Mick Hartley

Ahmadinejad speaks:

The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians could be resolved if Jewish immigrants would return to their countries of origin, thus allowing Palestinian refugees to return to theirs, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday.

I wonder how Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, and other Arab countries would feel about welcoming their Jews back – and, of course, returning to them their rightful property.

From 1948 until the early 1970s, 800,000-1,000,000 Jews left, fled, or were expelled from their homes in Arab countries; 260,000 of them reached Israel between 1948 and 1951; and 600,000 by 1972. Lebanon was the only Arab country to see an increase in its Jewish population after 1948, which was due to an influx of refugees from other Arab countries. However, by the 1970s the Jewish community of Lebanon too dwindled due to hostilities of the Lebanese Civil War. By 2002 Jews from Arab countries and their descendants constituted almost half of Israel's population.

The reasons for the exodus included push factors such as persecution, antisemitism, political instability and expulsion, together with pull factors, such as the desire to fulfill Zionist yearnings or find a better economic and secure home in Europe or the Americas. A significant proportion of Jews left due to political insecurity and the rise of Arab nationalism, and later also due to policies of some Arab governments who sought to present the expulsion of Jews as a crowd-driven retaliatory act for the exodus of Arab refugees from Palestine. Most Libyan Jews fled to Israel by 1951, while the citizenship of the rest was revoked in 1961, and the community remnants were finally evacuated to Italy following the Six Day War. Almost all of Yemeni and Adeni Jews, were evacuated between 1949-1950 in fear of their security. Iraqi and Kurdish Jews were encouraged to leave in 1950 by the Iraqi Government, which had eventually ordered in 1951 "the expulsion of Jews who refused to sign a statement of anti-Zionism." The Jews of Egypt began fleeing the country in 1948, and most of the remaining, some 21,000, were expelled in 1956. The Jews of Algeria were deprived of their citizenship in 1962 and had mostly immediately left the country for France and Israel. Moroccan Jews began leaving for Israel, as a result of the 1948 pogroms, with most of the community leaving in 1960s. Many Jews were required to sell, abandon, or smuggle their property out of the countries they were fleeing.

It'll mean quite a few Jews coming back to Iran too:

Many Iranian and Kurdish Jews fled Iran and abandoned their property in fear that they would remain hostages of a hostile regime… The exodus of Iranian Jews peaked following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when around 80% of Iranian Jews left the war-torn country for US and Israel.

One may of course wonder why on earth Jews, once settled in Israel or elsewhere, might want to return to a totalitarian Islamic theocracy – or to any of the Arab countries they or their ancestors left. They've managed, most of them, to make a good life for themselves elsewhere – an option denied to the Palestinian refugees by their fellow Arabs.

So it's hardly a serious suggestion from the Iranian president there. But of course we knew that.