The Everlasting Hatred (23 page)

—H
AJ
A
MIN AL
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USSEINI
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If you read about the Middle East problem in the newspaper today or listen to the discussions on the news, you can't help but be bombarded by analysts suggesting that the key to peace is resolving “the “Palestinian refugee issue.” Well, prepare to be shocked. There is another virtually untold side of the Middle East refugee story.
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Joan Peters put it so well in her monumental work,
From Time Immemorial
:

For every refugee—adult or child—in Syria, Lebanon or elsewhere in the Arab world who compels our sympathy, there is a Jewish refugee who fled from the Arab country of his birth. For every Arab who moved to neighboring lands, a Jew was forced to flee from a community where he and his ancestors may have lived for 2,000 years.
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The world seldom if ever hears about the more than 800,000 Jewish refugees who fled Arab terror and hatred and settled in Israel as a result of the Muslim fury at the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel. Perhaps it is because every single one of those refugees was accepted, resettled, and provided for by the young struggling Jewish state without question or hesitation. There never has been a Jewish refugee camp in Israel or anywhere else.
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On the other hand, Palestinians have never been accepted and settled in Muslim countries. They have been deliberately kept in miserable conditions so as to keep their hatred against the Jews and Israel at a fever pitch.

Here are some indisputable facts. In 1948, there were more than 850,000 Jews living in the Arab world. Today, there are fewer than 29,000. Where were those Jewish dhimmi communities in the Arab world? Before Israel was reborn, between 125,000 and 135,000 Jews lived in Iraq; 75,000 lived in Egypt; 30,000 lived in Syria; 55,000 lived in Yemen; 8,000 lived in Aden; 265,000 lived in Morocco; up to 140,000 lived in Algeria; 105,000 lived in Tunisia; 5,000 lived in Lebanon; and some 38,000 lived in Libya.
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Where are all of these Jews now? What happened to them? Where are their properties and financial resources? Why are they never mentioned in the “Palestinian Refugee debate” that keeps being trumpeted in the United Nations and the liberal media?

“The Arab world has been virtually emptied of its Jews, and the fledgling Jewish state would bear the burden of its hundreds of thousands of Jewish Arab-born refugees almost in secret,” explains Peters. “So unknown and undisclosed are these Arab-born Jews and the plight they have faced—the camps, squalor, uprooting, loss of property and security, discontent, unemployment and what they sensed to be neglect of their problems in Israel—that in countless conversations outside the Middle East with academics or professionals, from university graduates to blue-collar workers, including Jews as well as non-Jews, when the question of the ‘Middle East refugees' is raised, almost without exception the response is, ‘You mean the Palestinians—the Arabs, of course.' It is as though the sad and painful story of the Arab-born Jewish refugees had been erased, their struggle covered over by a revision of the pages of history.”
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Why isn't this story reported? Why isn't it chronicled? Why isn't it remembered? If Arab nations are responsible for expelling Jews in approximately the same numbers as the much-publicized Arab refugees displaced after the creation of Israel, why isn't the obvious solution a simple population exchange? Nowhere is the enormity of the Muslim myth swallowed by the West more graphically illustrated than in this issue.

Note also that there is absolutely no moral equivalence in this situation,
for the Jews did not drive out the Palestinian refugees
. The Palestinians were not threatened and killed to terrorize them into leaving. In many cases they were begged to stay. No! They were ordered to leave “temporarily” by the combined Muslim armies who promised to annihilate the Jews and their new state, and to give them the booty left by the Jews.

On the other hand, the Jews living in Arab countries were terrorized, killed, and driven out with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Their properties and assets were all confiscated. Those who escaped were thankful just to be alive.

The Jews were received and immediately repatriated into the new fragile state of Israel. They were given aid and jobs to the best of the ability of the struggling new country.

The Palestinians were deliberately forced into refugee camps by their fellow Muslims and not permitted to integrate in any way into the society of their unwilling hosts. Their own people didn't even try to help them; instead they prevailed upon the United Nations and gullible Western charities to supply the refugees' needs. They have been kept in these camps for more than sixty years—like an unhealed wound by their own people—just to be used as political pawns by Muslim negotiators to charge their plight as “Israeli aggression.”

