Joshua's Corner

“Unless the peace that follows recognizes that the whole world is one neighborhood and does justice to the whole human race, the germs of another world war will remain as a constant threat to mankind.”

– US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1943

The year was 1940. The anti-human scourge of Nazism had already begun its rampage across Europe, laying waste to Poland and brutalizing its people just months prior. The Holocaust, one of the darkest chapters in all of human history, had been raging since 1938, and was only set to intensify in the following years with the implementation of the deranged Final Solution. Tens of thousands of Jews, Roma, gay and lesbian individuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, communists, socialists, and political dissidents were already being persecuted and murdered by Hitler’s regime that indiscriminately slaughtered men, women, children, and the elderly in the name of racial superiority. And millions more were still to be killed outside of the specifically anti-Jewish Holocaust as the Nazis went on to blitzkrieg through Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Driven by twisted ideologies and the ruthlessly misguided ambition to acquire more land and resources for the supposed Aryan master race, to whom, the Nazis believed, all other peoples were inferior, and many of whom they thought deserving of extermination, the Nazi war machine had been unleashed upon the world.

At the start of the decade, in the wake of Poland’s fall, Hitler’s armies, drugged with methamphetamine, better known as crystal meth, to silence their fear and turn them into wired and berserk fighting machines, surged through Western Europe. From the plains of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France to the icy tundras of Norway, the roar of panzers reverberated amidst the screech of Stuka sirens and the stamp of Nazi boots, which left nothing but a trail of death and devastation.

From Narvik to Copenhagen, from Rotterdam to the Belgian Ardennes, and from Flanders to Paris, the peoples of Western Europe fought bitterly to resist the Nazi advance. Yet, one by one, these nations fell, casting all of Europe into the suffocating darkness of fascism, tyranny, institutionalized sadism, and prideful ignorance, until finally, on June 14th, 1940, Nazi troops streamed into the French capital. Eight days later, on June 22nd, at 6:36 pm, the French delegation led by General Charles Huntziger signed the Second Armistice at Compiègne, marking the surrender of France and the fall of the Third Republic.

Taking effect two days later, at 12:35 am on the morning of June 25th, following a separate peace with Fascist Italy, which had launched an all-out incursion over the Alps on the 21st, the French surrender solidifed fascist rule on the continent, effectively rendering the United Kingdom the last bastion of humanity and democracy in Europe, who for the next year and year and a half until the Soviet Union and the United States, respectively, joined the war, stood alone against the Nazi onslaught.

Vichy France

In the wake of the collapse of the Third Republic, the nation of France was split in two, with its northern half, including its Atlantic and Channel coasts, condemned to four years of Nazi occupation, and its southern half re-established as Vichy France, which would operate until 1942 as a puppet state of the Nazi regime when it too fell under occupation. With its capital in the city for which the regime was named in central France, this government abandoned the ideals of democracy and “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” that had defined the nation for over a century and adopted a nationalist authoritarian system. The constitution of the Third Republic was suspended and World War I hero Marshal Henri Philippe Petain was chosen as the leader of this new and outwardly pro-Nazi France, with former Prime Minister Pierre Laval as acting chief of government. For Petain at least, the alignment of Vichy policy with those of Nazi Germany regarding race, specifically Jews, was out of a hope that it would gain unoccupied France greater autonomy and spare them the worst of Nazi rule, rather than an honest subscription to Nazi ideology.

Of course, this is not how things unfolded, and the German army would nevertheless pour into southern France on November 10th, 1942, two days after Allied forces landed in North Africa to help the French resistance defeat the Vichy authorities in Africa and push the Axis back to the Mediterranean. And despite what could possibly be considered a commendable goal on the part of Petain to spare French citizens the brutality of Nazi occupation, this was at the expense of foreign Jews, who were no less human than those whose identification papers listed a French birthplace, not to mention the thousands of French patriots who defied the Nazi regime of terror, many of whom were tortured and murdered by the fascist forces.

