OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY?

OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY?

A TIME TO SPEAK (Ecclesiastes 3:7)

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VOLUME I: No. 6
15 June 2001 - 24 Sivan 2001
 
THY DWELLINGS, O ISRAEL (Numbers 24:5)
"Nevermore shall you be called Forsaken
Nor shall your land be called Desolate."  --  Isaiah 62:4
"I will restore My people Israel,
They shall rebuild ruined cities and inhabit them,
They shall plant vineyards and drink their wine,
They shall till gardens and eat their fruits, 
And I will plant them upon their soil, 
Nevermore to be uprooted 
From the soil I have given them,
Said The Lord your God."   --  Amos 9:14
"God will have mercy on Israel yet,
And again in his borders see Jacob set."  --  George Gordon, Lord Byron
There is much comment, reporting and misreporting on that part of the Land of Israel that lies outside of the 1949 cease-fire lines ("Green Line"), and the Israeli communities that dwell therein. Those reports and comments use a widely accepted set of terms, assumptions and concepts without to what they really mean: 
1) Is there a region that can be called "Occupied Palestinian Territory" or "Israel-Occupied Palestine"? 
There is no such place. There is no nation of Palestine, and never has been one in the history of the world. [See Issue I:2 - February   ]. Israel has Administered Territories, that lie between between the west bank of the Jordan River and the 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire line, that was never defined as a fixed border. There has been no national sovereignty over this land since the Roman conquest of Judea in 70 C.E. The last foreign state to rule it was the Ottoman Turkish Empire that ceased to exist in 1919. Israel is not "occupying" the territory of any other state or nation because the land does not belong to any other state or nation. They are properly termed "Administered Territories".
2) What is the modern history of this region? 
After World War I, the League of Nations gave Great Britain a Mandate for temporary administration over "Palestine", including what is now Israel and Jordan and the Administered Territories. The Mandate confirmed the terms of the British Balfour Declaration of 1917: Palestine was to be a Jewish National Home, open to "close Jewish settlement". Both documents protected the personal rights of the very sparse non-Jewish population already in this region, but created no national rights for that sparse population. The League of Nations Mandate was later confirmed by its successor United Nations.
In 1922, the British government altered the terms of the Mandate by detaching all of Palestine east of the Jordan River, to create the Emirate of Trans-Jordan for its protege Abdullah, a new arrival from the Hejaz in Arabia. This area was 76 percent of Mandate Palestine, sliced away from the Jewish National Home.
David Lincoln, rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York, draws on British historical documents for an explanation of this event, published in The Jewish Sentinel, October 1993:
"[. . . ] The Balfour Declaration had, of course, considered Trans-Jordan (today's Jordan) to be part of Palestine and thus to be included in any future Jewish State. In 1921, Churchill was appointed colonial secretary with responsibility for the Middle East. . . . . A little later he visited Palestine at the very time when the Emir (later King) Abdullah and his Bedouin Army were trying to enter Trans-Jordan from the south . . . . 
"Unwilling to reinforce the garrison [. . .] Churchill made a deal. Abdullah could settle down where he was The area was to be excluded from the Jewish National Home, and Abdullah was to agree not to oppose the rest of Palestine being Jewish! [. . . .] No one and no government ever thought or suggested that the "West Bank" should not be part of a future Israel. . . . . "
However, the British government thereafter violated both the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate by restricting or in places banning Jewish settlement even west of the Jordan. It also restricted or virtually cut off Jewish immigration, just at the time a National Home was most desperately needed by the Jews of German-occupied Europe. At the same time, the British tolerated if not encouraged Arabs from other countries to come in - albeit illegally - and take the places from which it banned the Jews.
  Since 1967, Jews have finally established or re-established communities that British governments and news media brand "illegal". In truth, it was the British ban on Jewish settlement that was illegal. 
3) How did Israel come to administer these territories? 
  In 1947, the United Nations Partition whittled down the remnant of the Jewish National Home to a mere 17 percent of Mandate Palestine. The Arabs, including the recent arrivals from other countries, where offered a state in the remainder of the land. They rejected the offer, and six Arab nations went to war to overturn the UN plan and prevent the establishment of the Stgate of Israel.
   In the course of that war, Trans-Jordan invaded and seized what are now the Administered Territories. It then changed its name to Jordan. In 1967, Jordan again attacked Israel, and lost the territories. Since them, Israel has been administering these territories. As explained in articles that follow, Israel did not attack or invade and does not "occupy" the territory of any other nation or state.
4. Where are the "settlements"? 
  The communities discussed in this issue are those established or re-established after 1967, in the area the Jordanians called their West Bank. The historical names for this area are the ancient and biblical "Judah" and "Samaria". [The Hebrew Yehuda and Shomron form the acronym YESHA.) They are all within the bounds of the Mandate Jewish National Home after 1922, and on land over which no other nation or state has or can rightfully claim sovereignty. 
  Some of the communities were re-established in places where the Jews had in previous decades been massacred or violently driven out by Arabs. These include the older parts of Jerusalem and the ancient Jewish community of Hebron, and the Etz-Zion bloc near Jerusalem. Some of those who came back to re-establish those communities are the children of the Jews who had been murdered or driven out.  Of the other communities, most of them are built on wasteland that had no owners. Any land that had a previous owner was purchased and paid for.
5. Are these Jewish communities a violation of the Oslo Accords or any other agreements?
  No. They are not a violation of any agreement. They are not banned or limited in any agreement. 
  They are termed "illegal" or "a violation of human rights" or "a war crime" by parties who believe that once Arabs destroy a Jewish community in the Land of Israel, it must remain forever judenrein. These same parties have no complaints about the proliferation of Arab "settlements" in the same area. Nor do they question the Arab demand that all territory they hold or claim be free of Jews, while Arabs make up almost 20 percent of the population of Israel inside the Green Line. 
6. Is the so-called "occupation" illegal? Are the "settlements" illegal?
No. Experts on international law have analyzed the status of the administered territories and the Jewish communities and found no taint of illegality on Israel's part. Outstanding among these experts was the late Eugene V. Rostow, an authority on international law, a U.S. government Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs (1966-1969) and a Distinguished Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. He examined the subject in two articles in The New Republic, 1990 and 1991.
 
Excerpts from article of April 1990:
"The Jewish right of settlement in the West Bank is conferred by the same provisions of the Mandate under which Jews settled in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem before the State of Israel was created. The Mandate for Palestine differs in one important respect from the other League of Nations mandates, which were trusts for the benefit of the indigenous population. The Palestine Mandate, recognizing "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country," is dedicated to "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing nonjewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."
"The Mandate does not . . . permit even a temporary suspension of the Jewish right of settlement in the parts of the Mandate west of the Jordan River. The Armistice Lines of 1949, which are part of the West Bank boundary, represent nothing but the position of the contending armies when the final cease-fire was achieved in the War of Independence. And the Armistice Agreements specifically provide, except in the case of Lebanon, that the demarcation lines can be changed by agreement when the parties move from armistice to peace. [. . . .. ]
 "Many believe that the Palestine Mandate was somehow terminated in 1947, when the British government resigned as the mandatory power. This is incorrect. A trust never terminates when a trustee dies, resigns, embezzles the trust property, or is dismissed. The authority responsible for the trust appoints a new trustee, or otherwise arranges for the fulfillment of its purpose. . . . . In Palestine the British Mandate ceased to be operative as to the territories of Israel and Jordan when those states were created and recognized by the international community. But its rules apply still to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which have not yet been allocated either to Israel or to Jordan or become an independent state. jordan attempted to annex the West Bank in 1951, but that annexation was never generally recognized, even by the Arab states, and now Jordan has abandoned all its claims to the territory. [. . . . ]
"The State Department has never denied that under the Mandate "the Jewish people" have the right to settle in the area. Instead, it said that Jewish settlements in the West Bank violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which deals with the protection of civilians in wartime. [. . . .] Article 49 provides that the occupying power "shall not deport or transfer part of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." But the Jewish settlers in the West Bank are volunteers. They have not been "deported" or "transferred" by the government of Israel, and their movement involves none of the atrocious purposes or harmful effects on the existing population the Geneva Convention was designed to prevent. 
"Furthermore, the Convention applies only to acts by one signatory "carried out on the territory of another." The West Bank is not the territory of a signatory power, but an unallocated part of the British Mandate. It is hard, therefore, to see how even the most literal-minded reading of the Convention could make it apply to Jewish settlement in territories of the British Mandate west of the jordan River. [. . . . ] 
"But how can the Convention be deemed to apply to Jews who have a right to settle in the territories under international law: a legal right assured by treaty and specifically protected by Article 80 of the U.N. Charter, which provides that nothing in the Charter shall be construed "to alter in any manner" rights conferred by existing international instruments" like the Mandate? The Jewish right of settlement in the area is equivalent in every way to the right of the existing Palestinian population to live there.
"Another principle of international law may affect the problem of the Jewish settlements. Under international law, an occupying power is supposed to apply the prevailing law of the occupied territory at the municipal level unless it interferes with the necessities of security or administration or is "repugnant to elementary conceptions of justice." From 1949 to 1967, when Jordan was the military occupant of the West Bank, it applied its own laws to prevent any Jews from living in the territory. To suggest that Israel as occupant is required to enforce such Jordanian laws-a necessary implication of applying the Convention-is simply absurd. When the Allies occupied Germany after the Second World War, the abrogation of the Nuremberg Laws was among their first acts.
"[. . . . ]Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 rule that the Arab states and Israel must make peace, and that when 'a just and lasting peace' is reached in the Middle East, Israel should withdraw from some but not all of the territory it occupied in the course of the 1967 war. The Resolutions leave it to the parties to agree on the terms of peace."
Excerpts from article of October 1991:
"The British Mandate recognized the right of the Jewish people to "close settlement" in the whole of the Mandated territory. It was provided that local conditions might require Great Britain to "postpone" or "withhold" Jewish settlement in what is now Jordan. This was done in 1992. But the Jewish right of settlement in Palestine west of the Jordan river, that is, in Israel, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, was made unassailable. That right has never been terminated and cannot be terminated except by a recognized peace between Israel and its neighbors. And perhaps not even then, in view of Article 80 of the U.N. Charter, "the Palestine article," which provides that "nothing in the Charter shall be construed ... to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments...."
"Yet the Jews have the same right to settle there as they have to settle in Haifa. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip were never parts of Jordan, and Jordan's attempt to annex the West Bank was not generally recognized and has now been abandoned. The two parcels of land are parts of the Mandate that have not yet been allocated to Jordan, to Israel, or to any other state, and are a legitimate subject for discussion."
  