Many myths have been spun to suppress the facts about the Jewish immigration from Arab lands. Some of these have already been exploded in earlier chapters. But let us rehearse again some of the myths that actually teach the exact opposite of the actual, demonstrable truth:

Myth #1
: The Arabs have nothing against Jews in general and “lived in peace and harmony with them” until the creation of the Zionist Movement and the consequent creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Myth #2
: Alienation with the Jews
began
in large part because Israel is almost entirely made up of European Jews who displaced indigenous Arab peoples in Palestine.

Myth #3
: The key to resolving the Middle East crisis is to stop “Israeli aggression and occupation of Arab lands” and to create an independent Palestinian state.

Myth #4
: Israel's U.S.-supplied military juggernaut has practiced continuous aggression against the neighboring, basically peaceful Muslim nations who are only trying to right a terrible wrong forced upon them by the West.

These myths have worked like magic for the Muslim propagandists for decades, but especially in the negotiations that have resulted from the Oslo Agreement.

While there has been much mythology about how the Arab refugees in the Middle East became refugees; there is little doubt about why Jews in Arab nations left their homes and their belongings to flee for their lives. Anyone who takes the trouble to investigate will discover that the facts of history easy to find.

“Clearly,” writes Joan Peters, “the massive exodus of Jewish refugees from the Arab countries was triggered largely by the Arabs' own Nazi-like bursts of brutality, which had become the lot of the Jewish communities.”
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In the 1947 debates over the rebirth of Israel, Egypt's delegate to the United Nations General Assembly quite openly threatened the very lives of the Jews living in Arab countries: “The lives of one million Jews in Muslim countries would be jeopardized by partition,” he blatantly warned.
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In fact, even the small handful of Jews still living in Arab lands do not remain by choice. In terms of both percentages of population and in real numbers, fewer Jews have chosen to live in Arab nations than chose to live in Hitler's Germany between 1933 and 1939.
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Why the contrast? Why did Jews leave everything behind to
flee Arab lands between 1948 and the present, while two-thirds of Germany's Jews, despite official anti-Semitic policies, stuck it out?

“Arab-born Jews realized that the Arab threats would be carried out, because they had lived as second-class—dhimmis—with reminders of pogroms in their own or their families' past experiences, whereas the German Jews felt themselves ‘assimilated,' part of the German mainstream,” explains Peters. “They expressed initial ‘disbelief' that any such bigotry as the Nazis' could be more than a cruel political joke.” No such illusions, however, were held with regard to the Arabs.

The big difference between the 1930s Germany and the situation beginning in 1948 was that Jews now had a place to go—Israel.

Imagine you're a Jew living in an Arab land and you hear the following report on the radio: “The Jews in the Arab countries have not respected the defense that Islam has given them for generations. They have encouraged World Zionism and Israel in every way in its aggression against the Arabs. . . . The Congress hereby declares that the Jews in the Muslim countries whose ties with Zionism and Israel are proved shall be regarded as fighters against the Muslims, unfit for the patronage and protection which the Muslim faith prescribes for adherents of peaceful protected faiths.”

If you lived within range of Radio Amman in 1967, you would not have had to imagine such a broadcast. This was an actual report and typical of many others heard on Arab radio and television throughout the Middle East.
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“Arab propagandists and sympathizers have persisted in the charge that Israel is a foreign outpost of Western civilization, the intruding offspring of Europe inhabited by European survivors of Nazi brutality. In actuality, more than half of the people in Israel today are Jews or offsprings of Jews who lived in Arab countries and have fled from Arab brutality; Israel's present population consists mainly of refugees and their descendants from two oppressions, European-Nazis and Arab.”
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For some reason, the whole world has swallowed the sometimes-unbelievable products of the Arab propaganda machine. As Egyptian-born author Bat Ye'or sees it, “Even in Israel there is a kind of ‘collective amnesia' with regard to the awesome contribution played by the Arab Jew in the history of the Jewish state.”
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“The fact that the Zionist struggle was active mainly in Europe and America, and the fact that ignorance has prevailed concerning the dhimmi condition and its after-effects (insecurity, fear and silence), have led to Zionism's being viewed as an exclusively Western movement,” Ye'or writes.

