In a fascinating profile of Linda Abu-Aziz Menuhin, an Iraqi-born Israeli forced to flee her native Baghdad in the paroxysm of anti-Semitic violence that erupted there after the Six-Day-War, the Jerusalem Post‘s Lela Gilbert reminds us that Palestinians weren’t the only refugees created by the 1948 Arab war against the new-born Jewish State: the onslaught by Arabs against Jews in their own lands continued for more than two decades after that, ending only when either by murder or attrition those countries had become virtually Judenrein. “From 1948 to 1970,” she writes, “850,000 to a million Jews fled or were expelled from Arab lands.”
Those who escaped Iraq were the lucky ones. The roundups and disappearances that had begun in Baghdad in 1967 were punctuated two years later by the public hanging of nine Jews accused of spying for Israel. Menuhin’s searing recollection:
Like Linda Menuhin, most of the fleeing Jews settled in Israel, and, like her, “each has experienced a personal nakba.” “Will the story of these refugees find its proper place among other issues under discussion in the Middle East peace process?” Lela Gilbert asks. The answer, given the Arab-as-victim narrative of most of the players involved: not likely.
