"All I can remember... is the element of
fear," Joseph Abdel Wahed writes, reflecting
on the events of his 12th year. "People in
the streets would mock us with the famous
Arab insult, Ya yahudi ya ibn el kalb
[Jewish son of a dog], or even more
ominously Idbah el-Yahud [slit the
throats of the Jews].
"This really scared us because there was
nowhere to hide. Many of us did not have
travel papers and even if we did, the
Egyptian
An antiquities
employee performs restoration work
on the Ben Maimon synagogue in Cairo
in August. Photo: AP
authorities wanted
to keep us as hostages and not let us out.
After the revolution of July 1952, their
attitude changed and they were only too glad
to kick us out, but not before confiscating
everything we owned - our businesses, farms,
hospitals and homes and bank accounts."
From 1948 to 1968, between 850,000 and 1
million Jews fled or were expelled from
their homes in Arab countries, including
Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Morocco, Algeria,
Tunisia, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. Some
Jewish refugees refer to the shattering
events as their Nakba, borrowing the
oft-repeated Arabic word for "catastrophe."
Others, particularly those who once lived in
Egypt, call it the "second exodus," relating
their experiences to the biblical
Israelites' miraculous flight from Egypt.
Most of these refugees, now in their sunset
years, feel blessed to have escaped Egypt
and grateful to have made their way to
Israel with little more than the shirt on
their back and - if they were fortunate -
one suitcase.
Joseph Abdel Wahed and Levana Zamir, also
from Egypt, now live at opposite ends of the
world. But for both of them, the events of
May 14, 1948 were, indeed, catastrophic.
That was, of course, the day when Israel
proclaimed its independence and declared
itself a nation, on its own land as bestowed
by the UN partition. To put it mildly, the
response across the Arab world was anything
but congratulatory. Wahed was 12 years old;
Zamir was 10. Although they weren't
acquainted at the time, they both lived in
or near Cairo.
These days, Zamir speaks of her
experiences in her breezy, sunlit Tel Aviv
apartment, surrounded by colorful décor and
a collection of fine art. In a quiet voice
she explains that she, her parents and her
six brothers were once part of an affluent
community that, for generations, had enjoyed
an elegant lifestyle that she describes in
her book, The Golden Era of the Jews of
Egypt, published in cooperation with the
University of Haifa.
Then the "catastrophe" struck.
"On May 14, 1948," Zamir recalls, "we
were sleeping. All of a sudden, exactly at
midnight, people were knocking very, very
hard on our door. We woke up and I saw 10
Egyptian officers in their black uniforms. I
wasn't afraid because my parents were there
and my mother was smiling to comfort me. But
the soldiers opened everything. They went
through everything. They were searching for
something, but we never knew what.
"The next day I went to school [she
attended a Catholic elementary school]. The
headmaster of the nuns came to me and said,
'They took your uncle to prison!' My uncle
lived in a big villa. He, my father and
another brother owned one of the largest
printing businesses in Cairo. I rushed home
and asked my mother, 'Is it true? Is he a
criminal?' My mother told me, 'He's not a
criminal. It's only because we are Jews.' So
then it was even more a trauma for me. I
thought to myself, 'I am also a Jew! I too
could go to prison!'"
Eighteen months later, when her uncle was
released from prison like many others - on
the condition of permanent expulsion -
Levana and her family fled Egypt, leaving
behind their sequestered assets and
possessions.
Zamir describes her childhood world -
before those terrible events - in nostalgic
vignettes, illustrated with fading
photographs. It was a way of life cherished
by her parents, an epoch of almost
fairy-tale quality. The affluent Jews of
Egypt, like those of Iraq, Iran and some
other cosmopolitan Muslim lands, were well
connected with royalty. They enjoyed
beautiful villas, social prestige and the
best of food and education, so much so that
they were able to overlook their dhimmi
status vis-à-vis their Muslim friends and
neighbors. Today, serving as president of
the Israel-Egypt Friendship Association,
Zamir works tirelessly to fulfill her dream
of restoring warm ties between Egyptians and
Jews.
TODAY, WAHED lives in California, in a
small town called Moraga, east of San
Francisco. He keeps in touch with scores of
other Jews from Arab lands and works with
the Jimena organization he founded
(www.jimena.org), seeking to provide
recognition to those Jewish refugees and
their families.
