"Could we have forced a smaller number of them to stay behind so we would always have a ready scapegoat or object of abuse?"
Cairo, January 31 - Amr Hawas and his friends have watched with envy over the last several months as "pro-Palestinian" activists across the Western world made violent threats against Jews and attacked both Jews and Jewish institutions either to celebrate the October 7 massacres or to protest Israel's response to them - but Egypt, like many Arab countries, expelled most or all of its Jewish population in the years following the establishment of Israel, and now he and his cohorts have no Jews upon whom to directly visit their frustrations.
Hawas, 20, agreed with his coworkers and neighbors that any demonstration in Egypt, devoid of a local Jewish community to ravage or even just threaten, could never compare to the visceral appeal of the demonstrations he sees in London, New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, all of which enjoy the advantage of having Jews in proximity to target.
"I'm not saying it was the wrong thig to do, send the Jews packing," he temporized, "but it might have been short-sighted. Could we have forced a smaller number of them to stay behind so we would always have a ready scapegoat or object of abuse? It's hard to say. I wasn't there at the time."
Egypt's Jewish population hovers at or near zero; anti-Jewish riots and government policies in the wake of Israel's founding in 1948 forced the ancient community that produced Philo, Maimonides, Saadia Gaon, and other luminaries through the ages to leave, mostly to Israel. The earliest Jewish communal presence in Egypt in history dated back to the early sixth century BCE, in the wake of the destruction of the First Temple; Jewish tradition sees Egypt as the birthplace of the Israelite nation, which left servitude in Egypt under Moses many centuries earlier, according to Biblical chronology, following one family's migration from Canaan there several generations before.
The emptying of the Arab-Muslim world's Jewish communities has confronted them with the same dilemma as Hawas's; no convenient outlet for pillage, rioting, rape, or lynching in response to anything hat can be pinned on Jews or Israel. Iran, a notable exception, keeps tight control of its several thousand Jews and refuses them exit visas, always holding that community under intimidation and suppressing the slightest hint of Zionism. Tens of thousands of Jews fled Iran when the Ayatollahs seized power in 1979.
"We can continue to abuse Copts, and that' always fun," acknowledged Hawas, "but everyone knows it's not the same. No one pretends the Copts aren't Egyptian or don't belong here; we just hate them and want to persecute them because they're not Muslim. The Jews, we would never accept as Egyptian, or Arab, and that always made how we treated them OK. It's a little funny for anti-Israel activists to start calling the descendants of the expelled communities 'Arab Jews' as a way to frame Zionism as an alien European phenomenon. I'm fine with that, because I hate Jews too; I just am appreciating the price we paid when we kicked basically ALL the Jews out."
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