Issue of Arab Jews
However, lately, and particularly after the Iraq war, Israel has been striving through various means tomake the refugee issue a double-edged problem. Briefly, Israel says, ‘I do not deny there is a problem of Palestinian refugees but at the same time there is also a Jewish refugee problem, so these two problems should be taken together.’
By Jewish refugees, Israel means the approximately 850,000 Jews who had to leave Arab countries when the state of Israel was created. This is the number that Jewish sources have accepted and have declared. We do not know the number Arab sources accept, hence, I presume that we will have take the number announced by Jewish sources as genuine. In addition to other sources, a group representing Arab Jews, called ‘Justice for Jews from Arab countries,’ in a report it presented to the United Nations five months ago, stated that about 900,000 Jews used to live in Arab countries before 1948, 850,000 of them had to leave the countries they were living in, now there are only 8,000 Jews left in those countries and has made this an indemnity issue.
This group in its 39-page report stated that Jews, who had to leave Arab countries, left behind a variety of properties worth $100 billion and stressed that the juridical conditions are more suitable now to compensate the owners of those properties. So, the group has officially brought the issue of Jewish refugees and their losses onto international arena.
This report is important both from this aspect and others as well. The report states that 600,000 Jews who had to leave Arab countries emigrated to the newly-created state of Israel and to various countries in the world. So, it is understood that the number of Jewish people who had gone to countries other than Israel was about 250,000.
When it comes to the issue and number of Jews from Iraq, which apparently of late has attracted huge media and state interest, this number is not 250,000 as the media and some officials hav estated. According to Professor Carole Basri, one of the important personalities who defends the rights of Jews, and herself immigrated from Iraq and her grandfather was the chief rabbi of Baghdad, 120,000 Jews left Iraq during the Operations Ezra and Nehemiah that resulted in Iraqi Jews being airlifted from Iraq and 110,000 of them settled in Israel.
This number given by Basri and published in a law magazine should be accepted as the realistic number, because there is no reason for Basri to show the number lesser than it actually is, and it is also obvious that the more the numbers grow, the more the rights of the Jewish rights will grow, as well as the possible indemnity cases…
In this case, I do not find the news that ‘150,000 Iraqi Jews immigrated from Northern Iraq,’ as published in our papers, to be realistic and right. Northern Iraq is not a region where Jews dwell in abundance. Iraqi Jews live in big cities like Baghdad, Basra and hold important commercial positions there. They do not prefer mountainous areas as history has indicated.
Hence, I reiterate, that I do not accept the number of Northern Iraqi Jews given by the media here and assess these Jewish ‘housing projects’ within the framework of the general rights and indemnities of Arab Jews.
