From Torch to Tunis to El Alamein: The Most Important Forgotten Week in Modern Middle East History

Many factors make the Middle East a fascinating, confounding, and strategically vital swath of territory. At a time when so many regional topics compete for our attention, it is appropriate to take a moment and reflect on a series of overlooked but seminal events that happened in a single week eighty years ago in November 1942, each helping to shape the Middle East we know today—Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa; the Nazi invasion and occupation of Tunisia; and the British defeat of German forces at the second Battle of El Alamein.

To discuss the history and legacy of these events, The Washington Institute hosted a virtual Policy Forum featuring the following speakers, with executive director Robert Satloff moderating:

• Mehnaz Afridi, professor of religious studies and director of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Interfaith Education Center at Manhattan College;
• Aomar Boum, professor of anthropology and the Maurice Amado chair in Sephardic studies at UCLA; editor, with Sarah Abrevaya Stein, of The Holocaust and North Africa (2018);
• Martin Cüppers, professor of history and director of the Ludwigsburg Research Center at the University of Stuttgart; coauthor, with Klaus-Michael Mallmann, of Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine (2010);
• Haim Saadoun, professor in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic Studies, Open University, Israel; former director of the Documentation Center of North African Jewry During World War II at the Ben-Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East.

The Policy Forum series is made possible through the generosity of the Florence and Robert Kaufman Family.