Posted on The Times of Israel
September 28, 2012
Maikel Nabil
After the Egyptian military took power in the country 1952, it started its campaign against Egyptian Jews, launching its propaganda against Jews in all the state-owned media. It freed all the terrorists who had committed violence against Jews before the coup, and jailed liberals and seculars instead. It encouraged aggression toward the Egyptian Jewish minority, which led to new terrorist attacks against Jewish individuals and properties in Egypt.
Between 1954 and 1956, 80,000 Egyptian Jews were expelled from Egypt, but not before they were robbed of their property. After that, Egypt revoked their citizenship, forbidding them from returning to their homeland. Of course, before they left, Egyptian authorities forced them to sign papers saying that they had been treated fairly and were leaving of their own will. There are currently around 300 Jews living in Egypt, isolated in an environment that is hostile to them.
The Christian minority in Egypt (known as Copts) reacted in a very selfish way at the time, choosing not to interfere in the crisis so as to avoid any harm. They thought that if they took the side of the dictatorship, they would be safe. Obviously, it didn’t work.
After the Egyptian military expelled Jews and outlawed Bahais and Shias, they started their campaign against Christians. The Egyptian regime has maintained since that time a very fundamental understanding of Islam, and forced it through the media and the education system. Violent attacks against Christians became increasingly frequent, and most of the time no one was prosecuted.
The Egyptian regime created an uncomfortable situation for Christians in order to force them to leave the country. And the evidence shows that it worked. Some 4 million Egyptian Christians have emigrated from Egypt over the last 60 years, representing one-third of the entire Coptic population, and comprising nearly 75% of Egyptians living abroad.
But Egyptian authorities are not satisfied with that. After Mohammed Morsi acceded to power, he decided to speed up this process. The Egyptian regime used the film “Innocence of Muslims” to start a huge propaganda campaign against Egyptian Christians. And of course, Christians in Egypt are becoming increasingly isolated under this propaganda. Violence against Christians occurs every day, and the state usually takes the side of the Muslim murderers.
It isn’t inconceivable that as a way of protecting this operation, the Egyptian state sponsored the attacks on foreign embassies. A group of poor thugs were paid and led to the American Embassy in Cairo to attack it, while they didn’t know where they were, or why they were there. Similar attacks occurred in other countries in which the Egyptian Intelligence has power. Not a single attack on a foreign embassy occurred outside the sphere of Egyptian influence. But Western countries cared more about their own interests in Muslim countries, and as usual surrendered to the racist blackmail of the Egyptian regime.
The Egyptian state is also excessively using the laws forbidding criticism of Islam. At least five Christians are now imprisoned in Egypt under the accusation of “insulting Islam.” Ayman Youssef Mansour, a 22-year-old blogger, was sentenced in October 2011 to three years because of comments about Islam on his Facebook page. Gamal Abdou Masoud, a 17-year-old kid, was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment last January because he was tagged on Facebook in a picture that criticized Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. Makarem Diab Said, a teacher from Asyut, was sentenced in April 2012 to six years’ imprisonment, because he said some aggressive words against Islam during a quarrel with one of his colleagues at work. Bishoy El-Beheri was also sentenced this September to six years’ imprisonment on two charges: insulting Islam, and insulting Morsi, the new president.
But perhaps the most poignant is the case of Alber Saber, a 27-year-old atheist from a Christian family. He was a hyperactive person since before the revolution. I first met him after I was released from prison last year. After that, he repeatedly asked me to launch a big campaign in Egypt to spread secular ideas. He was super-active on social media, criticizing religion and promoting atheism. Alber was arrested on September 13, and is now being tried under accusations of “insulting God” and “insulting Islam.” We are leading an international campaign on Facebook and Twitter calling for his freedom, in the hope that people will realize that dictatorships never stop. As long they exist, there will be new victims every day, and this new victim can be anyone.
The aim of the Egyptian regime in using this charge against Christians and atheists from Christian background is to create a status of panic and intimidation among Christians and to make them leave Egypt. Obviously, it’s working. Tens of thousands of Egyptian Christians are leaving their homeland every month, and Western countries are opening their doors to them in the knowledge that they could soon face genocide in their country.
Will Egyptian Christians face the same destiny as Egyptian Jews? Will the Egyptian regime manage to get rid of Christians and other minorities? Do the Muslim Brothers want to exclude Christians from the voting process because Christians usually vote for secular parties? Will Egypt lose more and more of its diversity? Only time will tell.
Read MoreSeptember 28, 2012
The Times of Israel September 28, 2012 Maikel Nabil After the Egyptian military took power in the country 1952, it started its campaign against Egyptian Jews, launching its propaganda against Jews in all the state-owned media. It freed all the terrorists who had committed violence against Jews before the coup, and jailed liberals and seculars […]
Read more
Posted on بي بي سي
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkJtA6wOJUg
لم يتبق في مصر سوى 12 يهوديا جميعهم من كبار السن.
