Erik Arnold is a freelance columnist who writes on a variety of cultural and political topics. Here is his take on the refugee problem in the Middle East:
Arab aggression has created not one but two groups of refugees in the Middle East. The world has not been allowed to forget the first but has remained largely unaware of the second. The first group comprises those Arabs who abandoned their homes in Palestine during the 1947-1949 fighting. They numbered 587,000... The second group encompasses the Jews who, between 1947 and 1963, were uprooted from African and Middle Eastern countries where their ancestors had lived for generations and where they were full fledged citizens until they suddenly became anathema. They numbered about 650,000 [Note: The numbers are actually much higher than this, being closer to 800,000. E.A.]... The overwhelming majority were poor people, but they collectively left behind property valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars... The world has not overly concerned itself about the Jews who were constrained by forces beyond their control --discriminatory laws, persecutions, physical violence, and purposeful exclusion from Arab societies -- to flee "to a place of safety," thus meeting Webster's definition of refugees. Attention has been concentrated instead on the plight of the Arabs who left Palestine voluntarily -- persuaded by their own military commanders and politicians that the war against the Jews would be short and their victorious return would be sweet with booty -- hence might be categorized more properly as "fugitives" rather than as "refugees." (Frank Gervasi, The Case for Israel, Viking Press, New York, 1967, pgs. 108-109).
The above paragraph makes succinctly clear a problem long ignored by the world's governments: the history of the persecution and expulsion of the large Jewish population of the Middle East and North Africa. The story of the Arab refugees has occasioned much gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts among the collective court of international opinion, while the same sentiment has not been granted to their more numerous Jewish counterparts.
Contrary to popular opinion, Jews never had it better among the Sons of Ishmael than they did among the Christian peoples of Europe. The writer Albert Memmi, born in Tunisia, champion of anti-colonialism and self described "left-wing Zionist," once wrote the following:
... "the supposed "idyllic life" led by Jews in the Arab countries is all a myth! The truth... is that we were, first of all, a minority in hostile surroundings and, as such, we had all the fears of the overly weak, their constant feeling of precariousness... Never, I repeat, never... have the Jews lived in the Arab countries otherwise than as diminished people in an exposed position, periodically overcome and massacred so that they would be acutely conscious of their position." (Albert Memmi, Jews and Arabs, trans. Eleanor Levieux, J. Philip O'Hara Inc., Chicago, 1975, pgs. 20-22).
He further states: "But if we leave out the crematoria and the murders committed in Russia, from Kichinev to Stalin, the sum total of the Jewish victims of the Christian world is probably no greater than the total number of victims of the successive pogroms, both big and small, perpetrated in the Moslem countries." (ibid pg. 27).
In fact, during Islam's golden age Jews were restricted as to their choice of occupation, mode of dress, forms of worship, and even access to specific parts of some cities. These discriminatory attitudes were enshrined in the Pact of Omar, the name for the collective body of legislation directed at both Jew and Christian in the Islamic world. On certain occasions the followers of Mohammed even introduced prejudicial measures later adopted by the Christian West, such as the "Jewish badge," as a mark of identification for "unbelievers."
And while Muslim tolerance varied greatly with both time and location, it could be revoked anytime -- with disastrous consequences. Jews were expected to know their place within the hierarchical scheme laid out in the Koran and subsequent laws. Success was always accompanied by a sword of Damocles. For instance, in 1066, the ibn Nagrela family, prominent courtiers at the Muslim court of Granada, were deposed and the ghetto destroyed by mobs incensed at the haughty behavior of the "infidels." This pogrom was preceded by a vitriolic attack launched by the theologian Ibn Hazm and the writer Abu Ishaq, both of whom castigated King Badis for his relative leniency in letting Jews rise to influential positions in contradistinction to their degraded station in Islamic jurisprudence.
The internecine warfare among the petty Moorish states which succeeded the Caliphate of Cordoba led to the invasion of the Iberian Peninsula by the Almoravides and Almohades in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, respectively. These Berber marabouts, warrior clerics similar in certain respects to the Teutonic Knights, streamed from their forts in the North African wastelands and with their intolerance put the nail in the coffin for Jewish life in Muslim Spain. By offering the choice of conversion or death to all "non-believers," a stance contrary to general Islamic practice, they gave the death knell to the relative tolerance of the "Iberian Renaissance."
