The current scandal over anti-Semitism in the British Labour party throws into sharp focus how misinformed, or just plain ignorant, its leader Jeremy Corbyn and some of its members can be. Dominic Lawson writing in the Daily Mail nails the widespread misconception of Israel as a nation of ‘whites’. (With thanks: Michelle)
“Bizarrely, the likes of Ken Livingstone and his leader Jeremy Corbyn (who can’t even bring himself to say the word ‘Israel’) see the Israeli Arabs as the ‘blacks’ and the Jews as the ‘whites’. Yet after the state of Israel was created by UN resolution in 1948, the overwhelming majority of Jews who flooded into the new nation were those from Sephardi and Mizrahi backgrounds, in other words, from Arab and Muslim countries.
Their descendants, not those of European survivors of the Holocaust, still form the majority of Israeli Jews.
The reason for this much less well-known exodus was not just that Jews had faced institutionalised discrimination in Muslim lands. The very creation of the state of Israel had enraged the Arab nations, whose citizens began exercising savage reprisals against their Jewish populations, many of whom were expropriated and expelled.”
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