Zionism Killed the Jewish-Muslim World
In an interview with Jacobin, filmmaker and academic Ariella Aïsha Azoulay traces how Western powers’ exploitation of Zionism led not just to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine but to the demise of Jewish communities across the Middle East.
Jews in the town of Buqei’a, Palestine, circa 1930. (Keren Kayemet Leyisrael via Wikimedia Commons)
Born in Israel, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, a filmmaker, curator, and academic, rejects the identity of Israeli. Before becoming an Israeli at age nineteen, her mother was simply a Palestinian Jew. For much of history, there was nothing unusual in this combination of words. In Palestine, a Jewish minority lived peacefully alongside the Muslim majority for centuries.
This changed with the Zionist movement and the foundation of Israel. The ethnic cleansing of Jews from Europe would lead, thanks to European Zionists, not only to that of Muslims from Palestine but of Jews from the rest of the Middle East, with nearly a million fleeing as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, many to Israel.
In an interview with Jacobin, Azoulay contextualizes Israel’s genocide in Gaza in the long history of European and US imperialism. Azoulay is a professor of comparative literature at Brown and the author of Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019).
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