The Jewish condition tended to worsen with the decline of Islamic power (with Turkey being the main exception), reaching its nadir in Iran and Yemen from the seventeenth century onwards. In those countries, the Jews were subjected to particularly humiliating forms of discrimination. In Shiite Persia, for example, with its stringent "sanitary" religious prohibitions, food or items handled by Jews were considered unclean and polluting to the faithful, a situation analogous in some respects to that of the Hindu caste of untouchables in India. Iran even created its own Marranos by forcibly converting the Jews of Meshed in 1839. In Yemen a royal decree instituted in 1673 and continuing until that country was conquered by the Ottoman Turks in 1872 forced Jews to go bareheaded, something particularly galling to the pious.
Yemen's treatment of its Jews varied little with the passage of time, which can be seen in the following description made by the German explorer Hans Helfritz in the 1930s:
The Southern Arabians regard the Jews as people of a lower grade, and despise them utterly, although both belong to the same Semitic race. Accordingly the Jew has very limited privileges and is subject to strict regulations. Evidently there is a desire to prevent him from climbing upwards. An indication of the inferiority of his position is in the fact that he is not allowed to ride a camel or a mule, but has to rely on donkeys for his transport. Further, he is not permitted to carry arms or to serve in the army; on the other hand he is required to pay a high sum to the Imam, who then condescends to see to his protection. He is called upon to perform the most servile tasks, and though he is allowed to trade in the Arab city [the Arab section of San'a], he may never settle among Mohammedans.
The houses in the ghetto, the Ka'a el Jahud (City of the Jews), may only have two floors, and the synagogues are allowed in no wise to differ from the ordinary living houses. Consequently the streets in the ghetto, in contrast to those in the Arab city, make a monotonous and unattractive impression..."The Jews must pay tribute," a distinguished Saudi told me, "in order that they may not forget their racial origin. It is also a reminder to them of the Prophet's tolerance and benevolence."... The Imam is not willing to allow his Jews to leave the country; nor may they establish any communications with their compatriots in Palestine, or with the Zionist Movement; nor may they receive teachers or propagandists from abroad. Many of them have escaped over the frontier; in such cases their whole property has been confiscated by the Imam. (Hans Helfritz, Land Without Shade, trans. Kenneth Kirkness, New York, Robert M. McBride and Co., 1936, pgs. 252-254).
This phenomenon recurred throughout the Mohammedan world. A late nineteenth century European traveler wrote the following similar observations about North Africa:
It has lasted long enough before the Jews enjoyed in those countries {i.e. Morocco and Tunisia} an existence worthy of human dignity... The oppression to which the latter {the Jews} are exposed, even to this day, are almost incredible... they had to live in a certain quarter, and were not allowed to appear in the streets after sunset... If it was a dark night, they were not allowed to carry a lantern like the Moors and Turks, but a candle, which the wind extinguished every minute. They were neither allowed to ride on horseback nor on a mule, and even to ride on a donkey was forbidden them except outside the town; they had then to dismount at the gates, and walk in the middle of the street, so as not to be in the way of Arabs. If they had to pass the "Kasba," they had first to fall on their knees as a sign of submission, and then to walk on with lowered head; before coming to a mosque they were obliged to take the slippers off their feet, and had to pass the holy edifice without looking at it... It was worse even in their intercourse with Mussulmans; if one of these fancied himself insulted by a Jew, he stabbed him at once, and had only to pay a fine to the state, by way of punishment... The Prime Minister down to the common soldier, took every opportunity to oppress and rob the Jews. They need only hear that this one or the other possessed great wealth to be after him at once for the purpose of confiscating his fortune for the paltriest of reasons, or to extort as many thousand piastres as they thought he was worth. (Chevalier de Hesse-Wartegg, Tunis: The Land and People, new edition, London 1899, pgs 115 -128. Quoted in Norman A. Stillman, The Jews in Arab Lands, Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 1979, pgs. 416-417, 420).
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the importation of such Western ideas as socialism, capitalism, secularism, and the idea of the modern nation state into what was basically an agrarian, religiously oriented, clan-based, and feudal society. The concomitant rise of Zionism among the despised Jews served to further aggravate the dislocation felt in much of the Arabo-Islamic world, and served as a lightning rod to galvanize the Muslim masses. Vicious attacks were launched against all Jews, including those of non- or even anti-Zionist feeling. The ferocious Hebron pogrom of 1929, in which the mostly Orthodox community was slaughtered to a man, accompanied by savage mutilations of both the living and the dead, was an extreme example of the new Arab behavior.
