http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/2000/0814/refugees.html
TIME EUROPE
August 14, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 7
The Other Side of the Refugee Coin
Jews driven from their homes in Arab countries gain hope of compensation
By MATTHEW REES Jerusalem
The last time Munira Mussafe saw her elegant house on the banks of the Tigris, it was through her tears. She and her family had to flee Iraq in 1951, leaving a spice warehouse burned out in anti-Jewish riots, a safe full of banknotes and jewels, and dozens of expensive, handmade Persian carpets. From prosperity in Baghdad, Mussafe and husband Salim brought their six children to a life of miserable poverty in the new state of Israel. Every day, Mussafe lamented the riches she left behind, even as Salim struggled to run a small dairy farm in the coastal town of Herzliya. Her daughter Judith, who fought decades of depression over the decline in her parents' status, hanged herself in 1988. Mussafe, 78, knows she can never recover the house or her daughter, but she believes new moves in the peace process with the Palestinians may help her win back the $2 million in cash and assets she left behind. "It's coming to me, just like it's coming to the Palestinians," she says. "Every refugee should be compensated."
Mussafe has a powerful ally in President Bill Clinton. In an interview with Israeli television, Clinton said the failed Camp David summit, which ended two weeks ago, at least brought good news for the more than 580,000 Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries. Palestinian negotiators agreed that these Jewish refugees should be compensated for the property they left behind or were forced to give up, he said. The President's comments reopened a little-noted but highly nettlesome area of dispute between Israel and the Palestinians which is sure to take on even greater urgency as the two sides move toward a final settlement. As the Palestinians negotiate for billions of dollars in compensation for their refugees, Israel will press for billions more to be paid to the Jews from Arab countries, probably by the kind of international fund suggested in Clinton's remarks. If the compensation is forthcoming, it could help the Israeli government sell an entire peace deal to voters of Middle Eastern and North African origin, who are a slight majority among Israelis. They're also largely right-wing and usually suspicious of prospective agreements with Arabs. "It will be very important," says Justice Minister Yossi Beilin. "It could help people accept the agreement. It would be something tangible."
Jews all over the Arab world faced persecution, fear and anti-Semitic attacks after the establishment of Israel in 1948. Communities that were 2,000 years old packed up en masse in the following few years and moved to Israel. Some of the expulsions were accompanied by government seizures of property, from the Iraqi regime in 1951 to Muammar Gaddafi's Libya in 1972. The Jews left behind them small goldsmiths stores on the Street Called Straight in Damascus and rich Italianate villas in Alexandria. According to Mordechai Ben-Porat, a former parliamentarian who, as a Mossad agent, helped bring refugees out of Iraq, the value today of the property abandoned or confiscated would be about $15 billion. That would dwarf the $1.25 billion compensation pledged by Swiss banks to Holocaust victims. Unlike the Palestinian refugees who were often kept in poverty by their Arab hosts and in some cases denied the right to find jobs outside their squalid camps, Jews from Arab countries were given citizenship in their new land. Still, these Jews, known as Mizrahis from the Hebrew word for east, faced discrimination from the European élite in Israel and lived in rough camps of tents and tin shacks. The towns that grew around those camps remain Israel's poorest neighborhoods. "We struggled to convince the world that there is another side to the refugee coin in this region," says Oved Ben-Ozair, chairman of the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries, a group based in Tel Aviv. "With Clinton's statement, we succeeded."
