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Posted on 01/06/2004 2:29:26 PM PST by dennisw
http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~peters/arabjew.html
In 1945 there were more than 870,000 Jews living in the various Arab states. Many of their communities dated back 2,500 years. Throughout 1947 and 1948 these Jews were persecuted. Their property and belongings were confiscated. There were anti-Jewish riots in Aden, Egypt, Lybia, Syria, and Iraq. In Iraq, Zionism was made a capital crime. Aproximately 600,000 Jews sought refuge in the State of Israel.1 They arrived destitute, but they were absorbed into the society and became an integral part of the state. In effect, then, a vertible exchange of populations took place between Arab and Jewish refugees. Thus the Jewish refugees became full Israeli citizens while the Arab refugees remained "refugees" according to the wishes of the Arab leaders.
1. Howe & Gershman, op. cit., p. 168.
Source: The Jewish Agency for Israel: The Jewish Refugees 1948-1972 (Quelle: http://www.jajz-ed.org.il/100/maps/refs.html)
The entire Yemenite community of Jews, who swarmed almost 50,000 strong into Israel via "Operation Magic Carpet," believed that "King David" Ben-Gunion was actually the Messiah calling them home. Jewish settlements in Yemen existed more than 2,000 years ago,[35] and some claim the Jews' presence there has been longer -- from the Jews' Babylonian captivity and the fall of the First Temple in 586 B.C. Yemenite Jewry fled to Israel from what historian S. D. Goitein described as "the worst aspect" of the Arab mistreatment of Jews. A Yemenite law decreed that fatherless Jewish children under thirteen be taken from their mothers and raised in Muslim homes as Muslims.
"Children were torn away from their mothers," according to Goitein. Despite attempts of family and friends to adopt the children secretly, "very often the efforts . . . were not successful.... To my mind, this law, which was enforced with new vigor about fifty years ago, more than anything else impelled the Yemenite Jews to quit that country to which they were very muchattached. ... The result was that many families arrived in Israel with one or more of their children lost to them ... some widows ... [were] bereaved in this way of all their offspring."[36]
Persecution was constant and extreme -- stoning Jews, an "age-old" custom, according to "an old doctor of Muslim law,"[37] was still common tradition at the time of the 1948 exodus -- although the bearability of life throughout the centuries of Muslim domination often depended upon whether the rule was Turkish or Arab.
The Jews ... always knew that they were living on sufferance; the local Arab population never harbored anything but hatred towards them. They (the Jews) remembered that "light" pogrom in 1933, when a few people were beaten up and wounded outside the Jewish Quarter, when there was some stoning and when a number of rioters entered a Jewish house and did some looting.
That reminiscence of the 1933 anti-Jewish uprising in Aden was contained in an eye-witness "memorandum" which described the "Disaster of the Jews of Aden," the Arab-led mass murder, pillage, and destruction that came down on Aden's Jews in December 1947. [61]
An Englishman who was in Aden from 1931, and was appointed Aden's governor in 1951, later described a traditional enmity between Arabs and Jews that preceded the Palestine partition by decades. His report contradicted others, which blamed the bloody pogrom in 1947 on outside factors and incitement in behalf of the Palestinian Arabs [62] Sir Tom Hickinbotham wrote that
The Jews are disliked by the Arabs whom they fear.... Therefore, we are always liable to have trouble between the Arabs and the Jews which might well spread to the Hindu community....
