I'm perfectly serious. The Arabs should remember that their countries did not treat Jews as equal and patriotic citizens and some of their forebears sometimes persecuted them -- hence their emigration to Israel, even though many of them were ambivalent about Zionism, too.
Take Iraq, for instance.
<blockquote>What do Palestinians and Arab-Jews Have in Common? Nationalism and Ethnicity Examined Through the Compensation Question
Yehouda Shenhav
Department of Sociology and Anthropology Tel Aviv University(1) Tel Aviv 69978, Israel e-mail: shenhav at post.tau.ac.il
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Let me begin with a telling story that took place in Israel in January 1952, about half a year after the official conclusion of the operation that brought Iraq's Jews to Israel. During this year, two Zionist activists, Yosef Basri and Shalom Salah, were hanged in Baghdad. They had been charged with possession of explosive materials and throwing bombs in the city center. According to the account of Shlomo Hillel, a former Israeli cabinet minister and Zionist activist in Iraq, their last words, as they stood on the gallows, were "Long live the State of Israel." (Hillel, 1985: 342) It would have only been natural for Iraqi Jews in Israel to react to the news of this hanging with outrage. On the contrary, however, the mourning assemblies organized by leaders of the community in various Israeli cities failed to arouse widespread solidarity with the two Iraqi Zionists. In fact, the opposite was true. A classified document from Moshe Sasson, of the Foreign Ministry's Middle East Division, to then Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett maintained that many Iraqi immigrants, residents of the transit camps, greeted the hanging with the attitude: "That is God's revenge on the movement that brought us to such depths" (2). The bitterness of this reaction attests to an acute level of discontent among the newly arrived Iraqi Jews. It suggests that a good number of them did not view their immigration as the joyous return to Zion depicted by the community's Zionist activists. Rather, in addition to blaming the Iraqi government, they blamed the Zionist movement for bringing them to Israel for reasons that did not include the best interests of the immigrants themselves.
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The story of how Iraq's Jews were brought to the newly established State of Israel provides an opportunity to reexamine the essence of the connection between ethnicity and nationalism. (Smith, 1986; Armstrong, 1982) Developments surrounding the "nationalization" of Iraq's Jews reveal how problematic it is to apply the thesis of primordial Zionism to them as an ethnic group, as well as to other Jewish groups in Europe and the Middle East. From the complex sequence of events in which the Iraqi Jews were brought to Israel, I have chosen to deal with one specific episode that has not yet been recounted: the fate of the property of Iraq's Jews, and its connection to the property of the Palestinian Arabs who were expelled or who fled in 1948.
This article focuses on two intersecting claims that faced the Israeli government between 1948 and 1951. One was the demand, put forward by the United Nations and the governments of the United States and Britain, that Israel compensate the 1948 refugees for property that had been impounded by the State's Custodian of Absentee Property. The other was the expectations of former Iraqi Jews that they would be compensated for their property that had been frozen by the Iraqi government in 1951. I will draw on archival sources to show that the Israeli government turned this bind into a system akin to double-entry accounting with regard to the two categories of property – that of the 1948 Palestinian refugees and that of the Iraqi Jews – in an effort to neutralize the claims of both. The Government of Israel cited the injustice that the Iraqi government had done the Jews of Iraq in order to explain its refusal to compensate the Palestinians, but told the Iraqi Jews in Israel to apply to that same Iraqi government for the restitution they sought.
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During the period 1949-1951 – when the drama described in this article was played out – approximately 130,000 Jews lived in Iraq, constituting 3 percent of the country's population. The largest community was in Baghdad, followed by Basra; together, these two cities accounted for some 75 percent of the Jews in Iraq. Three decades earlier, the supplanting of the Ottoman Turks in the Middle East by the French and the British during World War I had engendered two significant developments in the region (5). First, a potent Iraqi nationalism rapidly emerged as the Iraqis realized that the British had not come as liberators. The immediate result was an Iraqi uprising against the occupation in 1920. Iraq gained independence in 1932, and four years later the perpetrators of a military coup seized power in the country. Until 1941, when the revolt of Rashid Ali al-Kilani failed, Iraq was under the sway of a powerful nationalism that did not balk at forging ties with Nazi Germany in order to throw off British influence. Second, Zionist activity in the Middle East became more extensive, although in Iraq intensive activity did not begin until World War II. The interaction between these two social forces – Zionist nationalism and Iraqi-Arab nationalism – shaped the life of Iraq's Jews and finally transformed it beyond recognition.
In June 1941, following the flight of the pro-Nazi Rashid Ali and just prior to the British forces' reentry into Baghdad, the city's Jews were brutally attacked by Iraqi nationalists. The assault, known as the farhud, left some 250-300 people, mostly Jews, dead or injured. The Iraqi government, under Nuri Sa'id, did not shirk responsibility: eight of the assailants, including army officers and policemen, were sentenced to death. Following the 1941 attack, Zionist leadership began contemplating means to "Zionize" Iraq's Jews and perhaps organize the immigration of part of the community to Israel. The Va'ad Leumi (National Council) of the Yishuv – the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine – disseminated an exaggerated and distorted account of the farhud, and Yishuv institutions described the event as a calamitous massacre, and even as a Holocaust. (Tsimhoni, 1989) The assessment of Yishuv leaders was that the impact of the farhud would be to intensify Zionist feelings among Iraq's Jews, and that this momentum should be exploited to bring the community to Palestine. The first Zionist emissaries operated as soldiers of the British Army and as representatives of Solel Boneh, a construction company owned by the Histadrut federation of labor in the Yishuv, which had won public tenders in Iran and Iraq.