Many Arab intellectuals greeted the rise of Italian fascism and German National Socialism with applause. They felt an acute kinship with both ideologies for their anti-British and anti-Semitic elements. Copies of both the Czarist-era forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf were issued in numerous Arabic language editions. Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the British appointed grand mufti of Jerusalem, became a prominent Muslim activist on behalf of the Axis cause. After fleeing the Middle East for Berlin, he broadcast rabidly anti-Semitic propaganda for the Nazis' Arabic radio service as well as organizing Bosnian Muslim SS units for active use on the battlefront. Future Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat was a strong admirer of Hitler and kept a portrait of the Fuhrer in his private office as late as the early Fifties. The Egyptian "Green Shirts" attempted to emulate their radical European counterparts by instituting an economic boycott of Jewish businesses and committing random bombings of private homes of wealthy Jews. In 1941, Yunis al-Sabawi, the head of Iraq's fascist influenced militias, ordered all Jews to remain in their homes in preparation for a secret massacre planned to occur during the two days of Shavuoth. While Sabawi was deported to the Iranian border and hence was unable to follow through with his project, a more or less spontaneous mass slaughter did take place in Baghdad under the watchful eyes of the British army.
The post-World War II period witnessed the end of the millennia-old history of Jewish life in the Near East. Across this huge area dictators arose who emphasized the purely Arab character of their countries, thus automatically excluding the Jews from the nation-building process. The growth of Zionism and the subsequent battle for Palestine were used to stress the alien-ness and the subversive-ness of the Jewish populations. The persecution, despoliation, and expulsion of whole communities proceeded apace, ending only with the impoverishment and ejection of the Jews of Libya following the Qaddafi coup of 1969. Yet when the issue of refugees is discussed, the group in question is always Arab.
The implications of this one-sided emphasis for the Israel-Arab problem have been profound. While Arabs and their supporters loudly declaim the unconditional demand that Israel open its doors to a flood of emigrants and their descendents, no Muslim country is expected to do the same for Jews. Indeed, in many instances the Jewish presence in certain areas predates that of both Arabs (North Africa), and Islam (Yemen), by several thousand years. Yet there is no large-scale effort to make restitution to these shattered communities.
A visit to any library will reveal a large amount of works devoted to the dilemma of the Arab runaways. In fact, a whole "Palestine industry" has arisen dedicated to the articulation of this group's point of view while systematically ignoring that of the Jews. The Israeli government, rather than making a case for its own victimized citizens and their progeny, simply allows a black silence to engulf the memory of the destroyed Levantine communities of the world's oldest diaspora. _________________ He who is merciful with the cruel, will end-up being cruel to the merciful
- Kohelet Rabba 7:16
How many Jews lived in Arab countries? How long had they been in the Middle East?
Jews had been living in what are today Arab countries for over 2,500 years – fully one thousand or more years before the advent of Islam. In 1948, the population of Jews totalled nearly 900,000. Today, less than 5,000 remain. For a country-by-country summary see the Jewish Virtual Library.
Country (or modern day equivalent),
*Earliest Jewish Presence **Population 1948 ***Population 2001
Morocco *1st century CE** 285,000*** 2,700
Tunisia *2nd century CE ** 111,000 ***1,500
Algeria *1-2nd century CE **140,000 ***Less than 100
Egypt *4th century BCE **75,000 *** Less than 100
Syria *1st century BCE **30,000*** Less than 100
Lebanon *1st century BCE 10,000*** Less than 100
Libya *3rd century BCE** 40,000*** None
Iraq *6th century BCE **150,000*** Less than 25
Yemen *3rd century BCE ** 50,000 ***800
**Total 891,000 ***Less than 5000
What was the status of the Jews?
Their condition varied from country and country and era to era. Under Islamic law Jews were considered second class citizens (dhimmis) but were given limited religious, professional and business opportunities. In some cases, their condition improved temporarily with the advent of Western influence on the Arab countries.
What made the Jews leave?
Their situation took a dramatic turn for the worse as virtually all Arab countries backed or took part in war against Israel in 1948. This triggered a surge in mob violence and a pattern of legalised discrimination and state-sanctioned repression. The similarity of actions against the Jews, coupled with statements and records from the time, suggest that the conduct of ethnic cleansing was co-ordinated between the Arab governments. Those who did not flee became hostages to the Arab-Israeli conflict. No compensation was ever provided to those who fled.
Where did the Jewish refugees go?
