Point of No Return – Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries
Thanks to Jewish Refugees
The long Arab war against the Jews, in context
A Jew prostrates himself before the Caliph upon paying the Jizya tax
In order to understand the Long Arab War Against the Jews, we need to place it within the long history of Jewish people living under Arab and Muslim imperial rule from the seventh-century until the demise of the Ottoman Empire with the conclusion of World War I. From the time of Muhammad, until Islam ran head-first into modernity and the twentieth-century, the Jews of the Middle East were second and third-class non-citizens under the boot of Arab and Muslim imperial rule. However bad African-Americans had it in the United States under the vile rules of Jim Crow, it was never worse than Jewish people had it as”dhimmis”and what we call “dhimmitude” lasted one heck of a lot longer.
As dhimmis in Arab and Muslim lands, Jews (and Christians) could ride donkeys but horses were forbidden.
As dhimmis in Arab and Muslim lands, Jews (and Christians) were forbidden from building housing for themselves taller than Muslim housing.
As dhimmis in Arab and Muslim lands, Jews (and Christians) had no rights of self-defense.
As dhimmis in Arab and Muslim lands, Jews (and Christians) had no recourse to courts of law.
As dhimmis in Arab and Muslim lands, Jews (and Christians) had to pay protection money to keep their families safe from violence.
And this is one of my favorites, in certain times and places under Arab-Muslim imperial rule Jews were not even allowed to go outside during rainstorms lest their Jewish filth run into the street and infect their pure Muslim neighbors.
The point, however, is that just as we would never discuss African-American history without reference to both Jim Crow and slavery, so we must not discuss the Long Arab War against the Jews without reference to thirteen-centuries of Arab and Muslim oppression against all non-Muslims in the Middle East, including Christians and Jews.
This is not merely a political tactic. It is a matter of framing the conversation within something that resembles an historical context. The historical context is vital because without it the conflict is incomprehensible outside of the prominent western notion of mindless Jewish malice toward Arabs, presumably as unjust payback for the Shoah.
Westerners think that this is a fight between big, strong, mean Israel against the innocent, thumb-sucking “indigenous Palestinians” over land.
It isn’t.
What the struggle actually is is an ongoing attempt by the Arab peoples to force Jews back into dhimmitude out of a Koranic religious imperative.
The diaspora’s blindspot for the (Mizrahi) poor
When it comes to raising money for Israeli causes, the Jewish diaspora routinely finds Jews from Africa less interesting than African refugees, argues the iconoclastic Seth Frantzman in the Jerusalem Post.
A report on poverty in Israel found that 12 percent of the Israeli population had to beg for food (Photo: Marc Sellem)
A while ago I pitched an op-ed to an American Jewish publication. The Friends of the IDF had recently raised $31 million in California. I wanted to write that it would be worthwhile for contributors to give the same amount of money to support educational initiatives for IDF soldiers after the army. Israel has a conscript army and while it may be important that average Israelis serve, it is more important that they can get into college afterwards and have a financially successful future for their families.
The newspaper said it wasn’t interested.
Why wasn’t it an interesting topic? Because it didn’t fit the narrative that focuses primarily on Israel as either a place of conflict or a place to negotiate Diaspora Jewish identities. Many Israelis live in poverty, but while poverty may be a Jewish concern abroad, wrapped up in such concepts as “tikkun olam,” it isn’t a “sexy” issue. African refugees in Israel are interesting, Jews from Africa are less interesting.
That is the blind spot of well-meaning, left-leaning Jewish Americans who are critical of Israel’s policies. A recent visit by Jewish activists to Hebron underpinned this. They focused on social justice for Palestinians and token “civil rights” protests. One activist wrote of the “beautiful act of partnership, we, Jews and Palestinians, came together through trust and understanding and made huge strides in creating the first cinema that will stand in Hebron since the 1930s.” Aiding Palestinians to build a cinema is a worthy goal, but there is a disconnect here. Social justice and the fight against racism should not end at the Green Line, but for many left-leaning activists they do.
To sue for Balfour Declaration is breathtaking ‘chutzpa’
The Palestinian threat to sue Britain for the Balfour Declaration is a move of breathtaking chutzpa, says Lyn Julius in The Times of Israel. Edy Cohen in Israel Hayom (see below) says that today’s Palestinian leaders are merely following in the wartime Mufti’s footsteps in opposing the Balfour Declaration:
Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki has threatened to sue Britain for issuing the 1917 Balfour Declaration because, he claims, it led to mass Jewish immigration to British Mandate Palestine “at the expense of our Palestinian people”.
The Palestinian threat is not as laughable as it sounds. It is not altogether unexpected either, being of a piece with the current Palestinian strategy – exploit any law, abuse any forum, to delegitimise Israel.
The Balfour Declaration, named after then UK Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour, pledged Britain’s support for the establishment “in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. It was not intended at the expense of the local Arabs, whose civil rights would not be prejudiced: later, the 1936 Peel Commission proposed to partition western Palestine into an Arab as well as a Jewish state.
“Nearly a century has passed since the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917,” Malki was quoted as saying.”And based on this ill-omened promise hundreds of thousands of Jews were moved from Europe and elsewhere to Palestine at the expense of our Palestinian people whose parents and grandparents had lived for thousands of years on the soil of their homeland.”
