Hard on the heels of our series of articles on ‘Israel, Apartheid and Racism’ comes news of a memorial day first established in 2014 by Israel to commemorate a mass atrocity, largely unknown or ignored in the West. The date set was November 30th. This year it was decided to give the memorial day a fitting name, in Hebrew ‘Yom HaGirush’ – the Day of the Expulsion.1 Some aspects of the incitement behind that atrocity appeared in Part 4 of our series, actions driven by the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, whilst some of the enforced displacement of Jews from Arab/Muslim states was touched upon in Part 1. This day is dedicated in memory of the coordinated international expulsion in 1948 of some 850,000 from Arab and Muslim lands in which Jews had lived peaceably with their neighbours for as long as 2,700 years.2
Persecution and pogrom
Anti-Semitism in Europe under Hitler’s influence is well-known, but the build-up to the expulsion shows the horrors and difficulties that the Jews faced in the Middle East during this time.
On June 1st, 2015, an ‘International Farhud Day’ was observed by the United Nations. The ‘Farhud’ refers in Arabic to the horrors perpetrated against the Jews of Iraq and of Baghdad in particular, a veritable orgy of violence, arson and dispossession. Rachel Wahba, writing for the Times of Israel on Farhud Day last year, describes her mother’s experience prior to the attack: “The terror erupted in Baghdad on June 1, 1941, and lasted exactly forty-eight hours. My mother, Khatoun, was just sixteen, a young Baghdadi Jewish girl. In 1941 Iraq was home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world, with two thirds of the country’s Jews living in Baghdad. The Farhud broke out when Iraq’s pro-Nazi party was dismantled by the British. Anti-Zionist apologists for Islamic Jew hatred, continue to claim the Farhud was purely a European Nazi driven import. This flawed, dismissive explanation insults reality. The long history of dhimmi laws, and pervasive cultural contempt for the offending infidel Jew, is the sad truth. My mother grew up like most Iraqi Jews, knowing her place, as a second-class citizen, without equal civil rights, in her own country. … When my mother left her house to go to school, she learned to duck the slurs and intimidation by keeping her head bowed and eyes down. She tried not to take in the terrifying threats, ‘Slaughter the Jews! We are coming for you!’ She saw her brother beaten up and daring not to fight back. She witnessed the Shia date merchant in Karbala dutifully wash his hands after doing business with her father, a Yahud, a Jew – an insult to Islam and humanity.”3 This personal testimony clearly illustrates the conditions for Jews even before the pogroms began.
During the war, local officials throughout the Arab-influenced world set up concentration camps as centres of slave labour and torture.
According to Edward Black, the Farhud was only part of Arab-Muslim actions that were at first coordinated out of the British Mandate of Palestine and spread widely as a result of vibrant political and later military alliance with the Nazis. “This partnership functioned in the rarefied corridors of governments, the riot-torn streets of many cities on all sides of the oceans and eventually the gunpowdered trenches and frontlines of war-strangled Europe. The overseer of this alliance was Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, but he led an eager coalition of Arab leaders organized into the Arab Higher Committee, along with popular supporters from the Arab street. They had fused with Nazi ideology and goals, which included the destruction of the Jews and the defeat of British influence. After the Mufti fled criminal prosecution in Jewish Palestine in Oct. 1937, he relocated to Baghdad. Iraq became the new centre of gravity for the Arab-Nazi collaboration. By the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Iraqi Arabs under the guidance of the Mufti had imported all sorts of Nazi ideology and confederation into Iraq.” Then, in 1941, on June 1st, as Germany was poised to attack Russia and needed Arab oil, Nazi Arabs in Iraq launched their bloody two-day pogrom against Baghdad’s Jewish community.
Hajj Amin al Husseini in Bosnia with SS officers - note 4
Black continues, “The hyphenation of ‘Arab-Nazi’ applies, not merely because these Arabs were fascist in mind and deed, but because they actually identified with Germany’s Nazi Party. Some rioters wore swastikas; many had actually marched in the Nuremberg torchlight parades. The Syrian Social Nationalist Party adopted a flag that spun off from Nazi Germany’s. In that nightmare June riot, Jews were hunted in the streets. When found, Jewish girls were raped in front of their parents; fathers were beheaded in front of their children; mothers were brutalized in public; babies were sliced in half and thrown into the Tigris River. The Baghdad mobs burned dozens of Jewish shops, invaded Jewish homes and looted them.”