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Since the PLO launched the Oslo War in September 2000, there have been efforts in may quarters to make the perfectly legal civilian communities of YESHA equivalent to or even the cause of the violence and terrorism. There are even international efforts to make an end to terrorism conditional on the end to such communities.
The fallacies of these demands is exposed in "The Settlement Myth", by Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, 24 April 2001:
"[. . . .] The Palestinians, you may have noticed, have changed their tune. When the current orgy of violence against Israelis began last fall, the explanation out of Gaza City -- faithfully echoed by most of the Western media -- was that it was all Ariel Sharon's fault. His visit to the Temple Mount on September 28, it was said, outraged and infuriated Palestinians. [. . . .] Even Palestinians admit it isn't true. 
"[. . . . ] The real cause of the violence, Palestinians now claim, is the growth of Israeli communities in Gaza and the West Bank. "A cessation of settlement activities is part of a cessation of violence," says Faisal Husseini, a prominent Palestinian official. Jibril Rajoub, one of Arafat's top militiamen, seconds the motion. 'Everybody should know,' he announced, 'that those settlements are the cancer and the reason at all times for tension.' 
"This excuse, too, has found a ready reception in the media -- especially since the international fact-finding committee headed by George Mitchell recommended, as a 'confidence-building measure,' that Israel declare a moratorium on expanding the settlements. When Secretary of State Colin Powell briefed the press on the Mitchell Committee report, he was repeatedly asked what Washington would do to compel Israel to freeze its settlements. No reporter seemed to wonder what Washington would do to compel Arafat to stop his murderous offensive. 
"It hasn't taken long for the Palestinian line -- Jewish settlements justify Arab violence -- to become conventional wisdom. 'Stop those settlements,' commands [British magazine] The Economist [. . . .] The Chicago Tribune editorializes: 'There is little incentive for the Palestinians to return to the table without an Israeli freeze on settlements.' 
"Nonsense. 
"[. . . .] The Arab rocks, bullets, Molotov cocktails, and suicide bombs of the past eight months are no different from the Arab rocks, bullets, Molotov cocktails, and suicide bombs of the past eight years -- the years of the Oslo "peace" process. The more Israel has agreed to give, the more enraged and uncompromising the Palestinian reaction has been. A paradox? Only to those who have never mastered the fundamental lesson of Appeasement 101: Give a dictator the sacrifice he demands and you inflame his appetite for more. 
"To insist that Israel "stop those settlements" in exchange for an end to Arab violence is to insist that Oslo be up-ended. The Israeli-Palestinian accords have never barred Israel from building or expanding settlements in the territories; the ultimate fate of those communities has always been one of the "permanent status" issues to be decided at the end of the process. 
"By contrast, the starting point of the peace process -- the foundation on which it was built -- was that Palestinian violence had ended. "The PLO commits itself ... to a peaceful resolution of the conflict between the two sides," reads the document that Arafat signed on September 9, 1993, "and declares that all outstanding issues relating to permanent status will be resolved through negotiations.... The PLO renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence." . . . . They did not promise to end the violence only if Israel agreed to their every demand. They promised to end the violence for good. 
"If that promise was a lie, the entire peace process is a lie. Is it? Look at the Middle East and draw your own conclusion. 
    

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The Israel Foreign Ministry makes these points on the issue of the "settlements":
1. Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip territory has existed from time immemorial and was expressly recognized as legitimate in the Mandate for Palestine adopted by the League of Nations." 
2. Some Jewish settlements, such as in Hebron, existed throughout the centuries of Ottoman rule, while settlements such as Neveh Ya'acov, north of Jerusalem, the Gush-Etzion block in Judea and Samaria, the communities north of the Dead Sea and Kfar Darom in the Gaza region, were established under the British Mandate prior to the establishment of the State of Israel." 
3. For more than a thousand years, the only administration which has prohibited Jewish settlement was the Jordanian occupation administration, which during the nineteen years of its rule (1948-1967) declared the sale of land to Jews a capital offense." 
4. Repeated charges regarding the illegality of Israeli settlements must be regarded as politically motivated, without foundation in international law. Similarly, as Israeli settlements cannot be considered illegal, they cannot constitute a grave violation of the Geneva Convention, and hence any claim that they constitute a war crime is without any legal basis. Politically, the West Bank and Gaza Strip is best regarded as territory over which there are competing claims which should be resolved in peace process negotiations. Israel has valid claims to title in this territory based not only on its historic and religious connection to the land, and its recognized security needs, but also on the fact that the territory was not under the sovereignty of any state and came under Israeli control in a war of self-defense, imposed upon Israel." 
    

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The real issue is not the plots of land on which Israelis dwell, but that they dwell anywhere at all. How this issue is disguised is pointed out in "The Meaning of al-Nakba," by by Daniel Doron, Jerusalem Post, 24 May 2001:
"The Palestinian Arabs' insistence that Israel's establishment - which they mark as al-Nakba (the Catastrophe) Day - was on Arab land, stolen from them, reveals that their conflict with Israel is not about settlements or the refugees' rights. It is about Israel'slegitimacy and right to exist. [. . . .]
"Few deal any more with how the conflicting claims to the land arose, and what Israel's claim to the land is based on, morally and legally. Legal title to land is based on national sovereignty over it and on individual property rights. The tiny Palestinian Arab community that inhabited the Southern Syrian-Turkish province, which was later named Palestine, never had any national sovereign rights in this land. There was never an independent Palestinian Arab entity in "Palestine," so no one could have stolen"Palestinian" lands. 
"Private Arab property rights (mostly squatters' rights) were only over a small fraction of the land that was habitable. Over 95% of the land was totally desolate (as is most of the land in the West Bank today) or swampy, as Mark Twain and others attested back in the 1860s. The land was Turkish, then British and later Jordanian by unilateral annexation. It was always acquired, like the Arabs did, by conquest, not through any moral or legal claim. 
"After conquering the Middle East, the British decided, generously, to gradually return most of it to its Arab clients. The British reserved, however, a tiny sliver relative to the vast territories given to the Arabs, as a mandate sanctioned by the League of Nations for the express purpose of establishing a Jewish national home, because Jewish claims to this land were far more compelling, historically and morally. 
"Jewish sovereignty preceded the Arabs' by many centuries. Jews were forcibly expelled, and ever since were continuously endangered for lack of a home. It was only just to give them, too, a chance to survive in what was then a virtually empty, deserted land, especially since the Arabs received vast territories that could fully satisfy their yearning for independence. 
"[. . . .] As for individual Arab property, none was seized then for the purpose of building the Jewish national home. The Jews bought every acre of land, even though the mandate required the British to allocate to them much of the vast government holdings. 
"When catastrophe struck, the Jews were its victims, not the Arabs. The Arabs who feel the world owes them because of the refugees' tragedy showed no pity for Jewish refugees. As Jewish existence increasingly became endangered, they became more determined to annihilate those who were saved. [. . . .]
"Refusing to accept moral responsibility and blaming Israel, the Arabs are trying to undermine Israel's moral right to exist and are rationalizing its eventual elimination. This is what the commemoration of al-Nakba means." 
  

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Among the most passionate foes of Jewish communities in Judea-Samaria is the International Red Cross, which defines them as "a war crime". This is the International Red Cross that:
  1) refrained from any effort to help the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.
  2) assisted the escape of Nazi war criminals.
  3) refuses to recognize the Israeli Red Shield of David emblem, though it 
  recognizes the Arab Red Crescent, the Iranian Red Lion and the Russian Red Star.
  4) refrains from any reaction to Arab murder of Israeli prisoners of war.
  5) refrains from any disapproval of military use of Red Crescent ambulances.
One response to the IRC is "Legality of the Settlements" by Moshe Dann, Jerusalem Post, 22 May 2001: 
"The accusation by Rene Kosirnik, head of the International Red Cross's delegation to Israel and the territories, that settlements are "war crimes" at a time when Palestinian gunners and suicide bombers are targeting civilians is a moral outrage. 
"But Kosirnik's condemnations of settlements as "illegal" according to international law are not new. They rely solely on Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, drawn up a few years after the end of the Second World War . . . . According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the recognized authority on the Geneva Convention, this applies to what it calls "Israel's occupation of the West Bank." But there was no court; the ICRC was judge and jury. [See Rostow, above, on the accurate interpretation of this convention]
"This decision, taken originally by the ICRC in the early 1970s and confirmed every year since, has been the basis for opposition to Israeli "occupation" and "settlement." But these decisions, unlike legal opinions on any other issues, are made in secret, without any form of due process. Those who made the decision and the procedures by which they arrived at their conclusions are "confidential." Every attempt I made to obtain more detailed information was rejected. So much for democracy and judicial fairness. [ . . . .]
"[The] ICRC's consistent and determined bias, which undermines its claim to impartiality. Theirs is a shameful past and a dishonest present." 
 
 
END

The Forgotten Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries

The Forgotten Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries Historically, there was an exchange of populations in the Middle East and the number of displaced Jews exceeds the number of Palestinian Arab refugees. Most of the Jews were expelled as a result of an open policy of anti-Semitic incitement and even ethnic cleansing. However, unlike the Arab refugees, the Jews who fled are a forgotten case because of a combination of international cynicism and domestic Israeli suppression of the subject. The Palestinians are the only group of refugees out of the more than one hundred million who were displaced after World War II who have a special UN agency that, according to its mandate, cannot but perpetuate their tragedy. An open debate about the exodus of the Jews is critical for countering the Palestinian demand for the "right of return" and will require a more objective scrutiny of the myths about the origins of the Arab- Israeli conflict.

Introduction
Why was the story of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries suppressed? How did it become a forgotten exodus?

Semha Alwaya, an attorney from San Francisco and former Jewish refugee from Iraq, wrote in March 2005 in the San Francisco Chronicle that the world is ignoring her story simply because of the "inconvenience for those who seek to blame Israel for all the problems in the Middle East." As she notes, since 1949 the United Nations has passed more than a hundred resolutions on Palestinian refugees and not a single one on Jewish refugees from Arab countries. The UN makes a clear divide between the "right of return" of millions of refugees even into Israel proper (the pre-1967 borders) and the rights of these Jewish refugees.

Although they exceed the numbers of the Palestinian refugees, the Jews who fled are a forgotten case. Whereas the former are at the very heart of the peace process with a huge UN bureaucratic machinery dedicated to keeping them in the camps, the nine hundred thousand Jews who were forced out of Arab countries have not been refugees for many years. Most of them, about 650,000, went to Israel because it was the only country that would admit them. Most of them resided in tents that after several years were replaced by wooden cabins, and stayed in what were actually refugee camps for up to twelve years. They never received any aid or even attention from the UN Relief And Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, or any other international agency. Although their plight was raised almost every year at the UN by Israeli representatives, there was never any other reference to their case at the world body.

Only at the end of October 2003 was a bipartisan resolution (H. Con. Res. 311) submitted to the U.S. Congress that recognized the "Dual Middle East Refugee Problem." It speaks of the forgotten exodus of nine hundred thousand Jews from Arab countries who "were forced to flee and in some cases brutally expelled amid coordinated violence and anti-Semitic incitement that amounted to ethnic cleansing." Referring to the "population exchange" that took place in the Middle East, the resolution deplores the "cynical perpetuation of the Arab refugee crisis" and criticizes the "immense machinery of UNRWA" that only "increases violence through terror." The resolution called on UNRWA to set up a program for resettling the Palestinian refugees.

Typically, the issue of the Jewish refugees was not on the agenda of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for a final settlement at Camp David in July 2000. The subject emerged only after the parties failed to reach an agreement on the issue of the Palestinian refugees. Only then did the Israelis raise the question of justice for the Jews from Arab countries.

In addition to the international constraints, there have been domestic political reasons for successive Israeli governments' suppression of the subject. Many Israelis regarded the immigration and later integration of the Middle Eastern Jews into Israeli society as an important element in the Zionist ethos of the ingathering of exiles, and there was a reluctance to describe it in terms of a forced expulsion or, at best, an involuntary emigration. The Zionist leadership of the newborn state chose the romanticized code-name Magic Carpet to describe the immigration from Yemen, and the biblical title Operation Ezra and Nehemiah - they were Jewish leaders who returned to Jerusalem from Babylon to build the Second Temple - for the exodus of the Iraqi Jews.

