Tragedy, triumph of Mizrahi Jews holds real key to MidEast peace

Following the signing of the peace deals between Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, American Jewish leaders came forward to discuss how they played a behind-the-scenes role over the past 25 years to encourage the Gulf states to seek peaceful relations with Israel. Now that Israel has established a “warm peace” with Bahrain and the UAE, perhaps it is time for these same leaders and their organizations to begin an educational campaign in Arab language media about the 850,000 Jewish refugees who were forced to flee or were expelled from Islamic lands during the 20th century.

As a Mizrahi journalist, I believe that sharing the Mizrahi refugees’ story with the Arab and Islamic world, now that the tides of peace are upon us, is one of the most important things we can do to ensure that this new peace is solidified and maintained for years to come.

For more than 70 years the American Ashkenazi community’s leadership has horribly failed to educate Jews in America about the plight of the 850,000 Jewish refugees who fled or were forced out of the Arab countries and Iran during the last century. The Mizrahi Jews faced imprisonment, torture, executions, pogroms, forced exile and asset confiscations in the various Islamic countries after 1948. Their plight has been absent from international dialogue regarding the Middle East conflict.

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or decades, Israel had itself failed to share the Mizrahi narrative even though more than 50 percent of the Israeli population today is of Mizrahi background. For decades, these failures in discussing the Mizrahi refugees’ painful experiences have allowed the Palestinians and many Arab leaders to spew a false narrative that the Jews of Israel are “foreign colonialists from Europe” who have no true roots in the Middle East.

The failure of Jewish leaders to discuss the Mizrahis has resulted in their suffering never being widely known or shared with the Arab populations and the larger world. Instead, people have, ad nauseum, heard the Palestinian side of the story regarding the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Once the larger historical context of what happened to both Jewish Mizrahi refugees and Palestinians is properly presented to the Arab world, many moderate Arabs will better understand the Jewish perspective and strengthen the concept that Israel is the Jewish homeland which is not going anywhere.

The Palestinians’ false narrative about the Jews being “European colonialists” who have no genuine roots or claims to the Land of Israel will be debunked when confronted with stories of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who lived in most of the counties in the Middle East, including Israel, for centuries.

When Arab populations learn of the calamity of 850,000 Jewish refugees who were forced out of their homes and had their lives turned upside down, they may realize that the Palestinians were not the only victims after the 1948 war and that the Jews too have legitimate grievances that must be addressed and remedied in a final peace plan.

Many of the Arab countries today are essentially tribal societies that share common traditions and cultural norms with one another. When the Arabs learn of the massive Jewish populations that lived for centuries in the Arab and Islamic lands prior to their forced exiles after 1948, they may feel a closer bond — and solidify the peace — with Mizrahi Jews living in Israel today, who share their language, foods, music, art and culture.

Arab populations should learn how the 850,000 Jewish refugees from the Islamic lands after 1948 ultimately worked hard and pulled themselves up from their great calamity. This may help moderate Arabs to encourage or educate their Palestinian brethren that after 72 years it is time to give up the “refugee” mentalities and leave their refugee camps to build better lives for themselves. Their argument will be “look at the Jews, they were refugees from the Arab lands but they moved beyond the victim mentality and built new lives for themselves. You too can now do the same!”

Much of the Arab and Islamic world today does not know of the glorious history and successes of the Jews living in Islamic countries in the past centuries. They are for the most part in the dark about how Jews and Muslims in many of the Arab and Islamic countries lived side by side in relative peace at various points in time.

When Arab populations are exposed to this history of co-existence and tolerance that their ancestry had with the Jews, then they may be more willing to accept the Jews living in Israel as one of their peaceful neighbors in the region.

Creating treaties may be a challenging first step between Israel and its Arab neighbors, but maintaining that peace by educating the Arabs about the 850,000 Jewish refugees from the Islamic countries will be the key to a stable future in the Middle East.

I call on American Ashkenazi leaders who have long had relationships with the leaders in the Arab countries to launch an educational campaign about Mizrahi Jews in the Arabic language media in these nations. Why not bring in Mizrahi speakers from Israel, America and Europe to share their histories and experiences?

Why not build new blocks of commonality and friendship between Jews and Arab by sharing the Mizrahi Jews’ history in the Middle East? Why not give moderate Arabs, who want to help bring the Palestinians to the peace table, valuable information about the experiences from the Mizrahi Jews who gave up the victim mentality of being refugees and built a thriving new state for themselves?

A San Francisco-based organization, Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, has been gathering and sharing the hundreds of stories and the history of the Mizrahi Jewish community for nearly two decades. Its work inspired Christians United For Israel to create the “Mizrahi Project,” a documentary film about the Mizrahi Jews.

The film, available on YouTube, offers personal stories from Mizrahi refugees opening eyes about the Jews from the Islamic nations. I had the special honor of being one of the Mizrahi individuals featured in the film, and over the years I have personally received positive feedback from many Iranians and Arabs worldwide about the plight of the Mizrahi refugees.

For too long American’s Mizrahi Jews have been ignored and sidelined by the larger Ashkenazi community. With this new peace in the Middle East it’s time to include the Mizrahi Jews and share the experiences of the 850,000 Jewish refugees from the Islamic countries in order to strengthen this new Middle East peace.

Karmel Melamed is an award-winning and internationally published journalist based in Southern California.