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I’ve written articles recently on several Middle East subjects.
In a National Review article entitled “Egypt: Pity the Winner,” I discussed the Egyptian presidential elections, the remaining candidates, and the economic crisis the winner will face.
In the Weekly Standard, I wrote last week about “Negotiating with Iran, 1979 and 2012,” discussing the Iranian negotiating style and the negotiators representing the West.
More recently I wrote in the Standard about “History Lessons From Abbas,” criticizing a remarkable recent article by the Palestinian president in which he wrote of a Zionist conspiracy as the cause of the flight of Jews from Arab lands to Israel. Things were idyllic for Jews in the Arab states, he argues, and in the case of Iraq they “relocated to Palestine as the result of a tripartite Zionist-British-Iraqi conspiracy.” This publication has attracted no attention but deserves some, for what it reveals about the mind and the historical understanding of the Palestinian president.
Anyone interested in the flight of Jews from Arab lands should consult Abbas Shiblak’s ‘Iraqi Jews’ before rushing to knee-jerk judgements. He is a Fellow of Oxford University and his research collaborators included Iraqi Jews, including the last president of their community there. Later ‘could stand Israel no longer…alien and out of place…found their way to London’.
Zionism as is well known had little appeal to Jews of the Middle East but they were given no say by the incomers to Palestine, whose unilateral decisions c1950 unbalanced the region.