Almost every word in Malki’s statement is economical with the truth. As soon as the Balfour Declaration was made, Britain reneged on its promises to the Zionists. It hived off 70 percent of Palestine to Transjordan in 1921 and drastically curtailed Jewish emigration, sealing the fate of thousands more Jews trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Lord Balfour and his Declaration
Jews who came to Israel were ‘moved’ from Europe and elsewhere, says Malki. The elsewhere accounts for more than half the Jews of Israel – those who came as destitute refugees or descend from refugees from Arab and Muslim lands. And it was not the British, but the Arabs who were responsible for that exodus.
No Arab states were enjoined to respect the civil rights of their Jewish citizens. These Jews were unceremoniously thrown out of the Arab world without apology and without compensation – and their pre-Islamic communities destroyed.
The Palestinians, it is widely believed, cannot be held responsible for what happened to the Jewish refugees. While Israel could legitimately discuss Palestinian refugees in peace talks, Jewish refugees would have to address their grievances to Arab states.
Arab League states, which instigated the 1948 war against Israel, were indeed responsible for creating both sets of refugees. However, an extremist Palestinian leadership, which collaborated with the Nazis and incited anti-Jewish hatred all over the Arab world in the decades preceding the creation of Israel, played an active part in all Arab-League decision-making and dragged five Arab states into conflict with the new Jewish state – a conflict they lost and whose consequences they must suffer. The Palestinian move to sue is of breathtaking chutzpa: it is as if Germans were to sue the Allies for starting World War 2.
The idea of expelling the Jews of Arab countries after 1948 was adopted by the Palestinians as a policy. According to the well-connected Egyptian-Jewish journalist Victor Nahmias, the Palestinians were a major factor in the Jewish migration to Israel in 1950 – 51.
From the outset, the Palestinian cause was a pan-Arab nationalist cause. It has also a powerful Islamist dimension: From an early stage the campaign for Palestine took on an antisemitic hue. Palestine was a zero-sum game: in Arab eyes, the Jews had no claim to a single inch.
Every anniversary of the Balfour declaration, mobs in the Arab world took to the streets and the demonstrations at times degenerated into full-blown riots, as in Egypt and Libya in 1945, when 130 Jews were murdered.
Not only did the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini instigate deadly disturbances in Palestine in 1920 and 1929, wherever the Mufti went in the Arab world, he used the Balfour Declaration as a rallying cry to incite persecution and mayhem against the local Jews.
The Jerusalem Islamic congress of 1931, called by the Mufti, was followed by violence in Morocco throughout the 1930s. An entente between Tunisian nationalists and the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee sparked violence in Sfax in 1932. There was trouble in Yemen and Aden. All this well before the creation of the state of Israel.
But the worst incitement, with the deadliest consequences of all, took place in Iraq: In 1939, Palestinian teachers expelled by the British to Baghdad together with the Mufti, along with Syrian and Lebanese nationalists, played a key role fanning the flames of Jew-hatred with false propaganda. Seventy-five years ago this year, the Mufti fled to Berlin after being implicated in a failed pro-Nazi coup – but not before he had primed the Arabs of Baghdad to unleash the Farhud of 1941. The pogrom claimed the lives of at least 140 Jews, with many mutilated and raped, and 900 shops looted and wrecked.
This was the first battle in the Palestinian war against the defenceless Jews of the Arab world. Had the Nazis been victorious, the Mufti would have overseen the Jews’ extermination, not just in Palestine but throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
It is these Jews who have been denied justice, the right to compensation for their dispossession of assets and land several times the size of Israel itself, or the human rights abuses they suffered at the hands of Arab governments and mobs. It is these Jews who have every right to sue.
Abridged version in The Algemeiner, crossposted at Harry’s Place
Dr Edy Cohen writes in Israel Hayom:
The Balfour Declaration, or “the cursed promise,” as it’s termed in Arabic, sets down in writing Britain’s commitment to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel. The declaration does not nullify the establishment of an Arab state alongside the Jewish one, something the Arabs have rejected out of hand several times over the course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas isn’t the first Palestinian leader who has tried to take on the Balfour Declaration. In fact, the former mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, fought it tirelessly. Moreover, most of the mufti’s political and financial support from the Third Reich had to do with the declaration and opposition to it.
Everyone has always known that the Arabs can create propaganda that sounds good to Western ears. Their lies and incitement are boundless. Today, they are cynically exploiting the Palestinian Nakba festival just as, in the past, the mufti of Jerusalem would vociferously and cynically protest in Germany on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration to curry favor with the Nazis.
In effect, when the mufti arrived in Germany, he took care to mark the anniversary of the declaration with the Arab community in Berlin marching through the streets and a sermon at a Berlin mosque. This is what he said on November 2, 1943: “On this day, 26 years ago, the evil tidings of the Balfour Declaration, which intends to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine following the Jewish-English scheme in the previous war, was issued. This abusive declaration came from Britain, and it gives the Jews this Arab, Muslim land — the direction of the first Muslim prayer, the homeland of Al-Aqsa mosque and other places holy to Islam.”
