Jewish Property Claims against Arab Countries (review)

The virtual disappearance of the Jews of Arab countries — from the Maghrib to Iraq — in the years following the creation of Israel, and the explanations for their departure, is a subject of dispute, propaganda, acrimony, and conflicting narratives by those who emigrated, the Arab states from which they departed, the Israeli government and politicians, and Jewish organizations that purport to represent them. The one constant rhetorical theme in these debates is the question of linkage of Jewish “refugees” and their property claims against Arab countries to the claims of Palestinian refugees against Israel. The picture that emerges from Michael R. Fischbach’s well-documented, though at times repetitive, study is the cynical manipulation of this issue by successive Israeli governments, agencies, and politicians and a host of Jewish organizations for the purpose of deflecting or deflating Palestinian claims rather than representing the interests and grievances of those Jews who suffered losses in Arab states.

The first chapter offers an informative country-by-country account of the political process by which Jews left their countries and property behind. Less satisfactory is his presentation of the social and cultural composition of these diverse communities, which relies on problematic secondary sources (especially the polemical writings of Ella Shohat), and consequently makes generalizations based on the misunderstanding of how and in what context categories such as “Arab Jews,” Musta‘arabim, Sephardim, or Mizrahim, are used. While the history of the Jews of the Arab world is not the goal of the book, a more convincing explanation of their background and identity could have provided a better understanding of the complicated and ambivalent positions and attitudes of Jews from Arab countries in Israel towards the countries where they formerly resided.

The central thesis is persuasively developed in the second chapter, which traces the politics of Jewish claims from 1948 to 2001. Although there were several policy shifts and maneuvers as successive Israeli governments negotiated their relationship to its different constituencies — the Jews from Arab countries and the organizations they formed and later the Arab states and Palestinians as part of the peace process — what is consistent throughout the whole period of Israel’s existence is the linkage between Jewish and Palestinian claims for compensation of lost property, in which the former could be used to reduce the amount potentially claimed by the latter. From the perspective of the Israeli government, Jewish claims were much like an insurance policy that could be used against future claims of the Palestinians in the context of a peace settlement, and hence there was little desire by Israel to pursue vigorously, if at all, the claims of individuals or communities for compensation of their properties. Even here, there were sometimes misgivings in connecting the claims, mainly out of concern that it could elicit demands that Israel compensate its immigrants from Arab lands in the context of a settlement which the state could ill afford. While the issue was much debated in the early 1950s, it was all but ignored until the mid-1970s in the context of renewed Israeli-Arab negotiations. The Americans under President Jimmy Carter began speaking simultaneously of the rights of Palestinians and Jewish refugees. Also, the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC) was created in 1975 with the explicit goal of supporting the Israeli policy of linking Jews from Arab countries and Palestinians, causing some disagreement within the organization and among Jews from Arab countries both inside and outside of Israel over questions of whether Israel should represent their claims, or whether the Jews should be considered “refugees.” Yet by the end of the 1990s, Israel shifted its policy on linking compensations claims, with the realization that Palestinian claims would be disproportionately much greater, and thus supported the idea of an international fund that would deal with claims from both sides.

The third chapter addresses the issue of Jewish property claims in recent years through a summary...