The Ethnic Cleansing of Jews

I am angry.

So much wasted breath on accusations of Israel committing “ethnic cleansing” and practicing “apartheid” with no reference to the over 850,000 Jews who had to flee from Arab countries with only the shirts on their backs in 1948 and the many since.

According to the testimony of British Member of Parliament Theresa Villiers in 2019, over 856,000 Jews lived in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf region in 1945. Over 850,000 were forced out in 1948 with no compensation for lost properties, businesses, or personal belongings.  

According to her testimony, between 1948 and 1972 pogroms and violent attacks were carried out by Arabs against Jews.

In 1945 there were 38,000 Jews living in Libya. Today there are none.

Fifty years ago, 140,000 Jews lived in Algeria. Now there are none.

In Iraq there were 135,000 Jews.  Now there are none.

Some 259,000 left Morocco, 55,000 left Yemen, 180,000 left Syria, and 25,000 left Iran.

As I noted above, they left everything behind as they fled to the West.

No United Nations agency was established to assist these refugees, no movement exists to return their properties and provide them with compensation, and no right of return exists.

Some might argue that many fled to Israel.

Israel resettled them and today they are proud citizens of the world’s only Jewish state.

Many, including my mom who left Morocco to come to Canada with my dad in 1951, settled and became productive Canadians. So did the parents of the many Iraqi and Lebanese Jewish friends I had at university and who remain friends to this day.

All of this with no help from the United Nations nor any refugee status.

But Palestinians had twenty-three Arab countries to which to flee, and, instead, those countries refused them residency and forced them into refugee camps.

Today, Muslim Israeli Arabs serve in government, have served in cabinet, are judges (including a Supreme Court Justice) and are military and police officers. Ten are members of the Knesset (Parliament), and there are several Arab political parties that compete freely in elections for all levels of government.

How many Jews can claim similar rights in Arab countries?

None.

Over the past fifty years the U.N. has passed over 170 resolutions specifically on Palestinian refugees but not one on Jewish refugees.

The United Nations Refugee Works Agency (UNRWA) that caters exclusively to Palestinian refugees has an annual budget of $1.6 billion, all from the pockets of Western taxpayers.

Not a cent was ever spent by the U.N. to assist Jewish refugees fleeing from ethnic cleansing by Arab governments.

Not a word said about Arab apartheid that continues to this day.

Not a street march anywhere.

Arab countries are often the Palestinians’ worst enemy.

In 1948 Arab states refused the United Nations partition that would have created a Palestinian state and instead attacked Israel. Israel repelled the invaders and did expel some Arabs from its territory who had supported the invading forces.

Egypt has closed its border with Gaza and is building a complex fence system to prevent Palestinians from leaving the southern Gaza war zone and taking refuge in Egypt.

After the war of 1948, Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt Gaza. Never was there any mention of “Palestine” or a “two state solution” in the Arab world.

These territories were considered to be Jordanian and Egyptian and neither country moved to create the Palestinian state so demanded today by most of the world.

Again, no street protests or boycott campaigns anywhere.

In 2005 Israel left Gaza to the Arab population that could have built a mini-Singapore or Hong Kong on a major sea route in the Mediterranean and offered a model of economic and social development to the world.

Instead, Gazans voted for Hamas who invested billions of dollars of foreign aid in weapons and infrastructures for war that turned the territory into a terrorist base at the expense of its residents.

This angers me as well as it should all readers.

The history of the Middle East is a story of what former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban called the Palestinian knack for never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Many will say that what happened to the Jews from the Middle East happened in the past, and what is happening now to the Palestinians is the problem that the global community must resolve.

My argument is that all injustices must be addressed.

The Jewish victims of ethnic cleansing by Arab states deserve better.

Anything less is simply another example of global antisemitism.