[The Jews], generally speaking, kept very much to themselves, were self-effacing and their contacts with the Arabs were reasonably good.... The Arabs consider that the Jews are their social inferiors and, provided they keep their own place, or what the Arabs consider to be their place, there is no trouble at all and the two communities may live side by side in peace for years; but as soon as the Jews tended to forget that they were Jews and began to assert themselves as men, then there was always a likelihood of serious trouble[63]
The British Commissioner of Police in Aden testified in 1947 that "Since I arrived in Aden there has been a steady growing antagonism between Jews and Arabs ... shown by many petty assaults and by children throwing stones at each other."[64]
The antagonism that was evident in 1933 and more so in 1942 was inflamed by anti-Jewish broadcasts from Egypt just before the partition of Palestine. The messages of hate were relayed in public meeting places and helped to incite Arabs against Jews in Aden.[65]
In addition to the Egyptian broadcasts, "Orders [were] issued by the Arab League to arrange strikes and protests against the decision to partition Palestine," and rumors were spread that the Jews had been killing Arabs[66]
The pogrom that erupted on December 2, 1947, was devastating -- 82 Jews were murdered and 76 wounded; 106 out of the 170 existing Jewish shops in Aden were robbed bare and eight were partially emptied. Four synagogues were "burnt to the ground" and 220 Jewish houses were burned and looted or damaged.[67]
There were a few wealthier Jewish families who lived in an area called "Steamer Point," where passengers disembarked from the large liners." But after the 1947 massacre most of Aden's Jews were isolated for their own security and "for months did not dare to venture out of" the Jewish Quarter. A visiting Jewish official reported in January 1949 that "one felt that the pogrom had taken place not a year ago but a week ago ... the Jews still live in a state of tension and anxiety.... the Jews still erect barricades at night."[69]
Many thousands of the Aden Jews boarded the "wings of eagles" for Israel along with the Yemenite refugees." In 1958 some were victimized by murder and looting, and those diehard Jews who had remained in Aden after the 1947 massacre were alarmed. [71]
A visitor at the time of the 1958 riots observed,
It would seem that the problem of this Jewish community is not where to turn, but when to turn. They might be wise to remember that "he who hesitates is lost." They would not be the first Jewish community that waited too long.[72]
The remnant of the Jewish community in Aden was victimized again after the 1967 Six-Day War. Murder, looting, new destruction to the synagogues-Jews were finally evacuated with the help of the British, when they discovered the Arabs were planning to massacre what remained of the Jewish community. The Jewry of Aden became virtually "the community that was."[73]
The Jews of Iraq, too, flew to Israel-between 1949 and 1952 alone, more than 123,000[74] Iraqi Jews escaped or were forced to flee to Israel and to leave their assets and communal holdings behind.
The Iraqi Jews took pride in their distinguished Jewish community, with its history of scholarship and dignity. Jews had prospered in what was then Babylonia for twelve hundred years before the Muslim conquest in A.D. 634 ;71 it was not until the ninth century that dhimma laws such as the yellow patch, heavy head tax, and residence restrictions were enforced. Capricious and extreme oppression under some Arab caliphs and Mamluks brought taxation amounting to expropriation in A.D. 1000, and in 1333 the persecution culminated in pillage and destruction of the Baghdad synagogues. In 1776, there was a slaughter of Jews at Basra, and the bitterness of anti-Jewish measures taken by Turkish-Muslim rulers in the eighteenth century caused many Jews to flee.[76]
Almost immediately afterward, in August 1933, the Iraqi army massacred the Assyrians and the Jews began to feel increased foreboding. The London Daily News reported" that ". . . when the Iraq army returned after the weekend [following the Assyrian atrocity], not one Christian or Jew was seen on the streets." By now the increasingly violent demonstrations over the "Palestine problem" added to deteriorating conditions for the Jewish community; many Jews were murdered by agitated mobs," nitric acid was thrown by terrorists upon Jews in the street, and bombs were flung into synagogues.[83]
In 1941 the violence exploded into a bloody farhud -- massacre -- of the Jews, with the police openly participating in the attack. The investigating committee appointed by the Iraqi government determined that "all these attacks were carried out by the army with the assistance of some civilians"; the massacre was executed "without the police arresting anyone or protecting the Jews," and "large British forces stood at the gates of the city, none of them lifting a finger."[84] "Judaism" was "a threat to mankind," the Iraqi Minister of Justice declared."
