Jews who have lived under Muslim rule, wherever they live today, are determined to make the international community aware of their sufferings in the aftermath of the 1948–49 Arab–Israeli War. The first recognition of their plight came in 1957, when Auguste Lindt, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, spoke of the Jews who were being expelled from Egypt. ‘Another emergency problem is now arising,’ he said, ‘that of refugees from Egypt. There is no doubt in my mind that those refugees from Egypt who are not able, or not willing to avail themselves of the protection of the Government of their nationality, fall under the mandate of my office.’1
In the immediate aftermath of the Six–Day War of 1967, Dr. E. Jahn, a member of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, noted with regard to ‘Jews from Middle Eastern and North African countries,’ that ‘such persons may be considered prima facie within the mandate of this office.’2 Then on 22 November 1967 the United Nations Security Council also pronounced on the refugee issue, when it voted for Resolution 242 regarding the future borders of Israel. For two days, the Soviet Union had sought to refer to ‘Palestinian’ refugees, but Britain and the United States wanted the resolution to apply equally to both the Palestinian refugees from Israel and the Jewish refugees from Muslim lands. Lord Carrington for Britain and Arthur Goldberg for the United States were both emphatic in this wish, and ultimately prevailed. Hence the open wording of the Resolution, which affirms ‘the necessity … for achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem.’3
Following the Six–Day War, the plight of those Jews still living under Muslim rule gained international coverage. On 28 January 1970 a New York Times headline declared: ‘3 arab lands said to oppress jews; Iraq, Syria, Egypt Scored at a Parley in Paris.’ The article had been sent from Paris the previous day. It began: ‘Delegates from 26 countries appealed to world opinion today to save the handful of Jews remaining in Iraq, Syria and the United Arab Republic.’4 The United Arab Republic (UAR) was Egypt.
On 10 November 1975 the United Nations’ General Assembly in New York adopted Resolution 3379, by a vote of 72 to 35 (with 32 abstentions), stating that ‘Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.’ Every Arab and Muslim government voted in favour of the resolution, intensifying the harsh anti–Israel stance within the United Nations. The question of compensation for Jews who had been driven out of Arab and Muslim lands was clearly not going to receive meaningful support at the United Nations.5
In Paris two weeks later, on 24 November 1975, Jews originally from Arab and Muslim countries came together from Israel, Europe and the Americas to establish the Tel Aviv–based World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC). WOJAC demanded that the remainingJews in Syria and Iraq be granted their ‘elementary human and civil rights, including freedom to emigrate,’ and that ‘fair compensation’ be paid by the Arab States ‘for communal and private property which was stolen, frozen or expropriated as well as for injuries suffered by Jews as a result of discrimination or persecution by the responsible Arab countries.’6
On 27 October 1977, PresidentJimmy Carter made the first–ever United States presidential statement on this issue, speaking of Jewish refugees ‘who have the same rights as others do.’ The Camp David agreements between Israel and Egypt, brokered by the United States, referred specifically to the ‘mutual settlement’ of all refugee financial claims–those of Jews as well as Arabs.
The saga of Jewish dispossession was not only a matter of history. In 1986 the New York Times highlighted the plight that year of Jews in Lebanon. On February 24 a headline read: ‘jews in Lebanon urged to get out.’ The report began: ‘Leading French Jews, saying that the Jews of Lebanon are in imminent danger, called on them today to leave for other countries. The appeal at a conference here today came amid a continuing campaign by extremist Moslems against Lebanese Jews.’7
What rights did these Lebanese Jewish refugees have? What rights did the hundreds of thousands of Jews have, who had fled before them from so many Muslim lands? In an interview on 27 July 2000, President Bill Clinton brought the issue into the Twenty–First Century, focusing on the dispossessed of 1948. A fund ought to be set up, he said, that ‘should compensate the Israelis who were made refugees by the war, which occurred after the birth of the State of Israel.’ Israel, he went on to explain, ‘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.’8
In Locked Doors: The Seizure of Jewish Property in Arab Countries, published in 2001, Itamar Levin, an Israeli journalist and expert on Holocaust victims’ assets, called on the Israeli Government to ‘risk raising the claims filed by refugees’ as part of either Israeli–Palestinian or Israeli–Syrian negotiations. ‘Taking this risk,’ he wrote, ‘would mean some sort of justice for anyone forced to leave their home, against their will, carrying only one suitcase in hand.’9
In the Twenty–First Century no year has passed without some indignity being imposed on Jews in Muslim lands. In the first days of 2002, seventy Egyptian Jews and Jewish visitors to Egypt attempted to pray at the graveside of Rabbi Yaakov Abuhatzeira in Alexandria, Egypt, but were refused permission to do so by the Egyptian authorities. It is Jewish custom to visit the gravesite of a righteous man on the anniversary of his death; Rabbi Abuhatzeira was the father of the Baba Sali–Rabbi Yisrael Abuhatzeira–a renowned kabbalist scholar revered by several million Jews from Arab lands in Israel and around the world.10 Islamic groups in Egypt nonetheless insisted that their Government prohibit Jews from visiting the grave.
