THE FORGOTTEN JEWISH REFUGEES FROM ARAB LANDS AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE TODAY
International attention regarding the post-Arab Spring turmoil in the Middle East has focused largely on the number of deaths that have ensued - over 220 000 in Syria alone. Far less attention has been paid to a second unfolding humanitarian disaster, namely the vast numbers of people who been displaced, whether internally within their own country or driven into exile altogether. These number in the many millions.
Even before the emergence of ISIS in Iraq and the eruption of the current civil war there, the number of Iraqi refugees around the world was estimated at some four million, displaced by, amongst other things, the First and Second Gulf Wars and the international sanctions program against the Saddam Hussein regime.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the four year-old civil war in Syria has resulted in over 3 million fleeing to neighbouring countries, including Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. As a result of the ISIS scourge, another two million Iraqis and Syrians have been displaced.
Nor is the escalating refugee crisis in the Arab world limited to Asian countries. Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea are likewise experiencing massive population upheavals, with millions of their inhabitants having already fled to the dubious sanctuary of neighbouring countries. The latter, unsurprising, are failing to cope with the influx, particularly those - like Egypt and Yemen - which are themselves troubled by serious internal conflict.
In all, the current refugee crisis in the Middle East is the largest, while also exceeding many times over, the previous most serious case of population displacement in the region, namely those directly and indirectly resulting from the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
It is well known that an estimated 700 000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from Israel as a result of the conflicts immediately preceding and following the latter's establishment. Considerably less well known is that an even greater number of Jews were compelled to a greater or lesser degree, to leave their homelands through the creation of the Jewish state.
Exploiting the inevitable legacy of anti-white resentment in this country, local anti-Israel campaigners persistently portray the Zionist movement as an extension of European colonialism and Israeli Jews as a foreign implant of mainly East European origin. The reality, of course, is that the majority of Jews in Israel hail from Middle Eastern countries, which in addition to Israel itself (which since Biblical times has always had a Jewish presence) would include Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Libya and Iran.
In 1948, the year when Israel was established, there were an estimated 760 000 to 880 000 Jews living in communities throughout the Arab world. Today, there are fewer than 5000, nearly all in Morocco and Tunisia. Of those who left, approximately three in four, amounting to some 680 000, settled in Israel. Their descendants today number in the several millions, in Israel alone constituting over 60% of the population.
This extraordinary mass exodus, the bulk of which occurred in the course of little more than a decade, all but brought to an end in the various Arab-speaking countries a Jewish presence that predated by many centuries not only Islam but even Christianity. The Jewish communities in Iran, Iraq and Syria traced their origin at least as far back to the Babylonian conquest of the Holy Land in 587 B.C.E. and most likely even before that, to the Assyrian conquest of northern Israel and the famed exile of the "Ten Lost Tribes".
In some Arab states, the Jewish community no longer exists, while in others, only a few hundred Jews remain. The bare statistics tell their own story. Libya's population was once 3% Jewish; today, not a single professing Jew is known to be living in the country. In Egypt,
perhaps a hundred remain out of 80 000. Yemen's 60 000-strong community now numbers around 300, while Syria's 25 000 has been reduced to even less than that. Most dramatic of all has been the disappearance, after more than 25 centuries, of Jews from Iraq, where fewer than a dozen remain out of a pre-1948 community of 150 000.
The first generation Jewish immigrants from the Arab world had a great deal in common with their Arab fellow citizens, including, of course, the same language. Given this heritage, one would expect to find a higher degree of sympathy towards the Arab world within this sector of the Israeli population, but in fact the opposite is true.
In political terms, ‘Mizrachi' (‘Eastern' Jews, also referred to as ‘Sephardim'or ‘Taimoni') have consistently supported the more right-leaning parties, such as Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas. Without their support, Binyamin Netanyahu would have lost last week's election by a wide margin. By contrast, it is among the more secular, Westernised Jews of North European origin that one finds the highest levels of support for liberal-leftwing parties such as Meretz and Yesh Leatid.
The reasons why Oriental Jews, despite their common heritage, generally adopt a harder line when it comes to Israel's policies towards the greater Arab world are not hard to identify. In the years immediately leading up to Israel's establishment, and even more so in the two decades that followed, Jews throughout the Middle East were subjected to a systematic policy of state-sponsored persecution, discrimination and harassment.
Amongst other measures, they were dismissed from civil services, quotas were placed on their holding university positions and businesses were boycotted. Show trials against Jewish community members, instigated on the flimsiest of pretexts, were commonplace, almost invariably leading to conviction and public execution.
All of this went side by side with innumerable acts of violence against them by their non-Jewish neighbors, including massacres, looting and destruction of property and places of worship. The authorities in these countries turned a blind eye to these outrages, when they were not themselves actively involved in provoking them.