Jews suffered indiscriminate torture, imprisonment without charge, and relentless persecutions. When Iraq joined the Arab war against Israel's independence, in May 1948, government terror increased; Jews, who had been restricted to some degree from travel, now were forbidden to leave the country, and many fortunes were extorted or confiscated. Despite the law, thousands escaped illegally by paying heavy bribes.
After Israel's 1948 victory and official recognition of Jewish statehood, Nuri Said, fourteen times Prime Minister of Iraq, who "ruled the country in the 1950s irrespective of whether or not Nuri headed the cabinet himself,"[90] recommended a final Jewish solution for Iraq. Nuri Said proposed to the British Ambassador in Jordan at that time, Sir Alec Kirkbride, that "the majority of the Jewish community in Iraq" should be forcibly evicted "in army lorries escorted by armoured cars . . . to the Jordanian-Israel Frontier." There the "Iraqi Jews" would be ordered to "cross the line."[91]
Kirkbride later assessed the fate of Iraqi Jews, had Nuri Said's plan been enacted: "Either the Iraqi Jews would have been massacred or their Iraqi guards would have had to shoot other Arabs to protect the lives of their charge."[91] The likelihood of the Jews' protection by the Iraqi guards was remote, considering the precedent established by the police and army participation in the 1941 massacre. Nuri Said's solution, then, was unambiguous, as was the temper of Iraq toward its Jews.
Zionism became a capital crime, and Jews were publicly hanged in the center of Baghdad, with an enthusiastic mob as audience. Although no laws authorized, the confiscation of Jewish property in Iraq before 1950,[93] the Jews were stripped of millions of dollars through economic discrimination, "voluntary donations" appropriated by the government, and other subterfuges."
An Egyptian journal[94] reported in 1948 that all Iraqi Jews who went Palestine and did not return would be tried in absentia as criminals. Those who were tried in absentia were sentenced to hang or serve extended prison sentences. There had been more than 130,000 Jews in Iraq in 1947, 100,000 of them living' in or near Baghdad. Although some part of the Jews' property had already been expropriated, the bulk still remained in Jewish hands, while vast amounts were taken by officials who participated in illegal escapes.
Perhaps because of the desperate financial condition of the Iraqi government, Jewish "emigration" was legalized-upon confiscation of property and permanent loss of citizenship. In 1950, Iraq enacted a law that allowed Jews to "leave Iraq for good."[96] The Jews left their vast accumulated holdings behind, and within the first three years of the law, most of them were flown to Israel, with the Iraqi government taking "a handsome share of the profits" produced by the flights. [97]
Thus, the Jews-who, according to Nuri Said, "have always been and will forever be a source of evil and mischief "-- had largely been forced from Iraq.[98]
Between 1969 and 1973 at least seventeen Jews were hanged in a public square, and twenty-six others were "slaughtered" in their homes or in Iraqi prisons.[99] As of 1982, most of Iraq's Jewry had found refuge in Israel, and several thousand had found sanctuary elsewhere.
In 1948, 75,000 Jews lived in Egypt, in a community dating back to before the Babylonian captivity." After the Arab conquest, Jews in Egypt, as in other Arab countries, lived at the whim of erratic Arab sovereignty. One Arab caliph invoked sunna ("the Muslim term for customs ascribed to Mohammed") to tyrannize the Jews and Christians in Cairo in the ninth and tenth centuries. [101] Under the caliphs of Baghdad[102] life was restrictive at times, and generally unpredictable.
