(Author: Zvi Gabay, Vol. 71, No. 3, Chanukah 2016)
During the holiday of Shavuot, Iraqi Jews commemorate the anniversary of the Farhud – the riots that took place on the Shavuot of 1-2 June 1941. In the riots, reminiscent of Kristallnacht in Germany, over 150 Jews were murdered, hundreds more were injured, much Jewish property was looted and synagogues desecrated. The memory of the riots remains fresh in the minds of Iraqi Jews.
Similar vicious attacks (farhuds) were experienced by almost all Jews who lived in Arab countries. Jews experienced such tragedies in Algeria, Tunisia, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Yemen and Egypt in the years following these countries gaining their independence from Great Britain, France and Italy. Unlike the Arabs of Palestine, the Jews in Arab lands did not declare war on their respective countries. They never fought against them, as the Arabs in Mandatory Palestine did against the Jewish villages and communities in kibbutzim, towns and cities throughout the yishuv, and afterwards against the newborn Jewish State of Israel. Many of them lost their lives, both before Israel’s establishment and in retaliation for Israel’s victories over Arab armies in the war of 1948. Some were executed by public hanging (in October 1948, the wealthy Shafiq el Adass was the first to be hanged, in the city of Basra in Iraq, on a false charge of spying for Israel).
The world has heard a great deal about the tragedies that happened to the Palestinian Arabs, termed the ‘Nakbah’ (‘Catastrophe’), but knows almost nothing about the injustices committed against Jews who lived in Arab countries. What took place in those lands was in effect an ethnic cleansing of the Jewish communities living there. In one country after another, Jews were forced to leave, leaving behind the bulk of their personal and communal assets, including schools, hospitals, synagogues, cemeteries and prophets’ graves (some of which have since been demolished by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria). The Arab governments confiscated all their property.
Attacks against Jews in Arab lands occurred well before the establishment of the State of Israel. In Iraq, persecution began with discrimination in the areas of the economy, education and public life. Afterwards, Arab nationalism ignited the fires of antisemitic rioting, culminating in the Farhud of 1941. Similar tragedies befell Libyan Jewry. On 2 November 1945 (the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration), 133 Jews were killed and 400 injured; on the same day in Egypt, many Jews lost their lives and synagogues were set on fire. In November 1947, 100 Jews were murdered in Yemen-Aden.
The war of 1948 led to many more anti-Jewish attacks. In June, scores of Jews were murdered and their property looted in UJda and Jrada in Morocco. Many Moroccan Jews fled to Algeria. Later that year, in the dead of night, a mass expulsion took place in Egypt. There was a horrifying anti-Jewish atmosphere throughout the Arab world, fanned by inflammatory rhetoric.
The combination of xenophobic Sunni nationalism, as witnessed in our own day in most Arab countries and the spread of antisemitic ideologies produced a potent hatred against the Jews. According to the American historian Edwin Black, Hebrew University Professor S. Moreh and Dr Z. Yehuda of the Jewish Babylonian Heritage Centre, this hatred was abetted by Nazis such as the German envoy to Baghdad, Dr Fritz Grobba, and pseudo-religious leaders such as Haj Amin al-Husseini. The latter, who fled from Mandatory Palestine and became head of Hitler’s Arabic propaganda department, found in Iraq a convenient venue for his anti-Jewish activities. There he called on Arabs and Muslims everywhere to expel all Jews from their countries. The well-known radio commentator Eliyhoo Nawi, who later became Mayor of Be’er Sheva, recalled a song that was broadcast by Arabic radio stations: “Let the sword speak…to thin out our Jewish cousins…”
Jews were left with no choice but to flee from countries that they had helped to found and, with their contributions to government, economy, medicine, education, literature, poetry and music, to bring into the modern era. Their catastrophe is almost forgotten; it is not properly taught in schools, as the Nakbah is being taught. It is not discussed in the media, nor is it marked either nationally or within the United Nations institutions and UNRWA schools. Very few people anywhere are aware that approximately half of the Israeli population originates from Arab countries, where Jews had lived for thousands of years since being exiled from the kingdoms of Israel and Judea.
Arab propaganda has wisely concealed from international discussions the chapter of population exchange that occurred between Israel and Arab countries during and after Israel’s War of Independence. It repeatedly claims the “right of return” for Palestinians Arabs who fought Israel, some of whom fled to the neighboring Arab countries (as per instruction by their leaders). Simultaneously, Arab propaganda has succeeded in ingraining in the general public worldwide the notion that Israeli Jews “have come from Poland and Germany…” while the “Palestinian Nakbah”, which occurred through the fault of the Arab leadership, is the only disaster that took place upon Israel’s establishment.
This historical distortion of the demographic and political reality has occurred in part due to our own fault. Israelis must place the issue of Jews from Arab lands on the agenda in their country as a key part of the history of the people of Israel. A national memorial center should be established for the hundreds of Jewish victims who lost their lives. For the sake of educating future generations, a proper commemoration of the plight and the heritage of Jews from Arab countries should take place. Simultaneously, the issue must be raised in international forums.
