Presidents Sadat, Carter and Prime Minister Begin at the historic signing of the Israel-Egypt peace treaty on the White House lawn (AP)Amid the fanfare marking the 30th anniversary of Israel's historic peace treaty with Egypt, signed on the White House lawn on 26 March 1979, one question has received little or no attention - have Egyptian-Jewish property claims been met?
The answer is a resounding no.
Between 1956 and 1976, Jewish refugees from Egypt, most now living in Israel, filed some 7,000 claims, as requested by the Israeli Ministry of Justice - a quarter of all claims by Jews from Arab Countries. These claims are worth billions of dollars in private property alone. Individuals suspended their claims in order to allow the Israel government to handle the matter of confiscated or stolen properties on their behalf.
The Camp David Treaty declared: "Egypt and Israel will work with each other and with other interested parties to establish agreed procedures for a prompt implementation of the resolution of the refugee problem," without specifying if the refugees were Jewish or Arab.
Under Article VIII of the Treaty, the two sides agreed to establish a Claims Commission for the mutual return of financial claims. But the Claims Commission was never established.
In 1980, an Egyptian Jew, Shlomo Cohen-Sidon, wrote to Menahem Begin, suggesting that in the absence of a Claims Commission the state of Israel was now responsible for meeting Egyptian-Jewish compensation claims. But Cohen-Sidon's interpretation was rejected by Israel's foreign ministry.
Why was the Claims Commission never established? Egypt has never pressed for it. According to Itamar Levin, writing in Locked Doors (p146), the Egyptians initially realized that Israeli claims could leave Egypt 'stripped bare', as one Israeli source put it.
Israel, for its part, feared that Egypt might file a massive claim for oil pumped from the Abu Rudeis fields in western Sinai between 1967 and 1975. In anticipation, Egyptian Jews formally asked the Israeli government in 1975 not to return the oilfields without claiming compensation for Jewish property claims.
Israel did not do so, and the Jews of Egypt Organisation sued the state of Israel before the High Court of Justice in September 1975. But they lost the case: the Attorney-General Gabriel Bach concluded that it was too late. The agreement returning Abu Rudeis to Egypt had just been signed.
Levana Zamir of the Israel-Egypt Friendship Association argues that the U.N. Charter on Wars between countries stipulates that no natural resources need be returned in peacetime. Therefore the oil pumped by Israel from Abu Rudeis should not have been taken into account.
The Israel government produced a variety of excuses for not pursuing Egyptian-Jewish claims. In the end they claimed that at the time their property was taken from the Jewish refugees, they were not Israeli citizens. As one Egyptian Jew ruefully remarked, this argument never stopped Israel from claiming from Germany on behalf of Holocaust victims.
Michael Fischbach in his book Jewish property claims against Arab countries, suggests that Israel did not press the claims of Egyptian-Jewish refugees because it was 'saving' them for political linkage with the claims of Palestinian refugees in a final peace settlement.
But the late Israeli Minister of Justice, Tommy Lapid, declared in 2003 that the failure to resolve Egyptian-Jewish claims was a severe omission by Israel. Meanwhile, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC) have given a renewed impetus to the collection of claims, although they now declare recognition of refugee rights, not redress, is their top priority.
The pressure on Egypt to settle Jewish claims has slackened since July 2000, when after the Wye Plantation talks, President Clinton declared that an International Fund will be established both for Palestinian refugees and Jewish refugees from Arab Countries. Levana Zamir of the Israel-Egypt Friendship Association says: 'It is high time to begin establishing this International Fund."
The vast amount of communal property such as synagogues left behind must also be considered. Jews of Egypt may be tempted to follow the example of the Jews of Iraq, who set up the World Organisation of Jews of Iraq in 2008, a separate body to pursue mainly communal property claims.
The frustration of the claims process dates back to the early 1950’s when I believe the first claims were filed with the Israeli Ministry of Justice following the first wave of refugees from Egypt.
ReplyDeleteI cannot help but think that Shlomo Cohen- Sidon’s position was the right one in 1980.
I cannot help but feel that its’ corollary is that Israel is deliberately keeping this on a soft boil rather than taking it off the burner with little or no regard for the potential beneficiaries… an ethnical déjà vu? If the basis for losing the claim against the state of Israel was that it was “too late” in the 1975 return of Abu Rudeis, then surely this in itself constitutes ground enough for the State who had the claim files since the early 1950’s to be held responsible.
The argument that “at the time their property was taken from the Jewish refugees, they were not Israeli citizens” is neither reason enough nor a valid excuse. Rather it is an insult, by any standard, to intelligence. Setting aside the incomparable Holocaust victims, can one find any excuse for the “senior moments” of a State, holding the trumps in a negotiation, forgetting that the refugees it took in were for the most part “denaturalized” Egyptian citizens and / or “stateless persons”. And by the way, they just happened to be Jewish. You don’t have to be an Israeli citizen to have eaten bitter herbs! Tommy Lapid was right and consequently it is therefore now the liability of Israel. Israel would honour itself in establishing this fund with Egyptian -Jewish refugees in mind as its priority and thus leading the way.
The inclusion however of “communal property” in the claims is another matter. It should be remembered that communal property has been managed, or as some would have it mismanaged, by what has remained of the communities locally. The Egyptian government has possibly benefited from cheap leasing privileges but communal property rights have, to my understanding, been respected and protected. There are important questions however deriving from all this.
1/ What will happen when there is no longer a single community member?
2/ Why is it that the very identity, through registers and archives, of Jews from Egypt, the reason for being forced to leave in the first place, is still being illegally sequestered?
Ownership of our History and Identity precede in my mind, what can only eventually turn out to be too little too late.
Yves Fedida