Suffering is not a zero sum game between Israel and Gaza, but facts matter, if only to redress the balance.
As people around the world demonstrate for Palestinian rights, we shouldn’t overlook another group of Middle Eastern refugees who also have suffered for decades but whose plight is seldom discussed - the displaced Jewish refugees from Arab lands. Significant Jewish communities existed throughout the Middle East, North Africa, Babylon, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen and the Gulf region for more than 2,000 years, centuries before the advent of Islam and the Arab conquest. In 1948 some 900,000 Jews lived in Iraq, Yemen and other countries. Almost all of them were violently forced out.
After the decision of the United Nations in 1948 to partition Palestine and create a Jewish state, the Jews of the Arab lands became targets of their own governments. As Egypt’s delegate to the UN in 1947 chillingly told the General Assembly: “The lives of one million Jews in Muslim countries will be jeopardized by partition.” The dire warning quickly became the brutal reality.
Throughout 1947 and 1948, Jews in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, and Yemen (Aden ) were persecuted, their property and belongings were confiscated, and they were subjected to severe anti-Jewish riots instigated by the governments. In Iraq, Zionism was made a capital crime, and it still is. In Syria, anti-Jewish pogroms erupted in Aleppo and the government froze all Jewish bank accounts. In Egypt, bombs were detonated in the Jewish quarter, killing dozens. In Algeria, anti-Jewish decrees were swiftly instituted and in Yemen, bloody pogroms led to the death of nearly 100 Jews.
With their lives in danger and the situation growing ever more perilous, the Jews of the Arab World fled their homes as refugees.
Of the 820,000 Jewish refugees between 1948 and 1972, more than 200,000 found refuge in Europe and North America while 586,000 were resettled in Israel and without any compensation from the Arab governments who had confiscated their possessions. The majority of the Jewish refugees left their homes penniless and destitute.
In Israel, a newly independent country that was still facing existential threats to its survival, the influx of immigrants nearly doubled the population and a put a great strain on an economy struggling to just meet the needs of its existing population. The Jewish State, however, never considered turning away the refugees and, over the years, worked to absorb them into society.
Overall, the number of Jews fleeing Arab countries for Israel in the years following Israel’s independence was nearly double the number of Arabs leaving Palestine. The contrast between the Jewish refugees and the Palestinian refugees grows even starker considering the difference in cultural and geographic dislocation - most of the Jewish refugees travelled hundreds or thousands of miles to a tiny country whose inhabitants spoke a different language and lived with a vastly different culture. Most Palestinian refugees travelled but a few miles to the other side of the 1949 armistice lines while remaining inside a linguistically, culturally and ethnically similar society.
Moreover, the value of Jewish property left behind and confiscated by the Arab governments is estimated to be at least 50 per cent higher than the total value of assets lost by the Palestinian refugees.
To date, more than 100 UN resolutions have been passed referring explicitly to the fate of the Palestinian refugees. Not one has specifically addressed Jewish refugees.
Additionally, the United Nations created an organization, UNRWA, to solely handle Palestinian refugees while all other refugees are handled collectively by UNHRC. The UN even defines Palestinian refugees differently than every other refugee population, setting distinctions that have allowed their numbers to grow exponentially so that nearly 5 million are now considered refugees (which makes the so called right of return a practical impossibility ) despite the fact that the number estimated to have fled their homes is only approximately 400-700,000. After 1948, no more than 650,000 Palestinian Arabs could have become refugees. A report by the UN Mediator on Palestine arrived at an even lower figure, 472,000, and calculated that only about 360,000 Arab refugees required aid.
The greatest number of Jews who settled in mandate and independent Israel after 1948 are Mizrahi Jews, displaced from Arab lands where they had lived for centuries, while Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe make up 32 per cent of the population, hardly an example of colonisation. Yet, when referring to Middle East refugees, the international community refers only to Palestinians. In fact, there were more Jews displaced from Arab countries (856,000 ) than there were Palestinians who became refugees as a result of the 1948 Arab Israeli war (726,000 ).
According to one respected journalist, the expulsion of Middle Eastern Jews was “a Jewish Nakba,” or catastrophe, similar to how Palestinians describe Israel’s War of Independence.
Barnaby french
