“Arab aggression has created not one but two groups of refugees in the Middle East. The world has not been allowed to forget the first but has remained largely unaware of the second.” The first group comprises those Arabs who abandoned their homes in Palestine during the 1947-1949 fighting. They numbered 587,000.“The second group encompasses the Jews who, between 1947 and 1963, were uprooted from African and Middle Eastern countries where their ancestors had lived for generations and where they were full fledged citizens until they suddenly became anathema. They numbered about 650,000 [editor’s note: the number is actually closer to 800,000]. The overwhelming majority were poor people, but they collectively left behind property valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
“The world has not overly concerned itself about the Jews who were constrained by forces beyond their control – discriminatory laws, persecutions, physical violence, and purposeful exclusion from Arab societies – to flee “to a place of safety,” thus meeting Webster’s definition of refugees.
“Attention has been concentrated instead on the plight of the Arabs who left Palestine voluntarily – persuaded by their own military commanders and politicians that the war against the Jews would be short and their victorious return would be sweet with booty – and hence might be categorized more properly as ‘fugitives’ rather than as ‘refugees.’
* Excerpted from The Case for Israel by Frank Gervasi (Viking Press, 1967).
The above words make succinctly clear a problem long ignored by the world’s governments: the persecution and expulsion of the large Jewish population of the Middle East and North Africa. The story of the Arab refugees has occasioned much gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts in the court of international opinion, while the same sentiment has not been granted to their more numerous Jewish counterparts.Contrary to popular opinion, Jewish existence was never better in essence among the sons of Ishmael than amid the Christians of Europe. The writer Albert Memmi – born in Tunisia, champion of anti-colonialism and self-described ‘left-wing Zionist’ – wrote that “the supposed ‘idyllic life’ led by Jews in the Arab countries is all a myth! The truth…is that we were, first of all, a minority in hostile surroundings and, as such, we had all the fears of the overly weak, their constant feeling of precariousness….Never, I repeat, never…have the Jews lived in the Arab countries otherwise than as diminished people in an exposed position, periodically overcome and massacred so that they would be acutely conscious of their position.”
Memmi also stated that “if we leave out the crematoria and the murders committed in Russia, from Kichinev to Stalin, the sum total of the Jewish victims of the Christian world is probably no greater than the total number of victims of the successive pogroms, both big and small, perpetrated in the Moslem countries.”In fact, during Islam’s golden age Jews were restricted as to their choice of occupation, mode of dress, forms of worship, even access to specific parts of some cities. These discriminatory attitudes were enshrined in the Pact of Omar, the name for the collective body of legislation directed at both Jew and Christian in the Islamic world. On certain occasions the followers of Mohammed even introduced prejudicial measures later adopted by the Christian West, such as the ‘Jewish badge’ as a mark of identification for ‘unbelievers.’
And while Muslim tolerance varied greatly with both time and location, it could be revoked any time with disastrous consequences. Jews were expected to know their place within the hierarchical scheme laid out in the Koran and subsequent laws. Success was always accompanied by a sword of Damocles.
