As early as the 1970s, Arab leaders realised that they could not demand a ‘right of return’ for their Arab compatriots when they had driven out almost a million Jews. Hence, in 1975, the Arab League promoted an appeal for Mizrahi Jews—particularly those in Israel—to return to their countries of birth. Iraq and Morocco were among the most vocal. Arab states could then no longer be accused of denying a ‘right of return’ to their ex-Jewish citizens.

Thirty years earlier, the Jewish population of the Arab world had been decimated: Jews fled pogroms and state-sanctioned persecution and dispossession. It was, by any measure, an unprecedented, yet largely unrecognised, ‘ethnic cleansing’.

By 1975, only a handful of Jews still remained in Libya from a community of 38,000. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi invited Libyan Jews to “come home” in 2004, and a small Jewish delegation subsequently visited Libya. Yet this was not the first time the Libyan leader had asked the Jews to return to the land of their birth. When he made a similar offer in 1975 (‘Are you not Arabs like us, Arab Jews?’), Albert Memmi, the Tunisian-born French writer and intellectual, scoffed:

“Yes, indeed we were Arab Jews – in our habits, in our culture, our music, our menu. But must one remain an Arab Jew if, in return, one has to tremble for one’s life and the future of one’s children and always be denied a normal existence? We would have liked to be Arab Jews. If we abandoned the idea, it is because over the centuries the Muslim Arabs systematically prevented its realization by their contempt and cruelty.”

Who in their right minds would return to countries which remained as hostile to Jews as on the day they were forced out?

In 1975 Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council issued a decree, confirmed by a US diplomatic report, permitting Iraqi Jews who had emigrated after 1948 to return to Baghdad and regain Iraqi citizenship rights.

One man who did respond was Mordechai Khabaza, an Iraqi Jew living in Israel.

As soon as Khabaza arrived from ‘the Zionist entity’, he immediately aroused the suspicions and anger of the few hundred Jews remaining in Iraq. They avoided contact with him, fearing that the authorities would accuse them of associating with a
Zionist. Zionism had been made a capital crime, and Jews were commonly
accused of fabricated spying charges.

According to one account, Khabaza encouraged Iraqi intelligence to seize all Torah scrolls from synagogues ‘except the handful needed for prayers.’ He helped the authorities amass a stash of Jewish documents, which, ironically, was later discovered by the Americans floating in the flooded basement of the secret police headquarters. It was shipped from Baghdad to Texas for restoration in 2003.

Nothing more was heard of Mordechai Khabaza. The community believed that Saddam had had him killed once he had outlived his usefulness.

Three members of the Nawi family also returned to Iraq from Israel. A husband and wife, active members of the Communist party in Petah Tikva, moved back to Baghdad with their son. Mrs. Nawi told reporters at Baghdad airport that now she had started breathing the Baghdad air, she felt she was back in. paradise. After a while, however, this family too disappeared without trace.

According to one story, the community received a coffin and instructions to
bury it in the Baghdad Jewish cemetery. Security agents accompanied the community to the cemetery, to ensure that the coffin was not opened. Some Jews immediately concluded that the coffin contained the bodies of the Nawi couple. Others believe that the coffin was that of Mordechai Khabaza.

A trickle of Jews returned to Morocco, but the Arab leaders’ call to Jews to exercise their ‘right of return’ has been a failure. The only way forward to peace and reconciliation is if they recognise that an exchange of refugees between Mizrahi Jews and Palestinian Arabs had taken place. The clock could not be turned back: neither group is destined to return.

But UNRWA, which maintains the Palestinian refugee problem in perpetuity, still gives Palestinians the vain hope that they are going back. While Jews have long ago ceased to be refugees, the dismantling of UNRWA, as Wilf and Schwartz claim, has got to be the only answer.

• Jewish Refugees

A mention used to be as rare as a snowball in summer, but whenever an article in the mainstream media deals with Palestinian refugees or ‘ethnic cleansing’, someone, somewhere will drop into the conversation that almost a million Jews were forced to flee their homes in the Arab world in the 20th century.

Hen Mazzig: his grandmothers fled Iraq and Tunisia

The last few years have witnessed a burst of social media advocacy, with influencers like Abraham Hamra, Hen Mazzig and the Traveling Clatt emphasising their Mizrahi origins, or Gad Saad speaking with the authority of a Jew chased out of Lebanon.

What is new, however, is that an Ashkenazi public intellectual like Dr Einat Wilf will explain the Arab world’s rejection of the state of Israel in terms of the centuries-old refusal to countenance that a lowly and weak dhimmi people, routinely humiliated and banished from the public space, might ever enjoy sovereignty - or worse still, exercise power over Arabs. ‘Winter is coming’, she writes, as antisemitic antizionism causes Jewish life in the west to enter a new Ice Age. The need for Jews from Yemen, Egypt and Iraq, among others, to tell their stories is greater than ever.

For those of us who have toiled in obscurity for decades to raise awareness of the Jewish refugee plight, it is heartening that the commentator Haviv Rettig Gur, who has 128,000 followers on Instagram, is also viewing current politics through the lens of Jewish history in the Middle East. When asked by a viewer why Gazan refugees can’t return to Ashkelon, ‘Jews can’t return to Baghdad, Jews can’t go back to Sana’a (Yemen),” is his riposte.

“You want a single state (in place of Israel) without a liberal ethos,’ Gur addresses misguided liberals,”that sidesteps an ideology that emptied the Arab world of its Jews.”

More often than not such talking points will be met with outright denial: One favourite canard is that the Jews would not have had to leave Arab countries had Israel not been created, thus dismissing ample evidence of pre-existing antisemitism, such as the Mawsa exile of Yemenite Jews or the Farhud massacre in Iraq. Clips of the avuncuar professor Avi Shlaim have been infesting social media blaming Israel for ’false flag’ bombings which supposedly caused Iraqi Jews to leave. This assertion flies in the face of weighty evidence of the state-sanctioned persecution of Jews, their criminalisation as Zionists and dispossession on a grand scale.

I dare to hope that more and more defenders of Israel and Jews will set their arguments in the context of the Jewish ‘nakba’. More Jews were made refugees from the Arab world than Palestinians from Israel, and they offer a model for how to solve the problem once and for all - permanent resettlement in Arab states or a separate state of Palestine.

“There should be no doubt that it is antisemitic to direct anger about Israel’s actions towards Jews in Britain,” she opines. Yet it does”’help to explain the context …and this cannot be left unspoken.”

Ah… the context! The Jews mustn’t be blamed for ‘the enormity of Israel’s war on Gaza,’ she writes. She recognises that it is ‘antisemitic to direct anger about Israel’s actions towards Jews in Britain. Yet she goes on to quote journalists like Thomas Friedman who are happy to link Israel and Jews.

Rachel Shabi

She adds: “We are in need of a common language that can bridge these two truths without suggesting that Jewish people are in any way to blame.”

But blaming the Jews is just what pro-Palestinians are doing. People would not dream of attacking Chinatown for what Xi is doing to the Uighurs. Or blaming Russians in the West for their brutal war on Ukraine.

