Although couched in conciliatory language, Kuttab’s formulation of the issues was a classic combination of apple-cheeked appeal to equity coupled with historical sleight of hand. The Palestinian refugee problem, as he must know, was not caused by the creation of Israel per se but by the war Palestinians and Arabs launched in anticipation of that event. Aggressors take responsibility for the costs, human and political, of war; a reality that cannot be reversed by ingenious - and disingenuous — formulations of this kind.

Refugees have many rights, including to compensation, but repatriation is not automatically amongst them and it is undeniable that every other refugee problem of the twentieth century has been solved through resettlement, not repatriation. This includes the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees of Arab lands.

The reappearance of the ‘right of return’ has prompted a reappraisal of these Jewish refugees. Few know much about this other exodus. The effort to raise it, half hearted and perfunctory as it has been, proves controversial for reasons variously obvious and ironic.

Obvious, because Arab states that expelled, intimidated or ransomed their own Jewish communities during the 1940s and 1950s would not wish to be held morally accountable today, much less provide compensation. Unlike Israel, they lack the defence of self-defence: they were not resisting invaders and those within their borders in league them, merely turning on an unwanted, exploitable minority.

Ironic, because Palestinian apologists have sought to discount the Jewish refugee experience as lacking in credibility as compared with their own. Palestinian officials, for example, allege that Jews from Arab lands were not true refugees, that they left voluntarily over many years, and that their host countries would welcome them back in the event that they wished to return.

History tells a different story. Generally, Jews, no matter how long or well-established in Arab lands, were compelled to emigrate, sometimes in the face of imminent danger to their lives, particularly in the aftermath of the UN decision of November 1947 to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states.

Jewish communities in Arab lands were of differing vintage. The Iraqi community could point back to the original Babylonian exile, a 2,500 year period of unbroken residence that evolved customs and norms all their own. The Jewish presence in Yemen cannot be dated with precision, but is believed to antedate the age of Jesus. Yemenite Jews also demonstrate a particularity of traditions not replicated in other Jewish communities. It has been speculated that these represent those of biblical Jews with the greatest authenticity. A Syrian Jewish community had existed for 2000 years. North African Jews were later arrivals, variously from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. But whether recent, old or ancient, these communities were as settled as Palestinian Arabs had been; in some instances, more so and their upheaval, to say the very least, was no less sudden and traumatic.

The Iraqi Jewish community was at once traditional, secularised and well-established. Though not entirely strangers to discrimination and adverse political currents, nothing in their experience prepared them for the barbarism that erupted all round them. Britain was resolved on a policy of according Arabs self-government whatever the confessional configuration of the country in question. This delivered minorities, no matter how numerous or well established, to the arbitrary rule of others and Iraq was on this road already before the Second World War. Old Ottoman arrangements of communal autonomy that insulated these from the worst excesses of arbitrary power were to be removed with nothing substituted in their stead.

In 1941, pro-Nazi elements in the government and administration of Nuri Said, led by Rashid Ali Ghailani and supported by the pro-Nazi Palestinian agitator, Haj Amin el Husseini, staged a coup. Britain suppressed the uprising with little margin for error, thereby forestalling an airborne invasion by German forces in the Mediterranean waiting on stand-by. On 1 June, Baghdad was restored to government control, but soldiers and police sympathetic to the coup attempt carried out a pogrom against the Jewish quarter of Baghdad. The Iraqi authorities failed to act, causing a larger mob to participate in the terror. British troops were forbidden to intervene on the instruction of the British ambassador, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, who was more concerned for the prestige of the Iraqi authorities than the lives of people under their protection. So several hundred people were murdered, their killers demonstrating in the streets with the dismembered limbs of some of their victims. Zionism, previously only a fringe interest in this settled community, thereafter obtained a wider hearing.

The fate of the Iraqi Jews was a sad one. As Moshe Gat indicates in his detailed account, The Exodus of the Jews of Iraq, 1948-1951 (1994), official and unofficial persecution — incitement, pogroms, expropriation of assets — and the community’s burgeoning solidarity with Zionism combined to depopulate the Iraqi Jewish community in a few short years. In April 1950, Iraqi authorities encouraged Jewish emigration by legislation. Anti-Jewish violence and vandalism persuaded many of the virtues of this course and within a year, most had registered for this purpose. The Iraqi government then legislated in secret session to confiscate the assets of the departing Jews. The Israeli government vainly protested, but the cause of Iraqi Jews was taken up by no other power and Israel retaliated by confiscating the assets of refugee Arabs.

The outflow of Jews from Iraq thereafter became a flood, canalised to Israel with the aid of Zionist rescue organisations that already boasted experience of this type in Europe during the War. Their integration in Israel is amongst the least successful stories in the Zionist enterprise, as were indeed a number of other emigrations from Arab lands. These were often handled with unavoidably meagre resources, partly during a war for the state’s very existence, and under the ill-considered premises that rapid assimilation to the Israeli European majority would be both the most practical and beneficial procedure to adopt when in fact it was neither.