In the end, the Vichy regime’s policies were heavily responsible for the murder of approximately 77,000 men, women, and children, most of whom were murdered in the gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

It was in this environment, with the new Vichy regime conforming to Nazi policies and enacting anti-human legislation that denied a section of their population basic rights and decency across their own nation and all their colonies, as the Nazis had allowed the Vichy regime to retain control of their overseas territories, that the sultan of Morocco, a protectorate of the French colonial empire, Mohammed V, resisted, and whose courage and will amidst such overwhelming darkness saved the lives of 250,000 people.

This story of resistance in Morocco, which was then already a Muslim-majority nation, paints a poignant picture of human solidarity that transcended any imagined divisions of culture, faith, or race in an era of hate and exclusion that still resonates today. And in the 21st century, when we, as a global society, still struggle with discriminatory and hateful rhetoric and policies seeking to unnaturally turn us against our fellows, often resulting in violence, it would do well to remember times when people banded together in recognition of their shared humanity to do what was right.

But to truly appreciate the events that unfolded in Morocco during these years of slaughter, we must first understand how Morocco came to be subject to Vichy rule as well as its unique bond with its Jewish population in relation to its European neighbors to the north, and also anti-Jewish sentiment as it unfolded in France in the years before the war.

Morocco

Following the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 CE, the Umayyad Caliphate quickly expanded throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and even to Europe, taking over much of the Iberian Peninsula in 711, which would remain a part of the Islamic empire for centuries until the last Muslims were expelled from Spain with the defeat of the Emirate of Granada in 1492.

Across the centuries, Islamic caliphates, particularly that of the Abbasids following the Umayyad dynasty, and who ruled for over half a millennia from 750 CE to 1258 when it fell to Mongol forces, had been a beacon of social, technological, and scientific progress where people of all races and religions–Christians, Jews, Muslims, and those of the many smaller and indigenous faiths found in their lands, were treated largely equally, and valued for their intellectual contributions to society.

Regarding Jews in particular, who often faced extreme discrimination and violent persecution throughout all of Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, the Muslim world was a refuge where they could live and practice their faith freely. And both Jews and Christians even held offices in government beside their Muslim fellows. Members of each faith took part in each other’s celebrations and displayed a degree of cultural appreciation uncommon for their time. This embrace of pluralism was a hallmark of the caliphates for centuries, and even when they began to decline in the wake of the Mongol invasions, the Crusades, and internal conflict later on, this characteristic endured and continued to be a defining element of their successor states.

The Kingdom of Morocco on the northwest coast of Africa was one such place. As Sultan Mohammed V famously said, “There are no Jews in Morocco. There are only Moroccan subjects,” a statement that came to symbolize the tolerance and peaceful coexistence of Jews and Muslims in the North African nation, standing in contrast to the othering Jews and many other minorities faced in Europe and other parts of the world.

Closer to the Second World War, Morocco had been a colony of France since 1912, their colonization after centuries of self-rule sparked by the overthrow of Sultan Moulay Abdelaziz by his brother, the cruel Moulay Abdelhafid in 1908 who criticized his pro-Western stance. It was the catalyst after a long series of events that warrants its own explanation that triggered a rapid chain of events leading to the collapse of Moroccan self-determination and independence.

For the next four years, the incompetence of the usurper led to further rebellion, and despite his citing his brother’s European-leaning policies as the reason for his coup, actually signed in 1909 a treaty with France where he promised not to sign any treaties with any other nation without first securing French approval, a decision that significantly crippled Morocco’s independence. The final event in the chain reaction that led to Morocco’s colonization was the Agadir Crisis of 1911, which began with a rebellion against Abdelhafid. Besides drawing the attention of the German Empire as a chance to sabotage the French, it was also the opportunity for France to consolidate their control over the nation. The French forced Abdelhafid to request their help, after which they deployed a flying column, or rapid mobility land unit, to squash the uprising at the end of June.