ماجدة هارون رئيسة الطائفة اليهودية تطالب بالحفاظ على التراث اليهودي في مصر خوفا من سرقته أو ضياعه.
وقالت إنها تتمنى أن تتحول بعض المعابد لمراكز ثقافية تلتقي فيها جميع الأديان.
وكان الآلاف من اليهود قد رحلوا عن مصر خلال حربي عامي 56 و67، حيث اتهمت الحكومة المصرية كثيرا منهم بالعمالة لإسرائيل.
تقرير سالي نبيل من القاهرة.
September 7, 2014
بي بي سي https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkJtA6wOJUg لم يتبق في مصر سوى 12 يهوديا جميعهم من كبار السن. ماجدة هارون رئيسة الطائفة اليهودية تطالب بالحفاظ على التراث اليهودي في مصر خوفا من سرقته أو ضياعه. وقالت إنها تتمنى أن تتحول بعض المعابد لمراكز ثقافية تلتقي فيها جميع الأديان. وكان الآلاف من اليهود قد رحلوا عن مصر خلال حربي […]
Read more
Posted on The Jewish Chronicle Online
September 27, 2012
Anna Sheinman
Ben Youssef Gaon is the last Jewish man in Alexandria. As the president of the Jewish community in the city, he controls huge swathes of property, including synagogues, cemeteries and commercial and residential properties, all administered by a large team of Egyptians. A campaign is under way to stop the property, much of it donated by Jews fleeing after the 1956 Suez Canal crisis, going to the Egyptian state when he retires.
In 1937, Egypt's second city had a Jewish community of 25,000. Now it has only one functioning place of worship. The imposing Eliahou Hanavi Synagogue on Nebi Daniel Street had only two men at the erev Rosh Hashanah service this year, Mr Gaon and an American embassy employee. In previous years, a minyan from Israel made the trip for the High Holy Days, but diplomatic relations have deteriorated following Egypt's revolution, and some sources say the group were refused visas.
Stored in the synagogue are many precious sifrei Torah. The community also holds genealogical records and other valuable religious and cultural material, all of which may soon go to the Egyptian state.
A former cantor at Eliahou Hanavi, 81-year-old Geoffrey Hanson, whose visa to visit Egypt has been refused for the past five years for reasons unknown to him, is on a mission to protect the property, which he estimates as worth 100 million euros.
Mr Hanson, who now lives in Israel, suggests a solution: "A group of [ex-pat] Alexandrian Jews must come together and say they will run the community after Mr Gaon."
Roger Bilboul, president of the Paris-based Nebi Daniel Association, which acts to preserve Jewish cultural and genealogical heritage in Egypt, is broadly in agreement. "The idea of creating an international committee which can take over is something we have put to the government, but we have never had a response."
Bureaucratic stumbling blocks have increased following the revolution, but Mr Bilboul is optimistic. "We need to start knocking on doors, establishing a relationship with the new people in power. We are hoping to start by the end of this year."
But the situation in Alexandria currently is "very, very dangerous," says Desiré Sakkal, director of the Historical Society of Jews from Egypt, which is based in New York. This week, there was a fire on Nebi Daniel Street, in which book kiosks were burned, showing the level of anti-cultural feeling in the city. Although he supports the plan in principle, to act now would be "pure madness," Mr Sakkal said.
Mr Gaon has himself come in for criticism. His rival for the presidency, Victor Balassiano, wrote an article for the Historical Society accusing Mr Gaon of seizing power and changing the locks on the synagogue while Mr Balassiano was on holiday.
He is also alleged to have converted to Islam, something required on marriage to a Muslim woman in Egypt. However, Roger Bilboul asserts that Mr Gaon is now divorced, and has documentation affirming his Jewish faith.
Additionally, Mr Sakkal said: "Mr Gaon is [allegedly] an appointee of the Egyptian state, so you have to be very suspicious". Ben Youssef Gaon himself was not available for comment.
Read MoreSeptember 27, 2012
The Jewish Chronicle Online September 27, 2012 Anna Sheinman Ben Youssef Gaon is the last Jewish man in Alexandria. As the president of the Jewish community in the city, he controls huge swathes of property, including synagogues, cemeteries and commercial and residential properties, all administered by a large team of Egyptians. A campaign is under […]
Read more
Posted on Point of no Return
September 27, 2012
Historical evidence conclusively establishes that the forced exile of Jews from Arab countries was part of a general plan to punish Jews in retaliation for the establishment of Israel. There were organized pogroms against Jewish citizens. Jewish leaders were hanged. Jewish synagogues were torched. Jewish bank accounts and other property were confiscated. Jews remained in Arab lands at risk to their lives.
Yet Hanan Ashrawi and others dispute the applicability of the label of “refugee” to these Jews. Their argument is that since they are not seeking a right to return to their native lands, they do not qualify as refugees. Under that benighted definition, Jews who escaped from Germany and Poland in the early 1940s would not have been considered refugees, since they had no interest in returning to Berlin or Oświęcim.