Under the circumstances, it was not surprising that Mizrachi Jews began emigrating en masse. This was despite the fact that they would arrive in their new homeland - whether in Israel or elsewhere - all but destitute. Similarly to what was experienced by those Jews able to escape pre-war Germany, they were in most cases allowed to take only a fraction of their possessions with them (a typical case concerned those remaining Jews who left Iraq in 1967, who were permitted to take one suitcase and the equivalent of $50).
What remained was either confiscated by the governments of the day or plundered by the greater populace. The total value of Jewish property abandoned or seized during this time will never be known for certain; current estimates put it at between $100 and $300 billion. This includes former Jewish-owned real-estate amounting to 100 000 square kilometers (four times the size of the state of Israel).
Despite the magnitude of the catastrophe that befell Mizrachi Jewry, one resulting in millennia-old communities disappearing almost in their entirety, the "Jewish Nakhba" as it is sometimes called has been accorded minimal attention by the world at large, both whilst it was happening and to this day. Instead, it is the "Palestinian Nakhba" - a word meaning ‘disaster' and referring to the mass flight of the greater part of Israel's Arab population during the 1948 Israel War of Independence - that has dominated the entire discourse around refugees and restitution in the context of the Middle East.
Comparing the two situations, as one would expect, is an area fraught with controversy. Palestinian lobbyists claim that raising the issue is a red herring aimed at denying the Palestinians, and their descendants, their "right of return" and due compensation for their losses. Sometimes, it is denied that Mizrachi Jews came to Israel as refugees at all, but asserted instead that they arrived as voluntary immigrants.
From the other side, it is argued that the comparison is specious and, to the Jewish victims of Arab persecution, deeply insulting. This is because whereas Arabs in Israel were displaced in the course of a war of aggression that their own leaders and the surrounding Arab states had themselves instigated, Arab countries targeted their Jewish inhabitants solely because, as Jews, they were held to be collectively guilty for the humiliating loss of ‘Palestine' to the Zionist usurpers.
This notion of Jews everywhere being collectively guilty for Israel's misdeeds - real or imaginary - continues to inform much of Arab-Islamic discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian question, whether manifesting in the political, theological, academic or cultural realm. What is worse, it has been progressively broadened to encompass a burgeoning range of bizarre and noxious conspiracy theories alleging that Jews everywhere are the malign hidden hand behind the myriad troubles of the Arab and Islamic world in general. The lethal consequences of this mindset were starkly demonstrated by this year's terror attacks in Paris and Copenhagen, when the murder of those deemed to have blasphemed Islam took place side by side with deadly attacks against a kosher supermarket and synagogue respectively.
Denying that anti-Jewish persecution occurred in the Arab states, or that this was the major push factor in the Jewish exodus from those lands, is palpably absurd. It is impossible to airbrush an historical event of that magnitude out of the record, particularly one so well documented. That being said, one should not overstate what happened, such as by stating baldly that Arab Jewry were ‘expelled' from their countries of origin in retaliation for Israel's creation. The reality is that while there undeniably were strong ‘push' factors, significant ‘pull' factors existed as well.
The centrality of the Land of Israel is a fundamental concept in Judaism and Mizrachi Jews, no less than their European co-religionists, had long yearned for the ancient prophecies of the Return to Zion to be fulfilled. It also has to be taken into account that the Jewish exodus, as it got underway, generated a momentum of its own, that is to say, many Jews chose to become part of it for fear of being left behind. These are the kind of nuances that it behooves all professional historians to be aware of when analyzing the reasons behind the mass Jewish exodus from Arab lands. It goes without saying that they should likewise apply such objective critical standards to assessing the reasons for the Palestinian displacement in the years 1947-8.
Today, the persecution that sixty years ago led to the virtual disappearance of Jews in the Arab-speaking world is being repeated in the religiously-motivated persecution of Middle East Christians, communities whose origins likewise precede the emergence of Islam by hundreds of years. It is no accident that Iraqi Christians make up 40% of the refugees now living in nearby countries, despite having comprised less than 5% of the total Iraqi population.
The targeting of Christians and other religious minorities - such as Mandaeans, Yazidis and, indeed, other Muslims deemed to hold heretical views - is especially horrific in areas where ISIS is gaining ground. However, anti-Christian persecution - including massacres, forced conversions and church burnings is on the increase throughout the Middle East. Indeed, the Christian missionary organization Open Doors (UK) estimates that today, four out of every five acts of religious persecution are directed at people of the Christian faith, and that these occur particularly in Muslim-dominated countries such as Saudi Arabia. It all bears out the salutary lesson highlighted by, amongst others, former UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who in a recent Guardian column warned that while acts of hate might begin with the Jews, they never end with them.
David Saks is Associate Director, SA Jewish Board of Deputies
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