David B. Shemano wrote:
> Is there any evidence that there are a meaningful number of
Jews and Arabs that have any desire to live as equal citizens
in a democratic secular state in which neither Jews nor Arabs
have a power majority? Where is the historical evidence that
such a state in the region could be successful?
Actually Jews lived amicably with Arabs before the state of Israel
got created (in fact they were Arab Jews and frequently spoke
Arabic). Here's an Iraqi Jew's take on the tragedy of the creation
of this state that led to the expulsion of the Palestinians as
well as the expulsion of Arab Jews from their homeland:
THE JEWS OF IRAQ
By Naeim Giladi
I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell
the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from
Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force
them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to
confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions
rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I
write about what the first prime minister of Israel called "cruel
Zionism." I write about it because I was part of it.
My Story
Of course I thought I knew it all back then. I was young,
idealistic, and more than willing to put my life at risk for my
convictions. It was 1947 and I wasn't quite 18 when the Iraqi
authorities caught me for smuggling young Iraqi Jews like myself
out of Iraq, into Iran, and then on to the Promised Land of the
soon-to-be established Israel.
I was an Iraqi Jew in the Zionist underground. My Iraqi jailers
did everything they could to extract the names of my
co-conspirators. Fifty years later, pain still throbs in my right
toe-a reminder of the day my captors used pliers to remove my
toenails. On another occasion, they hauled me to the flat roof of
the prison, stripped me bare on a frigid January day, then threw a
bucket of cold water over me. I was left there, chained to the
railing, for hours. But I never once considered giving them the
information they wanted. I was a true believer.
My preoccupation during what I refer to as my "two years in hell"
was with survival and escape. I had no interest then in the broad
sweep of Jewish history in Iraq even though my family had been
part of it right from the beginning. We were originally Haroons, a
large and important family of the "Babylonian Diaspora." My
ancestors had settled in Iraq more than 2,600 years ago-600 years
before Christianity, and 1,200 years before Islam. I am descended
from Jews who built the tomb of Yehezkel, a Jewish prophet of
pre-biblical times. My town, where I was born in 1929, is Hillah,
not far from the ancient site of Babylon.
The original Jews found Babylon, with its nourishing Tigris and
Euphrates rivers, to be truly a land of milk, honey, abundance-and
opportunity. Although Jews, like other minorities in what became
Iraq, experienced periods of oppression and discrimination
depending on the rulers of the period, their general trajectory
over two and one-half millennia was upward. Under the late Ottoman
rule, for example, Jewish social and religious institutions,
schools, and medical facilities flourished without outside
interference, and Jews were prominent in government and business.
full: http://www.bintjbeil.com/E/occupation/ameu_iraqjews.html
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