Posted on 02/08/2003 5:50:19 AM PST by SJackson
On the eve of Israel's War of Independence, there were nearly 900,000 Jews living in communities throughout the Arab world, some of which were the oldest in the Diaspora, dating back 2,600 years.
The Jews' sojourn in Arab lands was marked by alternating periods of prosperity - in which they contributed to advances in medicine, commerce and culture - and of plight - in which they were subject to punishing taxes and relegated to the lower levels of the social strata.
War drums in the Arab world
It was to be expected that the relations between the Arab regimes and their subordinated Jews would be marred by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But nobody could have anticipated that the final outcome would be the liquidation of the Jewish communities.
The vast domains of the Arab world, almost totally clear of Jews (ie. "Judenrein"), bears absurd comparison vis-a-vis the ever-increasing numbers in the densely Palestinian-populated zones and within Israel proper.
Addressing the UN General Assembly on November 14, 1947, just five days before that body voted on the Partition Plan for Palestine, Heykal Pasha, the Egyptian delegate, stated, inter alia, that:
"The proposed solution might endanger a million Jews living in the Muslim countries. Partition of Palestine might create in those countries an anti-Semitism even more difficult to root out than that of Nazism. If the UN decides to partition Palestine, it might be responsible for the massacre of a large number of Jews.
"If a Jewish state were established ... riots would break out in Palestine, [and] would spread through all the Arab states, [leading] to a war between two races."
Later, Iraq's foreign minister Fadil Jamali declared at the UN that "interreligious prejudice and hatred" would bring about a great deterioration in the Arab-Jewish relationship in Iraq and in the Arab world at large. Heykal Pasha had been speaking not just on behalf of Egypt but for all the Arab states.
Heykal Pasha's thinly veiled threats of "massacre" and "war" did not at the time go unnoticed by Jews; they had the same ring as the proposition made by the Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini - hosted by Hitler in Berlin - of a "Final Solution" for the Jews of Arab countries, including - of course - Palestine. This was just the beginning.
The Partition Plan was accepted - albeit reluctantly - by the Jews. But the Arabs rejected it, threatening that it would lead to massacres and eventually to a war between the two races. They kept their word and, as predicted, a coordinated, all-front attack against nascent Israel was launched on May 15, 1948. The crushing defeat of the Arab armies added hurt pride to heightened feelings of hatred.
This was the signal for the final elimination of the Arab Jewish communities, be it through economic strangulation or political persecution.
Shimon Peres, one of Israel's most moderate statesmen, pointed to Jews in Arab countries as "being deprived of their basic rights," (at a WOJAC conference in Washington DC on October 26, 1987):
"The Jewish communities in Arab lands ... when uprooted, left behind their personal and communal possessions."
A land-by-land description of what actually happened to the Jews explains why they fled:
Iraq
The Iraqi regime in those days was not much more benevolent than the present one of Saddam Hussein. Jews were publicly hanged in the streets of Baghdad on the charge of "Zionist" activities.
By Shavuot 1941, 180 Jews were murdered and 700 injured, in a pogrom in Baghdad. Damages to Jewish property ran into millions of dollars.
Upon the establishment of the State of Israel this situation was further aggravated: Jewish emigration was forbidden, and hundreds of Jews were jailed. Those convicted of "Zionism" were sentenced to internal exile or fines of up to $40,000 each. Tens of thousands slipped out of the country.
But in 1950, the government legalized emigration and pressured the Jews to leave. Emigrants were permitted to take with them only $140 per adult; all of their enormous remaining assets and property were confiscated.
Israel came to their rescue in Operation Ezra and Nehemia. This prosperous community, which once numbered 190,000, has only 100 Jews today.
Syria
The Syrian Jewish community dates back to biblical times. Anti-Jewish pogroms erupted in Aleppo in 1947. All local synagogues were destroyed, and 7,000 of the town's 10,000 Jews fled in terror. The government then enacted legislation to freeze Jewish bank accounts and confiscate property. By the 1950s, just 5,000 remained in the country, subjected to harsh decrees: They were banned from emigrating, selling their property, or working in government offices, and were compelled to carry special identification cards.
