Thursday, January 03, 2013

Khaled Fahmy on Egyptian Jews

Khaled Fahmy provides a careful and fair assessment of Egyptian Jews but he is way off in his references to the Arab nationalist discourse on Arab Jews and clearly confuses Muslim Brotherhood anti-Jewishness with Arab nationalist rhetoric.   It is absolutely untrue that Arab nationalist discourse, especially of Nasserism, expressed distrust in the loyalty of Egyptian or Arab Jews.  In fact, in the trial of the "Operation Susannah" the Egyptian prosecutor made it clear that the government does not hold Egyptian Jews responsible for the terrorism of the Israeli intelligence service.   There are many Arab nationalist discourse from the time which insisted that Arab Jews are Arabs and don't belong to the Zionist movement although one can find anti-Jewish expressions here and there.  But Fahmy is way off in conflating the rhetoric of the Muslim Brotherhood with that of the Arab nationalists on this question.