This led to the signing of the Treaty of Fes nearly a year later on March 30th, 1912, officially called the Treaty Concluded Between France and Morocco on 30 March 1912, for the Organization of the French Protectorate in the Sharifian Empire. Under duress from the French, Sultan Abdelhafid signed away the independence of his country that had enjoyed self-determination for centuries under the pretext that France would help protect the usurper from those in Morocco who opposed his rule.

Accordingly, the treaty allowed France to occupy parts of the nation and to project French military control. The sultan and his Sharifian government retained purely nominal status as leaders and were now just puppets of their colonizers, while it was the French Resident-General who held absolute power in all foreign and domestic matters. The sultan was technically allowed to sign or veto decrees or “dahirs” from the Resident-General, but this was no more than a token. And in another demonstration of how the sovereignty of entire peoples were taken away and their voices silenced when nations were colonized was that this Resident-General was the sole representative of Morocco to other nations, robbing Moroccans of their ability to speak for themselves on the world stage.

Not surprisingly, once the terms of the Treaty of Fes were made known to the Moroccan people, who had already lived through years of instability and declining independence, a rebellion was sparked known as the Intifada of Fes, or the revolution of Fes. Feeling betrayed by their sultan, the people surrounded the Royal Palace, while some, pushed to the extreme by anger, also attacked the Jewish and European quarters of the city. But then a horrible carnage unfolded as the French commander of Fes’ garrison, General Brulard, who, according to Moroccan historian Mohammed Kenbib, thought “that the Jews were supporting the insurgents”, decided to unleash the power of his artillery on the Mellah of Fes, the Jewish quarter in the city, in Fes el-Jdid. The bombardment went on for two days, reducing entire apartment blocks to rubble and killing scores of both Muslims and Jews. When the rebels finally surrendered, the death toll amounted to 600 Moroccan Muslims and 42 Moroccan Jews, as well as 66 Europeans.

In the wake of this horrendous episode of violence, the nation’s capital was relocated to Rabat, and Morocco fell finally to colonial rule.

Mohammed V’s story in the context of Morocco’s resistance to Vichy anti-Jewish laws was thus also bound up in his nation’s status as a protectorate of France. Enthroned by the French in 1927 when it was in fact his older brother who was in line, Mohammed was chosen as he was considered by the French to be “more pliable and would be more [easily] manipulated,” the reporter Richard Hurowitz told Smithsonian magazine. “They thought he was going to be a puppet.” In reality, Mohammed was anything but, and would even go on to lead the Moroccan march to independence after the war.

Nazi Policy in Vichy France

Following the end of the First World War, as the map of Europe was drastically redrawn with the collapse of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires, Jews who had long faced brutal discrimination on structural, cultural, and direct levels such as the infamous pogroms in the east, especially in Russia, moved west to France. The Gallic nation had historically been the most humane of its European neighbors regarding its treatment of Jews, even as far back as the early 19th century during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, who, along with ensuring religious freedom for all denominations of Christianity and Jews, went so far as to declare France the homeland of the Jewish people.

Accordingly, France offered a chance for relative equality and opportunity that many European Jews could not find anywhere else on the Continent, and thousands of people and families seeking sanctuary from egregious breaches of human rights, went to begin new lives in France, and helped establish Paris as a major center of Jewish culture.

But this policy of humanity was not to last. By the 1930s, as the storm clouds of war were gathering over Europe, with the rise of the Nazis in Germany, the number of refugees, among them many scores of Jews, appearing at France’s borders skyrocketed. Anti-immigrant sentiment then steered French policy by 1939 to severely restrict the number of migrants who were accepted and many concentration camps, such as at Gurs and Rivesaltes, were established to detain refugees.