Egypt
In Egypt, too, Jews were expelled and their property taken. Physical and economic pressure - highlighted by the nationalization of Jewish property in the Generals' coup in 1956-57 - encouraged them to flee. From 75,000 the community now numbers only 200 - and some estimate the government's plunder of their assets totals $2.5 billion.
Yemen
Attacking Jews, looting their property, and limiting them to the most demeaning of positions were commonplace. But after Israel's successful defense in the 1948 war, mobs rampaged, sending the Jews fleeing for survival and forfeiting their property to the state. Israel's Operation Magic Carpet in 1949 brought some 50,000 Yemenite Jews home.
Libya
The 2,000-year-old Jewish community of Libya, which numbered almost 60,000 by the 1940s, was the target of mass anti-Jewish violence in November 1945. In Tripoli alone, 120 Jews were massacred and over 500 wounded, while 2,000 were made homeless, and synagogues were torched. By the early 1950s, more than 40,000 Libyan Jews had emigrated.
Algeria
After the French left Algeria, the authorities issued a variety of anti-Jewish decrees. Nearly all of the 160,000 Jews fled the country. All but one of its synagogues were seized and turned into mosques.
Morocco
After massacres in 1948, more than one seventh of the 350,000 Jews of Morocco fled in terror. During the 1950s, there was violence against the remaining communities in Casablanca, Rabat and Oujda. The majority of Moroccan Jewry emigrated during the years to follow.
Tunis
A thriving community of more than 100,000 Jews in Tunisia has dwindled to about 2,000 - about half of them on the island of Djerba.
A recent, ominous reminder of the Jewish heritage of Tunis was the terrorist attack on the ancient synagogue of Djerba in which German tourists were killed.
Transfer de jure
In all, some 867,000 Jews were brutally expelled from Arab countries, and tens of billions in Jewish assets were seized by Arab governments. Israel spent over $14 billion on aiding them in their flights, on their rehabilitation and full absorption.
There is parity between the 650,000 Palestinian refugees resulting from the 1948 war and the 700,000 Jews who fled from Arab lands and were absorbed by Israel. By sheer logic, a "transfer," painful for both parties, has been effected.
Dr. Ya'akov Meron, a lawyer and Orientalist at the Israeli Ministry of Justice, explains this:
"Actually, what happened was a kind of 'population and property exchange,' and each party must bear the consequences. Israel is absorbing the Jews of Arab states; the Arab states, for their part, must settle the Palestinians in their own midst and solve their problems. There is no doubt that, at the first serious discussion of the Palestinian problem in an international forum, Israel will put these claims forward."
US President Bill Clinton also labored this point in June 2000, saying that,"There is, I think, some interest ... on both sides in also having a fund which compensates the Israelis who were made refugees by the war, which occurred after the birth of the State of Israel. Israel is full of people, Jewish people, who lived in predominantly Arab countries who came to Israel because they were made refugees in their own land."
However, it is clear that the Arab countries are reluctant - to say the least - to absorb their Palestinian brethren. Nor will they accept the idea of compensating the banished Jews for their economic losses.
John Ben-Castle, the chief statistician of the British Mandatory administration, carried out a survey of the total property of the Palestinians and arrived at the sum of £ 100 billion (at the currency rate of 1945). This sum is dwarfed by the value of the property seized by the governments of those Arab countries where the Jews had played dominant roles in finance, commerce and other fields. Names like Kadourie of Baghdad, Safra of Aleppo, Cicuriel of Cairo and Gaon of Khartoum speak for themselves.
A precise census of the abandoned Palestinian property was carried out by the late Faisal Husseini. Its records are filed at Orient House in Jerusalem. A similar census to assess confiscated Jewish property was undertaken by a small unit headed by Meron. Its activities were suspended - due to economic considerations - by Yossi Beilin during his short term as Minister of Justice in 2000, to the dismay of all concerned.
This assessment has recently been resumed and an internal website to locate absentee owners is planned.
It is needless to add that while Palestinians have free access to the Israeli Land Registry archives, Israel is denied such facilities by hostile Arab regimes.
- The Middle East Quarterly, September 1995
- Middle East Digest, November 1999
- Al-Nahar (Beirut), May 15, 1975
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Edward Sa'id, an eminent Arabist at Columbia University and one of the outstanding spokesmen for the Palestinian cause, expresses his views.
