Isaac Cohen is rightfully aggrieved at the expulsion of his Jewish family from Egypt following the Suez Crisis in 1956 (“Egyptian Jews,” Voice of the people, Dec. 8). But his personal experience does not reflect the complex realities of Arab Jews in Egypt or other Arab countries subsequent to Israel’s independence in 1948. Cohen allows his personal experience to become an extension of Israeli propaganda, which contributes only to continued misunderstanding in that region.
Egyptian Jews, especially prosperous ones like Cohen’s father, were generally highly identified with the British colonial enterprise that held sway into the 1950s. Their cultural identities fit neatly into neither the emerging Egyptian nationalist or Zionist categories. Their status was further conflicted by the conspiratorial bombing of American installations in Egypt by Israeli agents in 1954 with the intent to drive a wedge between Egypt and the U.S. Israel’s unjustified invasion of Egypt in 1956, with the support of Britain and France, provoked the expulsion of about 1,000 Egyptian Jews of the 50,000 that remained. Most of the remaining emigrated, but were not expelled.
It was Israel’s policy to either encourage Arab Jews in various Middle Eastern and North African countries to emigrate to Israel, or to create conditions that would force them to do so.
Nevertheless, most cosmopolitan Egyptian Jews chose to emigrate elsewhere. Thus Cohen’s apparent identification with Israel and Zionism is not shared by all of the descendants of Jewish emigrants from Arab countries, many of whom understand that the success of Zionism spelled the beginning of the end of their centuries-old traditional cultures. To be respectful of current scholarship, this tragic fate cannot be primarily attributed to “Arab anti-Semitism” in the crude manner that current Israeli propaganda, and Cohen’s personal understanding, would have it.
Such historical understanding would contribute greatly to lowering the volume in the current accusatory climate by replacing innuendo with dialogue.