Before Camp David in July 2000, the conventional wisdom among both Israelis and international observers was that the issue of the Palestinian refugees should be left to the end of the peace process. It was believed that once the parties reached agreements on recognition, security, borders, water, normalization, and so on, the difficult refugee question would dissipate by itself. Indeed, it was never negotiated seriously since the abortive meetings of the UN Palestine Conciliation Commission in the early 1950s, which discussed a compromise on the refugees' return that the Arabs rejected.

From the very beginning, the Arabs treated the refugee issue as an instrument to achieve, through UN diplomacy, what they had failed to attain in the battles of 1948-1949 and the subsequent armistice agreements. The much-quoted General Assembly Resolution 194, which is adduced as legitimizing the Palestinian "right of return," was originally rejected by the Arab states and contains nothing that makes this "right" a principle of international law.4 The wording of 194 already compromised the basis of negotiation by establishing the Palestinian Central Council (PCC) with the aim of facilitating "indirect contacts between the sides," so as to overcome the Arab refusal to recognize Israel.

Subsequently, the General Assembly refused for many years to use the word peace in regard to settlements between the parties in the Middle East. This deletion from the UN vocabulary sharply contradicted the UN Charter and was a major failing for an organization that had mediated the armistice agreements after Israel's Independence War, for which its chief negotiator Dr. Ralph Bunche received the Nobel Peace Prize.

The conspiracy to exploit the human tragedy of the refugees against Israel was consolidated when the Arabs refused to accept the concept of resettlement, which appeared in 194 as an alternative solution. This approach was manifested in the establishment of UNWRA in December 1949 as the only agency of its kind to deal with a regional refugee problem.

On 14 December 1950, the UN again reiterated the principles of "repatriation or resettlement and compensation," and even voiced a concern that "the repatriation, resettlement, economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation have not been effected." The Arabs, however, rejected the conciliation efforts of the PCC and succeeded to convince the General Assembly to separate the refugee issue from the other contested matters of the dispute. This marked a turning point in the UN's attitude toward the refugee question; subsequently it took on a clear political dimension as needing to be solved in the framework of the "right of return" to an entity known as Palestine.

The UN never discussed the plight of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries even though it had all the necessary information on their expulsion and even "ethnic cleansing" resulting in their resettlement mostly in Israel. From that point the refugee issue became an independent question, with no relationship to the Arab-Israeli conflict as a whole and the hostile acts that had created the problem in the first place. Hence, the Arabs consistently rejected ideas such as the UN Security Council's 1949 proposals for an economic survey aimed at settling the refugees in different parts of the Middle East. Similarly, in June 1959 the Arabs reacted with fury when UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld presented multi year plan for the refugees' rehabilitation.

The crisis at Camp David in 2000 highlighted the disastrous impact of this approach. It became apparent that the gaps between the parties were unbridgeable. Both the Israelis and the Americans were shocked to discover the Palestinians' unwillingness to compromise on this matter. Even the pro-Palestinian Left in Israel felt betrayed and expressed the fear that the insistence on full implementation of the right of return is an attempt to destroy the Jewish state. It was only because of this crisis that the Israelis decided to present their own demands for the rights of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries. As a result, President Clinton made a historic statement recognizing these refugees' entitlement to compensation: "the fund should compensate 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 predominately Arab countries who came to Israel because they were made refugees in their own land."

This American commitment was not, however, entirely new. In a press conference held twenty-three years earlier, on 27 October 1977, President Jimmy Carter said in regard to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty: "Palestinians have rights...obviously there are Jewish refugees... they have the same rights as others do." Although both presidents' statements are critical for the historical narrative of the Arab- Israeli conflict and have serious implications for solving the Palestinian refugee problem, they remained tangential to the peace process. The matter of the Jewish refugees seems to lurk as a "secret weapon" or fallback position in case the Arab side refuses to compromise on the right of return.

Are Jews Refugees, Too?
On 11 October 2003, the New York Times printed a story whose title bore a question mark: "Are Jews Who Fled Arab Lands to Israel Refugees, Too?" In its evenhanded approach and politically correct sensitivity to Arab claims, the Times left the issue unresolved because, as the article's author Samuel G. Freedman asserted, the Middle East is "typified by clashes of narratives, different accounts of flight and dispossession that are used to justify political goals today." The Times, however, could have cleared up the confusion by consulting its own archives and checking the reports on the nine hundred thousand Jews who fled Arab states amid anti-Semitic riots and threats after Israel's creation in 1948. In those accounts there was no clash of narratives but only the "news that's fit to print" about the mortal danger these Jews faced.

On 16 May 1948, the day after Israel declared independence, the Times published a front-page story with the headline: "Jews in Grave Danger in All Moslem Lands." The paper noted that for nearly four months, "the UN had had before it an appeal for immediate and urgent consideration of the case of the Jewish population in Arab and Moslem countries." A sub-headline stated that: "Nine Hundred Thousand Jews in Africa and Asia Face Wrath of Their Foes," and the article cited reports of deteriorating Jewish security including violent incidents. The Times points out that according to a law drafted by the Political Committee of the Arab League, all Jewish citizens of these countries would be considered "members of the minority Jewish state of Palestine." This implies that there was a clear Arab strategy to expel their Jewish citizens while expecting that they would find refuge in Israel.

In the same UN General Assembly, death threats were aired against Jews without much ado. The Egyptian delegate, Heykal Pasha, warned already on 24 November 1947 about the consequences of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine: "the United Nations...should not lose sight of the fact that the proposed solution might endanger a million Jews living in Muslim countries...creating anti-Semitism in those countries even more difficult to root out than the anti-Semitism which the Allies tried to eradicate in Germany...making the UN...responsible for very grave disorders and for the massacre of a large number of Jews."9 The Palestinian delegate, Jamal Al-Hussayni, said the Jews' situation in the Arab world "will become very precarious. Governments in general have always been unable to prevent mob excitement and violence." Syrian UN representative Faris Al-Khuri is quoted in the New York Times as far back as 19 February 1947 stating that: "Unless the Palestinian problem is settled, we shall have difficulty in protecting the Jews in the Arab world." As reported by a Jewish publication: "With the entire Arabic press fulminating against the perfidy of Zionism, and with Arab politicians rousing their underfed and enervated masses to a dangerous pitch of hysteria, the threats were certainly not empty."

In Iraq the threats were made publicly, and its Foreign Minister Fadel Jamail offered a similar statement in the UN. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Sa'id pursued special efforts to expel his country's Jews and in different political venues raised the idea of a population exchange. Specifically, according to a diplomatic report he suggested "to force an exchange of population under UN supervision and the transfer of 100,000 Jews beyond Iraq in exchange for the Arab refugees who had already left the territory in Israel's hands." The case of the Jews of Iraq is a documented record of legislation and public executions as part an official government policy of ethnic cleansing of the Middle East's most ancient Jewish community.

Expulsion as the Goal
The Arab statements in the UN General Assembly and the New York Times reports prove that the intention to expel these Jewish populations preceded the establishment of Israel and the plight of the Palestinian refugees. At the end of the war for Israel's independence, early in February 1949, Britain's ambassador to Transjordan Sir Alec Kirkbride was present at an exchange between the abovementioned Iraqi Prime Minister Sa'id and his Jordanian counterpart, Samir El-Rifa'i, regarding the fate of the Iraqi Jews. The former leader was planning mass killings of his Jewish countrymen to induce them to flee via Jordan. According to Kirkbride, Sa'id "came out with the astounding proposition that a convoy of Iraqi Jews should be brought over in army lorries escorted by armored cars, taken to the Jordanian-Israeli frontier and forced to cross the line." Sa'id spelled out his strategy:

Quite apart from the certainty that the Israelis would not consent to receive the deportations in that manner, the passage of the Jews through Jordan would almost certainly have touched off serious trouble amongst the very disgruntled Arab refugees who were crowded into the country. Either the Iraqi Jews would have been massacred or their guards would have to shoot other Arabs to protect the lives of their charges.

Kirkbride and El-Rafa'i turned down the plan, and Sa'id went back to Iraq to reinforce his anti-Jewish measures internally.

What, then, happened to the nine hundred thousand Jews of the Arab countries?
In a few years, Jewish communities that had existed in the Middle East for more than 2,500 years were brutally expelled or had to run for their lives. The statements made in the UN were harbingers of what became a total collapse of these Jews' security. Following the Partition Resolution of November 1947, and in some countries even earlier during World War II, Middle Eastern Jews were the targets of official and popular incitement, state-legislated discrimination, and pogroms - again, all this before the massive flight of the Arabs from Palestine.

In Syria, anti-Semitism grew after the Nazis' rise to power in Germany. By the late 1930s, Syria already served as a headquarters for anti-Semitism and hosted Nazi officers. By 1945 the thirty thousand Syrian Jews already faced restrictions on emigration to Israel and some of their property was burned and looted, including the Great Synagogue in Damascus. In December 1947 there was a major pogrom against the Jews of Aleppo, the largest community with seventeen thousand; many were killed and seven thousand fled. Jewish bank accounts in the city were frozen and private property was confiscated; fifty shops, eighteen synagogues, and five schools were burned. Later, after Israel's founding, more Syrian Jews were killed and banks were instructed to freeze all Jewish accounts.

In Yemen, Jews were always treated as second-class citizens. As far back as the 1880s, 2,500 Jews moved from there to Jerusalem and Jaffa, and as conditions worsened another seventeen thousand left to Aden and Palestine between 1923-1945. Riots and massacres also occurred in Aden, which was in British-controlled Yemen. In three days of disturbances in December 1947, many Jews were killed and the Jewish quarter was burned to the ground, so that the community lost its business and economic base. Altogether in those three days, 82 Jews were killed, 106 shops looted out of 170, 220 houses destroyed, and four synagogues gutted.

The Iraqi Jews' condition deteriorated parallel to the rise of Nazism in Germany. Nazi ideology pervaded Iraqi society including the school curricula, which praised Hitler for his anti-Jewish policy and called the Iraqi Jews a fifth column. Hundreds of Jews were forced out of their civil service jobs in the 1930s, and during the 1936 Arab Revolt in Palestine, Jews were terrorized and murdered in Baghdad. That year the Chief Rabbi of Iraq, Sassoon Khaddouri, was forced to issue a statement denying any connection between Iraqi Jews and the Zionist movement, and in 1938 thirty-three Jewish leaders cabled to the League of Nations a strong condemnation of Zionism.

The worst, however, came in June 1941 with the Farhud, a pro- Nazi uprising against the Jews. Beginning on the Shavuot holiday, in two days incited mobs murdered two hundred Jews, wounded over two thousand, looted more than nine hundred homes, and damaged shops and warehouses.

The Partition Resolution of November 1947 found Iraq's Jews in a state of fear. There had already been riots in the two preceding years, and Jewish children were no longer accepted in government schools. In May and again in December 1947, Jews were accused of poisoning sweets for Arab children and trying to inject cholera germs in drinking water. In 1948, Zionism was declared a crime, 1,500 Jews were dismissed from public service, and Jewish banks lost their authorization. Many Jews were imprisoned and some hanged on the same "charge"; in 1948 the richest Jew in Iraq, Shafiq Adas, received the death penalty for "Zionist and communist crimes." His execution by hanging was a clear message that Jews had no future in the country. Again in 1949, numerous Jews were injured in a new wave of riots. Hence, the evacuation of more than one hundred thousand Jews to Israel between 1949-1951 was precipitated by Iraqi anti-Semitism and echoed the calls of Iraqi leaders for expulsion and population exchange.

