NOTE: Al Jazeera published an abridged version of this essay here. Poll: 76% of Israelis support Ukraine. Only 10% support Russia. Among Israeli Arab Muslims support of Russia – 35%. More than half the Israelis support official Israeli policy (which is close to neutrality). https://t.co/Glv5GyFueW — Imshin (@imshin) March 4, 2022 Since the start of […]
Arab Jews: the ‘Nakba’ That Wasn’t Zionist claims of a historic mass expulsion of Jews from Arab Lands are largely hype, hasbara, and myth
Over the years, a recurring hasbara trope has accused Arab states of ethnically cleansing their entire Jewish populations in the years between 1948-1956. They marshal vivid maps displaying the numbers of Jews originally in these countries and how many are left currently. Phrases like “expulsion,” “refugee,” “Jewish Nakba,” and “pogroms” are bandied about as if […]
Meron Disaster and the Dangers of Theocracy
Let’s begin at the beginning: Israel is a theocracy. Not a democracy. To be more precise, it is an ethno-theocracy, in which a single religion enjoys supremacy over others; and that religion controls dominant levers of social and political state power. This may seem somewhat afield from the post title, but bear with me. Every […]
How Hitler Killed Half the Jewish Diaspora and Zionism Projects Death of the Rest
I recently participated in an online panel that accompanied the screening of the film documentary, Yiddish: the Mama Loshn, for the Boulder Jewish Film Festival. I was not invited to the panel as a Yiddishist or professor of Yiddish or Jewish history (the three other panel members were). Instead, director Pierre Sauvage asked me to […]