One caliph, al-Hakim of the Fatimids, devised particularly insidious humiliations for the Jews in his attempt to perform what he deemed his role as "Redeemer of Mankind." First the Jews were forced to wear miniature golden calf images around their necks, as though they still worshiped the Golden Calf. But the Jews refused to convert. Next they wore bells, and after that, six-pound wooden blocks were hung around their necks. In fury at his failure, the caliph had the Cairo Jewish Quarter destroyed, along with its Jewish residents, in 1012.[103]
Beginning in the forties, many Jews were killed or injured in organized anti-Jewish riots, putting into fearsome perspective the 1946 report that "the general position of the Jews in Egypt is beyond comparison better than any [Arab and Muslim] country so far. . . "[119] Jews suffered extensive economic losses when the Egyptians passed a law that largely precluded Jews from employment; the government confiscated much Jewish property and "wrecked" the economic condition of the Jews within a few months.[120] In the days following the November 1947 vote to partition Palestine, Jews in Cairo and Alexandria were threatened with death, their houses were looted, and synagogues were attacked."[121]
Anti-Jewish riots were rampant in 1948. According to an eyewitness account, in one seven-day period, 150 Jews were murdered or seriously wounded."[122] Perhaps the letter to the editor of an Egyptian newspaper from a Muslim providesan insight to the hazards of Jewish life then:
With the outbreak of the 1948 war, Egyptian Jews were barred from leaving Egypt, whether for Israel or elsewhere. Then, early in August 1949, the ban was abruptly lifted, and much sequestered Jewish property was returned.
From August until November of 1949, more than 20,000 of Egypt's 75,000 Jews fled, many to Israel.[124] There was a brief and surprising period under the more tolerant leadership of General Muhammad Naguib, but he was overthrown by General Gamal Abdel Nasser, who authorized mass arrests and property confiscation. At the beginning of 1955 the Nasser regime hanged two Egyptian Jews as "Zionist spies," an action the Egyptian Embassy in Washington justified by distributing a pamphlet called "The Story of the Zionist Espionage in Egypt," claiming that "Zionism and Communism" both sought "world domination.""[125] After the Sinai Campaign of 1956, thousands of Jews were interned without trial,[126] while still other thousands were, served with deportation papers and ordered to leave within a few days; their property was confiscated, their assets frozen.[127]
From the Maghreb, known as North Africa, more than 300,000 Jews have crowded into Israel[135] since 1948. Almost 250,000 of them arrived from what is now Morocco, where Jews have lived since 586 B.c. The history of the Jews under Arab rule in North Africa is turbulent and erratic. The conditions of their lives as infidels under the Charter of Omar might have been bearable under a more tolerant Arab caliph of one region, while at the same time, in another, Jews would have been under siege, or massacred.[136]
By 1948, Jews had become nominally involved in local politics. When Israel was established, French authorities kept vigilant watch, struggling to maintain an equilibrium between the Muslim and Jewish communities, and the Muslim sultan appealed to his subjects to restrain violence against the Jews-reminding them of the protection Morocco had always given to its Jews.[169]
Early in June 1948, mob violence erupted simultaneously against the Jewish communities of several towns in northern Morocco, resulting in dozens of Jewish deaths. Shortly afterward, the first major group of Moroccan Jews -- 30,000 -- fled to Israel. The fate of Morocco's Jewish community fluctuated with each strong political wind: Moroccan independence as an Arab state was declared in 1956,and although emigration to Israel was declared illegal, 70,000 more Jews managed to arrive in the Jewish state. The sultan's return was followed by appointment of Jews to major government posts -- then, in 1959, Zionism became a crime. Two years later a new king ascended the throne and attempted to ease the panic among the Jews by legalizing emigration, but when he lifted the ban, another hundred thousand made their way to Israel.
Israeli victory in the 1967 war brought heightened hostilities from Muslim mobs, and by 1982 Moroccan Jewry had shrunk to less than ten percent of its former number.
The Jews, a people who had "arrived with the victory of the first conquerors" (the Phoenicians), left 2,500 years afterward.[190] The Jewish community of Algeria, which had numbered 140,000 in 1948, diminished within months; many thousands of Jews fled to Israel, and 125,000 went to France. In 1962 Algeria gained independence as an Arab state -- one that the Algerian Liberation Front had touted as a "secular democratic state"; that the Jews of Algeria had largely disappeared was fortunate, because the Nationality Code of 1963 permitted "secular democratic" Algerian citizenship only to those residents whose father and paternal grandfather were Muslim.[191]
The Jews of Tunisia soon began to flee from the extremism that the "Arabization" policy of the government had fostered. Of 105,000 Jews in 1948, 50,000 emigrated tot Israel and roughly the same number have gone to France and elsewhere.
