In his January 6 article for Al Jazeera, entitled “Palestinians, Egyptian Jews and Propaganda,” Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, waxes poetic about the havoc the elitist Ashkenazi Zionists wreaked upon Arab Jewish communities in the Middle East. He assumes that Zionist intervention alone decimated Arab Jewry, and argues that recent pleas for Arab Jews to return to Arab states have a long and legitimate history. Sadly, Massad’s article suffers from gross historical oversights. His emphasis on linking state responsibility with citizenship ironically legitimizes Israel’s negligent treatment of stateless Palestinians. In the interest of space, I have limited myself to five points of clarification:
1) Expulsion by any other name is just as illegal.
Massad
emphasizes “the fact that Arab Jews were not expelled from any Arab
country.” True, no Arab country explicitly issued a decree along the
lines of “All Jews are herewith banned, never to return, upon penalty of
death.” Since the Israeli government never issued a formal declaration
of expulsion, does that mean the Palestinians were never expelled?
Expulsion
can occur under coercive circumstances. Governments can “encourage”
people to leave by freezing their bank accounts, forbidding them from
most forms of employment, banning them from education institutions, etc.
Expulsion from society precedes expulsion beyond the state’s geographic
borders. In the course of my research on Arab Jewish identity,
moreover, I did meet Egyptian Jews who were, even according to Massad’s
definition, expelled. They were told they had 24 hours to leave the
country and leave they did. So yes, Arab Jews were expelled.
Not
only were they expelled, but their expulsion was recognized by
Palestinian leadership. While Massad broadcasts the PLO’s past proposal
for Arab countries to welcome home their Arab Jews, he neglects to
mention that at least one PLO member dared to criticize Arab states for
uprooting their Jewish communities. In May 1975 in An-Nahar,
for example, PLO member Sabri Jiryis lambasted Arab countries for
expelling the Jews “in a most ugly fashion, and after confiscating their
possessions or taking control thereof at the lowest price.” Foretelling
the current campaign, Jiryis added that “clearly, Israel will raise the
question in all serious negotiations that may in time be conducted over
the rights of the Palestinians.”
2) Lynching is not “harassment.”
Massad
lightly acknowledges that in some Arab countries, Jews ”suffered from
harassment by the authorities or even from segments of society at
large.” He does not discuss the forms of discrimination that were
systemic and enshrined in legal systems, in places like Yemen; and he
fails to mention the many instances in which Jews were attacked and
killed for being Jewish. Furthermore, he is unable to concede that
violence against Jews, which waxed and waned over the centuries, was
never fully absent and predated the establishment of Israel.
The
1800s witnessed a multitude of attacks against Jews in Aleppo,
Damascus, Beirut, Dayr al-Qamar, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Cairo, Mansura,
Alexandria, Port Said, and Damanhur. The 1900s were even more frightful,
the most notable massacre occurring in 1941 in Baghdad: 175 Jews killed
and nearly 1000 injured. These attacks were historically traumatizing
events for communities that had considered themselves (and had been
considered) integral to the fabric of Arab society. In Egypt, the
ostensible focus of Massad’s case, Jews were harassed, attacked without
recourse to justice and were even made to disappear, as archives from
the International Committee of the Red Cross indicate.
Although
I do not read the history of the Jewish communities in such a
lachrymose and teleologically Zionist way, Massad’s cleansing of nuance
within Arab Jewish history greatly distorts the conditions under which
Jews lived and left.
3) States are responsible for protecting their citizens.
Nowhere
does Massad seriously raise the question of responsibility of Arab
states for protecting their citizens. Yes, he brings up Nassar and
faults him for not doing enough, but excuses him on the grounds that
“this is not the same as expelling a population or deporting it.” Yet by
the time Nasser assumed power, most of the Yemeni and Iraqi Jews, and
many Moroccan, Syrian and Egyptian Jews, had already left/been forced to
leave (depending on whom you ask). Massad avoids accounting for the
failure of Arab governments to protect their populations—whetherdhimmis or
citizens—even though the Arab League had forewarned the United Nations
that they would not be held responsible for protecting Arab Jews
following the creation of Israel.
4) Most Egyptian Jews were stateless as a result of Egyptian law.
Massad
claims that “a substantial percentage of the Jews in Egypt were not
legally Egyptian, as they did not carry Egyptian nationality and many
did not even speak Arabic and carried European passports (Italian,
Russian, British and French), a fact that intensified the perception in
some popular quarters that they were not loyal to the country. This of
course was not the case with the old Egyptian Arab Jewish community
(especially the Qarra’in Jews) whose lives were eclipsed by the large
and powerful Ashkenazi and Sephardi families who arrived in Egypt in the
19th and early 20th century.”
First,
the figures: As a result of Egypt’s 1929 Nationality Law, more than 90%
of Egyptian Jews were denied citizenship, regardless of how many
generations they had lived in Egypt. In the 1940s, roughly one quarter
of Jews held foreign passports, less than one quarter held Egyptian
citizenship and the remainder were stateless. Given Massad’s passion for
the plight of the Palestinians, many of whom are stateless themselves,
his insistence on citizenship as the key marker of legitimacy for
Egyptian Jewish identity is ironic.
Second,
the romanticization of Qaraites: Massad creates a dichotomy between the
“new” community of modern, polyglot Arab Jews and the “old” Qaraite
community. Nevertheless, Egypt’s Jewish community was always an
admixture of Karaites and Rabbanite Jews (Sepharadim and native
Egyptian), and the fact that some Sepharadim arrived in the 1800s should
not be automatic grounds for societal or citizenship exclusion.
Romanticization is fodder for imagination, not history. Both communities
contributed to Egyptian society.
5) Arab Jews are entitled to compensation from their respective states.
Massad
predictably asserts that “it is the Palestinians who are owed
compensation for their stolen property by all the Jewish colonial
settlers who have been living on it for some six decades, including Arab
Jews.” They are. But why should this negate the proposition that Iraqi
Jews, whose assets were frozen by the Iraqi government, be owed
compensation from the Iraqi government or an international fund?
According to Massad’s logic, it is because Iraqi Jews were never
expelled, and because “the Zionists” sufficiently agitated Iraqi Jews’
position in society to cause them to leave. Even if they left “by
choice,” however, most Iraqi and other Arab Jews were unable to legally
exit their country with little more with than a suitcase per person and
petty cash. Once gone, Arab countries did in fact settle Palestinians
and their own citizens in ‘abandoned’ Jewish property. Jobbar, Damascus,
and Aleppo are but a few examples.
Compensation
is as old an issue as the refugee problem, dating back to negotiations
between David Ben Gurion and Nuri Al Said. Decades later, compensation
was discussed in the Camp David negotiations. Historical references to
compensation propose Israel (or an international fund) paying for
Palestinian losses, and Arab states (or an international fund) paying
for Arab Jewish loses. Instead, Massad remains fixated on a zero-sum
scenario of legitimacy, where only one group is entitled to receive
compensation.
In
sum, Massad’s article does a disservice to both Palestinians and Arab
Jews by dismissing the role of the state in fomenting violence, and by
legitimizing a state’s use of violence against non-citizens within its
borders. More nuance would not only have been more historically accurate
and intellectually honest, but would have better served the interests
of Palestinians and Arab Jews alike.
No comments:
Post a Comment