In March, the family of Shlomo Mansour marked his 86th birthday. Since the Hamas massacre of October 7, his children have not received any sign that he is alive or dead. Mansour is the oldest Israeli hostage in Gaza.
Mansour was abducted from Kibbutz Kissufim, one of several Israeli villages and towns attacked by Hamas. He was among hundreds of hostages dragged across the border into Gaza. But what makes Mansour unique is that he is the only person to have survived two massacres - not just the slaughter of October 7, 2023, but also the Iraqi Farhud of 1-2 June 1941.
In order to convey the enormity of the catastrophe that befell Israel on October 7 - the worst pogrom since the Holocaust - journalists, politicians and analysts have cast around for parallels with pogroms suffered by the Jews of Europe. Few have recalled comparable events in the Middle East itself, where the Jews (contrary to the false narrative that Jews are settler colonialists from Europe) were indigenous for more than two millennia, living in the region over 1,000 years before Islam and the Arab conquest.
The Farhud (Arabic for “forced dispossession”) of 1941 - seven years before the creation of Israel - mirrored the slaughter of October 7 in Israel. Mobs screaming Itbah al-Yehud! (“slaughter the Jews”) murdered hundreds of Jews, wounded 1,000, mutilated babies, raped women, looted and destroyed 900 homes and 586 Jewish-owned businesses.
Jews were thrown into the river Tigris. Iraqi doctors and nurses refused to treat the injured or, worse still, poisoned patients. Police joined the rioters.
The Farhud massacre was a watershed moment for the Jews of Iraq. A third of the inhabitants of Baghdad, they were unmatched in their loyalty and contribution to that country's economy, culture and heritage. After the Farhud Iraqi Jews realised they had no future in Iraq.
The family of Shlomo Mansour was among the 135,000 Jews - 95 percent of the community - who fled Iraq for Israel as soon as emigration was permitted. Among the founders of Kibbutz Be’eri on the Gaza border (which lost a tenth of its residents on October 7) were a group of young Iraqi Jews who had trekked across the desert to Palestine in 1947. They too were survivors of the Farhud and had turned to Zionism to save them.
Memories of the Farhud and similar episodes across the Middle East and North Africa reside deep in the psyche of more than half of Israel's Jews - refugees fleeing antisemitism in Arab and Muslim countries, or their descendants. Over 850,000 Jews became refugees - a greater number than Palestinians. Iraq today has just three Jews. Libya has none. Syria has none. Yemen has one. This was ethnic cleansing - and Hamas now wants to finish the job.
Unlike the Arab Palestinian refugees from Israel (who have not been resettled in the Palestinian Territories or Arab countries and who pass down their refugee status from generation to generation, even if they had acquired another nationality), Jewish refugees were granted citizenship in Israel and have long ago been absorbed. They view the Palestinian jihad as just the latest in a long tradition of anti-Jewish violence. Their trauma has spawned a legacy of bitterness and mistrust of their Arab neighbours, which is why many Israelis consistently vote for hardline, right-wing parties.
The roots of Hamas lie in the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist, Islamist group founded in the Nazi era. Antisemitism was - is - at the very core of its philosophy: the Muslim Brotherhood’s conspiracy theories of Jewish power have been carried over into the Hamas Covenant.
There is a link between Hamas and the Farhud. The driving force behind the Farhud was the wartime Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, an ideological antisemite and close associate of the Muslim Brotherhood who spent two years in Baghdad. The Mufti allied with the Nazis, spent most of the war years as Hitler's guest in Berlin and vowed to “kill the Jews wherever you find them”.
The Mufti’s antisemitic legacy, and that of the Muslim Brotherhood, are still with us. People who want to kill Jews will not settle for a diplomatic or two- state solution, especially when they think they are winning support for an international campaign to delegitimise the Jewish state. The eliminationalist spirit of the Farhud still animates Hamas and is shared, knowingly or unknowingly, by those western sympathisers who chant for the destruction of Israel “From the river to the sea”.
As Carl Sagan once said, “In order to know the present, you need to understand the past.” The antisemitism which led to the Farhud and the uprooting of Jews from their millennial communities in the Middle East and North Africa is alive and well, and is the engine driving Hamas’s war against the Jews of Israel. Past massacres in the Muslim world may not be well known, but they are key to understanding the anti-Jewish animus of today.
