The Jewish Refugee Problem - Due Recognition

by Joseph Braude / May 24, 2006

Later this week, a bipartisan group of senators and congressmen are expected to introduce a resolution that would make the Arab-Israeli conflict a little easier to resolve--by making it a little more complicated to discuss. The resolution urges the president to make sure that, during international discussions on refugees in the Middle East, "any explicit reference to Palestinian refugees is matched by a similar explicit reference to Jewish and other refugees, as a matter of law and equity." Sponsors of the measure include everyone from Rick Santorum on the right to Dick Durbin on the left, and a number of congressmen and senators in between.

The resolution constitutes a long-overdue acknowledgment of a tragedy which, for decades, Arab states have denied and the international community has ignored. Nine hundred thousand Jews have been forced to flee their homes in Arab countries and Iran since the years leading up to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. (Most left in two waves--immediately before or after Israel's independence, and during the years following the Six Day War.) Some were deported outright; others faced widespread campaigns of violence and intimidation so unbearable as to render their ancestral homelands unlivable.
Though a small number of Jews from Arab countries identified as Zionists in the early twentieth century, most had been thoroughly integrated into their societies and embodied the fondest hopes for a progressive, pluralist form of Arab nationalism. They had started no war, yet they came to be overwhelmingly stigmatized as traitors by the majority culture. Consider the infamous "Farhud," an event that took place in Baghdad in 1941 when Iraqis from the military and security services, German-backed fascist groups, and Baghdad's slums stormed Jewish neighborhoods and killed nearly 200 Jews. They also killed scores of Muslims, many of whom were fighting to protect their neighbors. Jewish businesses were destroyed and synagogues desecrated. Such violence against Jews, in Iraq and elsewhere, was an early manifestation of an ugly brand of Arab nationalism that exhibits little tolerance for ethnic and religious minorities--and, even today, continues to function as a crutch for dictators across the region.

Having served the Arab Middle East as government workers, professionals, merchants, and artists, the indigenous Jewish population left a profound economic and social void behind them as they fled for their lives--a void that some Arab countries still have not managed to fill, 60 years later. These states' loss was Israel's gain: Today, 52 percent of the Jewish population of Israel consists of emigres from North Africa and the Middle East.

Acknowledgement of this tragedy has been slow in coming. Though the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has asserted that Jews fleeing Arab countries were "bona fide" refugees who "fall within the mandate of the [UNHCR] office," not so much as a single resolution was ever passed by the United Nations on their behalf. By contrast, 101 resolutions have been passed on behalf of Palestinian refugees.

To his credit, Bill Clinton understood that the refugee problem was not one-sided. In July 2000, he told Israeli television that "Israel is full of people, Jewish people, who lived in predominantly Arab countries who came to Israel because they were made refugees in their own land." He called for an "international fund [to be] set up for the refugees" to resolve the claims of "both sides."

Still, international discourse on the subject has remained startlingly lopsided; and that, in turn, has played a role in perpetuating the Arab-Israeli conflict. By only acknowledging one mass dislocation--the Palestinian one--the international community has made the Arab-Israeli "refugee problem" appear to be intractable. In fact, once you acknowledge that both Palestinians and Jews have suffered dislocations, it becomes much easier to imagine give-and-take that would lead to a fair resolution of historical grievances.

Such claims are more than a political matter, however; for families like my own, they are also personal. My mother was born into a Jewish family in Baghdad in 1944. Several of her siblings are old enough to have personal memories of the "Farhud." My late grandfather and his oldest daughter and son--then twelve and eleven, respectively--were caught trying to flee the country in the late 1940s. The children spent six months in an Iraqi prison, which my aunt recalls as having been "full of Jews." They were eventually released and flown out of Baghdad with their mother, four more siblings, and 120,000 other Jews in the celebrated airlifts to Israel of the early 1950s. My grandfather suffered a year longer in prison before joining them on his own. They said goodbye to their friends, their home, almost all their belongings, and 2,500 years of Jewish history in Mesopotamia. Like many Palestinians, they too became refugees. And yet, somehow, over the last 50 years, their history has been largely ignored.

JOSEPH BRAUDE is the author of The New Iraq: Rebuilding the Country for Its People, the Middle East, and the World.