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This is a guest essay by Rachel Wahba, an Egyptian-Iraqi Jew born in India.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
From Jesus to bagels, from Einstein to Jonas Salk to Hollywood, we Jews have been fine with “cultural appropriation.”
The Yiddish of Ashkenazi Jews is now part of Americana: klutz, schmooze, oy vey, schlep, chutzpah, shlemiel, and shlimazel. If there were more Sephardic, Mizrahi, and Arab Jews like me in the United States, we’d have some doozies from Judeo-Arabic and Ladino, too.
But there is a line we have to draw. Our Holocaust, our genocide, and October 7th are not up for appropriation.
The cries that Israel is committing “genocide” the day after October 7th are not only twisted but pure appropriation of Jewish suffering and trauma.
Appropriation of our culture and religion has gone on for millennia, and it has been used against us. Take our Torah and rename it the Old Testament? Fine. But demanding that we give it up for a “New” Testament? Not fine. Take a cool Jewish rabbi from the Galilee, a Jew who kept Shabbat, turn his Passover seder into his Last Supper and his Jewishness into his death knell, and then blame the Jews? That lie was a terrible line to cross.
The Church pointed at us, Judean Jews living under Roman occupation, when the Romans had changed the name of our land to Syria-Palestina to distance us from our identity. We hardly had the power to conduct the cruel, Roman-style crucifixion of Jesus, who had become too popular among the Jews flocking to him, making the Romans uncomfortable.
Were Jews unhappy with Roman rule priming him for resistance against the Empire? I imagine this upstart rabbi was a political threat. We don’t know. What we do know is that Jews were in no position to crucify anyone.
But we paid for it. We paid for it terribly in the Spanish Inquisition. Even converting from Judaism to Catholicism did not save everyone from gruesome deaths and eventual expulsion.
We hid, and we ran when we could, from one country to another. The Land of Israel was no longer ours. After the Romans, the Ottoman Empire conquered the land and ignored it. Jews on every continent we wandered into prayed daily, facing Jerusalem, to return.
Expulsion after expulsion, from adopted homes in Christian and Muslim lands, under demeaning laws and normalized Jew hatred, we lived with the demand that we convert to what had been appropriated, or face pogroms and persecution.
I know this history in every cell of my body. I grew up politically powerless, a stateless Egyptian-Iraqi Jewish girl in a Catholic school in Japan.
The nuns of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary taught us in every classroom that the Jews killed Christ, the Son of God. After I gave my oral book report on the Holocaust, they told us that Hitler would go to heaven “because he was a baptized Christian.”
Mother Roberts was clear: I, the intransigent Jew, would “never see the face of God.” She lectured us that Jews would continue to be persecuted with “more Holocausts until Jews accept Jesus Christ as (our) Lord and Savior.” Not one classmate spoke up. That was in seventh grade.
Earlier, in third grade, my teacher Mother Joan of Arc, lovingly took my hand in hers and placed me in front of the life-size statue of Jesus dying in torment on the cross. I still feel the pain. Who could not? But I knew Jesus was not my god.
“Look, Racheline,” she said. “See above his crown of thorns, it is written, ‘Jesus, King of the Jews.’ He was a Jew, just like you.” I looked at her warm eyes and asked, “But if he was a Jew, then why must I convert?” Everything in a missionary school is about conversion, and at the time I had no choice but to go to this school.
Islam did its own version. It took parts of our Torah into the Quran. It took Abraham, Moses, and Jerusalem. It built mosques over our holiest places and forbade us entry. It took our prophets and our stories. It decided that Jews had corrupted our own scriptures and that the real versions belonged to Islam.
How many “River to the Sea” marchers know that Jews lived in the Middle East and North Africa for centuries before Muhammad was even born? And how many know about our lives as despised second-class citizens (known in Arabic as dhimmis) for refusing to convert or accept Islam’s version of us?
My family, from a long line of Egyptian and Iraqi Jews whose ancestors were in those lands before Islam, lived that arrangement as despised “dirty” Jews. We were legally second-class citizens, forced to pay a special tax, tolerated when it was convenient, and punished with no recourse when it wasn’t.
We, the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa, lived precariously. Coexistence was a fantasy, and life was too frequently marred by horror. Both my parents’ native lands are Jew-free now. Ask why. Have you heard about the Farhud in 1941? The expulsions from Egypt in 1956?
Nearly a million Jews were pauperized and forced out of Arab lands within a generation in the 1950s. Our property was stolen, our nationalities and passports confiscated, and our communities of twenty-five hundred years erased. We were humiliated and told never to return.
Today a new museum has opened in Baghdad in what used to be a Jewish school. It houses everyday objects along with religious artifacts, appropriated when Iraq forced its Jewish population to leave with only one suitcase of clothing. Our belongings feed the curious. As author Dara Horn painted the picture for us in her book, “People Love Dead Jews,” Iraq is Jew-free.
Most of us Jews from what became Arab lands are now in Israel. Most of us had nowhere else open to us, even if what was open was cramped tent cities (known as maabarot in Hebrew), in the dirt-poor Israel of the 1950s.
