In recent years, the stories of the Jewish communities living in Arab countries and Islam during the Holocaust have come to the surface and made it unmistakably clear: the Nazis and their enthusiastic aides at every site did not care about intra-Jewish divisions between secular and secular, Ashkenazi and Sephardic. 

The Holocaust era in North Africa and the Middle East has been pushed out of memory for more or less obvious reasons. After all, it is impossible to compare the fate of most of the Galician Jews that were destroyed, with the fate of Libyan Jews, who were only "sent" to concentration camps. But these, too, were victims of a similar Jewish fate, which differed almost arbitrarily. If only they could, the Nazis would have also sent the Jews of North Africa and the Middle East to Auschwitz - something they had planned, and avoided because of their defeat to the Allied forces in these countries.

On November 8, 1942, the British and English Allied forces landed on the coasts of Algeria and Morocco, ending the campaign in the area that had hitherto been under the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. For Algerian Jews, the Allied occupation signifies a departure from darkness after two years in which Nuremberg Laws were fully implemented. It was also a great pride for the involvement of the Algerian Jewish underground, which played a major part in the operation. In Morocco, the occupation signaled the opening of a rescue operation, in which they were able to save thousands of European Jews, led by lawyer Helen Casas Ben Atar.

In Tunisia the Germans ruled for another six months, until they were expelled by the Allies. At that time, they were able to deal with Jews in every way possible: forcing them to wear yellow badges, taking them out of public office and sending 5,000 of them to labor camps. Particularly remember the "Golden Sabbath" in February 1943, when German officers appeared at the Jarba synagogue, demanding that the parishioner, the sage, Hapoel Moshe Hacohen, collect within 50 hours 50 kilos of gold from the community, or else they would be murdered. And that's just one story.

Libya, too, was expecting and marrying the Allied occupation, which finally occurred in December 1942. In the preceding years, Italian Libyan occupiers and their German allies set up race laws for Jews, establishing the Jado labor camp, and even deporting many of them to extermination camps in Europe.

The Arabs' response to these anti-Semitic actions can be divided into several types. In some places, the population with which the Jews lived for centuries remained indifferent to the Jews, even from its own distress. Elsewhere, Righteous Among the Nations came to the rescue of Jews and protected them with their bodies, and in other places the Holocaust provided fertile ground for hatred of Jews who had been underground before.

The events of the parahood in Iraq are an example of this: during the 1941 Pentecost, Arab rioters operated for two consecutive days in robbery, looting, rape and murder of the Jews in Baghdad. These events were directly related to the ideology of the Nazi party, which also bought a strike among Arab nationalists such as Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who hoped that he could shut down the return to Zion by deporting Jews to camps in Europe.

These stories are not anecdotes that come to say artificially "We, the Mizrahim, too, had a Holocaust." The holocaust of the Jewish people, as its name, is the story of us all.

Adv. Ofir Tubol is the founder of the Golden Age movement