THE REFUGEES WE DON’T CARE ABOUT

Close to a million Jews were ethnically cleansed in the same era that 700,000 Palestinians became refugees. (Yawn.)

Jews in Iraq, 1932, standing outside Ezekiels’ tomb in Kafel, southeastern Iraq.

In 1948, there were more than a quarter of a million Jews in Morocco. Today it is estimated there are about 2,000. Over the same period, the Jewish population of Algeria fell from about 140,000 to fewer than than 50. Egypt: from 80,000 to 40 people. Iraq went from about 140,000 to an estimated five or seven people. Across North Africa, the Jewish population plummeted from about half a million in 1948 to about 3,500. Across the region of Muslim-majority countries, from the west of Africa across the Middle East to Turkey, Pakistan and Bangladesh, places that counted about a million Jewish citizens 70 years ago now have fewer than 30,000.

When Arab and Muslim leaders across the world turned ferociously against Israel at the moment of its inception, they and their Muslim citizens, to a large extent and to varying degrees depending on place, turned similarly on their Jewish fellow citizens. Anti-Jewish violence erupted across the region. Jews — almost every last one, as these numbers testify — fled or were forced out.

What about those refugees?

Well, like refugees throughout history, if lucky, these ones found new homes. They put the past behind them, as much as one can, and made the best of their lives.

But ask the average “pro-Palestinian” activist and they probably haven’t even heard of these refugees — even as they pronounce Palestinian refugees and their descendants the injustice of our era. An equivalent, of even larger, number of Jews were thrown out of their homes in the same era that 700,00 Arab Palestinians were displaced by the Arab initiated war against Israel in 1948-'49. But the world’s approrach to these two populations could not be starker. 

Even among those who do know their history, it seems this, like every other issue involving Jews, this is contested territory.

British writer Rahel Shabi, herself a child of Jewish parents from Iraq, rejects the idea that Jews from these countries should be considered refugees: “[T]hey left because they wanted to,” she (in)credulously writes.

“Broadly, you could say that any Middle Eastern Jew (‘Oriental’ or ‘Mizrahi’ Jew) who defines their migration to Israel as ‘Zionist’ cannot also be a refugee: the former label has agency and involves a desire to live in the Jewish state; the second suggests passivity and a lack of choice.”

This would be true if it were true. Just as the definition of Palestinian refugee includes people who fled for their lives or were expelled or otherwise made to feel unwelcome enough that they emigrated, the 800,000 to one million Jews who fled countries across the Middle East and North Africa after 1948 have individual stories and motivations. 

There were certainly some who thought the grass might be greener elsewhere. But the idea that 97% of Jewish people living as minority populations across two dozen countries just spontaneously upended their lives, in many or most cases leaving behind almost all their worldly possessions and what had been until the 1940s often a comfortable or at least tolerable existence, is preposterous. 

Is there a single instance in history when 97% of a particular population voluntarily migrated simply because “they wanted to”? There were pogroms and second-class citizenships for Jews in almost every Arab and Muslim-majority country for centuries. After 1948, life became far worse. To paper over this truth is barbaric. It is historical revisionism with a despicable political agenda. And these are actual human beings we are talking about. Shabi’s inhumanity is jaw-dropping.

I don’t know what her parents carried with them when they fled Iraq, but her inheritance seems to include a willingness to excuse ethnic cleansing when she decides the victims deserve it.

During the lead-up to the Partition Resolution, Arab leaders didn’t even hide the fact that they saw their own Jewish citizens as hostages.

An Egyptian official told the United Nations they should “not lose sight of the fact that the proposed solution might endanger a million Jews living in the Muslim countries. Partition of Palestine might create in those countries an antisemitism even more difficult to root out than the antisemitism which the Allies were trying to eradicate in Germany.… If the United Nations decides to partition Palestine, it might be responsible for the massacre of a large number of Jews.”

Translation: We’ve got about a million Jews here. Be a shame if anything happened to them.

Remember, these Jews were (ostensibly) citizens of the countries, like Egypt, where they had been living for generations. That their positions would be jeopardized if the UN voted for partition is a testament to the fragility of their social standing in every Arab and Muslim-majority country. When the ethnic cleansing of almost a million Jews is excused as an understandable consequence of the creation of the state of Israel, it reminds us of how precarious the position of Jews can be in societies where they do not form a majority. 

It is stunning how often, today, anti-Israel voices wax nostalgic about the harmonious existence Jews and Muslims had before Israel came along and ruined everything. There were some societies where Jews were tolerated and thrived. Others where life was constantly clouded by threats, fears and violence. But all of that supposedly merry history is bunkum when we know how it ends. Jews survived and sometimes thrived in Muslim-majority lands — until they didn’t. And that’s the point. When generations, centuries or, in the case of Iraq, millennia of Jewish life in a country ends in ethnic cleansing, it kind of takes the luster off the supposedly awesome existence up to that moment.

A representative of the Arab Higher Committee of Palestine to the UN General Assembly said “It must be remembered that there are as many Jews in the Arab world as there are in Palestine whose positions … will become very precarious. Governments in general have always been unable to prevent mob excitement and violence.”

Translation: We’d love to prevent our people from attacking and murdering the Jews, but you know those crazy mobs once they get started. What can you do? And, of course, what do any of our governments know about putting down popular dissent?!

Seven decades later, an imam and professor who is a leader in the Canadian Muslim community has the audacity to blame the emptying of Jews from across the Arab world with the creation of the Jewish state, as if the Muslim-majority states innocently and with disappointment watched their Jews depart en masse.

“If it were not for the creation of Israel, the Muslim world would now claim the highest number of Jews outside the U.S.”

True, if Muslim states from Morocco to Iraq had not ethnically cleansed their Jews, they would still be there. And if we drained the Mediterranean of water, it would be dry.

There is also a weird perspective among activists that Libya or Egypt or Lebanon or Iraq were somehow justified in expelling their Jewish citizens, that there was no injustice in the situation, that it is what it is.

For instance, when I raised the issue of Jewish refugees with an anti-Zionist rabbi who is one of Canada’s leading “pro-Palestinian” voices, he responded by wagging his finger and shouting “But that was after 1948!”

His position, apparently, is that the creation of Israel justified the destruction of Jewish civilizations across two continents. It is akin to saying that because Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians were interned after Pearl Harbor, it’s all OK. He was arguing that the creation of a tiny Jewish state was reason enough for every Arab- and Muslim-majority country to commit ethnic cleansing of its Jewish citizens.

Even if we were to accept the ludicrous idea that Israel’s very existence justified the expulsion of almost every Jew from two dozen countries, what does that say about their status? If all it took was Jewish self-determination in the form of tiny, struggling Israel to make life for Jews across the Muslim world intolerable, how tolerable or tolerant could it have been in the first place? So activists or journalists just add insult to injury by contending that 97% of Jewish people in those countries voluntarily and enthusiastically relocated out of some Zionist idealism.

It is a double crime. We ignore the genuine Jewish refugees while rewarding the Arab strategy of inventing the Palestinian refugee crisis and keeping displaced Palestinians in what amounts to a UN-operated captive breeding program for six million Palestinians and counting. Which is the subject of my next post …