Jews from Arab Countries vs. Palestinian Refugees: A Wash?
An Iraqi woman walks past an abandoned house in what was a Jewish neighborhood in the Iraqi city of Hilla, south of Baghdad, on August 12, 2015. Between 1948 and 1951 nearly all of Iraq's 2,500-year-old Jewish community fled amid a region-wide outbreak of nationalist ¬violence. Prior to the exodus that followed the creation of Israel in 1948, Jews made up around a third of Baghdad's population and played a major role in the political, economic and cultural life of the country. (PHOTO CREDIT HAIDAR HAMDANI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2019, pp. 42-45
Special Report
By Gregory DeSylva
ISRAEL IS LOUDLY PROCLAIMING a false equivalency between Palestinian expulsions and the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries across the Middle East and North Africa.
While not taking responsibility for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Israeli officials nonetheless argue that even more Jewish refugees were expelled or forced to flee from Arab countries, especially following the 1948 war. According to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs—an Israeli research institution—“Between 1920 and 1970, 900,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and other Muslim countries…600,000 settled in the new state of Israel.”
Another advocacy group, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, promotes their “cause” to governments and at the U.N. It claims as its most significant accomplishment the 2008 House of Representatives resolution calling on U.S. officials to refer to the “plight of the Arab Jewish refugees” whenever Palestinian refugees are mentioned.
The implication is that since the Arab countries expelled their Jews and have not compensated them for their property, therefore Israel has no obligation to allow the Palestinian refugees to return or to compensate them for their losses. The argument claims that Arab Jewish losses of land and property exceed Palestinian losses.
Based on a 1951 report by the U.N. Conciliation Commission for Palestine, British land expert John M. Berncastle estimated Palestinian losses at $4.4 billion versus Arab Jewish losses of $6.7 billion, in 2012 dollars. As of 2019 the ante has been upped dramatically: Israel is demanding $250 billion from seven Arab countries and Iran, with the Palestinians demanding $100 billion.
These analyses are predicated upon comparison of what happened to the Arab Jews and what happened to the Palestinians, but the analogy is false. What happened to the two groups was not comparable. Rather, these two events are related, constituting the two phases of the Zionist’s scheme to “…expel Arabs and take their places,” as Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion capsulized it in an Oct. 5, 1937 letter to his son Amos.
Ben-Gurion strove to expel Palestinian Arabs from their homes and properties in the Holy Land and replace them with Jews from everywhere—including Arab countries. The Zionists carried out the expulsion phase under “Plan Dalet” (or Plan D) whereby they ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians from that part of the Holy Land that would become Israel in 1948. According to the International Criminal Court, ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. The replacement phase manifested as the immigration to Israel of Jews from Arab countries and elsewhere to fill the vacancies so created.
EXPULSION: THE PALESTINIAN NARRATIVE
Zionism arose in the late 1890s with the aim of making the entire Holy Land a Jewish nation, and trouble has shaken the region ever since. Its intentions were particularly arrogant given that Palestine was part of the Muslim Ottoman Empire and was 81 percent Muslim vs. 8 percent Jewish and 11 percent Christian, all living in relative peace there.
The Zionist nation was to be a “Jewish democracy”—an idea as self-contradictory as “white democracy” or “Christian democracy.” In theory, Jews had to be politically dominant to make it a “safe haven” for the world’s Jews, who had endured much oppression. Thus, Jews had to become a large majority where they long had been a small minority. But they were not expected to become 100 percent of the population. The new country would be Jewish (large majority, politically dominant) yet appear to be a genuine democracy fully enfranchising its minorities. To achieve these goals, the proportion of Jews to Muslims and Christians had to change radically.
From 1892-1947, the Zionists removed Arabs mainly by buying land from “notable” Arab owners of large estates farmed by Arab tenants. These tenants originally had owned much of this land but had entrusted it to the “notables” to avoid conscription into the Ottoman military. After buying the property, the Zionists evicted the tenants and replaced them with Russian and European Jews, more than 550,000 of whom flooded the Holy Land in six waves. So, by 1947 Jews had increased to 32 percent of the population vs. 60 percent Muslim Arabs and 7 percent Christians—still far from a dominant Jewish majority.
With few exceptions, Arab Jews thus were not expelled or ethnically cleansed.
That year, the U.N. partitioned the Holy Land: 56 percent went to the Zionist state, 42 percent for an Arab state and 2 percent for internationally controlled Jerusalem. On March 10, 1948, Zionist political and military leaders, including Ben-Gurion, met in Tel Aviv and formally adopted Plan Dalet, a blueprint for the forcible ethnic cleansing of Arabs to make way for a repopulation with Jews. They drove out 750,000 Palestinian Arabs from the 78 percent of the Holy Land that the new state of Israel would control after the 1948 war. This transformation left 86 percent Jews and only 14 percent Arabs.
