In an Al-Monitor article published Dec. 22, my colleague, Iraqi journalist Shukur Khilkhal, wrote about the renewed discussion among Iraqi Muslims regarding the Jewish community and its contribution to Iraqi culture and society. He mentioned that the Baath Party, which ruled from 1968 to 2003, imposed a total ban on revisiting the issue of the Muslim majority’s attitude toward the Jewish community. It is only in the last decade that Iraqis have dared to cast a critical eye over the fate of the community that lived in their midst for some 2,500 years, until it was forced to flee in fright in the 1940s and ’50s.
Unlike the prevailing view in Israel, Iraq’s citizens do not place all the blame for the Jewish flight on the “subversive activities” of the Zionist movement. Historian Rashid al-Khayoun claims that several Arab religious figures played a central role in formulating a plan for the forced departure of some 150,000 Iraqi Jews.
The somewhat dry historic research has been augmented by films and television series that recount the contribution of the Jewish community to the local culture. Khilkhal reports that the changing consciousness is also permeating the justice system and that in 2009, an Iraqi Jewish woman managed to get back her home in Baghdad after winning a lawsuit for the restitution of property that was confiscated when the Jews were forced to emigrate.
Such texts are priceless added value to legal agreements, regional diplomatic initiatives and security arrangements between peoples and nations. The willingness of the people of the Middle East to recognize crimes against human beings for the sole reason that they were Jewish, the ability to apologize to them and to compensate them, are essential conditions for sustainable peace. The book “In Ishmael’s House: the History of the Jews and Muslim Lands” (translated into Hebrew only a year ago) refutes the prevailing belief about the allegedly “idyll” enjoyed by Jewish minorities in Muslim states. The author, renowned British historian Martin Gilbert, paints a more complex picture. The Jews were a distinct and low-level minority, dependent on the good will of the ruler. In return for the protection of their lives and property, they were forced to accept legal and social discrimination.
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