The constant obfuscation of the Oriental dimension of Zionism has helped to foster the image of Israel as a colonial state of Western origin—even perceived as a reaction to Nazism. In this way Israel is defined within an exclusively Western framework, in contradiction to the realities of history, geography and its demography. Without in any way denying the specific dynamics of European Zionism and its essential achievements, nothing can change the fact that the fate of Palestine and its Jewish population was determined by the laws of jihad and its ulterior consequences. It is the historical amnesia specific to Oriental Jewry that has caused Zionism to be interpreted as an exclusively European movement, even though it is the stream in which all the currents of a nation, dismembered by exile, converge and unite. This shortcoming is in part responsible for the difficulty of dialogue with those who attribute the present situation of the Palestinian Arab refugees to European and Nazism, whereas it is the consequence of a much more ancient tragedy. Only when the history of the dhimmis will have been taken into consideration will solutions be found to satisfy the rights of each party in conformity with historical realities.
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Modern media invented a perfect term for what the Muslim nations have done with the history of dhimmis—
turnspeak
—which means, “a cynical inverting or distorting of facts, which for example, makes the
victim
appear to be the
oppressor
.” Arab propagandists have used
turnspeak
to perfection in perpetuating the myth of “displaced” and “terrorized” Arabs in the Jewish-settled area of Palestine-cum-Israel.

The record shows that the migrant Muslims who traveled from other Arab lands to areas of Palestine that were reclaimed and developed by the Jews came to get jobs. It was
afterward
that Muslims began to claim “Jews displaced them from land that had been in their families for hundreds of years.”

I agree that there have been some colossal injustices inflicted on the people of Palestine. Only it wasn't the Jews who committed them, but the Muslims, who sought to drive the Jews out of a tiny plot of land that was only a fraction of what was originally mandated to them by the League of Nations. As we will see, when the map of the Middle East was completely redrawn after the fall of the Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1917, and Arab states were created from the stateless remains of the Ottoman occupation, a certain section was mandated to the Jews as a homeland. I hope that everyone reading this book will clearly see, that no matter how small the Jewish state was made, it was still too big for the Muslims—
because it isn't the size of Israel that matters to the Muslims, it is the existence of Israel
.

The most cynical myth of all, however, is the lie that Jews enjoyed freedom, liberty, and kind treatment while dwelling in Muslim-ruled lands before the rise of Zionism. Here are some facts from impartial observers on how the Jews, or dhimmis, were treated:

In their Holy Land, the Jews as well as Christians suffered long from harsh discrimination, persecution, and pogroms. According to the British Consulate report in 1839, “the
Jew's life was not much above that of a dog
.”

In truth,
“Arab” terrorism in the Holy Land originated centuries before the recent tool of “the Palestinian cause was invented
.” In towns where Jews lived for hundreds of years, those Jews were periodically robbed, raped, in some places massacred, and in many instances, the survivors were obliged to abandon their possessions and run. As we have seen, beginning with the Prophet Mohammad's edict demanding racial purity—that “Two religions may not dwell together . . .”—the Arab-Muslim world codified its supremacist credo, and later that belief was interpreted liberally enough to allow many non-Muslim dhimmis, or infidels, to remain alive between onslaughts in the Muslim world as a means of revenue. The infidel's head tax, in addition to other extortions—and the availability of the “non-believers” to act as helpless scapegoats for the oft-dissatisfied masses—became a highly useful mainstay to the Arab-Muslim rulers. Thus the pronouncement of the Prophet Mohammad was altered in practice to: two religions may not dwell together equally. That was the pragmatic interpretation.
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