Justice for Jews from Arab Countries:
The other Middle East refugees

BACKGROUND:
Since 1948, close to 900,000 Jews have been displaced from Arab countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Countries such as Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya – once home to flourishing centuries-old Jewish communities – saw their Jewish populations uprooted under Islamic regimes.

Living peacefully with their Arab neighbors for over 1,000 years before the birth of Islam, these Jews were displaced from Arab countries after the State of Israel was created in 1948. They have never received refugee status. Yet they suffered mass violations of human rights – murder, arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, stripping of citizenship, seizure of property, etc. In fact, more former Jewish refugees were uprooted from Arab countries (over 800,000) than Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 (U.N. estimates 726,000, although this figure has swelled to more than 4.4 million in 2005 because of their descendants).

Despite the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) ruling on two separate occasions that Jews fleeing from Arab countries were bona fide refugees who “fall within the mandate of UNHCR,” there has been no international response to the plight of these Jews.

Currently an organization, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, is actively advocating on behalf of these Jews, trying both to raise awareness of and document their history. These initiatives come at a time when it is apparent that any Israeli/Palestinian peace agreement will have to deal with the difficult issue of Palestinian refugees.

Recently due to the organization’s efforts, a landmark resolution on Middle East refugees will be introduced in the House of Representatives (H.RES. 185). A companion bill in the U.S. Senate (S.Res. 85) is yet to be introduced. Although non-binding, they urge the President to instruct U.S. officials to use all means available” to ensure that any resolution relating to the issue of Middle East refugees, and which includes a reference to the required resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue, must include a similarly explicit reference to the resolution of the issue of Jewish, Christian and other refugees from Arab countries.”

Expert witnesses testified this summer both before the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, chaired by Representative Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), and the Congressional Human Rights Caucus (CHRC), chaired by Representative Tom Lantos (D-CA). Representative Ackerman recounted how between 1948 and the Six Day war in 1967, the Jews of Iran and the Arab world faced “terror or government edict to forfeit not just their jobs, but entire businesses; not just their personal assets, but the property of entire communities; and most painful of all, not only did they lose their personal dignity and security, but their entire national identity.”

Congressman Ackerman also remarked “Jewish refugees have been successfully absorbed in Israel and elsewhere and, perhaps, as a result, their claims and misfortune have been largely ignored. Ranking Republican on the Subcommittee, Mike Pence (R-IN), agreed that there is a great deal of world opinion about Palestinian refugees, but a great deal of world ignorance about Jewish refugees.

Concurrently – and most important – an international Rights & Redress Campaign which has the support of 65 countries and organizations, including the Israeli Government, has been launched with dual goals – an international advocacy/public education campaign on the heritage and rights of former Jewish refugees from Arab countries, and the registration of family history narratives in order to catalogue the communal and individual losses suffered by these Jews.

Since this comprehensive data is not available anywhere today, these major world-wide efforts will be needed to achieve the ultimate goal of collecting, in a systematic, secure and confidential process, the personal testimonies on the mass violation of human rights and the persecution of Jewish minorities by Arab regimes. Timing is critical, because more than 70 percent of those who left Arab countries are no longer alive. Similar to the urgent need to reach aging Shoah victims, these survivors must also tell their stories now! Their collected testimonies will be catalogued and preserved by a special unit in Israel’s Ministry of Justice, established to compile the legal and factual basis necessary to assert the rights of these Jews.

Additional Links:

• House seeks justice for refugee Jews, courtesy of the New Jersey Jewish News (April 3 edition)
• CRC Launches Campaign for Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (March 2007)
• Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC) website