By Hassan Alaoui
What is happening between Israel and Morocco has a deep historical, cultural, human and religious depth. This depth does not exist anywhere in the Arab world or even in the world at all. Western countries can neither understand nor admit that the Jews are the very first inhabitants of Morocco. That is to say, at the very least, for no less than 3 or 4000 years or even more.
It is the community that has provided the greatest number and the best theologians in the world, the scrupulous copyists of the Torah whose tombs flourish in the heights of Sous, the Atlas, Safi, Essaouira-Mogador, Mazagan, the Atlantic Coast, Bejaad, Tafilalet and other regions!
I personally knew the daughter of General Benes, who was at the head of the military junta that ruled Brazil for several years and who, aged over 80, went almost every 3 years to Ben Hmed to reflect on the tombs of his ancestors, his general father having made the same pilgrimages!
In 1737 it was the Jews of Morocco who embarked on makeshift flotillas from Cape Verde and hampered across the Atlantic before arriving in the cities of northern Brazil: Natal, Belem, Manahaus and Rio Grande before rushing into the immense Mato Grosso…
At one time the Jews of Morocco constituted a community of nearly 80,000 citizens who have preserved their culinary traditions, their Moroccan religious rites, their attachment to the Kingdom of Morocco.
This historical and memorial thickness of Morocco with its Jewish communities has never been denied. Centuries have passed, empires have succeeded one another in Europe in particular, from the Carolingians to the Prussians, while the history of Morocco, more than a thousand years old, went through time and trials, the Jews in the front line.
In 1940, the fascist regime of Vichy wanted to impose on Moroccan Jews the wearing of the sinister swastika and King Mohammed V violently opposed it with this sentence thrown at Marshal Pétain: “They are my citizens and you will not touch them. ! “.
There are more than 1 Million Moroccan Jews in Israel who emotionally perpetuate their heritage and defend their memory!
No country can claim such a deep transcendent dimension. No one will understand this line which traces the Ariadne’s thread of a community of destiny which presides over this relationship between the peoples, Israeli and Moroccan. Those who pretend not to understand, even less to admit the teleology of this long and silent epic, who believe in fact that they easily break the tenuous thread of History in the name of ideology or even demagoguery, are mistaken or even fooling themselves the finger in the eye. They do not understand the geopolitics of our medium and long term interests!