Editors’ Note: This essay was submitted in September 2023, just a month before October 7th and the ensuing brutal Israeli war of which the destruction of Gaza and loss of life falls within the UN definition of genocide according to ICJ. Simone Bitton, one of the most acclaimed French-Moroccan Jewish filmmakers, is renowned for her powerful body of documentary work aimed at bridging divides and demolishing walls of misunderstanding between the West and the Middle East and North Africa (hereafter, MENA) region. Some of Bitton’s films, such as Umm Kulthum (1996), Bombing (2000), Ben Barka: the Moroccan Equation (2002), and Ziyara (2020), address themes of conflict, identity, and cultural dialogue. Nevertheless, Bitton is particularly celebrated for her meticulously researched documentaries on Palestine. Key works in her oeuvre include Palestine: Story of a Land (1996), Mahmoud Darwish (1998), Citizen Bishara (2001), The Wall (2004), and Rachel (2008). Each film reflects her commitment to exploring complex Palestinian narratives in local, regional, and global contexts. She is currently in the process of editing a new film dedicated to her friend and fellow Moroccan Jewish novelist Edmond Amran El Maleh, who was known for his critical writings of Israeli policies towards the Palestinians.
September 2023
It was a beautiful winter morning in 1983, the exact date of which a mysterious psychological barrier has always prevented me from recalling.
That morning, I stepped out of my room at the Balima Hotel in Rabat and was greeted in the lobby by Abou Marouane (Wajih Hassan Ali Kassem, 1939-2022), the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s representative in Morocco. I hesitantly responded in Arabic to his long traditional morning greetings. Then, with a knot in my throat, I climbed into the back of an official car with tinted, bulletproof windows. After courteously closing my door and taking a seat beside me, my host asked a few questions and directed the driver.
I was very young, barely 28, a budding filmmaker who had yet to make any of the films that would later bring me recognition as a documentarian. But I had already experienced two exiles and was actively involved in a small association aimed at facilitating dialogue between the Palestinian national movement and Israeli civil society, particularly addressing Israelis of Eastern origin, the “Mizrahim” from the Arab and Muslim worlds. With my comrades Raymond Benhaim, Daniel Cohen, and Robert Edde, co-founders of Judeo-Arab Perspectives, we defined ourselves as Arab Jews and the Palestinian issue was an intimate tear for us. We believed that the memory of a shared life could help the Mizrahim of Israel envision a peaceful future with the Palestinians and work towards establishing an equal relationship with them. The future would, unfortunately, bring us painful disappointments, but none of us ever deviated from the core of this youthful commitment.
At the time, I had just obtained a French passport, which greatly facilitated my travels on both sides of the Mediterranean. I lived in Paris and planned to settle there permanently, but for my Palestinian interlocutors, I was above all an Israeli of Moroccan origin, carrying a long-awaited message of peace and hope they wanted to believe in. Israelis who showed solidarity with Palestinians and advocated for the recognition of their official representatives were few, and among them, those of Arab origin were doubly exceptional. Our approach was seen as an act of betrayal, not only in Israel but also by the official institutions of global Judaism. This isolation was sometimes difficult to bear, but for me, it was compensated by the friendship and the depth of my exchanges with many engaged intellectuals who helped me understand, create, and act in accordance with my convictions. I didn't mind being frowned upon in powerful circles, which I considered reactionary and belligerent, while my life was punctuated by intense moments of shared fraternity with Mahmoud Darwish, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Ilan Halevi, and many other friends, now gone. In Morocco, I particularly remember luminous exchanges with Abdelkébir Khatibi, who had co-authored a beautiful book with our Egyptian friend Jacques Hassoun.
But I return to that winter morning in 1983. Of course, a Palestinian ambassador guiding an Israeli citizen through the streets of an Arab capital was not a common sight then nor has it become so since. But that wasn’t the real reason for my emotion. I already knew Abou Marouane, who was one of our most active contacts and never missed an opportunity to organize discreet meetings, sometimes in Morocco, sometimes in Tunisia (where the PLO had settled after being expelled from Beirut in 1982 by a terrible Israeli invasion marked by bombings and massive massacres). The Moroccan authorities discreetly respected and encouraged these efforts, and if I was in Rabat that day, it was because my translation skills had been requested to assist a small delegation of Israeli opponents in their conversations with both Palestinian and Moroccan personalities and activists. Abou Marouane knew that I was born in Rabat and that it was my first return to my hometown since leaving for Israel with my family in 1966. I had told him that I had already returned to Morocco once, a few months earlier, but had avoided Rabat for fear of breaking the charm of my childhood memories. This time, he had arranged for my invitation to be extended by a few days, and that morning, my militant mission complete, he had offered to accompany me in search of the house where I had grown up in the Hassan district.
