During the Second World War and in the war's immediate aftermath, between thirty and fifty million men, women and children were displaced from their homes, becoming refugees across the shattered landscapes of Europe, Asia and Africa. in sum, this mass migration ranks among history's most profound demographic rearrangements; in Europe, movements of the scale seen in the twentieth century had not been witnessed since the fall of Rome. In the main, these migrations occurred in the van of conquering armies; in Eastern Europe, around ten million Germans fled before the Red Army and the devastation visited on the dying Reich.
They were closely followed by Poles, Czechs, Balts, Finns, Ukrainians and Belorussians, pushed westward like so many chess pieces by the expanding borders of Stalin's Soviet Union. In the midst of all these were the few remnants of the Jewish people that had managed to escape or survive the peerless cruelty of Hitler's Final Solution.
In Asia, the migrations were in large part due to the collapse of the war-enfeebled European empires and the withdrawal of defeated Japan from the mainland. Notable for the sheer scale of the human misery involved was the disintegration of the British Indian Empire into rival Hindu and Muslim states, India and Pakistan. The life of these successor states dawned to at least a quarter million dead and amid an unknowable number of displaced persons.
This division of states and territories was a key feature of the era and indeed the subsequent years of the postwar order. Germany was divided, as were Cyprus, Korea, Yemen, Papua, Vietnam, and the newly created Pakistan. On the western edge of Asia, another piece of land was also sliced apart with the stroke of a pen: the British Mandate of Palestine.
Here, let me take a detour into context.
Sidebar: The governance of the British Empire
At its zenith, usually dated to Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee in 1897, the empire ruled a quarter of the globe and a similar share of its population. Britain's dominance was born out of its extraordinary development in the nineteenth century, when its industrial revolution, matchless navy, financial and technological supremacy created an empire over which the sun truly never set.
(Image Wikipedia, territories held by Britain, not always contemporaneously)
Governing this vast realm, however, was at all times beyond the capabilities of a small island race. To fill the inevitable administrative gaps especially at the local level, imperial policy created or employed distinct local elites, bound to the Crown by a complex system of honors, titles and orders of chivalry. In many of the Dominions of Rule, these delegates of Royal authority and prestige were Jewish, along with Parsees, Indian Muslims and so on. When the tide of empire receded, they were left to fend for themselves against the resentment of those they had governed.
Sidebar: Vienna, 1896
Journalist Theodor Herzl, a secular Jewish journalist, publishes his seminal work Der Judenstaat, arguing the case for adding a political dimension to the existing religious, cultural and ethnic concept of Jewishness: Zionism. In doing so, Herzl picks up the thread already spun by earlier movements of the nineteenth century, such as Junges Deutschland and Giovane Italia, national liberation movements in Germany and Italy respectively. Herzl had been radicalized by the contemporaneous Affaire Dreyfus in France, in which a Jewish officer of the French army had been essentially, and ironically in view of later history, framed for espionage in the service of imperial Germany.
Sidebar: London, 1917
At the height of World War One, while the outcome of the conflict is still very much in doubt, the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Lord Balfour, issues what becomes known as the Balfour Declaration, a statement of policy by HMG, saying
His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
Notably, Britain had earlier made similar declarations to Arab leaders in the Levant, with the goal of inciting an uprising against the suzerainty in the region of the Ottoman Empire. In 1919, Balfour writes a memorandum to his successor as Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon - of Curzon line fame - worth quoting at some length:
"The contradiction between the letters of the Covenant [of the League of Nations] and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the ‘independent nation’ of Palestine than in that of the ‘independent nation‘ of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose to even go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country though the American [King-Crane] Commission is going through the form of asking what they are.
The Four Great Powers [Britain, France, Italy and the United States] are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, and future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion that is right.
What I have never been able to understand is how it can be harmonized with the [Anglo-French] declaration, the Covenant, or the instruction to the [King-Crane] Commission of Enquiry.