Some Jews, often the elderly and occasionally those of sufficient means to purchase a tenuous security, remained. Rapacious measures stripped them of their assets, and trumped up espionage trials led to public hangings of Jews in 1969 at which the government urged the public to come out ‘and enjoy the feast.’ Perhaps 100 Jews still reside in Iraq today. But the salient fact is that 2,500 years of settled history came to a close in a single year. ‘It was a remarkable achievement’ writes the Baghdad-born historian, Elie Kedourie, with that mixture of literal truth and irony that best expresses the enormity of what had occurred.

What happened in Iraq — pogrom, persecution, expropriation and flight — was replicated in Syria and Libya, accounting between them for the creation of a further 50,000 refugees.

The Syrian case is particularly notorious, for a substantial number — some 5,000 — remained in a country that continued to persecute them severely without hope of escape and barred them by legislation from most professions and forms of livelihood. Jews attempting to leave the country could be subject to the death penalty if caught. The Syrian state, one of the most completely totalitarian in the Arab world, kept Jews under surveillance in the best Soviet style and acted only fitfully under international pressure to release them, although this had finally come to pass in the 1990s.

Yemenite Jewry, also an ancient community, suffered a fate more distinct in degree than in kind. Some 28,000 Yemenite Jews — one third of the total — resided in Palestine by 1939. This was the largest proportion of any Jewish Diaspora to be living in Palestine when Israel came into being.

In Yemen, the reaction to the creation of Israel was less traumatic than elsewhere but nonetheless decisively hostile: a pogrom in Aden in December 1947 claimed the lives of 82 Jews. Jewish property was looted the next year after six Jews were accused of ritual murder. As a result of these events, almost the entire community decided to emigrate.

Imam Ahmad proved a more liberal leader than his repressive predecessors, who had introduced such measures as forced conversion for Jewish orphans. He insisted that Jews sell in advance all their assets, but levied no discriminatory taxes nor mobilised existing adverse Muslim sentiment as had occurred in Iraq. As most Yemenite Jews were poor and uneducated, liquidating their assets proved a relatively simple affair. For all that, their fate remained precarious. Many concentrated in Aden, housed in overcrowded camps designed for 10% of their number, fed and housed only by the exertions of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Israel devised Operation Magic Carpet to bring them to Israel, a task that was accomplished by August 1950.

Between June 1949 and June 1950, 43,000 Jews arrived in Israel from Yemen, with a small trickle of latecomers following in the early 1950s. Again, a historically ancient community had been almost entirely liquidated by intimidation and persecution in a matter of a couple of years. Once again, only the elderly and infirm generally stayed, totalling no more than 800 in 1955. This had been reduced by natural attrition to 200 by 1968.

Algeria was a different story in many ways. Formally incorporated into metropolitan France, the Algerian situation was a classic colonial one in which minority Europeans enjoyed decisive economic and political primacy over the Muslim majority. In this explosive setting, Jews were in a quandary, formally French citizens and thus enjoying a measure of protection. In 1940, the Vichy authorities, in line with fascist policies, revoked Jewish citizenship, banned Jewish educational institutions and imposed racial laws and quotas on Algeria’s 117,000 Jews. However, Jewish and Muslim collaboration proved fruitful, a Union of Monotheistic Believers was formed and succeeded in discouraging Muslims from embracing Vichy measures. The anti-Vichy uprising in 1942, which prominently involved Jews, was successful, permitting American landings that November. American intervention was responsible for restoring citizenship to Algerian Jews. With the allied victory in 1945, Jewish institutions enjoyed a short-lived renaissance and French rule prevented an outburst of anti-Jewish violence after Israel’s creation.

In the end, however, the mounting Algerian independence struggle of the 1950s consumed the Jewish community. The Front Libération Nationale (FLN) at first appealed to Jews to join the struggle, then took to intimidation, assassinating Jewish figures. This was all in accord with the FLN commitment to revolutionary violence aimed at forever politicising society which also saw French officials and Muslim integrationists terrorised. In 1960, as the struggle worsened, the Great Synagogue of Algiers was desecrated. Disoriented and alarmed, the Algerian Jews put their hope in a political partition or a dual citizenship formula. Neither was availing and France, seeing hopelessness ahead, determined to evacuate.

