Palestinians
have not been the Middle East's only victims.
We Arabs should recall the many Jews who paid the price for the Arab-Israeli
conflict.
July 2007
With Gaza on a knife edge and any prospect of
imminent hope dashed, it seems hard to believe that just over two months ago
the Arab world dusted off the 2002 Saudi peace initiative and made Israel
an offer of comprehensive peace that few thought Israel could refuse. While not
rejecting it outright, Israel's visionless and embattled premier, Ehud Olmert,
ignored it and wished it would go away.
According
to Israeli diplomats, one of the main sticking points is the issue of the right
of return of the 4 million or so Palestinian refugees. Israel worries that the
Arabs will want to implement UN general assembly resolution 194 of December 1948, which states that
“the refugees wishing to return to their homes and
live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the
earliest practicable date” – which would pose fundamental difficulties, since
many of these homes no longer exist or have been occupied for generations by
others.
For its
part, the Arab peace offer does not make any demands on this front beyond
stating that a “just solution” needs to be found to the Palestinian refugee
problem. One way the Arabs can set in motion a new dynamic and make Israel face
up to its responsibilities is by facing up to their own past.
Palestinians
have not been the Middle East's only victims of tumultuous forces beyond their
control. Another group that got swept up in history’s unforgiving currents was
the Arab world's once-thriving Jewish minority: the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews.
There were
some three-quarters of a million Jews living in Arab countries prior to the
creation of Israel in 1948. The Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) had a
Jewish population of up to half a million; Iraq, up to 140,000; Egypt had up to
100,000; and Yemen, around 50,000. Today, the Jewish populations of most Arab
countries number a few hundred or fewer, with the exception of Morocco which
still has a few thousand Jews.
Although
most Middle Eastern Jews saw Zionism as a remote and alien European dream,
about half the Jews who left or were expelled from Arab countries ended up in
Israel. The rest went to Europe and the Americas, the largest single group
settling in France.
The last
few decades have been marked by creative reinvention and collective amnesia.
Israel has worked very hard to veil her Arab face, while the Arab world has
airbrushed out its Jewish features. But the terms “Arab” and “Jew” are
sometimes so fluid that individual members of either group have more in common
with each other than their own supposed kin.
Rather
like “Jew”, “Arab” is a very loose tag applied to a diverse range of peoples
and cultures. It covers the real McAhmed Arab societies of Arabia, as well as
the “Arabised” societies of the rest of the Middle East. The only things Arabs
share in common are language - and that is not always the case, given the great
difficult those from the western reaches of the Arab world have in
communicating with those in the east – and to a lesser extent religion, i.e.
most but by no means all are Muslim.
Each
major Jewish population in the Arab world had its own distinct identity and
history. The Iraqi Jewish population is believed to have been the most
established, having lived in Mesopotamia since
at least the Babylonian exile. In fact, according to Biblical
mythology, Abraham was an “Iraqi” who moved to Canaan
(modern-day Syria, Lebanon and
Israel-Palestine) and, procreative genius that he was,
gave birth to three nations: the Israelites, the Arabs and the Edomites. Bizarrely, “God” also promised old Abe
land that was already inhabited for his offspring, without satisfactorily
explaining how this would come about or what was to be done with the locals.
Prior to
the arrival of Israel, Iraqi Jews were so well integrated that they described
themselves as Arabs of the Jewish faith. In fact, the early pan-Arabist
movement in Iraq included Jews as part of its vision. Things began to sour,
however, with the mass immigration of Zionists to Palestine in the 1930s.
Unfortunately
for Iraqi Jews and for Iraq, they were being blamed for events they had no part
to play in and often disapproved of just because they happened to share the
religion of the Zionists in Palestine. They gradually fell victim to
increasingly repressive and discriminatory laws. During his short-lived
premiership, Rashid Ali al-Kaylani – who was against the British and their
puppet Nuri al-Said and hoping that “the enemy of my enemy
is my friend” wanted Iraq to join the Axis against the British – stoked up
anti-Jewish hatred, leading to riots which killed some 200 Jews and convinced
most of the rest that it was time to move on.
Although
the Arab League states prohibited the emigration of their Jews to Israel in
order to deprive the new state of labour and the Jewish population it
desperately needed to give the country an eventual Jewish majority, Iraq was
the first country to allow the mass exodus of its Jews, who faced harsh living
conditions and discrimination at the hands of their superior-feeling European
co-religionists. But being well-educated and entrepreneurial, they are now the
most successful Mizrahi population in Israel.
In
Morocco, the process of linking local Jews to events in Palestine was slower.
In fact, during the second world war, Morocco was under the control of Vichy
France. In 1941, the Vichy regime enacted anti-semitic decrees excluding Jews
from public functions and forcing them to wear yellow stars of David. King
Mohamed V refused to apply the racist laws and defiantly invited all the rabbis
of Morocco to his 1941 jubilee celebrations.
Sadly, the
beginning of the end began with the 1948 war during which anti-Jewish riots
broke out, killing 44 Jews. After that, the country where Iberian Jews and
Muslims had taken refuge from the inquisition and where much of its native
Berber population had converted to Judaism prior to the advent of Islam was
gradually depopulated of its Jewish community. Today, only 5,000 or so remain.
While in Morocco,
I visited some of the last remnants of its Jewish community in Marrakech, including the blind rabbi of the
city’s only remaining synagogue.
If the
Bible is anything to go by, Egyptian Jewry is the oldest in the world, and even
the Torah attests that the Jews had good times not just bad there. Only decades
prior to the creation of Israel, Egypt’s indigenous Jewish population doubled
through the immigration of Jews escaping persecution in other countries or
looking for prosperity. And Jews did not just play an important economic role
in Egypt. One of the leading lights of Egyptian anti-British nationalism was
the Italian-Egyptian Jew YaqubSanu who started the first newspaper in
Egyptian Arabic, a rag speciailising in political satire.
But as the
partition of Palestine and war loomed ever closer, things also soured in Egypt.
Over the coming two decades, Egyptian Jewry fell foul of anti-Zionism,
anti-colonialism, pan-Arabism and not to mention anti-Egyptian Zionist
intrigue.
An
interesting insight into the death throes of this disappeared world, not just
of Egyptian Jewry, but also of the excessive aristocracy and privilege of
Egypt's pre-revolutionary ruling elite is provided by André Aciman’s highly
readable Out of Egypt.
While it
is impossible to turn back the clock and undo a crime, we Arabs should recall
the hundreds of thousands of Jews who paid the price for the Arab-Israeli
conflict. We should continue to demand that Israel apologise for the expulsion
and exodus of the Palestinians, but we should offer a similar apology to our
one-time Jewish populations.
The Arab League should continue to press for a “just
solution” to the Palestinian refugee problem, but Arab states which once had
Jewish communities should also offer an equivalent “right of return”. Perhaps
many Jews, particularly those living in Israel, would not accept this offer,
but it is the virtue of the thought that counts.
Besides,
many Arab Jews refused to go to Israel and, instead, settled in Europe and the
Americas (around half a million, today). Some of these could be coaxed back to
Morocco or Egypt – and even, one day, Iraq. And with a restored Jewish minority
in Arab countries, the false divisions that Zionism, pan-Arabism and Islamism
have tried to impose on our diverse region can be chipped away and exposed for
the fallacies that they are.
