silent refugees

The Silent Refugees: Jews from Arab Countries

Roumani, Maurice M.

Mediterranean Quarterly, Volume 14, Number 3, Summer 2003, pp.41-77 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by King's College London at 06/11/12 5:25PM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/med/summary/v014/14.3roumani.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/med/summary/v014/14.3roumani.html

The Silent Refugees: Jews from Arab Countries

Maurice M. Roumani

Before the war on Iraq was launched in April 2003, two developments in theMiddle East seemed to have set the stage for more conflict and bloodshedthat would threaten to engulf the world. The first was the rising tide of terroragainst Israel, and more recently against Western targets. The second wasthe intransigence of the Palestinian Authority on the repatriation of Palestin-ian refugees that brought an end to the peace negotiations at Camp Davidand Taba, which had held a promise for the settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The Forces behind the Escalation of Violence

If we look closely at both factors, we can see that they are intertwined. ThePalestinian intifadah (uprising), with its terror and suicide bombers, wasused to pressure Israel into evacuating the West Bank and the occupied ter-ritories taken in the 1967 war. But whereas the intifadah seemed to have thelimited aim of removing the settlers from the occupied territories, the returnof the Palestinian refugees to what once was their home has broader impli-cations. It is intended to undermine the character of the Israeli state fromwithin and reduce its Jewish inhabitants to a minority, a status known all toowell to Jews, especially those who hailed from Arab countries.

The expulsion of those Jews from Arab countries and their resettlement in

Maurice M. Roumani, born in Libya, is a senior lecturer on political science and the Middle East at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, where he is also founder and director of the J. R. Elyachar Center for the Study of Sephardi Heritage. Roumani was the first secretary-general of theWorld Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC). He has written extensively on Jews fromArab countries and their integration into Israel.

42 Mediterranean Quarterly: Summer 2003

the newly established state of Israel changed their inferior minority status tothat of citizens with equal rights in a democratic nation. Thus, the presentcrisis looks like an orchestrated policy, the aim of which is to expel Jewsfrom the Middle East, as the Europeans had expelled them before. Thesetwo factors are interrelated in another way, in that they assume that Israel, ormore accurately, Jews, through Western ties and interests have robbed theArabs of their territory. For the Arabs, this is not a mere loss of territory butrather an affront to Islam and its teaching. The Arabs experienced similarfeelings when Napoleon’s army defeated their armies on the shores ofAlexandria in 1798. The trauma was so severe that it prompted deep soul-searching and new reforms within Islam.

In the case of Israel, Arab defeat triggered revolutions in the states ofthe Middle East and North Africa, regional instability, anger, and frustra-tion. Recently the Arabs, especially the Palestinians have given the nameof al Naqba (calamity, disaster, or catastrophe) to the Arab defeat at thehands of the Israelis in 1948. For the Arabs, Jews are considered dhimmi,namely, “protected” people under Islam, generally subjected to humiliat-ing and discriminatory laws. Zionism, which liberated the Jewish peoplefrom a minority status, was rejected by most Arabs and was generally seenas an attack on Arab territorial integrity. The many attempts that havebeen made over the past one hundred years to bring about a rapproche-ment between the parties has had limited success. Al Naqba can beredressed, according to Arabs, either through a continuous and unabatedmilitary struggle until victory is reached or, alternatively, through a tem-porary truce, reminiscent of another truce concluded by the Prophet thatallowed the community of believers to gather strength before engaging theenemy in the final battle.

Although many claim that this religious conviction represents a minorityposition in the Arab world, the wars waged against Israel over the past fiftyyears and the rising tide of anti-Semitism in the Arab world underscore theposition that continues to fire Arab nationalism and Islamism. The propo-nents of the latter, whose voices have grown stronger lately, leading theircamp into military struggle against Israel and the Jews, believe that they arebearers of the banner that was raised by the Prophet Muhammad in the sev-enth century against the Jewish tribes of Arabia and soon after against the

Roumani: The Silent Refugees 43

Christians in Europe. The march of Islam was halted in France, was rolledback to Spain, and landed in Morocco, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Over the centuries, the attempts by the Arab world to regain some of itslost glory vis-à-vis Europe have failed. It discovered that it was no match forthe powerful Christian states of Europe, and therefore a truce had to benegotiated in the true spirit of the Quranic tradition. This seemed to holduntil the 11 September 2001 attack on the twin towers in New York City, asymbol of Christian and Western power where, in the minds of some Arabs,the battle could be resumed.

A similar case can be made about the Jews. Over the centuries, and espe-cially in the Middle East, Jews remained a minority until the state of Israelwas established in 1948. In their case, although the newly established statewas recognized by the United Nations, the battle directed against them hadjust begun. The roots of this unabated campaign of war and lately of terror,allegedly against Zionism and not against Jews, can be found in the politicalculture of Islam over the past fourteen centuries. In identifying all Jews liv-ing within their borders prior to 1948 as Zionists, the Arab states committedthe same mistake they did in 1947 with the Palestinians. They systemati-cally planned and executed the expulsion and displacement of about 1 mil-lion Jews from homes in which they had lived for centuries, even long beforethe arrival of Islam.

The Middle East Refugee Problem

The Arab states are responsible not only for the creation of the Palestinianrefugee problem but also for the problem of Jewish refugees. The birth of therefugee problem of the Palestinian Arabs is well known. The state of Israelwas established by a UN General Assembly resolution on 29 November1947. The armies of seven Arab states chose to ignore the resolution andmarched against the new state with the intention of destroying it. In theprocess, they called upon the Arab inhabitants of Palestine to leave so thatthey could re-enter with triumphant Arab armies. Khaled El-Azm, formerprime minister of Syria, wrote in 1973:

Since 1948, it is we who demanded the return of the refugees to theircountry, while it is we who made them leave it. . . . We brought disaster


upon 1 million Arab refugees by inviting them and bringing pressure tobear upon them to leave their land, their homes, their work and theirindustry.1

As early as 1939, Mojli Amin, a member of the Committee of the ArabDefense for Palestine, proposed to Arab leaders to consider an “exchange ofpopulations” between Jews and Palestinians:

All the Arabs of Palestine shall leave and be divided up among the neigh-boring Arab countries. In exchange for this, all the Jews living in Arabcountries will go to Palestine. . . . The exchange of populations should becarried out in the same way that Turkey and Greece exchanged their pop-ulations. Special committees must be set up to deal with the liquidationof Jewish and Arab property.2

When the above idea failed, the Arab states, with the exception of Jordan,placed the fleeing Arabs into refugee camps to fester for the next fivedecades and use them on every occasion to revive the dream of regaininglost territory. Pablo de Azcarate, an official of the UN Palestinian Concilia-tion Commission, stated in 1966 that the General Assembly resolution of 14December 1948 on the rights of the refugees to return had given a platformto “Arab political elements” who were interested in the struggle againstIsrael rather than solving the problem of the Palestinian refugees andresulted also in paralyzing

any possible initiative . . . to the solution of the refugee problem by meansof reasonable and constructive compromise formula . . . and created astate of mind among the refugees based on the vain hope of returning totheir homes, which has immobilized their cooperation.3

Little is known about another refugee problem that was also taking placein the Middle East. There was a massive exodus of entire Jewish communi-

1. Khaled El-Azm, Memoirs of Khaled El-Azm, 3 vols. (Beirut: Al-Dar Muttahida lil-Nashr, 1973),386 –7. See also the Jordanian daily Falastine, 19 February 1949: “The Arab states which hadencouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of theArab invasion armies have failed to keep their promises to help these refugees.” 2. Cited by Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Pales-tine (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 25.3. Ibid., 24.


ties that had lived in the Middle East and North Africa under Islam foralmost fourteen hundred years, well before the dawn of Islam, and wereforced to leave and seek refuge in Israel.

Mohammed Hussein Heykal Pasha, an Egyptian delegate to the UN in1947, made the following statement on how the Arab states planned the sys-tematic expulsion of Jews, turning them into dispossessed and uprootedrefugees:

The United Nations . . . should not lose sight of the fact that the proposedsolution might endanger a million Jews living in the Muslim countries.Partition of Palestine might create anti-Semitism in those countries evenmore difficult to root out than the anti-Semitism which the Allies tried toeradicate in Germany. . . . If the United Nations decides to partitionPalestine, it might be responsible for very grave disorders and for themassacre of a large number of Jews.4

He added:

A million Jews live in peace in Egypt (and the other Muslim states) andenjoy all rights of citizenship. They have no desire to emigrate to Pales-tine. However, if a Jewish state were established, nobody could preventdisorders. Riots would break out in Palestine, would spread through allthe Arab states and might lead to a war between two races.5

Israel, however, was ready to accept these Jewish refugees and in 1948opened its doors to any Jew who wanted to come and live in a free anddemocratic state. Through the Law of Return, the State of Israel, with the aidof world Jewry, embarked on a process of absorption and integration, grant-ing the newcomers Israeli citizenship upon arrival.

