Zionism, to my mind, can be described as an effort to whiten the Jew philosophically and even literally. - Ella Shohat

Now that the three cultural topographies that compose my ruptured and dislocated history – Iraq, Israel and the United States – have been involved in a war, it is crucial to say that we exist. Some of us refuse to dissolve so as to facilitate “neat” national and ethnic divisions. My anxiety and pain during the (1991) Scud attacks on Israel, where some of my family lives, did not cancel out my fear and anguish for the victims of the bombardment of Iraq, where I also have relatives. War, however, is the friend of binarisms, leaving little place for complex identities.

Although I in no way want to idealize that experience – there were occasional tensions, discriminations, even violence – on the whole, we lived quite comfortably within Muslim societies. Our history simply cannot be discussed in European Jewish terminology.

This picture of an ageless and relentless oppression and humiliation ignores the fact that, on the whole, Jews of Islam-a minority among several other religious/ethnic communities-lived relatively comfortably within Arab-Muslim society. My point is not to idealize the situation of the Jews of Islam, but rather to suggest that, with a few exceptions, the agendas of Zionist and anti-Zionist historians have either subsumed Islamic-Jewish history into Christian-Jewish history or ignored the status of Jews in the context of other minorities in Islamic societies.