For Shabi, the rush to ban Gaza marches is to politicise antisemitism, to shut down free speech or to ‘manipulate fears for political ends’. “It impugns the motivations of the many on the basis of the reprehensible placards of a tiny few,” she claims.

Last time I looked, chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ was not a minority position.

It never occurs to Shabi that it is the Palestinian cause which politicises everything relating to Jews so that everything Jewish becomes controversial and fair game for attack. Boycotts and no-platforming of Jews are its stock-in-trade. It is ultimately an antisemitic cause.

Shabi’s argument is a variant of the Livingston formulation - the idea that people describe as antisemitism perfectly justifiable criticisms of Israel in order to suppress them.

But firebombings, stabbings of Jewish people and arson of Jewish sites constitute real antisemitism by self-declared anti-Zionists. No verbal acrobatics can explain them away as malign attempts to shut down free speech.

He returned to Australia.

And then Bondi Beach happened. Two gunmen mowed down a peaceful group celebrating the Jewish festival of Hanucah. Fifteen people were murdered.

A sea of flowers on Bondi Beach after the Hanucah massacre

Out of the blue, we received a message from Brian. ’ I now understand that Israel is not to blame. I sincerely apologise.’

We don’t know how many Australians, like Brian, had their eyes opened to the fact that Israel was not alone in facing murderous, antisemitic, jihadist terrorism. Not enough, it seems: witnesses who made submissions to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, set up by the government, have been subject to vicious abuse and harassment.

More than 14,000 submissions have been made to the Commission. As of yesterday, my organisation Harif, the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, made it one more. We were asked to contribute a Mizrahi (eastern) perspective to the debate. Jews who were born in the Middle East and North Africa were reliving their experience of Arab/ Muslim antisemitism, intimidation and harassment.

Too many people are ignorant of the fact that our enemies have always conflated Zionists and Jews. Antizionists claim that they are against Zionists not Jews, but Mizrahim remember that Jews in Arab countries were arrested, tried and even executed on spurious charges of spying for Israel. Many people in the West are not aware that almost a million Jews were driven out of Arab countries with nothing more than a suitcase. They don’t know that ancient, pre-Islamic Jewish communities suffered massacres in the 20th century just like the one on Bondi Beach. They don’t know that mobs screaming Itbach al-Yahud (Slaughter the Jews!) regularly came down the street. They don’t know that political movements which they think are new, were founded in the Nazi era. They did not know that the Muslim Brotherhood (Gaza branch: Hamas) was bombing the Cairo Jewish quarter in 1948. They don’t know that Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem laid the groundwork for exterminationist antisemitism almost 100 years ago.

Mizrahi Jews have seen it all before. Will the Commission take note? Not likely, but at least we tried.

It was presented to community leader Sir Moses Montefiore by the British Board of Deputies, representing all the congregations of the British empire, including those founded by Sephardi exiles in Barbados and Jamaica.

The centerpiece was a tribute to Sir Moses in recognition of his role in resolving the Damascus Affair of 1840. Sir Moses had travelled to see the Ottoman sultan, together with his French counterpart, Adolphe Crémieux, in order to plead for the release of Jewish notables falsely accused of a blood libel.

Enter Gloria Daniel, a Black Lives Matter activist whose great-great-great grandfather was a Caribbean slave. An artist who has exposed the identities of UK slave-owners, Ms Daniel seized on the centerpiece’s label mentioning Jamaica and Barbados. She jumped to the conclusion that Montefiore’s ‘monstrous trophy’ had been funded ‘in part by subscriptions from the proceeds of enslaved African people.’

Her evidence? Montefiore had helped secure a loan of £15 million to finance the compensation of slave-owners under the Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833.

The V&A told Ms Daniel that it ‘recognised the inherent tension and, following your intervention, shares your feeling that this needs to be rectified.’ The centrepiece would duly be re-labelled.

The innuendo that Montefiore, while not a slave-owner himself, may have profited from slavery is part of a smear campaign started in the 1990s by the Nation of Islam: they spread the libel that Jews had been willing participants in slavery and even dominated the Transatlantic slave trade.

Ms Daniel failed to consider that Montefiore was a genuine human rights campaigner and a prominent abolitionist. The loan that he, together with his brother-in-law Nathan Rothschild, had helped raise, would have facilitated the application of the law abolishing slavery. According to Jewish historians Abigail Green and Michael Friedlander, ‘it was a business deemed so unprofitable that no one else was willing to take it.’

Furthermore, the centrepiece was completed some ten years after the loan was made.

Although individual Sephardi Jews might have owned slaves, their involvement, according to these historians, was limited and indirect. The total cost of the centrepiece was £900, but individual contributions from outside London, say the historians, were capped at five guineas.

No more than 11 investors in the Dutch East India Conpany were Jewish, a tiny fraction of the 17th century Amsterdam community. Moreover, Jews, who generally did not enjoy equal rights in the 19th century, were vocal critics of the slave trade.

The UK Sephardi community remonstrated with the V&A and called in both historians to object to proposed changes to the labelling of the Montefiore centerpiece. In the end, all parties settled on a compromise, inserting ‘former plantation economies’ after Barbados and Jamaica.

The final caption ends up taking twice as much space as the original, as it was thought necessary to set out the Jewish context. To their satisfaction with the outcome, the historians have now gone public on the controversy surrounding the centrepiece.

This episode is symptomatic of cultural bias in the arts which magnifies the Jewish role in activities now deemed to be ‘evil’ or unacceptable. At the same time, museums have been co-opted in a campaign to ignore the Jewish contribution to creativity, or Jewish links to the Middle East - as we have seen in recent efforts to shut down a British Museum lecture on Ancient Israel and Judea.

The centerpiece example calls for vigilance, and vigorous pushback, wherever we see history being rewritten to serve an agenda.

A guided tour, “Montefiore to Mentmore, Silver to Scandal: The V&A with a Jewish Twist” will take place on 11 June as part of Jewish Culture Month.

One of the four holy cities of Judaism - together with Jerusalem, Tiberias and Hebron - Safed was settled in the 15th and 16th centuries by refugees from the Spanish Inquisition. Rabbis Luria, Caro, Elkabetz and Cordovero helped make it a leading kabbalistic and spiritual centre. In later centuries, the Sephardi Jews were joined by ultra-orthodox Ashkenazim. Today the city boasts at least 15 synagogues.

Safed’s artists’ quarter

But the silence of picture-postcard Safed is deceptive, and conceals a violent history. The Arabs of Safed are known for their extremism and cruelty towards Jews. Already in 1834, Safed’s Jews suffered a pogrom. The godfather of the 1970s Palestinian hijackings was the (Christian) terrorist Wadie Haddad, whose Safed house still stands.

The Hebron massacre is the most notorious of the 1929 Palestine riots. But Safed was not spared. Arab rioters rampaged through the Jewish quarter with axes and knives. Although honourable Arabs saved Jews, the marauders burnt bodies, broke into an orphanage and cut off the arms and legs of children. Some 20 Jews were slaughtered and 80 were injured.

