donosy
22.08.03, 07:47
By Linda S Heard
Online Journal Contributing Writer
August 20, 2003-The Palestinian Information Centre suggests
that the Israeli government is set to request Iraqi Jews to file details
of property and money they left behind with a view to demanding
compensation from the new Iraqi authorities.
The centre alleges that talks between Washington and Tel Aviv are
underway to resolve the issue, with $10 billion at stake, including,
perhaps, $3 billion of Iraqi funds currently frozen in the U.S.,
although these have been earmarked for Iraq's reconstruction.
In yet another example of Israeli double standards, we learned last
week that the Israeli authorities have expressed a firm negative to
any right of return for Palestinians forced out of their homes.
This verbal roadblock to peace was made in response to a
statement by the Palestinian National Authority's External Affairs
Minister Nabil Shaath who declared: "We do not see a solution for
our brothers (refugees) in Lebanon except their return to their
homeland," adding, this is a right "anchored in UN resolutions on
refugees and in the Arab (peace) initiative".
Indeed, former Israeli governments were reluctant to bring up the
issue of compensation for Arab Jews in case a precedent was set
and the door opened for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of
Palestinians to do likewise.
Whereas Palestinians, many of whom still carry rusting keys to
homes built by their grandfathers now situated in Israel proper, can
prove both their title to their land and the fact that their ancestors
were ousted, most Jews left Iraq of their own accord, lured by
Zionist portrayals of "a promised land."
Naturally, much depends on who is writing history. A pressure
group calling itself "Justice for Jews from Arab Countries" was
launched to publicise "the historical truth" of Jewish refugees from
Arab countries and claims that some 865,000 Jews were forced to
flee Arab and Muslim lands due to hostility.
The group's raison d'etre is to document claims, lobby heads of
state and encourage Jewish communal support. Its coordinator,
Stanley Urman, is quoted as saying: "We want to make sure that
every time the issue of refugees is discussed within the context of
the Middle East peace process, then the rights of former Jewish
refugees will also be addressed."
It is surely evident that the woes of Arab Jews were a direct result
of the violent birth of Israel and, until the Palestinians receive
justice from the Jewish state, it would be hard to justify the
premature settlement of claims by Iraqi Jews, especially if this
were done while the U.S. is at the helm in Iraq.
In a paper presented by lecturer Dr. Philip Mendes at the 14 Jewish
Studies Conference held in Melbourne last year, the question of
Jews who fled from Arab countries between 1948 and the
mid-1950s was explored. Plotting a middle ground between the
Zionist view that the Jewish exodus was due solely to Arab
violence and the Arab position, which puts the exodus down to a
Zionist conspiracy, the paper lends historical perspective to the
issue.
When it comes to Iraq, Mendes says that while pressure was put
upon Jews to dissociate themselves from Zionist activities, there
was no official government policy of discrimination and the Iraqi
authorities took action to protect the Jewish communities from
extremist attacks.
The paper's author describes Iraqi Jews as being generally
prosperous and integrated into Iraqi society while examining the
reasons why some 120,000 were airlifted from Iraq to Israel
between 1950 and 1951-operations known as Ezra and Nehemia.
While affirming that the outbreak of the 1948 Israeli-Arab War led to
a precarious position for Iraqi Jewry, he explains that many Iraqi
Jews were prominent members of the Communist Party, which was
agitating against the government, besides belonging to the Zionist
underground.
In March 1950, the Iraqis passed a Denaturalisation Bill, giving
Jews the legal right to emigrate, believing that the departure of
Zionists would marginalise anti-Jewish extremists while anticipating
that only 10,000 would choose to leave Iraq.
According to Mendes, the Israeli government of the day was
initially hesitant about agreeing to a large influx of Iraqi Jews partly
because there was a shortage of housing due to the mass arrival of
European Jewry. Subsequent to a wave of bombings between April
1950 and June 1951, targeting both Americans and Jews, Israel
relented and decided to airlift 95 percent of Iraq's Jewish population
out of the country.
The bombings preceding the airlifts are still the subject of dispute.
Some believe they were the work of Zionist agents bent on instilling
fear amid Iraqi Jewry so that they would be receptive to the Zionist
dream. Indeed, three members of the Zionist underground were
charged with perpetrating the attacks and executed.
Another airlift from Iraq to Israel, the first since 1951, took place
recently when six elderly Iraqi Jews decided to take up Israel's offer
of a new life. Several dozens, however, preferred to stay put.
Israeli propaganda, which invariably attempts to depict the plight of
Iraqi Jews, was shredded when Muslim and Christian Iraqis joined
hands to protect a Jewish cultural centre and a synagogue from
looters during the Anglo-American invasion.
Perhaps Professor Ella Habiba Shohat, an Iraqi Jewish writer and
activist, sums up best the position of Jews in the Arab world: "The
Jewish experience in the Muslim world has often been portrayed as
an unending nightmare of oppression and humiliation. Although I in
no way want to idealise that experience-there were occasional
tensions, discrimination, even violence-on the whole, we lived
