Knesset speaker Shlomo Hillel contends that Israel, in any future negotiations with Arab countries, must insist on compensation to Jews whose property and belongings were left behind or confiscated when they left their Arab homes for Israel.
“As a matter of fact, I think that we made a mistake when we did not include the subject in the peace negotiations with Egypt,” Hillel said. “It created a precedent which does not help the cause of Jews from Arab countries.” Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty in 1979.
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the Iraqi-born Hillel, 64, conceded he cannot provide an estimate of the value of property and capital lost by the Jews who fled the Arab countries. But according to various sources, the amount is $2-$3 billion.
Hillel said that about 40,000 Jews now live in the entire Arab world, compared to more than one million before the State of Israel was established in 1948. Describing the current situation, he noted that about 25,000 Jews live in Morocco, where they enjoy “peace and freedom”; 4,500 Jews live in Syria, where they are “oppressed and their movement is limited”; and the rest live in small Jewish communities throughout the Arab world.
Asked about the plight of Syrian Jewry, Hillel asserted that only international pressure will ease their oppression and enable them to leave Syria. He said this is the method that was used to release the Jews of Egypt after the 1967 Six-Day War.
“Syria holds the Jews as if they were hostages,” Hillel charged. “Recently we have been told that the Jews in Syria are not oppressed as before, but the reality is that their freedom of movement within the country is still limited, and most important, they are not allowed to leave the country at all.”
First elected to the Knesset in 1953, Hillel served as a minister in the Labor governments headed by Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin.
But Hillel occupies a special place in the history of modern Israel because of his pivotal role in the mass emigration of 125,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel from 1947-52. That story is told in Hillel’s book “Operation Babylon” (Doubleday, $19.95), the publication of which has brought Hillel here.
According to Hillel, for all practical purposes there is no Jewish community in Iraq today. “There are about 200 individual Jews in all Iraq who chose to stay there for personal reasons, mainly intermarriage,” he said, recalling that the Jewish community there was the oldest in the world, with a tradition spanning 2,600 years.
Hillel contended that the story of the Iraqi Jews must be told, albeit 40 years later, because the contributions of Sephardic Jews to the establishment of Israel have not been acknowledged.
He also pointed out that Israel has failed to emphasize during all these years that more Jews left and were expelled from the Arab countries than the 600,000 Palestinian refugees who lost their homes and fled from Israel in 1948.
“We have to stress that what really happened in reality is an exchange of population between Jews of Arab countries and Palestinian refugees,” Hillel said.
His book was a national bestseller in Israel (“We are going into the 15th edition,” he noted) and won the country’s most prestigious literary awards.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
