Appearing under the headline, “Review Fact Checking on Israel – Palestine Conflict Raises Concern,” Karen wrote on March 15, 2024:
On Feb. 23, The Oberlin Review Editorial Board wrote of its editorial process that, “each article is fact-checked rigorously by our production editors.” I can confirm that, in my dealing with the board, it questioned nearly every claim I made, from claims about civilian casualties in Gaza to the claim that the Bible is “one of the world’s oldest written records” (Review Article on Israel-Gaza War Contains Numerous Misrepresentations, The Oberlin Review, Feb. 16, 2024).
In some cases, the editors’ suggestions made the article stronger and clearer, and I appreciated them. However, the editors made one change to which I did not agree. In fact, when asked, I expressly declined.
In my initial submission, I wrote that, “in the decade after the 1948 war, when one Arab country after another expelled Jewish populations that had lived among them for centuries — albeit as second-class citizens known as dhimmis — many of those refugees, too, had nowhere to go except Israel. Today, about half of Israel’s Jewish population is descended from those refugees.” I agreed to remove the reference to dhimmis. Over my express objection, however, editors changed the second sentence to, “today, about half of Israel’s Jewish population is descended from Sephardic and Mizrachi diaspora communities — many of whom could have come to Israel as refugees.”
This is an erasure of the experiences of these Jews of color, who lived as second-class citizens in Arab lands for centuries prior to their eventual expulsion.
The dhimmi status to which Jews were subjected for over a millennium was a kind of Middle Eastern Jim Crow. As dhimmis, Jews, among other restrictions, as noted in Jewish Virtual Library, “were excluded from public office and armed service … were forbidden to bear arms … not allowed to ride horses or camels, to build synagogues or churches taller than mosques, to construct houses higher than those of Muslims or to drink wine in public … not allowed to pray or mourn in loud voices-as that might offend the Muslims. The dhimmi had to show public deference toward Muslims — always yielding them the center of the road.” Jews living as dhimmis in the Middle East and North Africa were periodically subjected to violence with no recourse. For example, in Morocco in 1465, almost all of the inhabitants of the Fez Jewish ghetto were killed. In Iraq in 1941, there was a two-day long outbreak of violence against the Baghdad Jewish community known as the Farhud. Estimates of the numbers of Jews killed in Farhud range from 180 to 1000.
When these Jews were finally expelled from the lands in which they had lived for millennia, they left behind, by one estimate reported by The Jerusalem Post, $150 billion worth of property. When they arrived in Israel, they endured economic hardship as well as discrimination from the more secular Ashkenazi Jews who had preceded them.
Read the rest here.
