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“Savaş, İsrail için mi?”
8 Mart 2003 tarihli New York Times gazetesinde Bill Keller’in “Savaş, İsrail için mi açılıyor?” başlıklı yazısında ABD’nin Irak’a saldırısının İsrail için yapıldığı delillerle anlatılmaktadır. Şu anda Pentagon’un başdanışmanı Richard Perle 1996 yılında; Benjamin Netenyahu’nun (o tarihte İsrail başbakanı danışmanı iken, kendisi gibi Yahudi asıllı Douglas Feith ve David Wurmser ile birlikte bir araştırma raporu hazırlamıştı. “Temiz bir son ülkeyi güvenli kılmak için yeni bir strateji” (Aclean Break A New Strateggfor Sewring the Realm) Şimdilerde bu raporu çok az bir değişiklikle Yahudi cuntasının elindeki Bush, aynen uygulamaktadır.
ABD’li Yahudi yazarın itirafı:
2 Şubat 2003 tarihli Washington Post gazetesi (Outiook-sayfa 82)’nde Yahudi yazar Loolwa Khazzoom’un itirafı gaflet içinde olan bazı yetkilileri uyandırmalıdır. Bu yazıdan bazı bölümleri aynen naklediyorum: “Benim gerçek kimliğim bölünmüş. Ben ABD’de büyüdüm. Ama ABD benim özkimliğimin ait olduğu yer değil. Kendimi Amerikan özel günleri, törenleri ve hikayelerine uygun görmüyorum. Benim sadece İsrail kimliğim de özümü açıklamaya yetmez. Çünkü benim soyum Iraklı, Mezopotamyalı... Ben asla Irak’ta bulunmadım. Ama uzun yıllar boyu konuşurken Arap-İbrani aksanı ile konuştum. Yalnız İsrail’deki gelenekleri de Mezopotamya folklorunu da yaşadım ve hissettim. İnsanlar her nedense Yahudi deyince bizim Polonya’dan veya bir başka Avrupa ülkelerinden geldiğimizi düşünüyor. Aslında bu çok yanlış. Çünkü ilk Yahudiler Mezopotamya’da yaşadı. Yani bugünkü Irak. Miladdan önce 586 Babil Krallığı gerçek Yahudi topraklarını, bugün Irak’ın bulunduğu bizim ilk vatanımızı işgal ettiler. Kendi topraklarımızda esir olduk. Özellikle 1950’den sonra ise modern Irak hükümeti kurulunca göçe zorlandık. Mülteci olduk. Gerçek kimliğimi silmek istedim. Pan-Jewis olmak Avrupalı Jewis (Avrupalı Yahudi) kimliğim... Ama sonra anladım ki, bu imkansız. Ben gerçek Iraklıyım... Mezopotamya’nın başta Irak, Fırat ile Dicle’nin arasında kalan toprakları Yahudilerin gerçek vatanıdır...” Tarihe bakıldığında 16 devlet kuran Türk Milletinin bu şekilde hesap yapıldığında dünyanın tamamına yakınına sahip olması gerekmez mi?
ABD-İngiltere-İsrail üçlüsü
Bu üçlü şer güçleri ve bunların oyununa gelen güçler sayesinde Doğu Akdeniz’den Basra Körfezine kadar (Suriye, İran, Türkiye dahil) İsrail’den başka hiçbir güç bırakmamaya kararlıdır. Bölgenin İsrail dışında bütün güçlerin direnci kırılacaktır. Ortadoğu’nun petrolü bu üç güç arasında taksim edilecek ve Dicle ile Fırat’ın suları İsrail’e akıtılacaktır. Irak’ta yapılacak barajların projelerini İngiltere şimdiden hazırladı. 21. Asırda su petrolden önemli olacaktır. “Bölgenin suya olan bağımlılığı, kaynaklarının kıtlığı ve en önemli su kaynağının bu iki nehir olduğu gözönüne alınırsa, suyun ne derece stratejik bir yatırım olduğu da anlaşılır.” ABD, Güneydoğu’ya bu maksatla asker yığıyor. Mağara ve arazileri kiralıyor.
Bazı yetkililer ne zaman uyanır onu bilemem?
M.Necati Özfatura
23 Mart 2003 Pazar
http://www.turkiyegazetesi.com/makaledetay.aspx?ID=167477#.UOijdXc18jQ
American, Iraqi, Jewish: So It Makes Sense for Me to Live in Israel By Loolwa Khazzoom
Hi Everyone!
