Suspended Animation

"They were hanged in the public square and the population was given the day off and invited to gather and dance in celebration underneath the dangling corpses. I still have nightmares about being back in Baghdad."
Lisette Shashoua, Jewish-Iranian-Canadian

"Fair and equal acknowledgement of all refugee populations arising from the Arab-Israeli conflict requires the recognition of Jewish refugees."
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird's office statement, Ottawa

"Addressing the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab countries is an important step toward achieving a comprehensive, negotiated two-state peace with an absolute end to the conflict and all claims."
David Koschitsky, chair, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, Canada

Jewish Children with teacher, Samarkand, 1910

The world knows of the pathetic plight of the 760,000 Palestinians who fled their homes in fear and hope in the knowledge that an assembled Arab-state army was set to invade and destroy the fledgling State of Israel in 1948 when it had the unmitigated gall to declare itself a state, based on a Partition resolution declared by the United Nations. The Jews of Palestine accepted the offer with alacrity, while the Arabs of Palestine bitterly refused to take their portion of the partitioned geography for a state.

That original 760,000 who fled have now grown to an estimated five million, awaiting return to their ancestral homes where many had lived for at least a hundred years, many more for far less a period of time, but considered their cherished homeland nonetheless. There are no figures establishing the numbers of descendants of the estimated 850,000 Arabized Jews who had lived for a thousand years in the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa.

They were considered enemies of the state when Israel raised itself from the dust of history that had created a diaspora that had been forced to scatter themselves across the world in search of a haven that history denied them. Jews were forcibly displaced from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen, their properties confiscated. They fled to Israel, and to any country that would have them, some ending up in North America.

Iranian Jewish Dervishes, 1922

Those that found haven in Israel represent the large body of Sephardic Israeli Jews who live alongside the Ashkenazic Jews who came from Europe. For the Palestinian refugees sixty years on, there has been no effort to be integrated into the Arab countries to which they fled; among them all only Jordan has advanced citizenship to the Palestinians settled there. Elsewhere, in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestinians live in 'refugee camps', squalid, crowded places.

The United Nations has maintained a special Palestinian-refugee-oriented mission dedicated solely to their support. They have themselves of their own initiatives not built civil infrastructure, businesses, able to sustain themselves in economic and social self-sufficiency, but remain entirely dependent on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees to sustain them, supporting education, health, food, and all other needs in a pathetic cycle of dependency and self-pity.

There has never been a recognition either from the United Nations or the countries from which Jews in the Middle East and North Africa were expelled of the need to compensate them for their loss of home and belongings and the trauma sustained by their expulsion from their ancient homelands. With the exception of the United States Congress which formally passed a resolution 2008 recognizing their tragedy.

Canada has now taken its own steps to remedy that lack of acknowledgement after a House of Commons foreign affairs committee heard testimony from survivors of the expulsion living in Canada. In a report released in November the committee recommended that Canada formally recognize the experience of those Jewish refugees from Arab countries, forcibly expelled to find a home for themselves elsewhere.

There have been 172 United Nations resolutions respecting the issue of Palestinian refugees. But never has a resolution recognized let alone addressed those Jews who were expelled from their homelands. The report from the committee refers to an Arab League plan meant to persuade Jews to leave through forcing them to declare a willingness to join Arab armies at war with Israel, resulting in an exodus of Jews across the Middle East and North Africa.

Their population has diminished from 856,000 in 1948 to the present time where 4,315 Jews remain in their Arab-dominated countries of birth in North Africa and the Middle East. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has claimed that he expects Israel to provide a quota of Palestinian refugees that they are prepared to absorb each year as one of his demands during peace negotiations. 

This is the very same man who has declared categorically that "not one Jew" will be permitted to remain behind in the territory of the West Bank that will become a Palestinian state. Israel is expected to absorb Palestinian refugees and their descendants who have been officially declared by the UN as refugees along with those who originally fled. But the new Palestinian state will be absolutely Judenrein.