The Palestinian exiles were bona-fide refugees, having fled partly out of fear of war, but primarily due to at least 31 massacres of Palestinians. Like most war refugees, they did not want to leave home and strove to return when the war was over. But Israel barred them with lethal force from doing so, declared their property abandoned, and made it state property. This confiscated property was then made available to Jewish immigrants—including Arab Jews. Counting descendants of the 1948 and 1967 refugees, there now are about five million Palestinian refugees, about 1.5 million of whom subsist in wretched camps in the West Bank, Gaza and surrounding Arab countries.
REPLACEMENT: THE ARAB JEWISH NARRATIVE
In 1945 about a million Jews inhabited the Arab states. They were often considered second-class citizens, but so were other non-Muslims. And while they occasionally experienced more or less harsh oppression, most did not want to leave their homelands. But since the late 19th century Zionism had been increasingly destabilizing not only the Holy Land, but Arab lands as well.
To replace the Palestinians expelled under Plan Dalet, the Zionists first imported Holocaust survivors and other European Jews, followed by some 600,000 Arab Jews. In contrast to Israel’s attitude toward the Palestinians, most Arab governments strongly opposed the departure of their Jews because they might migrate to Israel and thereby benefit the Zionist scheme. The Jews also constituted valuable human resources. Thus, rather than expelling their Jews, Iraq and Syria long prohibited them from leaving.
Iraq only lifted its prohibition in 1950 under American and British pressure, which got so intense that Iraq’s leader relented and even pushed some out. In 1956 Egypt expelled 25,000 of its Jews. Morocco barred its Jews from leaving from 1956-1961 but permitted their emigration the next three years. Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Bahrain all permitted their Jews to leave and did not expel them. Under U.S. pressure, Syria finally let its Jews emigrate in 1991—tellingly, under the condition that they would not go to Israel.
With few exceptions, Arab Jews thus were not expelled or ethnically cleansed. Rather, more often they were prohibited from leaving. Most Arab Jews did not want to leave, even when faced with growing violence. As the Jewish Virtual Library explains, “After the Arabs rejected the United Nations decision to partition Palestine to create a Jewish state, however, the Jews of the Arab lands became targets of their own governments’ anti-Zionist fervor.” These anti-Zionist sentiments spread to ordinary Arabs disturbed by Israel’s maltreatment of Palestinians and, it seems likely, by the prospect of Islam losing its standing in the Holy Land.
Even before 1947, Arab Jews had been targets of anti-Zionist sentiment in Arab countries. According to Israeli historian Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, the “Palestine problem” had affected Iraqi society since the late 1920s. The 1936-1939 Arab Revolt against Jewish land purchases and growing Jewish immigration in Palestine precipitated stormy anti-Zionist demonstrations and bomb-throwing against Jewish institutions in Iraq. In the “Farhud” of June 1941, Iraqi Arab nationalists tragically killed 150-180 Iraqi Jews because they supported British rule of Iraq, under which they had thrived. Antagonism to Zionism may also have contributed to this massacre: according to Meir-Glitzenstein, “In the first half of the 1940s, the Iraqi people were incited against Zionism by propaganda in the [Iraqi] press.”
The proposition that attacks on Arab Jews during this period stemmed from anti-Zionism rather than anti-Semitism is supported by the correlation of the dates of these attacks with Zionist historical milestones. The 1945 anniversary of the Nov. 2, 1917 Balfour Declaration granting British support to Zionism precipitated attacks on Jews in several Arab countries. On Nov. 2 and 3, anti-Zionist militants killed five Jews and injured hundreds in Egypt. From November 5–7, 140 Jews were killed in riots in Tripolitania (today’s Libya). On Nov. 6, 14 Jews were killed during riots in Lebanon.
The Nov. 29, 1947 partition of Palestine marked another major Zionist milestone with ominous implications for Arab Jews. The previous day, the Iraqi foreign minister warned the U.N. General Assembly, “Partition imposed against the will of the majority of the people [of Palestine] will jeopardize peace and harmony in the Middle East. Not only the uprising of the Arabs of Palestine is to be expected, but the masses in the Arab world cannot be restrained. The Arab-Jewish relationship in the Arab world will greatly deteriorate.” Three days later, Arab attacks on Jews and Arab-Jewish clashes in Aden, Yemen left 82 Jews and 38 Arabs dead. On Dec. 5, one Jew was killed and much Jewish property was destroyed in Bahrain. Later that month, attacks in Syria killed an estimated 75 Jews.
Rasel Kazes (r), 85, arrives in Istanbul, Turkey with her daughter, Silvia on May 23, 2019. Kazes, a Sephardic Jew, left Turkey at the age of 16 and migrated to Argentina with her husband. (PHOTO BY ISA TERLI/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES)
The May 14, 1948 establishment of Israel was Zionism’s ultimate milestone. On June 7 and 8, attacks in Morocco killed 43 Jews and injured 150. The attackers were angered over young Zionist Jews trying to go fight for Israel in the war that broke out on May 15. A few days later, 13 or 14 Jews and four Arabs were killed in Tripolitania in clashes between young Zionists going to fight for Israel and anti-Zionist Arabs going to fight for Egypt. That summer, bombings left 70 Jews dead and 200 wounded in Cairo. Measures against Arab Jews were not limited to inter-ethnic violence: Iraq made Zionism a capital crime and put several onerous restrictions on its Jews.
