On November 30th, people around the world commemorate the expulsion of Jews from the Arab world and Iran.
By Rachel Avraham
On November 30th, people around the world commemorate the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and Iran. According to the Jewish Refugees blog, “In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been ‘ethnically cleansed’ from 10 Arab countries and Iran. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored.”
Prominent Middle East scholar Yaakov Meron wrote in The Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands, “There was a deliberate policy on the part of the Arab League countries to drive out the Jews.”
Heykel Pasha, an Egyptian delegate, declared on November 24, 1947, “If the UN decides to partition Palestine, it might be responsible for the massacre of a large number of Jews. If a Jewish state were established, no one could prevent the disorders. Riots would break out in Palestine, would spread throughout all of the Arab states, and it might lead to a war between the two races.”
Immediately after the Partition Plan was adopted by the UN, anti-Jewish massacres soon became the norm across the Arab world, thus leading to their mass exodus from the region. According to the World Jewish Congress, “Throughout the generations, Jews in the region were often subjected to various forms of discrimination — and in many cases, ranked lower on the status of society than their Muslim compatriots — but they were nevertheless loyal citizens who contributed significantly to the culture and development of their respective countries.”
The World Jewish Congress continued, “Despite the positive influence that Jews brought to the places where they lived, more than 850,000 Jews were forced to leave their homes in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, and several other Arab countries in the 20 years that followed the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. Another major forced migration took place from Iran in 1979–80, following the Iranian Revolution and the collapse of the shah’s regime, adding 70,000 more Jewish refugees to this number.”
Egyptian Jewish activist Levana Zamir told me in an interview: “The Arabs did not want there to be a Jewish state. So, they took away the business of my father and imprisoned my uncle for the crime of being a Zionist, for a year and a half. Many Jews were imprisoned for a year and a half. I was 10 years old. They knocked on the door and stole many things, and they arrested my uncle. They tried to auction off my piano, but failed thanks to the intervention of an Arab friend. I did not know about my uncle’s imprisonment. I went to school and my teacher told me that they took my uncle to jail. I thought he killed someone. I was only 10. I cried and went to my mother and asked what he did. She said, ‘They took him because we are Jewish.’”
“It was a trauma for me to see him go to jail for being Jewish,” she explained. “I had nightmares at night over this. I dreamed for thirty years that I was at our home. A Muslim friend of mine was there, and all of the Arabs heard me speak Hebrew to her. I wanted in the dream to speak French or Arabic, but it came out in Hebrew. I then became scared that I would also go to jail for I am Jewish. We waited a year and a half until they freed my uncle from prison. They sent him directly from the prison to a boat. We then were expelled and could only depart with one suitcase. We went in the middle of the night.”
What happened on October 7th did not begin on October 7th. Arab sexual violence against Jewish women has a long history, dating back to the experience of Jewish dhimmi living in the Arab world. Flora Cohen, a Moroccan Jewish refugee, told me in an interview: “It was a common practice in Morocco for some Muslims to abduct young virgin Jewish girls, forcefully convert them to Islam and to make them marry Muslims.”
A relative of my late husband on the Moroccan side of the family suffered such a fate and was not able to make Aliyah with the rest of the family because of it. However, in 1834, Suleika, a Moroccan Jewish girl, did resist such a fate and was beheaded for her refusal to convert and marry a Muslim; Jewish pilgrims visit her grave to date.
Mazal Elijah, an Iraqi Jewish refugee, related that as a child in Iraq, Jewish women were never allowed to be left alone or to go out by themselves due to the fear that they would be raped: “Especially the Jews would get raped. We feared the Arabs. They were terrorists.” The late Salima Chahouda, another Iraqi Jewish refugee, concurred, noting that during the Farhud Pogrom, “They cut open the stomachs of pregnant women and raped en masse. If a woman left her house without an abaya (Islamic face covering), they would not be shy and would rape her.”
Even before the establishment of the State of Israel, in the 1940s, a certain individual translated Hitler’s writings into Arabic and disseminated them throughout the Middle East. That individual was the Mufti (Muslim religious leader) of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a local leader of the Arabs of Palestine who decided to help Hitler exterminate all the Jews in the world, with Hitler “taking care” of European Jews and Haj Amin al-Husseini “taking care” of Middle Eastern Jews. The translation of Hitler’s ideology into Arabic eventually led to the Farhud—a Nazi-Arab pogrom committed against the Jews of Baghdad on the eve of Shavuot in 1941. During the riots, approximately 1,000 people were killed, about 2,200 people were wounded, and extensive Jewish property was looted. This was the first Nazi event in the Middle East caused by the efforts of the “Palestinians.”
“To deny the tragedy of one million Jews from Arab countries is like Holocaust denial,” Zamir noted. “We lost our assets. Why not ask for them back? Can you understand people saying we are not refugees? Why only Holocaust survivors receive compensation and not us as well? Why
not ask for my inheritance? It’s mine. We have to be compensated. A right of return will never happen. Four million Arabs coming back here will make us dhimmi. Where there are Jews and Arabs, the Jews are dhimmi. It will be war again.” In regards to the idea of Jews returning to the Arab world, she emphasized, “They burn churches and persecute Christians. Is that a place for us?”
“The solution was given by Bill Clinton in July 2010 that the right of return won’t be,” she concluded. “There should be compensation to both sides; the Jewish refugees and the Palestinian refugees. Clinton called for an international committee to compensate and Israel agreed.” Now, the Jewish refugees from the Arab countries and Iran are waiting to be compensated for their losses.
