New Article: Lyn Julius’ Eurocentric Zionist Agenda and Arab Jewish History
David Shasha
Lyn Julius’ Eurocentric Zionist Agenda and Arab Jewish History
Mrs. Julius is the anonymous force behind the Point of No Return blog and a founder of HARIF. We have had many occasions to look carefully at how her Zionistic approach to Arab Jewish history is subservient to Ashkenazi interests:
She is a devoted enemy of Andalusian Convivencia:
She has just published a book collecting her posts from the Point of No Return blog that expresses her nihilistic, self-hating views:
http://jewishrefugees.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-book-of-blog-out-this-month.html
The Right Wing Zionist media outlet Fathom magazine has just published Julius’ discussion of the Suez Crisis and the Jews of Egypt:
http://fathomjournal.org/the-suez-crisis-and-the-jews-of-egypt/
Let us first take a look at the book’s sub-title:
How 3000 years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight
What that statement does is ignore the place of Israel and Zionism in the ongoing destruction of our culture, but more importantly is her silence on the lack of concern by Israel’s leaders for the consequences of their actions against Egypt and other Arab countries.
This is all very complicated stuff, but not if you believe Julius’ HASBARAH:
By the end of the ‘Seven Days’ War’, Britain and France had failed to achieve their objectives. Israel, while enduring humiliating universal condemnation for its Sinai campaign, reaped short-term respite from terrorist raids, the reopening of the Straits of Tiran to its shipping, and a strategic alliance with the French. But the Suez Canal stayed in Nasser’s hands. Britain and France did not manage to destroy the Egyptian dictator. On the contrary, Nasser turned a military defeat into a political victory. The champion of socialist pan-Arabism emerged stronger — and was poised to wreak his revenge on Egypt’s Jews.
Later in the Suez excerpt Julius brackets the fact of the 1954 Israeli spy mission in Egypt that is known as the Lavon Affair, as she piles on her anti-Egypt bias while at the same time attacking the scholar Joel Beinin, himself a prominent critic of Israel and Zionism:
At least one scholar, Joel Beinin, disputes this, claiming that so soon after the Holocaust’s full horror had become apparent, Jewish organisations such as the American Jewish Committee were projecting their paranoia and obsession with Nazi antisemitism on the Egyptians. Beinin lays the blame for the flight of Egypt’s Jews at Zionism’s door by dwelling at length on Operation Susannah, the ill-conceived and botched bombing of UK and US offices and a cinema instigated by the Israeli government in 1954 to coax the US and Britain to intervene in Egypt. (Also known as the Lavon Affair, ‘the Mishap’ or ‘the Unfortunate Business’). The perpetrators were ‘fifth column’ local Jews, but caused no casualties. Two were executed and the rest imprisoned.
Zionist HASBARAH never likes to dwell on the Lavon Affair which is commonly called the “Mishap” in official Israeli circles.
In addition, Julius’ presentation of the tragic events does not properly emphasize the partial nature of the deportation of the Egyptian Jews.
But we see that out of a community of some 80,000, the final total of those expelled was under 25,000, still leaving a majority in the country:
Between 23,000 and 25,000 Jews are estimated to have left Egypt between November 1956 and the end of 1958. By 1957, more than 6,000 left by ship with assistance of International Red Cross. Other relief groups, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS, the Central British Fund the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and the Jewish Agency helped refugees resettle in Israel, Western Europe, the US, Central and South America and Australia. UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld was said to have interceded to soften the harsh treatment meted out to departing Jews. There were so many Jews leaving Egypt, and some were in such distress that, for the first time, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Dr Auguste Lindt, recognised Jews departing Egypt as bona fide refugees under his aegis.
Indeed, the violent events of 1956 – preceded by the Lavon Affair and Israel’s misguided attempts to interfere in Egyptian affairs – were disastrous for many native Jews. But once again we face the paradox of Arab Jewish Zionism which holds that Jews are proud to have a country, yet complains when they leave their homes in the Arab-Muslim world and are called “refugees.”