Damascus was now a headquarters of anti-Jewish activities, and in 1937 a Nazi delegation, conferring with its Nazi representative in the Middle East, paid a visit to Damascus. As a result, anti-Jewish propaganda intensified and closer affiliations grew up between German and Arab youth organizations. An armed extremist group, the Arab National Youth Organization, declared a boycott against Arab merchants who bought "Zionist goods from Palestine."[232]
From Damascus the Arab Defense Committee warned the Jewish Agency president that "Your attitude will lead you and Jews of the East to the worst of calamities that has been written in history up to the present."[233] Despite the then-dominant Nazi-allied Vichy regime, local French authorities continued to defend the Jews from Arab extremist attack, although Jews were dismissed from official posts and penalized by economic restrictions. The Allied occupation in 1941 restored equilibrium somewhat, but Nazi propaganda continued.
In 1942 the Axis radio in Damascus caused additional alarm through broadcast of the false report that Roosevelt and Churchill had promised Syria to the Jews as part of a post-war Jewish state. The Jewish Quarter was raided in 1944 and 1945 [234] and the end of World War Il intensified the persecution and restrictions against the Jews. Tens of thousands of Syrian Jews had fled between the world wars and after. The Jews numbered roughly 35,000 in 1917; in 1943 about 30,000 still remained.[235] In June 1945 the director of the Alliance Jewish-affiliated school was murdered.
That same year Syria won its independence, and the Damascus Mufti warned at a religious conference that if Jewish immigration into Palestine was not halted, all countries of Islam would declare a "holy war" against the Jews."' Shortly afterward a Syrian student mob celebrated a Muslim holiday by desecrating the Great Synagogue of Aleppo, beating upon Jews at prayer and burning prayer books in the street.[237]
Intimidation by the government was initiated, and Jews were prohibited from leaving. Jewish leaders were informed that unless they publicly denounced Zionism and surrendered Jewish refugees en route to Palestine, all refugees captured would be put to death along with their helpers. When the Jews protested, the Syrian Prime Minister amended the law to provide life imprisonment instead of death. But he exacted three conditions from the Jews: "Surrender all persons aiding the movement of refugees; cooperate with security forces in capturing refugees, and issue a public statement denouncing Zionism and calling on all Jews in the Arab states to support the struggle against Zionism."[238]
It was through such scare tactics that Syrian Jews were induced to testify that "Jews of Syria were happy and not discriminated against; that their situation was excellent under the present Syrian government; and that they had absolutely nothing whatever to do with Zionism." A member of the Anglo-American Committee, investigating the precarious position of Jewish minorities in Arab states, reported that after the Syrian Jews raced through the "45-seconds of testimony," they fled to their seats amid "murmurs of sly amusement from the Moslem audience which said, as clearly as words, 'They knew what was best for them.'"[239]
By early 1947, only 13,000 Jews remained; thousands more Jewish refugees had fled, many of them covertly, and the Syrian government, according to the New York Herald Tribune, [240] launched "an investigation into the disappearance of some 17,000 Syrian Jews since the last government census [1943]."