The recognition of the displacement not only of the Palestinians but alsoof Jews was finally enshrined in UN Security Council Resolution 242, whichstated categorically that there should be “a just settlement of the refugeeproblem.” President Jimmy Carter reiterated the UN resolution in a press

4. Yaakov Meron, “The Expulsion of the Jews from the Arab Countries: The Palestinians’ Attitudetowards It and Their Claims,” in The Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands,ed. Malka Hillel Shulewitz (London: Cassell, 1999), 84.5. Ibid.


conference on 27 October 1977 when he said, “obviously, there are Jewishrefugees. . . . [T]hey have the same rights as others do.”6

But before the Jewish refugee problem was recognized by the UN, SabriJiryis, a member of the Palestinian National Council, accused the Arabs oftaking a “very active part” in the establishment of Israel:

This is hardly the place to describe how the Jews of the Arab states weredriven out of their ancient homes . . . shamefully deported after theirproperty had been commandeered or taken over at the lowest possiblevaluation. . . . Israelis will put these claims forward. . . . It may be . . . thatwe Israelis entailed the expulsion of some 700,000 Palestinians. . . .However, you Arabs have entailed the expulsion of just as many Jews fromthe Arab states. . . . Actually, therefore, what happened was a . . . “popu-lation and property exchange,” and each party must bear the conse-quences. Israel is absorbing the Jews, . . . the Arab states for their partmust settle the Palestinians in their own midst and solve their problems.7

What could have been a logical exchange of populations, one of manyafter World War II, and would have constituted a very small proportion ofworld population exchanges, instead turned into a protracted conflict betweentwo peoples who during previous centuries allegedly lived side-by-side inrelative harmony.8

Over the years, the Palestinian refugee problem was kept alive andbecame institutionalized through such UN organizations as UNRWA (UnitedNations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East),the Arab states, and the communist bloc. From time to time, Palestinianrefugees resorted to violence to attract world attention, culminating in the

6. Ibid., 10. See also Khalil Shqaqi, “The Principal Facets of the Refugee Problem,” Palestine-IsraelJournal of Politics, Economics and Culture 9, no. 3 (2002): 91.7. Al Nahar (Beirut), 15 May 1975, cited in Peters, 29 –30.8. Julius Stone, Israel and Palestine: Assault on the Law of Nations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-versity Press, 1981), 23: “Western states admitted, resettled and absorbed as citizens more than 9million destitute persons displaced in the course and aftermath of World War II. Even greater dis-placements and exchanges of population have been managed in Asia: for example, between India andPakistan.” A much greater figure of over 100 million refugees uprooted in the world since 1933 wasgiven by the World Alliance of YMCAs, World Communiqué, no. 4 (July–August, 1957). For detailssee Maurice M. Roumani, The Case of the Jews from Arab Countries: A Neglected Issue (Tel Aviv:WOJAC, 1983), 47. Also see Stone, 186 –7, n. 27, for detailed figures of world population exchange.


first intifadah and the current al Aqsa intifadah, which generated unprece-dented violence and terror against innocent civilians reminiscent of the peri-odic outbursts against Jews in other parts of the Arab world in the past.

In contrast to the high profile maintained by the Palestinian refugees,Jewish refugees in Israel began a costly rehabilitation program and playeddown their refugee status as much as possible. Their story was little knownuntil 1976, when a new organization named WOJAC (World Organization ofJews from Arab Countries) undertook to make their voice heard so that noMiddle East refugee settlement could take place without their claims beingpart of the equation. These claims are based on both historical and legalrights from centuries of continuous living in the Mediterranean region underMuslim rule.

Who Is a Refugee?

Since the first destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and their exile fromit, Jews everywhere have been known to pray daily for their return to theland of Israel. When the opportunity presented itself during World War I,they did not hesitate to turn their dreams, hopes, and aspirations into reality.The movement they created for this purpose came to be known as Zionism.

When WOJAC was established in the mid-1970s, a debate was wagedwith regard to the character of the migration to Israel. Some maintained thattheir choice to come to live in Israel was born of Zionist idealism. Theyclaimed that their migration to Israel was the fulfillment of two millennia ofdreams, hopes, and aspirations, and therefore they did not want to be calledrefugees. Others argued that they came as refugees from their countries ofbirth. They pointed out that yearning for Israel did not negate their status atthe time of departure from these Arab countries. In the case of the Jews fromArab lands, two forces of pull and push were at work simultaneously. Thepolicies pursued by Arab governments did not leave these Jews any choicebut to seek refuge from their persecution elsewhere. Few of those who hadprevious connections with colonial powers chose to migrate to Europeancountries, and the majority who were strongly attached to Jewish traditionchose Israel as their home. But the condition under which they left Arabcountries fits quite well the definition of a refugee in international law:


The essential quality of refugee [is] that he has left his country of regularresidence . . . as a result of political events in that country which renderhis continued residence impossible or intolerable and has taken refuge inanother country. . . . In general, the refugee cannot return to his countryof abode without danger to his life or liberty.9

European colonialism, which brought in its wake the modernization ofthese communities, also paved the way for the dissemination of EuropeanZionist ideas among traditional Jewish communities in the Middle East andNorth Africa. At the beginning, these ideas were limited to the study of themodern Hebrew language and the modernizing of Jewish educational insti-tutions. Later it included other cultural activities containing symbols ofromantic nationalism and idealism. These activities intensified in the inter-war period, gaining more followers who were attracted to these new ideasand symbols. During World War II, these activities were slowed. NorthAfrica and the Middle East turned into a battlefield between the Axis andAllied powers. As a result, many Jews were deported, others faced famineand sickness, and communal activities ground to a halt.

Before these communities could recover from wartime damage, they weredealt another blow by Arab attacks on lives and property, leaving little doubtin Jews’ minds that their days in these Arab countries were numbered. Theywere forced to leave, dispossessed, stateless, and wounded in body and soulfrom persecution and with a changed status as refugees without protection.As Yehuda Dominitz put it:

If the term refugee is taken to include a person who must surmount obsta-cles to leave the country where he is persecuted, suffers official or unoffi-cial discrimination or whose religious, political, social or economic rightsare restricted, then the concept of refugee includes all the Jewish immi-grants from Arab countries and the majority of those from EasternEurope, whose exit entailed both personal risk and the loss of civil rightsand property.10

9. Justice Yaakov Zemah, lecture delivered on behalf of WOJAC before the World Conference of Jew-ish Organizations meeting in Jerusalem, 1 July 1976. 10. Yehuda Dominitz, “Immigration and Absorption of Jews from Arab Countries,” in The ForgottenMillions, 156.


After their initial idealism had worn off and the difficulties of living inIsrael both economically and culturally were clear, one would expect someof these immigrants to want to return to their country of origin, as othersfrom the Western world had done. However, no Jew from an Arab countryreturned to re-create his life in any of those countries. The main reason liesin their treatment at the hands of the Arab governments and people over thepast two hundred-plus years.

The Treatment of Jews As a Minority in Arab History

In order to understand the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict, one needs to traceboth the theoretical and applied aspects of the Arab treatment of minorities ingeneral and Jews in particular. There is a tendency to play down the Arab-Islamic record of persecutions and humiliation of non-Muslim minorities com-pared with the treatment of non-Christian minorities in Christian Europe.

Some scholars take great pains bordering on apology to prove that medievalIslam was more tolerant than Christianity.11 Under classical Islam andthroughout the Middle Ages, both Christian and Jewish minority communi-ties enjoyed a degree of tolerance that was lacking in great parts of ChristianEurope. This was particularly true for the Jews. Bernard Lewis summed upthe situation as follows: “In the early centuries of the caliphate, we mayspeak of a move in the direction of greater tolerance. From the time of theProphet to that of the first caliphs and beyond to the universal empire of theUmayyads and the Abassids, there is an unmistakable increase in toleranceaccorded to non-Muslims. From about the twelfth and thirteenth centuriesonward, there is a noticeable move in the opposite direction.”12 The expul-sion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and the Holocaust in the twentieth centuryhave no equivalent under Islam.13

11. See Mark Cohen, “Islam and the Jews: Myth, Counter-Myth, History,” in Jews among Muslims:Communities in the Precolonial Middle East, ed. Shlomo Deshen and Walter P. Zenner (New York:New York University Press, 1996), 60.12. Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 55 –7. Hepoints out that “In the later Middle Ages . . . [t]here is more frequent and greater insistence on theenforcement of the restrictions of the dhimmi . . . more strictly applied and a relationship of humilia-tion, sometimes even of degradation became the norm . . . everywhere.”13. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York:Oxford University Press, 2002), 114–5.