In 1967, the United Nations’ Security Council took a different view of this matter. I know, because I worked with Justice Arthur Goldberg, who was then the permanent representative of the United States to the United Nations, on the wording of Security Council Resolution 242, on which the Middle East peace process has long relied. That resolution dealt with the refugee problem. The Soviet Union introduced a draft which would have limited the definition of refugee to Palestinian refugees. The United States, speaking through Justice Goldberg, insisted that attention must be paid to Jewish refugees as well. The American view prevailed and the resulting language referred to a “just settlement of the refugee problem.” Justice Goldberg explained: “The Resolution addresses the objective of ‘achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem.’ This language presumably refers to both Arab and Jewish refugees, for about an equal number of each abandoned their homes as a result of the several wars.”
Accordingly, the Jewish and Arab refugees have equal status under international law. There is now pending in Congress H.R. 6242, a law which would grant Jewish refugees from Arab countries equal status under American law. The time has now come, indeed it is long overdue, for these refugee problems to be granted equal status in the court of public opinion, and in the realm of morality.
If Hanan Ashrawi really believes that Jews who were forced to leave their homes are not refugees, let her defend her views in a public forum. I hereby challenge her to a debate on that issue.
If there are those who doubt the historical accuracy of the Jewish refugee narrative, let an international commission of objective historians take testimony from living refugees. Indeed, it would be useful for an archive now to be created of such testimonies, since many of those who were forced to flee from Arab lands are now aging.
There are some who argue that the issue of Jewish refugees is a makeweight being put forward by cynical Israeli politicians to blunt the impact of the Palestinian refugee narrative. But this is not a new issue. I and many others have long been concerned about this issue. Since 1967, I have consulted with Iranian, Iraqi, Egyptian and Libyan families who lost everything—life, property and their original homeland—as the result of a concerted effort by Arab and Muslim governments. What is cynical is any attempt to deflect attention from the real injustices that were suffered, and continue to be suffered, by hundreds of thousands of Jews and their families just because they were Jews who were born in Arab lands.
Read MoreSeptember 27, 2012
Point of no Return September 27, 2012 Historical evidence conclusively establishes that the forced exile of Jews from Arab countries was part of a general plan to punish Jews in retaliation for the establishment of Israel. There were organized pogroms against Jewish citizens. Jewish leaders were hanged. Jewish synagogues were torched. Jewish bank accounts and […]
Read more
Posted on The Jerusalem Post
September 23, 2012
Hamas on Saturday denounced the Israeli call to recognize the suffering of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and their material claims – the same way it acknowledges the plight of displaced Palestinians, the Ma’an News Agency reported on Sunday.
Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, Ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor and World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder presented the recently launched diplomatic campaign to raise the issue of Jewish refugees, in a special gathering at the UN before Israeli officials, foreign diplomats, activists and journalists last Friday.
Following the gathering Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement that, “those Jews are criminals rather than refugees.”
He added that, “Those Jews were not refugees as they claim. They were actually responsible for the displacement of the Palestinian people after they secretly migrated from Arab countries to Palestine before they expelled the Palestinians from their lands to build a Jewish state at their expense.”
Zuhri said it was the fault of the Jewish refugees from Arab lands who “turned the Palestinian people into refugees,” Ma’an reported.
Commenting on the conference, he said: “The Hamas movement views this conference as a dangerous, unprecedented move which contributes to the falsification of history and reversing of facts.”
Palestinian politicians like Hanan Ashrawi have argued that Jews from Arab lands are not refugees at all and that, either way, Israel is using their claims as a counter-balance to those of Palestinian refugees against it.
Ashrawi said that “If Israel is their homeland, then they are not ‘refugees’; they are emigrants who returned either voluntarily or due to a political decision.”
“Arab Jews were part of the Arab region, but they began migrating to Israel after its establishment,” she said. “They did so in accordance with a plan by the Jewish Agency to bring Jews from all around the world to build the State of Israel.”
Ashrawi did, nonetheless, acknowledge that “some Arab countries at that time were ruled by tyrannical regimes,” but, she noted, “all citizens, regardless of their religion, were subjected to suffering.”
PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat has also commented that there was no connection between Palestinian refugees and Israelis whose families are from Arab countries, but he supported their right of return.
“We are not against any Jew who wants to return to Morocco, Iraq, Libya, Egypt and elsewhere. I believe no Arab state rejects the Jewish right of returning to their native lands,” he said.
The story of the Jewish citizens who left, fled or were expelled from Arabic-speaking countries while the Israeli-Arab conflict flared has been relatively neglected, a fact Ayalon acknowledged in his speech.