The Washington Post just published my latest article, about why I moved to
Israel. Feel free to pass it on.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8824-2003Jan31.html
Best,
Loolwa
American, Iraqi, Jewish
So It Makes Sense for Me to Live in Israel
By Loolwa Khazzoom
Sunday, February 2, 2003; Page B02
Be´er Sheva, ISRAEL
I was slurping minestrone soup at an Italian restaurant, laughing with a
friend, when her cell phone rang. There had just been a double suicide bombing
in Tel Aviv. More than 20 were dead, about 100 wounded. Almost without
skipping a beat, my friend hung up her phone, went back to her
food and picked up our conversation where it had left off. It was just another
day in the land of Israel.
Yet I had a hard time looking at my food, let alone tuning into our
conversation. I could not stop fantasizing about everyone in the restaurant
stopping, holding hands and praying. All of us crying, screaming and clinging
to each other. I wanted something. Anything but
the routine of more dead and disfigured bodies.
That bombing and so many others remind me that nowhere in Israel is safe these
days. I have sat at cafes, ridden on buses and walked down streets where
suicide bombers have struck. One of my friends was on a bus behind a bus that
exploded. Friends of friends have been blown up. It was
perfectly possible that a bomber would strike the restaurant where I was
sitting.
At times like these, I am acutely aware that I do not need to be here. As an
American with Israeli citizenship, I have a choice. Although I live here
permanently now, at any given moment I can pick up the phone, book a flight
and pack my little derriere back to the safety of a quiet,
tree-lined street in Northern California. Unlike the scores of working-class
and poor Israelis with no option to leave, I can smell a ticket with my name
on it. But each time tragedy strikes, I decide once again to stay.
Of course, if playing it safe were the primary force driving me, I would not
have come here in the first place. I arrived at Ben Gurion airport in August,
just weeks after one friend was nearly shot as he prepared to board an El Al
flight to Israel from Los Angeles, days after another
friend had a close call at the Hebrew University bombing in Jerusalem, amidst
a wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks across the Jewish state, and with Iraq
threatening to retaliate against Israel if America bombs Baghdad.
Not that I was some GI Jane fearless type, mind you. As the date for my
departure to Israel drew closer, and the attacks on Israelis grew more
frequent, I became somewhat of an emotional wreck. I had an increasing sense
of doom, as if flying to Israel meant imminent death.
And yet, I did not cancel my ticket. I had visited Israel so many times I
couldn´t keep track, and despite the mounting threats and violence, I still
felt strongly that that was where I wanted to be. In a desperate,
down-to-the-wire phone call, a close Israeli friend helped me to
understand why. "If you scheduled a trip for, say, Hawaii and a war developed
in the region after you purchased the ticket, you would cancel your trip in a
nanosecond," he said. "But this is not Hawaii. It´s Israel. It´s home." He was
right. Uncannily, he then described precisely
why I felt deeply torn: "For Israelis, the decision to stay or return to
Israel is easy. This is where we live. We´re here, period. You, however, are
Israeli on the one hand but American on the other. You don´t have to be here.
You have an option. Which makes the decision to come or stay a
very difficult one."
My identity is indeed torn: I grew up in the United States, but for me,
America is largely a place of life experience and nostalgia - my home, but
not the place that reflects my core identity. I do not see myself in American
imagery, holidays, rituals or history. I guess it comes down to
the fact that my primary identity is that of a Jew, and that for me, being a
Jew is inextricably intertwined not only with Israel, but with Iraq. That´s
where my father came from before fleeing in 1950 to Israel, where he became a
citizen. In 1958, he settled in the United States. As
his daughter, I am an Israeli citizen.
My connection with Iraq is more complicated. I have never been there, but I
sing and pray in the Iraqi dialect of Judeo-Arabic, the language of Jews
indigenous to the region. I follow the Iraqi traditions for all Jewish
holidays. I have an Iraqi accent when I pray in Hebrew, although
I have purposely unlearned sounding Iraqi when I speak, partly because nobody
here could understand me, and partly because of ridicule. Still, the fear of
Middle Easterners so common in America now doesn´t exist in Israel - so long
as you´re a Middle Eastern Jew. If I were Iraqi and
Muslim, it might be a problem, given Iraq´s threat against Israel. But because
I´m Jewish, I´m seen as belonging.
That my connection with Iraq is filtered through a Jewish lens surprises most
Americans. When they think of Jews, they think Poland and Germany, bagels and
cream cheese, Goldsteins and Rosenbergs. But the first Jews came from
Mesopotamia, the land that is today Iraq. They returned to
that land in 586 BC, when the Babylonian Empire conquered and destroyed the
Kingdom of Judah - the southern region of ancient Israel. After demolishing
the kingdom and leaving it in ruins, the Babylonians took the people of
Israel, as captives, again to the land that is today Iraq.
My family remained on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for the
next 2,500 years until 1950, when the modern Iraqi government forced the Jews
to flee as refugees.
