On Sep 10, 2006, at 7:13 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> On 9/10/06, ravi <gadfly at exitleft.org> wrote:
>> At around 10/9/06 9:24 pm, joanna wrote:
>> >
>> > The diaspora of Arab Jews back to Israel followed on the heels
>> of 48 and
>> > the disposession of the Palestinians. It is also the result of
>> terrorist
>> > actions on the part of Israel to make Jews feel unsafe in the
>> rest of
>> > the Middle East. This happened in Iraq for a fact.
>>
>> So, you think Yoshie wasn't being sarcastic? I thought she was!
>
> 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
>
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
>
> 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.
>
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
>
> 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.
>
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
>
> 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/>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>