ARABS AND NAZISM
Arie Stav
...As soon as Hitler rose to power, parties that imitated National Socialism were founded in Arab countries, like the Social-Nationalist Party in Syria led by Anton Sa'ada, who openly and enthusiastically copied the Nazis. Sa'ada, who styled himself as the Fuhrer of the Syrian nation, stated in the party platform that the Syrians were the superior race by their very nature. Hitler was "Islamicized" and known by his new name Abu Ali (in Egypt, for some reason, it was Muhammed Haidar). Egyptian followers even "found" the house in which Hitler's mother was born in Tanta, Egypt and the place became a pilgrimage site.
The most influential Arab party to follow the Nazi model was Young Egypt, known also as the Green Shirts, in tribute to the Nazi Jung Deutschland and the Brown Shirts of the SA. The party was founded by Ahmed Hussein in October 1933, and followed the German model down to the raised hand greeting. There were stormtroopers, torch processions, Nazi slogans including a literal translation into Arabic of "one folk, one party, one leader" as well as "Egypt over all." Bands of hooligans were formed for the
suppression of opponents and, of course, Ahmed Hussein took the role of Fuhrer. Nazi anti-Semitism was emulated in every detail, from a boycott of Jewish businesses to physical attacks and anti-Semitic incitement. Indeed, Nazi anti-Semitic theory, practice and policy fitted the needs of Arab nationalism of the 1930s like a glove.
During the war, members of the Young Egypt spied on behalf of Rommel's Afrika Korps and a young lieutenant by the name of Anwar Sadat was tried and imprisoned. After the war, Gamal Abdul Nasser, another member of Young Egypt, was among the group of officers who led the July 1952 revolution in Egypt. The first step of the new regime after it had seized power--shades of Hitler--was to outlaw all the other political parties in Egypt. Sadat continued to express open admiration for Hitler in a letter he sent to the Egyptian daily Al Mussawar on September 18, 1953. This open bow to Hitler--despite the revelations of Nazi atrocities in the Nuremberg trials--is evidence of the depth of Sadat's identification with Nazism.
Nazi ceremonials continue to be used in today's Egypt. The President's ceremonial troops wear Wehrmacht helmets and receive heads of government at Cairo airport with a military parade which contains the famous goosestep. One of the most surrealistic sights during the negotiations surrounding the peace treaty with Egypt was the figure of Begin, survivor of the Holocaust, walking past the honor guard like someone in a trance.
Nostalgic admiration of Nazis has remained strong in Syria. Sami al-Joundi, a founder of the Syrian Ba'ath movement, writes: "We were racists. We admired the Nazis. We were immersed in reading Nazi literature and books that were the source of the Nazi spirit...We were the first who thought of a translation of Mein Kampf. Anyone who lived in Damascus at that time was witness to the Arab inclination toward Nazism."
Needless to say, Hitler's definition of Zionism in Mein Kampf is endlessly quoted. "They [Zionists] do not have any intention to establish a Jewish state in Palestine in order to settle there. They only fight for one place in which they [can base] a central organization for carrying out their global plot, a city of refuge for criminals and a training center for the scoundrels of the future." This paragraph, cited in most anti-Zionist writings in the Arab world, bestows the weight of supreme authority.
Similarly, in answering the argument of "the Zionists" that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are a fabrication, Mein Kampf is quoted as proof of their authenticity, which settles the matter, given that Hitler's authority has assumed canonical status. Mein Kampf, incidentally, continues to be published in numerous editions in the Arab world, especially in Egypt.
The Arab countries were not unique in serving as refuge for fleeing war criminals, but only in the Middle East, and particularly in Egypt, could the Nazis find shelter bestowed on the basis of ideological identification. Nasser received hundreds of war criminals, among them the SS General who commanded the Einsatzgruppen in charge of the murder of Ukrainian Jews, who became his close companion and bodyguard. Hundreds of Nazis were harnessed in the Arab effort to liquidate Israel, through developing means of destruction or indoctrinating the armed forces. Alois Brunner, one of the most brutal war criminals, found shelter in Damascus, where he served for many years as the senior adviser of the Syrian general staff.