It is not clear whether the Zionist advocates love Israel more than they hate Arabs!
In spite of this, we must never deny that Nasser was an authoritarian dictator and a violent man who suppressed dissent and sought to nationalize many of the country’s businesses – those of Muslims, Christians, and Jews. He should be properly judged in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the battle with European Colonialism and his abject failure to institute democratic values to Egypt as it emerged from British occupation.
But we must carefully note that the Egyptian Jews were caught in a crossfire between the Arab world, the West, and Zionism as they lacked the power to stand up for their own interests.
This does not make the personal stories of those who left any less traumatic, but it should remind us that this exodus, which extended to the 1967 June War which finally left a very small remnant of Jews in Egypt, was both gradual and tied to the ongoing Israeli aggression in the region.
In this context it is interesting to ponder the way in which Julius characterizes Egyptian cultural cosmopolitanism:
Jews had lived in Egypt since Biblical times, but most were relatively recent arrivals from elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire, attracted by the economic possibilities of the Suez Canal, which had opened in 1869. Some held European passports — a means of achieving greater rights and security under Ottoman rule. Pre-1948 Egypt was a cosmopolitan place, as captured in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet: 57, 000 Greeks, 27,000 Italians, 80,000 Jews, and thousands of Armenians and Maltese.
The passage shows Julius’ consistent bias when it comes to the Egyptian Jewish history – which is connected to the Bible rather than to the Muslim-Jewish symbiosis of the Middle Ages. Julius likes to see Arab Jews as living in the region since “before Islam” in a way that seeks to ignore the many centuries of creative cultural interaction between native Jews and Muslims. Her view, pace the prominent mention of Durrell, is utterly Eurocentric as she ignores the contributions of Arab Jews to the culture of the region.
Contrary to this alienated Zionist view, we have the following article by the scholar David Wasserstein “So, What Did the Muslims Do for the Jews?”:
There is a long history of Arab-Jewish Convivencia that is in the process of being erased by Julius and other HASBARAH advocates.
Towards the end of Julius’ article on the Suez Crisis, we read the following passage that lauds Israel in spite of the systemic prejudice of the country’s Ashkenazi leaders against Arab Jews:
In all, about half the Jews of Egypt fled to Israel – more might have done so had the Jewish state not been struggling to feed, accommodate and employ the new arrivals. Although they rebuilt their lives and none today consider themselves refugees, there remains an unresolved injustice. It is imperative, as a matter of law and equity, that Jewish refugees from Arab countries be on the agenda of any peace settlement.
This citation from the article sums up Julius’ beliefs about the positive nature of Israel and her relentless attacks on the Arab-Muslim world.
She ignores the pervasive bias that Israel displayed towards Jewish immigrants from the Arab-Muslim world and the cultural erasure that took place in the country; a fact that has been confirmed by the recent Biton Committee initiative:
While the Biton Committee is part of a Right Wing plan to bring Mizrahi Jewish support for the Settler movement and its leaders like Naftali Bennett, it is also a tacit admission of how Israel sought to erase Arab Jewish culture and history.
The curricular initiative serves to contradict Julius’ rose-colored glasses view of Zionism and exposes the twisted logic behind her advocacy of the Arab Jewish Refugee movement.
When the Middle East was dealing with violence between Israel and the Arab states, Arab Jews were being ignored by the Zionists.
But now that Arab Jews can be used in order to support Israeli talking points, we have self-haters like Lyn Julius being carted out in the Jewish media as legitimate representatives of our community.
Sadly, Julius presents a view of Arab Jews that is incomplete and biased. Her agenda is tied to the larger HASBARAH project which is centered on Anti-Semitism and on Islamophobic prejudice.
Rather than presenting the richness of classical Sephardic Jewish history and culture and its close ties to the Arab-Muslim civilization, Julius and the HASBARAH voices seek to distort our heritage at the service of Zionist alienation and the contemporary Israeli political agenda.
David Shasha