Gurs

The most notable among them, it was set up in April of 1939, nearly half a year before the outbreak of war, at the foot of the Pyrenees in southwestern France. At first a camp for political refugees, in 1940, the French government imprisoned some 4,000 German Jewish refugees–men, women, and children fleeing the sickening atrocities unfolding in Germany, in the camp, whom they labeled in dehumanizing fashion as “enemy aliens.” Then, following the Fall of France that same year to the German invasion, administration of the camp was transferred to the collaborationist Vichy regime that rose from the ashes of the Third Republic. That October, the Nazis deported approximately 6,500 German Jewish men, women, and children from the region of Baden in southwest Germany to France, most of whom the Vichy government imprisoned in Gurs. A quarter of them, about 1,600, died there and in other Vichy concentration camps. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 11%, or about 700 of them were able to later leave the country, and 12%, or about 765, went into hiding. But 40%, or approximately 2,600 of these wrongfully detained prisoners were transported to Auschwitz after July 1942 for labor and death. The fate of the remaining 600 are unknown to this day.

The adults and children alike who were imprisoned at the camp endured horrible conditions, including overcrowding and shortages of food, water, and clothing and between 1940 and 1941, about 800 died from a plethora of diseases, among them typhoid fever and dysentery. Amidst these appalling conditions, commonplace for many of the Vichy regime’s concentration camps, thousands more continued to be sent off to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Until November of 1943, when the camp was temporarily closed until it was used again to detain political prisoners and resistance fighters arrested by the Vichy police, before being a prisoner-of-war camp for German soldiers and French collaborators following the liberation of France in 1944, a total of nearly 22,000 prisoners, 18,000 of whom were Jewish, and over 1,100 of whom died in the camp, were detained there.

Statut de Juifs

Within months of the Fall of France, the collaborationist Vichy regime began implementing anti-Jewish measures modeled after the Nazis’ own racial laws. The Statut de Juifs, or Jewish Statute, was enacted in France in two parts, in October of 1940 and June of 1941. Applied to all Jews by faith as well as those considered to be Jewish by virtue of having at least three Jewish grandparents, a standard set by the Nazi Judenpolitik, the laws restricted the number of Jews who could work in certain fields, and barred Jews from many other professions entirely, such as commerce, education, medicine, and law, as well as the military and civil service. Excluded entirely from the public sphere and robbed of their rights, children were expelled from schools and families were evicted from their homes and forced to live in squalid ghettos.

Alongside these oppressive and dehumanizing laws was the program of “Aryanization,” which the Laval government implemented in July 1941 to confiscate all Jewish property and assets, from houses and apartments to heirlooms and money, leaving the large majority of Jews in France impoverished.

But the darkness was only destined to deepen. In the winter of 1942, several high-ranking Nazis, including SS official and chief of the Reich Security Main Office Reinhard Heydrich, a chief architect of the Holocaust, organizer of the Einsatzgruppen death squads, and mastermind behind a string of intelligence services and security agencies of the Nazi regime, notably the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, the intelligence branch of the SS, met to discuss the Final Solution. This was the Wannsee Conference, where the plan for the mass deportation and genocide of Jews in Europe was formalized.

Like the peel of a death knell, the persecution and murder of Jews across the Continent intensified, including in France. Beginning on March 27th, 1942, more than 1,000 Jews were sent away on trains from Compiègne to Auschwitz and two months later, on May 29th, a decree was issued that was to take effect on June 7th: all Jews in occupied France were from then on required to wear the yellow star.

With the help of Vichy police, Nazi authorities proceeded to carry out often violent raids across the nation, with French police arresting 13,000 Jews in Paris between July 16th and 17th and detaining them for days in horrible conditions in the Vélodrome d’Hiver sports arena. As Vichy policy only allowed, at these early stages, adult Jews to be sent to the death camps, entire families were torn apart as older siblings, parents, and grandparents were systematically separated from younger children. But later that year, the Vichy regime would allow the transport of entire families, and began shipping off children and babies along with adults to the darkness that awaited them in the east.

Within a few months of the Wannsee Conference, by the autumn of 1942, approximately 42,000 Jews had been processed at the Drancy transit camp outside Paris, a third of whom were from Vichy France, while the large majority of the rest were either foreign or stateless. Almost all who were transported straight from Drancy to Auschwitz were murdered upon arrival.

Just one example of the thousands of families who were torn apart and the sacred bonds between children and parents that were destroyed by the sins of ignorance and malice was that of Marcelle Bock and her family. Born in 1931 as Marcelle Burakowski, she was the oldest of three girls, the sister to twins two years younger than her, named Jenny and Berthe. When Marcelle was just 11 years old, she, her sisters and their mother, were arrested during the raids of July 16th and 17th, 1942 for no reason other than that they were Jewish, and transported to the Vélodrome d’Hiver detention center.

We can never truly understand the sheer horror that they must have gone through, nor understand the pain that Marcelle felt when she escaped alone, as Jenny, Berthe, and her mother were sent away to die in Auschwitz. Her father was the only family she had left until two years later, he too was arrested by Nazi authorities and deported to Auschwitz on June 1st, 1944, where he met the same end as his wife and their youngest daughters. Marcelle survived, living with two different families outside Paris, but the pain of losing her family in such a brutal way at just 11 years old was a horrific injustice of the most extreme degree that destroyed her world.

Amidst hearing the crimes of the Vichy regime and the soul-shattering consequences that they caused, it is important to note that the horrific measures carried out by the Nazi authorities which in many ways behaved like a terrorist occupying force and the Vichy regime were in fact met with anger and protest from the general French populace, reflecting the multiple forces acting on French society at the time, which was dealing with a uniquely oppressive occupation, even if indirectly through the puppet Vichy regime. An unelected government, they did not represent the views of the majority of the French people, who recognized the Nazis as a force of savage brutality. At the same time, for the founding members of the Vichy regime, such as Marshal Petain, collaborating with the Nazis was a terrible price to pay to try to ensure the safety of French nationals, and indeed, the great majority of Jewish citizens of France were spared the worst of Nazi terror. Yet this of course does not make up for the murder of approximately 77,000 men, women, and children who perished in the dark abyss of hatred and violence carried out in the name of national, racial, and religious glory and purification.

The historian Michael Marrus has said that while the “‘Final Solution’ in France was a Nazi project from beginning to end,” the rounding up of Jews there to be sent to death camps in such large droves would likely not have been as significant without the help of French police and other collaborators.

In the end, the story of French complicity and assistance in the genocide of Jews is a difficult subject to grapple with that today remains a point of contention among some political forces in modern France. Though for the sake of the future, and to prevent the same horrors from being visited on any other group of people, it is imperative that we also remember this part of the history of the Holocaust.

Resistance

This was the environment in which Sultan Mohammed V of Morocco stood up against the anti-human policies of the Vichy regime and saved the lives of a quarter of a million people who otherwise might have met the same fate as the 77,000 Jews in mainland France. In Morocco, while there was some level of anti-Jewish sentiment characteristic of the tendency to discriminate against any group sadly found in every nation, it was nowhere near the heights found in Europe or many other parts of the world or a mainstream sentiment shared by the general Moroccan public.

As such, when the Vichy regime was moving to enact their anti-Jewish legislation in the autumn of 1940, Mohammed worked to block their implementation in Morocco. Sadly, his power was merely nominal, and the measures were still put in place, and, according to the structure of the nation as a protectorate of France, Mohammed was forced to ratify them with his signature.

Yet while he affixed his name to them officially, his mind and heart were committed to protecting the Jews of Morocco as his equals and reaffirmed his commitment to defending the Jewish people. As he told Jewish leaders soon after signing the decrees at a secret meeting, he considered Moroccan Jews to be equals with Moroccan Muslims, and would do what was necessary to protect his people.

In defiance of the Vichy regime and the Nazis themselves, Mohammed refused to meet with Nazi officials in Morocco, and though he lacked real political power, he used his office as sultan to wield symbolic power and made sure the racist decrees weren’t fully enforced, and repeatedly used rhetoric that highlighted the equality among the religious and ethnic groups that had characterized Morocco for centuries.

Jewish culture and the practice of their religion was able to largely continue in Morocco, and in November of 1941, when the Feast of the Throne, a yearly holiday held to honor the sultanate of Mohammed, was held, he had as guests at the great banquet following the pageantries, rabbis and other prominent Jews. The Vichy regime was incensed, interpreting this as a repudiation of their authority, which was precisely what the sultan was intending. As he said, “I absolutely do not approve of the new antisemitic laws, and I refuse to associate myself with a measure I disagree with. I reiterate as I did in the past that the Jews are under my protection, and I reject any distinction that should be made among my people.”

His leadership inspired other Moroccans, even as Vichy troops occupied their country, to resist their colonizers’ injustices in a remarkable demonstration of courage sustained by their sense of duty and the virtue of compassion that is considered a central element of Islam, to defend the rights of their fellow human beings. The bravery of Sultan Mohammed is especially noteworthy, for his place as merely the nominal leader of Morocco meant that he could have been easily toppled by the Vichy regime, even by assassination. But the lives of his people were not a price he was willing to pay for his own security or status. And while there were no doubt political gains to be made as it further increased his popularity among all Moroccans and created a spectacle of resisting external rule, as the historian Susan Gilson Miller alludes to in A History of Modern Morocco, the dangers that surrounded his resistance leads us to believe that he shared a genuine concern for the human rights of his people.

The sultan’s method of resistance is also particularly noteworthy for while he highlighted the equality and respect that Jews, as fellow members of the human community deserved, he also emphasized on the much larger point at stake, which was the division of humanity. To him, the persecution and genocide of Jews in Europe was not only an atrocity towards the Jewish people, but to humanity as a whole.

For beyond whatever differences can be found among people, whether they be of culture or race or religion, is the common humanity that unites us all under the natural law of reality and even God. The Holocaust was not especially savage and barbaric because it was directed at Jews specifically, but because it subjected anyone at all to brutalization, humiliation, and the heinous sin of genocide. The 6 million direct victims of the Final Solution could have been anyone, and it would have been as repulsive as the murder of the Jews. And indeed, many other minorities were also targeted by the Nazi regime, as we discussed at the beginning of this article. That the recorded number of those from other groups murdered ranks lower than the number of Jews who were killed doesn’t in any way diminish their horrific nature. Millions were being dehumanized and murdered, from Jews to Slavs to Jehovah’s Witnesses, to dissidents and nonconformers, but they were ultimately all human.

This was the perspective of Sultan Mohammed, who risked his own life to defend humanity. The impeded enforcement of the Jewish Statute ensured that not one of the quarter of a million Jews in Morocco were deported to the Nazi death camps. While many were still forced to live in ghettos by the Vichy authorities and their children were expelled from school, the vast majority of Jews in Morocco were spared the worst of the Nazi onslaught.

“What he did ended up delaying actions that could have been taken earlier,” Hurowitz says. “If he hadn’t taken a stand, then Jews could have been rounded up before the Allies came.” In the end, only about 2,100 of them were imprisoned at Vichy labor camps in the Sahara desert as punishment for opposing the regime. Many of them died from exhaustion, hunger, and disease, and while even a single death is an unjustifiable tragedy, the vast majority of their fellow Jews in Morocco survived.

The resistance of the Moroccan people ensured the relative safety of their Jewish fellows until the first Allied forces finally reached the shores of the desert country on November 8th, 1942, when US troops landed at the towns of Safi and Fedala on Morocco’s Atlantic coast. Vichy forces were no match for the advancing American army, and the nation was soon liberated. Mohammed and the people of Morocco celebrated their arrival, and even joined their ranks to carry on the fight against the Nazi war machine. The following year, Mohammed hosted the Casablanca Conference where he discussed the war and his nation’s relations with the United States and Great Britain with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill themselves. Then, just two years later, in 1945, just months after the liberation of Paris, he would walk down the Champs-Élysées with the French resistance hero Charles de Gaulle.

And with the survival of Morocco’s Jews during the Second World War who went largely unscathed by the Nazis’ barbaric policies implemented by the Vichy regime, it is worth noting that Morocco was not the only Muslim-majority nation that stood up against injustice. At the same time that Mohammed V and his people were fighting to protect their fellows, government officials in Tunisia, another protectorate of France, worked to safeguard their Jewish population from the worst of Vichy, and by extension Nazi rule.

One example was that of Muhammad VII al-Munsif, the ruler, or Bey of Tunis, who awarded multiple Jewish doctors and entrepreneurs royal titles and honors within days of him rising to power on June 19th, 1942.

Legacy

As a result of Sultan Mohammed and the people’s of Morocco’s heroic resistance, they gained the “eternal gratitude” of the Jews of Morocco, as the head of the Council of Jewish Communities of Morocco Serge Berdugo said. And till today, the solidarity that Moroccans displayed with their Jewish neighbors amidst the horrors of the Holocaust continues to inspire the enduring bond between Muslims and Jews in the nation. As the entrepreneur Richard Attias said in 2014, “I really have a deep root to my country for a very simple reason,” which was Mohammed’s honor. “I believe it’s this duty of memory that made me stay Moroccan,” he added, “even if I left Morocco at 16”.

Mohammed’s resistance made him a hero. Yet in 1953 he was overthrown and exiled by the government of the French Fourth Republic which feared he would bring about Moroccan independence. Yet the man who had been chosen to be sultan under the impression that he would be a “malleable” puppet would only return to power two years later. And under his leadership, Morocco regained its independence in 1956, whereupon Mohammed V became king of Morocco. This new nation was built on the foundations of equality, affirming the equal rights of both Jews and Muslims.

“All Moroccans, Muslim and Jewish, are subjects of the same nation,” as Mohammed said the following year. “They must act together.”

This doctrine of humanity endured even after Mohammed V. His son, Hassan II, who succeeded him as king in 1961, was an ardent champion of Muslim-Jewish coexistence, even as tensions began to emerge between the Arab world and Israel, prompting the rise of both anti-Jewish and Islamophobic sentiment.

Despite this, Morocco remained a beacon of unity and a symbol of hope for the future, an example of peaceful coexistence without discrimination or bigotry. As US President Bill Clinton said in 1995 at a state dinner with Hassan II, “In a region where passion and hatred have so often overwhelmed cooler heads and clearer minds, yours has always been a voice of reason and tolerance.”

Our Responsibility

The unwillingness of Sultan Mohammed V and the people of Morocco to allow their fellow people to be robbed of their rights and be the victims of a hateful regime serves as an inspiration to the rest of us today who live in a world where, tragically, fear and anger are still being used to divide humanity and turn us against each other.

In both the East and the West, we see a troubling rise in hateful rhetoric fueling violence in the name of race, religion, and nationalism. In India, dehumanizing policies and speech is spurring atrocities against the Muslim population, from cultural genocide in the form of the demolition of mosques to direct violence with the humiliation and murder of Muslims, referred to in India as “infiltrators”. As noted in Dr. John Rafy at the Woolf Institute’s article The Politics of Inter-faith Love in India, as well as in several other sources and human rights organizations, spouses in interfaith marriages, which mostly comprise Muslim-Hindu couples are also targeted by violent extremists, as well as anyone involved in the beef industry who are brutalized and even lynched by vigilante groups. One case of this was from 2016 when a group of “cow vigilantes”, or gau rakshaks, forced a group of Dalit youths who were transporting beef to publicly consume cow dung. One of the vigilantes said that this “was to teach them a lesson, and also to purify them”.

In Azerbaijan, as reported by Human Rights Watch and many other prominent human rights organizations, one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, numbering 120,000, faces constant persecution at the hands of their own government and even the harrowing specter of genocide as they live under military blockade, with the flow of vital humanitarian aid such as food, medicine, and fuel deliberately cut off by the Azerbaijani dictatorship.