Concentration camps
Arab regimes during WWII, led by the Mufti, made efforts to send Jews to Auschwitz. The Mufti had been given guided tours of several camps, including the SS’s camp-system headquarters. During the war, local officials throughout the Arab-influenced world set up concentration camps as centres of slave labour and torture. Of the dozens of camps in Arab lands were Im Fout in Morocco, Djelfa in Algeria, and Giado in Libya. In spite of such events, my own father, who served with RAF 644 Squadron at el-Qastina in 1945-6 in what was, at that time, known as Palestine, remembered witnessing considerable anti-Semitism even among the officers and men of Britain’s Parachute Regiment who were there ostensibly to ‘keep the peace’ between Arab and Jew.
A co-ordinated expulsion
All this was only the beginning. In 1948, as the struggling Jews moved towards independence, the Arab League announced that it would implement a mass expulsion of all of its Jews. It coordinated forms and procedures among more than a dozen countries. In Iraq, the definition of criminality was modified to include ‘Zionist’—which included such things as a Jew found possessing items with Hebrew markings, even from a prayer book. Jews were legally deprived of their long-held citizenship, and the confiscation of Jewish assets was permitted.
Similar disenfranchisements were repeated across the Arab and Muslim world. Assisting in these processes were some 2,000 Nazis – former concentration camp guards, Gestapo, SS officers and Wehrmacht commanders who had escaped the Nuremberg trials to continue Hitler’s war against the Jews.
Plans to eliminate the Jews
Azzam Pasha with Hajj Amin al Husseini Cairo c.1946 note 6Around the same time, the Arab League promised to suppress the proposed new state of Israel. The Secretary-General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, chillingly declared on October 11th, 1947, “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres.” In fairness, we should note that this stark quotation has been challenged as merely representing Azzam Pasha’s fear for the future.5 However, it’s worth looking carefully at the apologist’s translation: “Personally I hope the Jews do not force us into this war because it will be a war of elimination ….”. Notice firstly that any blame is attributed to the Jews. Then consider the context of the speech, which ends, “I warned the Jewish leaders whom I met in London about continuing their policy, and I told them that the Arab soldier is the strongest in the world … and we will fire the last bullet. In the end I understand the consequence of this bloody war … I can imagine its victims, but I have a clear conscience since we were called to fight as defenders and not attackers.”5 The savage threat was only too real, the language still that of ethnic cleansing.
For four months, the World Jewish Congress pleaded with the United Nations, then convening in Lake Success, New York, to stop the ethnic cleansing. This was no secret. The New York Times headline announced, “Jews in Grave Danger in all Moslem Lands”. The article clearly listed the expelling countries and estimated how many thousands of Jews would be ethnically cleansed: French Morocco: 190,000; Iraq: 130,000; Algeria: 120,000; and on, until the total reached almost 900,000. Tragically, as noted above, this figure proved to be prescient.
The legacy of the Arab-Nazi alliance can still be seen to this day. Here’s a chilling image from 2006 in the West Bank town of Jenin, capturing a passing-out parade of Palestinian Authority police:
Palestinian Authority police Nazi salute, Photo credit, Mohamad Torokman, Reuters
Black’s article closes with words to remember: “From Morocco to India, and from Yemen to Afghanistan, the lives and centuries of legacies were incinerated. It was done in broad daylight with barely a murmur from the world. It happened not even five years after the world learned that six million Jews had been exterminated and millions more made refugees. Mark it down on a piece of paper: Yom HaGirush.”
As we approach the season in which we remember not only the birth of our Jewish Messiah, Yeshua, but also the slaughter of the Jewish infants of Bethlehem, let us, with Israel, belatedly remember this Day of Expulsion. Remembrance should re-invigorate our sympathies for the Chosen People, as well as our awareness of their re-gathering according to God’s eternal purposes. It should also strengthen our commitment to the promotion of truth in the ongoing propaganda battles regarding Israel. As 2022 is imminent, enter the date – 30 November: Yom HaGirush – in your new diaries and continue to pray for the peace of Jerusalem.
Notes
1. Yom HaGirush: Background accessed 14 Dec 2021
2. The Inside Story of Jewish ‘Expulsion Day ‘ – Yom HaGirush | United with Israel accessed 14 Dec 2021
3. Farhud Day: Remembering the screams | Rachel Wahba | The Blogs (timesofisrael.com) accessed 15 Dec 2021
4. Who was Hajj Amin al-Husayni? :: About Holocaust accessed 15 Dec 2021
5. https://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/yabber/yabber_azzam.html 02 Jan 2015, accessed 15 Dec 2021
6. 61138.jpg (1000×750) (wordpress.com) accessed 15 Dec 2021
7. Truth: Nazis, al-Husseini, Iraq, and Hussein (eagle007.blogspot.com) accessed 15 Dec 2021
