Mick Hartley

David Cesarani at CiF reminds us that the history of Arab-Jewish population displacement since Israel's founding is far from the one-way process it's normally portrayed as:

The thousands of British visitors who go to Morocco each year probably have no idea that the country once had a thriving Jewish population of 250,000. As recently as 1955 there were over 50,000 Jews in Marrakech alone. But how many tourists struggle through the maze of alleyways to reach the mellah, the old Jewish quarter, or the cemetery with its graves going back to the 17th century? The destruction of the Jewish communities of North Africa and the Middle East is a forgotten scandal that deserves to be remembered. Over 800,000 Jews left their homes, often in brutal circumstances, between 1948 and 1968, yet their suffering and loss has hardly been recognised by a world community that is otherwise highly sensitive to the plight of refugees and the displaced.

For all these reasons it is laudable that the US-based organisation Jews for Justice from Arab countries (JJAC) is today holding a congress in London and organising a lobby of parliament to raise awareness of this historic wrong. Anyone who believes in the correctness and the logic of restitution and compensation for those driven from their homes and robbed by the Nazis or the Soviets can hardly deny that there is a case to answer here.

It is estimated that the governments in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen pocketed billions of dollars from abandoned or expropriated Jewish properties and assets. Moreover, Israel and the world Jewish community spent millions more absorbing the impoverished refugees who flooded into the new state of Israel in the late 1940s and the late 1950s. In an era of apology and reparation this is, surely, the appropriate subject for an international conference.

But…well, Cesarani isn't happy:

However, there is another and questionable side to the campaign mounted by JJAC. Its policy statements always place recognition of the flight, forced emigration and expulsion of Jews from Arab countries within the framework of a "just settlement" of the Middle East conflict as a whole.

More specifically, JJAC advocates note that the number of Jews driven from their homes between 1948 and 1968 is marginally greater than the number of Palestinian Arabs displaced during the creation of the state of Israel. They argue that in working out a just settlement for the Palestinian refugees it is important to bear in mind the allegedly parallel and superficially similar "ethnic cleansing" of Jews from Arab lands. The implication is that room exists for a quid pro quo. The demand in the Arab world for the "right of return" for the Palestinians, or its commutation into substantial compensation, can be traded for cancellation of the claims of Jews from Arab lands against the countries that ejected them.  […]

The Jews from Arab lands who settled in Israel deserved compensation, from Israel. And, to a large extent, they got it. The Mizrachim are now a well-integrated and affluent pillar of Israeli society.

It would be perverse in the extreme if Palestinians were made to pay the price for the way Jews from some (not all), Arab countries were treated in an odyssey that culminated in bad treatment from some (not all), of their fellow Jews in Israel.

So, although there is an overwhelming case for examining the dispossession and displacement of Jews from parts of North Africa and the Middle East, and indeed a case for restitution and reparation for a proportion of them, it is not appropriate to place this quandary in the context of solving the Middle East conflict. And it is quite simply obnoxious to play their suffering off against the misery of the Palestinians. These two wrongs will never make a right.

I admit that my knowledge of the Jewish removal/flight from Arab lands is less than comprehensive, but aren't there some double standards operating here? Some Jews left Arab countries voluntarily. So did many Palestinians, from Israel. Some were forced out, with varying degrees of force and threats. So were many Palestinians. Yet the Jews now in Israel have integrated, and accept the reality of their new lives, while the Palestinians were never welcomed into Arab countries, and have, for the most part, consistently refused to accept the reality of the existence of Israel, on the grounds of some primordial essence of the land of Palestine which means it can only ever belong to Arabs.

And it's all Israel's fault. Jews forced out of their homes in Arab lands, where they've lived for generations, deserve compensation…from Israel. And Palestinians driven out of their homes, where they've lived for generations, deserve compensation…from Israel.

Is this a return of the rootless Jew, for whom uprooting from their ancestral home means next-to-nothing compared to the genuine sufferings of the Palestinians? And why is it "quite simply obnoxious to play their suffering off against the misery of the Palestinians"? Apart, that is, form the need in a forum like CiF to maintain the axiom that no other suffering can compare to the suffering of the Palestinians.