Passover, which marks the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery, is over for another year. The festival has a special resonance for Jews, who, in their own lifetimes, experienced an exodus from repression.
In the last 50 years, hundreds of Jews from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya and more have personal stories of escape from violence, arrest, persecution, harassment, economic strangulation and extortion. Many sought refuge in Israel. Others built new lives for themselves in the West. All were relieved to find a new home in free and tolerant societies.
But as antisemitism soars, the West no longer looks as safe as it did. Jewish refugees from the Arab and Muslim world especially feel they are reliving the nightmares they once fled.
The anti-Jewish bigotry that has prevailed for decades in the Arab street has migrated to the West, where incitement and mob violence are met with an official reluctance to name the problem, let alone enforce the law. Indeed, the forces of law and order buckle before verbal and physical attacks and bullying by pro-Palestinian protesters. In the United Kingdom, for instance, police and prosecutors find it more convenient to caution or arrest victims of mob violence than their aggressors. In this toxic environment, Jews feel timid and unprotected.
The slogans chanted by the pro-Palestinian left—“From the river to the sea,” “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to Jews!”—express genocidal antisemitism, the enduring legacy of pro- Nazi Muslim Brotherhood ideology, now disguised as a human-rights cause.
Iranian- backed groups and Islamist front groups, such as the Council of American-Islamic Relations in the United States and the Muslim Association of Britain in the United Kingdom, operate openly. With their progressive allies, they have infiltrated mainstream politics, unions, churches, universities and media.
Those Jews who fled the Middle East and North Africa for the West sense they have been here before: the bullying and harassment they thought they had escaped are back with a vengeance.
Abraham Hamra, whose family went as refugees to the United States from Damascus in the 1990s, says his family fled a country where Jews were restricted in their movements and their professions, where their passports were stamped Mussawi (“a follower of Moses”), and where the perpetrators of violence remained unpunished. On arrival in America, he marveled at the freedoms that allowed Jews to walk freely wearing their kippahs and Star of David necklaces. “Who would have believed that 50 years later,” he declared, “the same type of hatred that led to the ethnic cleansing of 850,000 to a million Jews from Arab countries and Iran would follow me to the United States and transform into a social-justice movement?”
In 1970, along with almost 2,000 other desperate Jews, the remnant of an ancient 150,000-member community, Lisette Shashoua, was smuggled out of Iraq and resettled in Canada. In Baghdad, she had been terrified to witness the televised spectacle of the public hangings of 14 people—nine of them Jews—who had been falsely accused of spying for Israel.
Lisette, who had such high hopes when she landed in Canada, where today synagogues and Jewish schools are being attacked, does not hide her disillusion and anxiety: “Fifty years ago, we ran away from Iraq,” she says. “We came to the West for safety with nothing. None of us got a single penny from our adoptive countries, yet we were ever so grateful to be given the opportunity to work and to be treated equally.”
She points out that “we all served and assimilated in our new countries with loyalty and devotion. We paid our taxes promptly and were ever so proud to be Canadian, American, British ... but those who spread hate and violence have followed us and want to oust us again, turning our new adoptive countries against us! Where do we go now?”
The question is a good one. The answer necessitates a firm response from Western governments: Will they learn the lessons of history?