Read MoreSeptember 23, 2012
The Jerusalem Post September 23, 2012 Hamas on Saturday denounced the Israeli call to recognize the suffering of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and their material claims – the same way it acknowledges the plight of displaced Palestinians, the Ma’an News Agency reported on Sunday. Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, Ambassador to the UN Ron […]
Read more
Posted on Commentary
September 21, 2012
By: Jonathan S. Tobin
The tragic fate of Palestinian Arab refugees has always loomed over the Middle East conflict. The descendants of those who fled the territory of the newborn state of Israel in 1948 have been kept stateless and dependent on United Nations charity rather than being absorbed into other Arab countries so as to perpetuate the war to extinguish the Jewish state. The refugees and those who purport to advocate for their interests have consistently sought to veto any peace plans that might end the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. They have refused to accept any outcome that did not involve their “return” to what is now Israel, an idea that is tantamount to the destruction of Israel. The Palestinians have gotten away with this irresponsible behavior because they retained the sympathy of a world that saw them as the sole victims of Israel’s War of Independence. But the historical truth is far more complex.
Far from 1948 being a case of a one-sided population flight in which Palestinians left what is now Israel (something that most did voluntarily as they sought to escape the war or because they feared what would happen to them in a Jewish majority state), what actually occurred was a population exchange. At the same time that hundreds of thousands of Arabs left the Palestine Mandate, hundreds of thousands of Jews living in the Arab and Muslim world began to be pushed out of their homes. The story of the Jewish refugees has rarely been told in international forums or the mainstream media but it got a boost today when the first United Nations Conference on Jews expelled from Arab Countries was held at the world body’s New York headquarters. While Palestinian refugees deserve sympathy and perhaps some compensation in any agreement that would finally end the conflict, so, too, do the descendants of the Jews who lost their homes. As Danny Ayalon, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister rightly said today:
We will not arrive at peace without solving the refugee problem – but that includes the Jewish refugees. Justice does not lie on just one side and equal measures must be applied to both.
It is true that the descendants of the Jewish refugees are not still living in camps waiting for new homes. Though the process was not without its problems, rather than abuse those Jews who were dispossessed and using them as political props as the Arabs did, refugees from the Arab world found homes and lives in Israel and the West with the help of their brethren. But that does not diminish their right to compensation or a fair hearing for their grievances.
The truth about the Jewish refugees is something that foreign cheerleaders for the Palestinians as well as the Arab nations who took part in the expulsion have never acknowledged, let alone refuted. As Ron Prosor, Israel’s UN ambassador, pointed out in his speech at the conference, what occurred after Israel’s birth was nothing less than a campaign aimed at eliminating ancient Jewish communities. Arab leaders “launched a war of terror, incitement, and expulsion to decimate and destroy their Jewish communities. Their effort was systematic. It was deliberate. It was planned.”
Indeed, not only did Jews lose billions of dollars in property but were deprived of property that amounts to a land mass that is five times the size of the state of Israel.
This is something that a lot of people, especially those to whom the peace process with the Palestinians has become an end unto itself don’t want to hear about. They believe that the putting forward of Jewish claims from 1948 is merely an obstacle to negotiations. But such arguments are absurd. Peace cannot be built merely by appeasing the Palestinian claim to sole victimhood. Just as the dispute over territory is one between two peoples with claims, so, too is the question of refugee compensation. Peace cannot be bought by pretending that only Palestinians suffered or that only Arabs have rights. Indeed, such a formulation is a guarantee that the struggle will continue indefinitely since the Palestinians are encouraged to think that they are the only ones with just claims.
For far too long the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has been cast as one pitting the security of the former against the rights of the latter. Framed this way, it is no surprise that the more emotional appeals of the Palestinians have often prevailed over the arguments of Israelis. Rather than asserting their historic rights, the Jews have often allowed themselves to be cast in the false role of colonial oppressor. The Palestinian pose as the only victims of the war enables them to evade their historic responsibility for both the creation of a refugee problem in 1948 as well as their refusal to accept Israeli peace offers.
Let’s hope today’s conference is the beginning of a serious debate about the issue as well as a turning point in discussions about Middle East peace. Peace requires respect for the rights of Jewish refugees as well as those of the Palestinians.
Read MoreSeptember 21, 2012
Commentary September 21, 2012 By: Jonathan S. Tobin The tragic fate of Palestinian Arab refugees has always loomed over the Middle East conflict. The descendants of those who fled the territory of the newborn state of Israel in 1948 have been kept stateless and dependent on United Nations charity rather than being absorbed into other […]
Read more
Posted on The Times of Israel
September 20, 2012
By: Lyn Julius
hatever else you might say about Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon’s campaign for recognition of the rights of Jewish refugees from Arab countries, he has certainly put the cat among the pigeons. The Arab press and media are in disarray; the campaign has brought forth what Ayalon has termed “extreme and babbling responses” from the Palestinian leadership.
Last week’s “Justice for Jews from Arab Countries“ conference in Jerusalem, staged by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) in association with the World Jewish Congress (WJC), made history: it was the first official attempt in 64 years to introduce the plight of 850,000 Jewish refugees into mainstream public discourse. On September 21, the scene shifts to New York, when Danny Ayalon, WJC President Ron Lauder and leading lawyer Alan Dershowitz will call for UN recognition of the rights of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
Reactions so far in the mainstream media range from bewilderment to hysteria. The campaign is a “cynical manipulation.” It’s about talking points, political point-scoring, “hasbara.”
