Israel’s Oriental Jews-demand Voice in Talks with Arab States

Leaders of Oriental Jewish communities in Israel have demanded that the government include their representatives in any negotiations with the Arab states and have called on the world to recognize their status as refugees and their rights and claims from their former homelands.

At an assembly of leaders of the various Oriental immigrant associations last week MK Mordechai Ben-Porat urged the world to recognize that the flight of more than 700,000 Jews from Arab lands and of 590,000 Palestinian Arabs from Israel at the time of Israel’s creation constituted one of the many population exchanges the world had seen in the past generation.

Ben-Porat, who organized the assembly, said he would convene a gathering of Oriental Jews from Israel and abroad to examine the question of Jewish rights and claims from Arab lands.

He argued that over and above property compensation claims — which had never been properly catalogued and classified — the Jews from Arab lands were entitled, as distinct ethnic minorities who has “seceded”, a proportional share of those land at natural wealth and resources.

He said a team of legal experts would be set up to draft the various claims and demands which Oriental Jews should present to the Arab states.

CRITICIZES AVOIDING ISSUE

Shaul Ben-Simhon, the Moroccan leader, and Professor Andre Chouraqui, speaking for Algerian Jewry, criticized successive Israeli governments for sweeping this issue of Oriental Jewry’s claims under the carpet. Chouraqui said in the early fifties the government had considered the claims “not worthwhile.” Later Premier Moshe Sharett pushed through a Cabinet decision calling for a detailed research effort into Oriental Jewry’s property and other claims — and in the sixties the then-Justice Minister Yaacov Shimshon Shapiro again suggested such a survey. But both times a slothful and unwilling bureaucracy foiled the Cabinet decision, the professor charged.

Ben-Simhon spoke of “discrimination” in this matter — but he admitted too that Oriental Jews themselves had slept on their rights and let the years slip by without taking action.

Now, however, with the resumption of the Geneva Conference imminent and the Palestinian question likely to come up, the time was ripe for a thorough study and systematic classification and presentation of Oriental Jewry’s claims and demands, Ben-Simhon said.

IRAQI COMMUNITY ANCIENT

David Petal of the Iraqi Immigrants Association said his community had flourished in all walks of life in Iraq since the sixth century B.O.E. It had preceded the Arabs by more than a thousand years — and had cooperated with successive Arab rulers in developing Iraq’s trade and economy, he said,. The first Finance Minister of modern Iraq was a Jew as were many top officials in state industry.

The finest suburbs of modern Baghdad were almost totally Jewish-owned, Petal said. Certainly Jewish property abandoned in Iraq was worth many times more than Palestinian Arab property left behind in Israel, Petal said.

Knesset speaker Yisrael Yeshayahu said the top priority for the assembly and the new organization being founded was to inculcate into an ignorant and apathetic world the awareness that Jewry from Arab lands were refugees in every sense of the term.

This political campaign must be the first aim of the reawakened Oriental effort to secure rights for Arab Jews, Yeshayahu urged, Claims for proprietary compensation must be the next priority, with demands from the Israel government.only third. There was no point in wasting effort through recriminations and internecine strife with the government or between the various Oriental organization, Yeshayahu cautioned.