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I'm a 'Jewish Palestinian' and I don't believe in different races

Yad Vashem’s first Palestinian Holocaust educational fellow Sa’ad Khaldi explains why education is the only buffer against radicalisation

February 23, 2023 10:25
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4 min read

“I’m a science teacher and when we talk about race, or describe someone as mixed race, I object on scientific grounds,” says Sa’ad Khaldi. “You can’t be mixed race, and there is no such thing as the Jewish race. There is only one race, the human race. But ethnicities — they do exist, of course. There are around 5,000 ethnic groups in this world.”

Mr Khaldi is a rare blend of two of them: Ashkenazi Jewish and Muslim Arab. Or, as he puts it: “I’m Palestinian and Jewish.” And he is also Yad Vashem’s first Palestinian Holocaust educational fellow, on which more later.

Conceived in East Jerusalem in the year the State of Israel was founded, he was born in Damascus in the summer of 1949. When his Jewish mother and Muslim father’s marriage broke down a few years later, she left Syria for her native Manchester and took little Sa’ad with her.

There, the halachically Jewish boy with a Muslim name was raised by his Christian stepfather who sent him to a Methodist Sunday school.

As he writes in the unpublished family memoir he has handwritten for his three children, which he will be discussing with Holocaust historian Trudy Gold at Jewish Book Week this Sunday: “Family histories are like dustbins — they pretend to be orderly, but actually they are a random jumble and somehow we try to make sense of them.”

To make sense of Mr Khaldi’s biography, you need to step back a generation and consider the extraordinary life of his father, Hazim Khaldi.

He was at the London School of Economics when the Second World War broke out. He volunteered to join the British Army, was attached to the East Kent Regiment and posted to Syria. At some point his battalion was turned into the Palestine Regiment, an extraordinary unit in which Jew and Arab fought side by side under the British flag against Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Sa’ad’s father became close with a young Jewish Palestinian called Uzi Narkiss, and after the Palestine Regiment disbanded the two men would go on to fight each other as enemy combatants in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence and again in 1967 in the Six-Day War.

After that conflict finished they rekindled their friendship.
His father died in 1979 after becoming the first unofficial Palestinian leader in the West Bank, during which time he held face-to-face talks with the Israelis, one of the first Palestinians to do so.