In 2002 the major Jewish–American organisations founded Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC). Launched at a press conference outside the United Nations in New York on 30 September 2002, its mandate was, and remains: ‘To ensure that justice for Jews displaced from Arab countries assumes its rightful place on the international political agenda and that their rights be secured as a matter of law and equality.’ Ten months later, in July 2003, Stanley Urman, the organisation’s Executive Director, and David Matas, a Canadian human rights lawyer, issued a dossier setting out the case for the rights and redress of Jews who had been dispossessed by Arab nations after 1948. Their theme was that in the absence of historical truth and contemporary justice ‘there can be no reconciliation, without which there can be no just, lasting peace between and among all peoples of the region.’11
Also in 2003, David Matas and Stanley Urman, together with Irwin Cotler–soon to be Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada–published a detailed report on the confiscation of Jewish property, based on the legal decrees of several Arab governments. ‘Figures as to losses vary,’ they wrote, noting that the estimate of the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC) was ‘well over $100 billion.’ In the Cotler–Matas–Urman report, as in the earlier Urman–Matas dossier, the main focus was not on the monetary aspect, but on justice.12
The time had come, many Jews from Muslim lands believed, for their story to be at the forefront of the Jewish narrative. The debate on the issue of restitution and justice was certainly gaining international attention. At the end of October 2003 a bi–partisan resolution submitted to the United States Congress–but never adopted–recognised the ‘Dual Middle East Refugee Problem.’ It spoke of the forgotten exodus from Arab countries of nine hundred thousand Jews, who ‘were forced to flee and in some cases brutally expelled amid coordinated violence and anti–Semitic incitement that amounted to ethnic cleansing.’13
As part of a bizarre Libyan exercise in public relations, in April 2004, Saif al–Islam Gaddafi, the son of the Libyan leader, said that all 30,000 Libyan Jews who had earlier fled the country ‘were entitled to be compensated by the State for property confiscated before their departure.’ Nothing came of this. Those Libyan Jews in Israel, Gaddafi’s son added, would be able to return to Libya–‘their country and original homeland’–leaving their homes in Israel to the Palestinian Arabs.14
A real breakthrough came one year later. On 3 June 2005 the Canadian Prime Minister, Paul Martin, made the first statement on Jewish refugees by a Western leader outside the United States. He declared: ‘A refugee is a refugee and the situation of Jewish refugees from Arab lands must be recognized.’ Martin added: ‘All refugees deserve our consideration as they have lost both physical property and historical connections.’15
One problem that confronted all campaigners for redress–and continues to confront them to this day–is that the plight of Palestinian Arab refugees is not only visible, but also perpetuated by the United Nations’ annual renewal of their status as refugees. The Jews from Muslim lands, despite having been legally recognised as refugees historically, were not perceived as refugees in recent decades, having been integrated into society in Israel and other countries. Eli Timan, an Iraqi Jew living and working in London, commented: ‘The difference is that we got on with our life, worked hard and progressed so that today there is not a single Jewish refugee from Arab lands.’16 It had been the goal of the Jewish refugees to become citizens, and in this they had succeeded.
On 4 April 2007, the senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee in the United States, Cuban–born Congresswoman Ileana Ros–Lehinten (Florida), stated at a Congressional Hearing: ‘Jews who were born in Arab countries have lost their resources, their homes, their heritage and their heritage sites.’17 In written evidence to the Congressional Hearing, the Canadian Member of Parliament and former Justice Minister Irwin Cotler set out the legal case for redress, arguing that ‘the rights for Jewish refugees from Arab countries have to be a part of any peace process if that peace process is to have any integrity.’18
In November 2007, on the eve of the Annapolis Conference, at which Israeli and Palestinian leaders tried–as they had done at Oslo in 1993–to embark on the path to a lasting agreement, a number of Jews from Muslim lands sought to put their issue–recognition and redress–on the negotiating table. Baghdadi–born Heskel Haddad, who had fled from Iraq in 1951, gave an interview to the press in which he said that it was ‘imperative’ to raise the issue at Annapolis. Haddad calculated that the amount of land and property that the Jews had been forced to leave behind in Iraq, Egypt and Morocco totalled 100,000 square kilometres, five times the size of the State of Israel.19
On 27 November 2007, at the end of the Annapolis Conference, Israel’s Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, spoke of the relevance to any future Israeli–Palestinian agreement of the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab countries after 1948. A month later Maurice Shohet, a leader of the Iraqi Jewish community in the United States, joined fourteen other Jews, who had emigrated to the United States from many lands, in a meeting at the White House with President George W. Bush. At this meeting, Shohet asked the President to remember the rights of the Jews from Arab countries whenever the rights of Palestinian Arab refugees were raised in the international arena.
