Seventy-five years ago this month, the Iraqi Parliament passed a law permitting Jews to leave the country provided that they forfeited their citizenship. In March 1951, Law 5, passed in urgent session, froze the property of Iraqi Jews stripped of their citizenship.
Dozens more anti-Jewish laws were passed. Law 12 set up a Secretariat to manage confiscated Jewish property. From 1951-56, several decrees were passed, seizing, managing, disposing of and liquidating Jewish property. These decrees piled the pressure onto Jews still living in Iraq.
A recent report by Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC) valued the lost assets and property of Iraqi Jews at $34 billion at today’s prices.
Back in 1949, little did the Iraqi government realize that almost the entire community would register to go. The departing Jews were issued with a laissez-passer document as they boarded the airlift to Israel. It was effectively an expulsion order.
Expecting at most an exodus of 14,000 Jews, the regime did not imagine that Iraq would be emptied of them. But Jews had been so desperate to flee the country that they were risking heavy prison sentences in order to illegally cross the border into Iran. Iraq was hemorrhaging 1,000 Jews a month – and their money.
The regime had declared war on Israel, introduced draconian emergency laws against its own Jewish citizens, persecuted Zionists and communists, banned Jews from higher education, jobs and travel, and had executed Iraq’s wealthiest and best-connected non-Zionist Jew, Shafiq Ades, on trumped-up spying charges. Most worrying of all, in the febrile atmosphere of the time, the Jews feared a second Farhud, the massacre of 1941 that had claimed almost 200 Jewish lives.
President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Gazans be moved out has been greeted with a chorus of disapproval, not least from well-meaning liberal Jews. But it is forgotten that transfer is not a new idea – and that it has only ever been applied to Jews.
An exchange of Arabs and Jews
IRONICALLY ENOUGH, it was the Arab side that first mooted a population exchange in the Middle East. In 1949, Nuri al-Said took office as Iraqi prime minister and floated the idea that the 150,000 Jews of Iraq should be traded for the Arab refugees created by the war in Palestine, although Jews in Arab countries were non-combatants hundreds of miles away.
The Israeli foreign minister, Moshe Sharrett, initially refused any possible linkage between the two sets of refugees. The Israeli government thought it was a cynical ploy to seize the abandoned property of Iraqi Jews. The British ambassador at the time reported that a population exchange was acceptable to Israel in principle, but that the idea of exchanging 100,000 homeless (Palestinian) refugees for 100,000 (Jewish) refugees who would leave their assets behind was seen in Israel as extortion.
As it turned out, Iraq was bent on legalizing the dispossession of the Jewish community in any case. Some 130,000 Iraqi Jews fled to Israel; only 7,000 Palestinian refugees arrived in Iraq. By then, foreign minister Sharrett had accepted that there had been a linkage of refugee populations. By 1970, all the Arab countries had disgorged almost a million Jews, most of whom arrived destitute in Israel, stripped of their citizenship and assets. Jews from Arab and Muslim countries and their descendants now form over half of Israel’s Jews.
The charge of ethnic cleansing is habitually leveled at the Jewish state, although the Palestinian Arab population never ceases to rise. But true ethnic cleansing is what happened to the Jews, 99% of whom were driven out of their pre-Islamic communities in a single generation. On October 7, 2023, Hamas just sought to finish the job.
Nobody is suggesting that Gazans should be transferred forcibly. It would be enough if they were given the choice to leave of their own free will and resettle elsewhere, rather than be condemned to live among the rubble as hostages to the conflict with Israel. Roughly equal numbers of Jewish and Arab refugees (around 700,000) exchanged places within the region – just as Greeks and Turks had done in their war, as did Indians and Pakistanis. In the historical context of the Middle East, the exchange of Jewish and Arab refugees arising out of the Arab conflict with Israel was never completed. It is time that it was.
The writer is the co-founder of Harif, the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. She is the author of Uprooted: How 3,000 Years of Jewish Civilization in the Arab World Vanished Overnight.