As a teenager in Iraq my Jewish grandmother watched her best friend raped and killed and another friend shot along her 8 siblings and her mother. 150,000 Jews lost everything and were forced to leave to Israel, the only country to accept them. My father and his family were part of 105,000 Tunisian Jews who were forced to leave the country after decades of abuse + violence. But you won’t hear the stories of oppression and ethnic cleansing of 850,000 Jews from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). You won’t hear about the many Jews who died when their countries turned on them, nor about the lives and communities we once knew. For many Mizrahi (MENA) Jews the world never recognized our collective trauma and it’s always sidelined. If that’s not enough, when presented with the historical realities of how the Turks and Arabs have oppressed communities all over the Middle East, the international media, scholars and activists from the west will whitewash these crimes of colonialism by claiming the Arab, and later Ottoman Turkish Empires, were peaceful and tolerant, allowing minorities to flourish, even going so far as to say how Europeans led the Turks and Arabs to violence. Minorities in the Muslim World (57 countries in MENA) sought independence separate from the empires. This was true for the Armenians, Georgians, Assyrians, Kurds, Jews and Lebanese Christians. And before them, even the Greeks and the Serbs. And yes, many of these smaller groups of peoples appealed to Western Europeans for help. In response to the national awakening of these smaller groups in the late 1900s, the imperialist nations, the Turks, Arabs and Iranians not only sought to preserve their power but even claimed the land of these nations in a process called irredentism. In a narrative flip, these imperial peoples of the region (particularly the Turks and Arabs) claimed the nations seeking independence were stealing land from them and used violence to retrieve it. From the 1880s until 1923, The Pan-Turks not only sought to unite the various Turkish peoples, but they were also central in claiming the places that Turks had conquered as settler colonialists like Armenia, parts of Greece and the Assyrian parts of present-day Turkey. They were also instigators of genocides in these areas when groups subject to their rule showed any sign of pursuing independence, including the Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians. Turks ensured the Kurds and Assyrians who remained would be subjected to forced assimilation and they expelled all of the Greeks and Armenians from Turkey. Pan-Arabs, who were also active from the 1880s, claimed areas where Arabs had settled under settler colonialism in the Middle Ages and sometimes later, as original Arab homelands. In aiding the British in overcoming the Ottoman Empire, Arab leaders positioned themselves to take over multicultural countries and pursue their own imperialistic goals. Thus, Pan-Arabs forced Arab culture and customs upon the Assyrians, Berbers, Maronites and Egyptian Copts. By the 1940s, they had created the Arab League and tried to Arabize all of North Africa and the Middle East. In fact, Pan-Arabs – even more than the Pan-Turks – were different from the Pan-Germans, for example, in accepting the assimilation of non-Arab peoples as Arabs in principle, even though in practice they still viewed them as different. Hence, the policies of Arabization and forced assimilation. In fact, all of the indigenous peoples of the Middle East – from the Kurds to the Assyrians, to the Jews and the Maronites, many already diminished by mass murder – were present at the Versailles Treaty and called for their national self-determination. As countless of activists push a PR campaign to commemorate the Palestinian Arab refugees of the Arab war on Israel, I wish they had half the sympathy for the millions that were and still are truly oppressed by imperial power. Read more: https://t.co/sdGsRYD9HY
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