The Mufti Haj Amin el Husseini was the equal of any of the war criminals. In postwar testimony, a senior aide to Eichmann described el-Husseini's appetite for destruction. He said that the Mufti visited the Auschwitz gas chambers, in disguise, and reproved the Germans for their lack of diligence in the destruction of the Jews. He loudly protested the proposed Nazi deal to save 4,000 Bulgarian Jewish children or to exchange trucks for Hungarian Jews.
The Mufti was never tried because the Allies were afraid of the storm in the Arab world if its national hero were to be treated as a criminal. The Mufti was received as a national hero in Egypt where he was among the sponsors of the 1948 war. Indeed, the Mufti represents the link connecting the two attempts to destroy the Jews, that of the Nazis and that of the Arabs. It is thus not surprising that the Mufti has a lofty place in the PLO's pantheon. Arafat saw the Mufti as an educator and leader, declaring in 1985 that he deemed it an honor to walk in his footsteps. Arafat stressed that the PLO continued to march in the path carved out by the Mufti. ....
...According to this view, the existence of Israel is intended to solve the logistical problem of gathering the Jews into one place in order to make it easier to destroy them. Jahia al-Rahawi amplifies this theme in Al Ahrar, the Arab daily published by Egypt's Liberal Party. "When the State of Israel was established and recognized by many in both East and West, one of the reasons for this recognition was the desire to get rid of as many representatives as possible of the human error which is called Jews. There was an additional purpose, a secret one, namely to place them all in one location so that they might be extinguished at the appropriate moment. In this confrontation, we see how that great man Hitler, may Allah have mercy on him, one of the wisest of men, dealt with this problem. Out of compassion for humankind, he tried to destroy every Jew, but despaired of healing this cancerous growth that spread in the body of humanity." This was published on July 19, 1982. On October 22, 1986 Sheik Yusef Badri, one of Egypt's senior theologians, was quoted as saying: "We are waiting for the day when the Jews will be gathered in Falestin and it will be a day of enormous slaughter. The Jews will hide behind stones and rocks but each will call to a Moslem and say 'A Jew hides behind me. Come and kill him.' "
When Berlin fell, Hitler said that the destruction of Germany was appropriate for a nation that had failed to fulfill its purpose. In 1982, Ahmed Ben Bela, knowingly or not, repeated Hitler's words when he expressed his willingness to destroy the Arab world so long as Israel was destroyed. If there is no other solution, he declared, there will be a nuclear war and so that matter shall be finished once and for all.+
afsi.org
Why Jews Fled the Arab Countries
by Ya'akov Meron
COORDINATING A PROGRAM OF EXPULSION
In a key address before the Political Committee of the U.N. General Assembly on November 14, 1947, just five days before that body voted on the partition plan for Palestine, Heykal Pasha, an Egyptian delegate, made the following key statement in connection with that plan:
The United Nations . . . should not lose sight of the fact that the proposed solution might endanger a million Jews living in the Moslem countries. Partition of Palestine might create in those countries an anti-Semitism even more difficult to root out than the anti-Semitism which the Allies were trying to eradicate in Germany. . . If the United Nations decides to partition Palestine, it might be responsible for the massacre of a large number of Jews.
