Thursday, February 05, 2009

The Fogoten Refugees: Jews Displaced From Arab Countries

In 1945 there were up to one million Jews living in the Middle East and North Africa outside the Palestine Mandate - many living in communities dating back more than three millennia, well before even the arrival of Islam. Today, there are only several thousand. Who are these Jews? What precipitated their mass-exodus in the 20th century? Where did they go? And why don't we know their stories?

This has been a cause of mine for many years. Most Westerners simply do not know that More Jews were displaced from Arab countries in the last 60 years, than Palestinians were ever displaced from Palestine. According to official Arab statistics, close to 1,000,000 Jews left their homes in Arab countries from 1948 until the early 1970s. Some 600,000 resettled in Israel. Their descendants, and those of Iranian and Turkish Jews, now number 3.06 million of Israel's 5.4 to 5.8 million Jewish citizens. WOJAC estimates that confiscated Jewish property in Arab countries would be valued today at more than $300 billion and Jewish-owned real-estate left behind in Arab lands at 100,000 square kilometers (four times the size of the State of Israel). Yet it is the Arabs who make claims.

4 comments:

  1. Jews were all around the world. They did not have a country then. They are still around the world as bankers, financiers: this way they control the world. Their Holy Land is United States.

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  2. From time to time we get yucky comments like the one above. itThe price of freedom.

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  3. It's about time Americans wake up to how Israel own the American politicians and the press. This country is going to be the most hated country in the world if we continue to be blinded to how we are being wagged by Isreal and it citizen. The average American is dumb, fat and happy, even as our country is being taken to destruction, led by Israel.

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  4. Anonymous,did it ever occur to you to read up on history of 'how' Jews ended up professions like Banking? If you'd care to look (which I doubt you will), you'll find that the early Church in Europe forbade Christians to go into those professions such as money lending, as 'interest' was seen as 'sinful'. Professions like money lending were actually seen as the lowest of the low,and Jews were barred from most other professions by Europe anyway. Banking was one of the very few professions they were allowed to be involved in. Therefore,blame the Church for the "sucess" of the Jews you'd like to blame on the "Jews" for some reason. Prior to those times,the Diaspora from the Middle East were the few who understood fields like trade,after picking it up indirectly under the Romans. Entering particularly northern Europe, they were smart folks in a fuedal land that was almost entirely ignorant, beyond hacking each other to death to gain power.

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