Less than two decades later, the strategically important city dominating eastern |Galilee was the scene of a fierce battle, as evidenced by the police station, still today pockmarked with bullet holes. Hostilities broke out in April 1948 between Arabs and Jews even before the British mandate for Palestine had ended. The Jews, numbering 1,200, faced 12,000 Arabs - both Muslims and Christians. The Jews were hopelessly outnumbered and the British authorites advised them to evacuate their women and children. But the British could not guarantee the Jews’ safety. The Jews decided to stay put.

They turned their balconies into concrete defensive walls. Some 200 Haganah and Palmach men and women drove back an Arab attack. They lost 42 fighters. The Jews only had one home-made mortar known as the Davidka. These guns - the Palmach had six - were not very effective, but made a huge noise. As a storm raged, the Arabs panicked. They imagined that the Jews had a secret weapon - possibly even an atomic bomb.

Incredibly, 12,000 Arabs fled, never to return. Among them were the families of Mahmoud Abbas, the present leader of the Palestinian Authority, and of Queen Rania, the spouse of King Abdullah of Jordan.

Literally overnight, the Arab neighbourhoods turned into a ghost town. The Jewish inhabitants went wild with joy. To this day, the residents of Safed still talk of the miracle of the Davidka.

Obviously there are no simple answers, but we need to point out certain deficiencies in the main vehicle for educating about antisemitism - Holocaust education.

The first is that Holocaust education is Eurocentric. It does not teach that the Holocaust would have reached beyond the confines of Europe had the Nazis not been defeated in North Africa. The numbers of Middle Eastern and North African Jews who died during WWII may have been a fraction of those who were murdered in Europe, but the impact of Nazi-inspired ideology on the Arab and Muslim world, and the present-day consequences of it, have been huge and are expressed today in the Hamas charter and the genocidal objectives of Islamic State.

The main engine of lingering Nazi ideology has been Islamism, which has declared a jihad against the Jews since the Nazi era, when Islamism was born in Egypt. Islamism is in cahoots with Palestinianism, patented by the Nazi collaborator, the Palestinian mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, which I define as genocidal eliminationism. It was the Mufti who promoted genocidal eliminationism (‘Kill the Jews, wherever you find them!’ ) against the Jews through his wartime Radio Berlin propaganda broadcasts. In the words of the German scholar Matthias Kuntzel, the Nazi war against the Jews became the Arab war against Israel.

The Mufti of Jerusalem meeting Adolph Hitler in November 1941

Since 1979, genocidal antisemitism has become the official ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It makes no secret of its wish to wipe out Israel, finance antizionism in the West and plan terrorist attacks against Jews. Ties have long existed between the Ayatollahs and the Muslim Brotherhood.

It is obvious that the Mufti, Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood are not the only sources of antisemitism. We are living with the consequences of a concerted campaign of antizionism initiated by the Soviet Union in the 1950s. This played its part in influencing progressive thought by inverting the truth, denying or minimising the Shoah and demonising Israelis as Nazis. Coupled with Edward Said’s anti-orientalism, post-colonial guilt misapplied to Israel as a European settler state, a social justice movement dividing the world into powerful white oppressors ranged against oppressed people of colour (with the Israelis absurdly placed on the side of the powerful whites), antisemitism is today a toxic brew coming from the far-left, the far-right and Islamism.

The main challenge facing Jews today is antisemitic antizionism. The destruction of the Jewish state as we know it has become a moral imperative, because supporters of the Palestinian cause see Israel as essentially evil, just as the Nazis, just as the Muslim Brotherhood, saw Jews as essentially evil. If Holocaust education were to teach that antizionism is antisemitic, more people might then understand Israel’s existential need to defend itself.

This article is based on my online conversation with Holocaust educator Trudy Gold of Lockdown University.

Despite his protests that part of his family is of Moroccan origin, Agmon is but the latest example of an Ashkenazi using insulting language to express contempt for Israel’s Mizrahim, who now make up more than half the country’s Jews. The writer Alona Kimhi called them bloody Neanderthals. The academic Amir Hetsroni, known for his provocative statements, told the Israeli TV host Amira Buzaglo that her parents should have stayed to rot in Morocco.

The Ashkenazi academic Amir Hetsroni is known for his provocative statements

The culprits are mostly Ashkenazi liberals or leftists. (As a Likudnik Agmon is an exception.) The young liberals have been moving to Berlin, now that their ‘Beautiful Israel’ has been ruined by Middle Eastern and North African Jews. The sons of the secular elite Labour founders of the state may harbour resentment of the politically conservative, staunchly patriotic and religious Mizrahim. This attitude goes back to the 1977 Ma’apach, when the right under Menahem Begin, backed by the great mass of Mizrahi voters, won power. Likud, mostly under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, has since proved impossible to dislodge.

The French journalist Daniel Bensoussan-Bursztein has made the intellectual cleavage in the Jewish world the subject of an incisive and detailed new book. He is the author of ‘La Question Séfarade’. (This is also the title of a 1979 essay by Jean-Paul Sartre on the ‘Second Israel.’)

Bensoussan-Bursztein is the son of the Moroccan-born historian Georges Bensoussan. He has also studied Yiddish, the language spoken by his maternal grandparents.

The ‘wars of politics and culture’ between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim is a topic I touch on in my own book, Uprooted, and monitor at the Point of No Return blog under the label ‘Leftist bias against Jewish rights’. But Bensoussan-Bursztein is not afraid to plumb greater depths in these murky waters.

He brings a welcome French perspective to the debate. France has the only majority-Sephardi community in the diaspora: its Ashkenazi intellectuals, many with a Bundist or Marxist background, tend to deride the vast mass of French Jews of North African origin as ‘noble savages’ - observant, loud and proud Zionists, vulgar nouveau-riches from the Sentier, the Paris garment district. You can spot the Tsarforkim (an amalgam of ‘Tsafatim’ and ‘Marokka’im’ ) a mile away on Tel Aviv’s beaches.

With trademark meticulousness, Bensoussan-Bursztein identifies a number of misapprehensions colouring the post-colonial Ashkenazi viewpoint: chiefly among them is the view that the rift between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East and North Africa developed in the colonial era. This distortion projects a myth of pre-colonial interfaith harmony, erases centuries of minority repression under Islam, and puts on a par Arabs as victims of European colonialism and Jews as victims of the European Holocaust (‘A Jew is an Arab in Poland.’)

Jews who lived in Arab countries are portrayed as complicit with European colonialism: as far as the Arabs are concerned, they are traitors. The Algerian Jews, who held French citizenship, are the most striking example of betrayal. Almost all were ‘repatriated’ to France when Algeria gained its independence in 1962, along with the pieds-noirs colonials.

For the Jews themselves, however, the colonial era represented a liberation from institutionalised inferiority as dhimmis under Islam : the colonial period was the only time when they enjoyed opportunity, equal rights and a modicum of security. Yet liberals distort the pre-colonial dhimmi status to make it appear that subjugated Jews were party to a social contract or enjoyed citizens’ rights. The US scholar Ethan Katz, author of ‘The Burdens of Brotherhood,’ goes so far as to proclaim the Jews in Arab countries were ‘Islamised Jews’ and the Arabs ‘Judeified Arabs’.

