Ties Between Morocco and Israel Run Much Deeper than Recent Accords

A toothless old Berber sits in the shade of a small tree at the edge of Agouim, a tiny village 45 miles south of Marrakesh, and speaks of a singular morning in 1948 when he, as a child, helped his Jewish neighbors abandon their homes in Morocco for Israel. “I helped carry luggage when the Jews boarded the buses,” he told an interviewer at the beginning of an (at times) surprisingly even-handed production by Al Jazeera World, a 2015 documentary film entitled “Return to Morocco,” dealing with the Jewish exodus of the late 1940s from that part of North Africa.