Discussion on Ethnic Cleansing and Displacement

A whole city was gassed in a single day.

No Oxford resolution about them. Professor Pappé will tell you about

nineteen

forty-eight.

He will tell you that it was an ethnic cleansing.

He has built a career on that. I'm here to tell you what his career left

out. In the same decades, two people in this region lost their

homes.

Seven hundred thousand Palestinians, Arabs, were displaced in nineteen

forty-eight. Dr. Karmi was one of them. Her loss is real.

Eight hundred and fifty thousand Jews were expelled from

every Arab land in the region. Pappé's refusal to acknowledge this

is not history, it's selection. His own colleague,

leading historian Professor Benny Morris, called him "One of the world's

sloppiest historian." I don't think you are sloppy.

I think you know exactly what you're doing.

Iraq did not expel its Jews because of anything Israel did.

The Farhud, the pogrom that destroyed my grandmother's

childhood, happened in nineteen forty-one, seven years

before the proposition had a state to blame.

My grandmother watched her best friend raped and mutilated in the streets of

Baghdad by an Iraqi Arab policeman because she was a

Jew.

That is how her childhood ended.

The Jews of Iraq were stripped out of the citizenship by

law in nineteen

fifty, written in Baghdad, passed in Baghdad,

signed by Iraqi Arabs. That was not Israel doing.

That was the unwillingness of Arab nationalists to allow anyone else

to be sovereign in this region. The Kurds have faced century of

state violence, at least hundred and sixty thousand killed in the

Anfal campaign alone. Whole city was gassed in a single day.

No Oxford resolution about them. Christians were once majority in

Lebanon. They are now under a third of the country.

The Assyrians live primarily in the diaspora.

The Greeks of Alexandria were expelled.

The Amazigh were Arabized before Morocco finally agreed that it's their

country too. Every people that asked sovereignty after the

Ottoman Empire fell have been told the same thing by Arab

nationalists. Whatever their stripe, Pan-Arabs,

Syrians, Iraqi, Lebanese, and now Islamist, the

Levant is Arab. There is no other story.

There is no other people. Arab national self-determination was a

legitimate aspiration. I don't want to say that it wasn't.

But the problem is the claim that Arabs should be the only sovereign

people in

the Levant, that even Israel, zero point zero three percent of the

Middle East,

the only Jewish country in the world, even Israel can't exist because it's

Jewish.

We have to Arabize it too, right? The problem is the claim

that Arabs should be the

only sovereign people in the Levant.

Once the claim is set aside, peace become possible.

Morocco has proven it.

The Jews are not the exception to this pattern.

We are the people who build states strong enough to survive this.

Dr. Karmi and I are both children of

Pan-Arabism's failure.

Her family lost their home in Jerusalem. Mine lost their home in Baghdad.

One ideology, two losses. We are both its victims