In contrast, the Moroccan Muslim historian Ali Lmrabet remarks that the Arabs and Jews were never brothers, and Jews with Middle Eastern roots report that the dominant feeling towards Arabs was fear. The author quotes a saying popular among Jews: ‘you cannot trust an Arab even if he has been six feet under for 40 years’.

A debate rages about Jewish identity: at one extreme, Shlomo Sand, a cranky Israeli academic, whose writing is popular in France, denies that Jews are a people: they are either Khazar converts or Arabs. Indeed, the only Mizrahi Jews approved by the far left are those who identify as ‘Arab Jews’ - supposedly torn away from their Muslim brethren by the evil Zionists. This is a concept promoted by the post-colonial academics Ella Shohat and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay.

In reality, only a tiny minority of Sephardim self-define as ‘Arab Jews’. An alternative, proudly Zionist, Mizrahi role model is represented by the minister of Moroccan origin Miri Regev, or the Egyptian-born spy hero Elie Cohen.

The romanticisation of Arab-Jewish relations on the left goes hand in-hand with a whitewashing of Arab antisemitism. Pogroms are downplayed and become ‘incidents’ in North African history. Some claim that Mizrahim showcase their victimhood out of jealousy for the Holocaust’s European victims. ‘The Arab world never had an Auschwitz’, they say.

Liberal intellectuals berate French Jews for supporting the ‘Islamophobic’ rightwing politician of Algerian-Jewish origin, Eric Zemmour, who stood as a presidential candidate in 2022. They claim that the Sephardim are in an unsavoury alliance with the far right. (Israel has also invited criticism for reaching out to rightwing European nationalists.) Yet, as Bensoussan-Bursztein rightly points out, 14 Jews were murdered between 2003 and 2023, none by the far right.

Today, Israel and France’s Jewish community are mostly composed of refugees from Arab and Muslim antisemitism whose communities have disappeared, yet the memory of their mass exodus is being rewritten. Foremost among the revisionists is the US-based academic and historian of Iranian Jewry Elior Sternfeld. According to Bensoussan-Bursztein, Sternfeld believes that the Israeli government is exaggerating the dhimmi history of Mizrahi Jews in order to push forward an islamophobic agenda.

Denial and distortion of Muslim antisemitism are not such an issue in Israel, where most Israelis have at least one Mizrahi grandparent. But in the US, where a third of (Ashkenazi) young Jews are thought to have distanced themselves from Israel, ignorance of the true facts could have serious consequences for the Jewish future. Bensoussan-Bursztein’s book is thus a welcome counterpoint to a disturbing trend. It should be translated into English.

Today is Easter Sunday, when the Christian world’s religious and political leaders deliver uplifting messages.

Pope Leo XIV called on “those who have the power to unleash wars” to choose peace.“ “Let us abandon every desire for conflict, domination and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars,” he said. Uppermost in his mind was the current war being waged by Israel and the US against Iran.

All very lofty sentiments, but the pontiff’s words show moral equivocation. There is no equivalence between western democracies fighting a just war on the one hand, and a fanatical regime ideologically committed to exporting global terrorism and violence on the other. The Islamic Republic is a regime hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons which it will not be afraid to use, even at the cost of the lives of its own citizens.

The casus belli here is not so much ‘imminent threat’ as ‘unacceptable risk.’ Whatever one may think of Donald Trump - and there is plenty about him to criticise - he should be credited for taking decisive action to stop Iran’s race to becoming the next North Korea. The best case scenario is ‘regime change’ but failing that, the war would leave Iran’s missiles and infrastructure so extensively degraded that they would take years to rebuild.

The craven Europeans still believe that ‘this is not our war,’ although the Iranians have demonstrated that their ballistic missiles could reach Rome and London. Europe has not learned the lessons of the 1930s - that appeasement never works.

In Churchill’s famous words, "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last." Not only does it fail to recognise the seriousness of the Iranian threat, but the West suffers from a dangerous tendency to underestimate the power of ideology.

The Islamic Republic has turned down several chances to do a deal. Platitudes about ending wars and ‘choosing peace’ are not helpful.

Iraq’s behaviour was the most egregious of the Arab countries: it executed or “disappeared” more Jews than any other. However, all the members of the Arab League –Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and, later on, the Maghreb countries – persecuted their Jewish citizens and most stole their property. The most moderate in its approach has been Morocco, yet even this nation turned on its Jews when it joined the Arab League in the 1960s. Only 1 per cent of the Jewish population of some 250,000 in 1948 now remains, and the community dwindles year by year.

Communities that had tens or hundreds of thousands of Jews are, to all intents and purposes, extinct. At the time of writing, Syria has six Jews and Yemen four (including a man jailed on trumped-­ up smuggling charges); Libya and Algeria, zero.

There were almost a million Jews living in Arab countries in 1948; there are only 4000 today.

According to the writer Nathan Weinstock, this displacement of 99 per cent of the Jewish population is unprecedented. (Two-­ thirds of the Jews in Tsarist Russia had continued to live there, despite horrific pogroms, and a third of German Jews had not left their country on the eve of World War II.) The displacement of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) could be designated ethnic cleansing, a term now perversely applied to Israel’s behaviour.

The self-­ described pragmatist Ahmed al-­ Khalidi is one of the few to swim against the tide of denial: “As a Palestinian who refuses to parrot our leadership’s lies, I have to say it bluntly. Telling Mizrahi Jews – Jews from Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Syria and the rest of the Arab world – that they are doing ethnic cleansing to us is the gaslight of the century.”

Yet for all the attention that conflict in the Middle East attracts, for all the arguments and the passions it generates, the casting out of almost a million Jews from what is today the Arab world barely registers.

The above is an extract from Cast out, an essay by Lyn Julius published by the Jewish Quarterly on 26 March 2026. Order your copy now!

The Heart and Soul podcast has BBC reporter Mike Lanchin interviewing the founders and directors of the village. But instead of asking searching questions about the future of the ‘peace movement’ in the wake of the murder of one of its prime activists in her Gaza border kibbutz, Vivian Silver, Lanchin is content to indulge in fallacies and kumbaya generalities.

The first fallacy is that the village brings Israelis and Palestinians together. It does not. It brings together Jewish and Arab Israelis within the Green line.

The second fallacy is that Neve Shalom is somehow unique in Israel. The state has mixed cities where Jews and Arabs mingle daily - Jaffa, Haifa, Ramle, Beersheva, Lod and Jerusalem. (Granted, Neve Shalom has a school with matching numbers of Jewish and Arab children, and a ‘conflict resolution’ centre.)

True to form the podcast distorts the context to minimise the tragedy of 7 October for all Israelis. The Hamas attacks killed 1,200 ‘people.’ These ‘people’ were overwhelmingly Jews, but also Bedouin Arabs and others. The Hamas casualty figures of 70,000 are attributed to ‘the territory’s health ministry’ - no mention of Hamas there.

We are never introduced to the almost invisible culprit disrupting the interfaith nirvana: Jew-hating Islamist terrorism.