"The by now notorious peace process has finally come down to the one issue that has been at the core of Palestinian depredations since 1948: the fate of the refugees. That the Palestinians have endured decades of dispossession and raw agonies rarely endured by other peoples - particularly because these agonies have either been ignored or denied, and even more poignantly, because the perpetrators of this tragedy are celebrated for social and political achievements that make no mention at all of where those achievements actually began - is of course the locus of "the Palestinian problem," but it has been pushed very far down the agenda of negotiations until finally now, it has popped up to the surface.
"Along with [the original displacement of the 1948 war] went the scandalously poor treatment of the refugees themselves. It is still the case, for example, that the 40,000-50,000 Palestinian refugees resident in Egypt must report to a local police station every month; vocational, educational, and social opportunities are curtailed; and a general sense of not belonging adheres to them, despite their Arab nationality and language.
"In Lebanon the situation is even more dire. Almost 400,000 Palestinian refugees have had to endure not only the massacres of Sabra, Shatila, Tel al-Za'atar, Dbayyeh, and elsewhere, but have remained confined in hideous quarantine for almost two generations. They have no legal right to work in at least 60 occupations; they are not adequately covered by medical insurance; they cannot travel and return; they are the objects of suspicion and dislike. In part, they have inherited the mantle of opprobrium draped round them by the PLO's presence (and since 1982 its unlamented absence) there, and thus they remain in the eyes of many ordinary Lebanese a sort of house enemy to be warded off and/or punished from time to time.
"A similar situation exists in kind, if not in degree, in Syria. As for Jordan, although it was - to its credit - the only country where Palestinians were given naturalized status, a visible fault line exists between the disadvantaged majority of that very large community and the Jordanian establishment for reasons that scarcely need to be spelled out. I might add, however, that for most of these situations where Palestinian refugees exist in large groups within one or another Arab country - all of them the direct consequence of 1948 - no simple, much less elegant or just, solution exists in the forseeable future. It is also worth mentioning, or rather asking, why it is that a destiny of confinement and isolation has been imposed on a people who quite naturally fled to neighboring countries when driven from their own, countries that everyone believed would welcome and sustain them. More or less the opposite occurred: except in Jordan, no welcome was given them - another unpleasant consequence of the original dispossession.
What of Yasser Arafat's leadership?
"Arafat survives inside the Palestinian territories today for two main reasons: one, he is needed by the international supporters of the peace process, Israel, the US and the EU chief among them. He is needed to sign, and that, after all, is what he is good for. The second reason is that because he is a master at corrupting even the best of his people, he has bought off or threatened all organized opposition (there are always individuals who cannot be co-opted) and therefore removed them as a threat. The rest of the population is too uncertain and discouraged to do much. The Authority employs about 140,000 people; multiply that by five or six (the number of dependents of each employee) and you get close to a million people whose livelihood hangs by the string offered by Yasser Arafat. Much as he is disliked, disrespected, and feared, he will remain so long as he has this leverage over an enormous number of people, who will not jeopardize their future just because they are ruled by a corrupt, inefficient, and stupid dictatorship which cannot even deliver the essential services for daily civil life like water, health, electricity, food, etc.
"That leaves the Palestinian diaspora, which produced Arafat in the first place: It was from Kuwait and Cairo that he emerged to challenge Shukairy and Haj Amin. A new leadership will almost certainly appear from the Palestinians who live elsewhere: they are a majority, none of them feels that Arafat represents them, all of them regard the Authority as without real legitimacy, and they are the ones with the most to gain from the right of return, on which Arafat and his men are going to be forced to back down.
"Palestinian leadership has selfishly put its own self-interest, over-inflated squadrons of security guards, commercial monopolies, unseemly persistence in power, lawless despotism, anti-democratic greed and cruelty, before the collective Palestinian good. Until now, it has connived with Israel to let the refugee issue slither down the pole; but now that the final status era is upon us all, there's no more room down there. And so, as I said above, we're back to the basic, the irreconcilable, the irremediably interlocked contradiction between Palestinian and Israeli nationalism."
(From the introduction to Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return, Pluto Press, London, 2001)
Award-winning Columbia University professor Edward Sa'id has published several books on the Palestinians and the Middle East.