On 16 January 2008 a headline in the Jerusalem Post announced: ‘official: bush aware of jewish refugees’ plight.’ According to the report, President Bush, at the start of his final year as President of the United States, had raised the issue of Jewish refugees from Muslim countries with the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
On 19 March 2008, Regina Waldman, an executive committee member of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC), appeared before the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, where she testified about her family’s flight from Libya after the Second World War.20 At this meeting in Geneva the Executive Director of JJAC, Stanley Urman, submitted to the Human Rights Council the organisation’s report, ‘Justice for Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries: The Case for Rights and Redress.’ It included documents showing a pattern of State–sanctioned oppression that precipitated the mass exodus of Jews from ten Arab countries.
An important development came on 1 April 2008, when the United States Congress unanimously passed House Resolution 185, the first formal recognition by any Government of equal rights for Jewish refugees from Arab countries. The Congress also affirmed that the United States Government should recognise that all victims of the Arab–Israeli conflict must be treated equally. It further urged the President and all United States officials participating in Middle East discussions to ensure that references to Palestinian refugees ‘also include a similarly explicit reference to the resolution of the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.’21
On 23 June 2008, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries held a meeting in London, attended by fifty delegates from ten countries. On the following day, at a hearing in the British House of Lords, Edwin Shuker, President of JJAC, spoke about his family’s flight from Iraq. Eighty–year–old Sarah Fedida described her family’s expulsion from Egypt in 1956. Irwin Cotler, the former Canadian Minister of Justice, told the House of Lords: ‘The displacement of 850,000Jews from Arab countries is not just a “Forgotten Exodus” but a “Forced Exodus.”’
The issue of redress for Jewish refugees from Muslim lands–and of their equivalence to Palestinian Arab refugees–continued to gain momentum in the international arena. On 21 August 2008, at a meeting with the Foreign Press Association in Israel, the Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, stated: ‘Israel is the homeland for the Jewish people and the Palestinian State is the homeland for the Palestinians. Just as Israel gave refuge to Jews who needed to leave–not only Europe after the Holocaust but also Arab States after the creation of the State of Israel’–and were ‘absorbed’ in Israel.22
In the opinion of Irwin Cotler, David Matas and Stanley Urman, three leading experts on the rights of Jews from Muslim lands, ‘the plight of the Palestinian refugees will be solved only as part of an overall Middle East peace settlement. But there cannot be an overall peace settlement without also addressing the wrongs done to Jewish refugees from Arab countries. A peace agreement which provided redress for Palestinian refugees without redress for Jewish refugees would be wrong in principle and unworkable in practice.’23
Another step forward in the quest for restitution and justice came in January 2009, when the Israeli Ministry of Pensioners’ Affairs created a special department to collect claims byJews who had lost their property when they left Arab countries. In the words of the Director–General of the Ministry, Dr. Avi Bitzur, ‘Israel has talked about this on and off for sixty years. Now we are going to deal with it as we should have all along.’24
On 3 February 2009, Dr. Bitzur gave details of the new Israeli campaign for compensation of seized property and assets at a panel entitled ‘A Matter of HistoricJustice: Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries,’ held at the Ninth Annual Herzliya Conference in the Israeli coastal town of Herzliya.25 That compensation would be part of the equation of Arab and Jewish losses after 1948. The key word was ‘justice.’ What had for many years been seen only as a part of history–the mass exodus of 850,000 Jews, and the loss of their homes, shops, factories, land, synagogues, schools and personal possessions–was being presented as a living, relevant issue in the struggle for the redress of rights for two peoples: Jews from Muslim lands seeking redress and recognition, and Palestinian Arabs seeking redress and statehood.
