Why Do We Rejoice There and Rage Here?

Death is not the harshest thing that happens to homelands; forgetting is. When I saw Moroccan hands carrying water and soap to wash a wall in Marrakesh because a Jew had prayed near it, I thought of neither politics nor law. I thought of that slow decline that makes a person believe he is defending values while, in fact, he is insulting them, and think he is purifying a place while he is polluting the nation and its history.

The Morocco I know was a country that embraced everyone without panic. In the Atlas Mountains, the plains of Souss, and the ancient cities, Muslims, Jews, Amazigh, and Arabs lived a common destiny. That was not manufactured tolerance; it was a way of life. Moroccan Jews were not a minority grudgingly tolerated; they are part of this country’s fabric. For someone today to wipe away their trace with soap is not a minor error but an erasure of memory and of the “Tamghrabit” values upon which we built our identity.

But the harder question is: how did we get here? It began when satellite dishes entered our homes in the 1990s, bringing religious channels that presented a model that was completely different from authentic Moroccan religiosity. They convinced us that our weddings were forbidden, our music was depravity, and our grandmothers’ tattoos were a crime. They stripped us of our identity and clothed us in a foreign one. Then, news channels transformed the entire region, in the eyes of the simple Moroccan, into an eternal battlefield, and hostility shifted from the “Israeli” to the Jew, and from the Jew to any place that evoked them. At that point, a Jew’s prayer in Marrakesh became a provocation requiring purification, even though those Jews had not come to provoke anyone; their “Haredi” prayer had simply coincided with prayer time, just as Muslims do everywhere.

Now consider this contradiction that exposes us: Why are we proud of images of Muslims praying in New York’s Times Square or in London’s gardens, even though their prayers there are not pre-coordinated with the authorities and seek no one’s permission? Why do we not demand that anyone “purify” those places? If the New York municipality sent workers to wash the place where Muslims prayed, we would call it a “hate crime.” But when a Jew prays in Morocco, especially when their “Haredi” prayer was not intended to offend Muslim sensibilities but merely coincided with prayer time as any believer does anywhere on earth, we bring water, soap, and rubber gloves as if it were “desecration” requiring purification. Where is the justice? Where is the flaw?

The flaw is that, due to the imported Salafi legacy, we have learned that the other has no right to be an active presence in a place unless they are in a position of weakness. The Muslim in the West is “oppressed,” so we glorify him, while the Jew among us is not “oppressed” but a “symbolic occupier” whose traces must be erased, even if their prayer was fleeting and intended no offense. We no longer distinguish between the Zionist enemy occupying Palestine and the Jewish human being who lived with our ancestors for centuries, ate their bread, shared their joys and sorrows, and left their bones in the soil of this homeland. Our trampling of the values we demand the West respect is a deeper wound to our religion than a Jew’s prayer in a corner of the Marrakech kasbah.

Whoever thinks that erasing the trace of a synagogue or temple serves the liberation of Jerusalem is delusional. The Palestinian cause has never been solved through abstract hatred, but through wisdom and building a strong internal front. Another irony is that the walls of our ancient cities turn daily into public toilets and garbage dumps, and we see no such enthusiasm to confront that. This contradiction reveals that the motive was never concern for the place, but something else disguised by religion to direct simple people against their own nation’s interest.

There are those who hold Moroccan nationality but whose thinking is influenced by other capitals, placing others’ causes above the stability of their homeland. These are the “new Kharijites of the homeland”: they rebel against society and national consensus in the name of a religion they do not understand or causes that serve only their enemies. The danger is that the repetition of their actions without punishment entrenches the idea that this group is “above the law.” When a temple is closed or a shrine destroyed without the authorities moving, a message is sent that sectarianism has become a red line parallel to the constitution.

This discourse has a cost beyond the moral dimension. Morocco is preparing to host the 2030 FIFA World Cup, targeting millions of tourists and positioning itself as a reliable partner for investment. All of this collapses with a single scene that circulates the world: Moroccans washing a wall because a Jew stepped on it with his shoe. This scene amounts to hundreds of millions in negative publicity, and, before anything else, it harms our territorial integrity file, which needs a cohesive internal front that earns the world’s respect.

There is no escape from facing the truth: prolonged official silence has been read by extremists as fear and by moderates as abandonment. The constitution is clear in recognizing the Hebrew component as part of national identity, and King Mohammed VI has declared himself the Commander of the Faithful without exclusion. The law exists, and the provisions against racial discrimination are clear. What is required is the will to apply them, because tolerance of the beginnings of extremism does not extinguish it but encourages it to persist.

We do not want a Morocco that knows how to wash walls. We want a Morocco that knows why the wall is washed and what is being washed from it. The wall they purified carried the memory that this country was an oasis of peace in a region that chose madness. The true purity of the wall is not in removing the trace of the other, but in protecting the other’s right to leave a trace. Which Morocco do we want? A Morocco that does not need to prove its existence by demolishing the stones of others, because it knows that its true existence lies in its adherence to the values of tolerance and dignity for all, without exception, and without “purification.”

The question will remain: Which Morocco do we want? But the answer is that we never live in a Morocco where we are forced to ask this question in the first place.