Understanding the complexities of belonging in a post-colonial nation
Jews have long been a political boon as well as a political liability for Morocco. As of December 10, Morocco became the most recent Muslim majority state to agree to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for American recognition of the kingdom’s claims to the long-contested Western Sahara. The deal, brokered by President Trump, follows Bahrain, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. As “unprecedented” as many of the Trump administration’s moves may have been, however, this recent Moroccan-American-Israeli agreement has its roots in the Cold War era. Further, there is a complex internal Moroccan Jewish story within the Western Sahara conflict, which itself sheds light on the history of Jewish political belonging.
I am a scholar of modern Moroccan Jewish history, and have recently written a book, The Sultan's Communists », tracing the long arc of Moroccan Jewish political history in the twentieth century, including the pivotal question of Western Sahara. In it, I show that the 1975 Green March, in which Morocco laid claim to Western Sahara in the name of Islam and the nation, was a prime opportunity for Moroccan Jews to prove their patriotism. Moroccan Jews both at home and in the Diaspora overwhelmingly supported the claim. One of them, former Moroccan national liberation leader Simon Lévy, joined the many hundred-thousand strong Green March. Lévy, a prominent Moroccan Jewish Communist who only ten years prior had been kidnapped off the streets of Casablanca and brutally tortured by police for his politics, was proud to participate in this gesture of, as he and the state saw it, restitution of Moroccan land wrongly severed by colonial forces. Another prominent Moroccan Jewish political figure, Abraham Serfaty, would languish in prison for nearly twenty years as a result of his support for the Polisario front, Western Sahara’s primary national independence group. Both men rejected Zionism out of their ardent Moroccan patriotism, and saw those Moroccan Jews who left for Israel as “traitors” to the nation. They differed profoundly, however, in their vision of Western Sahara’s relationship to imperialism, as well as the nature of Moroccan-Israeli relations.[1]
In the 1980s, Morocco increasingly advertised Jewish tourism campaigns, marketed in particular to Israelis of Moroccan origin.
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