Jews from Arab Lands

On Monday, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon opened the international conference “Justice for Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries” in Jerusalem. The conference is an initiative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Ministry for Senior Citizens and the World Jewish Congress.  Some 850,000 Jews left or were forced to leave Arab countries in the late 1940's-50s around the time of the founding of the State of Israel. 

I first became interested in the fate of these people around 1976 when I became aware of the existence of the World Organization for Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC).  I spent a year on sabbatical in 1977 in Israel and visited the offices of WOJAC in Tel Aviv.  I met their Director Maurice Roumani, a Jew from Libya whose family had narrowly escaped death at the hands of maurauding Arab mobs (he is now Head of the Arab Studies Dept. at Ben Gurion University).  After I returned to the US I helped to distribute WOJACs material.  But, there was little interest in this story and even the State of Israel ignored the fact that more Jews were refugees from Arab countries than there were Palestinian refugees (originally ca. 750,000).  Furthermore the wealth and property stolen from these Jews (est. b$300) far exceeded what the Palestinian Arabs had lost.

If we lived in a perfect world the plight and fate of the Jews form Arab countries would have been part of the equation of negotiations between Israel and the Arabs from the start.  It was not! Successive Israeli Governments ignored the situation.  Why this was so is hard to explain since this would have bolstered the Israeli position as well as being a humanitarian problem.  Until the mid-1950s hundreds of thousands of Arab Jews lived in tent cities in Israel, called ma'abarot, otherwise known as refugee camps.  Even when we visited in 1977 the last ma'abara still existed near Rishon Letzion, but the claims and suffering of these people was not recognized by the Israeli Government.  Instead they were gradually absorbed into the social fabric of Israel, as should happen with refugees.

Why was this so?  Several reasons have been advanced for this, one is that the leaders and culture of Israel was predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish, in other words white, Yiddish-speaking European Jews controlled the Government and were not interested in the plight of their Arab Jewish brethren.  Another reason given is that Israel was a positive forward-facing country and Israelis were not sympathetic to the suffering of fellow Jews, be they Holocaust survivors or Arab Jewish refugees.  Another reason cited is that the negotiations were with the Palestinian Arabs and did not include the fate of the Jews from Arab countries, these should be left for negotiations between Israel and those countries themselves.  Whatever the reasons, these Jews, whose suffering and refugee status was real, were ignored.

Now suddently the Israeli Government has pushed this cause to the fore, and has begun a PR campaign to inform the public of the case of the Jews from Arab countries.  Deputy FM Danny Ayalon has made a video on the subject, one in a series on Israel public policy, about the refugees (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_3A6_qSBBQ) and the Government has officially announced that it will seek redress for the fate of these Jews in future negotiations, as indicated in the current conference in Jerusalem. Their number, wealth and former property is documented in hundreds of affidavits and original records of land ownership and property that was stolen.  Not only were individuals involved in this theft, but Governments, such as those of Egypt and Iraq, officially confiscated their holdings.  There is now a new organization named Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa (JIMENA) that is representing this cause (www.jimena.org) in the USA. This injustice must be redressed!