Al-Arab op-ed: Iraq should normalize relations with Israel

The normalization train keeps going. This is a particularly strong piece in Al Arab (UK) by University of Brussels professor Saif Sham that notes that Arab anti-normalization positions are often just antisemitism.

What Sabah Al-Saadi proposed with a law criminalizing normalization with the Zionist entity is surprising. For those who do not know him, he is a deputy in the Iraqi parliament, and yet he does not distinguish between the Zionist entity, the state of Israel and its people, and the Jews, as he spoke in the text of his proposed law about “the criminalization of normalization with the Zionist entity that usurped the Palestinian lands in any way”.

The Saadi Law, in its form and clauses, is an oppressive and arbitrary law, which calls for the death penalty, and encourages the spread of individual dictatorship among judges, each of them practicing it according to their liking. For example, what does Al-Saadi mean by the State of Israel? This country contains many nationalities, ethnicities and religions. Nevertheless, it overlooks the existence of Israeli Muslim Arabs who live in this country and hold its nationality and passport. Is this group also included in the normalization law, and it is forbidden for us to deal with them?

Iraq needs normal relations with Israel for the clear reason that large numbers of Israeli Jews are of Iraqi origin.

Establishing relations with Israel is a natural matter for Iraq and the Iraqis, while Al-Saadi calls by his law to ostracize the Iraqi Jews, not recognize them, and strip more of their rights, as stated in Article 17.

This is a law that violates the freedom of a large segment of Iraqis, breaks ties of kinship, friendship and love between members of the Iraqi people, and ignores the size of the relations between the Iraqi people inside Iraq and the Jews of Iraq.

According to this law, the death penalty applies to everyone who prints, publishes, sells, and even whoever buys or reads any of the books of the Iraqi Jews who have made a major contribution to building Iraq from the dawn of time to modern Iraq that was established after the First World War.

Al-Saadi wants to fight and cut ties with institutions that promote normalization, so does he mean by that to close embassies, such as the US embassy and others, for example, under the pretext that their countries encourage normalization, so that we end a situation in which Iraq becomes isolated from the world?

Article 17 states that “the Tourism and Antiquities Authority prohibits any foreign tourist activities aimed at promoting or normalizing with the Zionist entity through the exploitation of Jewish antiquities in Iraq.” 

Looting the property and rights of others is the language of the mob, who understand nothing in the language of dialogue except bloodshed, displacement, and the looting of property. Al-Saadi calls for a second “Farhood” that recalls the acts of violence and looting that broke out in Baghdad and targeted the city's Jewish residents on June 1, 1941, and overthrows the remaining hope for the return of the Iraqis to their land to which they belonged for more than 2,500 years.

The properties of the Iraqi Jews were plundered and their features were distorted, as happened in the Shamash School, which was established in 1929, which was a secondary school for the Jewish elite due to its high level of education. It was founded by Yaakov Shlomo Shamash in Baghdad, and in 1930 it attracted more than 900 students. Literature and the English language were studied in depth. This great cultural edifice was confiscated to be converted into a regular school under the name “The Message”, and then it  became a car park.

This also happened in Basra, the house of Yosef Karah, which was demolished in 1999 to turn into a dump, and the house of Moshe Tuwaiq, an architectural masterpiece, which today has become a mere medical clinic.

It seems that Al-Saadi wants to continue the acts of vandalism committed against the heritage and history of Iraqi Jews. He also wants to return the execution scenes that Iraqis used to see being carried out in public squares. With his proposed law, Al-Saadi wants to return these gallows to be use for all who dared praise the Jews of Iraq.

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