The Jewish presence in North Africa and the Middle East, particularly inthe areas now called Israel and Jordan, predates Islam by twenty-six hun-dred years. Even before the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem andthe exile of the Jews to Babylon in 586 B.C.E., Jews were found in ancientareas of Leptis Magna (Cyrene, Libya) and in Carthage (Tunis).14 With thespread of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula to the Mediterranean and partsof Europe, Muslims at the beginning constituted a minority. They soonbecame a majority and without delay imposed their new system of govern-ment on the local populations. Those who belonged to the monotheistic reli-gions, like Christians and Jews, were spared, but their status was foreverconfined to paying the jizya (poll tax), and they were subject to discrimina-tory laws in order to differentiate them outwardly from the community ofbelievers. The following two verses of the Quran illustrate this point:

Fight against those to whom the Scriptures were given, who believe nei-ther in Allah nor in the Last Day, who forbid not what Allah and Hisapostle have forbidden, and follow not the true faith, until they pay tributeout of hand, and are humbled. (my emphasis) (Sura 9, verse 29)

O you who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians as friends. Theyare friends to one another. Whoever of you befriends them is one of them.Allah does not guide the people who do evil. (Sura 5, verse 51)

Since politics and religion in Islam are one, the sanctioned and sustaineddiscriminatory attitude toward monotheistic minorities has been legislatedthroughout the centuries. In the twentieth century, with the intensification ofArab nationalism, the treatment of minorities took a turn for the worse.15

This attitude toward minorities is intrinsic to Islamic teaching, althoughboth the Quran and the Hadith reflect an ambivalent position, which at timesspared both Jews and Christian from humiliation, persecution, and death.

14. James Parkes, A History of Palestine from 135 A.D. to Modern Times (New York: Oxford UniversityPress. 1949), 29 – 81; G. D. Newby, A History of the Jews in Arabia (Columbia, S.C.: University ofSouth Carolina Press, 1988), 14–22; James Parkes, Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine(London: Penguin, 1970), 15 –32.15. See Haim H. Cohn, “Discrimination of Jewish Minorities in Arab Countries,” in Human Rights inPeace Times; Hayyim J. Cohen, The Jews of the Middle East 1860–1972 (Jerusalem: Israel Universi-ties Press, 1973).


On the one hand, the teaching of the Prophet Muhammad acknowledges thepatriarchs and the prophets of ahl-al-Kitab (People of the Book) as beingtrue and includes part of the holy narrative as shown in the following exam-ple when Moses was ordered to take his people to the “Holy Land”:

And remember when Moses said to his people, “O my people, call to mindAllah’s favor upon you when He appointed Prophets among you and madeyou kings, and gave you what He gave not to any other among the peoples.O my people, enter the Holy Land which Allah has ordained for you anddo not turn back, for then you will turn losers.” (Sura 5, verses 19–20)

But in “portions of [Islam’s] religious and secular literature, Islam appearssimilar to Christianity in its theological opposition to the Jews and Judaism.While in Christendom, massacres of the Jews began relatively late in the his-tory of the relationship of the two faiths, in Islam the very first encounterbetween Islam and Judaism produced a violent anti-Jewish pogrom.”16

The inferior position of the Jews in Islam was reinforced by legislationenacted as early as the eighth century and codified in the eleventh andknown as the Covenant of Umar. It comprised a series of regulations designedto separate Muslims from non-Muslims and guard the superiority of the for-mer through the humiliation and suppression of the latter. Observance ofthese regulations was the price paid by the non-Muslim People of the Bookfor living under Muslim rule.

On pain of death, Jews were forbidden to revile the Quran, Islam, orMuhammad, to marry Muslim women, to proselytize among Muslims, toinjure Muslims in life or property, to assist the enemy, or to harbor spies. Inaddition, they were forbidden to build houses higher than those of Muslims,to ride horses (and later also mules), to drink wine in public, and to pray,mourn, or bury their dead with loud voices or in a way that might be offen-sive to Muslims. Moreover, the dhimmis were forbidden to bear arms, andtheir testimony was invalidated and not accepted by Muslim courts.

Some Muslim rulers such as al-Mutawakkil (847–61) ordered Jews towear yellow clothing, ropes instead of a belt, colored buttons on their tur-bans, and patches on the front and back of their outer garments centuries

16. Mark Cohen, 60.


before this custom was introduced in Europe.17 Al Hakim (1004) initiallycompelled Jews to wear a wooden image of the Golden Calf and later six-pound blocks around their necks in the streets of Cairo. Mamluk rulersdecreed in 1301 that Jews wear yellow turbans only and, in 1363, differentcolor shoes.

Jews were not spared physical assaults, which brought death to many ofthe Jewish communities in North Africa. In Morocco during the eighth cen-tury entire communities were wiped out by Idris I. In 1033, six thousandJews in Fez were murdered by one of the rulers who declared that the perse-cution of Jews was legal. In 1465, Fez was again the scene of mass murder ofJews incited by a mob and led by the ulama (clerics), who claimed they hadbeen appointed to conduct the affairs of the Muslim state and that Jews hadneglected the observance of the terms of the Pact of Umar.18 One of the worstperiods in the annals of Muslim treatment of non-Muslims was the time of theAlmohad dynasty in Morocco, a fanatical sect of the twelfth century that gavethe infidels the choice between converting to Islam or facing death. Their rulebrought about the destruction of Jewish communities in Fez and Tlemcen andthe forcible conversion of Jews in Meknes, Ceuta, and Sijilmassa.

Over the centuries, the destruction and seizure of Jewish property byMuslims (homes, shops, synagogues, and revered tombs) was even morecommon than murder and physical attack. Decrees ordering the destructionof synagogues were frequently promulgated in countries such as Egypt andSyria, as well as in Iraq and Yemen. Laws prohibiting the construction ofnew synagogues or the repair of old ones were used as a pretext for suchaction. A North African scholar summarized the fate of the Jew as follows:“The humiliations that accompanied the status of dhimmi were accepted by the Jews as inescapable realities of life . . . the customary degradations,the blows administered in passing, the deliberate jostling, the swallowedinsults.”19 Arminius Vambery, a nineteenth-century scholar, was emphatic in

17. Yahudiya Masriya, Les Juifs en Egypt (Geneva: Editions de l’Avenire, 1971), 15; Avraham Ben-Yaakov, Abridged Version of the History of Babylonia (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Reuben Mass, 1971),59 –60.18. H. Z. (J. W.) Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa: From Antiquity to Our Time, vol.1. (Hebrew) (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1965), 291–5. 19. Andre Chouraqui, Between East and West: A History of the Jews of North Africa (Philadelphia, PA.:Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968), 50.


describing the plight of the Jew: “I do not know of any more miserable,helpless, and pitiful individual on God’s earth than the Yahudi in thosecountries. The poor Jew is despised, belabored, and tortured by Muslims,Christians, and Brahmins alike. He is the poorest of the poor.”20

Arabs became increasingly intolerant, selectively using Islamic or Euro-pean anti-Semitism to back up their persecution of Jews. In most casesMuslim clerics, more than the rulers, favored strict enforcement of the Pactof Umar. Unlike the rulers, the clerics had direct access to the communityof believers at least once a week at Friday prayers. The weekly sermon fueledthe believer’s mind with messages both theological and political. Clerics hadmore power over the believers than did the ruler of the state. It can be under-stood why riots against minorities have often followed such prayers.

The Islamic tolerance of the Middle Ages and “the golden age” in Spainwas short lived. Mistreatment and discrimination against non-Muslim minori-ties persisted in most of the Ottoman Empire, growing worse in subsequentcenturies.21 “Until the mid–nineteenth century, no change occurred in thelegal position of the non-Muslim subjects of Muslim rulers. The special taxlaws and the restrictions regarding the erection of new synagogues and theshape of the existing ones remained in force. The Muslim authorities strictlyenforced the ghiyar, the distinctive dress and footwear, and the segregationin special quarters.22 From the early nineteenth century the personal safetyof non-Muslims grew much worse, especially for Jews, who experiencedwaves of pogroms in all Middle Eastern countries starting in 1805. Out-breaks of such savagery were not confined to Jews alone, however, but affectedChristians even more than Jews. In the past two centuries, Muslim powerweakened and failed to rise to the challenge of the West, creating frustrationand resentment.

20. Bernard Lewis, Islam in History: Ideas, Men and Events in the Middle East (New York: LibraryPress, 1973), 135.21. H. Z. (J. W.) Hirschberg, “The Oriental Jewish Communities,” in Religion in the Middle East, vol.1, ed. A. J. Arberry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 214.22. Ibid., 150.


Dwindling Jewish Communities: A Survey

From the nineteenth century onward, Arab countries have undergone changeand turbulence. The impact of the West followed colonialism in the after-math of the First World War. The rise of conflicting nationalisms in the regionand the rising tensions in the postwar era have changed both the politicaland economic landscape of the Middle East. In the twentieth century, dis-criminatory legislation was enacted, persecution of and death sentencesagainst Jews were carried out by Arab states, and the remaining Jews inthese countries were expelled through legislation specifically enactedagainst Jews who, despite their protests, were forced to leave behind bothcommunal and private property accumulated over centuries.23

There is increasing evidence that the expulsion of Jews from Arab coun-tries was planned in 1947 at the time of the partition plan and even beforethe State of Israel was established in 1948.24 This decision followed theanti-Jewish riots and pogroms that took place against Jews in most Arabcountries, the most notorious of which occurred in Iraq and Libya.

Well-established Jewish communities had to face displacement anduprootedness from a milieu that had been familiar to them for many genera-tions. This process was neither peaceful nor easy and was accompanied bypain, sacrifice, and suffering. In equating all Jews with Zionism, the Arabstates, supported by the Arab League, embarked on a campaign againsttheir Jewish subjects, which left the Jews no choice but to leave or be expelled.In either case, Jews were forced to relinquish their rights, their properties,and their possessions, which were confiscated—nationalized by the state orsimply taken by an Arab neighbor or business colleague. They left in mostcases with a suitcase and a meager sum of money.

In Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, laws were enacted depriving Jews of their citi-zenship.25 Soon after, Jewish property was confiscated by the state withoutcompensation. No appeals against these measures were allowed. At thesame time, Jewish businesses “such as banks, insurance companies, indus-trial plants and the like were nationalized” by the state without any com-

23. Hayyim J. Cohen, 177– 8.24. See Meron, “The Expulsion of the Jews,” 85.25. Cohn, 128.


pensation.26 In less than a decade after 1948, these communities had nochoice other than to relocate in Israel.

Over the past fifty years, the history of the displacement of these commu-nities, their heroism, and their arrival in Israel have been well documented.A growing body of literature has emerged describing how and why thesecommunities were expelled. Norman Stillman writes, “In the ten yearsbetween 1929 and 1939, the Jews of Arab lands had witnessed the steadyundermining of their position almost everywhere. During the decade thatfollowed, the process of erosion would increase in rapidity and intensity,leading finally to a total collapse.”27 Stillman further asserts that what hadbefallen the Jews of Arab lands was not much less traumatic than what hap-pened to their brethren in Europe: “Indeed, in many Arab countries theJews would experience a brief but bitter foretaste of what awaited theirbrethren in Europe.”28

In addition to the effects on the Jewish community of the rising tide ofArab nationalism, in the North African countries a blow occurred from theNazi and Fascist military presence in the region. Only “logistical problemsimposed by geography, their own military weakness and the brevity of theiroccupation” forestalled the implementation of the Final Solution on the Jewsof Tunisia and, especially, Libya.29

The activities of the anti-Semitic Vichy France government in theMaghreb, the Italian Fascist government with its German cohorts in Libya,and Haj Amin al-Hussaini, the mufti of Jerusalem, broadcasting from Berlin,calling upon the Arabs “to kill the Jews wherever you find them, for the loveof God, history, and religion,” left the Jewish communities exhausted, desti-tute, frightened, and apprehensive about their future at the end of the war.

Over a period of almost a millennium, between 1170 and 1950, the num-ber of Sephardi and Oriental Jews had remained constant: 1.4 million and1.5 million, respectively. After the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492,Jews remained primarily in the Mediterranean area and within the Islamic

26. Ibid., 129.27. Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (Philadelphia: Jewish PublicationSociety, 1991), 112.28. Ibid., 113. See also New York Times, 16 May 1948.29. Stillman, 130.


orbit. In the same period, Ashkenazi Jews who lived in Europe and in thenew world increased their number many fold, from one hundred thousand in1170 to 10 million in 1950, after the Holocaust.30

The above demographic picture begs the question as to why the Spanishand Oriental Jews, in contrast to their brethren in Europe, were reducedfrom constituting 93.3 percent of world Jewry in the year 1170 to only 13.04percent in the year 1950.31 At the time of the independence of Israel in1948, there were approximately 860,000 Jews living in the countries of theMiddle East and North Africa. Between 1948 and 1975, 751,000 Orientaland Sephardi Jews arrived in Israel.32 If we exclude the Sephardim, about600,000 out of these 860,000 Jews arrived in Israel between 1948 and 1954.Another 200,000 Jews found refuge in Europe and the Americas, and by1976 only about 26,000 Jews were left elsewhere in the Middle East andNorth Africa.33 In 1998 it was estimated that only 10,000 Jews still livedoutside Israel in the Middle East and North Africa, mostly in Morocco.34

Morocco

The Jewish community of Morocco dates back to the destruction of the FirstTemple in the year 586 B.C.E. With the advent of Islam, these Jews wereforced to live in separate quarters called the mellah in Morocco or the harain Tunisia and Tripolitania. Over the centuries, the Jewish communities inthe urban centers of Morocco, such as Marrakech, Fez, Meknes, and Rabat,were subject to intermittent humiliation, repression, and brutality that costmany Jewish lives. An example of these atrocities was reported to haveoccurred in Fez in the year 1033, when six thousand Jews lost their livesand property and their wives were taken as prisoners.35

30. Salo Wittmayer Baron, Ancient and Medieval Jewish History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Uni-versity Press, 1972), 70; Raphael Patai, Tents of Jacob: The Diaspora—Yesterday and Today (Engle-wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 79; Sammy Smooha, Israel Pluralism and Conflict (London:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 281.31. Smooha.32. Ibid., 281.33. Roumani, The Case of the Jews, 2. 34. Michel Abitbol, Le passé d’une discorde Juifs et Arabes du VII siècle à nos jours (France: LibrairieAcademique Perrin, 1999), 429.35. Aviva Muller-Lancet, La vie Juive au Maroc (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1985), 9.


In 1912, Morocco came under French rule. The situation of the Jews,compared to the past, had improved, although “in June 1943, 43 Jews weremurdered and pogroms and other forms of attack persisted until Moroccanindependence in 1956.”36 Laws were introduced making emigration ille-gal,37 but nevertheless, between 1955 and 1957, over seventy thousandMoroccan Jews arrived in Israel. When in 1959 Zionist activities becameillegal in Morocco, thirty thousand Jews left for France and the Americas. In1963, the ban on emigration was lifted and more than one hundred thousandJews left the country.

As a consequence, the Jewish population of Morocco, which was esti-mated at 250,000 in 1948, was reduced to a mere 35,000 in 1972. As theArab-Israeli conflict intensified, Moroccan Jews felt more insecure, and theirsituation became more precarious, despite the protection and toleranceshown by the monarch toward them. In 1998, it was estimated that only sixthousand Jews remained in Morocco.38

Algeria

When the French occupied Algeria in 1830, Jews were freed from theirminority status under Muslim rule. This freedom was resented by the localpopulation, both Muslims and the European political element, who initiateda smear campaign in the press. Synagogues were desecrated, and Jews wererobbed and murdered when anti-Jewish riots and massacres commenced inthe 1880s and 1890s.39

The rise of Nazi influence in the region “gave rise to new anti-Semitism.In 1934 in Constantine a massacre left twenty-five Jews slain, dozenswounded, and Jewish property once again pillaged.”40 In 1948, there were140,000 Jews living in Algeria in sixty communities, each maintaining atleast one synagogue, with a rabbi and educational services. During the

36. Tudor Parfitt, “The Jews of Arab Countries and Iran: A Survey,” manuscript reproduced fromParfitt’s report The Jews of Africa and Asia: Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Other Pressures (Lon-don: Minority Rights Group of London, 1987).37. Stillman, 174.38. Abitbol, 429.39. Peters, 56.40. Ibid.


three months between May and July 1962, almost all the Jews of Algerialeft the country, following the Evian Agreement that granted independenceto Algeria.41

During the struggle for independence, pressure was put on Jews toendorse the national cause. A spokesman for the Liberation Party indicatedin 1960 that “Jews will endure the consequences of their hesitant attitudewhen Algeria will come into being.” Consequently, 14,000 Jews emigratedto Israel and another 125,000 to France, leaving behind only a tiny fractionof what used to be one of North Africa’s largest Jewish communities.42 In1972, the Jews that remained in Algeria no longer maintained any indepen-dent form of communal organization but were under the supervision of theFrench Secretariat of the World Jewish Congress. In Algiers, only one syna-gogue remained, compared with a community that in 1960 numbered thirtythousand and had twelve synagogues. Today there are hardly any Jews leftin Algeria.

Tunisia

In Tunisia, on many occasions the authorities showed concern toward theirJewish minority. Nonetheless, there were occasional attacks on Jews andJewish property. The Middle East war of 1967 dealt a final blow to theapparently tolerable situation in Tunis. “On June 5, 1967 widespread anti-Jewish rioting in Tunis, the capital, where the vast majority of Jews lived,resulted in the looting of most Jewish shops and businesses and the dese-cration and burning of the Great Synagogue.”43 “In 1979, a Djerban syna-gogue was burnt down, and in 1983 a synagogue was destroyed in Zaris,close to the Libyan border. In 1985, shortly after the Israeli air force raid onthe PLO quarters in Tunis, two Jewish children and a man were killed andthirteen people were injured outside a synagogue in Djerba when a policeguard ran amok.”44

41. Maariv Publishers and the World Jewish Congress, The Jewish Communities of the World: Demog-raphy, Organizational Structure, Religion, Education, and Culture (Hebrew) (Tel Aviv: “Hdkl” Pub-lishers, 1973), 12–3.42. Ibid., 13.43. Stillman, 174.44. Parfitt.


The rise of Tunisian nationalism led to anti-Jewish legislation and in1961 caused Jews to leave in great numbers. In 1948, the Tunisian Jewishcommunity had numbered 105,000, with 65,000 living in Tunis alone. By1961, the total Jewish population had declined to seventy thousand and in1968 only twelve thousand Jews were left in Tunisia. Heightened anti-Jewish persecutions during the Six Day War influenced even more to leave.Soon after 1967, seven thousand Jews emigrated to France.45

The Jews of Tunisia constituted a wealthy and prestigious community.The change that occurred in government policy generated fear and insecu-rity for the Jews, which eventually caused most of them to leave. Over fiftythousand emigrated to Israel. In 1958, the Jewish community council wasabolished. In 1999, about fifteen hundred Jews remained in Tunisia.