A similar wave of persecution took place in Egypt and Libya, where in 1945 there were riots and massacres of hundreds of Jews, with destruction of synagogues and other communal buildings. This recurred in 1948 with the arrest of thousands in Egypt, and deadly attacks in both countries along with synagogue burnings and confiscation of both communal and private property.

The North African countries of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia also saw periodic waves of anti-Jewish riots including mass killings, but they were less intensive and with fewer casualties because of the better protection offered by the French authorities, who were engaged in their own conflict with the Arabs. However, many testimonies express fears of sudden deterioration that were reinforced by developments in other Arab countries and in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Clash of Narratives or Deliberate Injustice?
The creation of the Jewish refugee problem in the Middle East was strongly intertwined with the establishment of Israel and the Arab rejection of a Jewish state. When, after successive wars, a peace process slowly emerged, the Palestinians expected that Israel would strongly pursue the issue of the Jewish refugees. In a 1975 article Sabri Jiryis, then director of the Institute of Palestine Studies in Beirut, accused the Arab states of expelling their Jews "in a mostly cruel manner after confiscating their possessions or taking control of them at the lowest price." Jiryis expected that the Israelis would claim, in future negotiations, that there had been a population exchange in the Middle East. Although Israelis indeed raised the issue in international forums and information material, it did not enter the peace talks as a clear and unequivocal demand. Jiryis, however, envisaged it differently:

There is no need to say that the problem of those Jews and their passage to Israel is not merely theoretical, at least from the viewpoint of the Palestinian problem. Clearly, Israel will raise the question in all serious negotiations that may in time be conducted over the rights of the Palestinians....Israel's argument will take approximately the following form: It is true that we Israelis brought about the exodus of Arabs from their land in the war of 1948...and that we took control of their property. In return, however, you Arabs caused the expulsion of a like number of Jews from Arab countries since 1948 until today. Most of them went to Israel after you seized control of their property in one way or another. What happened, therefore, is merely a kind of "population and property transfer," the consequences of which both sides have to bear. Thus, Israel gathers in the Jews from Arab countries and the Arab countries are obliged in turn to settle the Palestinians within their own borders and work towards a solution of the problem. Israel will undoubtedly advance these claims in the first real debate over the Palestinian problem.

Why did this not materialize?
Although the repression of painful memories by the Jewish refugees themselves is understandable, it is harder to grasp the silence of Israel's government and society on an issue that touches the very heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Drawing an analogy between the stories of the Jewish and Palestinian refugees enables presenting a moral argument against the Palestinian demand for a right of return. For different reasons, however, both the Israeli Left and Right have been reluctant to make that analogy.

The Left, for its part, has trouble with an argument that tends to emphasize the morally superior approach of the Jewish side, which absorbed and rehabilitated its refugees whereas the Arabs worked to perpetuate the Palestinian refugees' suffering as an anti-Israeli tool. For the Left, the Zionist ethos involves much guilt over Israel's having allegedly caused the Palestinians to flee. The radical Left has even made sweeping and false accusations that Israeli forces committed systematic massacres and deportations. According to the New Historians and post-Zionists, the state of Israel was born in sin. These notions have found their way into the public discourse, and have been adopted in academe and among the tone-setters in the Israeli culture and media.

The Israeli Right and Center have inhibitions of a different kind. These circles, which represent the mainstream ideology, believe the term "Jewish refugees" should be avoided so as to diminish the social tensions between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. In their view, it is better to stress that most of the Jews from Arab states were drawn to Israel by Zionist ideals and did not come as refugees. Indeed, many Israelis from Arab countries prefer that interpretation. The truth, however, is that the vast majority of Israelis, both Ashkenazim and Sephardim, came to the Promised Land as persecuted or deported refugees; the voluntary, pioneering leadership was always a small minority.

For ideological reasons, as part of its Zionist mission, the Israeli government did not retain the term refugees for the Jews who came from Arab countries. Because it refers to someone without a home or a shelter, the state of Israel "abolished the term from the Jewish historical lexicon," aiming to show that its door was open to Jewish immigration according to its Law of Return. However, these Zionist principles concealed the fact that almost all the Jews from Arab countries were indeed refugees who had suffered a great deal as individuals and as a community. They had undergone persecution, official and unofficial discrimination, and daily political, social, religious, and economic restrictions. They also were refugees because they arrived penniless after all their property and bank accounts were confiscated or looted.

As for the Zionist motives of these immigrants, they were reflected in their religious life in their Diaspora countries where they had prayed for their homeland in Israel and for the welfare of Jerusalem. But like their brethren in Europe, their strong ties to Zion, which were kept and nourished for two thousand years, were never translated into a voluntary, massive immigration to the Land of Israel. What prompted that were the riots and massacres that had been threatened and incited by the Arab leaders even from the rostrum of the UN.

The Role of the UN and UNRWA
The UN clearly played a central role in constructing the Arab narrative and ignoring and later delegitimizing the Jewish-Israeli one. The world body gave the Jews only a short grace period after the Holocaust and up to the establishment of their state. When the UN voted to partition Mandatory Palestine into two states on 29 November 1947, most Jews around the world were ecstatic. Yet even this historic decision was achieved only because of a sudden shift by the Soviet Union and its satellites motivated by political expediency. The Soviets, already engaged in the Cold War, wanted first and foremost to speed Britain's departure from the Middle East. They later reaffirmed Israel's establishment in the Security Council resolutions of 15 July 1948, which blamed the Arab League for rejecting calls for a ceasefire, and in Israel's admittance to the UN in May 1949.

The approval of Israel's UN membership has both political and legal significance, beyond the recognition itself. The passing of the resolution by the General Assembly, against the Arab will, can be considered an ex post facto acknowledgment of the armistice agreements, and a confirmation of the realities created by the Arab rejection of partition: the territorial changes and the need to resettle the Arab refugees in their new areas of residence. Such resettlement of refugees was the regular practice in numerous cases after World War II, and was referred to regarding the Arab refugees in two other General Assembly resolutions: 194 of December 1948, and 394 of December 1950.

The strategy of delegitimizing Israel was based from the beginning on the tragedy of the Palestinians. The Arabs exploited their distress in seeking to make Israel a pariah state. UNRWA was established as the only UN agency devoted to a specific group of refugees. Unlike the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, an agency that deals with all other refugees throughout the world, the Arabs opposed rehabilitation plans for the displaced Palestinians. UNRWA's political objective was clear: to create a permanent reminder of alleged Israeli misdeeds so as to keep the Palestinian issue alive. In August 1958, the former director of UNRWA in Jordan said: "The Arab States do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die."

In 2000, more than fifty years after UNRWA's establishment, an official PLO document reaffirmed the Arab strategy to perpetuate the refugees' distress by keeping them in the camps: "In order to keep the refugee issue alive and prevent Israel from evading responsibility for their plight, Arab countries - with the notable exception of Jordan - have usually sought to preserve a Palestinian identity by maintaining the Palestinians' status as refugees."

The UNRWA system has largely enabled the corruption of the Palestinian Arab leadership, who have never displayed a real concern for the refugees but only exploited them for political-financial interests. Although UNRWA has carried out laudable humanitarian work, this cannot atone for its generally destructive role. The way in which UNRWA's mandate is defined plays into the hands of militant groups, including those in the camps. The literature on humanitarian aid refers to the camps as a "refugee-warrior" community, meaning they serve as military staging grounds.

Indeed, the link between refugee camps and terror in general was recognized by the UN Security Council in 1998 when, in discussing refugees in Africa, it declared the "unacceptability of using refugee camps...to achieve military purposes." Later that year Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in his report to the Security Council, demanded that "refugee camps...be kept free of any military presence or equipment." But such strictures were never applied to the UNRWA camps, where suicide-bomb belts are prepared, car bombs are constructed, and terrorists are trained.

The Myth of Arab Tolerance
Both Jewish and Arab writers, in different times and for different reasons, have contributed to the myth about the interfaith utopia between Jews and Arabs under Islam. In the nineteenth century, among Jewish authors, this reflected frustration over the failures of European emancipation, and in the twentieth century it figured in Arab accusations that Zionism and Israel had spoiled hundreds of years of pleasant coexistence. Specifically, the myth of Arab tolerance is used to deny the allegations that Jews were expelled from Arab states or faced threats and persecution there. Arab and Palestinian leaders have claimed that the Jews who left those countries can return and resume their peaceful lives.

The historical record of Jewish life under Arab rule, however, is mixed and much less encouraging. Maimonides, the greatest Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages, was close to power in Islamic society and conversant in the Arab language and culture. In his classic "Epistle to the Jews of Yemen" (1172), which he wrote to bolster the Yemenite Jews in the face of oppression and attempts at forced conversion, he wrote:

You know, my brethren, that on account of our sins God has cast us into the midst of this people, the nation of Ishmael, who persecute us severely, and who devise ways to harm us and to debase us. This is as the Exalted had warned us: "Even our enemies themselves being judges" (Deut. 32:31). No nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None has been able to reduce us as they have.

For Maimonides, who knew about the Crusaders' depredations against the Jews of Europe, this was an emphatic historical judgment. It may reflect his own family's experience of fleeing Spain after the deterioration in the Jews' conditions there and the death threats they faced from Muslim extremists, or it could be a great thinker's religiocultural assessment and anticipation of the future Muslim-Jewish confrontation.

The particular myth about the Golden Age and interfaith utopia in Spain was popular in Jewish historiography in the nineteenth century. The Jews' traumatic expulsion from Catholic Spain in 1492 and the fact that they found refuge in Muslim Turkey reinforced the longing for the better periods when Jews were somewhat economically and culturally integrated in Muslim Spain. Moreover, nineteenth-century Jewish historians were frustrated by their people's tortuously slow acceptance by European society in what was supposed to be a liberal age. As the greatest of these scholars, Heinrich Graetz, put it in his History of the Jews:

Wearied with contemplating the miserable plight of the Jews in their ancient home and in the countries of Europe, and fatigued by the constant sight of fanatical oppression in Christendom, the eyes of the observer rest with gladness upon their situation in the Arabian Peninsula. Here the sons of Judah were free to raise their heads, and did not need to look around them with fear and humiliation....Here they...were allowed to develop their powers in the midst of a free, simple and talented people, to show their manly courage, to compete for the gifts of fame, and with practiced hand to measure swords with their antagonists....

The height of culture...was reached by the Jews of Spain in their most flourishing period.

Bernard Lewis, however, offers a more balanced assessment of the fourteen centuries of Jewish life under Islamic rule:

The Jews were never free from discrimination, but only rarely subject to persecution;...their situation was never as bad as in Christendom at its worst, nor ever as good as in Christendom at its best. There is nothing in Islamic history to parallel the Spanish expulsion and Inquisition, the Russian pogroms, or the Nazi Holocaust; there is also nothing to compare with the progressive emancipation and acceptance accorded to Jews in the democratic West during the last three centuries.

Unlike Christianity, Islam had no tradition of deicide and Muslims did not blame Jews for the demise of their prophet Mohammed, who died a natural death. However, Muslims' attitudes toward contemporary Jews were influenced by biographical accounts of Mohammed and by hadith concerning Jewish attempts on the Prophet's life, and when the Islamic world was threatened from within or without, its leaders became harsher toward the other religions leading to discrimination and violent persecution.

Since the late nineteenth century both theological and racist European anti-Semitism, including the innovations of the Nazis, have been internalized in the Muslim world. This includes themes centering on Jewish "chosenness," with wide dissemination of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Lewis observes that hatred of Israel is the only grievance that can be freely and safely expressed in the Arab totalitarian societies; Israel serves to deflect anger about economic conditions and lack of political freedom.

