The Markaz Review:

Ilan Benattar

The Moroccan Jewish Marxist Abraham Serfaty (1926-2010), a longtime political prisoner sometimes referred to as “Morocco’s Mandela,” was one of the 20th century’s most insightful observers of Moroccan Jewish affairs. This in spite of the fact that by the late 1960s the majority of the community — numbering between 200,000-250,000 around mid-century — had relocated to a country where he would never set foot, the State of Israel. As a vigorous anti-Zionist and an unrepentant revolutionary, his writings on Israel bristle with fury over two homelands lost: Palestine for Palestinians and Morocco for Moroccan Jews. In his various essays on the “Zionist entity,” he devotes particular attention to the dual position occupied by what he terms its Arab Jewish “colonial minority,” a demographic in which Israelis of Moroccan origin feature prominently. This “colonial minority,” according to Serfaty, functions as both “an instrument of oppression against the Palestinian people and as cannon fodder in the service of the expansionist aims of the American-Zionist rogues in the Middle East.”

In 1982, while incarcerated for his underground political activities — he was in jail from 1974 until 1991 — Serfaty penned “An Address to the Wretched of Israel,” which he dedicated to “my Arab Jewish brothers and sisters.” Serfaty writes with particular verve about the protest movement that had emerged from within this community a decade earlier:

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