With a history like that, Iraqi Jews are as authentically Iraqi and Jewish as
you can get. Nonetheless, throughout my life, neither the Jewish nor the
Middle Eastern communities have been keen on accepting us fully. In Jewish
communities in America, I experienced contempt,
ridicule and discrimination based on my heritage and religious traditions. I
was expected to subsume my identity in favor of some kind of a pan-Jewish
yearning for my European roots. What European roots?
Nor did I have easy entree into the Middle Eastern community of America, which
was dominated by Arab Muslims and Christians. I was expected to erase the
narrative of my family and community in favor of an anti-Israel, pan-Arab
reality. Repeatedly, I received the message that I
would be warmly accepted as an Iraqi only if I checked my Jewish identity at
the door.
A big part of my desire to go to Israel this time was to return to the place
where Mizrahim like me - Jews indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa
- are the majority Jewish population, where I do not have to explain my
identity or search far and wide for community. Until the
mass Russian immigration here in the 1990s, Mizrahim were close to 70 percent
of the Jewish population. Now, we are just over half.
I was also eager to visit my elderly Iraqi-Israeli relatives. When they sought
refuge in Israel, most of them settled in Ramat Gan, a Tel Aviv suburb.
Ironically, when Saddam Hussein attacked Israel during the 1991 Gulf War, many
of the Scud missiles aimed at Tel Aviv landed in Ramat
Gan. And so for some of my relatives´ neighbors whose homes were destroyed,
Iraq took everything they had, twice in a lifetime. I wanted to get my
family´s stories on film before it was too late.
I also sought to increase access to film, books, music recordings and other
resources of non-European Jews through my organization, the Jewish
MultiCultural Project. And I wanted to complete an advanced Hebrew program, so
that I could fully immerse myself in the literature of Jews
across the globe. In general, I just wanted to be in the place where the
international Jewish story would be all around me.
In addition, I was hungry to return to the land, people and culture that free
my soul. I longed to see my Israeli friends, because I missed them and because
I was so worried about them. In the end, despite my fears about living in
Israel now - with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
raging and Israeli fears of possible attacks by Baghdad in a matter of weeks
or months - my decision to move here came down to this: love, celebration and
an affirmation of who I am, all of which revolve around life. My reasons not
to go involved fear alone - a reason revolving
around death . So through the terror and the tears, I chose life. But not
until the shores of Tel Aviv appeared on the horizon, outside the window of
the British Airways jet, did I know I had made the right choice. My whole body
shook with emotion.
As I stood at the curbside of Ben Gurion airport, waiting for a Thrifty
shuttle bus to take me to my rental car, a deep sense of knowing flooded my
body: This time I was not a tourist. Two months later, I returned to Northern
California long enough to pack my life into 37 cardboard boxes,
and moved to Israel for good.
During the month I was back in California, I would frequently wake up
thinking, "Loolwa, you have seriously gone off the deep end." Then I would
spend the next hour panicking, gingerly stepping among boxes muttering, "What
am I doing?" An hour or two later, with anxiety
mounting, I would stop packing and sit on my bed in tears.
And I still can be found in tears. The decision to move to Israel has not
gotten any easier in the three months since I arrived for good. Just because I
am facing my fears does not mean they are not with me. Only yesterday, I read
about people´s spinal cords being severed by the
shrapnel loaded into suicide bombs. A part of me keeps yelling, "Get out of
here and get out of here quick!"
But where else can I live in an apartment building in which Jewish immigrants
from Morocco, Iraq, Tunisia and Iran are all together - and with a Tunisian
synagogue directly across the street?
With Mizrahi identity reflected in my surroundings, I am free to focus on
finding a place within my community, rather than educating strangers, over and
over, about my community´s existence. What´s more, here I have camaraderie and
support for my efforts, instead of having to struggle
alone. I still can pursue the interests I had in the United States -
practicing yoga, singing in a rock band, teaching self defense - but now
these activities connect me to my community instead of taking me from it. Last
week, I taught a self-defense workshop to a group of
female teachers at a local school. Half or more of the teachers were Mizrahi.
In all the years I offered self-defense workshops in the States, I do not
remember even one person of my heritage in the groups.
"You seem a lot more relaxed," a Berkeley friend said when we spoke on the
phone recently. Indeed, I feel a lot more relaxed.
This is a terrifying and heart-breaking time to be living in Israel. But here
I am rooted in the multicultural Jewish story. I can´t guarantee that love for
my people will be strong enough to keep me here through the daily terror. But
for now, this is home.
Loolwa Khazzoom is editor of the forthcoming "Behind the Veil of Silence:
North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Women Speak Out" (Seal Press) and the
director of the Jewish MultiCultural Project.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Loolwa Khazzoom
Edited (1/6/2013) by ikicihan
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