The Nakbah is marked every year on 15 May – the date of the declaration of Israel’s independence – with public demonstrations. These are headed by Arab members of the Knesset who mourn the fact that their predecessors – the former leaders of the Arab community, Haj Amin al-Husseini and his followers – failed in their attempt to wipe out Israel, and organised by NGOS financed by foreign governments who parrot the Palestinian slogans. This noisy campaign receives wide media coverage. By contrast, the disaster that befell Arab Jewry hardly merits any public or media notice. This is despite the fact that its human and physical dimensions were larger than the Nakbah (the total number of Jews forced out of their homelands was about 856 000, while the Arabs who left Mandatory Palestine numbered about 650 000 – according to UNRWA statistics). Only on 22 February 2010 was the issue of the Jews from Arab countries placed on the Israeli agenda, with the enactment of The Law of Preservation of the Rights to Compensation of Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries and Iran. The Act states that any negotiations for the achievement of peace in the Middle East must include the subject of compensation for those Jewish victims. Four years later, on 30 November 2014, a memorial ceremony took place in the President’s residence to honor the existence and expulsion of the Jews from Arab countries, according to a law adopted by the Knesset that year.
Under the instructions of the Arab League, Arab governments have perpetuated the misery of the Palestinian refugees, not allowing them to be rehabilitated or to become citizens in their host countries. This is due to the ideology that maintains that rehabilitating the Palestinians would be to Israel’s advantage. The Arab League insist that the refugees continue to live on charities received through UNRWA, most of whose funds are donated by the USA and other Western governments. Arab leaders have repeatedly placed full responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem on Israel. At the same time, Israel never made a serious effort to exonerate itself of this accusation, even though UN Resolution 194 (December, 1948) did not hold it responsible.
Another claim made by the Arab propaganda machine is that the Jews were not forced to flee from the Arab states, where they had allegedly “lived in peace and harmony”. Here, a history lesson of the conflict would be in order. Arab propagandists would discover that during the 1947 UN debates on the proposal to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, their representatives (Heykal Pasha from Egypt, Dr. Fadhil el Jamali from Iraq, Jamal al-Husseini, head of the Palestinian Arab delegation and others) not only declared that “the partition line will be a line of fire and blood”, but announced that partitioning Palestine would put the Jewish communities in the Arab countries in mortal danger. All acted according to a decision adopted by the Arab League political committee meeting held in Zofar, Lebanon, in September 1947. At that meeting the League further called on all Arab Palestinians to fight the partition plan “with no mercy”, promising them financial assistance, arms and fighters in that regard. Further, the League called on its members “to open the gates” for those who might escape the fighting in Palestine. And there were many Arab refugees, despite the fact that some Arabs, particularly in Haifa, were persuaded not to leave.
Immediately after 29 November 1947 – the day that the partition plan passed – Arab gangs attacked the Jewish communities in Palestine while the Arab armies began planning to invade Palestine as soon as the British Mandate expired on 14 May the following year. Simultaneously, the above-noted riots against Jews in Arab countries began.
There were certainly people in the Arab countries who did not support the attacks on the Jews in their midst, but their voices were not heard. Jews were the scapegoats in internecine power struggles between Sunnis and Shiites, just as today Israel is at the center of the struggle between Shiite Iran and the Sunni Arab countries.
Notwithstanding the fact that the human dimensions of the catastrophe suffered by Jews from Arab countries were greater than those of the one suffered by the Palestinians the world’s attention has always focused on the latter. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1957 did indeed recognize Jews from Arab countries as refugees, but the UN General Assembly did not pass a single resolution on their behalf. By contrast, more than 160 resolutions and declarations have been passed in support of the Palestinian refugees. This one-sided approach has not solved the problem and indeed has exacerbated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It could be that the Jewish refugees were ignored because they were able to rehabilitate themselves, in Israel and elsewhere, with the conditions of their lives in the transition camps (maabarot) becoming a thing of the past. By contrast, all of the UN resolutions and the billions of dollars donated by the international community have not improved the situation of the Palestinian refugees, who continue to live in appalling conditions (as witnessed during the vicious civil war currently taking place in Syria).
The time has come for Arab leaders to acknowledge the reality created by their wars on Israel. They should cease toying with the possibility of turning back history and stop reciting the “right of return” slogan for Palestinian refugees, thereby sowing illusions in their hearts. In recent years, a process of awakening can indeed be discerned in the Arab world, especially among intellectuals, who recognize that it was not only the Palestinians Arabs who suffered a ‘Nakbah’ but that the Jews of the Arab world had their own catastrophe.
A solution to the tragedy of the refugees in the Middle East – Palestinians and Jews – can only be found by looking at the total picture. Any solution must be shared by the Arab states, Israel and the international community. It must be based on President Clinton’s proposal in 2000 to establish an international fund to compensate Palestinian and Jewish refugees. In the Middle East conflict, the Palestinians were not the only ones to suffer; the Jews suffered too. Justice must be done, and it must be seen to be done, for both sides, for the sake of a true peace in the Middle East.
Zvi Gabay is a former ambassador for Israel and deputy general of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His diplomatic career commenced in 1970, lasting until his retirement with the rank of Senior Ambassador in 2004.