Yehuda Bauer notes that the study of Islam is important for Holocaust scholars because the same patterns and threats have arisen and a second Holocaust is perfectly possible: "In radical Islam there are forces which are mentally prepared - given the power - to carry out genocide against others." Whereas in the past traditional Islamic sects like the Saudi Wahabists did not focus on Jews, they now speak explicitly of eradicating them: "Their language is a mixture of that of the Nazis and the Qur'an."

Denial of History and Justice

The denial of history has become an important tool in the Arab- Palestinian narrative. The obfuscation of the Jewish exodus from Arab countries is part of a larger revisionist endeavor. For instance, the official Palestinian Authority newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida quotes Muslim writer Safi naz Kallan's statement that: "there is no people or land named Israel, only Zionist thieves unfit to establish a nation or have their own language and religion." These Jews are "Shylocks of the land, busy emptying Palestinian pockets." At the Camp David talks in July 2000, Yasser Arafat denied any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, thereby contradicting the Koran, the hadith, and other Islamic sources. His representative Saeb Erekat said the very idea of the Temple is a Jewish invention with no historical basis. President Clinton replied: "it is not just all the Jews around the world who believe that the Temple was there but the majority of Christians as well."

The Arabs' claim of a right of return for the Palestinian refugees relies on false premises: that there is such a right under international law, that it was granted to the Palestinians in UN resolutions, and that Israel is responsible for creating the refugee problem. The case of the Jewish refugees highlights the Arabs' unwillingness to recognize the Jewish right to a homeland and calculated policy of exploiting the conflict to pursue their goal of an "ethnic cleansing" of Israel. This policy has long and consistently been practiced by the Arabs. Today almost no Jews live in the Arab world, and Christian communities have dwindled sharply there.

In launching their war against the Jewish state in 1948, Arab countries were basically responsible for both the Jewish and Arab refugee problems. During this eighteen-month confrontation, in which Arab armies invaded Israel and battles raged in almost every city and settlement, there were instances in which Israeli troops forced the local Arab population to leave their homes. These were acts of self-defense in a war that killed six thousand of the six hundred thousand Jews then in the country, and it is clear that Israel did not, as alleged, mastermind a large-scale expulsion of Palestinians. According to their own testimonies, most of the Palestinians left because of the threats and fear-mongering of Arab leaders.

In his memoirs the former prime minister of Syria, Khalid Al- Azm, placed the entire blame for the refugee problem on the Arabs:

Since 1948 it is we who demanded the return of the refugees...while it is we who made them leave....We brought disaster upon...Arab refugees, by inviting them and bringing pressure to bear upon them to leave....We have rendered them dispossessed....Then we exploited them in executing crimes of murder, arson, and throwing bombs upon...men, women and children - all this in the service of political purposes.

In March 1976, in the official PLO journal in Beirut, Falastin Al- Thawra, current Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas wrote:

The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from Zionist tyranny, but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe....

The Arab demand for a right of return is a formula for destroying Israel as a Jewish state and reflects the unwillingness to seek a realistic settlement. Open discussion of the Jews' flight from Arab countries will encourage a more objective scrutiny of the myths about the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Arab and Palestinian responsibility for the population exchange that occurred weakens their argument for a "return" and highlights the double standard the UN has consistently applied to the conflict.

The case of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries and their harsh expulsion is a critical element in transforming the refugee question from a political-military tool to a humanitarian issue and helping to set the Middle East narrative straight.

JEWS IN SYRIA BEFORE 1948 and other Arab countries

JEWS IN SYRIA BEFORE 1948
The last Jews who wanted to leave Syria departed with the chief rabbi in October 1994. Prior to 1947, there were some 30,000 Jews made up of three distinct communities, each with its own traditions: the Kurdish-speaking Jews of Kamishli, the Jews of Aleppo with roots in Spain, and the original eastern Jews of Damascus, called Must'arab. Today only a tiny remnant of these communities remains.

The Jewish presence in Syria dates back to biblical times and is intertwined with the history of Jews in neighboring Eretz Israel. With the advent of Christianity, restrictions were imposed on the community. The Arab conquest in 636 A.D, however, greatly improved the lot of the Jews. Unrest in neighboring Iraq in the 10th century resulted in Jewish migration to Syria and brought about a boom in commerce, banking, and crafts. During the reign of the Fatimids, the Jew Menashe Ibrahim El-Kazzaz ran the Syrian administration, and he granted Jews positions in the government.

Syrian Jewry supported the aspirations of the Arab nationalists and Zionism, and Syrian Jews believed that the two parties could be reconciled and that the conflict in Palestine could be resolved. However, following Syrian independence from France in 1946, attacks against Jews and their property increased, culminating in the pogroms of 1947, which left all shops and synagogues in Aleppo in ruins. Thousands of Jews fled the country, and their homes and property were taken over by the local Muslims.

For the next decades, Syrian Jews were, in effect, hostages of a hostile regime. They could leave Syria only on the condition that they leave members of their family behind. Thus the community lived under siege, constantly under fearful surveillance of the secret police. This much was allowed due to an international effort to secure the human rights of the Jews

JEWS IN EGYPT PRIOR TO 1948

Jews have lived in Egypt since Biblical times, and the conditions of the community have constantly fluctuated with the political situation of the land. Israelite tribes first moved to the Land of Goshen (the northeastern edge of the Nile Delta) during the reign of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep IV (1375-1358 B.C).

During the reign of Ramses II (1298-1232 B.C), they were enslaved for the Pharaoh's building projects. His successor, Merneptah, continued the same anti-Jewish policies, and around the year 1220 B.C, the Jews revolted and escaped across the Sinai to Canaan. This is the biblical Exodus commemorated in the holiday of Passover. Over the years, many Jews in Eretz Israel who were not deported to Babylon sought shelter in Egypt, among them the prophet Jeremiah. By 1897 there were more than 25,000 Jews in Egypt, concentrated in Cairo and Alexandria. In 1937 the population reached a peak of 63,500.

Friedman wrote in "The Myth of Arab Tolerance", "One Caliph, Al-Hakem of the Fatimids devised particularly insidious humiliations for the Jews in his attempt to perform what he deemed his roll as "Redeemer of mankind", first the Jews were forced to wear miniature golden calf images around their necks, as though they still worshipped 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 it's Jewish residence, in".

In 1945, with the rise of Egyptian nationalism and the cultivation of anti-Western and anti-Jewish sentiment, riots erupted. In the violence, 10 Jews were killed, 350 injured, and a synagogue, a Jewish hospital, and an old-age home were burned down. The establishment of the State of Israel led to still further anti-Jewish feeling: Between June and November 1948, bombs set off in the Jewish Quarter killed more than 70 Jews and wounded nearly 200. 2,000 Jews were arrested and many had their property confiscated. Rioting over the next few months resulted in many more Jewish deaths. Between June and November 1948, bombs set off in the Jewish Quarter killed more than 70 Jews and wounded nearly 200.

Jews In 1956, the Egyptian government used the Sinai Campaign as a pretext for expelling almost 25,000 Egyptian Jews and confiscating their property. Approximately 1,000 more Jews were sent to prisons and detention camps. On November 23, 1956, a proclamation signed by the Minister of Religious Affairs, and read aloud in mosques throughout Egypt, declared that "all Jews are Zionists and enemies of the state," and promised that they would be soon expelled.

Thousands of Jews were ordered to leave the country. They were allowed to take only one suitcase and a small sum of cash, and forced to sign declarations "donating" their property to the Egyptian government. Foreign observers reported that members of Jewish families were taken hostage, apparently to insure that those forced to leave did not speak out against the Egyptian government. AP, (November 26 and 29th 1956); New York World Telegram).

By 1957 it had fallen to 15,000. In 1967, after the Six-Day War, there was a renewed wave of persecution, and the community dropped to 2,500. By the 1970s, after the remaining Jews were given permission to leave the country, the community dwindled to a few families. Nearly all the Jews in Egypt are elderly, and the community is on the verge of extinction.

JEWS IN IRAQ PRIOR TO 1948

The Iraqi Jews took pride in their distinguished Jewish community, with it's history of scholarship and dignity. Jews had prospered in what was then Babylonia for 1200 years before the Muslim conquest in AD 634; it was not until the 9th century that Dhimmi laws such as the yellow patch, heavy head tax, and residence restriction enforced. Capricious and extreme oppression under some Arab caliphs and Momlukes brought taxation amounting to expropriation in AD 1000, and 1333 the persecution culminated in pillage and destruction of the Bagdad Sanctuary. in 1776, there was a slaughter of Jews at Bosra, and in bitterness of anti Jewish measures taken Muslim rulers in the 18th century caused many Jews to flea.

The Iraqi Jewish community is one of the oldest in the world and has a great history of learning and scholarship. Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, was born in Ur of the Chaldees, in southern Mesopotamia, now Iraq, around 2,000 A.D. The community traces its history back to 6th century A.D, when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judea and sent most of the population into exile in Babylonia.

The community also maintained strong ties with the Land of Israel and, with the aid of rabbis from Israel, succeeded in establishing many prominent rabbinical academies. By the 3rd century, Babylonia became the center of Jewish scholarship, as is attested to by the community's most influential creation, the Babylonian Talmud.

Under Muslim rule, beginning in the 7th century, the situation of the community fluctuated. Many Jews held high positions in government or prospered in commerce and trade. At the same time, Jews were subjected to special taxes, restrictions on their professional activity, and anti-Jewish incitement among the masses.

Under British rule, which began in 1917, Jews fared well economically, and many were elected to government posts. This traditionally observant community was also allowed to found Zionist organizations and to pursue Hebrew studies. All of this progress ended when Iraq gained independence in 1932.

In June 1941, the Mufti-inspired, pro-Nazi coup of Rashid Ali sparked rioting and a pogrom in Baghdad. Armed Iraqi mobs, with the complicity of the police and the army, murdered 180 Jews and wounded almost 1,000.

Although emigration was prohibited, many Jews made their way to Israel during this period with the aid of an underground movement. In 1950 the Iraqi parliament finally legalized emigration to Israel, and between May 1950 and August 1951, the Jewish Agency and the Israeli government succeeded in airlifting approximately 110,000 Jews to Israel in Operations Ezra and Nehemiah. This figure includes 18,000 Kurdish Jews, who have many distinct traditions. Thus a community that had reached a peak of 150,000 in 1947 dwindled to a mere 6,000 after 1951.

Additional outbreaks of anti-Jewish rioting occurred between 1946-49. After the establishment of Israel in 1948, Zionism became a capital crime.

JEWS IN IRAQ AFTER 1948

In 1950, Iraqi Jews were permitted to leave the country within a year provided they forfeited their citizenship. A year later, however, the property of Jews who emigrated was frozen and economic restrictions were placed on Jews who chose to remain in the country. From 1949 to 1951, 104,000 Jews were evacuated from Iraq in Operations Ezra and Nehemiah; another 20,000 were smuggled out through Iran. In 1952, Iraq's government barred Jews from emigrating and publicly hanged two Jews after falsely charging them with hurling a bomb at the Baghdad office of the U.S. Information Agency.

With the rise of competing Ba'ath factions in 1963, additional restrictions were placed on the remaining Iraqi Jews. The sale of property was forbidden and all Jews were forced to carry yellow identity cards. After the Six-Day War, more repressive measures were imposed: Jewish property was expropriated; Jewish bank accounts were frozen; Jews were dismissed from public posts; businesses were shut; trading permits were cancelled; telephones were disconnected. Jews were placed under house arrest for long periods of time or restricted to the cities.

