Also intersting how this skips from:
May 1999 -- Israelis elect a new Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, to lead them in the peace process with the Palestinians and neighbouring states.
To:
Sept 2000 -- Intense violence escalates. More than 400 people die in Israel in a matter of 14 weeks (380 Palestinians).
There's a lot of filler missing between these two dates, no?
Like:
* Barak offers 85%+ (I forget the exact number) of the West Bank & Gaza as a Palestinian state, as peice of land that comes within 9 miles of the Mediterranean (and of TelAviv). Arafat abruptly cancels teh talks and walks away.
* A controversy erupts when it's discovered that construction workers on the Temple Mount are destroying ancient artifacts from the Jewish Temple.
* The Al-Aqsa Intifada erupts - supposedly because there is one Jew in the world - Ariel Sharon - who is forbidden from visiting Judaism's holiest site - the Temple Mount - on fear of deadly Jihad. Even though he's visiting as a member of the Knesset investigating the destruction of ancient artifacts.
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© St. Petersburg Times, published August 3, 2000
JERUSALEM -- In the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, there's one big issue that's not even on the table. Yet it's very much on the minds of thousands of Jews -- those who left their homes in Arab countries after Israel's 1948 war of independence.
The flight of an estimated 800,000 Arab Jews "is not well known in the rest of the world," concedes Jacob Efrati, a Jew who was born in Libya. "The reason is that Israel did not want to cause any more misery so it made every effort to absorb them."
The 1948 war, which pitted the new nation of Israel against several Arab countries, resulted in a transfer of population the likes of which the world has rarely seen. In just a few months of 1948, at least 600,000 Palestinian Arabs left or were driven from their homes on Israeli soil. Over the next few years, Arab countries saw the departure of most of their Jewish residents, about 600,000 of whom settled in the new Jewish state.
It was not an easy transfer for either side, and its repercussions are still being felt. Palestinians are demanding the "right of return" to their land or at least compensation for property losses. Next to the fate of Jerusalem, the Palestinian refugee question is probably the toughest issue facing negotiators.
But Jewish refugees say they too should be compensated.
If negotiators ever compared figures for property lost by Arabs who fled Israel with those for Jews who fled Arab countries, Efrati insists, the results would be revealing. "I'm sure it would show that we lost more," he says.
In many ways, Efrati's story is that of the Jewish people throughout history. His ancestors moved from place to place -- Germany, England, France, Italy, Spain -- because, as he says, "nobody wanted the Jews." They finally settled in the North African nation of Libya where his grandfather became chief rabbi. But as anti-Semitism rose after the 1948 war, his family was on the move. In 1951, when he was 6, they left all their possessions and took a ship across the Mediterranean to Haifa, Israel. For almost four years, they lived in a tent on an old British military base, hauling water from a quarter-mile away and cooking on a tiny oil burner.
"Jews from all over the world came here," he says. "There were very few buildings at the start of Israel but in two years Israel absorbed almost 2.5-million Jews."
Helped by donations from the Jewish diaspora, the new nation provided shelter, albeit modest, and education for the new arrivals. Efrati became an economist and is city auditor of Maale Adumin, the Jewish settlement in the West Bank near Jerusalem.
Efrati's wife is also a refugee. But she took a very different route to Israel.
Tzvia Efrati was born in Iraq, home of one of the largest Jewish communities in the Arab world. Jews had lived there since 586 B.C. when Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, captured Jerusalem, destroyed the first Jewish temple and drove the exiles hundreds of miles across the desert.
Mrs. Efrati's family owned a small garment factory in Irbil, in northern Iraq. Relations were good between the city's 4,000 Jews and its Arab residents -- most of the factory's customers were Arab, and Mrs. Efrati's mother frequented the same Turkish bath as Muslim women.
"The first problem was the start of World War II and the Holocaust, when Arabs decided they would do the same to Jewish people," Mrs. Efrati says. In 1942, some Jewish residents in Irbil were attacked and stoned, frightening her family and other Jews into temporarily closing their businesses and hiding in their homes.
An influential Arab citizen of Irbil ordered an end to the violence "and we had some quiet years," Mrs. Efrati says. "But after that the Jews were afraid -- it was never the same as before."
After Israel declared statehood in 1948, the Iraqi government decided to expel all of Iraq's Jews. Israel, founded as a homeland for the Jewish people, felt it had no choice but to accept any who wanted to come.
The relocation of tens of thousands of men, women and children took more than two years, as Jews from all over Iraq were rounded up and transported to Baghdad. There they had to wait to board planes furnished by the Israeli government.
Mrs. Efrati was too young to remember, but her parents told her what happened.
"There was a cop standing in front of the door. He made sure my mother left everything except her wedding ring and watch, which had to have a leather band. They couldn't take any gold -- she was wearing a gold headpiece and gold (jewelry) on her feet, and she had to take them off. Then the cops sealed the door with wax so nobody could open it."
In moving to Israel in 1951, Mrs. Efrati's parents went from prosperity to penury. First they lived in a tent, then a prefab house with a mud floor. The only work her father could find was as a street cleaner. Her mother, who once had her own household staff, became janitor of a high school.
But the educational opportunities were there, and Mrs. Efrati took them. Today she heads a department in the Israeli Ministry of Construction and Housing. The Efratis' own home is a spacious terrace apartment with a sweeping view of Jerusalem.
Despite the hardships of their early years in Israel, the Efratis see a key difference between how Israel and the Arab world handled the vast floods of refugees in the years after the 1948 war.
They fault rich Arab countries for not accepting more Palestinians, or at least giving them greater help. As a result, the Efratis say, thousands of Palestinians still live in squalid refugee camps.
"The point is, we (in Israel) feel responsible for our brothers," says Jacob Efrati.
"It's been about 50 years," his wife adds. "Look at how we live 50 years later and look at how Palestinians live."
-- Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com