In December 1947 anti-Jewish riots climaxed in a vicious pogrom; Syrian mobs poured into the mellah of Aleppo, burnt down most of the synagogues, and destroyed 150 Jewish homes, five Jewish schools, fifty shops and offices, an orphanage, and a youth club. Holy scrolls, including a priceless ancient manuscript of the Old Testament, were burned, while the firemen stood by and police "actively helped the attackers."[244] In the aftermath, the Syrian president asserted to a visiting Jewish delegation that "Incidents of this sort occur even in advanced countries . . . . "[245] and the Minister of Finance rejected the request for a loan to repair one of the synagogues so that the Jews could continue to worship. [246]
A bomb tossed into the heart of the Damascus Jewish Quarter, in front of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, caused inestimable damage; most important, it reinforced terror among the Damascus Jews. On the eve of the establishment of the State of Israel, in April 1948, several Aleppo rabbis wrote to a Brooklyn congregation:
This is the third day we are in hiding. The Arab mobs are raging and threatening our lives. Pray for us. Act in our behalf before your government. Our lives are in total danger ... help us! [247]
Addressing its Jewish former citizens, the government ludicrously warned all "Syrian" citizens that unless they returned immediately,[248] they would lose Syrian citizenship. Compounding the orders prohibiting Jews from leaving the country, they were forbidden to change their places of residence, [249] sell private property, or acquire land.[250] In 1949 all bank accounts held by Jews were frozen.
In summer 1949, following the ascendance of a regime that promised "equality," the synagogue at Damascus was bombed during Sabbath preparations, with more than a score dead and twenty-six wounded. The new Syrian president called for an investigation and arrests, and when a Palestinian Arab confessed, the president promised justice based on the evidence.[251] But the new leader was killed in another military coup, with his successor's subsequent government becoming more unremitting in its severity than ever before.
Palestinian Arabs, many militantly anti-Jewish, were given the Jewish public buildings and the vacant former living quarters of Jewish escapees in the mellah: there they confronted their Jewish neighbors with omnipresent threats, often fulfilled. Such was the quality of terrorizing that some members of the normally close-knit protective Jewish community became informers when an Israeli escaped from prison in 1953 and sought sanctuary at the Damascus synagogue:
The congregation was in consternation. The hostile regime and the suffering it had caused them had destroyed their self-respect. Anyone suspected of aiding Israel only brought disaster on himself, and now an Israeli prisoner, escaped from jail. ... [His] fate was sealed the moment he crossed the threshold of the synagogue. ... A squad broke in and removed the "dangerous Zionist" . . .[252]
The Jews were kept strictly within the confines of the ghetto, with penalties for escape as harsh as those of a prison. Yet many remained unintimidated-those Jews took great risks through carefully guarded secret routes, leaving everything behind, to escape from the oppressive existence, hundreds of Jews, including women and children, were arrested and tortured in the attempt to be smuggled out. [253]
Since then, except for brief periods,[254] Syria's Jewish community has huddled together, its collective and individual human rights and dignity distinctly cut off. [255]
Under the early twentieth-century French occupation, Jews were less discriminated against in Lebanon than elsewhere in the Middle East; only "a few" recorded incidents of anti-Jewish attacks marred Jewish life there in the thirties. In 1945, the time of Lebanese independence, twelve Jews were murdered in the Muslim-populated town of Tripoli; following the 1947 partition of Palestine, houses and synagogues were attacked by muslims.[262] In 1948 a Beirut Jew was murdered; in 1950 a Jewish school was bombed and its director killed-acts predominantly executed by Muslim groups.[263] Money extorted from the Lebanese Jews as "contributions" often went directly to finance Arab Palestinian sabotage.
Yet, on the whole, historians note that Jews were protected by authorities as Lebanese independence emerged in 1946. During the anti-Zionist demonstrations at the time of Israel's declaration of statehood, "police forces were posted" in Beirut's Jewish Quarter "day and night when required"-sharp contrast to the official behavior in other Arab states at the time.[266]
During the 1948 war, Maronite Christians as well as Christian authorities protected the Jews from "Muslim fanatics"[265]' and offered assistance to Jewish refugees fleeing from Iraq and Syria. Jews retained their jobs, even as civil servants, until 1957, and authorities continued to guard the Jewish community from the Muslim opposition's attacks.[266]
Until 1958, Lebanon was the sole Arab state where Jews had increased in number-to about 9,000-after the war of Israel's independence. When Lebanon officially began to finance terrorist activities by the newly inspired Arab Palestinian "Revolution" in 1968, many of the remaining Jews left.