The world ignored us. It ignored our ethnic cleansing all over the Arab world. No one asks, “Where are your Jews?” We survived the Holocaust, the pogroms, the Farhud, the terrible toll of war in 1948, then 1967, then 1973, and the slaughters of October 7th.
And now we are committing “genocide”? The charge is obscene.
The word genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew whose dozens of family members were murdered in the Holocaust.
Now “genocide” gets shouted at us on campuses and spray-painted on synagogues. “Ethnic cleansing” is spouted by people who have never once heard the word Farhud, who never saw what my mother witnessed in Baghdad in 1941. I heard those blood-curdling screams through her memories, and through Granny’s stories of the rape, pillage, and slaughter.
Recently I saw Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur in San Francisco. He said, “You know who Israeli Jews are? The Jews who didn’t get into America.” They are the Jews who survived the Holocaust and had nowhere to go; the Jews who survived pogroms in the Middle East and North Africa and had nowhere to go; the Jews who were kicked out or forced out of Arab lands in the 1950s and had nowhere to go. And by the way, Middle Eastern Jews (Mizrahim in Hebrew), make up more than half of Israel’s Jewish population.
Instead of shutting down the Qatar & Co. enterprise, the charismatic Islamists play the “genocide” game against us, appropriating our genocide. Figures like Zohran Mamdani and ridiculous ones like Greta Thunberg echo Islamist propaganda and claim Israel should not exist.
Wars are a hell no one should have to experience: no Israeli, no Gazan, no one. The Gaza war brought on accusations of genocide manufactured by Hamas. Hamas started a terrible war, and Hamas refuses to surrender. Hamas depends on as many of its own people dying as possible for its ultimate cause: to destroy Israel.
I grew up in postwar Japan. I met survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I saw their burns and disfigurement, the war-weary amputees, and the beggars and their children picking lice off their bodies on the streets. I saw a small bit of the hell that wars are. I remember hearing Japanese adults talk about the war and admit, “Hai, sensō maketa kara, ganbarō” (“Yes, we lost the war, now we courageously rebuild”). They surrendered. They rebuilt. They gave up war. Hamas does the opposite.
Genocide is the intent to destroy, to exterminate, a people. The word has a meaning, and that meaning matters precisely because it was built out of what happened to us. That Hamas wants every Jew in Israel slaughtered is genocide. Appropriating our history by claiming “genocide” while Hamas forces its own people to suffer horribly is its long game for getting rid of the Jewish state.
Genocide? What army bent on destroying a people warns them first? The IDF drops leaflets, sends text messages, and makes phone calls telling Gazans where it is about to strike so they can get out. It’s not rocket science. If Israelis wanted genocide, it would have happened.
On October 13, 2023, the IDF warned about 1.1 million people in northern Gaza to move south, out of harm’s way. Did Egypt open its doors? And who forced Gazan women, men, and children not to go anywhere? Who caged them in? Hamas. “There will be no ‘displacement,’” Hamas euphemistically, cruelly decreed. Hamas set up roadblocks on the main road south to stop people from escaping.
Hamas needs its people stuck where the bombs fall. Hamas needs children killed for world support. Hamas has told us it is willing to have as many of its own people killed as it takes to win world opinion, in order to annihilate the Jews and get rid of Israel.
Hamas proudly recorded the beheadings and rapes of October 7th on body cams for all to see — a barbaric attack on men, women, children, and babies. Yet instead of outrage and horror at Hamas, the mass “protests” against Israel’s supposed “genocide” began the very next day, October 8th.
The Hamas charter vows death to Israel, death to the Jew. They carry out the vow in their actions, on their body cams, in their every move. That is what intent to commit genocide looks like. They refuse coexistence. They want one state.
Israel has tried several times for a two-state solution. I shouldn’t have to repeat this, but it’s so easily “forgotten.” We want a country, no matter how small, so we will share, and we have partitioned. We tried to give up more and were met with resounding no’s each time. Under Islamic doctrine, once a land has been Islamized, as the Ottoman Empire did in the Land of Israel, it can never revert to its original owners.
Every version of Jew-hatred says the same thing: The Jew is the source of the world’s evil, and the world will be redeemed when the Jew is punished.
Two-thousand years ago, a Jew was hung on a cross so he could carry the sins of the world. Today it is Israel, the Jew among nations, carrying the sins of the world: all the colonialism, racism, every war and every injustice the West feels guilty about, all of it hung on one Jewish state the size of New Jersey.
The word genocide will not be appropriated to twist our suffering, our Holocaust, into ostracizing and killing Jews. Genocide will not be appropriated and handed back to us as an indictment. They don’t get to nail us to the cross again.
Preston Moore, you claim here that Netanyahu has broken or breaking Devine Laws. That's a very serious accusation. Would you like to clarify for the readers, which Devine Laws exactly did Netanyahu break?
It would be helpful if you add some real genuine evidence to your accusations.
So this DIvine Law of which you speak, whatever it might be, are only Jews subject to it? Kind of like the UN laws - or is everyone equally responsible for not breaking these DIvine laws? If we as Jews are subject to special DIvine Laws, it would be helpful to know what they are. And if no one else, like you for instance, are subject to them, it would also be nice to know that.