From the Archives: Israel’s violence then and now

Born and raised in Egypt, my Jewish-origin father never recovered from the creation of the state of Israel

by Mike Scialom, Medium

I’ve been in equal parts despair and rage since the genocide of the Palestinian people began on October 8th, 2023. It’s been seven months now, and on it goes. It seems never-ending, and it’s getting worse.

I’ve had to confront myself about why this is, as though I’m doing an intervention. The question I put to myself is sometimes ‘why is this causing you (me) so much pain?’. Other times, it’s ‘why am I going mad? What’s the root cause of this? Why am I so invested?’.

After all, in one way I am a child of the state of Israel. I would not exist were it not for the creation of Israel in 1948. My Jewish-origin — he once told me his family could be traced back to the 1492 expulsion from Spain — father was born in Egypt in 1921, and lived there until the early 1950s. As far as I could tell, he was happy in Egypt. His father had moved in Cairo from Livorno, in Italy, in the late 19th century. He was a cotton trader. Rather than import cotton from Egypt to Italy, he decided to export cotton from Egypt to his homeland.

This wasn’t a random decision — after the Suez Canal opened in 1869, European skills and trades were welcomed. My grandfather joined a vibrant community of expats from across Europe: their native tongue was French. By the time my father was born the family was wealthy: they had a home in Cairo and a residence in Alexandria for the hot summer months. Business was good. They co-existed with the local population. It didn’t go so far as intermarriage (to my knowledge), but it certainly included jobs, friendships and some shared social activities.

My father became a teacher: he lectured in philosophy at the American University in Cairo. He had survived the Second World War relatively unscathed. There was no obvious reason to leave this prosperous multi-cultural community.

Then, on May 14th 1948, the state of Israel was created, and on 15th May that year the Nakba began. Half of Palestine’s mainly Arab population — around 750,000 people — were expelled from their homes or made to flee, initially by Zionist paramilitaries then, after May 14th, by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). On 15th May 1948 the first Arab-Israeli war began, and the situation was suddenly very different for the Jews in Egypt. They had not engineered a disconnect from their Arab hosts: it was imposed on them by Europeans determined to find a homeland for Jews following the Holocaust.

The end game had begun, and within a few years my father was forced to leave, his assets sequestered by the Egyptian state. He arrived in London penniless. Initially he recommenced his studies and gained a doctorate in philosophy from the University of London — his dissertation was on ‘phenomenology and the analysis of social action’. Then he moved into business, where he achieved modest success, before working for the Department of Trade and Industry as a trade envoy until he retired.

My mother was a good Christian woman and their marriage produced three children. I was raised as a Christian. There were no Jewish symbols in our house, no acknowledgement of any Judaic ceremony. To all outward appearances, my father abandoned his faith — to some extent his faith abandoned him too, for he had ‘married out’, a form of self-excommunication which leaves scars aplenty — until he eventually resumed going to synagogue in his 70s. The only thing that gave the game away was my surname — ‘Scialom’ is the Italian spelling for the Hebrew word ‘shalom’. Quite a giveaway, of course.

None of the Scialoms from Egypt moved to Israel. They went everywhere but Israel — to Canada, Switzerland, Peru, London…. They understood well enough that Israel was created by a bunch of psychopathic terrorists using Judaism as their cover story. This isn’t an assertion — this is fact, and indeed the perpetrators were proud of what they did, as you can see from the following video, comprising interviews with the Zionist murderers of 1948.

(You can watch the whole film here )

Israel was trouble from the start. The dichotomy of being Jewish and yet being a victim of Israel caused my father decades of suffering, which he either couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about — with me at least. To speak out against Israel was immediately conflated with anti-Semitism, an association which Israel has ruthlessly continued to propagate. It was a wound that never healed. It was a wound which I internalised. It lay dormant, almost undisturbed, until the slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza began in earnest last October. Then, suddenly, I couldn’t ignore it because I had been mentoring a young Palestinian woman, who I call Aminha to protect her identity.

Aminha was studying at the University of Gaza when the horrific Hamas attacks of October 7th took place. She gave birth to a boy a few days later, and began describing the situation around her as the Israeli forces started razing her homeland. Gradually, it became obvious that the vicious malevolence of the Israeli mindset — the mindset upon which Israel was built — had not mellowed in the intervening decades. On the contrary, it had incubated into a new level of ferocity, which informed the Israeli troops and the settlers who have brutally continued their persecution of the Palestinian people.  (You can read more about her horrendous experience shared by so many on this previous post by Mike Scialom [LL]: Aminha has been gassed, bombed and is now being starved.)

I haven’t heard from her since shortly after Israeli troops took over Rafah, preventing humanitarian aid from getting through. The last time I heard from her, she was struggling to feed her boy and herself. She said she was getting weaker. I am beside myself with worry for her wellbeing.

People like me — if there are any who have a similar story— have to speak out. We can’t sit in silence. We know the truth. We embody the truth. We are the product of the past and have to talk about it. To not talk about it is to be complicit. It’s true that the creation of the state of Israel created hundreds of thousands of Arab victims, but they also created victims like my father, who barely spoke of what happened to him.

Looking back, he clearly had PTSD. He also had an affinity with the Arab people that put him at odds with his own. And, though I didn’t fully appreciate it until recently, I had internalised his unresolved pain and now, 76 years after the events that catastrophised his life, I have to try and resolve that pain. And I won’t be able to do that by retreating into silence — it didn’t work for my dad and it wouldn’t work for me. It’s not easy and every day there are setbacks. But I am not caught up in the relentless bombardments, and it is for the sake of those who are that I write.

Thanks for reading this blogpost. I wish you well as you try and navigate through this horrific episode in human history.

Mike Scialom is business editor for the Cambridge Independent Newspaper