The programme just won’t name the perpetrators. The village ‘took a hit’. ‘Violence engulfs’. ‘ Both sides lost trust in each other’. We are told about the Arab Nakba - the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who left Israel. No mention of the greater number of Jewish refugees forced out of Arab countries.

The 7 October attacks are described as ‘signficant’. But the real story is that they have proved a wake-up call to non-Jewish Israelis. More and more Arab Christians and Bedouins have signed up to the IDF. That would have been a much more interesting story, but it does not fit the BBC’s agenda.

Instead of exploring this phenomenon, the programme makes obligatory army service by Jews sound controversial. Adam Ben-Shabbat, a Jewish resident of the village, was called up to the IDF reserves soon after 7 October. For his Arab friend Ramez, who is half-Christian and half-Muslim, this was a betrayal. Since 7 October, he said, “it is very hard to make compromises, hard not to stick with your own.” Translation: the atrocity entrenched hardline attitudes among the Arab villagers who failed to reach out to their Jewish co-residents. Many disappeared from the village. No wonder, if they found no empathy among their Arab neighbours.

All the aggression described by the programme seems to come from the Israeli side: fifty Palestinians were killed at the Gaza border in 2018 (no mention that Hamas was continually provoking the Israelis, and most of the deaths were Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists). Ramez complains of racist jibes he received at a Jewish school he attended. People did not want to rent to him in Tel Aviv. Nevertheless he was admitted to a Jewish school. Despite the racism, Ramez now manages to live in Tel Aviv (find me a Jew who lives in Ramallah).

The Neve Shalom directors are determined to carry on their work but many an interfaith project has unraveled after failing the 7 October test. Jews have found no empathy in interlocutors who have subsequently climbed on to the ‘Gaza genocide’ bandwagon.

Trapped in its perennial ‘both sides-ism’ the BBC tiptoes around the underlying asymmetry : Arabs want to kill Jews. Or at best, refuse to recognise their right to a state. The Jews are always the side expected to compromise. How do you compromise with people who want you subjugated or dead?

Last month a Paris court threw out the case, saying it had no jurisdiction. The family ought to be suing Iraq in an Iraqi court, it argued.

‘The idea is preposterous!’ was Philip Khazzam’s’ response, while his lawyer, Jean-Pierre Mignard, exclaimed that the family would be turning up in Baghdad in bullet-proof vests.

Iraq is no place for Jews - there are today five or fewer out of an original community of 150,000. They have been persecuted out of existence and stripped by law of their citizenship if they left the country. Their property was ‘frozen’ after the Iraqi parliament passed a law in 1951 stating that all those who renounced their Iraqi citizenship no longer had a right to their property.

But the Lawees, who had left Iraq for Canada, had retained their Iraqi citizenship into the 1960s. They began renting the building out to France in 1964. In 1969 the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein decreed that a portion of the rent should be paid in dinars to the Iraqi state. In 1971, citing a legal amendment stating that the family were no longer citizens, the regime decided that the owners were not entitled to the balance of the rent.

While France, the traditional home of human rights, has affirmed the rights of Jews whose possessions were stolen by the Nazis, the court’s judgment comes as a blow to the family. However, the verdict is a victory of sorts, as the court had for the first time admitted that Iraq ‘s laws were discriminatory.

Similar Nuremberg-style laws had been passed by almost every Arab state against their Jewish citizens. No lawyer has wanted to handle any case for compensation. There is only one case where a Jewish family managed to obtain restitution: the Cecil Hotel in Alexandria.

The time is long past for Jews who lived in Arab countries, who lost some $263 billion worth of property and assets, to obtain justice. But too many states are in denial about the mistreatment of their Jewish citizens. To recognise the wrong done to them is a start.

For their part, the Lawees have declared that they are not giving up the fight.

The wartime Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, meeting Hitler in November 1941

This year, on Holocaust Memorial Day, educators are wringing their hands in despair. Eighty years of Holocaust education have failed, they lament, as antisemitism skyrockets. The numbers of UK schools observing HMD has plummeted, while a minority insist on also commemorating the Gaza ‘genocide’.

How has it come to this?

The problem with Holocaust education is that it is stubbornly Eurocentric. It is necessary to understand the connection, often erased for reasons of political correctness, between the Nazis, their Arab sympathizers and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the 1930s, Arabs were active collaborators with the Nazis. The Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al Husseini, played a leading role in inciting the genocide of Jews. Despite strenuous efforts to downplay it, his legacy of Nazi-inspired antisemitism inspires the Palestinian cause today.

The Mufti helped stage a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq in 1941 and incited the anti-Jewish massacre known as the Farhud, making no secret of his wish to exterminate the Jews in his sphere of influence. As Hitler’s guest in Berlin, the Mufti obtained Hitler’s blessing to manage the destruction of MENA Jews, raised SS units of Muslim troops and broadcast poisonous anti-Jewish propaganda. For reasons of realpolitik, he was never tried at Nuremberg for war crimes, though he could have been.

The Mufti was, according to the scholar Matthias Kuentzel, the lynchpin of the Nazis’ great war against the Jews and the Arabs’ small war against Israel. Nazis fought alongside Arabs in the 1948 war and Nazis became military advisers to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. Nasser used Israel as an external threat in order to unite the Arabs into a single political entity.

The moral architecture of Palestinianism was erected to dehumanise and delegitimise Zionists. This was the work of the Soviet Union’s Zionologists in the 1950s. Inversion was the name of the game: Israelis were the new Nazis intent on genocide. (In reality, most Arab states and the Palestinian leadership never abandoned their objective of wiping out Israel, physically or demographically. ) Ethnic cleansing was what the Israelis had done to the Palestinian refugees. (In reality, it is what Arab governments had done to their Jewish citizens, driving out 99 percent.) Apartheid was supposedly practised by the Jewish state. (In reality, it is how Islamic law treats its women, its subjugated Jews and minorities).

Also in the 1950s, through the writings of the ideologue Sayyid Qutb, Islamized antisemitism, influenced by European ideas of Jewish conspiracy and control, became entrenched in the Muslim Brotherhood’s philosophy. Palestine is the central focus of their campaign to rebuild the caliphate. Hamas is none other than the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Its ideology has been to spearhead the destruction of Israel through terrorism. Its aim has always been genocidal – a never-ending series of October 7 massacres.

The only books translated from Arabic by the Islamic Republic of Iran were by Sayyid Qutb. The Ayatollahs do not attempt to conceal their ultimate aim: to perpetrate a second Holocaust while denying the first.

Because of a lack of western understanding of antisemitism in the Muslim world, Arabs are misleadingly portrayed as “innocent bystanders” to the Holocaust who “paid the price” for a European problem through the creation of Israel. In fact, many were sympathisers and collaborators with Nazism.

Israel was the solution, not the cause of antisemitism in the Middle East and North Africa. But Israel is barely mentioned by Holocaust educators.

Holocaust education needs to teach about the direct link between Nazism and the genocidal ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its offshoots like Islamic State and Hamas.

Lessons cannot be learned if the Holocaust is viewed in a vacuum, divorced from its impact on politics today.