The car glided smoothly through the city center streets, which were free of traffic jams at the time. The walls, the river, the avenue climbing towards the heights of the city, the Hassan Tower: everything was exactly as I remembered it. The Albert Camus primary school, the Lalla Aïcha girls’ high school where I had just finished sixth grade before leaving, the corner grocery store with gas bottles on the sidewalk, my sidewalk, the neighbors’ white houses. Everything was as in my memories, even more beautiful, but more floral, and smaller too. I remembered vast mansions, but they were just modest cottages. How had I forgotten the colors of this hibiscus, these bougainvillea? Everything was there, but my house was nowhere to be found. The driver, sorry, persisted, but after circling the neighborhood for the third time, I had to admit it: the house no longer existed. It was a small white house built by my maternal grandfather before I was born, with four apartments arranged around a courtyard, a street-facing garden protected by an ivy-planted hedge, and where a fig tree, a loquat, a lemon tree, and a palm tree grew. We lived there with my grandmother and two families of Jewish cousins. It had been sold in the 70s after everyone left for Israel or France. Then it vanished, replaced by a recent, ugly, falsely luxurious, and charm-free small building, guarded by a sentry in a wooden hut. Perhaps an embassy. Yes, an embassy, they told me, disappointed too, nodding sadly. The embassy of the United Arab Emirates. My house!
I had left Rabat at the threshold of adolescence, a little Francophone Arab Jew, curious to discover the distant and mysterious country whose name was forbidden to mention in the street and from where perfumed letters regularly arrived via Paris, which my mother read aloud in the evening before the gathered family. The letters spoke of Israel and Jerusalem, where my older sisters urged us to join them. Many Jews had already left Morocco, but my father said he was too old to start a new life. My mother’s tears, which wet the letters from her daughters every night, eventually convinced him. Morocco emptied of its Jews, like the entire Arab world, for various reasons that some historians are just beginning to seriously examine (by that I mean they are beginning to go to the sources and avoid repeating this or that biased propaganda narrative). For my part, I had to leave Rabat because my mother couldn’t live separated from some of her children. It was in Jerusalem that my political consciousness began to form, during the first demonstrations of the Black Panthers and with the Matzpen militants who supported them.
In the official car of the PLO ambassador, I told Abou Marouane these things. I told him that I often dreamed of seeing Rabat again, as he dreamed of seeing his native village in Palestine. We had left Morocco of our own free will, and nothing legally prevented me from settling there, but I knew I wouldn’t do it, a page had turned, there would soon be no more Arab Jews. Our story was over, but it hadn’t been a mirage. Could we use this memory to build a common future? Could he conceive of building a project with us, he the exiled Palestinian whose life was dedicated to the struggle for return?
In 1983, many PLO cadres already acknowledged the irreversibility of the links that Israelis from all over the world had formed with the land of Palestine. They were ready for negotiation to share the land or sovereignty with those who had defeated and dispossessed them. Abou Marouane was among them, but he wanted to ensure I understood how much violence had been inflicted on Palestinians to reach that point. It was important for him to verify that I knew his people’s history and understood their struggle. Over a mint tea on the terrace of the Ouddayas Moorish café, where Jewish families used to gather on Sunday afternoons, he then told me his story. He spoke at length about his father, a nationalist leader hanged by the British in Akka, the birth of Fatah, of which he was one of the founders, and the promise he made to his wife to remarry her one day on the homeland’s soil.
How many times had I listened to a Palestinian recounting the thread of his national, familial, and personal tragedy? How many Nakba stories had I heard that shook the smooth and virtuous Zionist narrative served to me at the Jerusalem high school? Abou Marouane’s story was familiar to me even before he provided the details. But that day, still shocked by the disappointment of realizing the house where I had taken my first steps was gone, it seemed a click was happening within me, and the Palestinian wound ceased to be foreign, becoming an integral part of my own identity.
