Some fifteen years ago, a Canadian named Chaim Moetzen came to Khartoum in search of the remnants of the city’s Jewish graveyard—which had been transformed into a garbage dump—but was chased off by cries of “Jew!” Since the fall of Sudan’s Islamist dictatorship in 2019, and the opening of relations with Israel, Moetzen has returned to clean up the site and reconstruct its tombstones. Will Brown writes:

Sudan has a small but rich Jewish history. In the 1900s, hundreds of Arabic-speaking Jews from across the Middle East lived in the Sudanese capital harmoniously alongside Muslims and Christians, working as merchants, business folk, doctors, and lawyers. . . . But when the Arab-Israeli conflict began in the 1950s, a flood of anti-Semitism washed across the Arab world, forcing nearly all of Sudan’s Jews to flee.

Many arrived in Israel, Geneva, London, and the U.S. as stateless refugees and by the 1980s, there was almost no trace of the community left except the small Jewish graveyard in downtown Khartoum. When the Islamist dictator Omar al-Bashir came to power in 1989, the community’s heritage came under attack like never before.

No one quite knows what happened to the graveyard. But it’s clear that many of the tombstones were smashed into thousands of pieces, most probably by anti-Semites. Other marble slabs were looted and local authorities allowed the site to become a dumping ground.

Motzen asked for and immediately got permission from the minister of religious affairs, Nasr Eldeen Mofarih, . . . to restore the site as a private individual in January 2020. He paid for a Sudanese archaeologist and dozens of workers out of his own pocket and got to work. Over several weeks they removed some fourteen trucks of almost everything imaginable from the site. “There were about five metric tons of glass, car parts, a crazy amount of dirt, medical waste, lots of scorpions, and even beehives,” he says.

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.