‘I believe that Jews have to know their history’
Since the deadliest day the Jewish community has experienced since the Holocaust, protesters have filled streets across the West. Intertwined within these protests have been activists who denounce Israel as an imperialist state, a foreign entity planted by European empires that needs to be uprooted.
Executive producer Moses Znaimer, founder of ZoomerMedia Limited, told National Post that his interest in the subject grew once he “began to understand more fully the extent of it and the nature of the lies that it unveiled.”
“I was amazed that nobody had done anything about it; that the (Jewish) community itself was not talking about it; that even the Israelis weren’t talking about it,” he said.
The documentary opens up with graphic images of the Hamas atrocities spliced with English-speaking activists justifying the attacks because Jews are not indigenous to the region.
His statement serves as the jumping-off point for the film to explore the deep roots of Jewish history in the Middle East, and how the people disappeared. The region was home to nearly one million Jewish people, often referred to as Mizrahi Jews, before they were ethnically cleansed throughout the twentieth century. Many were forcibly expelled or fled following the establishment of Israel in 1948, when surrounding Arab nations invaded and sought to destroy the newborn country.
“Algeria, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, your Jews fled as refugees after suffering persecution and deadly pogroms,” Hillel Neuer, the leader of UN Watch, a group that scrutinizes the United Nations (UN) and its agencies, is shown saying, at one point in the film, as part of his now-famous “Where Are Your Jews?” speech that was delivered before the UN Human Rights Council seven years ago.
Jewish life throughout the region was often precarious prior to the emergence of a Jewish state. Many fled pogroms reminiscent of October 7, such as the Farhud in Iraq, where nearly two hundred Jews were killed and thousands more injured in Baghdad in 1941. A similar pogrom in Aleppo six years later killed almost one hundred people and led to most of the community fleeing in its wake.
“These are Judenrein countries now where they (once) had big Jewish communities,” Judy Feld Carr, a community leader in Toronto, told National Post, referring to the Nazi term for towns that were cleansed of their Jews.
Since the 1970s, Carr helped thousands of Syrian Jews seeking to flee their country by paying ransoms or bribery deals to officials in the country. The dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad used the historic Jewish community as a bargaining chip to extract wealth.
Many of these events have been lost to history, Carr said, because Jewish refugees became well-integrated and successful in their newly adopted homes and cared for by co-religionists.
“That’s what astonished me, that not only the world at large had forgotten this, if ever it had taken note, but that within the Jewish community itself, it was not something that was talked about,” Znaimer told the Post.
“I had become, over the years, you know, aware that in the lead up to the (Israeli) Declaration of Independence, there had been a lot of turmoil in Palestine itself, but really had no real comprehension of the depth of the histories and the nature of the communities that were displaced on the other side.”
A second theme of the documentary touches upon UNRWA, a group accused by critics of perpetuating the conflict by opposing the integration of Palestinians into their host countries, sharing antisemitic material in classrooms and having Hamas members within their ranks.
“Every refugee population in the world goes down over time. Because you’re a refugee, but if your kid is born in the United States or Canada or somewhere and has nationality, they’re not refugees anymore,” documentarian Simcha Jacobovici says near the end of the documentary.
“You had 700,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands, they don’t exist as refugees, their children and grandchildren are not refugees. And none of the Jewish refugees, the Jewish Arabs, have ever counted as refugees.”
The film seeks to balance this narrative, acknowledging the reality of Palestinian refugees who either fled or were expelled by Israel during the 1948 conflict alongside a similar number of Jews depopulated from Arab countries throughout the Middle East.
“I believe that Jews have to know their history,” Carr said. “That what’s happening now is also part of our history.”
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