How Jews were treated after the Six-Day War
How did Arab countries treat their Jewish citizens in the aftermath of the Six-Day War? Zionism had already been outlawed, but being Jewish now became a "crime": (With thanks for this summary: JIMENA)
Egypt: During the first days of the 1967 Six Day War almost all male Egyptian Jews aged 16 and over were imprisoned and kept in over crowded prison camps. Some would not be released for three full years. Jews of foreign nationality were summarily deported.
Libya: Muslims rioted in the Jewish Quarter of Tripoli. 18 Jews were killed. Homes and synagogues were burned to the ground and the mobs prevented Libya's Jews from returning to their communities. The Libyan government rounded up all the Jews, confiscated their property and expelled them. Iraq: After the Six-Day War, the government imposed more repressive measures: expropriation of Jewish property; freezing of Jewish bank accounts; dismissal of Jews from public posts; the forced closing of Jewish-owned businesses; cancellation of trading permits; disconnection of telephone, and Jews were placed under house arrest for long periods of time or restricted to the cities.
Tunisia: During the Six-Day War Jews were attacked by rioting Arab mobs; and synagogues and shops were burned. Despite government appeals to the Jewish population to stay, 7,000 Jews migrated to France.
Lebanon: The majority of Lebanon's 7,000 Jews left in 1967, feeling that their position in an Arab country was insecure.
One book that documents the anti-Jewish crimes committed by various Arab states against their Jewish citizens in a relatively comprehensive manner is Joan Peters' "From Time Immemorial". But the book's flaws have made it a poor vehicle for disseminating knowledge of our history.
ReplyDeleteThere are few if any well-written pro-Israel scholarly historical books that target the contemporary educated reader. The telling of the history of the 1948 War has been handed over to the revisionist historians, whose distortions and inversions are mind-boggling. They have converted the Arab attempt to destroy the Yishuv and the desperate and heroic Jewish defense into a tale of supposed injustice done to the Palestinian aggressors. The 1956 War has, in their hands, become an imperialist adventure, not a blow against Egyptian aggression, terrorism, and military preparation for destroying Israel. As the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day war approaches, there are signs that another campaign of lies and concoctions about the event is being assembled by our enemies.
Knowledge of history is an important front in the war, a front that Israel is abandoning without a serious fight.
Israel is at a serious disadvantage in the telling of history: while it has opened its archives to historians, the Arab countries' archives remain resolutely closed. We can never hope to hear anything but a one-sided version of history as long as this is the case.
ReplyDeleteArchives are not necessarily a source of guaranteed truth. On the contrary, they are vulnerable to manipulation, censorship and deception.
ReplyDeleteTo this day the British government refuses to publish some of the minutes of Cabinet meetings held in 1948 concerning Palestine. One suspicion is that they contain discussions of criminal acts that the British were considering against Jews in Palestine.
Only a few days ago poisonous anti-Israeli calumnies concerning the 1976 Entebbe hijacking were publicised, and treated by the media as if they were plausible. These lies were invented by British diplomats and came from British government archives, newly opened under the 30 year rule.
The idea that the opening of the Arab states' archives would facilitate the dissemination of historical truth is optimistic, to say the least. The notion that archival documentation is a superior source of historical material compared to eye-witness and oral accounts may sometimes be true, but is often false. As the historian Walter Lacqueur observed, albeit in a different context, historical accounts will cease being contested only when nobody cares any more.
I take your point, but no matter how open to manipulation archive material may be, the historical account is infinitely more distorted when the archives of Arab countries are out of bounds.
ReplyDelete