The Palestinians argue it's the other side of a completely different coin and that most of the Jews came to Israel out of Zionist conviction, rather than as true refugees. Adel Dajani left his father's home in West Jerusalem's German Colony in 1948 when he was 17, fleeing the battle that raged then for the city. Now a retired banker who lives in Amman, Jordan, Dajani recently took his wife and daughter to the ornate sandstone house on a leafy street renamed Zvi Graetz, after a nineteenth century biblical scholar. The Israeli woman who lives there today had herself fled from Iraq. Briefly, she let Dajani inside. "I was taken by the shivers," he says. Despite the efforts of Yasser Arafat's negotiators, Dajani expects to receive little compensation for the 16 houses his family left in Jerusalem, and he believes the Jews who fled Arab lands should get nothing either. "A lot of them left of their own free will, not under the gun like us." Palestinian officials at the peace talks agreed to the idea of compensation for the Mizrahi Jews only on condition, they say, that the money comes out of an international fund. They fear Israel will try to cancel out at least some of what it owes the Palestinian refugees by netting it against payments due their Jewish counterparts. They are suspicious, too, that Israel will cite the estimated $11 billion it spent over four decades integrating the Jewish refugees to further cut the cash it will hand over to the Palestinians.
Many of the Mizrahi Jews harbor the same suspicion. They believe they may never see their compensation and that the Israeli government only floated the idea to trim its potential obligations to the Palestinians. "It's an elegant stunt by the Israeli government," says Yehouda Shenhav, a Tel Aviv University professor. They'd better hope Clinton isn't in on the trick.
With reporting by Jamil Hamad and Aharon Klein/Jerusalem
http://www.jewishxpress.com/issue27/suicide.htm
Listen to Sabri Jiryis, a prominent Palestinian Arab researcher at the Institute for Palestinian Studies in Beirut:
"While it is estimated that 700,000 Arabs fled the 1948 war...against this...Arabs caused the expulsion of just as many Jews from Arab states...whose properties were taken over...a population and property exchange occurred and each side must bear the consequences (Al-Nahar, Beirut, 5/15/75)." Much more evidence for this exists in books written by Arab kings and officials as well as by others.
So, why is it that over fifty years later, Arabs-- who have received billions of dollars in aid from the U.N., oil revenues, other international funds, etc.--still have not relieved the plight of their own refugees? They have, after all, twenty-two states on some six million square miles of territory--lands that belonged mostly to non-Arab peoples like Kurds, Black Africans, Copts, Berbers, etc. before their conquests and forced arabization in the name of the Arab nation. Jews absorbed their refugees into their sole, tiny state that is not even the size of New Jersey.
The answer can be illustrated by Arab actions. Some years back, with the status of the territories unresolved, Israel offered to knock down the dilapidated camps and replace them with new housing and better living conditions. It's worth remembering that Egypt and Jordan occupied these territories from 1948-1967 and not only did nothing about this but never discussed the creation of another Palestinian Arab state here either. The Arabs demanded that Israel do nothing to remedy life in the camps. Again, why?
Quite simply, Arabs have used their own refugees as pawns in their war to delegitimize Israel. For them, there is no justice nor suffering besides their own. They don't want the refugee problem solved--not as long as it means that a viable Israel will still exist on the morrow. That's why they tacked on the "right of return" of millions of real or alleged Arab refugees to the recent Saudi peace plan. The result is that that Saudi "peace" plan still envisions Israel's Jews being overwhelmed so that a second Arab state will replace Israel, not live side by side with it. This should come as no shock since all Palestinian (and many other) Arab maps, school books, etc. omit Israel as well. This is also why current talk about a "provisional Palestinian Arab State" being created at this time is scary. Faisal Husseini, the late showcase moderate of the PLO, said that while he'd accept any land diplomacy would yield, a purely Arab Palestine from the River to the Sea was the real goal...the same old "destruction of Israel in stages" strategy dominant since after the "one fell swoop" alternative collapsed as a result of its failure in the Six Day War in 1967.
So, this tragic conflict still has no end in sight. And the horrendous human tragedy specifically associated with suicide/homicide bombings has been both created and sustained by Arabs themselves. Reasonable compromises have been repeatedly offered--and rejected-- to end the Arab-Israeli conflict...certainly more than anything Arabs have ever offered to the numerous native, non-Arab peoples they conquered and forcibly arabized in carving out most of the twenty-two states they now call their own.
http://216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:wiHuwzAYNkUJ:www.jewishrefugees.org/documents/
General%2520Release%2520article.doc+jews+driven+arab&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
THE RIGHTS OF JEWS FROM ARAB COUNTRIES
(Draft Article for Bulletins, Newsletters, Press, etc.)