Persecution was at its worst at the end of 1968. Scores were jailed upon the discovery of a local "spy ring" composed of Jewish businessmen. Fourteen men-eleven of them Jews-were sentenced to death in staged trials and hanged in the public squares of Baghdad; others died of torture. On January 27, 1969, Baghdad Radio called upon Iraqis to "come and enjoy the feast." Some 500,000 men, women and children paraded and danced past the scaffolds where the bodies of the hanged Jews swung; the mob rhythmically chanted "Death to Israel" and "Death to all traitors." This display brought a world-wide public outcry that Radio Baghdad dismissed by declaring: "We hanged spies, but the Jews crucified Christ." (Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie, Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, p. 34).

Jews remained under constant surveillance by the Iraqi government. Max Sawadayee, in "All Waiting to be Hanged" writes a testimony of an Iraqi Jew (who later escaped): "The dehumanization of the Jewish personality resulting from continuous humiliation and torment...have dragged us down to the lowest level of our physical and mental faculties, and deprived us of the power to recover.".

In response to international pressure, the Baghdad government quietly allowed most of the remaining Jews to emigrate in the early 1970's, even while leaving other restrictions in force. Most of Iraq's remaining Jews are now too old to leave. They have been pressured by the government to turn over title, without compensation, to more than $200 million worth of Jewish community property. (New York Times, February 18, 1973).

Only one synagogue continues to function in Iraq, "a crumbling buff-colored building tucked away in an alleyway" in Baghdad. According to the synagogue's administrator, "there are few children to be bar-mitzvahed, or couples to be married. Jews can practice their religion but are not allowed to hold jobs in state enterprises or join the army." (New York Times Magazine, February 3, 1985).

In 1991, prior to the Gulf War, the State Department said "there is no recent evidence of overt persecution of Jews, but the regime restricts travel, (particularly to Israel) and contacts with Jewish groups abroad.".

Persecutions continued, especially after the Six-Day War in 1967, when many of the remaining 3,000 Jews were arrested and dismissed from their jobs. Finally In Iraq all the Jews were forced to leave between 1948 and 1952 and leave everything behind. Jews were publicly hanged in the center of Baghdad with enthusiastic mob as audience.

The Jews were persecuted throughout the centuries in all the Arabic speaking countries. One time, Baghdad was one-fifth Jewish and other communities had first been established 2,500 years ago. Today, approximately 61 Jews are left in Baghdad and another 200 or so are in Kurdish areas in the north. Only one synagogue remains in Bataween, - once Baghdad's main Jewish neighborhood.- The rabbi died in 1996 and none of the remaining Jews can perform the liturgy and only a couple know Hebrew. (Associated Press, March 28, 1998).JEWS IN MOROCCO PRIOR TO 1948

The Jewish community of present-day Morocco dates back more than 2,000 years. There were Jewish people in the country before it became a Roman province. in 1032 AD, 6000 Jews were murdered. Indeed the greatest persecution by the Arabs towards the Jews was in Fez, Morocco, nothing was worse than the slaughter of 120,000 Jews in 1146. In 1391 a wave of Jewish refugees expelled from Spain brought new life to the community, as did new arrivals from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1497. From 1438, the Jews of Fez were forced to live in special quarters called mellahs, a name derived from the Arabic word for salt because the Jews in Morocco were forced to carry out the job of salting the heads of executed prisoners prior to their public display. Chouraqui sums it up when he wrote: "such restriction and humiliation as to exceed anything in Europe". Charles de Foucauld in 1883 who was not generally sympathetic to Jews writes of the Jews: "They are the most unfortunate of men, every Jew belongs body and soul to his seigneur, the sid [Arab master]". Similarly, in 1465, Arab mobs in Fez slaughtered thousands of Jews, leaving only 11 alive, after a Jewish deputy vizier treated a Muslim woman in "an offensive manner." The killings touched off a wave of similar massacres throughout Morocco.

JEWS IN MOROCCO AFTER 1948.

In June 1948, bloody riots in Oujda and Djerada killed 44 Jews and wounded scores more. That same year, an unofficial economic boycott was instigated against Moroccan Jews. In 1956, Morocco declared its independence, In 1963, more then 100,000 Moroccan Jews were forced out and went to Israel.

JEWS IN YEMEN PRIOR TO 1948

In Yemen from the seventh century on the Jewish populations suffered the severest possible interpretation of the Charter of Omar. For about 4 centuries, the Jews suffered under the fierce fanatical edict of the most intolerant Islamic sects. The Yemen Epistle by Rambam in which he commiserated with Yemen's Jewry and besought them to keep the faith, and in 1724 fanatical rulers ordered synagogues destroyed, and Jewish public prayers were forbidden. The Jews were exiled, many died from starvation and the survivors were ordered to settle in Mausa, but later, this order was annulled by a decree in 1781 due to the need of their skilled craftsmen. Jacob Sappir a Jerusalem writer describes Yemeni Jews in Yemen in 1886: "The Arab natives have always considered the Jew unclean, but his blood for them was not considered unclean. They lay claims to all his belongings, and if he is unwilling, they employ force...The Jews live outside the town in dark dwellings like prison cells or caves out of fear...for the least offense, he is sentenced to outrageous fines, which he is quite unable to pay. In case of non-payment, he is put in chains and cruelly beaten every day. Before the punishment is inflicted, the Cadi[judge] addresses him in gentle tones and urges him to change his faith and obtain a share of all the glory of this world and of the world beyond. His refusal is again regarded as penal obstinacy. On the other hand, it is not open to the Jew to prosecute a Muslim, as the Muslim by right of law can dispose of the life and the property of the Jew, and it is only to be regarded as an act of magnanimity if the Jews are allowed to live. The Jew is not admissible as a witness, nor has his oath any validity.". Danish-German explorer Garsten Neibuhr visited Yemen in 1762 described Jewish life in Yemen: "By day they work in their shops in San'a, but by night they must withdraw to their isolated dwellings, shortly before my arrival, 12 of the 14 synagogues of the Jews were torn down, and all their beautiful houses wrecked". The Jews did not improve until the establishment of the French Protectorate in 1912, when they were given equality and religious autonomy. In 1922, the government of Yemen reintroduced an ancient Islamic law that decreed that Jewish orphans under age 12 were to be forcibly converted to Islam. In 1947, after the partition vote, Muslim rioters, joined by the local police force, engaged in a bloody pogrom in Aden that killed 82 Jews and destroyed hundreds of Jewish homes. Aden's Jewish community was economically paralyzed, as most of the Jewish stores and businesses were destroyed. Early in 1948, looting occurred after six Jews were falsely accused of the ritual murder of two Arab girls. (Howard Sachar, A History of Israel). 50,000 Jews were kicked out of Yemen in 1948.

JEWS IN TUNISIA PRIOR TO 1948

The first documented evidence of Jews in this area dates back to 200 A.D and demonstrates the existence of a community in Latin Carthage under Roman rule. Latin Carthage contained a significant Jewish presence, and several sages mentioned in the Talmud lived in this area from the 2nd to the 4th centuries. During the Byzantine period, the condition of the community took a turn for the worse. An edict issued by Justinian in 535 excluded Jews from public office, prohibited Jewish practice, and resulted in the transformation of synagogues into churches. Many fled to the Berber communities in the mountains and in the desert. After the Arab conquest of Tunisia in the 7th century, Jews lived under satisfactory conditions, despite discriminatory measures such as a poll tax. From 7th century Arab conquest down through the Almahdiyeen atrocities, Tunisia fared little better than its neighbors. The complete expulsion of Jews from Kairouan near Tunis occurred after years of hardship, in the 13 century when Kairouan was anointed as a holy city of Islam. In the 16th century, the "hated and despised" Jews of Tunis were periodically attacked by violence and they were subjected to "vehement anti-Jewish policy" during the various political struggles of the period. In 1869 Muslims butchered many Jews in the defenseless ghetto. Conditions worsened during the Spanish invasions of 1535-1574, resulting in the flight of Jews from the coastal areas. The situation of the community improved once more under Ottoman rule. During this period, the community also split due to strong cultural differences between the Touransa (native Tunisians) and the Grana (those adhering to Spanish or Italian customs). Jews suffered once more in 1956, when the country achieved independence. The rabbinical tribunal was abolished in 1957, and a year later, Jewish community councils were dissolved. In addition, the Jewish quarter of Tunis was destroyed by the government. Anti-Jewish rioting followed the outbreak of the Six-Day War; Muslims burned down the Great Synagogue of Tunis. These events increased the steady stream of emigration.

JEWS IN LIBYA PRIOR TO 1948.

The Jewish community of Libya traces its origin back to the 3rd century B.C Under Roman rule, Jews prospered. In 73 A.D, a zealot from Israel, Jonathan the Weaver, incited the poor of the community in Cyrene to revolt. The Romans reacted with swift vengeance, murdering him and his followers and executing other wealthy Jews in the community. This revolt foreshadowed that of 115 A.D, which broke out not only in Cyrene, but in Egypt and Cyprus as well. In 1785, where Ali Burzi Pasha murdered hundreds of Jews.With the Italian occupation of Libya in 1911, the situation remained good and the Jews made great strides in education. At that time, there were about 21,000 Jews in the country, the majority in Tripoli. In the late 1930s, Fascist anti-Jewish laws were gradually enforced, and Jews were subject to terrible repression. Still, by 1941, the Jews accounted for a quarter of the population of Tripoli and maintained 44 synagogues. In 1942 the Germans occupied the Jewish quarter of Benghazi, plundered shops, and deported more than 2,000 Jews across the desert, where more than one-fifth of them perished. Many Jews from Tripoli were also sent to forced labor camps. Conditions did not greatly improve following the liberation. During the British occupation, there was a series of pogroms, the worst of which, in 1945, resulted in the deaths of more than 100 Jews in Tripoli and other towns and the destruction of five synagogues. The establishment of the State of Israel, led many Jews to leave the country. A savage pogrom in Tripoli on November 5, 1945 were more than 140 Jews were massacred and almost every synagogue looted. (Howard Sachar, A History of Israel).In June 1948, rioters murdered another 12 Jews and destroyed 280 Jewish homes. Thousands of Jews fled the country after Libya was granted independence and membership in the Arab League in 1951. (Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times). After the Six-Day War, the Jewish population of 7,000 was again subjected to pogroms in which 18 were killed, and many more injured, sparking a near-total exodus that left fewer than 100 Jews in Libya. When Col. Qaddafi came to power in 1969, all Jewish property was confiscated and all debts to Jews cancelled. Today, no Jews are believed to live in Libya. Although emigration was illegal, more than 3,000 Jews succeeded to leave to Israel. When the British legalized emigration in 1949, more than 30,000 Jews fled Libya. At the time of Colonel Qaddafi's coup in 1969, some 500 Jews remained in Libya. Qaddafi subsequently confiscated all Jewish property and cancelled all debts owed to Jews. By 1974 there were no more than 20 Jews, and it is believed that the Jewish presence has passed out of existence. JEWS IN ALGERIA PRIOR TO 1948

Jewish settlement in present-day Algeria can be traced back to the first centuries of the Common Era. In the 14th century, with the deterioration of conditions in Spain, many Spanish Jews moved to Algeria. Among them were a number of outstanding scholars, including the Ribash and the Rashbatz. After the French occupation of the country in 1830, Jews gradually adopted French culture and were granted French citizenship. On the eve of the civil war that gripped the country in the late 1950s, there were some 130,000 Jews in Algeria, approximately 30,000 of whom lived in the capital. Nearly all Algerian Jews fled the country shortly after it gained independence from France in 1962. Most of the remaining Jews live in Algiers, but there are individual Jews in Oran and Blida. A single synagogue functions in Algiers, although there is no resident rabbi. All other synagogues have been taken over for use as mosques. In 1934, a Nazi-incited pogrom in Constantine left 25 Jews dead and scores injured. After being granted independence in 1962, the Algerian government harassed the Jewish community and deprived Jews of their principle economic rights. 150,000 Jews were forced out of Algeria when France left Algeria.