In other words, the involvement of the Israeli MFA has raised the media’s worst suspicions. Haaretz and The Daily Telegraph report that the Israeli government is obeying a recommendation of the Israeli National Security Council. It’s a premeditated strategy. It’s a stumbling block to peace, proof of the Israeli government’s ‘insincerity’, an excuse to avoid a peace settlement even when peace talks are not going on. (Naturally, perpetuating Palestinian refugee status down through the generations is not political. And the Palestinian insistence on their “right of return” to Israel is not a stumbling block to peace. )
The Jewish refugees campaign has been referred to as a tactic intended to deflect attention from Israel’s African refugees crisis, according to Shayna Zamkanei, or divert public opinion from Israeli “discrimination” against Sephardim, according to Sigal Samuel. (You know, discrimination is that thing which makes every Sephardi girl reach for her hair-straightening tongs in order to look like her Ashkenazi friends.)
Much Arab criticism has claimed that Jews from Arab countries were not refugees at all. If they were, they would assert a “right of return” of their own to their countries of birth. Since they are now in their homeland of Israel, their aspirations have been fulfilled (Radical Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy has now jumped on this bandwagon). Blogger Petra Marquardt-Bigman calls this vain attempt to “dezionize” Israel an own goal: Ironically, Hanan Ashrawi’s logic is a ringing endorsement of Zionism for the 650,000 Jews who did resettle in Israel.
For Hussein Ibish (ably challenged by Ben Cohen), the very fact that the Jews are not asking for a “right of return” makes their campaign for justice “hollow.” They have no substantive claims, he alleges – barring a desire to delegitimise the Palestinian “right of return.”
According to Canadian refugee rights lawyer David Matas, however, you can’t both claim to be a refugee and assert a ”right of return.” “The very assertion of a ‘right of return’ is an acknowledgement that the conditions which led to refugee status no longer hold sway,” he told last week’s conference. Needless to say, the conditions in almost all Arab countries remain as hostile and unsafe for Jews – if not more so — as on the day they fled.
What the Jewish refugee issue does is to remove a stumbling block to peace by pricking the bubble of Palestinian exceptionalism. If one set of refugees from the conflict has been shown to have been absorbed without fuss, what does it say about the other?
Others on the Israeli left have objected to the linkage of the two sets of refugees. One Almog Behar, a young Israeli-born poet, has popped up on Facebook to speak on behalf of an unheard-of committee of Iraqi and Kurdish Jews in Ramat Gan against “renewed Israeli government propaganda efforts to counter Palestinian refugee rights by using the claims of Jews who left Arab countries in the 1950s.” Clutching at Behar’s straw, an Iraqi newspaper is now reporting that Iraqi Jews refuse to be associated with the “file on Palestinian refugees.”
For leftist Larry Derfner, the Israeli campaign is not content with seeking parity — it is going for superiority. Derfner contends that the Israeli government’s “splashy new victimhood campaign” engenders a tawdry suffering contest.
Leftist blogger Kung Fu Jew charges:
I would think that Jews of Arab origin would be outraged that their dispossession is again raised only as a talking point against Palestinian refugees.
Well actually, Jews from Arab countries are thrilled that their issue is finally being pushed to the fore. In much of the sniping at Ayalon’s campaign, there is sneering contempt; not compassion for Jewish refugees, nor appreciation for their human rights, from people who only seem to care about Palestinian rights. Under human rights law, Jewish refugees do have substantive claims for which there is no statute of limitations – to remembrance, recognition and redress, a notion that includes compensation.
The biggest obstacle to this campaign seems not the foreign or leftist press but mind-numbing ignorance among Israeli Jews. According to a poll released by the WJC to coincide with the international conference, 54% of Israeli Arabs are more likely to link Jewish refugees from Arab countries with Palestinians displaced from Israel, compared to only 48% of Israeli Jews. Even more worrying, 96% of the Jewish population was found to have no knowledge of the issue, compare to 89% of Israeli Arabs.
Danny Ayalon, you have an uphill struggle ahead – to educate your own.
Read MoreSeptember 20, 2012
The Times of Israel September 20, 2012 By: Lyn Julius hatever else you might say about Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon’s campaign for recognition of the rights of Jewish refugees from Arab countries, he has certainly put the cat among the pigeons. The Arab press and media are in disarray; the campaign has brought forth […]
Read more
Posted on Israel Hayom
September 14, 2012
By: Dror Eydar
The U.N. and the U.S., with the help of the Arab League, are perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem — a perfect tool with which to bash Israel. On the opposite side, shockingly and hypocritically, no one gives a second to the 850,000 Jews who were displaced from Arab countries by means of violence, looting, threats and murder.
