Six-Day war anniversary reopens deep scars

Next week marks the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War. The Arab defeat directly affected the few thousand Jews still living in Arab countries and led to the final stage in their 'ethnic cleansing'. (You can read some of their recollections here.)

For Gina Waldman, a Jew living in Libya at the time, the event reopens deep emotional scars.

The 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War between Israel and five Arab states marks the final step in the mass expulsion of the Jews indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa.

This event reopens deep emotional scars for me. My family was among those expelled from Libya in 1967. It marks the destruction of a Jewish civilization over 2,000 years old. Of the 900,000 Jews that lived in the Middle East and North Africa 50 years ago, less than 5% remain today. Our communities are extinct.

The Six-Day War in 1967 affected me directly. I was living in Libya but, I am not an Arab, nor a Muslim. I am a Libyan Jew who, in the aftermath of the war became a stateless refugee. The rioting mob took to the street during this conflict and burned the homes of their Jewish neighbors. The government then proceeded to expel us.Our homes and properties were confiscated, our cemeteries desecrated, our synagogues looted. While fleeing the country, my family and I miraculously escaped certain death, thanks to British friends who rescued us from a bus being doused with gasoline, about to be blown up by the mob.

The Middle East conflict, like all conflicts, has produced many refugees. The UN singled out only one group of refugees for special assistance and attention. The Palestinians. The narrative of the Christian refugees who are now fleeing their homeland because of the radicalization of Islam, and Jewish refugees who were ethnically cleansed because of their religion, are ignored. Most of 900,000 Jewish refugees went to Israel which became the biggest and most successful refugee camp in the world.

Israel integrated its refugees and gave us dignity and hope. This is in sharp contrast to how Arab countries treated the Palestinian refugees. The Arab governments incited the mobs to kill Jews and instituted policies that led to nearly 900,000 Middle Eastern Jews becoming stateless refugees.

For the past 59 years they refused to settle the 750,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants. Instead these governments forced Palestinians to live in misery in segregated refugee camps denying Palestinians basic human rights. In the last 100 years wars and ethnic conflicts produced over 100 million refugees. Yet none of them were kept in camps by their host countries for as long a period as the Palestinians in Arab countries.

The Jewish refugees survived pogroms and expulsions, struggled to reconstruct their damaged lives and overcome the destruction of their communities. We were forgotten by the international community. Since 1949, the United Nations passed more than 100 resolutions on Palestinian refugees; but not a single one for Jewish refugees from Arab countries. This one-sided approach has created a distorted understanding of the conflict by ignoring the oppression of indigenous Jews by the Muslims.

For centuries the Jewish and Christian communities lived under oppressive discriminatory laws as Dhimmis with limited rights because they were not Muslims. Because of this distorted narrative, the vast majority of people view the Middle East as exclusively Arab, exclusively Muslim, and do not know that Jews and Christians lived in the region for over two millennia. Today nine Arab countries are Judenrein – free of Jews - and are increasingly becoming Christianrein.

If you have any stories to tell of how the Six-Day war affected you please let the BBC and your local media know.