Cooking up fantasies about Mizrahi Jews

Jonathan Cook: fantasist

In actual fact, 70 Israelis of Mizrahi and Sephardi descent met Mohamed Madani and other Palestinian officials in Ramallah in April with the approval of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

It was Netanyahu’s last-ditch attempt to persuade the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, with whom Madani is close, to make peace. Bearing giant images of Baghdad in the 1920s and sweets from Iraq, the Palestinians paid a return visit to the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center Or Yehuda near Tel Aviv: they warned that it could be Israel’s last chance to make peace while Abbas was in power.

Mohamed Madani, Cook alleges, was banned for ‘European colonialist’ reasons. In fact the Israeli government has accused Madani of ‘subversive activity’ and ‘political terror’.

Undeterred, Cook brazenly sets out his ‘European colonialist’ stall.

Using the offensive expression ‘Arab Jews’ Cook alleges that Israel’s Ashkenazi establishment “excluded Jews from Arab countries from their nation-building project.” He pads out his thesis with cherry-picked quotes from Ben Gurion and others denigrating Mizrahi Jews as “a rabble” and “mentally-retarded.”

Cook cooks up the theory that Israel’s European leaders were motivated by a need to prevent ‘Arab Jews’ from making a political alliance with Palestinians. This explains why Israel’s establishment smothered the immigrants with DDT, segregated them from their Palestinian brothers and then tried to disinfect them of their Arabness.

What’s even more clever, is that the Israeli Government managed to make Mizrahi Jews “internalise the self-hatred cultivated for them by the state.” Hence, Mizrahim have been brainwashed to vote for the far-right and scream “death to the Arabs” at football matches. Genius, no?

With impeccable logic, Cook says this Arab-hatred has led to such incidents as the Hebron shooting by a Mizrahi soldier of a Palestinian as he lay wounded.

Cook trots out other hackneyed fantasies, such as “Israel engineered much of the migration of Arab Jews, inducing them with false promises or conducting false-flag operations to foment suspicion of them in their home countries.”

Even in his own writings, Mahmoud Abbas admits that Arab regimes made a ‘fatal’ mistake — causing the Jews to emigrate en masse as a result of discriminatory laws.

Jonathan Cook describes himself as a journalist — but he seems better at writing fiction.