Sudan’s Culture of Anti-Semitism

In early December 2012, Sudanese officials claimed to have captured an Israeli spy in the Darfuri town of Kereinek. Curiously, the alleged infiltrator in question was no ordinary spy. This particular foreign agent had wings and feathers. The ‘spy’ turned out to be a vulture, which as it would later be revealed had been tagged by the Israeli Nature Service for the purpose of studying avian migration patterns. 

One is compelled to ask the bird-seizing officials, why they think a nation that possesses some of the most sophisticated surveillance technology in the world would resort to utilising scavenging birds to monitor their adversaries? And why would that nation equip its secret spy vultures with ankle bands identify itself as the dispatcher?

But asking such questions of the Sudanese officials, questions inspired by common sense, would unlikely be met with coherent answers, for the reason that they are burdened by a mania which at its core is so utterly senseless. 

The officials in question, like so many other Sudanese, are afflicted with the mind-virus that is anti-Semitism, a symptom of which seems to be the impairment of one’s critical faculties. 

A history of Sudanese anti-Semitism 

A fact unknown to most Jews and Sudanese alike, the smallest Jewish community in the Middle East used to call Sudan home. At its peak between 1930-50, the Sudanese Jewish community numbered no more than 1,000. It was a small but vibrant community whose members enjoyed warm relations with their neighbours. 

All that came to an end in the 1970s, when following an increasingly hostile climate, the last Jews were forced to leave the country. In the aftermath of the 1967 Arab League Summit in Khartoum, anti-Semitic attacks became more frequent and Sudanese newspapers began advocating for the murder of prominent Jewish community figures. The hate campaign against the Jewish community eventually culminated in Jewish men being imprisoned on trumped up charges.

Over the last years, Daisy Abboudi, a British researcher and daughter of Sudanese Jews, has recorded the stories of her forefathers. She started the website, Tales of Jewish Sudan, where she posts extracts of interviews with living members of the community. Among the storytellers is Yehoshoa Ben-David, a graduate of the University of Khartoum who now lives in Israel. He warmly remembers his time at the University of Khartoum and going down to the stadium to support his local football team, Al Hilal Omdurman. Another storyteller, David Gabra, talks about fasting for 30 days so he could enjoy breaking the fast with his Muslim friends. 

But some of the stories leave a bitter aftertaste, and speak to thegrowing hatred the community started facing, such as Ben-David recollecting a crowd throwing stones at his aunt’s house. 

For her project, Abboudi has interviewed around 50 Sudanese Jews, she summed up their experiences and memories as a mix of nostalgia, sorrow and bitterness. ‘It’s a bit bittersweet when they look back because on the one hand it was such an amazing life but on the other, they were effectively forced to leave,’ says Abboudi.

A decade or so after the last of the Sudanese Jews had departed, a devastating famine struck neighbouring Ethiopia, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee to Sudan. Among the refugees were thousands of Ethiopian Jews, known as Falashas. No sooner had they arrived in Sudan than there were reports of their persecution inside the Sudanese refugee camps. The reports made it all the way to the Associate US Coordinator for Refugee Affairs, Robert Krieger, who came up with the idea of secretly airlifting them out of Sudan and delivering them to Israel. In 1984, Krieger met with Mossad and Sudanese representatives to relay his proposal, and thus Operation Moses was born.

After having airlifted out thousands, Sudan’s Arab allies were made aware of the operation and pressured the Sudanese to stop the airlifts. The Sudanese government obliged, leaving the remaining Falashas to fend for themselves. 

A common sentiment among Sudanese is the existence of an everlasting bond between themselves and Ethiopians. Evidently, this bond does not encompass the Jews of Ethiopia. 

Hatred and conspiracy theory 

In modern times, whenever the Israel-Palestine conflict flares up, you can expect large scale Sudanese demonstrations, as well as the accompanying mass outbreak of Jew-hatred.

But even at demonstrations completely unconnected to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Jews are still at the forefront of many Sudanese minds. At a 2006 demonstration in Khartoum, protesting the deployment of UN troops to Darfur, one protester held up a sign which succinctly read, ‘To Hell, Zionism’.

Now, you may ask what a Jewish nationalist movement has to do with a UN peace keeping mission in northeast Africa? To the anti-Semite, everything. Because anti-Semitism is not merely a hatred, it is simultaneously a conspiracy theory, and in Sudan, as in the Muslim world in general and the Arab world in particular, the Jews are routinely accused of being the orchestrators of all the world’s ills. 

In August 2017, Sudanese cleric Sheikh Muhammad Hassan Tanoun verbalised the conspiracy from the pulpit, when he delivered a sermon in the Abu Bakr AlSiddiq Mosque in Khartoum, and said, ‘Ever since [the Jews] existed on the face of the Earth, they have been the head of the serpent…all things evil and all the tragedies on earth are caused by their schemes, their deception, and their wickedness.’ The sermon was broadcasted on Sudan TV for the whole nation to hear. 

This is by no means an isolated incident. Anti-Semitic sermons are commonplace inside Sudanese mosques, attend a few Friday sermons and you are likely to be subjected to it.

Under the guise of criticising Israel 

The notion that the fervent anti-Israel sentiments in Sudan are born out of sober reflections on the foreign and domestic policies of Israel, or mere sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people, is quite frankly absurd. Israel is by no means without sin. However, the list of countries guilty of equal or greater offences is a very long one indeed. And yet, these other countries do not routinely have their flags burned on Sudanese streets, their citizens, unlike Israel’s, are not banned from entering the country on the basis of their nationality. And the rightfor these other nationsto exist is not opposed by large swathes of the Sudanese public. 

The fact of the matter is, Sudan has an anti-Semitism problem. This ancient hatred, which often verges on the psychotic, has made Sudanese people chase their own countrymen out of their homeland, forcing some of them to flee to Israel, only to then have the audacity to condemn them for living in Israel.

In the 1980’s, it made it so starved and desperate Ethiopians were unable to find refuge in a sister country whose people can usually pride themselves on their extraordinary culture of hospitality. In present day Sudan, this bigotry consistently rears its ugly head throughout public and private life.

No people are destined to perpetuate the bigotries of previous generations. There is no reason why Sudan could not follow in the footsteps of many other countries and relegate anti-Semitism to the margins of society. But such a development cannot simply be willed into existence. It will only come about through the concerted effort of resilient campaigners, and it would likely take decades for their efforts to succeed.

Ben-David is now in his 70s and living outside Tel Aviv. Of his country of birth, he said, ‘If I could get a ticket under an assumed name, I will go [back], honestly.’ It is a tragedy that Ben-David ever had to leave his homeland in the first place.

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Mustafa Fagog Badri was born in Sweden to a Sudanese father and a South Sudanese/Italian mother. He is currently pursuing a political science degree at Lund University in Sweden. He is politically right-of-centre and takes particular interest in issues such as economic freedom, secularism and animal rights.