Although the Zionist movement's immediate interest in Iraqi Jewry was triggered by the farhud, it had other causes as well, which were not necessarily related to the well being of the community. Iraq was an important station in the land transfer of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, who had reached the Soviet-Iranian border. In order to secure their entry into Palestine, it was essential to have permanent assistance along a route on which Iraq and Iran were major stations (Meir, 1973). The Zionist movement in Europe therefore maintained that it was essential to establish a Zionist center in Iraq. A second reason for taking an interest in Iraqi Jewry presented itself when the leaders of the Yishuv grasped the scale of the Holocaust and realized that European Jewry was cut off: to improve the Jewish demographic balance in Palestine. (Meir, 1993) Like Jews from other Islamic countries, the Jews of Iraq were considered a key population reservoir that could tilt the demographic balance in Palestine in the Jews' favor. The geographical proximity between Iraq and Palestine was considered an exploitable advantage: "It is easier [for us] to get there... and for them, too, it is easier to reach the Land of Israel."(6)
The possibility that Iraq's Jews could remain in their native land – the so-called "Iraqi option" (Qazzaz, 1991) – was rendered unfeasible by two reasons that were not unrelated. One reason that the Jews were compelled to leave was the surging Pan-Arab and Iraqi nationalist movements (Shiblak, 1986). Israel's establishment in May 1948 was a boost for the Iraqi nationalists, and the practice of Zionism was outlawed in July 1948. Jews in the civil service were dismissed, and the entire Jewish community was placed under surveillance. The situation was aggravated by Prime Minister Nuri Sa'id's co-option of the right wing nationalist party Istiqlal into the government. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry informed the State Department in Washington that the Government of Iraq was concerned about the inroads being made by Communism and Zionism among the Jews. (Shiblak, 1986: 70) The second reason that the Jews were compelled to leave was the activity of the Zionist movement in Iraq and the establishment of the State of Israel, which resulted in the Jews irrevocable identification with Zionism. Indeed, the activity of the Halutz movement in Iraq caused many local Jews to be perceived as Zionists, and hence as a fifth column. The actions of the Zionist movement in Iraq forged a reality that, in retrospect, justified its own presence there. As Ben-Tzion Yisraeli, an emissary of the Jewish Agency in Iraq, foresaw in 1943, "They [the Iraqi Jews] are liable to be among the first to pay the price for our enterprise in the Land of Israel..."(7)
Shortly after his government assumed power, in January 1949, Nuri Sa'id toyed with the idea of deporting the Iraqi Jews to Israel. However, the British ambassador in Palestine warned him that such an act could have serious unanticipated repercussions. Israel, the ambassador explained, would welcome the arrival of cheap Jewish labor and would demand that in return the Arab states resettle Palestinian refugees. (Tsimhoni, 1991) In February 1949, the Foreign Office instructed the British ambassador in Baghdad, Sir Henry Mack, to caution Nuri Sa'id against expelling the Jews, as this would adversely affect the position of the Arab states. (Shiblak, 1986)
In March 1950, Iraq enacted a denaturalization law – valid for one year – that enabled the Jews to leave the country after renouncing their citizenship. In total, more than 100,000 Jews were brought from Iraq to Israel between May 1950 and June 1951, all of them by air. Some 60,000 were brought to Israel during the last three months of the operation, between March and June 1951, but only after their property had been impounded by the government. Thus, an entire community, which had been strongly attached to its native land, was uprooted, and its right – and the right of the individuals within it – to decide its own fate was appropriated. (Swirski, 1995) Moreover, the community was deprived of its economic rights and of the right to decide where to live and what nation to be a part of. More significantly, perhaps, the collective memory of a community was appropriated and transplanted into a different narrative – the Zionist narrative – which the Iraqi Jews played no part in creating. . . .
<http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/mepp/prrn/PAPERS/shenhav1.htm></blockquote>
Clearly, both Iraqi and Israeli sides were to blame for Jewish emigration from Iraq to Israel.
> > As for the Jews in the middle east, they were historically safer there
> > than anywhere else in the world up till 48 except perhaps in the U.S.
>
> I saw a documentary the other day with an interview of a leader of
> Jewish groups in India, who mentioned that through their long presence
> in India, they might have been the only group who did not face
> [systematic or large scale] discrimination. FWIW.
I don't know about the Jews of India, but the Jews as well as other religious minorities under the Ottoman Empire and other premodern Muslim states were given the status of dhimmi, which was indeed better than that of being a non-Christian or heretical Christian in Christendom, but was not equal to that of Muslims.
As I have shown in my posting "Jews and Other Minorities, Islamism, and Secularism in the Middle East" <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20060821/044730.html>, Iran and Turkey have done better by their Jewish communities, but even there equality did not and still does not obtain. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>