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Monday, August 23, 2010

Two vignetttes from 1953

The cool thing about news archives is that you can find out details of history that are virtually unavailable anywhere else.

Take this throwaway part of an article in the Canadian Jewish Chronicle from 1953:

So in the aftermath of the 1948 war, you could not enter Egypt or Lebanon if you were Jewish. How many years did this apply to Jordan, Syria and "other Arab states?"

But how many times have we been told that Arabs were not anti-semitic, only anti-Zionist? Even though we know what happened to Jews in Arab countries after 1948, the hatred that Arabs had towards Jews even extended to foreign Jews - a not insignificant detail.

The only reason I found that out was because I was stumbling onto this one:


This was in 1953, when the Gulf was a few trillion dollars poorer than it is today. Yet instead of this same point being more relevant today, as it should be, it is all but ignored.