When the issue of refugees is raised within the context of the Middle East, people invariably refer to Palestinian refugees, not Jews displaced from Arab countries. In fact, there were more Jews displaced as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict than Palestinians.
Jews in substantial numbers resided in Arab countries over 1,000 years before the advent of Islam. In 1948, there were over 850,000 Jews living in Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa. By 1958, 97% of all Jews in Arab countries had emigrated due to hostile political, social and economic climates.
COUNTRY |
JEWISH POPULATION 1948 |
1976 |
|
Egypt |
75,000 |
100 |
|
Iraq |
135,000 |
400 |
|
Lebanon |
5,000 |
500 |
|
Libya |
38,000 |
20 |
|
Syria |
30,000 |
4,350 |
|
Yemen |
55,000 |
1,000 |
|
Aden |
8,000 |
0 |
|
Morocco |
265,000 |
17,000 |
|
Algeria |
140,000 |
500 |
|
Tunisia |
105,000 |
2,000 |
|
Total: |
856,000 |
25,870 |
Source: Roumani, Maurice M., The Case of the Jews from Arab Countries: A Neglected Issue,
(© 1983, World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC)
In virtually all cases, as Jews were driven out or fled from their country, individual and communal properties were confiscated without compensation.
Securing rights and redress for Jews displaced from Arab countries is a complex challenge that, in light of the world�s preoccupation with Palestinian refugees, has not yet been adequately addressed by the international community.
There are many who would reject any linkage between the issue of Palestinian refugees and the plight of Jews displaced from Arab lands. There is neither comparable history nor demography that could allow for any appropriate comparison between the respective plights of Palestinian refugees and that of Jews displaced from Arab lands.
There does exist, however, a moral imperative to ensure that justice for Jews from Arab countries assumes its rightful place on the international political and judicial agenda and that their rights be secured as a matter of law and equity.
OBJECTIVES
Justice for Jews from Arab Countries is a coalition of Jewish communal organizations, established under the auspices of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the World Jewish Congress and the American Sephardi Federation. Organizations participating in this initiative include: the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, Jewish Community Centers Association, United Jewish Communities, B�nai B�rith International, the Board of Jewish Education, Hadassah, Jewish Council for Public Affairs.
The objectives of this international campaign are:
i) To educate public opinion on the causes, and plight,
of Jews who were displaced from Arab countries; and
To document the history and testimonies of displacement; and
To advocate for, and secure rights and redress, for
the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict.
LEGAL AND POLITICAL BASIS
The rights of former Jewish refugees are no less legitimate than those of Palestinian refugees. Indeed, there are legal and political bases to pursue these rights.
Resolution 242, adopted by the United Nations in 1967, declares that there should be �a just settlement of the refugee problem.� The Resolution makes no distinction between Arab refugees and former Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
The Camp David Accords and the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty provide that �the parties agree to establish a Claims Committee for the mutual settlement of all final claims.� President Carter stated in a press conference on Oct. 27, 1977 that �Palestinians have rights? obviously there are Jewish refugees? they have the same rights as others do.�
The rights of Jews displaced from Arab lands were discussed at �Camp David II� in July 2000. Immediately thereafter, President Clinton was interviewed on Israeli television and stated clearly:
�There will have to be some sort of international fund set up for
the refugees. There is, I think, some interest, interestingly enough, on both sides, in also having a fund which compensates the Israelis who were made refugees by the war, which occurred
after the birth of the State of Israel. Israel is full of people, Jewish people, who lived in predominantly Arab countries who came to
Israel because they were made refugees in their own land