At the beginning of the week I had the chance to take part in a rare historic event: the first official conference on the issue of Jewish refugees, held under the auspices of Israel's Foreign Ministry in cooperation with the World Jewish Congress. The international conference was titled "Justice for Jewish Refugees From Arab Countries." For the first time in decades, the call for justice for the Jewish people was once again heard in Jerusalem. Not just a call for security, or apologetic Israeli discourse in the face of Palestinian calls for so-called justice, but a clear call, by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to bring the issue of Jewish refugees back into every international arena: the ethical, legal, diplomatic and political arenas.
As one of the conference participants, former Canadian Minister of Justice Professor Irwin Cotler, said: “Where there is no remembrance, there is no truth; where there is no truth, there will be no justice; where there is no justice, there will be no reconciliation; and where there is no reconciliation, there will be no peace – which we all seek.” Indeed, this is a serious issue that has been neglected and kept silent for years, in stark contrast with the Palestinian refugee issue, which has become self evident and universally recognized in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinians have become experts at marketing their victimhood to the world, and thus, the concept of a “just solution” became unilaterally linked to the Palestinian narrative. But just like every aspect of the Middle East story, here, too, the truth is far more complex.
With the exception of a few years prior to World War I, the Arabs living in this region never accepted the Jewish presence here. They rejected the various partition plans, ranging from the Peel Commission in 1937, through the 1947 Partition Plan, to the Oslo Accords and other generous Israeli offers. They were always willing to accept land, but never to sign a final agreement that would spell the end of the conflict.
In Nov. 1948, the U.N. appointed a task force to coordinate humanitarian aid work for Palestinian refugees. A short time later, the U.N.’s Economic Survey Mission issued its recommendation to resolve the Palestinian refugee problem by resettling them in Arab countries and integrating them in industry and agriculture there. That is how the United Nations Relief and Works Agency came about. Obviously, the plan never came to fruition, because the Arab countries refused to naturalize the Palestinian refugees. They were tasked with being the eternal victims — a means to bash Israel.
The Twentieth Century saw millions upon millions of refugees, products of various wars. Population changes occurred in many places around the globe. Millions of Sikhs and Hindus, for example, were displaced from Pakistan to India in the 1950s, and millions of Muslims, meanwhile, took the opposite route. This population exchange involved a lot of violence, but ultimately, it happened. Incidentally, then-Pakistani President Mohammad Ayub Khan visited Cairo in 1960 and voiced hope during a press conference there that the fact that his country absorbed some seven million refugees from India would serve as an example to Arab countries to absorb 750,000 Palestinian refugees.
But the status of Palestinian refugees is unlike the status of any other kind of refugee. The U.N. has two agencies that deal with refugees: the UNHCR which handles all the refugees in the world, and a refugee agency just for the Palestinians: UNRWA.
The U.N. also has two different definitions of refugee status: one is a general definition assigning refugee status to "people who are outside their countries because of a well-founded fear of persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group, and who, for persecution related reasons, are unable or unwilling to return home." This definition affords refugee status for a limited number of years, and only to the displaced persons themselves, not their offspring. Under this definition, refugee status is revoked when a displaced person settles in, and integrates into another country. But not so when it comes to Palestinian refugees.
A Palestinian refugee is defined as “anyone whose normal place of residence was in Mandate Palestine during the period from June 1, 1946 to May 15, 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war." In short, anyone who lived here for two years prior to the establishment of the State of Israel is considered a Palestinian refugee who lived here “for thousands of years” since the biblical Jebusites ... And incidentally, only Palestinian refugee status can be passed down from generation to generation. Most of UNRWA’s budget comes from the U.S. and the EU, both of which are pushing Israel to resume negotiations with the Palestinians but are simultaneously helping to perpetuate the conflict.
Opposite the 600,000 or 700,000 Palestinian refugees, there are more than 850,000 Jewish refugees who were forcibly expelled from Arab countries over the establishment of the State of Israel and its victory in the 1948 War of Independence.
The Arab countries are ultimately responsible for creating the refugee problem, both the Palestinian refugee problem that resulted from a war waged by Arab countries against Israel, and the Jewish refugee problem, by stripping Jews of their citizenships, confiscating their property, murdering many of them and violently expelling the rest from the places they had populated for 2,500 years. All this, some 1,000 years before the rise of Islam.
It is important to get familiar with the testimonies of Jewish refugees. A good starting point is a website called The Forgotten Million, operated by the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries. These Jews also lived in refugee camps for a time: the Israeli maabarot (refugee absorption camps). But, as opposed to the Palestinian refugee camps, the tents in the maabarot eventually became shacks, which then became permanent housing and ultimately cities.
And so, in stark contrast with the U.N.-fueled eternal refugee-hood of the Palestinians, these Jewish refugees integrated into their old-new homeland and were no longer of any interest to anyone. The term "pogrom" was seen as referring to violence only European Jews were subjected to. Furthermore, as Cotler mentioned, in the case of Arab Jews, the violence, the loss of citizenship, the theft of property and the expulsion reflected the stated policy of the Arab League, which had suggested a similar course of action against Jewish nationals back in 1947.