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The Difference Between Yasser Arafat Now and Anwar Sadat Then After losing three wars, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt came to the painful conclusion that Israel could not be beaten on the battlefield. He therefore made the courageous and historic trip to Jerusalem. Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, after intensive negotiations, reached the first peace agreement between Israel and an Arab state, known as the Camp David Accord. This was brokered by US President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
Another US President, Bill Clinton, made even greater efforts to bring about peace between Israel and the Palestinians, but to no avail. Arafat spurned the far- reaching concessions offered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, choosing instead the path of terrorism and initiating the latest intifada in August 2000.
Had Arafat inherited only a part of Sadat's wisdom and vision, there would probably have been a viable and flourishing Palestinian state today. Instead, there are thousands of bereaved families and no end in sight for a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem. |
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In order to understand the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is necessary to review the events that led up to it. The concept of a homeland for the Jews was advocated by the Zionist Movement in the 19th century - although the return to the Promised Land was a 2000-year-old dream.
Dr. Theodor Herzl translated the Zionist Movement's concept into a political program, namely a Jewish State. This was supported by the famous Balfour Declaration of 1917. International recognition was assured by the League of Nations in the Treaty of San Remo in 1920.
Following the defeat of Germany and her allies in WWI, Turkey lost her empire. Its vast domains were divided in order to create the new states of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. Palestine, on both sides of the Jordan, was entrusted to Britain for the establishment of the Jewish National Home.
Although the original area designated National Home was considerably reduced by the British in 1922 in order to provide for the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan - the Jews nevertheless succeeded in developing the small area left to them into a flourishing enterprise, literally causing the desert to bloom.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is instructive to compare Arab gains from the Allied victory in WWI with those of the Jews. On the one hand, five independent newly- born states on an enormous area, as against the promise of a National Home on a very small area.
The growth of the Jewish population in Palestine was resented by the Arabs who expressed their hostility by fomenting bloody riots in 1920, 1929, 1933 and 1936-39. The most tragic was the massacre of the ancient Jewish community of Hebron in 1929.
In order to resolve the conflict, on November 29, 1947 the UN voted in favor of a Partition Plan which provided for two independent states, one Jewish, one Arab, while Jerusalem would be internationalised.
Although there was hesitation among the Jewish public, it was decided to accept the Plan, notwithstanding that the area allotted to the Jewish State was, once again, considerably reduced.
The Arabs rejected the plan outright. Contemptuous of the will of the world, bands of Palestinian Arabs, aided by irregular volunteers from neighboring countries, attacked Jewish communities and clashed with the Hagana defense force. With the termination of the UN Mandate on May 14, 1948 the British forces had withdrawn from Palestine. Regular troops of the armies of Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon invaded the country, along with volunteer detachments from Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Yemen.
"The Arabs intend to conduct a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades," declared Azzam Pasha, secretary-general of the Arab League, on the BBC, May 15, 1948.
Despite the fierce resistance of the nascent Israel Defense Force, the Arabs made significant headway in their assault. Egyptian troops reached the Jerusalem suburb of Talpiot, and, advancing along the coast, were stopped 40 km. short of Tel Aviv. In the North, the Syrians took Kibbutz Mishmar Hayarden, only 25 km. from Tiberias.
Jordan captured the Old City of Jerusalem and destroyed its 58 synagogues. They also took Gush Etzion, the resort hotel of Kalia (and the kibbutz next to it on the Dead Sea) and the Monastery of Latrun on the Tel Aviv- Jerusalem road. The Latrun stronghold - as well as the bitter fighting at the nearby Castel fort and Arab villages - frustrated Israeli attempts to break the six month siege on Jerusalem.
The Jewish casualty toll in the 1948 war was far greater than that of the Arabs. Estimated at 3.2%, it is among the highest casualty rate of any recorded conflict.
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Israel and the Axis of Evil One and a half million Jews fought with the Allies against Germany, Italy and Japan in WWII. Among them were over 30,000 Jewish volunteers from tiny Palestine. In the cemeteries of Normandy, Stalingrad and El-Alamein, one can see tombs engraved with the Magen David but none with the Islamic Crescent. The Arab world stood aloof. Moreover, leaders like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the ruler of Iraq sided with the Nazis. Some Western democracies, while misjudging Israel's present struggle, seem to have forgotten these facts. |
VIII-The Forgotten Exodus, IX-An Arab Voice, X-The Birth of Israel
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