This Sunday is the Israeli national day for commemorating the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab lands. Over 40 events are being planned all over the world to mark the day. Stephen Oryszczuk in the UK publication Jewish News finds out why the issue is a question of justice:
The Israeli government this year
designated a new day, 30 November, to remember historic wrongs done to
the Jewish people. The wrong in question was the uprooting of 850,000
Jews from ancient communities in Arab and Muslim lands, including Iran,
after the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Some call it a period
of “systematic persecution” or “ethnic cleansing”.
Events will be held around the world on
Sunday. There will be a Board of Deputies reception at the Jewish
Museum in Camden. On Saturday at St John’s Wood Liberal Synagogue,
historian Nathan Weinstock will explain “how a Belgian Ashkenazi Jew
wrote the story of the eradication of Jews from Arab lands”.
Weinstock says the story “demands an
understanding of the dhimma – Jewish social status under Islam – and an
appreciation of the repercussions of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict,
leading to the great post-World War II Jewish exodus”.
Once-equal Jewish citizens were
persecuted, Jewish stores and workshops were looted, Jewish workers were
fired and Jews were restricted from entering universities. Expelled
from Egypt, displaced in Iraq and held hostage in Syria (on the
suspicion that they would “join the Zionist enemy” and attack their
country of birth), most left when they could, leaving all possessions
behind. The story is one of immense sadness.
Many Sephardi Jews had deep cultural
ties to the land, and influenced it greatly. Jewish writers were the
foundation of Iraqi literature, for example, and in mid-19th century
Egypt, the man who invented the nationalist slogan ‘Egypt for the
Egyptians’ (known as ‘the Egyptian Molière’) was a Jew named Jacob
Sanua. The repercussions of this huge and little-known upheaval shape
today. “No understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict is complete
without taking into account the fact that half of all Israeli Jews are
descended from, or are themselves, Jewish refugees from Arab or Muslim
lands,” says the Board of Deputies.
But why is the issue only now being
recognised? “Successive Israeli governments didn’t really make much of
it, contrary to what Arab countries did for Palestinian refugees,” says
Baghdad-born Edwin Shuker, who now lives in London. “It was a huge
mistake on many levels. There are fewer than 5,000 Jews left in Arab
lands. I am part of a dying generation. We want this narrative
incorporated into the Jewish people’s story.”
For Shuker, the 30 November
commemoration “opens a new chapter” in that story, and Lyn Julius,
co-founder of Harif, the UK association of Jews from the Middle East and
North Africa, agrees that it is a “watershed” moment. But she says the
refugees themselves partly explain the slow process of recognition.
“When they came to Israel in the 1950s, they compared themselves to
Europe’s Jewish refugees, to Holocaust survivors.
What happened to them was far worse, so
they thought ‘let’s just get on with it, let’s not make a fuss’.” It
was early in the state’s creation, and the country needed to build an
Israeli identity, she explains. “Forget the past and move on, that was
the only way to integrate Jews from 130 countries,” says Julius.
“Politically, it was disastrous, and
the Palestinians made all the running, screaming that they were the only
refugees, which the world bought.” Some are cynical about the timing of
the Knesset law, which came in the middle of the peace negotiations
with the Palestinians earlier this year. Arab- Israeli peace process
analyst Dr Constanza Musu says Israel “conducted a very systematic
campaign to have the issue of refugees addressed in the negotiations”.
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