This salutary awakening should be felt by every Israeli who desires peace, but it only occurs when their quest is sincere, and when the Palestinians and Arabs they encounter on their path speak frankly to them. Israelis know the history of the Jews, but they know very little about their own history as Israelis, that of their encounter with the Palestinians. Yet, the history of the Jews is complicated, while that of the Israelis is quite simple, but it is unacknowledged: it is the story of colonial dispossession, ethnic cleansing, the replacement of one people by another. To exist as a nation-state, Israel has razed villages, seized houses, fields, and entire cities. The spoliation was creeping until 1947, gigantic and institutionalized in 1948-1949, expanded in 1967, and again creeping and daily, interminable, to this day. Not a week goes by, even today, without a Palestinian land, house, or olive tree being seized by Israeli settlers. The hemorrhage has never stopped, the Nakba continues. Certainly, the Arab Jews were not responsible at the outset since they did not participate in the conception of this machinery nor in its terrible and terrifying stage of 1948. When the great waves of Moroccan immigration arrived in Israel, hundreds of Palestinian villages were already razed and the UNRWA camps were already filled with refugees in Gaza, Lebanon, and Jordan.
That is why, in the winter of 1983, when Abou Marouane accompanied me through the streets of the Hassan district to revisit my childhood, we both thought that there was still time for an awakening among the Mizrahim in Israel to stop this deadly machinery. That is what we hoped for, and what we fought for. But today, I must face the evidence: Many Mizrahim are now just as responsible as other Israelis for the continuation of the occupation and the apartheid system that has taken root in Israel-Palestine.
We failed because the balance of power was too overwhelming, and few forces in the world had the courage to support us. There was indeed, in the 1990s, a negotiation process between Israel and the PLO, but the Oslo Accords that resulted were fundamentally flawed because they did not recognize Palestinian national sovereignty and did not put an end to colonization. All the hopes born at that time have died, colonization and spoliation have never ceased and have intensified considerably. Israel is currently led by a far-right government that includes avowed fascists, whose very existence is shameful to any Jew worthy of the name. As for the Palestinian leadership, it is in total bankruptcy, also inspiring a sense of shame and despair in a youth to whom it no longer offers any credible project. Blood continues to flow, and the situation is truly disastrous. But it would be an illusion to believe that the Palestinians will ever stop fighting for their freedom. Their resistance on the ground takes new forms with each generation, it is daily despite the absence of political leadership, and their cultural and artistic expression is extremely powerful: Palestinian intellectuals and artists are currently the true ambassadors of their people around the world. As for the Israelis, no one can predict what will become of their society, which is today traversed by movements of extreme polarization.
Personally, it is through my films that I express my commitments today. The one I am currently making is dedicated to Edmond Amran El Maleh, whom I have already mentioned. A former communist leader who turned to literature later in life, El Maleh is the author of the magnificent story “Mille sans un jour” and many other essential texts where he has been able to put words better than anyone else to our contemporary memory of Arab Jews torn from ourselves. The depth of his thought lies precisely in the fact that he has always linked the exodus of Moroccan Jews to the Palestinian tragedy. Following his example modestly, I abandoned direct political activism thirty years ago to devote myself to a more personal work. Whether it concerns Palestine or Morocco, my work essentially consists of preserving a documentary trace of what the dominant narratives aim to erase.
Today, Morocco is experiencing a particular moment in its relations with its Jewish diaspora. A new generation of Israelis, whose parents or grandparents left Morocco in the 1950s to 1970s, is trying to reconnect by visiting the places of their origins. Direct flights connect Tel Aviv to Casablanca, Marrakech, and soon to Essaouira. The emotion of these special tourists is real, and I am well placed to understand and share it. But unfortunately, their pilgrimage brings nothing more than this emotional and communal identity. It is an emotion closed in on itself, an ambiguous and sterile return to the roots, which gives more importance to the arms trade than to the exchange of ideas and the outlining of a restorative political project. Nothing is being done, on either side, for hearts and minds to open up to finally articulate, even in thought, a possible contribution of Moroccan Jews to a paradigm shift in Israel, which would involve the end of the occupation and apartheid and the sketching of a common citizenship with the Palestinians. I regret it, because it is a missed opportunity, perhaps the last, to give a restorative meaning to this important political development. Because today, as in the past, for peace to come, it is with the Palestinians that Israelis must accept to live as equals. Normalization or peace agreements with Arab countries such as Morocco today or Saudi Arabia tomorrow do nothing to change the stubborn fact of occupation and the crushing of one people by another. I would like Morocco and Moroccans, in welcoming these Israeli tourists, their lost brothers in the East, to tell them more insistently that sweeping the Palestinian issue under the rug, as is almost entirely the case today, only aggravates and exacerbates the situation on the ground. Because there is indecency in this forgetfulness, and a danger of terrible explosion to come, here as there, which, for my part, it is important to remember at every opportunity.
Translated from French by Aomar Boum