Libya

The Libyan Jewish community, which numbered between thirty-five thou-sand and thirty-six thousand in 1948, is yet another example of an ancientJewish community that disappeared entirely in less than sixty years.

The Jews of Libya, “whose presence in Cyrenaica can be claimed with cer-tainty from not long after the reign of Ptolemy I in the third century B.C.E.,”suffered a fate similar to that of the Jews in Iraq.46 When Libya was underthe British Military Administration between 1943 and 1951, a pogrom brokeout between 4 and 7 November 1945 that left 130 dead, 30 widowed, and92 orphaned out of the total community of 32,000.47 The renowned Italianhistorian Renzo De Felice describes the pogrom as one with “unimaginablecruelty and some even burned alive . . . in some cases whole families werewiped out.” In the town of Qussabat, “many women and girls were raped,and many men and women, in order to save their lives, were compelled toabjure their faith and embrace Islam.”48

The estimated damage claimed for compensation resulting from the 1945

45. American Jewish Congress, 74.46. Renzo De Felice, Jews in an Arab Land: Libya, 1835–1970 (Austin: University of Texas Press,1985), 1.47. Ibid., 366.48. Ibid., 194.


pogrom amounted to MAL (Military Administration Pound) 268,231,752.49

In 1948 another pogrom took place, “much less dramatic . . . than that of1945,” since it occurred only in Tripoli and was on a much smaller scale andwith fewer victims and material damage. It was equally devastating, however,since it caused panic and havoc among the Jewish population who, after thetwo pogroms, lost all hope of carrying on a semblance of daily routine.Between April 1949 and December 1951, on the eve of Libya’s indepen-dence and while still under British military administration, more thanthirty-one thousand Jews emigrated to Israel. Over the years, other Jews leftfor Italy, England, and the United States. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli war,Arab mobs ran through “the streets of Tripoli shouting anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish, and anti-imperialist slogans, hunting down Jews and attacking theirshops and homes.”50 “On June 7 two whole families, thirteen persons in all,were taken away from Tripoli by a Libyan official (subsequently sentencedby the Sanusi authorities, then absolved by the revolutionary government) onthe pretext of leading them to safety in a camp where Jews were beingassembled. He slaughtered them somewhere outside the city.”51 On 20 June1967, Jews in Benghazi were interred in a camp, soon to be airlifted to Italyas refugees. They left all their possessions behind and were allowed to takealong only one personal suitcase. More than forty-one hundred Jews wereevacuated to Italy with the help of the American Jewish Committee. Theywere received “as refugees under the aegis of the United Nations High Com-mission for Refugees.”52

In Libya, 1967 signaled the end of what was left of its small Jewish com-munity. A few days before the outbreak of the war, the clerics incited mobsby proclaiming “a holy war and gave sermons to this effect on the radio.”53

Entire families were taken away from their homes, more than one hundredshops were looted and thirteen persons were killed, seven from one family.After the police took control of the situation, the remaining Jews left behindtheir homes and possessions; some food was still cooking on the stove whenthey were taken away. Although they were penniless, Italy welcomed them as

49. Ibid., 368.50. De Felice, 274.51. Ibid., 277.52. Ibid., 280.53. Ibid., 274.


refugees, placing them in camps where they awaited their rehabilitation withthe aid of international and Italian Jewish organizations. After centuries ofJewish presence in Libya, today Libya is Jude rein.

Egypt

After the British granted independence to Egypt in 1922, there were spo-radic minor outbursts against the Jews, but Jews in Egypt lived relativelywell until the Revolution of the Free Officers in 1952.

In 1948, the number of Jews living in Egypt was estimated at seventy-fivethousand, but by 1956 this figure had declined to forty thousand. Ten yearslater, the number had dwindled even further, to twenty-five hundred, and in1999 there remained only one hundred. As in Libya, riots against Jews tookplace in Cairo in 1945. This signaled the beginning of the deterioration ofthe status of the Jewish community in Egypt until their almost total evacua-tion after the 1967 war.

On 2 November 1945, Arabs “broke into the Jewish quarter in Cairo andset fire to a synagogue with its 27 Torah-scrolls; a hospital, an old people’shome and other Jewish institutions were destroyed. Jewish shops in the citywere also damaged.”54 Two years later, a “company law” was introducedrestricting commercial activities of foreigners, but it affected mostly Jews. In1948, other measures followed; citizens were not allowed to leave Egyptwithout “a special permit.”55

On 30 May 1948, “an order was issued empowering the government toconfiscate the property of persons whose activities . . . were detrimental tothe State”56 At the same time, “hundreds of Jews accused of Zionism orcommunism were arrested or placed in detention camps. On June 20, bombswere placed in the Jewish quarter in Cairo, demolishing 12 houses in theexplosion, killing 34 Jews and wounding over 80.” In July and September of1948, bombs were placed in the Jewish quarter of Cairo, killing and wound-ing hundreds of Jews.57 After the Sinai campaign of 1956, “a military orderwas issued authorizing the Director-General of absentees’ property to man-

54. Hayyim J. Cohen, 49.55. Ibid., 50.56. Ibid.57. Ibid.


age the property of political prisoners and even to sell it.” “Hundreds ofJews” were arrested, and their property was transferred to the above agency.Among those detained were “some of the wealthiest and most respectedmembers of the Jewish community.”58 In the same month, orders were givento the Jews to pack a small part of their belongings and leave the countrywithin a few days. Each was allowed to take with him, out of all his property,only thirty Egyptian pounds, jewels worth up to 140 Egyptian pounds, andunlimited Egyptian goods (clothing and shoes). Within three and a halfmonths, between November and March 1957, 14,012 were expelled fromEgypt, followed by another wave of 7,000 expelled in September 1957.”59

During the war of 1967, Jews were arrested and detained in concentrationcamps for up to three years, after which most of the Jews of Egypt foundrefuge in Europe or in Israel.60

Iraq

The Jewish community in Iraq, one of the oldest and largest in the Arabworld, numbered 135,000 in 1948. Over 77,000 lived in Baghdad alone,making up a fourth of the capital’s population. The community was wealthyand prestigious. Before World War II, Jews held a dominant part in theimport trade and occupied high government positions.61

From the First World War until 1932, when Iraq was declared indepen-dent, Jews lived as well “as if they were living on British soil.” Jews rose inthe hierarchy of the British administration, and many of them became wellto do. With the passage of time, other doors were opened to them in the edu-cational and social fields, and they were well integrated in the Iraqi socialand cultural milieux. Jewish literary figures well versed in Arabic Iraqi lifeand culture emerged and later continued with their professions in Israel.

However, political events in Palestine overtook events in Iraq. The eventsin Palestine in 1936 and 1938 led to assaults on Jews and their synagogues

58. Ibid., 52.59. Ibid.60. Ibid.61. Joseph B. Schechtman, On Wings of Eagles: The Plight, Exodus, and Homecoming of OrientalJewry (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1961), 104.


and homes, leaving many dead or wounded and bereft of property.62 Thishappened at a time when not all Iraqi Jews identified with Zionism. Some ofthe lay leaders and part of the wealthy class, including the chief rabbi,regarded the anti-Jewish events as passing and hoped for a better futurewhen they would continue to be a part, even an active one, of the affairs ofIraq.63 It took less than three years for these leaders to realize how wrongthey were.

Between 31 May and 2 June 1941, Jews were brutally attacked by the“army with the assistance of civilians,” leaving more than 180 dead, severalhundred wounded, and much property damaged.64 This pogrom becameknown as the Farhud in the annals of Iraqi Jewish history.

At six o’clock [in the] evening a brutal massacre took place. Jews travel-ing by bus were forcibly pulled out, slaughtered on the spot, and run overby buses. During the evening and night hours, until after midnight, sol-diers, policemen and members of the youth squads stormed the Jewishquarters—they murdered, raped, wounded, plundered, and set houses onfire.65

Subsequently, Jews were told to leave the country or await a greaterpogrom than the one of 1941. From then on the situation of the Jews wors-ened. In 1948, Article 51 of the criminal law established that both commu-nists and anyone accused of Zionism could face imprisonment or death.Hundreds of Jews were arrested and fined, and one, a rich and well-knowncommunity leader, Shafiq Ades, was publicly hanged.

According to the memoirs of Sir Alec Kirkbride, the British ambassadorto Jordan in 1948, Nuri Said, the former prime minister of Iraq, recom-mended that “the majority of the Jewish community in Iraq” should beexpelled “in army lorries escorted by armoured cars . . . to the Jordanian-Israel Frontier,” where they will then be forced “to cross the lines.”66 Had

62. Hayyim J. Cohen, 26.63. Stillman, 58.64. Hayyim J. Cohen, 29 –30.65. Ibid., 30.66. Sir Alec Kirkbride, From the Wings, Amman Memoirs 1947–1951 (London: Frank Cass, 1976),115.


the plan of Nuri Said materialized, Kirkbride wrote, “either the Iraqi Jewswould have been massacred or their Iraqi guards would have had to shootother Arabs to protect the lives of their charge.”67 Obviously, Said had thisplan in mind; he wanted to counter the expulsion and the exodus of thePalestinians in 1948 by de facto declaring an exchange of population.