I do not think that Zionism will hurt the Arabs, but they will never say they want it. Whatever be the future of Palestine it is not now an ‘independent nation’, nor is it yet on the way to become one. Whatever deference should be paid to the views of those living there, the Powers in their selection of a mandatory do not propose, as I understand the matter, to consult them. In short, so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.
Leaving aside for the moment Balfour's contemptuous dismissal of the rights and needs of the Arab population in the territory, it's worth noting that there have always been Jews in Israel, in an unbroken line since ancient times. Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since at least the middle of the nineteenth century. In short, the selection of Palestine for the national home of the Jewish people, whatever imperial caprice was involved, did not happen at random. That it directly conflicted with simultaneous promises made to Arab stakeholders apparently was not too troublesome to His Majesty's Government.
Sidebar: Berlin, 1933
In January, Adolf Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg. In the next two years, Hitler casts aside all constitutional constraints on his office, establishes his Nazi party as the sole political organization in the country, and is elevated to the unprecedented position of Führer und Reichskanzler. Having solidified power, Hitler sets about undoing the Treaty of Versailles, strips German Jews of their civil rights and property, annexes neighboring territory over the ineffectual opposition of Britain and France, and in 1939, launches the most devastating war in history with an assault on Poland, coincidentally home to three million Jews. From since long before he becomes chancellor, Hitler has two goals: to rule Europe, and to exterminate the Jewish people. Hitler's ideas, meanwhile, gain some currency in other parts of the world, notably the colonial Middle East, where they find some utility in the anti-imperialist struggle.
Sidebar: Europe, 1941 – 1945
In 1941, Hitler's dream of ruling Europe is extinguished at the Battle of Stalingrad. Not by coincidence, weeks later, a conference held in a discreet villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee plans the fulfillment of his second dream: the extermination of the Jewish people.
For the next several years, the entire power of a modern, industrialized state is bent on this goal: the physical destruction of a defenseless people. It has been argued, notably by historian Sebastian Haffner, that the war after Wannsee was essentially a holding action, allowing Hitler the temporal and physical space to attempt something for which no word even existed, but what we have come to call simply genocide.
1947 – 1948: Endgame
After the conclusion of the war, as the fullness of the horrors it entailed became clear to the powers in Washington, London and Moscow, the case for a Jewish state in the Land of Israel became urgent; this in especially as neither Britain nor the United States had seen fit to open their borders to more than a few Jews fleeing the Third Reich. Adding to the pressure were hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors essentially warehoused in displaced persons (DP) camps at the expense of the U.S. and British governments. The UN General Assembly voted to divide the territory into two states, one Arab, one Jewish, with Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and the holy sites of the three monotheistic faiths placed in a corpus separatum under international oversight. All three resulting entities were bound to observe minority civil and womens' rights. Meanwhile, despite the tragedy of the Holocaust, the Jewish community in the Mandate, the Yishuv, had successfully built the infrastructure required for statehood; in consequence, on May 14th, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the new state of Israel.
At that point, many things came together: the profound historic irritation of the Arab world at the Zionist project per se, the hostility directed generally at the administrative classes of the fading colonial empires by the subject peoples thereof, fueled in part by the irredentist ideology of Arab nationalism, the understandable reluctance of colonial populations to accept decisions made without even the semblance of consent by the imperial powers, and the gradual replacement of Britain and France as regional hegemons by the Cold War powers, the United States and the Soviet Union.
The day Ben-Gurion declared independence, there was already war in the Mandate between Arabs and Jews. The next day, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq declared war outright. That war, the Israeli War of Independence, didn't end all that well for the Arab state combatants, generally less well equipped than their Israeli opponents and faced with much stronger resistance than anticipated.
