והנה חלק מראיון עם פליט יהודי
ממדינה צפון אפריקנית. ההסבר שלו להכחשה כמו שלך ככל הנראה די נכונה: Thus I arrived in France, and found myself up against the legend which was current in left-wing Parisian salons: the Jews had always lived in perfect harmony with the Arabs. I was almost congratulated for having been born in such a land where racial discrimination and xenophobia were unknown. It made me laugh. I heard so much nonsense about North Africa, and from people of the best intentions that, honestly, I did not react to it at all. The chattering only began to worry me when it became a political argument that is, after 1967. The Arabs then made up their minds to use this travesty of the truth, which fell on willing ears once the reaction against Israel had set in after her victory. It is now time to denounce this absurdity. If I had to explain the success of the myth, I would list five converging factors. The first is the product of Arab propaganda: "The Arabs never did the Jews any harm, so why do the Jews come to despoil them of their lands, when the responsibility for Jewish misfortune is altogether European? The whole responsibility for the Middle East conflict rests on the Jews of Europe. The Arab Jews never wanted to create a separate country and they are full of trust and friendship towards the Moslem Arabs." This is a double lie: the Arab Jews are much more distrustful of the Moslems than are the European Jews, and they dreamed of the Land of Israel long before the Russian and Polish Jews did. The second argument stems from the cogitations of a part of the European Left: the Arabs were oppressed, therefore they could not be anti-Semites. This is ridiculously manichaeistic - as though one could not be oppressed and also be a racist! As if workers have not been xenophobic! Actually the argument is not convincing: the real purpose is to be able with a clear conscience to fight Zionism and thus serve the Soviet Union. The third argument is the doing of contemporary historians, among whom, curiously enough, are certain Western Jews. Having undergone the dreadful Nazi slaughter, they could not imagine a similar thing happening elsewhere. However, if we except the massacres of the twentieth century (the pogroms in Russia after Kishinev and later by Stalin, as well as the Nazi crematoria), the total number of Jewish victims from Christian pogroms over the centuries probably does not exceed the total of the victims of the smaller and larger periodic pogroms perpetrated in Arab lands under Islam over the past millennium. Jewish history has so far been written by Western Jews; there has been no great Oriental Jewish historian. This is why only the "Western" aspects of Jewish suffering are widely known. One is reminded of the absurd distinction drawn by Jules Isaac, usually better inspired, between "true" and "false" anti-Semitism, "true" anti-Semitism being the result of Christianity. The truth is that it is not only Christianity that creates anti-Semitism, but the fact that the Jew is a member of a minority - in Christendom or in Islam. In making of anti-Semitism a Christian creation, Isaac, I regret to say, has minimized the tragedy of the Jews from Arab lands and helped to confuse people. The fourth factor is that many Israelis, perturbed by the issue of coexistence with their Arab neighbours, wish to believe that this existed in the past; otherwise the whole undertaking would have to be discarded in despair! But in order to survive, it would be far wiser to take a clear view of the actual environment. The fifth and last factor is our own complicity, the more or less unwitting complacency of us Jews from Arab countries - the uprooted who tend to embellish the past, who in our longing for our native Orient minimize, or completely efface, the memory of persecutions. In our recollections, in our imagination, it was a wholly marvelous life, even though our own newspapers from that period attest the contrary. How I wish that all this had been true - that we had enjoyed a singular existence in comparison with the usual Jewish condition! Unfortunately, it is all a huge lie: Jews lived most lamentably in Arab lands. The State of Israel is not the outcome only of the sufferings of European Jewry. It is certainly possible, contrary to the thinking - if there is any thinking at all - of a part of the European Left, to free oneself from oppression and in turn to become an oppressor towards, for example, one's own minorities. Indeed, this happens very often with many new nations.