Stillman, in his book on Jews in Arab lands, sheds some light on thisquestion of exchange of populations. He reports that “the idea of exchangesof Jewish and Arab minorities following the Greek-Turkish and other proce-dures was being discussed in diplomatic circles at the time and was favoredby the Israelis, the Great Powers, and even some Arab politicians. . . . Whenthe Iraqi government itself proposed such a scheme, the Israelis counteredthat they would only be prepared to agree if the Iraqi Jews were allowed toleave with their possessions, but ‘could not in any circumstances agree toreceiving them as penniless, displaced persons.’”68

The test case failed and with it the idea of exchange of populations. In themeantime, the Iraqi government continued its harassment, dispossession,and hanging of Jews in Iraq. Laws were enacted to legalize the government’saction to confiscate Jewish property and provide for the loss of citizenship,thus paving the way for the eventual eviction of Jews from Iraq.

Between 1950 and 1951, most Iraqi Jews, about 110,000, left for Israelcarrying with them “50 pounds sterling per adult and 20 pounds sterlingper child. Some of them succeeded in selling their property, but because ofthe great number doing so and the ruling of the religious law ( fatwa) ofShaykh Muhammad al-Khalisi prohibiting the purchase of Jewish property,the prices they received were trifling. Others abandoned their possessions inIraq and emigrated penniless. In March 1951, the government froze theproperty of those who left or were about to leave the country. The total valueof the property frozen was $150 million to $200 million.”69

“In 1968 a law was passed in Iraq by which public notaries and registrarswere enjoined from certifying or registering any disposition by a Jew of hisproperty, and banks were enjoined from paying out to any Jew money

67. Ibid.68. Stillman, 158 –9, n. 42.69. Hayyim J. Cohen, 35.


deposited by him in excess of 100 dinars per month.”70 Subsequently, Jewswere held on false charges of espionage, and nine were hanged in a publicsquare before cheering crowds. In 1999, only thirty-five old and ailing Jewswere reported living in Iraq, mostly in Baghdad.

Syria

The lot of Syrian Jews was no different from the situation in other Arabcountries. In 1917, the Jewish population in Syria was estimated at thirty-five thousand and in 1943 about thirty thousand, mainly distributed amongAleppo, Damascus, and Kamishli.

During the French mandate over Syria in 1920, the Druze revolted againstthe French and in the process turned against the Jews, killing and looting.71

However, the most serious problems for the Jews began in the 1930s, whenthey were accused of being Zionists.72 Anti-Jewish demonstrations were fol-lowed by looting and attacks on Jews.

Between 1945 and 1948, Jewish quarters in Damascus and Aleppo wereransacked, most synagogues and property, including homes, schools, and anorphanage, were destroyed, and scores of people were killed and woundedby bombs.73 By 1948, about fifteen thousand Jews had left Syria, many ofthem reaching Israel. In 1949, “thirteen Jews were murdered in Damascus,and the synagogue there was damaged.”74

In Syria, as in Libya, Jewish cemeteries were destroyed and public high-ways were built over them. During the early 1950s, Libya and the Arabstates increasingly tightened their grip on the Jewish communities by clos-ing Jewish schools and synagogues and prohibiting any Jewish education orpublic worship.75 In addition, Jews were not allowed to own or drive motorvehicles. Telephones were forbidden for Jews in homes or businesses.

In reviewing these laws and other measures, Justice Hayyim H. Cohn con-cluded that “the Arab states disclose a conscious or subconscious desire to

70. Cohn, 130.71. Peters, 62.72. Ibid.; Hayyim J. Cohen, 45.73. Peters, 64; Hayyim J. Cohen, 46.74. Hayyim J. Cohen, 47.75. Ibid., 132.


take revenge on Jews for the establishment or survival or prosperity of theState of Israel for which they themselves are in many ways responsible.”76

When, in 1958, Syria and Egypt decided to create the United ArabRepublic, Jewish identity cards were stamped with the word Musawi, mean-ing of the faith of Moses. In Kamishli, the exteriors of Jewish homes weremarked by this name in red.77 By 1969, the forty-five hundred Jews still leftin Syria were held as hostages. Those who tried to escape were caught andtortured. The few that were allowed to leave from time to time for medicalcare were obliged to deposit large sums of money with the government or toleave behind one of their family members.

The worst, however, was yet to come. Since Jews were suspected of beingspies for Israel, the authorities forbade them from having contacts with for-eigners. Checkpoints were placed by the army in Damascus and in Aleppowhere Jews lived, and “the agents who patrol these neighborhoods harassthe Jews and allegedly engaged in extortions, bribery and rape.”78 The mis-treatment of Jews by the Syrians reached a new height when, in 1984, anAleppo Jewish woman named Lily Abadi and her children were brutallymassacred and their bodies mutilated.79 In the face of this kind of atrocity,Jews tried to escape and paid the price with their lives. One such case wasthe capture of four women who, in their attempt to escape Damascus via theLebanese border, were betrayed by their smugglers, taken to a cave near theborder, and murdered by them.80

The remaining forty-five hundred Jews in Syria were more clearly in jeop-ardy. The intervention of international Jewish and non-Jewish organizationsdid not yield much result. Only the persistent, clever, and clandestine workof a Canadian woman, Judy Feld Carr, over a period of almost thirty yearsrescued almost all the remaining Jews of Syria. Her fascinating story of con-tacts with the high echelon of different Syrian governments over the yearsand how she planned the exodus of the remaining Syrian Jews has only in

76. Ibid., 133.77. See Parfitt, n. 38.78. Ibid.79. Harold Troper, The Ransomed of God: The Remarkable Story of One Woman’s Role in the Rescueof Syrian Jews (Toronto: Malcolm Lester, 1999), 150.80. Ibid., 80.


part been recounted and waits to be told in full. In a recent interview, shenoted that there may be thirty-eight Jews left in Syria, old and ailing, irrele-vant and insignificant to the Syrian authorities.81

The Absorption and Integration of Jews from Arab Countries in Israel

It is not the purpose of this section of the essay to dwell on the dysfunctionaleffects resulting from immigration to Israel, the clash of cultures betweenWestern and Eastern Jews, and the struggle that developed over the years infacing and eventually reducing the social, economic, and political gapbetween them. The purpose instead is to illustrate, on one hand, how in 1948the newly established Israeli government, the Jewish Agency, and WorldJewry shouldered the responsibility and the funding for the absorption of the newcomers and their integration in the new state and society and, on theother hand, how these newcomers adapted to their new home, despite theunexpectedly difficult conditions that they found upon their arrival.

Between 1948 and 1954, Israel had to absorb six hundred thousand Jews,mostly from Arab countries, and the Jewish population of the new state dou-bled. Since the Law of Return was passed by the Knesset (Israeli parlia-ment) on 5 July 1950, Jews from Arab countries have had to carve for them-selves a place in the new modern Israeli society. The Jewish society thatthey found upon arrival in Israel contrasted sharply with their traditionaland religious backgrounds. It became clear that their brand of Zionism dif-fered from that of Western Jews in that it was based on religious and tradi-tional beliefs, an important factor that escaped the Arabs who had madethem pay dearly for their Zionism. Another factor that escaped the Arab gov-ernments is that Israel was established to receive and to serve as a haven forthose Jews who are considered unwelcome, unacceptable, or persecuted intheir countries of birth: “Israel will accept every Jew and with the help ofthe Jewish people provide for his basic needs.”82 Unlike its Arab neighbors,

81. Judy Feld Carr, letter to the author, 15 April 2003.82. Dominitz, 163.


who also were faced with an influx of refugees but who chose to entrust theirfate to the hands of the United Nations, Israel, with the help of World Jewry,did everything possible to offer its Jewish refugees freedom from persecu-tion, opportunity, and the basic resources necessary for resettlement andintegration. However, due to the difficult military, economic, and politicalcircumstances in which the newly established state found itself, the processof rehabilitation of the Jews from Arab countries in such a short period oftime was accompanied by hardship and suffering.

In the first place, as Yehuda Dominitz, former director-general of the Imi-gration and Absorption Department of the Jewish Agency, put it:

The absorption and integration of the newcomer caused a demographic,social, cultural and economic upheaval—both in the existing populationand among the immigrants themselves. The fact that the population wasprepared to make the sacrifices necessary to absorb the huge number ofnew arrivals, half of them from Asia and Africa, testified to the strength ofcontemporary commitment to Jewish solidarity.83

The absorption and integration of six hundred thousand Jews from Arabcountries who arrived en masse after 1948 entailed an enormous effort tocreate an integrated and pluralistic Jewish society in Israel. Jews from Arabcountries did not have it easy with their brethren from Europe, and the firstencounter with these Jews often produced shock and alienation that broughtabout social, economic, and political differentiation based on ethnic identifi-cation. Mistakes were made that might have been avoided, and their conse-quences were manifested over the following decades.84

However, in the early period, the Israeli government was under a verytight schedule to provide important and urgent services to the newcomers,including housing, education, jobs, training, and health care. These serviceswere costly, and funds had to be raised and austerity measures introducedto cope with the new situation.