Jews and Kurds at a meeting organised by the Jewish-Kurdish network in a UK parliamentary committee room on 19 January 2026

The young man stood at the back of a parliamentary committee room and tearfully pleaded for Israel to save his family. They were in Rojava, the Kurdish enclave in north-eastern Syria. Reports were filtering out of abductions and massacres as Syrian regime forces swept across the Kurdish-held territory. Islamic State prisoners had been released from jail and there was no knowing what destruction they would inflict.

The occasion at the UK parliament was an event attended by Jews and Kurds to focus on cooperation between these two Middle Eastern non-Arab minorities. Both peoples are indigenous, predating by several centuries the Arab conquest which had converted the Kurds to Islam and subjugated the Jews as dhimmis. Both peoples have clung on to their language and culture through thick and thin.

At the end of WWI, there were high hopes, with the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire, that Assyrians and Kurds would enjoy an autonomous enclave, if not a homeland of their own. But only the 1917 Balfour Declaration, with its commitment for a home for the Jews, was endorsed at the 1920 San Remo conference and written into the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.

A century later 30 million Kurds are still spread across four nations - Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. After 2003 and the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi Kurdistan came closest to achieving autonomy, but has to fend off pressure from Tehran and Baghdad. The Jewish state has been embattled since the day it was declared.

In the 1960s Israel sent advisers and weapons to the Kurds in Iraq. In return, the Kurds helped smuggle 2,000 desperate Jews out of the country.

Both Kurds and Jews have faced persecution, displacement, genocide and the jihadist exterminationist threat. In 2014, when ISIS was on the rampage in northern Iraq Jews stood with Kurds and Yazidis. Since the 7 October attacks on southern Israel, Kurds have joined Jews to demonstrate their solidarity.

The dominant narrative in the West assumes that only Arabs are entitled to political rights, while the Kurdish demand for self-determination is ignored. Zionism - Jewish self-determination - is demonised. But as this latest display of solidarity in a parliamentary committee room showed, Jews stand with Kurds and Kurds stand with Jews. May they turn solidarity into political action.

Detail from the Shah Abbas mosque in Isfahan

At Persepolis outside Shiraz, we saw the luxury tents erected for the 2,500 year anniversary of the Persian empire, now looking a little frayed. Trees had been planted and song birds imported for the celebrations. The Shah had spent some $20 million on the festivities. Six hundred guests including heads of state had dined on English porcelain at a lavish banquet prepared by Maxim’s.

Even during my short visit the economic chasm in Persian society was apparent. The great mass of poor Iranians with their chador-clad women contrasted with the urban, western middle class, siloed in their colonial-style clubs. Jews were then living the good life, eating Caspian caviar at their parties which never started before 11 pm.

It is easy with the luxury of hindsight to say that Iran was a powder keg waiting to explode under the weight of its contradictions. The 1979 revolution caused the flight and dispossession of much of the middle class, but years beforehand, there were discreet portents of the trouble to come. My aunt’s regular fruit vendor told her in 1977: “you have been buying fruit from me for 20 years; you are a Jew; mark my words, this country is not for you; pick up your family and leave”.

When the 1979 revolution broke out, my uncle sent my aunt and cousins away to New York. Five years would pass until they were re-united. Meanwhile, back in Iran, their cook’s two sons joined the religious police or komiteh, holding my uncle at gunpoint and blackmailing him. They asked for a large sum of money or they would turn him into the authorities as a Zionist spy. My uncle paid up.

It is too early to say whether the protests now sweeping in Iran will result in the fall of the brutal Islamic regime. There are too many imponderables. Are we on the cusp of a new era? We are all watching with baited breath.

It was presented to community leader Sir Moses Montefiore by the British Board of Deputies, representing all the congregations of the British empire, including those founded by Sephardi exiles in Barbados and Jamaica.

The centerpiece was a tribute to Sir Moses in recognition of his role in resolving the Damascus Affair of 1840. Sir Moses had travelled to see the Ottoman sultan, together with his French counterpart, Adolphe Crémieux, in order to plead for the release of Jewish notables falsely accused of a blood libel.

Enter Gloria Daniel, a Black Lives Matter activist whose great-great-great grandfather was a Caribbean slave. An artist who has exposed the identities of UK slave-owners, Ms Daniel seized on the centerpiece’s label mentioning Jamaica and Barbados. She jumped to the conclusion that Montefiore’s ‘monstrous trophy’ had been funded ‘in part by subscriptions from the proceeds of enslaved African people.’

Her evidence? Montefiore had helped secure a loan of £15 million to finance the compensation of slave-owners under the Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833.

The V&A told Ms Daniel that it ‘recognised the inherent tension and, following your intervention, shares your feeling that this needs to be rectified.’ The centrepiece would duly be re-labelled.

The innuendo that Montefiore, while not a slave-owner himself, may have profited from slavery is part of a smear campaign started in the 1990s by the Nation of Islam: they spread the libel that Jews had been willing participants in slavery and even dominated the Transatlantic slave trade.

Ms Daniel failed to consider that Montefiore was a genuine human rights campaigner and a prominent abolitionist. The loan that he, together with his brother-in-law Nathan Rothschild, had helped raise, would have facilitated the application of the law abolishing slavery. According to Jewish historians Abigail Green and Michael Friedlander, ‘it was a business deemed so unprofitable that no one else was willing to take it.’

Furthermore, the centrepiece was completed some ten years after the loan was made.

Although individual Sephardi Jews might have owned slaves, their involvement, according to these historians, was limited and indirect. The total cost of the centrepiece was £900, but individual contributions from outside London, say the historians, were capped at five guineas.

No more than 11 investors in the Dutch East India Conpany were Jewish, a tiny fraction of the 17th century Amsterdam community. Moreover, Jews, who generally did not enjoy equal rights in the 19th century, were vocal critics of the slave trade.

The UK Sephardi community remonstrated with the V&A and called in both historians to object to proposed changes to the labelling of the Montefiore centerpiece. In the end, all parties settled on a compromise, inserting ‘former plantation economies’ after Barbados and Jamaica.

The final caption ends up taking twice as much space as the original, as it was thought necessary to set out the Jewish context. Satisfied with the outcome, the historians have now gone public on the controversy surrounding the centrepiece.

This episode is symptomatic of cultural bias in the arts which magnifies the Jewish role in activities now deemed to be ‘evil’ or unacceptable. At the same time, museums have been co-opted in a campaign to ignore the Jewish contribution to creativity, or Jewish links to the Middle East - as we have seen in recent efforts to shut down a British Museum lecture on Ancient Israel and Judea.

The centerpiece example calls for vigilance, and vigorous pushback, wherever we see history being rewritten to serve an agenda.

A guided tour, “Montefiore to Mentmore, Silver to Scandal: The V&A with a Jewish Twist” will take place on 11 June as part of Jewish Culture Month.

Among other books, the Publishing House presented its most recent work, an updated version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in 1903.

In spite of the Abraham Accords, you might not find it shocking that this notorious Tsarist police forgery is still being peddled to an Arabic readership. Disappointingly, it is something of a bestseller at book fairs across the Arab world.