On 9 June 2009, five days after President Barack Obama spoke in Cairo to the Muslim world, calling for American–Muslim reconciliation, the New York Times published a letter from André Aciman, a Jew who had left Egypt with his family in 1964. Aciman wrote that ‘with all the President’s talk of “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world” and shared “principles of justice and progress,” neither he nor anyone around him, and certainly no one in the audience, bothered to notice one small detail missing from the speech: he forgot me. The President never said a word about me. Or, for that matter, about any of the other 800,000 or so Jews born in the Middle East who fled the Arab and Muslim world or who were summarily expelled for being Jewish in the 20th century.’26
André Aciman’s letter reflected a widespread concern that, even though the first decade of the Twenty–First Century was closing with a search for reconciliation and understanding between Christian and Muslim societies, Jews who had lived in Muslim lands would not be remembered, nor their hopes for justice upheld.
On 22 February 2010 the Israeli Knesset approved a law instructing the Israeli Government to protect the rights of Jewish refugees from Arab countries in all forthcoming peace negotiations; the first Israeli law to recognize Jews as coming to Israel not only to fulfil Zionist aspirations, but as refugees. Working to ensure the law’s passing were Nissim Ze’ev, the Knesset member who introduced it–whose parents came from Iraq–and a Libyan–born Israeli businessman, Isaac Devash, who mobilised the leadership of Sephardi and other constituencies in Israel to support it. The search for justice had taken a significant leap forward. It was also a search for reconciliation, based on the international fund proposed by President Clinton in 2000, to benefit both Jewish and Palestinian refugees through an equitable resolution of their mutual sixty–year status as refugees.
1 Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Geneva, 29 January to 4 February 1957.
2 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Document No. 7/3/2/Libya, 6 July 1967.
3 United Nations’ Security Council Resolution 242: United Nations website, www.un.org/documents/sc/res/1967/scres67.htm.
4 John L. Hess, ‘3 Arab Lands Said To Oppress Jews,’ New York Times, 28 January 1970.
5 It took sixteen years before the Zionism Is Racism resolution, Resolution 3379 of 10 November 1975, was revoked by Resolution 4686 on 16 December 1991.
6 ‘Resolution Adopted by the Preparatory Convention of WOJAC in Paris on 25.11.1975’ (flyer): World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries. A year later, at WOJAC’s request, I produced an illustrated booklet, The Jews of Arab Lands: Their History in Maps (London: Board of Deputies of British Jews, 1976).
7 Richard Bernstein, ‘Jews in Lebanon Urged to Get Out,’ New York Times, 24 February 1986.
8 ABC News transcript: ‘Israeli TV Interviews Clinton,’ 27 July 2000.
9 Itamar Levin, Locked Doors, page 235.
10 ‘Jews Denied Permission To Pray At Rabbi’s Grave,’ Israel Faxx, 4 January 2002, IsraelNationalNews.com.
11 David Matas and Stanley A. Urman, Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries: The Case for Rights and Redress (brochure), page 1.
12 Irwin Cotler, David Matas and Stanley A. Urman, Jewish Refugees: The Case for Rights and Redress, 2003.
13 Washington DC: House of Congress Resolution 311.
14 Alex Sholem, ‘Come Home, Gaddafi’s son invites Libyan Jews to return,’ The Jewish News, 16 April 2004.
15 Canadian Jewish News, interview, 3 June 2005.
16 Eli Timan, letter to the author, 13 December 2007.
17 ‘Justice for Christians, Jews And Other Displaced Minorities,’ The Editors, 21 July 2007.
18 Quoted in the Canadian Jewish News, 9 August 2007.
19 Etgar Lefkovits, ‘Expelled Jews hold deeds on Arab lands,’ Jerusalem Post, 16 November 2007.
20 Another Jew who spoke at this open forum was Moroccan–born Sylvain Abitbol, an executive committee member of JJAC and a co–President of the Canadian Jewish Congress.
21 House Resolution 185, 110th Congress, 1st Session, House of Representatives, introduced on 12 February 2007. Fear of such a resolution led, a year later, to the Egyptian authorities cancelling a tourist trip planned by a group of Jews born in Egypt ‘due to false rumours that this group was coming to Egypt for property claims.’ Information conveyed by Levana Zamir, House of Lords, London, 23–25 June 2008: The International Association of Jews from Egypt: Annual Report, 2008.
22 Israel Foreign Ministry, 21 August 2008.
23 The Hon. Irwin Cotler, David Matas and Stanley A. Urman, Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries: The Case for Rights and Redress, page 57.
24 Haviv Rettig Gur, ‘Government to recover assets in Muslim lands,’ Jerusalem Post, 27 January 2009.
25 The speakers included Dr. Avi Bitzur, Director–General, Ministry for Pensioners’ Affairs (in the chair); Raffi Eitan, Minister for Pensioners’ Affairs, in charge of Restitution of Jewish Rights and Assets; and Edwin Shuker, President of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries.
26 André Aciman, ‘The Exodus Obama Forgot to Mention,’ New York Times, 9 June 2009.