The Suez War of Oct. 29 to Nov. 7, 1956—a failed Israeli attempt to reverse Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, barring Israel from using it—marked a rare Zionist setback, as the U.N. and the United States forced the invaders to withdraw. Yet the Suez Crisis had anti-Zionist repercussions for Egyptian Jews: soon after Israel invaded, Egypt expelled 25,000 and forced them to sign away their property.
Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War was another major Zionist milestone. Soon Libyan Jews were again targeted, with 18 killed and many injured. In Qamishli, Syria, 57 Jews were killed in a pogrom. In Egypt, Jewish men between the ages of 17 and 60 were deported or jailed and tortured, more Jewish property was confiscated, and most remaining Egyptian Jews left for Israel. Iraq expropriated Jewish property, froze Jewish bank accounts, fired Jews from public posts, prohibited them from using the phone, kept them under constant surveillance, held many under house arrest, restricted them to the cities, cancelled Jewish trading permits, and closed many Jewish businesses. In Bahrain, riots induced its remaining 500-600 Jews to emigrate.
Compelling evidence suggests that the attacks and measures against Arab Jews were motivated by anti-Zionism rather than anti-Semitism. Gudrun Kramer, author of The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914-1952, concludes that the Egyptian Jews were attacked because of their real or alleged links to Zionism.
Regardless of its motivation, this violence worked counter to Arab interests, inducing the Arab Jews to do what the Zionists wanted them to do: migrate to Israel. As too often has been the case, Arabs harmed their own interests by engaging in violence against civilians.
Despite violence and repression, most Arab Jews still clung to their homelands. To further motivate them to leave, Zionist agents operated in several Arab countries, applying such force as necessary to ensure their exodus. To convince less educated Jews in Iraq and elsewhere to migrate, they portrayed Israel as a paradise.
Higher status Iraqi Jews required more convincing: from 1950-1951, a series of bombings in Baghdad killed three or four Jews and wounded dozens. According to Naeim Giladi, a former member of the Iraqi Zionist underground, they carried out bombings in an effort to force more Jews to leave Iraq. Moroccan Jews also required special “persuasion.” Israeli historian Yigal Bin-Nun has documented Zionist crimes committed to convince Jews to migrate to Israel. Some Libyan Jews believed the Jewish Agency was behind the June 1948 riots, since the riots helped it achieve its goals. Zionist agents also urged Algerian and Tunisian Jews to emigrate to Israel.
Anti-Zionist attacks, persuasion, threats and terror finally broke Iraqi Jews’ ties to their country. When Iraq lifted its prohibition in 1950, they hastened to migrate—especially to Israel. Similar forces were dislodging Jews from the other Arab countries.
Jews who exited Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Syria had some or virtually all of their property confiscated for the same reason Jews were often prohibited from leaving: to keep that wealth from benefitting Zionism. Tellingly, in 2010 Libya agreed to compensate only its Jewish emigrants who had not migrated to Israel. Confiscated property also compensated these countries to some degree for their loss of human capital. Jews who exited Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Yemen generally did not lose their property because they sold it and circumvented prohibitions against taking cash out of the country by converting it to jewels. Lebanon and Bahrain did not constrain their Jews from leaving or confiscate their property.
Some Jews from countries that prohibited their emigration crossed into Israel illegally. Where they were permitted to leave, the Zionists flew thousands to Israel in operations like “Magic Carpet” from Yemen, and “Ezra and Nehemiah” from Iraq. Upon arrival in Israel, they were placed in temporary “transit camps,” then re-settled in “development towns” on the sites of demolished Palestinian villages. Others were moved into vacant houses of Palestinian refugees. There, Zionism’s “expel and replace” scheme was on full display.
LIABILITY AND COMPENSATION
What happened to the Arab Jews has only superficial resemblance to what happened to the Palestinians. Their narratives are not comparable. These were closely related but distinct events: the expulsion of one group—the Palestinians—and their replacement by another group, the Arab Jews.
The Arab countries had no comparable scheme to expel Jews and replace them with Palestinians. The Palestinians were the victims of the Zionist crime. The Arab Jews were more or less unwitting pawns in that scheme. There is no logical, moral or legal equivalence between their narrative and that of the Palestinians.
Zionist Israel is responsible for restitution to the Palestinians. If the Arab Jews deserve further compensation, then Israel—whose founders engineered their migration and indirectly incited their Arab countrymen against them—should also be responsible for making them whole.
Gregory DeSylva is a board member of Deir Yassin Remembered and has written and produced six videos related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.