Heykal Pasha then elaborated on his threat:
A million Jews live in peace in Egypt [and other Muslim countries] and enjoy all rights of citizenship. They have no desire to emigrate to Palestine. However, if a Jewish State were established, nobody could prevent disorders. Riots would break out in Palestine, would spread through all the Arab states and might lead to a war between two races.1
Heykal Pasha's thinly veiled threats of "grave disorders," "massacre," "riots," and "war between two races" did not at the time go unnoticed by Jews;2 for them, it had the same ring as the proposition made six years earlier by the Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al-Husayni to Hitler of a "final solution" for the Jews of Arab countries, including Palestine. But the statement appears to have made no lasting impression, to the point that a historian of the Jews in Egypt has described Heykal Pasha as "a well-known liberal."3
Particularly noteworthy is that although Heykal Pasha spoke at the United Nations in his capacity as a representative of Egypt, he continuously mentioned the Jews "in other Muslim countries" and "all the Arab states," suggesting a level of coordination among the Arab governments. Indeed, four days after his statement, Iraq's Foreign Minister Fadil Jamali declared at the United Nations that "interreligious prejudice and hatred" would bring about a great deterioration in the Arab-Jewish relationship in Iraq and in the Arab world at large,4 thereby reinforcing the impression that Heykal Pasha was talking not just on behalf of Egypt but for all the independent Arab states. Further confirmation came several days later, after the General Assembly had decided in favor of partitioning Palestine, when, "following orders issued by the Arab League,"5 Muslims engaged in outrages against Jews living in Aden and Aleppo.6
Another indication that Arab rulers coordinated the expulsion of Jews from their terrorites comes from a Beirut meeting one and a half years later of senior diplomats from all the Arab States. By this time, March 1949, the Arab states had already lost the first Arab-Israeli war; they now used this defeat to justify an expulsion that had been officially proclaimed before the war even began. As reported in a Syrian newspaper, "If Israel should oppose the return of the Arab refugees to their homes, the Arab governments will expel the Jews living in their countries."7
According to Walid Khalidi, perhaps the leading Palestinian nationalist historian and a highly reputable source, "The Arabs held their ground throughout the period from November 1947 to March 1948. Up to March 1, not one single Arab village had been vacated by its inhabitants, and the number of people leaving the mixed towns was insignificant."8 The mass departure from Palestine of 590,000 Arabs began only in April 1948; yet , Heykal Pasha had publicly and very formally announced a program to expel Jews from Arab countries fully five months earlier.
To understand how and when the expulsion of Jews from the Arab countries was actually carried out, we look at the Iraqi case in some detail, then others more breifly.
IRAQ
As mentioned above, the Iraqi authorities openly and formally identified themselves with Heykal Pasha's threats just four days after he uttered them. Foreign Minister Jamali addressed the United Nations in this manner:
The masses in the Arab world cannot be restrained. The Arab-Jewish relationship in the Arab world will greatly deteriorate. . . . Harmony prevails among Muslems, Christians and Jews [in Iraq]. But any injustice imposed upon the Arabs of Palestine will disturb the harmony among Jews and non-Jews in Iraq; it will breed interreligious prejudice and hatred.9
By "the masses in the Arab world," Jamali in fact meant his own government, which soon took a series of steps, including anti-Semitic legislation, against its Jewish population. This began with a 1948 amendment to the Penal Code of Baghdad, adding Zionism to other ideologies and behavior (communism, anarchism, and immorality) whose propagation constituted a punishable offense. Laws in 1950 and 1951 the deprived Jews of their Iraqi nationality and their property in Iraq, respectively.10
At times, Iraqi politicians candidly acknowledged that they wanted to expel their Jewish population for reasons of their own, having nothing to do with retaliation for the Palestinian exodus. Perhaps the most interesting incident took place at the tail end of the Israeli war of independence, in late January or early February 1949, when Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri Sa'id described a plan to expel Jews from Iraq to Alec Kirkbride, then the British ambassador at Amman, and Samir El-Rifa'i, head of the Jordanian government. Kirkbride recounts that Nuri
Came out with the astounding proposition that a convoy of Iraqi Jews should be brought over in army lorries escorted by armoured cars, taken to the Jordanian-Israeli frontier, and forced to cross the line. Quite apart from the certainty that the Israelis would not consent to receive deportees in that manner, the passage of Jews through Jordan would almost certainly have touched off serious trouble amongst the very disgruntled Arab refugees who were crowded into the country. Either the Iraqi guards would have had to shoot other Arabs to protect the lives of their charges. . .
Samir and I were flabbergasted and our faces must have shown our feelings. . . .