Israel struggled to resettle some 600,000 at great cost. Some 300,000 others built new lives in France, Britain, Italy, Australia, Latin America, Canada and the US.
Why has little been heard about these Jewish refugees?
The reasons are complex. Principally, because they did not remain refugees for long, but were successfully integrated into their host countries.
Do the Jews wish to ‘return’ ?
There was an exchange of almost equal numbers of Arab and Jewish refugees between Israel and the Arab world. To ‘return’ would be a retrograde step. The Jewish refugees are living proof that all refugees can start afresh provided their host countries have the will to resettle them.
Why is the issue of the Jewish refugees central?
History: the truth about the Jewish refugees needs to be told. Too many people view the Middle East conflict through a distorted prism which expunges the Jewish refugee narrative.
Morality and legality: the plight of the Jewish refugees is an unresolved human rights issue. There is a moral imperative that justice be done and that the Jewish refugees from Arab countries issue assume its rightful place on the international agenda.
Peace: for a peace process to be credible and enduring and for all parties to be reconciled, all outstanding issues must be addressed and all claims finalised.
What did the UN do for Jewish refugees?
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees recognised displaced Jews as bona fide refugees but offered no help. The UN General Assembly has not passed a single resolution in their favour, whilst it has passed 101 resolutions about the Palestinian Arab refugees and dedicated an agency, UNWRA, to their exclusive care.
Do the Jewish refugees feature in blueprints for Middle East peace?
UN security council resolution 242, the Madrid peace conference, the Road Map and the bilateral agreements between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians all refer to a just solution of the ‘refugee problem’– never distinguishing between Jews and Arabs.
Is thecampaignfor Jewish refugees a “tit-for-tat” response to Palestinian claims?
The legitimate call to secure rights and redress for former Jews displaced from Arab countries is not a campaign against Palestinian refugees. It is a “stand alone” campaign. It would be inaccurate and counterproductive to link the legitimacy of the rights for Jews displaced from Arab countries to the issues concerning Palestinian refugees. They are neither identical, nor symmetrical.
Ms. Ragen,
I commend you on your integrity towards Israel.
My parents and I are Jewish. My mother and I were born in
Egypt and while the political situation was worsening, my
father, who was an eternal optimist, believed everything
would get better.
Well after the June 1967 war, we were thrown out of Egypt,
with 10 Egyptian pounds each (evidence is in each of our
passports). Our property, business, bank accounts, jewelry,
in short all that we owned was taken away from us.
We ended up in a refugee camp in Naples, from which we
started the proceedings to apply for a visa to the US.
We were given rigorous physical tests, had to prove that
someone (my
aunt) would guarantee our stay and that we would not be a
burden to the American government. After seven months, we
were granted the visas and started our lives in the most
wonderful, free country in the world.
We worked our way up, never applying to any Medicaid, food
stamps or anything. Even though my mother (always known as
the woman of steel) had a nervous breakdown at the thought
of having left her country of birth penniless, we managed to
survive on my initial salary of $90.00 per week for all
three of us.
We did not bomb innocent people, we did not get money or
goods from the UN (I would actually purchase Pepsodent,
Camay, Cadum, Scott Tissue, etc. on the streets of Cairo.
Those were clearly marked "from the UN for the
Palestinians".)
Arabs steal from Arabs. Arabs do not help each other. The
ones who live in the Gaza squalor could have bettered
themselves with or without the help of the millions of their
bretherens, some who are billionaires. Instead, hate for
the Jews is propagated from kindergarten. Even when I was
growing up in Cairo, my books denied the existence of Israel
and defined all Jews as the enemy.
Iran gives $25,000 to the family of a terrorist who straps
himself/herself to a bomb and murders innocent civilians of
all ages.
Of all the horrors that I have read, seen on TV, I shall
never forget the interview with an Arab woman whose son had
caused such havoc when he blew himself up and took with him
Israeli children, and adults. She said :
"I have seven other sons who will do the same thing and I am
proud of each one of them"
As a woman, a Jew, a mother, I was repulsed, disgusted,
dismayed and thoroughly bewildered.
Sorry, Ms. Ragen to have gone into a diatribe, but the
inequity which exists in the world, the hatred toward a
small state that has flourished, keeps inventing medical
breakthroughs, and wants to leave peacefully revolts me
daily.
Please continue your good work for Israel. We are all human
beings and deserve better than to be inhumane.
Viviane Franco Koenig
New York
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