In
discussions about refugees in the Middle East,
a major piece of the narrative is routinely omitted, and my life is part of the
tapestry of what's missing. I am a Jew, and I, too, am a refugee. Some of my
childhood was spent in a refugee camp in Israel
(yes, Israel).
And I am far from being alone.
This
experience is shared by hundreds of thousands of other indigenous Jewish Middle
Easterners who share a similar background to my own. However, unlike the
Palestinian Arabs, our narrative is largely ignored by the world because our
story -- that of some 900,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries dispossessed
by Arab governments -- is an inconvenience for those who seek to blame Israel
for all the problems in the Middle East.
Our
lives in the Israel
of the 1950s were difficult. We had no money, no property; there were food
shortages, few employment prospects. Israel was a new and poor country
with very limited resources. It absorbed not only hundreds of thousands of us,
but also an equal number of survivors of Hitler's genocide. We lived in dusty
tents in "transit camps," their official name because these were to
be temporary, not permanent.
Housing
was eventually built for us, we became Israeli citizens, and we ceased being
refugees. The refugee camps in Israel
that I knew as a child were phased out, and no trace of them remains. Israel
did this without receiving a single cent from the international community,
relying instead on the resourcefulness of its citizens and donations from
Diaspora Jewish communities. Today, many of Israel's
top leaders are from families that were forced to flee Arab countries, and we
make up more than half of Israel's
Jewish population.
I
was born in Baghdad,
and like most other Iraqis, my mother tongue is Arabic. My family's cuisine, our mannerisms, our outlook, are all strongly
influenced by our synthesized Judeo-Arabic culture.
There
once was a vibrant presence of nearly 1 million Jews residing in 10 Arab
countries. Our Middle Eastern Jewish culture existed long before the Arab world
dominated and rewrote the history of the Middle East.
Today, however, fewer than 12,000 Jews remain in these lands -- almost none in Iraq.
What
happened to us, the indigenous Jews of the Arab world? Why were 150, 000 Iraqi
Jews -- my family included -- forced out of Iraq? Why were an
additional 800,000 Jews from nine other Arab countries also compelled to
leave after 1948?
When
the world of the 1930s and '40s was divided between the democratic Allies and
the Fascist Axis, Arab nationalists in Iraq
and Palestine
chose to form an alliance with Nazi Germany. The father of Palestinian
nationalism and the mufti of Jerusalem,
Haj Amin al-Husseini, began his close collaboration with Nazi Germany
in the mid-1930s.
The
British put out an arrest warrant for the pro-Nazi Palestinian leader, but he
escaped when war broke out in Europe in the
spring of 1939. Later that year, he arrived in Baghdad and linked up with pro-Nazi Iraqi
nationalist Rashid Ali al-Gaylani. In 1941 al-Husseini and al-Gaylani
engineered a pro- German coup against the pro-British Iraqi government, which
brought a reign of terror to Iraq's
Jews. This culminated in what we remember as the Farhud,
an Arabic word akin to "pogrom."
In
a two-day period Arab mobs went on a rampage in Baghdad
and elsewhere in Iraq,
murdering, raping and pillaging these cities' Jewish communities. Nearly 200
Jews were killed, more than 2,000 injured; some 900 Jewish homes were destroyed
and looted, as were hundreds of Jewish-owned shops. My father was a survivor of
the carnage. He hid in a hole dug in the ground to save his life. He saw Iraqi
soldiers pull small children away from their parents and rip the arms off young
girls to steal their bracelets. He saw pregnant women being raped and their
stomachs cut open.
Britain eventually regained control, but al-Husseini and other Palestinian nationalists had already
fled to Berlin
where they became honored guests of the Nazi state. Hitler told a grateful al-Husseini that "Germany's
only remaining objective in the [Middle East]
would be limited to the annihilation of the Jews living under British protection
in Arab lands."
Later,
in a speech over Radio Berlin's
Arabic Service, al-Husseini voiced support for the
Nazis' "Final Solution" and became the first Arab leader to call
openly for the expulsion of Jews from Arab lands -- some eight years before
there was a single Palestinian refugee.
Even
though Hitler lost the war, al-Husseini's call was
heeded. In 1948, Iraq
rounded up and imprisoned hundreds of Jews. Others were removed from their jobs
in the civil service, business licenses of Jews were revoked, and quotas were
placed on Jewish high school and college students. Later, discriminatory
restrictions were imposed on Jewish travel abroad and the buying or selling of
property. Thus, even if Jews wanted to escape Iraq, they could not do so legally,
and they could not liquidate their assets.
In
1950, the Iraqi parliament passed a law called Ordinance for the Cancellation
of Iraqi Nationality for Jews, Law No. 1 that stripped Iraqi Jews of their
citizenship. In 1951, the Iraqi parliament passed another law, confiscating all
Jewish property. Within a year, most of Iraq's
ancient Jewish population, my family included, fled to Israel.
Elsewhere
in the Arab world, Jews faced similar circumstances. In Libya in 1945, nearly 100 Jews were
massacred. In 1948, the Jewish communities of Aden
and Algeria
were rocked by a series of attacks that left hundreds dead and many more
injured. Discriminatory laws against Jews were passed in other Arab countries.
Within a decade, the exodus of Jews from Arab countries was almost complete,
with most going to Israel.
All
of this was conducted under the guise of law by Arab governments. This forced
Jews to flee lands where we had lived for thousands of years before the
Arab-Islamic conquests.
Since
1949, the United Nations has passed more than 100 resolutions on Palestinian
refugees. Yet, for Jewish refugees from Arab countries not a single U.N.
resolution has been introduced recognizing our mistreatment or calling for
justice for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees forced out of our
homes. This imbalance of the world's concern is itself an injustice.
Arab
governments instituted policies that led to nearly 900,000 Middle Eastern Jews
becoming stateless refugees. Those same governments forced about 750,000
Palestinian refugees and their descendants to remain in impoverished refugee
camps, refusing them citizenship and denying them hope.
Peace
between Israel
and the Arab world requires a solution that recognizes
that there were two refugee populations. Acknowledging and redressing the
legitimate rights of Jewish refugees from Arab countries will promote the cause
of justice, peace and a true reconciliation.
Semha
Alwaya is an attorney in the Bay Area and a founding
member of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North
Africa (www.jimena-justice.org). E-mail us at insight@sfchronicle.com.