“Dilemmas of Dhimmitude,” published in the Spring 2005 issue of Jewish Quarterly, came to us as a suggested follow-up to our series on Jews in Arab lands. The writer, Lyn Julius, is a journalist and co-founder of HARIF, an association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa in the UK.
Last year [2004], the Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafy invited the Jews of Libya to ‘come home’. In October, a Jewish delegation did return for the first time in almost 40 years – and was well received. They wished to visit their roots, renew business ties, seek the restoration of Jewish communal sites and compensation for lost property. (A follow-up visit of some 20 Israelis of Libyan origin was scheduled for March 2005, the first time Israeli citizens will have set foot on Libyan soil.) And Libya, anxious to be rehabilitated in the post-Saddam era, seems eager to usher in a new era of reconciliation.
Yet this was not the first time the Libyan leader had asked the Jews to return to the land of their birth. When he made a similar offer in 1975 (‘Are you not Arabs like us, Arab Jews?’), Albert Memmi, the Tunisian-born French writer and intellectual [whom we know also as a supporter of left Zionism — ed.], scoffed:
“Yes, indeed we were Arab Jews – in our habits, in our culture, our music, our menu. But must one remain an Arab Jew if, in return, one has to tremble for one’s life and the future of one’s children and always be denied a normal existence? We would have liked to be Arab Jews. If we abandoned the idea, it is because over the centuries the Muslim Arabs systematically prevented its realization by their contempt and cruelty.” Click here to read this entire enlightening article online at the Jewish Quarterly Web site.
It is natural for the great majority of Jews who left Arab States to feel they do not wish to return “home”. In some cases they were literally expelled in very much the same way that Jews in European countries had been expelled for centuries from virtually every country where they had lived. In other cases at times of tension between Israel and her neighbours like 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, many Jews left voluntarily because they saw in detail that they were very unwelcome in their countries of birth.
Even further, their property was confiscated as they left with no compensation. The total number of refugees from Arab countries is roughly equivalent to the Palestinian refugees created by the War of Independence and the Six Day War. Some elements of these Mizrahi Jews now want any settlement of the Palestinian refugee problem to also settle their own grievances against the Arab States they came from.