The studiously avoided refugees

In his speech in Cairo last week President Obama referred to himself as a “student of history.” A number of writers have pointed out that there’s a dimension of the Middle East’s history that the President failed to mention.

A half year ago Reut Cohen wrote:

My paternal grandfather vividly recalls his experiences living as a Jew in Baghdad and the Farhud pogrom, which was a Nazi pogrom coordinated by Haj Amin al-Husseini. In a two-day period Arab mobs went on a rampage in Baghdad and other cities in Iraq. Nearly 300 Jews were killed and more than 2,000 injured; some 900 Jewish homes were destroyed and looted, and hundreds of Jewish-owned shops were robbed and destroyed. My older family members recall witnessing how Iraqi soldiers pulled small children away from their parents and ripped the arms off young girls to steal their bracelets; pregnant women were raped and their stomachs cut open. My grandfather hid his baby brother underneath his t-shirt when the violence began and ran home. My great-grandfather saved his entire family during the riots that broke out in Baghdad by claiming to be a Muslim when Iraqi troops came into their home with the intent of looting, raping, and killing. Eventually, when being a Jew was practically criminalized, my father’s family escaped to Israel with only the clothes on their backs — their belongings were confiscated — leaving behind everything that they knew. Their experience was not a unique one and was shared by several thousand Baghdadi Jews.

Other Islamic countries treated their Jewish populations similarly. My maternal grandmother escaped from Syria during the mid-1940s. Her parents had died and she was forced to live with an older sister. As a 16-year-old girl, she decided to pay a Druze man with the gold her mother left to her and made the long, tedious journey to modern-day Israel. Because Syrian officials would incarcerate any Jew fleeing in the direction of Israel, my grandmother and other individuals making their way from Syria to what eventually became Israel would only be able to walk at night. Several Syrian Jews found it nearly impossible to flee. The last few Jews from Syria made their escape in the early 1990s. Our male relatives who arrived in Israel in the 1990s shared their stories with us. They were taken by Syrian authorities and tortured for unspecified amounts of time, experiencing unspeakable cruelty at the hands of Syrian officials.

Daniel Dagan writes (h/t Crossing the Rubicon):

For much too long Israel has been portrayed as a project of Western immigrants who seized a foreign country in the Orient and drove out its population. Yet I am an Israeli, and I come from the Orient. So I know for sure that I don’t fit this routine story – and I am certainly not alone. Nearly half the Jewish population in Israel are refugees from Arab or Muslim countries. Considering their plight is an indispensable part of any debate on promoting accommodation between Muslims and Jews, let alone between Arabs and Israelis.

Andre Aciman, in a similar vein writes:

With all his references to the history of Islam and to its (questionable) “proud tradition of tolerance” of other faiths, Mr. Obama never said anything about those Jews whose ancestors had been living in Arab lands long before the advent of Islam but were its first victims once rampant nationalism swept over the Arab world.

Nor did he bother to mention that with this flight and expulsion, Jewish assets were — let’s call it by its proper name — looted. Mr. Obama never mentioned the belongings I still own in Egypt and will never recover. My mother’s house, my father’s factory, our life in Egypt, our friends, our books, our cars, my bicycle. We are, each one of us, not just defined by the arrangement of protein molecules in our cells, but also by the things we call our own. Take away our things and something in us dies. Losing his wealth, his home, the life he had built, killed my father. He didn’t die right away; it took four decades of exile to finish him off.

Yaacov Lozowick comments:

Still, it’s worth noting the many things Obama got wrong, not to denigrate him but to retain clarity. While I certainly hope Obama’s aspirations materialize, pretending history didn’t happen is a fine tactic for a speech, but a poor strategy for changing things.

By juxtaposing the mention of the Holocaust with his mention of the Palestinians, President Obama effectively endorsed the view that Israel was founded as a response to the Holocaust. The Arab world has little problem with this. Their approach, in general, is “the Holocaust was European crime, why should the Palestinians suffer?”

So instead of encouraging reconciliation the President’s approach more likely perpetuated the grievances.

Mentioning the Jewish refugees would have accomplished two things. The first, is that it would have served as a reminder that Israel serves as a refuge to all Jews whose hosts no longer want them. Jews in Arab and Muslim lands have suffered depredations; the population of those countries are just as responsible for the creation of a Jewish homeland as are the Europeans. (And yes, it still goes on today.)

And given the integration of Oriental Jews into Israel, also shows that self determination need not be the responsibility of others. President Obama clearly stated that he held Israel responsible for the failure of the Palestinians to have a country of their own. But this absolves their leadership from its own failures to create the institutions of civil society. The contrast in the treatment of Jewish refugees and Arab refugees from 1948 is stark, and the President would have done well to mention it. After all he’s the one who called for “honesty” even if it’s inconvenient.

(h/t Crossing the Rubicon)

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.