The most challenging and immediate task was to find housing for all new-comers, including the survivors from the Holocaust. The housing that the

83. Ibid., 156.84. See Roumani, The Case of the Jews, on the role of the army in national integration; and Smooha.


government could provide at the time was immigrant camps and maabarot(transit camps) as temporary means, while more permanent housing wasbeing built. By the end of 1951, 90 percent of the 256,000 immigrants whoreached Israel were Jews from Arab countries and were living in temporaryhousing:85 “Immigrant camps were planned for 6,500 newcomers a monthbut from July 1949 onwards the number of new arrivals was higher.”86

In the meantime, extensive construction projects were undertaken by thegovernment to transfer those immigrants from transit camps to permanenthousing. By March 1955, sixty-one thousand housing units had been com-pleted.87 Immigrants were encouraged to relocate to what became known asdeveloping towns on the periphery of Israel. This policy had a double purpose:first, to disperse Israel’s population and avoid concentration in the centerand, second, to settle remote areas. But at the same time, this policy had anegative effect on those Jews from Arab countries who were sent to towns faraway from the center with a low level of public and private services.

As housing expanded into the construction of larger dwellings and subsi-dized mortgages, the last maabarot were finally dismantled in 1962. In 1999about 160,000 families “still lived in public owned apartments for whichthey paid only a nominal rent for many years.”88 The estimated cost of hous-ing these Jews from Arab countries over the years is calculated at over $3billion.89

Other challenges that the State of Israel had to face as part of absorbingthe new immigrants from Arab countries included training and changing theoccupational status and vocations of these newcomers. In their countries oforigin, these immigrants had worked mainly in commerce, particularly assmall shopkeepers. There were hardly any farmers. By 1954, 60 percent ofall immigrants had changed their vocations, and about ten thousand fami-lies were working in rural settlements. Jews from Arab countries had to

85. Dominitz, 166. In the first year, 1948 to 1949, 205,000 immigrants arrived. By the end of 1949,150,000 had found accommodation throughout the country and 54,000 remained in camps. Accord-ing to Dominitz, Jews from Arab countries constituted less than half of all immigrants but accountedfor some 90 percent of the maabarot dwellers. 86. Ibid., 165.87. Ibid., 167. 88. Ibid., 168.89. Ibid., 170.


undergo a change in their vocations and adjust to a new environment. Fromthe 282 moshavim (cooperative villages) that were established, more thanhalf (145) were inhabited by Jews from Arab countries. According to Dominitz,“The Israeli economy provided 200,000 jobs for approximately one-third ofthe new arrivals from Arab countries, and some $2.5 billion was invested forthis purpose.”90

In the education field, the arrival of Jews from Arab countries posed sev-eral challenges to Israeli policy makers. The relatively young age of the pop-ulation of new arrivals in the 1950s led to a threefold increase in the numberof children in schools. Special education was needed for those who had beenunable to attend school in their country of origin in order to bring them up tothe level of the existing population.91

As early as 1949, reforms were introduced to accelerate the integration ofthe newcomers and to reduce the differences and gaps between them andthe existing population. Such reforms included the extension of compulsoryeducation to the age of fourteen and later to eighteen. When Jews from Arabcountries were unable to utilize these reforms because of economic hard-ships, the army introduced compensatory programs so that no young personwould enter the labor force after finishing his compulsory army service ofthree years without a certificate of elementary education or two years of highschool.92

Education expenditures over the years proved to be second only to themilitary budget. The amount expended on education for Jews from Arabcountries alone was estimated at $4.5 billion. The gap that existed from the1950s has been narrowing, and in 2001 more than 48 percent of Jews livingin developing towns have obtained their matriculation certificate.93

The arrival of newcomers also necessitated an expansion of health ser-vices, since many of these immigrants suffered from trachoma, tuberculosis,and other diseases. The improvement in health service practically wiped outsome of the diseases brought from North Africa. Thousands of hospital beds

90. Ibid., 173.91. Ibid., 176.92. See Maurice M. Roumani, From Immigrant to Citizen: The Contribution of the Army to NationalIntegration in Israel (The Hague: Foundation for the Study of Plural Societies, 1979).93. Statistics from the Adva Center, available at www.adva.org.


were added to cope with the doubling of the population. By 1962, publichealth was provided to all the transit camps. In 2001, life expectancy formales ranked among the top five countries in the world, and for females itwas not too far behind. “In contrast to other industrialized countries, lifeexpectancy of males in Israel ranks relatively high (76.2 years), just belowthat of Australia (76.8 years), Sweden (77.1 years) and Japan (77.6 years).The women’s situation is different. Israeli females are ranked relatively low,with a life expectancy of 79.9 years. Japan, France, and Switzerland are atthe top of the ranking, with life expectancies of 84.3 years, 83.6 and 83.0years, respectively. Germany, United States and United Kingdom are closeto Israel at the ranking.”94 The absorption and integration of Jews from Arab countries was reported to have cost Israel and World Jewry about $11billion.95

Israel can look at its record of integrating such a large number of immi-grants from Third World countries in less than two generations with a greatsense of satisfaction and achievement. Not without a struggle in some fields,the gaps among the different ethnic groups has been reduced. Representa-tion in the Knesset in the 1990s of Jews from Arab countries and theirdescendants was 30.8 percent.96

A Solution to the Middle East Conflict: Compensation and Curriculum

Since the issue of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries and their claimswas raised in an organized form by WOJAC in 1976, there has been littlesuccess in achieving redress, and their claims have remained largely onpaper.97

In contrast, the United Nations Refugee Welfare Agency (UNRWA, estab-lished by UN General Assembly resolution 302, December 1949) has sup-

94. Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), Complete Life Tables of Israel, 1995–1999 (Jerusalem: CBS,2000), available at www,cbs.gov.il/publications/mortality/mort_e.htm.95. Dominitz, 183.96. See the number of those originating from Arab countries who have been members of the Knessetand the government ministries since 1977, in CBS.97 See WOJAC’s Voice 1, no. 1 (1978): 16 –7, and 1, no. 2 (1979): 14–7.


ported the rehabilitation of Palestinian refugees with billions of U.S. dollars.98

The Arab states, with the exception of Jordan, have refused to absorb orintegrate the Arabs of Palestine and instead have kept them for decades tofester in refugee camps and to live with the hope that one day they wouldreturn to their homes, as has been promised to them since 1949 by Arabstates. Over the years, the number of refugees became a controversial issue.Many reports from different sources, including the UN, point to contradic-tory numbers that can range from 3.8 million, according to UNRWA, to amere forty thousand “surviving refugees directly displaced in 1948 whomeet UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner) criteria.”99

Contrary to the stand taken by the Arab states vis-à-vis their brethren,Israel absorbed more than six hundred thousand Jewish refugees from Arabcountries in a short period following independence in 1948. Two generationslater they are not only integrated but they constitute a sizeable proportion ofthe state’s leadership. However, the process of their absorption and integra-tion was costly and accompanied by great suffering and struggle. The pas-sage from the traditional societies from which they came to a competitivemodern society cost these Jews a change in family structure resulting insocial anomie and economic hardship. Special programs like ProjectRenewal had to be introduced with the aid of World Jewry to raise the stan-dards of these immigrant-refugees in the fields of housing, education, andjob training. By 1986, the amount expended for the resettling and rehabili-tation of the new arrivals reached a figure of over $12 billion.100 No UNagency came to the aid of these refugees, even after the peace agreementbetween Egypt and Israel was signed in 1979. That agreement specificallystipulated “a mutual settlement of financial claims,” but Egypt has refusedto deal with claims of its former Jews.101

Over the years, Jews from Arab countries have demanded that they becompensated for communal and private property that was stolen, frozen, orexpropriated, as well as for injuries suffered by these Jews as a result of dis-crimination or persecution by the Arab states. They also have demandedthat Arab states restore all assets of spiritual, cultural, and religious signifi-

98. Shulewitz, The Forgotten Millions, app. 1, 209.99. The Jerusalem Report, 28 January 2002, 27.100. Dominitz, 183. 101. Yaakov Meron, interview with the author.


cance to their Jewish owners. The value of public and private property thatthese Jews left in their countries of birth amounts to tens of billions of U.S.dollars.102

One can also add the “territorial rights” that the Arabs have claimed fortheir brethren, the Palestinians. Already in July 1949, the Arab statesdemanded territorial rights for the Arab refugees who refused to return toPalestine to live under Israeli control. In April 1966, the Arab governmentsstill held the idea that Arab refugees have these territorial rights. YaakovMeron found no difficulty in applying the argument used by Arab states indemanding territorial compensation for the Palestinian refugees to the Jewsfrom Arab countries.103 The Arab argument dates back to the Lausanne con-ference of 1949, when the Arab refugees refused the offer of Israel to acceptone hundred thousand of them back. They argued instead that the territorythat they had left for the Jews under the Partition Plan should be compensatedin the form of territory and not money. This was reiterated by Syrian presidentHafiz al-Assad when he was quoted as saying: “I also have in mind that thetotal area of the West Bank is 5,000 square kilometers, which cannot absorbthree million people [i.e., Palestinian Arabs], but the area of Israel is 20,000kilometers, and it can.”104 Meron argues that if we were to apply this method toJews from Arab countries, then we would discover that Jews will own a greaterarea than allotted to them under the partition plan. He uses the case of LibyanJewry as an example. In 1948, Libyan Jews numbered thirty-five thousand.Upon their arrival in Israel, Libyan Jews would have brought with them theterritorial rights of thirty-five thousand square kilometers, seven times thecombined areas of the territories occupied during the 1967 war. Meron furtherargues that if we add to this the “territorial rights of Jews from Iraq, Yemenand other Arab countries” we will reach “an astronomical” figure.105

