By Yossi Schwartz, ISL the section of the RCIT in Israel/Occupied Palestine, 3.12.2021
The Zionist propaganda that claims that the Jews from the Arab and Muslim states suffered from the holocaust is based on the technique of the big lie. The Times of Israel for example writes:
“The expulsion of 850,000 mostly Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) and Sephardic Jews from Arab and Muslim countries took place before, during, and after the Holocaust. As nationalist Arab leaders aligned with Nazi Germany in the name of oil and expelling the British, Jewish communities were targeted for pauperization, expulsion, and murder… By all accounts, the infiltration of Nazi leaders and policies into the Middle East was a tipping point in the history of the region’s Jews. Beginning with Iraq’s notorious Farhud pogrom on June 1–2, 1941, Jews in Iraq and elsewhere faced intensified persecution akin to what took place in pre-Holocaust Nazi Germany as leaders such as Iraqi Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani sought to emulate Hitler’s tactics”. [i]
Blaming Rashid Ali al-Gaylani as a person who sought to kill the Jews is a fraud as we showed in another article. The Farhud pogrom took place after al-Gaylani and the Mufti of Jerusalem escaped from Iraq to Germany. There is no question that the Nazis killed millions of Jews. However, the Zionists in their propaganda since the middle 1970’s have expanded their definition of the Holocaust to include the emigration of the Jews from Arab and Muslim countries after 1948. What they hide among other things is the Zionist role in the uprooting of these Jews from their countries. Not only that, but by the manipulation of the memory of the Holocaust to include the uprooting of the Arab Jews in the Holocaust in Europe they give ammunition to the Holocaust deniers who can say that if what happened to the Arab Jews is a Holocaust the Jews lie when they speak of millions of Jews who were killed by the Nazis.
In the former article on this subject, we dealt with the reasons Jews left Yemen and Iraq. In this article, we deal with Morocco and Algeria.
Morocco
In 1948 when Morocco was under French rule while the Zionists massacred and expelled the Palestinians. Two violent anti-Jewish riots broke out in Oujda and Djerada, leading to the deaths of 44 Jews. The internet site “Jewish Virtual Library” that spreads the Zionist propaganda writes:
“Jews have been living in Morocco since the time of Antiquity. Prior to World War II, the Jewish population of Morocco reached 225,000. Morocco’s King Mohammed V met with representatives from Nazi Germany and Vichy France during the Holocaust to discuss the issue of Jews in Morocco. The Moroccan King famously stated at the meeting that in his country, there are no Jewish citizens, there are no Muslim citizens, and they are all Moroccans. The Jews of Morocco were not sent away to concentration camps and were not subject to the full brunt of Nazi evil. Although Jews were not deported during the war, they did suffer humiliation under the Vichy government. Following the U.S. landing in 1943, a few pogroms did occur. In June 1948, bloody riots in Oujda and Djerada killed 44 Jews and wounded scores more. That same year, an unofficial economic boycott was instigated against Moroccan Jews”. [ii]
This site does not mention any other event in which Jews were killed in Morocco and if there were similar events it would tell them in detail. Haaretz writes on this event: “June 8, 1948, was the second and final day of anti-Jewish rioting in the northeastern Moroccan towns of Oujda and Jerada, in which 44 people were killed and some 60 wounded. The massacres, whose circumstances have never been definitively determined, came weeks after Israel’s declaration of statehood and contributed to a dramatic upsurge in the departure of Jews from Morocco, most of them to Israel“. [iii]
Haaretz does not dare to tell the reasons for this event as the reasons are known.
“In 1948, when the riots broke off, Oujda was under French sovereignty and Jerada (60 kilometers away from Oujda) was home to more than 120 Moroccan Jews. According to the same source, rioters descended on Oujda’s Jewish quarter and killed four of its Jewish residents, as well as a Frenchman, and wounded 30. On the same day 37 Jews were killed including the town’s rabbi, Moshe Cohen, and four family members, Haaretz stated. The police arrived later assessing the material damage that hit the two towns. The pasha of Oujda, Mohammed Hajoui as stated by Haaretz condemned the violence and even visited the homes of all its victims, consequently, he was attacked on the 11th of June in a mosque. Responding to the deadly attacks, the French, and most precisely René Brunel who was the French commissioner of Oujda, blamed the Moroccan Jews for the events. He insisted that their passage through Oujda on their way to Israel, and their supposed sympathies with the Zionist movement unleashed the anger of the population“. [iv]
Algeria
Most of Algeria’s Jews had been entitled to French citizenship since 1870. In 1870, the Crémieux decree separated the Jews from the rest of the Algerian population and turned them into French citizens in their own country. In 1940, the Vichy government revoked this decree and French citizenship along with it. After WWII the Jews once again became citizens of France. During the Algerian War, most Algerian Jews took the side of France, against the indigenous independence movement.