Jewish Refugees from Arab States

The Jews of the Eastern Mediterranean before and after the Arab Conquest
Excerpted from: Martin Gilbert. “The Routledge Atlas of Jewish History.” 7th edition

“… 6,000 Jews massacred in Fez in 1033; hundreds of Jews slaughtered in Muslim Cordoba between 1010 and 1015; 4,000 Jews killed in Muslim riots in Grenada in 1066, wiping out the entire community; the Berber Muslim Almohad depredations of Jews (and Christians) in Spain and North Africa between 1130 and 1232, which killed tens of thousands, while forcibly converting thousands more, and subjecting the forced Jewish converts to Islam to a Muslim Inquisition; the 1291 pogroms in Baghdad and its environs, which killed (at least) hundreds of Jews; the 1465 pogrom against the Jews of Fez; the late 15th century pogrom against the Jews of the Southern Moroccan oasis town of Touat; the 1679 pogroms against, and then expulsion of 10,000 Jews from Sanaa, Yemen to the unlivable, hot and dry Plain of Tihama, from which only 1,000 returned alive, in 1680, 90% having died from exposure; recurring Muslim anti-Jewish violence-including pogroms and forced conversions-throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, which rendered areas of Iran (for example, Tabriz) Judenrein; the 1834 pogrom in Safed where raging Muslim mobs killed and grievously wounded hundreds of Jews; the 1888 massacres of Jews in Isfahan and Shiraz, Iran; the 1910 pogrom in Shiraz; the pillage and destruction of the Casablanca, Morocco ghetto in 1907; the pillage of the ghetto of Fez Morocco in 1912; the government sanctioned anti-Jewish pogroms by Muslims in Turkish Eastern Thrace during June-July, 1934 which ethnically cleansed at least 3000 Jews; and the series of pogroms, expropriations, and finally mass expulsions of some 900,000 Jews from Arab Muslim nations, beginning in 1941 in Baghdad (the murderous "Farhud," during which 600 Jews were murdered, and at least 12,000 pillaged )-eventually involving cities and towns in Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Syria, Aden, Bahrain, and culminating in 1967 in Tunisia-that accompanied the planning and creation of a Jewish state, Israel, on a portion of the Jews' ancestral home.” Andrew Bostom. “Antisemitism in Islam’s Foundation Texts.” Jewcy. November 18, 2008.

Excerpted from Martin Gilbert, “The Routledge Atlas of Jewish History”/ 7th ed.

For more than 3,000 years Jews lived in the principal towns of the Eastern Mediterranean. The longest single overlordship of the area was that of Rome (677 years). Jewish rule in Judaea and Samaria in ancient times lasted a total of 641 years. Other rulers of the area included the Arabs (447 years), the Ottoman Turks (401 years) and the Crusaders (192 years).

Antioch: In Roman times, a centre of Jewish settlement whose Jews were granted equal citizenship rights with Greeks. In 600 AD after attempts to forcible conversion, the Jews rebelled, and many were killed; in 1171 only 10 Jewish families still remained; in 1750 about 40; in 1894 about 80 an din 1928 about 10.

Tripoli: At the time of the Arab conquest, the Arab Governor established a garrison of Jewish troops to guard the town against Byzantine attack. Early in the 11th century, Jews were persecuted, their synagogue turned into a mosque, and several houses destroyed. In the 16th century Jewish refugees from Spain settled and prospered. Early in the 17th century there were further persecutions and many Jews fled. In 1939 there were only four Jewish families left.

Beirut: In 500 AD there was a flourishing Jewish community, but in 1173 Benjamin of Tudela found only 50 Jews. In 1889 there w ere 1,500 Jews out of a total population of 20,000, in 1913 there were 5,000 out of 150,000.

Gaza: Some Jews settled here in Talmudic times. In 1481 AD Meshullam of Volterra found 60 Jewish householders. From 1600-1799 the Jewish community flourished, but in 1799 it fled the city on the eve of Napoleon’s arrival. Resettled in the 1880’s some 90 Jews were recorded in 1903.

Rafah: A flourishing Jewish community lived here both before and after the Arab conquest, but in 1080 AD the Jews were driven out after nearly a thousand years of continuous settlement.

Aleppo: Jews lived here from biblical times. In 1172 AD there were 1,500 Jews; in 1900 more than 10,000 forced to pay an annual poll tax.

Damascus: Contained some 10,000 Jewish inhabitants in Roman times, and over 3,000 when visited by Benjamin of Tudela in 1173 AD. In 1840 a ritual murder charge was brought against the Jews and in 1880 they were falsely accused of taking part in a massacre of Christians. In 1901 there were eight synagogues, and as many as 20,000 Jews.

THE JEWISH CONDITION UNDER MUSLIM RULE 750 AD – 1900 AD

Despite many decades of prosperity, influence, trade and toleration, the Jews living in t he Arab and Muslim world faced the continual danger of anti-Jewish discrimination, violence and persecution, sometimes over brief, but sometimes over long periods. From Spain to Saudi Arabia, this took the form of confinement to ghettoes, punitive taxation, enforced wearing of special clothes and other humiliations, as well as repeated looting and killing.

Algiers: 1805 – 40 Jews murdered.

Granada: 1066 – More than 5,000 Jews murdered during Arab riots

Morocco: 1864 – 18880 – More than 500Jews murdered in 16 years, often in broad daylight in the main streets.

Tripolitania: 1897 – Synagogues plundered throughout . Several Jews murdered.

Fez: 1033 – More than 6,000 Jews massacred.

Sefrou: - 1880 – Jewish quarter pillaged by Muslims, after a flood in which 54 Jews died.

Demnat: - 1875 – 20 Jews murdered; 1884 – Several Jews murdered amid much persecution

Marakesh: 1232 – The Jews massacred. Anti-Jewish persecutions throughout Morocco.

Tunis: 800 AD – Jews forced to pay an annual tax which constituted a substantial income for the State; 1145 k- Jews forced to convert or to leave; 1250 – Jews forced to wear distinguishing marks on cloths; 1869 – 18 Jews murdered by Muslims within a few months.

Kairawan: 1016 – the Jews of the city persecuted and forced to leave. Returning later they were again expelled.

Tunisia: 1150’s & 1270’s: Fierce anti-Jewish persecutions.

Jerba: 1864 – Arab bands pillage the Jewish communities, burn and loot synagogues, and rape the women.

Libya: 1588 – Forcible conversion of many Jews to Islam; 1785 – Ali Gurzi, Pasha persecutes Jews. Many hundred murdered; 1860 – Harsh anti-Jewish measures. All Jews leaving forced to pay a heavy exit fine (except those going to Palestine).

THE JEWS OF IRAQ; 600 BC – 1900 AD

The Jews of Iraq formed large communities from biblical times and were settled in hundreds of towns and villages for more than 1,200 years before the Muslim conquest of 634 AD. After that conquest they continued to proper despite spasmodic and at times severe persecution. In 800 AD and again in 850 AD they were subjected to heavy taxation, restrictions of their residence and forced to wear a yellow patch on their clothing. In 1000 AD they were subjected to severe oppression, including punitive taxation. In 1333 the synagogues of Baghdad were destroyed and much property looted. From 1750 to 1830, under Turkish rule, anti-Jewish measures were so severe that many fled to Persia and India. By 1900 the Jews of Iraq, after 2,500 years of continued settlement number more than 120,000.

500 AD: The scholars of the Sura and Pumbeditha academies compiled the Babylonian Talmud and served as spiritual guides for all diaspora Jewry for over 1,000 years. By 600 AD there were about 806,000 Jews living in Mesopotamia.

THE JEWS OF IRAQ IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

1933: 20 Jews murdered in Mosul.

1935: Jews removed from Government Service. Many Jews forbidden to travel to Palestine

1936: 10 Jews killed by Arab riots in Baghdad and Basra. Teaching of Hebrew prohibited.

July 1937: Violent anti-Jewish demonstrations in Baghdad. Jewish property destroyed.

June 1941: Baghdad - During riots following collapse of pro-Nazi Government of Rashid Ali, 175 Jews killed and 1,000 injured. Much looting of Jewish property. 900 Jewish houses destroyed. Many Jews tortured.

July 1946: Baghdad – Anti-Jewish riots. Hundreds of Jews wounded and much property destroyed.

1947: No Jewish children accepted in Government schools

May 1947: Following destruction of much Jewish property by mob attack, Jews were forced to move from Faluja to Baghdad. A Jeew murderered by a mob in Baghdad which accused him of giving poisoned sweets to an Arab child.

December 1947: A Jew accused of trying to inject cholera germs in water drunk by Arab children.

August 1948: Zionism declared a crime (with Nazism, Communism, Atheism and Anarchism). Many Jews imprisoned, some hanged.

September – October 1948: Basra – Many wealthy Jews arrested. One millionaire hanged and his fortune seized. His cousin died after 4 months in prison. All were accused of allegedly supplying arms to Zionists.

October 1948: President of the local Jewish Community in Sulaimaniya arrested on charge of maintaining contact with his sons in Israel.

December 1949: Baghdad – Anti-Jewish riots, many injured.

March 10, 1950: Official decree confiscates all property of Jews leaving for Israel, and appoints a special custodian to sell it by public auction. All emigrants’ bank accounts seized by the State.

February 25, 1958: Abolition to Jewish Community Status. All community property, including schools and hospital, transferred to Government.

March 3, 1968: Law No. 10 forbids Jews to receive more than 100 Iraqi dinars per month for sale of immovable property (in 1948 the Jewish community had been made to pay 250,000 dinars towards the Iraqi war effort against Israel and towards the Palestinian Arab refugees).

1969: 9 Jews hanged for “Zionist” activities in January; 2 hanged for “spying for Israel and the CIA”; in August 2 killed in September; 4 killed in November.

October 1972: Many Jews arrested. 16 disappear without trace. More than 20 murdered.

April 1973: A family of 5 Jews murdered in their home.

Jewish Population: 1948: 135,000; 1971: 2,500; 1974: 400

THE JEWS OF SYRIA 1936 –1975

1936 -9: Damascus - Headquarters of anti-Jewish propaganda, intensified after visit of Nazi officers from Germany.

1938: Damascus - Jews frequently stabbed on streets

June 1945: Damascus - A Jewish educationalist murdered.

November 18, 1945: Aleppo – Great Synagogue looted. Prayerbooks burnt in the street

December 2, 1947: Aleppo – Anti-Jewish riots. Many Jews killed; 140 Jewish homes, 50 shops, 18 synagogues and 5 schools burned.

April 1948: Aleppo – Further anti-Jewish riots. Many Jews in hiding, in fear of their lives.

August 5, 1949: Damascus – Bomb thrown in synagogue on Sabbath eve. 12 killed, 26 injured.

December 1949: Damascus – Jewish Community Council dissolved.

November 1950: Haifa – 30 Syrian Jews murdered at sea by Arab seamen paid to take them by boat to Israel. 20 bodies washed ashore at Haifa.

February 8, 1967: Damascus – Ministry of Defense Circular lists 47 Jewish merchants and forbids army personnel to trade with them.

