THE NAKBAS - I wish these people had half of the sympathy they have for the Palestinians for the millions that were and still are truly oppressed by imperial power.

This May and every May Palestinians around the world mourn what is now 70 years of “Zionist imperialism” and the “nakba” (catastrophe) they have suffered. You will hear the fictitious story of the “white” Jewish Europeans who came and colonized the land of the indigenous “brown” Palestinians, all within the context of European colonialism and white supremacy.

Indeed, much noise is made around the world about the “sexy” Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinians (the Arab community at the time) and their advocates are extremely vocal. But lost in the debate over what happened or didn’t happen to the Palestinians in their catastrophe are the stories of the tens of millions – yes, tens of millions – of victims of genocide, expulsion and forced assimilation (cultural genocide) from Arab and Turkish imperialism.

My family are Berber Jews on my father’s side and Iraqi Jews on my mother’s. Both were expelled from their lands, and because of this persecution I came to learn about these largely untold stories. Over time I have learned that many other groups were persecuted, en masse, without any restitution or “right of return,” and the global community is (and was) silent. Why the double standards? In the last 150 years, “nakbas” occurred to those indigenous to North Africa, the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean.

The approximate number of victims from genocides one rarely hears about include: The Assyrians (300,000 from 1914-1920); Armenians (1.5 million from 1914-1923); Kurds (50,000-180,000 from 1986-1989); Greeks (450,000-750,000 from 1913-1920); Yazidis (10,000 in 2014 alone, other numbers unknown); and the Sudanese in Darfur (300,000 from 2003-2009).

The victims of expulsion and persecution leading to emigration include: Lebanese Maronites (eight million-14 million Lebanese in the diaspora, and four million in Lebanon); Assyrian Christians (15 million in the diaspora and in Syria); and the Armenians under the Turkish Empire (11 million in the diaspora today).

In Lebanon and Syria, both states deliberately created nationality laws that would bar Christians from returning, ensuring a Muslim Arab majority in these countries.

From North African and Middle Eastern Jewish communities, 850 000 Jews were expelled or forced to flee North Africa and the Middle East. Additionally, one million Copts have left Egypt.

But even where expulsions or emigration did not occur, widespread persecution did.

Who hears about the forced assimilation of the Berbers, Kurds and Sudanese? Since the 1960s, these communities have been suffered under forced Arabization in schools and government institutions. For example, Berber only became an official language in Algeria in 2002; prior to 2002, Kurdish was forbidden in Turkish media; and apartheid laws against Jewish communities in Yemen dictated that Jewish children be taken from their families and given to Muslims in forced conversions. There are numerous similar examples against Jewish communities throughout the Middle East – even in the late 20th century. To this day, no restitution has been made by the persecutors of these heinous crimes.


https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/The-nakbas-553448

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