“The Algerian War from 1954 to 1962, looms large over every text … Algerian Jews were forced to choose between the multiple aspects of their identities. In the Algerian War, most Jews chose France over independent Algeria. For many, that experience was one of rupture leading to an exile” [v]
They opposed France’s proposed independence for Algeria. Some Jews did join the FLN fighting for independence, but a larger group supported the OAS, secret paramilitary terrorist group [vi], and the Zionists agents from Israel armed young Jews to fight against the FLN.
“In 1955, the Mossad established a special force in the Maghrib known as the Misgeret [Framework]. The Misgeret was active in Algeria in the three central departments [regions] of Constantinos, Oranie, and Algeria. In the Constantinos, it consisted of about one hundred young members whose unit commanders underwent training in France or Israel. Possessing French citizenship, as the overwhelming majority of Algerian Jewry, they were reservists in the French army stationed in Algeria and thus experienced in the handling of weapons. The Misgeret created weapons caches, and only its Algerian unit commanders could have access to the Israeli emissaries in charge. Between May 1956 and the end of 1961” [vii]
In 1961, six months before the conclusion of the Evian accords promised independence for Algeria, riots broke out in the city of Oran. The aggressors were overwhelmingly Jews, while those injured or killed were largely Muslims. The events in Palestine caused tension between Jews and Muslims in Algeria, in addition to the support of Israel and many Jews for French colonialism. [viii]
Israel had close relations with France and it supported it during the Algerian war of independence. In 1956 Israel, British imperialism, and French imperialism attacked Egypt that under Nasser supported the independence of Algeria.
When France left Algeria, many Algerian Jews left with the colonialists. After Algeria gained its independence in 1962, it passed the Nationality Code in 1963, depriving non-Muslims of citizenship. This law extended citizenship only to those individuals whose fathers and paternal grandfathers were Muslim. 140,000 Jewish left after the passage of the law.
We find in the Jerusalem post:” Following the end of World War II and the establishment of the State of Israel, Moroccan Jews were encouraged to move to Israel by Zionist groups and organizations. With French rule remaining over Morocco, Jews were allowed to immigrate legally, and many young Moroccan Jews left to help fight during the War of Independence… With the ascension of Hassan II to the throne in 1961, an agreement was made that he would accept a large per-capita bounty from the international Jewish community for each Jew who emigrated from Morocco, and under this agreement Jews were allowed the freedom to leave. By the eve of the Six-Day War, some 120,000 emigrated during these six years alone“. [vix]
Thus like in other Arab states the Jews of North Africa were not refugees but emigrants uprooted from their home countries because of the imperialist’s policy of divide and rule, the collaboration of most Jews with the colonial rule, because of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by the Zionists in 1947-8, because the Zionists intervention in North Africa on the side of French imperialism, because of the agreement of Israel with the king of Morocco and because of the reactionary attitude that did not differentiate between Judaism and Zionism. To claim that the Jews from the Arab countries were refugees and to include them in the Jewish holocaust is to deny the real tragedy of the Jews in Europe.
Down with the Zionists’ lies!
Down with the Zionist apartheid state!
Down with the reactionary rulers of the Arab states, servants of imperialism!
For a Palestine red and free from the river to the sea!
For a socialist federation of the Middle East!
Endnotes:
[i] https://www.timesofisrael.com/ignored-by-the-un-mizrahi-jews-survived-pogroms-and-expulsions-too/
[ii] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jews-of-morocco
[iii] https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-this-day-44-dead-after-anti-jewish-rioting-in-morocco-1.5251018
[iv] https://en.yabiladi.com/articles/details/54417/june-1948-anti-jewish-rioting-events.html
[v]https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/33871/6/Roberts_Sophie_B_201103_PhD_thesis.pdf
[vi] https://www.jstor.org/stable/23603696
[vii] Michael M. Laskier Israel and Algeria amid French Colonialism and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1954-1978 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236816049_Israel_and_Algeria_amid_French_Colonialism_and_the_Arab-Israeli_Conflict_1954-1978
[viii] Joshua Schreier A Jewish Riot against Muslims: The Polemics of History in Late Colonial Algeria Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2016
[ix] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/moroccan-jewry-in-israel-set-to-commemorate-60-years-of-aliya-599658