Although no Lebanese Jews were employed by the government, and the Lebanese could not communicate with the "enemy territory" of Israel, Jews were allowed to travel freely, even within the Middle East, before Lebanon's Arab-versus-Arab bloodletting was renewed in the early 1970s. But few of them visited the Arab countries of their own volition.[267]
The Jews of Lebanon enjoyed greater freedom than any other Jewish group living in the Arab world, primarily because of the Christian-dominated government. It was not until the advent of Muslim revolt-the demise of "secular democracy" in the Arab world-that the Lebanese Jews became sufficiently insecure to flee in great numbers.
On the eve of the Allied victory in Tripoli, Axis troops stormed the Jewish Quarter and slaughtered the leaders of the Jewish community. As the Allies freed he Jews from concentration camps and the British took control of Libya, anti-Jewish crowds stormed Tripoli and other communities.[289] Nonetheless, Jewish activities were revived. "Palestinian Jewish soldiers serving with the British army opened Hebrew schools for liberated Jewish children,"[290] and peace brought some restoration of security to Libya's Jews.
The struggling community was totally unprepared for the violent anti-Jewish loodbath that began November 4, 1945. The Tripoli pogrom was inspired by anti-Jewish riots in Egypt a couple of days earlier, but the ravages in Tripolitania were even more devastating. Whereas the Egyptian violence was directed to pillage and looting, Arab nationalism and religious fanaticism in Tripoli was aimed at the physical destruction of Jews.
According to the New York Times' Clifton Daniel,
Many of the attacks were premeditated and coldly murderous in intent.[291]
Babies were beaten to death with iron bars. Old men were hacked to pieces where they fell. Expectant mothers were disemboweled. Whole families were burned alive in their houses. Two brothers lost 27 relatives in one attack.... When the riots were raging, the thirst for blood seemed to have supplanted the desire for loot and revenge.[292]
Forced conversion, girls raped with their families looking on-the Muslim gangs' bestiality was directed specifically against Jews, and only Jewish dwellings and businesses were devastated. Just one week after the atrocity had ended, an Arab leader was interviewed:[293] he warned that because of "Zionist activity"- Libyan Jewish Boy Scouts sang "Zionist" hymns and Zionist clubs were formed -- the Arabs "have become annoyed" and the Jews must disavow "militant Zionism." In the short period following the November 1947 vote to partition "Palestine" into a Jewish state and an Arab state, the Libyan mobs murdered more than 130 Jews. [294] Another Tripoli horror was perpetrated the following year, with impassioned zeal, and the erstwhile unswervable Jewish community began to flee. Libya's Jewish population in 1948 was 38,000; by 1951 only 8,000 Jews remained.[295]
The precarious position of Libyan Jewry deteriorated further when the British began to move Arab families into the former homes of departed Jews, in the walled hara. Where before the Jews had felt some measure of security in isolation, now there was hostility on the doorstep. [296] By the time Libya achieved independence in 1952, there were relatively few Jews left to take advantage of the purported equality offered under the new constitution. From the time of Libya's entry into the Arab League, Jewish clubs were closed, and life, while less violent, was no more secure.
By the 1960s, only some hundreds of Jews remained, and with the renewal of Arab mob violence after the Six-Day War,[297] practicafly all of Libya's remaining Jewish population was forced literally to run for their lives.[298] Leaving behind everything they owned, most became a part of the 37,000-member Libyan refugee community in Israel.
This page was produced by Joseph E. Katz
Middle Eastern Political and Religious History Analyst
Brooklyn, New York
Source: "From Time Immemorial" by Joan Peters, 1984, a national
Portions Copyright © 1984 Joan Peters, Portions Copyright © 2001 Joseph Katz
All Rights Reserved
Ping list for Islamic Jihad and terrorism. 3 pings per day, every day.
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Might check out a tad more historic background on the matter ~ and note that there was this "thing" called the Dark Ages. It started before Islam ~ pretty well put Western and Northern Europe out of business for nearly 1,000 years.
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