In all the Thomas affair furore, however, few critics have actually pointed out that half of Jews living in Israel are Mizrahim, originally from Arab and Muslim countries. They are as indigenous to the region as any Arab Muslim – in fact more so, as most Jewish communities predated Islam by 1,000 years. As Naim Kattan writes in Farewell Babylon, ‘An Arab could not tell a Jew to go home as the Jew had been there before him.”
How and why did they end up in Israel? Simply because they were driven out by Arab and Muslim antisemitism. Their land and property was stolen by Arab governments for no other reason than they were Jews. Were Helen Thomas ever to acknowledge the fact, it would be just as perverse for her to suggest that Mizrahim ‘go home’ to such hotbeds of anti-Jewish hatred as Libya, Yemen and Syria, as to the killing fields of Germany and Poland.
Go read the rest.