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Tunisian Jews were enlisted into forced labour during the six-month Nazi occupation from November 1942 (photo credit: Yad Vashem).
Once a year in Israel, a piercing siren is sounded for two minutes. On every road, street and corner of the country, life is temporarily suspended. People stop in the middle of walking, driving or working, to stand in silence, and commemorate the suffering of the Holocaust in honour of Israel’s national day of memorial.
Despite a collapsing Lebanese economy and considerable political turmoil, Hezbollah continues to threaten Israel. These threats must be taken seriously,.
One can point to the Oujda and Djerrada riots of 1948, in which 48 Jews died. Spasmodic violence in the 1950s was directed against the wedge group caught between the French colonials and the Muslims the Jews. One can point to the fact that Morocco forbade its Jews from emigrating for five years, provoking increasingly desperate attempts to flee.
Zionism became a crime and a pretext for imprisonment once Morocco became a member of the Arab League. Jews in mixed areas were frequently harassed and threatened. Mob violence erupted so frequently that the troubles were hardly worth recording. One Jewish woman asked her neighbors for assurance that an anti-Jewish riot was not being planned for the date of her daughter’s wedding.
Last month, 200 academics published a document called The Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, which they recommend should replace the IHRA.
The Mizrahim suffered persecution but, at some times and in some places, there was tolerance, which allowed them to prosper and make contributions to the societies in which they lived in commerce, academia, the arts, and even as government advisers. From Morocco to what became Pakistan, Jewish communities survived.
Then in 1940, Nazi Germany defeated France. The French colonial possessions of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia came under the rule of the Vichy regime, a collaborationist government that introduced “race laws” discriminating against Jews, excluding Jews from certain professions and confiscating Jewish property.