Moroccans Pulling for Native Son In Israel

The Associated Press

March 22, 2006

In Morocco, Old-Timers Remember Native Son Who Grew Up to Be a Candidate for Israel Prime Minister

By SCHEHEREZADE FARAMARZI

BOUJAD, Morocco - Past a faded green door, under washing flapping from a line, stands a dilapidated house that represents the beginning of a Jewish odyssey. The house on the Darb al-Kadareen alley in this town's Jewish quarter was once the home of a toddler named Armand Perez who would take the Hebrew name Amir Peretz and become the Israeli Labor Party's candidate for prime minister in Tuesday's election.

His date of birth March 9, 1952 and the years of his parents' births are meticulously recorded in Boujad's Town Hall in both the Western and Islamic calendars.

Today, no one in this farming town 170 miles from Rabat, the capital, remembers the boy who left at age 4. But some recall his father, David Perez, telling how he cried as did some of the town's Muslims when he and other Jews sold their houses half a century ago and immigrated to Israel.

Those were tumultuous times. Israel was at war with the entire Arab world. Its Zionist mission was to gather in the Jews of the diaspora, and that included as many of Morocco's 200,000 Jews as wanted to go. Some left as soon as Israel came into existence in 1948, and many more 5,000 a month after Morocco won independence from France in 1956.

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