While nothing quite as blatantly antisemitic is being carried by western libraries, the indocrination against Jews and Israel in English is a tad more subtle, closer to home.

Take the Washington public library (DCPL). This venerable institution is attracting attention not for what titles it carries, but for what it does not.

A DC resident has been waging a year-long battle to get the library to carry digital copies of books by authors who are impartial or support Israel. Although it does have print copies by such authors, the selection of Kindles and Ebooks on offer includes works by Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said, John Mearsheimer, Norman Finklestein, Ilan Pappé and Peter Beinart.

The library has 17 copies of Beinart and Mearsheimer’s works combined. Only one of 56 copies of ‘On Palestine’ by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé has been checked out. None of Finkelstein's five digital copies of two books are checked out. On the other hand, there are two always-checked-out copies of Noa Tishby’s ‘Israel: a simple guide to the most misunderstood country on earth.’

There is one solitary digital copy of a book written in 1983 by the celebrated and successful Alan Dershowitz about his experiences in court. Outselling all the above anti-Israel critics combined, Dershowitz has since written up to nine bestsellers on Israel and Middle East politics. None features in digital form. ‘ If DCPL exercised even the bare minimum of fair play you would have digital copies of 6 -8 bestsellers over the past 10 years but you have zero,’ our complainant writes. One can only conclude that Dershowitz is being ‘banned for ideological reasons.’

The library pleads that it cannot afford to buy the digital copies that he suggests. Ebooks for non-fiction books can cost up to $140, and the DCPL has to pay yearly licensing costs on top. If a reader wants a particular title they are invited to fill in the suggestion form.

Our complainant has offered to raise the money for the missing digital books but the library ‘does not accept individual donations.' Yet the library was able to purchase six copies of books by the virulently anti-Israel Ilan Pappé but only two of The War on the West by Ben Shapiro - checked-out of course. They have added six copies of Omar El Akkad’s audio book :’One day everyone will always be against this.” One reviewer called this author ‘ an authoritative voice on the tragic unfolding crisis in Gaza.’

The library has failed to redress the balance since the 7 October attacks in spite of the explosion of books coming out of Israel and the diaspora.

Only one of three digital copies of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique by Sa’ed Atshan has been borrowed. Four of five copies of Except for Palestine by Marc Lamont-Hill are still available. This leads one to to the inevitable conclusion that the library is spending its precious resources on books that no-one wants to read.

After a long silence the library has replied that ‘there is no demand’ for more copies of Tishby’s book. Yet there is a maximum six-week waiting list for the two digital copies.

The library releases digital copies on the Holocaust, Bagels, Yiddish, Jewish Comedians and Jewish Cookbooks, but it cannot find space for Eli Sharabi’s Hostage, The War of Return by Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz, or even Uprooted by Lyn Julius.

(This is a book close to the complainant’s heart as his children’s paternal grandfather was an Arabic-speaking Jew from Alexandria, Egypt.)

While initially giving the library the benefit of the doubt (‘I am sure it is unintentional censorship’) this DC resident is now angry : ‘ the library is showing severe and systematic bias that appears to violate the core mandates of its professional and public duties’.

He has made a formal request for a review of the digital collection and a rectification of the current imbalance.

He comes battle-hardened from a campaign by an ad hoc group of parents against indoctrination by teachers at their children’s school. They won, and the school has changed its rules.

If it were not for the vigilance and persistence of such people, the drift towards demonisation of Israel and Jews is such that it is not inconceivable that we might soon find multiple Ebooks of The Protocols available to borrow.

A resolution has just been tabled in the US congress to have the 30 November recognised as Jewish Refugee Day. We ought to - we must - get our MPs to do the same at Westminster.

What is this all about? It’s about the mass exodus of almost a million Jews. A larger number than Palestinians who left Israel, and the largest displacement of non-Muslims from the Middle East and N Africa. Their property and assets, valued at $263 billion, were stolen by Arab governments without compensation. Private land seized from Jews amounted to Jordan and Lebanon combined. The Jews also suffered a cultural genocide – synagogues, cemeteries, shrines destroyed, their rich heritage obliterated.

According to this chart, Baghdad once had proportionately more Jews than New York or Warsaw, but 99 percent of the Jews have fled. A whole civilisation has been extinguished. Only 4,000 remain. There are more Arabs in Tel Aviv than there are Jews in the Arab world. This was ethnic cleansing. And on 7 October 2023, Hamas tried to finish the job.

But we are confronted with denial, obfuscation and inversion of the truth. The Palestinian Ahmed Khalidi is a lone voice: ‘To accuse Jews forced to leave Arab countries of ethnic cleansing is the gaslight of the century’ he says. Sadly, people like him are very rare.

The other salient point is that these communities were very old and some go back to Biblical times.

The Arab occupation was the largest and longest in the Middle East.

After the 7^th century millions of Persians, Berbers, Copts, Arameans, Jews, Greeks, and others suddenly found themselves under Arab rule. Their languages and faiths were pushed aside. Next time you hear the false narrative of European settler colonialism, think of how ancient these communities were. To quote Khalidi again: “It’s historic amnesia to call Jews colonisers. “ They predated Islam by 1,000 years or more and were indigenous in relation to Arabs and Turks.

So what was the relationship between Jews and Muslims during the 14 centuries that they lived alongside each other? There was a cultural symbiosis that was absent in the Christian world. There were intellectual golden ages. But symbiosis is not the same as coexistence, which assumes an equality in the relationship. Jews and Christians were ‘dhimmis’, inferior to Muslims. Because they had failed to convert to the ultimate religion of Islam, they had few rights.

They had to submit to restrictions and humiliations and subcontract their right to self-defence to the ruler of the day in exchange for a tax. A form of racial segregation. Apartheid even.

The situation only improved in the colonial era when Jews and Christians gained equality with the Muslims. The colonial era was a golden age which Jews born in these countries sometimes view with nostalgia.

But all this came to an end with the rise of antisemitism. Arab nationalism marginalised non-Muslim minorities. Jews were unfairly accused of being collaborators with colonialism although they had lived in the region long before the Arabs.

On 7 October 2023 a man called Shlomo Mansour was thought to have been taken alive from his kibbutz into Gaza. He would have been the oldest hostage at 85. Sadly he was murdered.More tragic still, he had survived a massacre that took place in Iraq seven years before Israel was founded – the Farhud. Shlomo and other 650,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries – the majority – sought refuge in Israel. Israel was the solution, not the cause, of Arab antisemitism. So if anyone tells you that Muslims and Jews lived in perfect harmony before Israel, tell them about the 1941 Farhud. Or a massacre in Libya 80 years ago. Or a massacre in Morocco in 1912.

The 1941 Farhud massacre in Iraq was inspired by Nazism. The driving force behind the Farhud was the pro-Nazi Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini who was in Iraq at the time. He intended to exterminate the Jews not just in Palestine but throughout the Arab world. He spent the rest of WWII in Berlin broadcasting genocidal propaganda.

Islamist antisemitism, a Nazi-inspired form of antisemitism, is still with us today. The Mufti was allied with the Muslim Brotherhood (Gaza branch: Hamas). The Muslim Brotherhood agitated against the Jews from the 1930s onwards in Egypt. Islamists consider Jews as the epitomy of evil. They must be destroyed. Just read the Hamas charter. This genocidal ideological legacy is still with us.