June 1967: Kamishliye – 57 Jews killed by the mob during anti-Jewish riots

February 8, 1967: Ministry of Defense Circular lists 47 Jewish merchants and forbids army personnel to trade with them

March 1974: 4 young Jewesses murdered while attempting to leave Syria. Since 1971 at least 50 Jews (men, women and children) arrested. Many tortured. Beatings in streets commonplace.

Restrictions in force since 1967:

1. Jews’’ right to emigrate is completely forbidden. This applies even to Jews in Syria who hold foreign passports.
2. Jews are forbidden to move more than 3 kilometres from their place of residence. Those wishing to travel further must apply for a special permit.
3. Identity cards issued to Jews are stamped in red with the word “Mussawi” (Jew).
4. Jews are normally subject to a 10 p.m. curfew
5. Jews allowed 6 years elementary schooling only
6. Jewish houses in Kamishliye are marked in red
7. Jews barred from jobs in the public service, in public institutions or in banks
8. Government and military personnel are forbidden to purchase from Jewish shops
9. Foreigners may not visit the Jewish quarter unescorted
10. Jews forbidden to own radios or telephones, or to maintain postal contact with outside world
11. No telephones are installed in Jewish homes
12. The possessions of deceased Jews are confiscated by the Government. Their heirs must then pay for the use of the property. If they cannot, it is handed over to the Palestinian Arabs
13. Only two Jewish schools open in Damascus. Their directors and most of their teachers are Muslims. Exams usually ordered to be held on the Sabbath

Jewish Population: 1943 – 29,770; 1946: 18,000; 1974: 4,000

THE JEWS OF YEMEN AND ADEN

1900: By 1900 Jews had lived in Yemen for over 2,000 years.

1905: Reintroduction of earlier laws forbids all Jews to build higher houses than Muslims, to raise their voices in front of Muslims, or to engage in religious discussion or in any traditional Muslim trade or occupation.

1920’s: Jews ousted from textile and soap trades, and forced to train Muslims to take thseir place.

1922: Anti-Zionist propaganda spread by Palestinian Arabs. A special law orders forcible conversion to Islam of all Jewish orphans under 13, even when the mother was still alive; another common Muslim law reimposed.

1929: Jews forbidden to emigrate to Palestine. Some managed to flee to Aden.

1948: Anti-Jewish violence following rumour that 6 Jews had been arrested in Sana for murdering 2 Arab girls for ritual purposes.

1949: Jews, allowed to go to Aden, seek refuge there en route to Israel.

1933: Anti-Jewish attacks. Many Jews stoned and stabbed by Arab rioters.

November 1947: Broadcasts from Egypt relayed in the cafes, inciting anti-Jewish feeling.

December 1947: 3 days of anti-Jewish rioting leave 82 Jewish dead, 106 shops looted (out of 170), 220 Jewish houses destroyed and 4 synagogues burnt to the ground.

1965: Synagogue looted and burnt

June 1967: Some Jews murdered, 3 synagogues destroyed and Jewish property looted. Britain supervises evacuation of remaining 132 Jews to Israel.

Jewish Population in Yemen: 1948: 55,000; 1974: 500

Jewish Population in Aden: 1948: 8,000; 1974: nil

THE JEWS OF EGYPT

1882, 1919, 1921, 1924: Alexandria - Jews attacked in anti-foreigner riots.

1938 – 39: Towns in which there were serious anti-Jewish riots and violent protests against Jewish immigration from Nazi Germany to Palestine

November 2, 1945: “Balfour Day” riots throughout Egypt. 10 Jews killed, 350 injured. Shops looted and synagogues wrecked. Scrolls of the Law burnt in the streets.

May 15, 1948: 2,000 Jews arrested. Two weeks later a Law was passed confiscating the property of those arrested.

June i6, 1948: New York Times reports large Jewish financial contributions to the anti-Israeli War Chest and to Arab refugee relief.

June – July 1948: Over 50 Jews killed, some after savage mutilations. Many Jewish homes destroyed.

September 22, 1948: 20 Jews killed and 61 injured after an explosion in the Jewish quarter of Cairo, followed by Arab looting of Jewish houses, and seizure of Jewish property by the Government.

1956: 4,000 Jews expelled. Some allowed to take only a single suitcase out of Egypt. Those expelled were forced to renounce all property rights and financial claims.

1957: All Jews not in “continuous residence” since 1900 deprived of citizenship.

1960: Many synagogues closed down. Jewish orphanages, schools and old peoples’ homes forced to close. The Jewish hospital confiscated; its medical staff arrested

May-June 1967: All Jews in official employ dismissed. 500 Jews, including rabbis, arrested. Some brutally tortured, some released only in 19970, others expelled with only meager personal belongings.

Jewish Population: 1948 – 75,000; 1974 – 350

THE JEWS OF LIBYA: 1942- 1975

1942: During German occupation Jewish quarter sacked and looted; 2,000 Jews deported across the desert; as many as a fifth died.

November 4 – 7, 1945: Zavia; Zansur: Tripoli; Amrus: Kussabat; Tawarga; Benghazi – Towns in which more than 100 Jews were murdered (some tortured first, some burnt alive) during the anti-Jewish riots.

June 1948: Tripoli - 12 Jews and 4 Arabs killed in anti-Jewish riots. 280 Jewish houses destroyed.

1951: With Libya’s independence, all Jewish ties cut with Israel and Jewish organizations abroad.

1963: Jewish right to vote rescinded. Mass arrests. Jews forbidden to hold public office.

June 1967: Tripoli - Jewish shops ransacked and burned. 18 Jews killed. Those wishing to leave for Israel allowed only a single suitcase and 20 lbs. sterling.

1967: Six day war marked by wide-spread destruction of Jewish property. Synagogues, shops and homes looted and burned. 100 Jews killed.

Jewish Population: 1948: 38,000; 1974: 20

THE JEWS OF TUNISIA 1880 – 1975

1880: Nabel - 7 Jews killed

1881: French protectorate, condition of Jews improved. With Tunisian independence in 1956, the treatment of Jews rapidly worsened.

August 1917: Bizerta; Tunis; Susa; Mehdia; Sfax – Towns, whose Jewish quarters were looted by Tunisian troops during rebellion

July 1932: Sfax – Jews attacked by an Arab mob protesting at the Jews of Europe going to Palestine.

November 23, 1942: Germans arrest over 4,000 Jews, confiscate Jewish money, and deport some Jews to European concentration camps.

September 27, 1957: Rabbinical tribunal abolished. All matters of personal status to be judged by lay courts.

1958: Tunis – Ancient synagogue and cemetery destroyed for urban renewal.

July 22, 1958: The Jewish councils of Tunis and Sfax dissolved, and community work restricted to religious and charitable activity.

1964: Severe limitations imposed on Jewish economic activity

June 5, 1967: Anti-Jewish riots. Great Synagogue burned. Scrolls of the Law destroyed. One Jew killed. President Bourguiba publicly condemned the riot, apologized to the Chief Rabbi, and ensured that the rioters were punished, compensation paid, and the synagogue rebuilt.

Jewish Population: 1948 – 110,000; 1974 – 2,000

“We should have liked to be Arab Jews. If we abandoned the idea, it is because over the centuries the Muslim Arabs systematically prevented its realization by their contempt and cruelty…Not only were the homes of Jews in Germany and Poland torn down, and scattered to the four winds, demolished, but our homes as well.” Albert Memmi (a Jew born in Tunis), in “Who is an Arab Jew”, 1975.

THE JEWS OF ALGERIA

May 18, 1887: Mostaganem - Sacking of synagogue marks beginning of widespread anti-Jewish violence throughout Algeria.

1933: Algiers - French pro-Nazi elements lead anti-Semitic demonstrations.

August 5, 1934: Constantine – 25 Jews killed and much property destroyed during Muslim attacks on Jews.

1936: Algiers - A Jewish soldier killed in the street for tearing down anti-Semitic poster

1956: Jews were slowly forced to abandon their shops and professional jobs as a result of Arab boycott and their replacement by Arabs.

1956: Oran – Jewish shops sacked. Mobs march on Grand Synagogue.

1960: Algiers - During anti-French riots, the Great Synagogue desecrated and destroyed.

1960: Oran – Jewish cemetery desecrated.

1961: Algerian Provisional Government opposes Jewish emigration to Israel.

1962: With independence the Algerians deprive the Jews of their principal economic rights

1965: Algerian Supreme Court declares that Jews are no longer under the protection of the law. All Jewish commerce boycotted.

1966: A Jew executed on the Jewish New Year for “economic crimes”.

May 1967: Constantine – Grenade thrown at Jewish owned café. 13 injured.

1967: Synagogues desecrated, following Six Day War.

Jewish Population: 1948 – 140,000; 1974 – 500

THE JEWS OF MOROCCO

1875: Debdou – 20 Jews killed.

1903: Taza – 40 Jews killed by Muslims during anti-Jewish riots.

1903 – Azemmour – Many Jews killed in Muslim attacks.

1907: Mazagan - 30 Jews killed; 200 women, girls and boys abducted, raped, and then ransomed.

1907: Azemmour – Many Jews killed in Muslim attacks.

April 28, 1912: Fez – At start of French rule, Muslims riot, killing 60 Jews and sacking the Jewish quarter of the city.

1942: Casablanca – Synagogue desecrated in anti-Jewish riots.

June 1948: Djerada – 43 Jews killed during Muslim riots. Over 150 wounded.

1952: Following internal political strife, much anti-Jewish mob violence by Muslims.

Summer 1954: Much pillaging of Jewish property and destruction of Jewish schools

1955: Mazagan – Anti-Jewish violence. Much Jewish property destroyed. Several Jews killed also in Safi and Oued Zem.

February 1957: Exit visas for Jews abolished.

1958: Number of Jewish officials in Government deliberately decreased. All Zionist activity forbidden.

Summer 1960: Many Jewish schools nationalized.

1965: Publication of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”.

Jewish Population: 1948 – 285,000; 1974 – 20,000

JEWISH REFUGEES TO ISRAEL FROM ARAB LANDS MAY 1948 – MAY 1972

In 1945 there were more than 870,000 Jews living in the Arab world. Many of their communities dated back 2,500 years. Throughout 1947 and 1948 these Jews were subjected to continual pressure and persecution. There were anti-Jewish riots in Aden (where 82 Jews were killed), in Egypt (where 150 Jews were killed), in Syria (where Jewish emigration was forbidden), and in Iraq (where “Zionism” was made a capital crime). Many Jews of the Arab world were thus driven to seek a refuge in the new State of Israel. Arriving in Israel destitute, they were absorbed into the society, and became an integral part of the State. A further 260,000 found refuge in Europe and the Americas.

Morocco: 260,000; Algeria: 14,000; Libya: 35,666; Tunisia: 56,000; Egypt: 29,525; Iraq: 129,290; Lebanon: 6,000; Syria: 4,500; Yemen and Aden: 50,552

The transfer of populations on a massive scale, whether as a result of war or statecraft, has been a constant feature of twentieth century history, in almost every case; those uprooted from one land were absorbed into the life and society of their new home. The movement of more than 580,000 Jewish refugees from the Arab lands to Israel, and of a similar number of Palestinian Arabs to Gaza, the West Banks, Jordan, Syria and the Lebanon, was typical of such movements, although actually on a smaller scale than most of them. But whereas the uprooted Jews strove to become an integral part of Israeli life, the Palestinian Arabs remained, often as a deliberate act of policy by their host countries, isolated, neglected and aggrieved.