When the Arab states present the Palestinian refugee problem in territor-ial terms, one does not need to wonder much about what is behind theirclaims. In the first place, Palestinian refugees and their descendants arelocated in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. By moving to

102. Oved Ben-Ozer, chairman of WOJAC, interview with the author.103. Meron, “The Expulsion of the Jews,” 97.104. Ibid.105. Ibid.


these areas, the Palestinians have in fact moved only a few miles away fromwhere they once lived, in a society that shares ethnic, religious, cultural,political, and social norms and even an identical climatic environment. Someestimates show that more than 60 percent of the Jordanian population isPalestinian. Crown Prince Hassan once told the national assembly that“Palestine is Jordan and Jordan is Palestine.”106 The fact that Palestinianrefugees or guerillas moved easily among the above states only proves “thestrength of Arab nationalism and the tenuous character of the Palestinianattachment except as a political tactic against Israel.”107

This is confirmed also by PLO leaders such as Zuhair Muhsin, who isreported to have made these remarks to the Netherlands paper Trouw on 3March 1977:

There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians andLebanese. . . . We are one people. Only for political reasons do we care-fully underline our Palestinian identity. For it is of national interest for theArabs to encourage the existence of the Palestinians against Zionism. Yet,the existence of a separate Palestinian identity is there only for tacticalreasons. The establishment of a Palestinian state is a new expedient tocontinue the fight against Zionism and for Arab unity.108

This argument rests well with the case made by Julius Stone that in 1917only two nations were allocated the spoils of the Ottoman Empire, the “Arabnation” and the “Jewish nation,” both inhabitants of the region for over amillennium and, in case of the Jews, even longer. This territorial allocationresulted in nineteen Arab-Muslim states in the Middle East and NorthAfrica, encompassing over 5,632,910 square miles.109 The same principlewas also applied to the Jewish people in 1917 by allocating them 46,000

106. This statement was made on 2 February 1970, as reported in Stone, 24. There are many otherreferences to this effect by others, including the PLO, over the years.107. Marie Syrkin, “Who Are the Palestinians?” Midstream (January 1970): 12.108. Stone, 11.109. Philip Steele, The Kingfisher Atlas of the World (New York: Kingfisher, 1997). The statesincluded Iraq with 169,234 square miles, Jordan with 35,478, Kuwait with 6,880, Lebanon with4,016, Oman with 119,500, Qatar with 4,416, Syria with 71,504, United Arab Emirates with 32,302,Yemen with 205,000, Egypt with 386,690, Libya with 679,359, Morocco with 177,116, Algeria with919,591, Tunisia with 63,383, Saudi Arabia with 849,400, Bahrain with 266, Iran with 636,293,Turkey with 301,380, and Sudan with 971,102.


square miles. In 1922, this portion was subsequently reduced to create theKingdom of Jordan, leaving the Jewish people with only 10,871 squaremiles, about “one two-hundredth of the entire territory distributed.”110

It cannot be said that an additional ten thousand square miles will makemuch difference to the almost 6 million square miles of territory now inArab possession. So it is obvious that the problem is not one of territory butrather a matter inherent in the political culture of Arab history, namely, Arabintolerance toward non-Muslim minorities, especially those who escapedArab rule and became independent in a region that Arabs claim is exclu-sively theirs.

Therefore, Jews from Arab countries argue that what happened in 1947and 1948 was de facto an exchange of population, whereby Jews from thesecountries were resettled in Israel and Arab refugees from Palestine shouldbe resettled in the neighboring Arab countries. This would not be the firstsuch population exchange in history: “The number of Greek Orthodox wholeft the Turkish Republic for Greece after the First World War was twice asgreat as that of the Jews who left Muslim countries from 1948 onwards andpartly settled in Israel, or of the Palestinian Arabs who left for the neighbor-ing Arab countries in 1948.”111

Therefore, after fifty years of conflict, it should be recognized that theproblem in the Middle East is not an exchange of territories but rather theexchange of populations. The heart of the conflict revolves around the refusalof Arab states and the Palestinians, in particular, to reconcile themselves toIsrael’s legitimate and permanent right to nationhood. However, it seems thatbefore this change of heart can occur, the Arabs will have to undertakereforms of their educational system so that the Jew, the Israeli, and the non-Muslim will not be seen in the negative light shown in their textbooks overthe past fifty years.112

Research institutes at several universities in Israel and abroad have beenmonitoring the deterioration in the Arab perception of the “Israeli” or “Zion-ist,” when in fact they refer to the Jew. Friday sermons by Muslim clerics

110. Ibid., 17.111. Hirschberg, 211.112. See Bernard Lewis, “Antisemitism in the Arabic and Islamic World,” in Present Day Anti-Semitism, ed. Yehuda Bauer (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1988), 61–6.


continue to incite people against the Jews. Recently the “Protocols of Zion,”an anti-Semitic forgery produced in Russia, has been turned into a televi-sion series on Egyptian screens. These “Protocols” are sold by the hundredsof thousands in Saudi Arabia. The al-Aqsa intifadah has generated anotherwave of anti-Semitism, as reflected in schoolchildren from the age of six andolder. Their textbooks do not refer to the Israeli but to the Jew as an enemyof Allah and of Islam. It is the use of religion that is most disturbing, since itreminds all of those who lived under Islam that basically nothing haschanged. Although no one would like to see “a clash of civilization” in thisregion, and major efforts are being invested in interfaith dialogue, Arableaders and state agencies have shown no sign of discouraging this cam-paign against Israel and the Jews.113

The Oslo peace agreements have failed in part because from the startthey addressed the conflict through the territorial dimension, which is ofsecondary importance. This is a conflict that has been raging for over ahundred years, in addition to the previous thirteen hundred years of Arab-Muslim treatment of minorities in the Middle East, so the Oslo architectsshould have approached the solution to the conflict by changing school cur-ricula of both rivaling parties. Only a well-planned and monitored programof educational reform by an international agency like the UN can producethe climate for a peaceful modus vivendi in the Middle East and elsewhere.In an age of globalization when large numbers of Muslims are making theirhomes outside the Middle East, in Europe and other Western countries,Arab states are faced with a new phenomenon in which their coreligionistsare a minority in their host countries. For the Arabs, the next challenge isthe European arena and perhaps even beyond, where Arabs and Muslimswill start demanding equality and respect, democratic values that for cen-turies they themselves were reluctant to grant to others. This may convincethe Arab states that territorial boundaries are less important than these values guaranteeing mutual respect and understanding among differentpeoples.

Similarly, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict should be looked upon not so

113. Itamar Rabinovitch, “Anti-Semitism in the Muslim and Arab World,” in Present Day Anti-Semitism, 257–64.


much from the territorial dimension but more from the plight of humans whoseek to lead a normal life in a peaceful environment. The sooner the refugeeproblem, both Arab and Jewish, is settled through compensation and accep-tance of a de facto exchange of populations, the sooner the suffering and thefrustrations of both groups will end.

A step in that direction was taken by a tribunal held in Washington, D.C.,on 27 October 1987 and chaired by the late Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, atwhich both verbal and documentary evidence was submitted by WOJAC’srepresentatives. Among the tribunal’s recommendations were the following:

• The just claims of Jewish refugees from Arab lands for violation oftheir personal and property rights should be acknowledged by theArab states responsible and just compensation rendered.

• The international community, which has granted substantial monetarycompensation to Palestinian Arab refugees, should join in providingredress to Jewish refugees from Arab lands and to assist in rectifyingthis manifest injustice by diplomatic and other peaceful means.

• Further, and, without prejudice to the foregoing, in any comprehen-sive peace settlement, a claims committee for the mutual settlementof the financial claims of all refugees—Jews and Arabs—should beestablished.

These recommendations were also reflected in the U.S. House of Repre-sentatives on 17 November 1987 by Gary L. Ackerman of New York and on27 January 1988 by Barney Frank of Massachusetts and included in theInternational Security and Development Cooperation Act of 1987 dated 16December 1987 (legislative day, December 15) under Section 620.114 TheJews from Arab countries are ready to consider a fair settlement of theirclaims and recognition of their legitimate rights to live as free people and nolonger as dhimmis in the Middle East.

114. See Proceedings and Debates of the 100th Congress, H.R. 3100, 132–3; Congressional Record–House, H 9976-7, E 4470, 1987– 8.

silent refugees

Documents

pressure israel

jews fromarab countries

case of israel

arab countries wojac

arab countriesmaurice

arab countriesroumani

arab defeat

palestinian refugees