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JULIAN SCHVINDLERMAN, a Jerusalem-based political analyst, holds a master’s degree in Society and Politics of Israel from the HebrewUniversity of Jerusalem.

The tragic plight of the Palestinian refugees has received considerable media attention, especially in recent weeks. Not much, however, has been said about another refugee problem created at the outset of the same war that led to the Palestinian exodus. Yes, the Arab attack against the newly born State of Israel in 1948 created not one, but two refugee problems.

A foreshadowing of tragic events to come took place in Syria just a few days after the 1947 UN Partition Resolution — a pogrom in Aleppo, Syria, in which Jews were injured, synagogues burnt down, and Jewish properly looted. Later on, Jewish civil servants were dismissed, and an official pro­nouncement was issued decreeing that Jewish citizens could no longer sell their property — a measure intended to prevent the Syrian Jews from emigrating.

Things only got worse during and just after the so-called Arab-Israeli war itself. Together with the 540,000 Palestinians who fled (or who were expelled, according to some) from Palestine during that war, 860,000 Jews from Arab lands were forced  to  emigrate  from  Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. During this period, entire Jewish communities, which had never represented even the slightest threat to the ruling regime, were forced to abandon their native Arab countries, leaving behind virtually all their property as well as a rich historical presence in those lands. Upon their departure, these «Arab Jews» looked back to see their homes looted, bank accounts frozen, and invaluable cul­tural treasures expropriated by Arab regimes, which in one stroke chose to end abruptly three thousand years of Jewish communal life in the Middle East and North Africa.

Once the State of Israel was established in May 1948, the situation of the Jewish citizens still remaining in Arab countries deteriorated even more drastically. In a report recently issued by the World Jewish Congress, Itamar Levin presents a chilling description of the precarious state of these communities at the time. In Baghdad, for instance, the Iraqi police would search Jewish houses at any time during the day or the night. «When the owners did not hurry to open the doors, the doors were smash­ed,» according to Levin’s account. Once arrested, only money could gain a Jewish detainee’s freedom; many Arabs took advantage of the opportunity and chose not to repay debts owed to Jews — in some cases they even blackmailed their Jewish neighbors.

The situation did not improve in any of the Arab coun­tries over the next decade. When the 1956 Sinai war erupted, Egypt expropriated all British, French, and Jewish properties. Five hundred companies owned by Jews were lost and the assets of another 800 companies were frozen. The WJC report features a picture of a cloth­ing store in Cairo formerly owned by a prominent Jewish family; today it operates under government ownership. During this same period, Jewish professionals in Egypt were barred from their respective associations and thereby rendered unable to work; Jewish stores were also boy­cotted. In Syria, authorities forbade Jews to work their own agricultural lands in the northern town of Kamishili, robbing them of their only source of income. If a Syrian Jew managed to escape to Lebanon, his family, and even his neighbors, would have to pay for it.

One decade later came the 1967 Six-Day War. After Israel’s lightning victory, the Syrian regime instituted a ban on telephone services to the Jews and a non-renewal policy on their driver’s licenses. As for the Jews of Baghdad, almost all had become beggars by this time. The exceptional Iraqi Jews who had managed to keep a decent living standard risked being arrested and accused of spying for Israel or the United States if they happened to be dressed well in public, for example. Such systematic and brutal persecution led many more Jews to flee Arab lands in the years that followed.

Malka Hillel Shulewitz and Raphael Israeli point out in their book, The Forgotten Millions, that contrary to the dis­placed Palestinians of 1948, the Jews from Arab lands were, in many cases, expelled from areas remote from the field of battle and had to flee «in a most ugly manner» — in the words of Sabri Jiryis, director of the Institute of Palestine Studies in Beirut in 1975. Of these fleeing migrants, 600,000 found refuge in Israel, whereas the remaining 260,000 went to Europe and the American continent. In both cases they managed to integrate suc­cessfully into the societies that hosted them. For Israel, having just emerged from a war that took 1 percent of the lives of the Jewish population in Palestine, this massive immigration (which, by the way, numerically equaled the extant local Jewish population) was a Herculean chal­lenge. Yet Israel managed somehow to absorb hundreds of thousands of unfortunate refugees, who in most cases arrived penniless.

Of course, the material assets left behind by the Jewish communities in Arab countries could have gone a long way to reduce the socio-economic impact that such an influx of newcomers had on the young Israel.  «Each Egyptian pound, Iraqi dinar, or Syrian lira would have made a sig­nificant difference,» Levin wrote in his report. In addition to the energy and finances expended in absorbing these immigrant waves, Israel carried out daring operations to retrieve those Jews who had stayed behind in Arab lands, such as the legendary «Operation Magic Carpet,» under which 43,000 Yemenite Jews were rescued and brought by plane to Israel in 1948-1949, and «Operation Ezra and Nechemia,» which brought 123,500 Iraqi Jews in 1951.

Instead of confining the Jewish refugees to squalid camps along Israel’s borders once they arrived, con­demning them to a miserable existence, and exploiting them politically over five decades — essentially turning them into terrorists — the Israeli government permitted and even encouraged them to become productive mem­bers of Israeli society. Today they and their descendants represent almost 45 percent of the Israeli population, and their contribution to Israel’s cultural heritage is an estab­lished fact. As a result of the choice made by the Israeli leadership at the time to support rather than suppress the Jewish refugees, the world today neither hears about, nor is forced to deal with, a Jewish refugee problem. In con­trast, today neither the Palestinians nor the Arabs accept the reality of the de facto population exchange that occurred as a result of the 1948 war, nor, unlike Israel, do they accept due responsibility for absorbing their own refugees — even as the Arab world occupies 99.9 percent of the geographical area of the Middle East, with Israel covering the remaining fraction.

The unsung history of Jewish refugees from Arab lands takes on particular relevance now that the Arab nations are currently demanding that Israel pay the price for an Arab military defeat suffered in a war of aggression they themselves initialed. This moral absurdity is nonetheless sur­passed by a logical absurdity of even greater proportions, as was expounded by Israeli military analyst Ze’ev Schiff: the Arabs not only expect Israel to withdraw from territories but also to absorb Palestinian refugees inside its ever-shrinking borders. They are even demanding monetary compensation from the Jewish state for those Palestinians who may opt to remain in their Arab host countries.

As Israel and the world Jewish community have invest­ed considerable effort over the last few years in demand­ing European reparations for the tragedy that befell the Jews during the Holocaust, so they should devote equal energy to demanding reparations for the suffering caused the Jewish people by Arab regimes since 1948. In addition to being a pertinent item in the menu of available options that could balance current Arab demands, this initiative would vindicate an enormous historical injustice imposed on those who, for the last half a century and before the eyes of the world, have been rendered invisible.