Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 11 

The ethnic cleansing of Mizrachi Jews has been erased from history

I have a confession to make. I am not a huge fan of shakshuka. For the uninitiated, this is an Israeli breakfast dish believed to have originated in Tunisia, Libya or possibly Yemen,  and brought to Israel by immigrants from those countries in the 1950s. Much modern Israeli food hails from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Indeed much contemporary Israeli culture, including literature, music, architecture, religion and politics, is strikingly Middle Eastern in its character. Given that the original Zionist pioneers were, in the main, European, it’s worth asking a serious question, one that goes beyond the vagaries of culinary fashion: how did this Orientalisation of Israel come about? 

The answer is chilling.

On 20^th March 2017, the UN Human Rights Council held one of its thrice-yearly sessions in which it ritually condemns Israel under agenda item 7, the only item that targets a specific country. On this occasion, however, something highly unusual occurred. Hiller Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, was granted a few minutes to address the Council. After the PLO, Qatar, Syria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and other Arab regimes had again accused the Jewish state of racism, ethnic cleansing and apartheid, Neuer said this: 

Once upon a time, the Middle East was full of Jews. Algeria had 140,000 Jews. Algeria, where are your Jews? Egypt used to have 75,000 Jews. Where are your Jews? Syria, you had tens of thousands of Jews. Where are your Jews? Iraq, you had over 135,000 Jews. Where are your Jews? [1]

The listeners sat in stunned silence. They had no answer. Which is a shame, because it’s an important question to which few outside Israel are prepared to give the time of day let alone offer a truthful answer. 

Roughly 60% of the six million Jews who today live in Israel originated from the Muslim countries of the MENA. The majority of these Mizrachi (Eastern) Jews, like their European Ashkenazi counterparts, didn’t visit Israel as tourists and decided to stay on to enjoy the sunny Mediterranean lifestyle but were fleeing discrimination, persecution and violence. 

Jews have inhabited the Middle East for around 3,000 years. Though most were expelled from their homeland by the Romans in the first century, large numbers resettled throughout the MENA, put down firm roots and contributed immeasurably to their adoptive nations. When Jewish sovereignty was re-established in 1948, the Jews residing in these countries were deemed by the Arab League to constitute “the Jewish minority of Palestine” and became targets of riots, pogroms and intensified official persecution. The result of this tsunami of anti-Jewish hostility was a mass exodus of 850,000 Mizrachi Jews. About 650,000 arrived in Israel, where they were housed in primitive refugee camps (ma’abarot) for up to ten years, the remainder finding refuge in the West. A tiny minority succeeded in clinging on to a precarious existence in their MENA homes. 

As with the Palestinian refugees, whose collective trauma is passionately and publicly commemorated as their Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), controversy still surrounds the precise proportions of the Jewish refugees who fled in fear or were expelled. One issue is beyond doubt: unlike the Palestinian refugees, there has been no international acknowledgement of their plight. No special international agencies were established to meet their needs, no resources were allocated to alleviate their hardship, and no UN resolutions condemned their treatment at the hands of their oppressors. The Jewish Nakba, that resulted in the displacement of many more Jews than Palestinians from their homes, has been all but erased from history while the Palestinian experience has been fetishised. 

Although the term Nakba can be applied to both these human tragedies, there is no moral equivalence between them. The roughly 710,000 Arab refugees from Western Palestine had been caught up in a war that their leaders (along with neighbouring Arab states) had declared on the nascent Jewish state. They were not victims of ethnic cleansing – otherwise, how could 160,000 Arabs have elected to stay? By contrast, the MENA Jews, having suffered second-class dhimmi status for centuries, were dispossessed violently or under threat of violence merely for being Jewish (by now redefined as “Zionist”). These Jews were indeed ethnically cleansed, either in single, brutal assaults (such as Jordan’s expulsion of the Jews of Judea and Samaria (that they promptly renamed the West Bank) or in the course of sustained campaigns of intimidation and abuse (as in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria). 

Some commentators have suggested that a useful way to view this double refugee problem is to accept that an exchange of populations took place and that the moral slate is thereby wiped clean. If only life were that simple. That formulation won’t work for many reasons.

First, the Palestinian refugee issue has been an effective stick with which to beat Israel for decades. By defining refugee status (in this case only) as inherited, Israel’s enemies, aided and abetted by UNRWA and other agencies, have ensured that the refugee population expands relentlessly as a permanent irritant in the region and a ceaseless demographic threat to Israel through their insistence on the mythical “right of return.” Never has a humanitarian cause been so effectively weaponised for a malign political purpose.  

Second, the majority of Jewish refugees from Muslim countries have been successfully absorbed into Israel and other countries (at great personal and collective cost) and have no wish to don the mantle of victimhood in their struggle for recognition. In that sense, they play into the hands of those who are inclined to shrug their shoulders and move on. 

Third, the Mizrachi Jews deserve their story to heard and to be offered recompense. That is a matter of a natural justice. It is also an urgent prerequisite for peace. The lack of acknowledgement, let alone resolution, of the issue has been a running sore both within Israel (where many Mizrachim have been deeply sceptical of attempts at rapprochement with the Arab world) and in Israel’s relations with countries of the MENA as well as with the rest of the world. Journalist Matti Friedman has described the displacement of Mizrachi Jews as one of the hidden dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict [2]. 

In her landmark book on the subject of the dispossessed Jews of the MENA, Lyn Julius [3] lamented the undeniable fact that successive Israeli governments have come so late to this realisation. Only since 2010, when the Knesset passed a law binding Israeli leaders to secure compensation for the Mizrachim, has the subject even been on the negotiating table. The mechanism for achieving this more balanced approach to the double refugee issue might be to create an international fund, as proposed by President Clinton. This would be used to compensate both refugee populations, Palestinian and Jewish (taking account of the previous allocation of billions of dollars to the former and none to the latter). Julius quotes Levan Zamir, head of the Israeli organisations representing Jews from Arab lands: “Peace will not bring about the international fund, the international fund will bring about peace.” 

Next time you sitting in an Israeli restaurant tucking into your kubbeh, couscous or even (sigh) shakshuka, remember the bitter provenance of these culinary favourites: the unrecognised, unfathomable and unresolved calamity – the invisible Jewish Nakba – that propelled them to the centre of Israeli life.

[1] https://unwatch.org/algeria-jews-hillel-neuer-u-n-human-rights-council/

[2] Friedman M. A different history of displacement and Loss. Times of Israel, 15 May, 2012.https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-different-history-of-displacement-and-loss/

[3] Julius L. Uprooted: How 3000 years of Jewish Civilisation in the Arab World Vanished Overnight. London, Vallentine Mitchell, 2018