Where Should Jews Go Back To?

Budapest Jewish WWII memorial shoes on the River Bank, June 2, 2005. (Csorfoly D/ wikipedia)

The colonizer libel, "Jews go back to Europe, promoted by some pro-Palestinian protesters collapses the tapestry of Jewish diversity into a racist caricature of “hyperwhite colonizing superrace.” This stereotypical view ignores an important historical truth: the majority of Israel’s Jews are not descended from Europe but from Arab nations.

Israeli Jews hail from all over the world: Ashkenazi Jews originated in Europe; Sephardic Jews are associated with the historic Jewish communities of Spain and Portugal; and from Arab countries, known as Mizrahim in Hebrew.

The Mizrachi Jews trace their origins to ancient Jewish communities that have existed for millennia in the Middle East and North Africa. Historically, the State of Israel was founded not only by European Jews who managed to escape or survive the Holocaust, but also by nearly 1 million Jews who fled the Arab world due to terrible massacres, such as the Farhud pogrom in Iraq.

Israeli Jews also hail from Ethiopia, India, Latin America, and more. Many Israelis are a mix of different descents (this writer is one of those mixes: a son of an Argentine mother and an Israeli father of Iraqi descent).

So, where should Jews go back to? In the face of all these historical facts, the question itself becomes ludicrous. And yet: should Jews go back to Europe, where some six million were murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators in the Holocaust? Or maybe they should go back to Iraq, where a single pogrom claimed the lives of nearly 200 Jews within two days? Or to Spain, where Jews were expelled from 500 years ago, and where, just recently, an online map identifying Jewish and Israeli-linked businesses has appeared, echoing antisemitic practices from Europe’s darkest chapters?