I replied, at once, that the matter at issue was no concern of His Majesty's Government. Samir refused his assent as politely as possible but Nuri lost his temper at being rebuffed and he said: "So, you do not want to do it, do you?" Samir snapped back: "Of course I do not want to be party to such a crime." Nuri thereupon exploded with rage and I began to wonder what the head of the diplomatic mission would do if two Prime Ministers came to blows in his study. We then broke up in disorder, but I got them out of the house whilst preserving a minimum of propriety.11
Nuri probably chose the British embassy in Amman as the site at which to disclose his plan to the head of the Jordanian government because high-ranking British officials had often spoken of the need to exchange Palestinian Arab and Arab Jewish populations,12 and he most likely expected British understanding of, it not support for, his scheme.
Similarly, when Nuri visited Jerusalem on January 13, 1951, he met 'Arif al-'Arif, the Palestinian leader who served as Jordan's district commissioner for Jerusalem. 'Arif asked Nuri to hold up the departure of Jews from Iraq "until the problem of Palestine and of the refugees had been solved," or at least "for one or two years." Nuri refused to do so. Revealingly, his reasons bore only on considerations of internal Iraqi policy:
The Jews have always been a source of evil and harm to Iraq. They are spies. They have sold their property in Iraq, they have no land among us that they can cultivate. How therefore can they live? What will they do if they stay in Iraq? No, no my friend, it is better for us to be rid of them as long as we are able to do so.13
Nuri candidly acknowledges here that he wanted the Jews out of Iraq, and never mind what consequences their exodus might have for the future of the Palestinian Arabs.
In conversation with foreign diplomats, however, Nuri presented the expulsion of Iraq's Jews in a very different light-as an exchange of population. On no less than six occasions in 1949, he made this point with foreigners.
(1) In talks with the U.N. Reconciliation Commission in Baghdad on February 18, 1949 (in other words, even before the Beirut meeting of Arab diplomats in March 1949, when the Arab states coordinated their stand on the matter), he threatened harm to the Jews: "Iraq has thus far been able to protect its 160,000 Jews but . . . unless conditions improve and unless Jews now demonstrated their good faith with deeds not words Iraq might be helpless to prevent spontaneous action by its people."14
(2) To an American diplomat in Baghdad on May 8, 1949, Nuri mentioned his idea of a "voluntary exchange on pro rata basis of Iraqi Jews for Pal[estinian] Arabs," adding the threat that "firebrand Iraqis might take matters into [their] own hands and cause untold misery to thousands [of] innocent persons."15
(3) On August 8, 1949, he raised with an official of the British Foreign Office the idea of "an exchange of population."16
(4) On September 29, 1949, a member of the British embassy in Baghdad reported Nuri's wish "to force an exchange of population under U.N. supervision and the transfer of 100,000 Jews beyond Iraq in exchange for the Arab refugees who had already left the territory in Israeli hands."17
(5) On October 14, 1949, Nuri spoke with U.N. officials about the exchange of "100,000 Baghdad Jews and 80,000 other Jews in Iraq for [an] equivalent number [of] urban Arab Palestinian refugees."18
(6) To the Clapp Mission in 1949,19 Nuri presented the Jewish expulsion from Iraq as part of a population exchange.20
This (and other evidence) leads to the conclusion that while the Iraqi government sought to present the explusion of Jews as a crowd-driven retaliatory act for the exodus of the Arab refugees from Palestine, it in fact had a full-fledged plan in place before the Arab refugee problem even came into existence.
This interpretation resolves a number of historical questions. It explains the origins of the otherwise mysterious legislation in 1950 depriving Jews of their Iraqi nationality. For example, Shlomo Hillel cannot understand how this complete reversal of the Iraqi attitudes happened, and suggests that Nuri Sa'id did not really intend immediately to apply the law.21 This author respectfully disagrees: take into account the U.N. declarations, the anti-Jewish legislation, and the government persecution of Jews, and it becomes clear that the deprivation of Iraqi nationality was but another step in a plan of expulsion.
