The Jews in the Arab World

MY cousin who was hanged was a good man. Some of the most important men in Iraq came to his store. He was very, very far from politics." The speaker was Benjamin Aharon, 51, who left Baghdad in the early 1950s as did more than 100,000 fellow Jews, and now lives in Israel. Although his family had lived in Baghdad and Basra for centuries, he had no regrets about leaving. "We were all suspected of being spies for Israel, but we did nothing, nothing . . . They are Nazis." The 2,500 Jews who remain in Iraq today live under a reign of terror. All must carry special identity cards; none are permitted to hold passports. Their phones have been confiscated, their mail opened, their businesses seized, bank accounts frozen. Few still hold jobs, all are closely watched by secret police.

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The hangings in Baghdad were a bitter dramatization of the plight of the many thousand Jews who still live in the Arab world, and Israel opened a determined publicity and diplomatic campaign designed to protect them. They are among the remnants of the great Diaspora--the dispersal of the Jews from Jerusalem after the conquest of their capital by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C. Down through the centuries, Jews and Arabs got along with one another reasonably well; though Jews generally were treated as second-class citizens, they were respected as "people of the Book." They prospered as traders, artisans and scholars. One of the Prophet Mohammed's wives was Jewish. So was Harun al-Rashid's ambassador to Charlemagne, and Maimonides, court doctor to the great Sultan Saladin. Not until the 20th century did tensions begin to approach their present peak: with the formation of Israel in 1948, thousands of Jews began to leave their longtime Arab homes. For the 75,000-odd who still remain in Arab countries, life has become increasingly harsh during the past few years.

Syria, Egypt and Libya rank near Iraq in the severity of their treatment of the Jews. For the estimated 5,000 who still remain in Syria, lightning house searches and capricious arrests are commonplace. Jews are confined generally to ghettos, and all must carry identification cards stamped "Jew" in red ink. Jobs and passports are heavily restricted: on the rare occasions that a Jew is permitted to leave the country, he must leave a $5,000 deposit refundable upon his return. For many, it is a small enough price to pay for the opportunity to depart.

Egypt's few Jews are steadily harassed. There are only about 1,000 left, and it is believed that all heads of families, and younger males as well, have been jammed into the Abu Za-abal prison camp near Ismailia. Crushed together in tiny cells, they are allowed no visitors, are often beaten and poorly fed. In Libya, 20 Jews were slain by angry mobs in the wake of the Six-Day War, and the suddenly concerned authorities allowed about 3,500 to leave. Fewer than 1,000 remain, and a good many of these are reported to be in prison.

The essence of the old Arab-Jewish modus vivendi has been largely preserved in Lebanon, where the Beirut government has been relatively easy on its some 7,000 resident Jews. "We have nothing to complain about," claims the head of Beirut's Jewish community. "Why should I go to Israel?" a Jewish real estate dealer asks. "Those people in Israel are practically Socialists, you know." Morocco's 50,000 Jews get along reasonably well with the government; emigration is permitted, and persecution is all but nonexistent. Tunisia's 10,000 Jews live quietly. There are only about 1,000 Jews in Algeria, and despite the government's intransigent views on Israel, they are not persecuted. In Saudi Arabia and Jordan, there is no danger of repression: all Jews have left.

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In general, the weaker a regime is politically, the tougher it seems to be on its Jews. They serve as convenient scapegoats; henceforth, they may also serve as hostages in dealings with Israel. Egypt, Syria and Iraq have refused all appeals to free their captive Jews, perhaps fearing that a sudden release might be interpreted as a capitulation to Israel or, minimally, as an admission of ill-treatment. There is talk of trying to buy the Jews out of captivity, similar to the effort undertaken in 1943 when Nazi Germany's concentration camps held millions of Jews, but no formal campaign is as yet under way. Ironically, nothing might so readily improve the position of the Jews in Arab lands as more secure and confident Arab regimes.

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