The humiliating defeat of the Arab armies in war and the concomitant Palestinian Arab refugee crisis - what has come to be called by those affected the Nakba, or 'catastrophe' - created, in correlation with the other factors described here, a second crisis that is often overlooked in the narrative: the wholesale expulsion of Jews from their homes throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
The 'grave danger' the New York Times refers to is
[...] a law drafted by the Arab League Political Committee “which was intended to govern the legal status of Jewish residents of Arab League countries. Their bank accounts would be frozen and used to finance resistance to 'Zionist ambitions in Palestine.' Jews believed to be active Zionists would be interned and their assets confiscated.“
The American Sephardi Federation writes:
The expulsion and exodus of over 850,000 Jews from Arab countries is among the most significant yet little known injustices against humanity of the past century. For hundreds of years, and in many cases for millennia, Jews lived in countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Iran, Iraq and Yemen. In fact in several of these countries the Jewish population was established long before what has become today’s local population or over 1,000 years before the advent of Islam.
From the seventh century on, special laws of the Dhimmi (the “protected”), later known as the Covenant of Omar, subjected the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa to prohibitions, restrictions and discrimination and the harsh conditions of inferiority. Many Jews did manage to prosper despite these circumstances including occupying high government positions.
Discrimination against Jews in Arab countries took a dramatic turn for the worse in 1948 after the birth of the State of Israel. Between the 1940s and 1980s, the Jews of Arab countries endured humiliation, discrimination, human rights abuses, organized persecution and expulsion by the governments of the countries of their origin.
During this time, Jewish property was seized without compensation, Jewish quarters were sacked and looted, and cemeteries were desecrated. Synagogues, Jewish shops, schools and houses were ransacked, burned and destroyed, and hundreds of Jews were murdered in anti-Semitic riots and pogroms. Of the over 850,000 Jewish refugees who left Arab countries, approximately 600,000 sought refuge in the State of Israel and were resettled there at great expense. Arab states have refused to acknowledge these human rights violations and provide relief to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were forced to abandon their homes, businesses and possessions as they fled those countries.
This Jewish exodus was not an entirely random, undirected event, as a threat by an Egyptian delegate to the UN five days before Ben-Gurion's declaration makes clear:
The United Nations . . . should not lose sight of the fact that the proposed solution might endanger a million Jews living in the Moslem [sic] countries. Partition of Palestine might create in those countries an anti-Semitism even more difficult to root out than the anti-Semitism which the Allies were trying to eradicate in Germany. . . If the United Nations decides to partition Palestine, it might be responsible for the massacre of a large number of Jews. [...]
A million Jews live in peace in Egypt [and other Muslim countries] and enjoy all rights of citizenship. They have no desire to emigrate to Palestine. However, if a Jewish State were established, nobody could prevent disorders. Riots would break out in Palestine, would spread through all the Arab states and might lead to a war between two races.
To be sure, as with most stories of the bloody Twentieth Century, this one is not all a chiaroscuro black and white. David Green in Palestine Solidarity Review writes:
At a superficial but appropriately critical level [sic], the Israeli revisionist historian Tom Segev summarizes emigration immediately after the founding of Israel, especially in relation to North Africa: “Deciding to emigrate to Israel was often a very personal decision. It was based on the particular circumstances of the individual’s life. They were not all poor, or ‘dwellers in dark caves and smoking pits.’ Nor were they always subject to persecution, repression or discrimination in their native lands. They emigrated for a variety of reasons, depending on the country, the time, the community, and the person.” Segev summarizes the “messianic fervor” that led to “operation Magic Carpet” in Yemen in 1948-49, but also notes that the Jewish Agency emissary in Aden, “asked permission to prepare the Yemenite authorities to expel the remaining Jews from their country.”
These Jewish refugees have never received the international attention given to Palestinian refugees displaced during Israel's founding. Today, they make up roughly half the population of Israel. Owing in part to their lesser economic power stemming from the forfeiture of their assets to their former host governments as a price of emigration, the Mizrahim or Arab Jews remain disadvantaged.
In 2008, both houses of Congress passed resolutions calling attention to these forgotten victims, and urging the U.S. government to make a just resolution of their claims an integral part of any Arab-Israeli peace.
Justice, however, can mean many things to many people. But it begins with their story being told.
[Update]: From citizen53 in the comments, a resource om Jewish refugees from the Middle East, Point of No Return.