Why is the issue of the exodus still relevant today, after 70 years?

First, because it is an unresolved injustice. Over half Israel’s Jews are refugees from Arab countries themselves or their descendants. A peace settlement that does not recognise them would not lead to true peace and reconciliation.

Second, because history is repeating itself. Since 7 October 2023, we have had to endure a tsunami of Jew-hatred in the West.

Antisemitism flourishes when the forces of law and order appease the bullies and the inciters, when the police do nothing, or arrest Jews for provoking the mob with a kippa or a star of David. We have seen this movie before in Arab and Muslim countries. We must learn the lessons of history.

We must teach the history, culture and heritage of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) Jews in Jewish schools, and we welcome the Board of Deputies’ encouragement and commitment to making this happen.

The story of MENA Jews is a vital part of Jewish history . Every Jew needs to think of him or herself as if he or she came out of Iraq or Libya or Syria, and treat this history as his or her own. Harif can help you get the message out to your congregants, to students, politicians and the media.

Those of us who have been following the BBC’s Middle East coverage can see from the BBC website that the story is framed as the Israel-Gaza war, the Israeli Goliath against the Palestinian David, and not the Israel-Iran war, with the tiny Jewish state battling on seven fronts.

Unlike coverage of the war in the Ukraine, no military analysts have been wheeled in to examine the situation on the ground, either’s side’s strategy or the weaponry used. The focus is purely on Gazan civilians, with the implication that Israel is committing war crimes.

In terms of Gaza, we have witnessed a descent into, at best, a moral equivalence between arsonist and firefighter - a terrorist group fighting a democratic state. Allegations by Hamas are deemed gospel truth while incontrovertible facts are considered Israeli claims.

Every morning during Israel’s Gaza war we have been treated to what I call the Daily Gaza on BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme: a sob story from ‘our trusted freelancers’ in the Strip, reinforced by some UN body confirming mass starvation or some other libel du jour. It seems obvious to all but the BBC that no trusted freelance can report without the say-so of Hamas. His or her life might depend on it.

Notwithstanding the terrible conditions experienced by Gazans, we never hear from ‘trusted freelancers’ on the Israeli side. In fact the BBC’s Israel coverage is supplied by anyone but Israelis. Apart from broadcasting the return of the 20 remaining hostages, there is a dearth of human interest stories. When the BBC wanted to show the Israeli side it was always to demonstrate the divisions in Israeli society and undermine the government. The crowds in Hostage Square were shown as much protesting against Bibi as they were pleading for the hostages’ release.

The Israeli mainstream is rarely given a voice. The last Israeli ambassador to the UK was never invited to speak. When the BBC wants to hear from Israelis, it interviews has-been contrarians like Ehud Olmert or Ehud Barak, or even anti-Zionists like Daniel Levy.

There is no denying that BBC staff are in thrall to a type of leftist groupthink. The rot set in decades ago when the Corporation started to recruit from the Guardian’s Media pages. It no longer employs foreign correspondents based long-term in their respective countries. Instead, whenever a crisis blows up, journalists without the necessary in-depth knowledge are parachuted in.

The BBC does not carry commercial advertising on its domestic broadcasts, but its World Service TV does: a major advertiser - and therefore funder - is Qatar. Join the dots and now you see why BBC Arabic has little incentive to be anything other than a second al-Jazeera.

Public outrage has been building against BBC bias simply because our national broadcaster is funded by the British taxpayer. Its output in fields other than news is often excellent, but when it comes to current affairs it is hamstrung by its woke agenda and fear of appearing islamophobic.

The clock is ticking until the BBC’s charter comes up for renewal in two years’ time. We shall see if anything changes.

The Mufti is generally thought of as the leader of the Arab nation in the 1930s and 40s, Hitler’s most senior Arab collaborator, the chief instigator of the 1941 Farhud anti-Jewish massacre in Iraq and the founder of SS units in the Balkans. However, Sheikh Yasir Qadhi, an imam based at the Plano Islamic Center in Texas, sees the Mufti simply as a ‘freedom fighter’ who ‘wanted to liberate his land’. In other words, he is another Nelson Mandela.

A disciple of the anti-colonialist forerunner of Islamism, Rashid Rida, Haj Amin was appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by the British in 1921. He was alarmed to see invading ‘European Zionists’ increase their numbers from 3 - to 35 percent of the population in Palestine during the 1920s. (There was never any problem with the (submissive) Sephardi Jews, the Sheikh claims). Qadhi ignores the fact that the Palestine mandate saw a huge increase in the Arab population too - attracted by the buoyant economy created by the Jews. He admits that the Zionists were paying top dollar to buy Muslim land - ‘it was too good to refuse.’

The Zionists ‘pretended the Wailing Wall was theirs’ and had designs on the Al-Aqsa mosque on Temple Mount. The Hebron massacre is downplayed as ‘a massive mob melée between Arabs and Jews in which ‘more than a dozen’ were killed on each side. But the Mufti began preaching violence against the Jews as early as 1920, instigating the Nebi Musa riots. Sheikh Qadhi makes no mention of the Mufti’s constant campaign of anti-Jewish incitement, not just in Palestine but across the Arab world. Only the Zionists, he says, were terrorists - although the Irgun and Lehi were not established until after WW2 in order to fight the British. No mention of the Arab Revolt of 1936 - 39, in which the Mufti’s men murdered hundreds of his Muslim rivals.

The thorniest issue Sheikh Qadhi is forced to debunk is the Mufti’s wartime record as a Nazi collaborator. ‘He only met Hitler once, and for less than an hour,’ the Sheikh almost pleads. “ He didn’t do anything with the Nazi party.” While it is true that the Mufti did not goad Hitler into committing the Holocaust, it is an inconvenient fact that he sought Hitler’s blessing to manage the extermination of the Jews in his sphere of influence. Thousands of Jews were prevented from reaching Palestine at his behest and met their deaths in the camps.

On the run from the British, the Mufti is portrayed as having no choice but to seek refuge in Germany, the only country that would accept him. How does one explain his poisonous broadcasts of anti-Jewish propaganda (’Kill the Jews wherever you find them!’) over Radio Berlin? Sheikh Qadhi asserts: ‘He was reading the news in the Arabic language!’

No one could have predicted how evil Hitler was (’Even Churchill praised him until 1940’, claims the Sheikh). As well as downplaying Muslim sympathy for Hitler, Qadhi reiterates the myth that Muslims protected Jews. Nowhere in Sheikh Qadhi’s discourse is there any mention of the Mufti’s constant overtures to the Nazis, his calls for jihad, his backing for the pro-Nazi coup in Iraq, and the Farhud massacre of 180 Jews, for which the Mufti was primarily responsible.

Sheikh Qadhi’s video has already had 23,000 views in just four days: it boggles the mind how many people will ultimately swallow his lies and omissions. For the truth, there are many reliable books on the Mufti, and I recommend you try this video by Oren Pinto of Travellingisrael.com.