The Middle East's Forgotten Refugees

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.”

Many of these forgotten refugees were members of ancient Jewish communities that predated Christianity. More than a few were wealthy, powerful and successful. Nearly all of them left their homes with little more than the shirts on their backs, leaving behind houses, bank accounts, investments, personal treasures and their means of livelihood.

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: