Arab-Jewish refugee speaks at lecture - The Spartan Daily

By Erin Caballero
Daily Senior Staff Writer
November 15, 2005
Co-founder and Libyan refugee Gina Bublil Waldman spoke of the Jewish-Arab conflict at a noon lecture on Tuesday in the Morris Dailey Auditorium.
Waldman co-founded JIMENA, Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, an organization that aims to tell the story of Jewish refugees from the Arab regions along with bringing about a lasting peace in the Middle East.
"Hate is a weapon of mass destruction," Waldman said as she recalled the horrors of the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and the neighboring countries.
Born in the Libyan city of Tripoli in 1948, Waldman and her family were forced to flee when the then-leader Muammar el-Qaddafi issued a decree that forced Jewish people to give their assets over to the Libyan government if they wanted to leave. Jewish people in Libya at the time, however, had experienced overt and institutionalized anti-Semitism long before they were forced to leave with only the clothes on their back and $20 in their pocket, Waldman said.
"If you have 10 Jews and you kill five, how many Jews do you have (left)?"Waldman rhetorically asked, remembering a particular arithmetic lesson she learned in school when she was 6 years old.
According to Waldman, the Six-Day War created mobs that burned down her family's home and business, but an Arab neighbor told the mobs that her family had left, ultimately risking his life to save theirs'.
She told the audience, which was so silent that a dropped pin could be heard, that "languages can save your life," telling of an incident when she had to decide which of the three languages she knew at the time to use convince the bus driver to let her use the phone. The bus driver was pouring gasoline underneath the bus in an effort to blow it up and kill all seven occupants aboard. If she hadn't bothered him and "focused all her energy" on the matches he was holding in his hand, none of the occupants, herself included, would be alive today.
She later fled to the island of Malta, then to Italy and Germany, and finally came to the United States, which she has made her permanent home.
The presentation wasn't without its history or cultural lessons - the students, faculty and other guests were treated to a display of Arab-Jewish art and a Libyan wedding dress that was owned by Waldman's great-grandmother.
The dress, a 5-meter-long piece of fabric striped with red, cream and thin strips of gold, was worn like a sari and covered the hair. In her culture, red means good luck and the outfit was completed with intricately beaded gold Libyan jewelry. The entire ensemble was modeled by SJSU student Shadzi Shabrokh, a senior majoring in journalism.
"It's beautiful - I don't know if I could wear it all day, though," Shabrokh said.
"It was a really cool opportunity to show that the Palestinians weren't the only ones affected by the occurrences of the Six-Day War," said Andrew Schwartz, president of the SJSU Jewish Student Union.
Schwartz said there were approximately a million Jews living in the Arab lands in the earlier part of the 20th century, but after the Six-Day War, only 6,000 people remained. He said most went to Israel, and the rest went elsewhere.
Source: The Spartan Daily