Saleem Ayoub Quna
By Saleem Ayoub Quna
“Pogrom” is a Russian word which means an organized act of cruel behavior or killing done to a large group of people based on their race and religion.
The word caught the attention of Europeans in the third quarter of the 19th century after many Jewish communities in towns and cities across the south-eastern parts of the Russian Empire, mainly Poland, Ukraine and Odessa, were attacked and harassed by the larger community, followers of the Russian Orthodox Church. They saw members of the smaller Jewish communities exploiting and blackmailing them, for financial and commercial gain.
The wave of pogroms spread to other countries in Europe in similar fashion and continued for three years in the early 1880s. These events paved the way for some Jewish activists like the Hungarian-born, Theodor Herzl, a writer, journalist and lawyer, to start a political movement to defend the Jews against such attacks. Herzl later became the founder of Zionism.
Another most important reason for the repeated pogroms was the assassination of Russia’s Tsar Alexander II at the hands of a Jew. The Tsar was blamed for encouraging his people to attack members of the Jewish community.
In addition to killing, setting on fire, and vandalizing Jewish properties in the above-mentioned cities and towns, tactics of starvation and deprivation were systematically employed to further harass and punish the Jews.
Later in the early and mid-1940s and under the watch of Adolf Hitler, the founder of Nazis, European Jews especially in Germany were brutally persecuted in a process that led to what the Jews call the “ Holocaust”; this became a decisive turning point in Jewish-European relations.
Enter Smotrich
Today, almost 140 years after the pogroms, and 80 years after the Holocaust, a descendant from the Ukraine, the land of the pogroms and holocaust atrocities, the name of Bezalel Smotrich emerges from the smoke of guns over the strip of Gaza, to openly call for the expulsion of all Palestinians from their ancestral home land that today forcefully became Israel.
It also happens that he is also the actual Finance Minister in Netanyahu’s extreme-right government, and head of the National Religious Party.
Although he was born, according to international law, in an illegal settlement on the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, his last name should be a reminder of his ancestors’ village (Smotrych) west of Ukraine today!
If the expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank who refuse to recognize his “greater Israel”, according to this man doesn’t work, Israel must resort to every possible tactic to drive them out of their homes.
These tactics must include but not limited to exterminating as many Palestinians as possible in Gaza and/or starving them to death, and that will be just fine for him and even moral as he recently made clear.
It is ironic that the an offspring of survivors of the pogroms and Holocaust, gives himself the right and liberty to borrow the same ugly tactics applied against his own ancestors, to be practiced against those who had nothing to do with European pogroms and Holocaust atrocities! Such a bizarre and mind-boggling analogy makes one wonder what kind of character we are dealing with here?
This man, I strongly believe, has more than one little problem! He has a short and selective memory; has an overdose of instinct hatred against those who oppose him; and an extreme sense of superiority versus any different ethnic or religious group.
Finally one simple advice for, hopefully, the last fallen angel of death and starvation: Ask your Sephardim compatriots who lived and thrived in many Arab countries, like Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen and Syria before the establishment of your “little Israel” in 1948, if any heard about or experienced any kind of pogrom behaviors at the hands of their Muslim and Christian compatriots, who lived in peace and harmony for more than two and half millennia long before your ancestors survived the atrocities of European pogroms and Holocaust and decided to take refuge in this part of the world?
This opinion was especially written for Crossfire Arabia by Saleem Ayoub Quna who is a Jordanian author writing on local, regional and international affairs and has two books published. He has a BA in English Literature from Jordan University, a diploma from Paris and an MA from Johns Hopkins University in Washington. He also has working knowledge of French and German.
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