The Iraqi plan of expulsion also explains the bombing of the Mas'uda Shem Tob Synagogue in Baghdad on January 14, 1951, as Jews were registering there to emigrate to Israel. Zionists have been accused of causing the violence in the hopes of spurring the Jews to leave Iraq, an accusation whose truth so eminent an authority as Elie Kedourie has said "must remain an open question."22 But knowing of the authorities' expulsion plan suggests that not Zionists but Muslim Iraqis were behind the incident . That an Iraqi army officer arrested for throwing the bomb belonged to the opposition Istiqlal Party points to that faction's responsibility.23
OTHER ARAB COUNTRIES
Similar patterns of Jewish exodus existed in other Arabic-speaking countries, including Yemen, Libya, Syria, Egypt, Algeria and Jordan.
Yemen. Yemeni persecution of Jews prompted a trickle of Jewish emigration to Palestine from the third quarter of the nineteenth century on. Heykal Pasha's speech merely added momentum to the longstanding Yemeni policy of discrimination against and degradation of Jews, based on a particularly pedantic interpretation of the Islamic law. A bribe from the American Joint Distribution Committee to Yemen's ruler, Imam Ahmad ibn Yahya, led to his agreeing to the mass exodus of Jews to Israel in 1949-50 by airplane via Aden, an operation known as "On Eagle's Wings" (or, in journalistic lore, "Magic Carpet"). The Jews of Yemen, relying on their own means, sufferng losses of life and deprivations, traversed the desert to Aden by foot and on donkeys. There, the Jewish Agency lodged them in camps and eventually boarded them onto planes that took them to Israel. In this way, some 50,000 Yemeni Jews reached Israel during the two-year period.
We lack information about the Yemeni government's decision-making process. But this case provides the clearest example of Jews' being persecuted and expelled for reasons having to do with Islamic law.
Libya. In Libya, as in Yemen, the exodus of the Jews began even before Heykal Pahsa's declaration at the United Nations. Attacks on Jewish quarters in Tripoli and other cities occurred in 1945, leading to a death toll the British put at 130 Jews.24 In other words, Jews began leaving Libya three years before the establishment of Israel and seven years before Libya gained independence. Their departure turned into a mass exodus as soon as Israel gained independence and the gates opened to Libyan Jewry. As in Iraq, internal policy appears to be the reason both for the Jews' expulsion and for later rhetoric inviting them back.
Syria. In Syria, too, the majority of Jews departed before independence in 1946, and long before Heykal Pasha's statement and the establishment of Israel. As in Yemen and Libya, crude pressure on the Jews of Syria-such as the 1947 pogrom in Aleppo and the rape and murder of four Jewish girls who allegedly tried to smuggle themselves out of Syria-caused a substantial emigration.
While Syria is distinguished from other Arab countries by the fact that its legislation does not manifest discrimination against Jews, Heykal Pasha's policy was indeed applied there, too. The government seized control of Jewish property in Syria on the basis of emergency legislation and gave it to Arab refugees. Thus, Palestinians were settled in Damascus's Jewish ghetto, while the Alliance Israélite Universelle School, finished 1n 1939, became a school for Palestinian children. A diplomat at the French embassy in Damascus intervened with the Syrian authorities about this school and was told that the Syrian Jews had to provide room for the Arab refugees, the latter having been expelled by their Palestinian co-religionsits.25
Egypt. In some cases, the execution of the Arab plan of expulsion extended over a period much longer than that of the military hostilities. In Egypt, the expulsion reached its climax only after the overthrow of the monarchy by disgruntled army officers back from the Palestinian battlefield. In Algeria, which did not attain independence until 1962, the expulsion took place later yet.
