Activists acknowledged such treatment only accelerated the emigration of Jews.
Cairo, February 3 – Opponents of Jewish sovereignty in the ancestral Jewish homeland voiced frustration today that their ongoing efforts to demonstrate that Jews do not need that sovereignty, by means of harassing, attacking, and inciting against those Jews everywhere, has borne little practical fruit, with vanishingly few Jews remaining in those lands that spent hundreds or thousands of years treating them as second-class at best, and as fodder for extermination at worst.
Anti-Zionist activists in the Middle East, where thriving Jewish communities existed until the middle of the twentieth century amid rising persecution, expressed puzzlement and disappointment in numerous interviews and discussions this week that their main avenue of endeavor to convince Jews to trust their host cultures to protect them – in the main by confiscating Jewish property, mass-raping Jewish women, imprisoning Jews on trumped-up charges, subjecting Jews to massacres and pillage, and generally making living safely as a Jew in countries throughout the region untenable – has enjoyed precious little success. In fact, the activists acknowledged, such treatment only accelerated the migration of Jews from the lands they had inhabited for up to twenty-five centuries to the reestablished Jewish one.
“Jews don’t need to cause trouble or risk displacing Palestinian Arabs by establishing a state of their own,” argued Moroccan activist Hassan Mubruk. “That’s a point my predecessors and I have made repeatedly, but the Jews refused to listen, and now the region has seen a century of turmoil. As soon as the Zionists declared their statehood more than seventy years ago, our governments stressed that in cogent terms: we nationalized their property, looted their homes, beat them in the streets, and sent them packing with little more than the clothes on their backs – and they spat on our faces by going, by and large, to the Zionist entity, in direct contravention of everything we had worked to instill in them. The lack of appreciation for our concern for their welfare just galls.”
“We don’t have any Jews left here,” noted Yemeni activist Itbah al-Yahud. “The last handful were expelled last year. It’s a shame that after more than two thousand years here, they failed to realize how good they had it, and after 1948 left in large numbers whenever an opportunity presented itself. How could they possibly not want to stay? They had protected status, which our society understood as license to abuse, torment, oppress, and harass them. Ingrates.”
Activists also observed that their colleagues in most European countries expressed parallel puzzlement.