Jewish refugees want 'justice' like Palestinians, some say it's a ploy

By Michele Chabin Special for USA TODAY | USATODAY

PETAH TIKVA, Israel – Asher Elgavi, 75, remembers well when his family fled the ancient Jewish enclave in Libya and became refugees.

At age 9, he watched from a rooftop as Arabs burned and looted homes and synagogues in the Jewish quarter of Tripoli in 1948 amid a wave of anti-Jewish rioting throughout the Arab world. Twelve Jews were killed that night in Libya.

"That's when the Jews of Tripoli knew they had no future there," said the retired scientist and father of five, becoming tearful.

From 1948 to 1972, about 860,000 Jews left their homes in Arab countries to escape anti-Semitism in Arab cities, some of which had a Jewish presence for more than 2,000 years, the Israeli government says.

The government along with the World Jewish Congress is asking the international community to recognize "Mizrahi" or "Arab Jews" as refugees like it does other displaced populations. Mizrahi Jews "want justice," said Daniel Meron, who heads the Israeli Foreign Ministry's United Nations bureau.

The demand is not unlike that of Palestinians, Arabs who fled Israel around the time of Israel's war of independence. The Palestinians numbered about 750,000, and 280,000 or more joined them as a result of the 1967 Six-Day War, says the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

But Palestinian leaders see no such comparison and said they are angry that Israel is pushing its campaign at the same time they seek statehood at the U.N. General Assembly. Another vote on statehood may occur at the U.N. next month.

Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, accused Israel last month of engaging in a "manipulative strategy" that is "part of a public relations campaign that is both cynical and hypocritical."

Meron disagrees.

"Shortly before Israel was established, the Arab states colluded to punish the Jews by confiscating their belongings and freezing their bank accounts," Meron says. "They need to be compensated for their losses."



Much has been reported on the Palestinian refugees living in stateless territories of the West Bank and Gaza on the borders of Israel and in enclaves in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Because UNRWA also classifies the Palestinians' descendants as refugees, their numbers have ballooned to about 5 million people.

The Arab world has for decades demanded compensation for the refugees and a right for all 5 million to return to Israel. Israel says allowing that many into Israel, a country of 7 million, would turn the Jewish nation into an Arab state, putting Jewish futures in peril again.

Last month, Israel sponsored a conference at the United Nations on the Jewish refugees, pointing out that Israel granted them citizenship while Arab nations refused to do the same for Palestinians. The conference was part of the recently launched "Justice for Jewish Refugees" campaign to convince the international community to recognize the issue and deal with it.

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Alyalon said Israel plans to make the issue of part of negotiations with the Palestinians over a future Palestinian state.

Ashrawi wrote in the Huffington Post that Israel's intention is not to protect the rights of Jews but "undermine the rights of the Palestinian refugees, whom it uprooted, dispossessed, and expelled from their homeland."

She told USA TODAY that the Palestinians recognize the suffering of Jews, "or any other minority in the Arab world, especially due to the impact the Zionist movement had on internal relations in the Arab world."

But she says anti-Semitism in Arab countries, "came as a result of the creation of the state of Israel and the suffering of the Palestinians.



"If there are any Jews who believe their homeland is Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon or Yemen," she said, the Palestinian leadership "will do everything it can so they can return to their homeland."

Israel insists it is not trying to detract from Palestinian claims but have their own recognized. Unlike the PLO, the Mizrahis are not seeking the right to return to former homelands. They say the solution for both sides is to create a fund from which Jewish and Palestinian refugees receive compensation for their loss.

A group called the Committee of Baghdadi Jews in Ramat Gan says that it is wrong to expect Jewish losses in Iraq to be used to "offset" the losses Palestinians suffered.

"If in future negotiations Israel will convince the Palestinians to offset claims of property between Palestinian refugees and Jewish refugees from the Arab world (and if this is not only an excuse to postpone negotiations), we expose the fallacy of this trade," the group stated.

Mizrahi Jews and their advocates insist that they meet the United Nation's refugee criteria and cannot be ignored.

"They are refugees in that they were living in a country from which they were uprooted, displaced and denationalized by law. Their assets were plundered and sequestered," said Irwin Cotler, a former Canadian justice minister who has explored Jewish refugee status.

The tumult of the aftermath of World War II hastened the demise of Jewish populations in Arab countries where they had lived since the third century B.C. in some cases. Though Jews had been marginalized by Arab regimes and subjected to violence, they thrived in the old Jewish Quarters of Tripoli and Benghazi in Libya, Cairo in Egypt and Aleppo in Syria.

The Nazi axis powers oppressed Jewish communities in North Africa as they did in Europe, and after the war the Jews were treated sometimes with indifference or hostility by the victorious allied powers. Violence against Jews escalated when Israelis declared independence.

In addition to seizing or destroying Jewish property, some countries passed laws forbidding Jews from taking certain jobs and studying at universities.

Dan Diker, secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress, said Israel, the Jewish world and the international community "are decades late" in addressing the refugee issue. He said Israel had not made the issue a priority sooner because it was preoccupied with its survival in a hostile region and with absorbing more than a million immigrants, including hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors.

Not all Mizrahi Jews support the campaign, however.

"Palestinians and Iraqi Jews may have claims to compensation over property, for instance, but what on earth has one to do with the other?" Rachel Shabi, an Israeli journalist of Mizrahi descent, asked in an op-ed in Haaretz newspaper.

Mizrahis say the only difference is that Israel made them citizens, along with the Arabs who remained in Israel.

Elgavi was among 30,000 Jews who fled Libya following anti-Jewish pogroms, including one in 1945 that left 140 Jews dead.

"We lived in Tripoli, opposite the sea, and a mob tried to break down the door of our building," said Elgavi, surrounded by family photos in his apartment in this Tel Aviv suburb.

The Elgavis' Muslim landlord helped them escape to the rooftop, from which the family climbed from adjoining rooftops to get to the city's Jewish Quarter. Asher's 1-year-old sister, who had the mumps, died along the way.

The family boarded a ship for Israel in 1949, leaving behind a home and a cobbler shop in Tripoli. They lived in a vast tent city for a year, then in a flimsy wooden hut with an outhouse for the next 12 years.

"We were refugees as much as the Palestinians were refugees," Elgavi said. "The fact that we chose integration over victimhood shouldn't be held against us."