In the West, extremist parties and politicians have sown a web of fear around the Islamic faith and its believers, portraying them as inherently violent, anti-Western, and a threat to security, with media outlets across the political spectrum aiding in the construction of this tailored narrative to reinforce the fears that politicians are trying to drum up in order to stoke divisions which they can use to gain power. The Gallup article Islamophobia: Understanding Anti-Muslim Sentiment in the West talks about the various ways that this kind of prejudice has endangered Muslims across the United States and the Western world as a whole, including how many members of the Islamic faith are stereotyped as either terrorists or terrorist sympathizers.

Alongside Muslims, conspiracy theories that have now been elevated to the national spotlight of many countries by demagogues who either truly believe them or are merely using them to sow hatred, or both, suggesting that the world is run by a secret cabal of Jewish plutocrats, or that Jews are to be blamed for the death of Jesus Christ can still be found in the West.

Rising prejudice as well as violence towards Asians has also become a significant danger, with both politicians and civil society in some parts of the world perpetuating extremely troubling rhetoric which has inspired waves of violence against them, especially those of either Chinese nationality or ethnicity. Just one example of this is the rise in violent crimes that were committed against Asians in the wake of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic that some politicians blamed on the people of China. A case of this was the Singaporean student who was violently assaulted in London on February 24th, 2020 as a result of racist scapegoating that blamed Asians for the global crisis.

Even women today are facing a new level of violent misogyny that has transcended race and nationality to target every member of the gender with the rise of the incel and “male supremacy” subcultures that call for a world order where men are treated as superior and that women are meant to be subservient to men in every way, and even that women are the cause of all of men’s problems. Sentiment like this, which is terrifyingly prevalant across several platforms, with multiple podcasts and online shows with audiences of tens of thousands of people promoting this hateful and violent ideology, has contributed to a rise in violence against women that have been classified as terrorist attacks, such as the 2020 Westgate shooting. The attack, which is really just one of several others of this nature, was motivated by, as the perpetrator Armando Hernandez who is a self-proclaimed incel said, his anger with society and specifically with women for rejecting him.

Seeing all of these cases of injustice and the origins from which they emerge—political rhetoric designed to ultimately give politicians too inept to win elections on their own merit in the name of security, proves that the divisions many of us fight over are meaningless and are distracting us from the true project we need to be focusing on, which is that of finally recognizing and embracing our common humanity on a global scale.

In today’s world, where persecution based on race, religion, gender, nationality, language, and even political beliefs poses a threat to peoples around the world, and with essentially every group being targets of vitriolic speech and violence and pitted by governments the world over as eternal enemies, the story of solidarity in Morocco stands as a poignant example of unity and compassion.

Beneath the shadow of occupation, war, and hate, these heroes of history, from Mohammed himself to ordinary Moroccans, came together to defend humanity, even as their nation was surrounded by the forces of brutality, ensuring not only the survival of 250,000 of its people, but also the emergence of an even stronger bond centered around common humanity that endures among its people till today.

These artificial divisions that are being manufactured to tear us apart are an existential danger to the peace and security that we cherish and indeed pose a threat to our very humanity. As a result of hateful rhetoric, mass propaganda, and the utilization of ‘us vs. them’ mentality to cultivate disunity from which politicians can gain power by presenting themselves as saviors, some have lost sight of the one ultimate truth: that we are all human. In children we see that love and kindness is much more natural to the soul, children who see everyone around them as potential friends. They are living proof that the lines we draw to box ourselves in according to race, gender, religion, and color are nothing more than social constructs that have often been corrupted to stoke fear, provoke anger, and justify hate and violence.

Recognizing that our shared humanity should and does take precedence over any sense of division is the only thing that will truly bring an end to the conflicts that still rage. Until all people are seen as fellow humans, none of us are truly safe or free, for the same engines of chaos that fracture society along these lines can be turned on anyone, and motivate different groups to carry out even the most abominable forms of violence against each other. Politicians and pundits might denounce this worldview as a satanic plot or even a communist or hippie and naive fantasy and that the old way is just how things are done, that violence and discrimination will ultimately always be a reality. But none of those things are true, and we don’t have to accept the idea that the civil wars among us are inevitable. If anything, these conflicts are the most unnatural tragedies in our world, and we have the power to stop them.