The capable young intelligence officer reached for my newsletter with a smile, looked at it for a long time, looked at it from different angles, and then turned it in as if hoping for better news. on that side. There were none.
However, the king’s cousin, Moulay Ahmed Alaui, agreed to meet with me in parliament and I had no hesitation in introducing me as a reporter for the Jerusalem Post to fellow parliamentarians.
It was 1978, five years after the trauma of the Yom Kippur War and a year before Egypt and Israel agreed at Camp David to make peace. Unlike the Arab countries that have agreed in 2020 to normalize relations with Israel – the United Arab Emirates, Sudan and Bahrain – and other countries called American peace targets, Morocco was alone on Israel. to engage in war. A Moroccan infantry brigade, north of the Syrian army in the Yom Kippur War, attacked Israeli tanks and units from the Golani Brigade at the base of Mount Hermon and suffered heavy casualties. However, marginal ties between the two countries resumed after the ceasefire stopped.
As peacemakers developed between Egypt and Israel after the war, Morocco became a major enabler. Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and other Israeli leaders flew into Morocco in a panic for secret talks, which would eventually lead to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s visit to Israel and peace talks.
ON my 1978 tour, the common sight I encountered within the Jewish community was doubts. The community enjoyed the warmth of the royal house, businessmen were doing very well economically and generally had good relations with Arab neighbors. The community had full civil rights. But there was uncertainty. “I’ve lived here all my life,” said a young manufacturer who invited me to his luxury home for Sunday lunch, “but I don’t feel at home.”
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One Muslim friend did not own him, he said – by his own choice. There were some who wanted to be friends with him but he didn’t feel comfortable with them. He did not allow his four young children to play with Muslim children. As we talked, the four of them were looking through the gate at a lively outdoor street football game played by Arab children from the neighborhood who were doing well.
Another said that the absence of attacks on suspects during the Yom Kippur War “says a lot about the suffering of ordinary Moroccans.” But concern, he said, was legitimate for any Jew living in Arab society. “There is a certain fanaticism hidden in such a society. I would say that 80% of the Arabs here would not be sad to see us leave. “
The Istiklal Party, then a small member of the government coalition, would often print articles in its newspaper that were just as anti-Jewish as anti-Israel. He had even reproduced the Elders Zion Protocols. But government newspapers had embraced dramatic pro-Jewish positions. Under the heading “Descendants of Abraham,” a paper proposed the cultural and intellectual level of the Jewish community, which he described as “part of a Moroccan personality.”
King Hassan II himself publicly referred to a Jewish “genius”. For the first time, a government newspaper reported that sympathy for Israel was a natural feeling for Moroccan Jews. Skeptics would argue that this friendly view had nothing to do with Rabat’s interest in Washington’s support. In any case, the Trump administration, in announcing this month the consolidation agreement between Israel and Morocco, announced its support for Morocco’s territorial claim in Western Sahara vis-a-vis the Polisario Front with support Algeria.
During my visit four decades ago, I met one of the few Jewish intellectuals who did not leave Morocco after the Six Day War. He described the easy life in Morocco. “Where else would someone on my salary be able to be a member of a club and ski-water, golf or tennis every day?”
But there were deeper reasons. Gerard, as we call him, saw himself as the protector of Jewish times in Morocco. An obsession, he called it. He had, since his university days more than 20 years previously, been a militant integrator. In newspaper articles and public forums, he called on the Moroccan people to participate fully in national life and for Muslims to recognize them as fellow citizens, not foreign entities.
“I’m pretty alone here, you know.”
His wife had died years before and he had sent his daughter to Paris to study for a law degree.
“It hurts but there are no young men here.” I can’t keep it. I am about to send my son to university in Paris too. I have not one relationship left in Rabat and not one close friend. They are all gone. I play golf because I can play on my own. “
As we parted, he noted that Moroccan Jewry was made up of extended families with very close relationships. “We are not raised for exile. I believe no one is there. “
The writer was a reporter at the Jerusalem Post and author of Yom Kippur War, the Cherbourg Ships and the Battle of Jerusalem.