50,000 Jews was looted or destroyed. The dead were later buried in mass graves – and the illusion of peaceful coexistence was buried with them. Although Jews had lived in this ancient Babylonia and Mesopotamia region for some 2,500 years, it counted for nothing when the Farhud broke out.

There were, of course, some righteous people among the general Muslim population, courageous people who risked their own lives to save their Jewish neighbors and friends. But they were a minority.

The campaign of terror came against the backdrop of the power vacuum between the collapse of the pro-Nazi government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, who had seized control from the Iraqi monarchy, and the return of British forces to Baghdad. The interim Iraqi prime minister was an ardent supporter of Hitler and introduced the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, to the Nazi leader. Nazi thinking fell on fertile ground. As always, the Jews paid the price….

In 1948 there were some 140,000 Jews in Algeria, 75,000 in Egypt, 150,000 in Iraq, 38,000 in Libya, 30,000 in Syria, 105,000 in Tunisia, 55,000 in Yemen and 100,000 in Iran. Today, some of those countries have no Jewish community at all; others have fewer than 10 Jews….

Adding these numbers gives us a figure of of 693,000 Jews, and all but a handful fled those lands., When we add to that number the 265,000 Moroccan Jews, who have been inexplicably left out in the paragraph just above, this bring the total number of Jews in Arab lands and Iran to 951,000 The Israelis claim that 850,000 Jews were expelled from Arab lands; the difference is explained by the 100,000 Iranian Jews, most of whom did not begin their mass exodus until 1978-79.

Jews are accused of “ethnic cleansing” or even of “genocide,” but the 1.4 million Arabs who in 1948 lived in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza have become 7 million — 2.1 million in Gaza, 3.2 million in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, and 1.7 million Israeli Arabs in Israel tell quite a different story. Genocide? What genocide? Jews fled the violence in Arab lands that was prompted by the 1948 war and the Arab defeat. But even before that mass exodus, Arabs had been attacking Jews. The best known of these pre-1948 pogroms was the Farhud.

The Knesset looks as if it will finally approve a Commemoration Day for the Farhud. It’s been a long time coming. Let the Farhud represent all those pogroms that took place in so many of the Arab lands, and remind us, too, of the the 850,000 Jews who fled. those lands after 1948. Let the details of this atrocity be made much better known around the world. And the next time the UN asks its members to observe “Nakba Day,” the Israeli ambassador, supported by the American, Canadian, British, Australian, and all the EU states’ ambassadors, should demand that a “Farhud Day” also be observed at the UN. Remember the Farhud!