Now that the issue has gotten official state recognition, Israel’s representatives should raise the issue of Jewish refugees at every diplomatic event, and demand that justice be done. More than 150 resolutions having to do with Palestinian refugees have been adopted by the U.N. Not one has to do with their Jewish counterparts. It is time to change all that. By the way, U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 talks about a “just settlement of the refugee problem” — all refugees, including the Jewish ones.
And one more interesting historical note: the same thing that happened to the Jews half a century ago is currently happening before our very eyes to Christians living in Arab countries. The Christians of the Middle East are being persecuted, murdered and expelled. There is only one country in the Middle East where Christians thrive: Israel. That is an important public diplomacy tool.
But not only for diplomacy, it is also important for the sake of education. Every Israeli needs this. Without recognition of the Jewish “nakba” (the term Palestinians use to describe the catastrophe of their expulsion from Palestine), as some Jewish survivors describe their past, the resulting vacuum will have room only for the Palestinian version. “And you shall tell your son ...” as the Bible says.
Read MoreSeptember 14, 2012
Israel Hayom September 14, 2012 By: Dror Eydar The U.N. and the U.S., with the help of the Arab League, are perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem — a perfect tool with which to bash Israel. On the opposite side, shockingly and hypocritically, no one gives a second to the 850,000 Jews who were displaced from […]
Read more
Posted on Tablet
September 12, 2012
Lee Smith
Outside of Israel, the Jewish community of Alexandria is perhaps the Mediterranean’s oldest, dating back to Alexander the Great’s founding of the city in 332 B.C. But this year, there may not even be High Holiday services at the city’s last remaining synagogue, Eliahou Hanabi, also known by its street address, Nabi Daniel.
The Egyptian press first reported that government authorities “ordered the cancellation” of this year’s Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur celebrations. But the synagogue’s caretaker, Youssef Gaon, explained that there would be services. “The only difference,” he said, “is a rabbi and cantor who usually lead the services were denied entry to the country.”
Apparently they were not granted visas for security reasons. That shouldn’t come as a surprise: The Muslim Brotherhood-led government is incapable of providing security for anyone—from ordinary Egyptians who have endured a crime wave of epic proportions since Hosni Mubarak was toppled in February 2011 to Americans based in our Cairo embassy, which is currently being mobbed by Islamists. Only a year ago this month, the Israeli embassy was also besieged; its staff was lucky to escape alive.
Given the small size of the city’s permanent Jewish community—according to one Egyptian paper, four men and 18 women, almost all of them between their 70s and 90s—these guests were crucial in order to create a prayer quorum. As the blogger Elder of Ziyon put it: “For the first time in some 2,000 years, Alexandria will not have a minyan.”
But while some see this episode as the end of Jewish life in Egypt, it is in fact the coda to a tragic story of one of what was once a thriving Jewish community in the Middle East—and for the past 50 years has existed primarily as a memorial to the past.
***
Yves Salama, now an IT entrepreneur in New York, was born in Alexandria but left with his family in the middle of the 1967 war. He remembers his bar mitzvah at Nabi Daniel in 1963. “It was a beautiful synagogue, at its height. In 1956, there were maybe six synagogues open in Alexandria, but they were closed one by one, until only Nabi Daniel was left.”
Salama last visited Egypt five years ago to see his Uncle Max, who was the caretaker of the synagogue until his death in 2008. “My understanding,” Salama told me, “is that the celebrations during the High Holidays were largely a result of the Israeli consulate in Alexandria. Otherwise Nabi Daniel is more of a museum.”
The troubles for Alexandria’s Jews began in 1948. With the creation of the state of Israel, and the subsequent Arab-Israeli war, almost a quarter of Egyptian Jewry—around 80,000 people, concentrated mostly in Cairo and Alexandria—fled the country under severe pressure, many of them settling in Israel. After the Free Officers’ Revolution overthrew King Farouk in 1952, the new government made efforts to reach out to the Jewish community. But that posture changed when Gamal Nasser took control. After the 1956 Suez Crisis, Nasser expelled some 25,000 additional Jews. The 7,000 or so Jews who remained after 1967 were subject to arrest and more expulsions, until the community ceased to exist as anything but a relic.
So, who were the Jews that stayed? “I wondered about this for a long time,” said Lucette Lagnado, the author of two celebrated memoirs about her family’s expulsion from Cairo and their subsequent troubles, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit and The Arrogant Years. “The answer is that many of them are women who married Coptic Christians or Muslims and adopted those confessional identities. After their spouses died, they come out as Jews.”