Jews in Egypt faced acute problems in the 1940s but these did not set their mass departure in motion. Rioting against Jews occurred in November1945, then resumed in June-November 1948,26 the latter time inspired by the war with Israel. An amendment to the Egyptian Companies Law dated July 29, 1947, required that 40 percent of a company's directors and 75 percent of its employees be Egyptian nationals, causing the dismissal and livelihood of many Jews, 85 percent of whom did not possess Egyptian nationality.27 A letter to the editor of Akhir Sa'a in 1948 offers some insight into the predicament of Egyptian Jews:
It would seem that most people in Egypt are unaware of the fact that among Egyptian Muslisms there are some who have white skin. Every time I board a tram I hear people pointing at me with a finger and saying "Jew," "Jew." I have been beaten more than once because of this. For that reason I humbly beg that my picture (enclosed) be published with the explanation that I am not Jewish and that my name is Adham Mustafa Galeb.28
This testimony rather directly refutes the fine rhetoric of Heykal Pasha about Jews' enjoying "all rights of citizenship."
Cairo was slow in carrying out the plan proclaimed by its own diplomat, Heykal Pasha; only during and after the Suez Crisis of 1956 did Egyptian Jews leave in substantial numbers. At that time, the Egyptian Nationality Law was amended to prohibit "Zionists" from holding Egyptian nationality,29 Army Order no. 4 then confiscated property of individuals and associations;30 and supervision, imprisonment, or expulsion followed. The amendment to the Nationality Law of 1956 defined the term Zionism as "not a religion but the spiritual and material bond between those defined as Zionists and Israel."31 A furthur ministerial decree in 1958 indicates that all Jews between the ages of ten and sixty-five leaving Egypt would be added to the list of persons prohibited from reentering the country.32 Clearly, these decrees had little to do with the Arab refugees of a decade earlier.
Algeria. In Algeria, no significant Jewish emigration occurred until the summer of 1961, and then nearly the entire population was gone within the year.33 Algeria's independence from France was the key event here; Jews were no longer welcome after the French depature. The Algerian Nationality Code of 1963 made this clear by granting Algerian nationality as a right only to those inhabitants whose fathers and paternal grandfathers had Muslim personal status in Algeria.34 In other words, although the National Liberation Front in Algeria was known for its slogan "A Democratic Secular State," it adhered to strictly religious criteria in granting nationality.
Jordan. No Jews lived in Transjordan in 1946 (when it became an independent state), as a result of Winston Churchill's 1921 decision in favor of "preserving [the] Arab character" of Transjordan35 and the resulting British policy forbidding Jews from settling there. Legislation passed in 1954 declared that only non-Jews coming from the former British Mandate of Palestine were entitled to Jordanian citizenship.36 What is so striking about Jordan is that although it lacked a Jewish population, it still shared in the general Arab trend of excluding Jews. Further, it actively discriminated against Lebanese and Syrian Jews.37....
....CONCLUSION
Accounts of the late 1940s widely assume that the Arab exodus occurred first, followed by the Jewish expulsion. Kirkbride refers to "a decision of the Iraqi government to retaliate for the expulsion of Arab refugees from Palestine by forcing the majority of the Jewish population of Iraq to go to Israel."46 In Libya, too, there is a similar tendency to associate the uprooting of the Jewish community with the establishment of the State of Israel. "Jews," John Wright argues, "were forced out of Libya as a result of events leading up and following the foundation of the State of Israel in May 1948."47
But these accounts oversimplify the actual sequence of events: as we have seen, in a good many cases, Jews were forced out well before the Palestinian exodus. As 'Arif, Sirtawi, and Jiryis acknowledge, the Arab states contributed substantially to the Palestinians' present predicament. A recognition of the full wrong done to the Jews of the Arab countries should put to rest Palestinian claims for restitution by Israel. As Péroncel-Hugoz correctly points out, the Jews "left property and space [they] legitimately owned" in the Middle East. In coming to Israel, then these Jews brought with them certain rights.
This information not only straightens out the sequence of events fifty years ago but it refutes exorbitant claims made in the name of Palestinians. A recognition of the true nature of those events represents the best chance for a swift resolution of the Palestinian refugee question today. With so many issues that will have a lasting effect on the future of their populations awaiting the attention of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, this is one case where the two sides would do well to let history stand and call it even.
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