"I was 12 years old in May 1948," Wahed
says, "living in Heliopolis [a Cairo
suburb]. I remember the words of Azzam
Pasha, the head of the newly formed Arab
League, talking about the founding of
Israel. He said, 'This will be a war of
extermination that will be likened to the
Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.' The
very next day, the Egyptian army [and four
other Arab armies] headed toward the new
State of Israel to 'throw the Jews into the
sea.' It was supposed to be a slam dunk, but
they lost.
"By then everything had begun to unravel
and our previously secure lives in Egypt had
fallen apart. The Jewish section of Cairo,
the Haret el-Yahud, was bombed
[frequently] until 1949, killing and
wounding many innocent Jews. Accompanying
this were the usual assaults on our
synagogues and on Jewish individuals. The
authorities sometimes played a part in these
assaults, especially the Muslim Brotherhood,
which began in the late 1920s under the
leadership of Hassan el-Banna. In 1967,
about 400 Egyptian Jews, including my uncle
and other relatives were thrown in
concentration camps. They were treated
harshly and forced to commit sexual acts.
They were released in 1970."
Another man whose family fled Egypt,
Yossi Ben-Aharon, now lives in Jerusalem. A
career diplomat, Ben-Aharon served as
director-general of the Prime Minister's
Office under premier Yitzhak Shamir and
represented the Foreign Ministry for nearly
a decade in the United States. In a recent
interview, Ben-Aharon made it abundantly
clear that the explosive violence against
Jews in the Arab world following May 14,
1948 was no coincidence. He has collected a
number of statements of lethal intent made
by Arab leaders, calling for the death and
destruction of Jews in their Arab homelands
in case of the UN partition of Palestine.
For example, addressing the Political
Committee of the UN General Assembly on
November 24, 1947, Heykal Pasha, an Egyptian
delegate, said that "the proposed solution
[partition] might endanger a million Jews
living in Moslem countries... if the UN
decides to partition Palestine, it might be
responsible for very grave disorders and for
the massacre of a large number of Jews."
"Immediately after the UN approved the
partition resolution on November 29, 1947,"
Ben-Aharon says, "Arabs attacked the Jews
throughout the Middle East, including
Palestine. Yet, since 1949, the Arab states,
together with Palestinian organizations,
have mounted an intensive propaganda
campaign, based on a rewriting of history,
in an attempt to shift responsibility for
the Palestinian refugee issue onto Israel.
They describe the events of 1948 - and the
estimated 762,000 Arab refuges - as an
'ethnic cleansing' by Israel.
"The facts of history point to the
opposite: ethnic cleansing was perpetrated
by Arab governments against their Jews, as
witnessed by the fact that 850,000 Jews were
forced to leave the Arab countries, while
more than 4 million Arabs continue to live
in geographic Palestine, including more than
a million in Israel. Now, 60 years after the
events, the time has come for the historical
facts to be recognized and for justice to be
done."
"We Jews who were ethnically cleansed
from the Arab world did not get one penny
from the UN," Wahed adds, "while the
Palestinians have received over $50 billion
[including funds from the European Union]
since 1950. They still are receiving
financial assistance."
THE JEWS who once lived in Muslim lands,
like Zamir, Wahed and Ben-Aharon, have
established new lives for themselves in
Israel and elsewhere. But they have not
forgotten. Hundreds of thousands of them
were eyewitnesses to violent persecutions,
deadly pogroms and forced expulsions that
erupted instantaneously - as planned by Arab
leadership - following the UN decision for
the partition of Palestine and the founding
of Israel.
In 1948, the number of Jews living in
Egypt was estimated between 85,000 and
100,000. Today fewer than 50 Jews live in
Egypt.
In 1948, there were nearly 900,000 Jews
in Arab Muslim lands. Today only around
6,500 remain in all of Algeria, Bahrain,
Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Qatar,
Syria, Tunisia and Yemen combined.
There were not only Palestinian Arab
refugees in the wake of Israel's founding
and the ensuing battle for survival. There
were two sets of refugees: Arabs and Jews.
Ben-Aharon concludes, "Responsibility for
the resettlement of the Arab refugees from
Palestine should be shouldered by the Arab
governments and the Palestinian leadership.
The rights and claims of Jews from Arab
countries, both personal and communal, must
be recognized and addressed properly and
equitably. Only then can a climate conducive
to mutual understanding and coexistence be
fostered."
Lela Gilbert is a freelance writer and
journalist who has authored or co-authored
more than 60 books in the field of
ecumenical non-fiction, including the 2009
release, Blind Spot: When Journalists Don't
Get Religion.º She is an adjunct fellow at
Hudson Institute.