Still, some who stayed didn’t marry out and remained publicly committed to their Judaism. Salama’s Uncle Max, for example, helped restore the Nabi Daniel synagogue, repairing its roof, entrance steps, and cemetery walls. Two things sustained Jewish worship and devotion in Egypt after the forced exodus: the efforts of Israel’s diplomatic corps in Egypt, and, much more important, the Egyptian government’s desire to show Washington that it took the Camp David accords seriously. The fact that Cairo is not offering any accommodations to Egypt’s tiny Jewish community in order to placate Washington this year augurs ill for future relations between Egypt and Israel, the state that absorbed the energies and talents of the Jews that the Arabs once envied and admired, but finally exiled.
Lagnado blames this turn for the worse on the revolution. Ever since the Tahrir Square protests began, Lagnado told me, “I’ve had a horrible knot in my stomach. It was clear quickly that Egypt was going to be led by a Muslim Brotherhood regime.”
Other Egyptians aren’t so sure that there’s been a big change in the public’s attitude toward Jews since current president Mohamed Morsi took power. “We are anti-Semitic; why should the president be less anti-Semitic?” Amr Bargisi, senior partner at the Egyptian Union for Liberal Youth, told me on the phone from Cairo.
Bargisi, a vocal critic of his countrymen’s anti-Semitism, believes that the fundamental issue predates the revolution. “There has long been an effort to efface all traces of Jewish life in Egypt.” He notes, for instance, that even when Mubarak was still in power, the 2010 reopening of the Maimonides synagogue in Cairo was not well received. “When the images hit the Egyptian press they showed that Jewish ceremonies weren’t grim—so Egyptians were unhappy.”
Bargisi’s colleague Samuel Tadros agrees that the mainstream of Egyptian society regarded Jewish rituals with suspicion long before the Brotherhood came to power. “There are two issues that stir the anger of the Egyptian public,” said Tadros, a fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom. “The first is that there’s this popular Egyptian conception of what Jews do when they gather for celebrations—they drink, have sex, etc. The second is that Egyptians believe the Jews will use these festivities as a foothold to retake parts of Egypt.”
***
There are good reasons for the Jewish state to miss Mubarak: He was attentive to the sensibilities of his superpower patron, Washington, which meant that he kept the peace with Israel. And while American policymakers did not often feel strongly enough to voice complaints about anti-Semitism to Egypt, when they did, the Mubarak regime walked it back. For instance, in the wake of the hateful 2002 Ramadan television serial Rider Without a Horse, Mubarak’s political adviser Osama el-Baz contributed a three-part series in one of the government’s official newspapers criticizing anti-Semitism.
Still, the Egyptians who lived under Mubarak’s decades-long reign were every bit as anti-Semitic as the electorate that brought Morsi to power. The difference is that Mubarak saw Jewish issues, Jewish artifacts, and synagogues as chips to be used in his bargaining with the United States. But this is the kind of balancing act between Washington, Cairo, and Jerusalem that sustained the peace treaty for more than 30 years. For in the end, it is not fear of Israel that will keep Egypt from waging war, but fear of what the Americans might do.
Morsi apparently doesn’t care about appeasing the Americans in this regard, and it seems that the White House is applying little pressure—even as it plans to provide Egypt with another $1 billion aid package. If the United States blinks when an Egyptian mob scales the walls of its embassy in Cairo on the anniversary of 9/11, there is little chance that the White House is going to stick its neck out for a handful of elderly Jews in Alexandria.
Read More September 12, 2012
Tablet September 12, 2012 Lee Smith Outside of Israel, the Jewish community of Alexandria is perhaps the Mediterranean’s oldest, dating back to Alexander the Great’s founding of the city in 332 B.C. But this year, there may not even be High Holiday services at the city’s last remaining synagogue, Eliahou Hanabi, also known by its […]
Read more
Posted on Point of no Return
August 30, 2012
For the first time in 2,000 years, this year there will be no Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services at the Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue in Alexandria.
The synagogue was the last 'working' synagogue in Egypt. A synagogue has stood on this site since Hellenistic times, although the current building dates back to the 19th century.
The Egyptian authorities have banned High Holiday services for 'security' reasons. The decision, announced on Monday, comes as a blow to Rabbi Avraham-Nino Dayan, an Israeli of Egyptian origin, who every year takes on the task of assembling a minyan (quorum) of volunteers from Israel and abroad. There are only two Jewish men and some 20 Jewish widows living in Alexandria.
Levana Zamir, who heads the International Association of Egyptian Jews in Israel, comments: "It seems this is really the end of Jewish life in Egypt. The authorities have found a way to take over the last Jewish bastion, since all the remaining synagogues are already archaeological and tourist sites. It is very sad."
The Passover Seder in Alexandria last year was also cancelled for security reasons, although a Seder took place in Cairo. High Holiday services are usually held for expatriate Israeli embassy staff at the Maadi synagogue in Cairo. Since the fall of Mubarak, Israelis have been flying home to spend the holidays with their families.
Read MoreAugust 30, 2012
Point of no Return August 30, 2012 For the first time in 2,000 years, this year there will be no Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services at the Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue in Alexandria. The synagogue was the last ‘working’ synagogue in Egypt. A synagogue has stood on this site since Hellenistic times, although the current […]
Read more