During the last binge of FLN terror and French OAS counter-terror, the community was largely uprooted. With the departing French, 72,000 Jews left en masse by the end of 1962. A further 5,000 made their way to Israel. Half the community however remained, officially with French citizenship. The new Algerian government of Hoari Boumédienne now orchestrated anti-Jewish measures, including discriminatory taxation, a boycott of Jewish commerce and quotas in education. Already impoverished and endangered, Algeria’s remaining Jews faced new waves of violence in the wake of Israel’s 1967 victory over the Arab states that had gone to war with the enthusiastic acclamation of Arab, including Algerian, opinion. At this, the Algerian Jews picked up and left, their possessions sequestered and their synagogues, with but a single exception, converted into mosques. By 1969, fewer than 1,000 Jews, or less than 1 per cent of the number that had inhabited the country only a decade earlier, still resided in Algeria. Even a community not turned out by reaction to Israel’s creation was unable to withstand the ravages of Arab nationalism.

Egypt possessed a Jewish community dating back to the Middle Ages that in 1947 numbered 65,000. Like the Jews of Iraq, they tended to be affluent and well established. Egypt was only a latecomer to the pan-Arabist pretensions of other Middle Eastern regimes and remained largely unaffected by the anti-Zionist passions that gripped other lands already before the War.

This quickly changed when Egypt sought Arab leadership through the British-created, Cairo-based Arab League. In November 1945, the ‘Young Egypt’ movement of Ahmed Hussein attacked the Cairo Jewish quarter, torching synagogues, old age homes and hospitals. Similar pogroms were carried out the same month in Syria and Libya, though Israel had yet to come into existence.

With the creation of Israel, anti-Jewish hostility flared still more strongly. Emergency laws were declared now that Egypt had invaded Israel, a royal permit became a requirement to leave the country, and Jews were targeted by legislation aimed at confiscation of their assets. Official persecution encouraged unofficial lawlessness. From June until August 1948, Jewish neighbourhoods were bombed and Jews attacked in the streets, 250 being killed. Legislation also removed protection for foreign nationals, many of whom were Jews, and although some relaxation of repressive measures followed with the armistice of 1949, in which Jewish detainees were released and some assets unfrozen, it was short-lived. Some 25,000 Jews — over a third of the community — had already left the country by 1950. Those that remained were kept under surveillance and its leaders coerced into issuing anti-Zionist proclamations.

By this stage, Egypt itself was in turmoil, royalist legitimacy having been fatally undermined by the military defeat at Israel’s hands. The Black Saturday riots of January 1952 were generally anti-foreigner, but hit Egyptian Jews heavily. With the military coup, Mohamed Naguib proved favourable to the Jews, but he was ousted in 1954 by Abdul Nasser who was not. Repressive measures returned, including trumped up spy trials, a practice recently revived in Iran. With the Egyptian military defeat cum political victory of 1956, Nasser intensified his persecution. Jewish assets were again confiscated or subject to forced sales, some 3000 Jews were interned in concentration camps and many thousands more expelled after being divested of their assets and capital. By 1957, a mere 8,500 Jews remained of a community that had numbered 65,000 a decade earlier. With no relaxation in policy, this number had thinned to 3,000 by 1967, at which time all Jews were removed from public life even down to the most modest administrative postings. Those subsequently permitted to leave departed destitute. Such was Nasser’s conception of socialist redistribution of wealth.

Morocco furnishes a case where even lawful government was only marginally effective in preventing anti-Jewish persecution. The community was large — about a quarter of a million in 1948 — but generally poor and uneducated and without any voting rights in local elections other than in Casablanca. Despite French control, 43 Jews were murdered in the riots of June 1948 in Jérada and Oudja. The authorities, unlike any other in an Arab country, sought out the perpetrators, brought scores to trial and executed and imprisoned a number with the result that there was no repetition for the remainder of the first Arab-Israeli war. But the experience had proved traumatic enough, and some 30,000 Jews had left Morocco for Israel by 1953. With a revival during 1953-4 of pogroms in Oubja, Casablanca, Rabat and Petiljan and the sack of communal buildings and schools, a further 37,000 Jews left within a year.

The downward spiral was stopped only by Mohammed V (1953-61). He conferred equality on Jewish citizens, even including a Jewish minister in his Cabinet. But repressive measures were now introduced to stem Jewish emigration, which continued to exercise an appeal to a community that reasoned it could not place its future in the hands of transient monarchs. An additional 47,000 Jews had left by the end of the 1950s.

King Hassan (1961-99) proved exceptional in protecting Jewish rights. He legalised Jewish emigration to Israel, legislated Jewish equality with Muslims, and Jews began to appear in government, the law courts and universities. Hassan’s liberalism, however, incited anti-Jewish passion, fanned by the opposition Istiqlal Party, which disseminated antisemitic literature including Arabic versions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Thus Moroccan Jews continued to live in a threatening climate, Jewish girls being kidnapped and forced to embrace Islam. An anti-Jewish economic boycott, masterminded by Istiqlal after the Arab defeat of 1967, was averted only by Hassan’s firm resolve and personal intervention.

It is a melancholy fact that even the exceptional conduct of Hassan failed to prevent what had occurred in successive Arab countries. A climate of anti-Jewish hysteria and menace, coupled with a right of emigration Hassan had instituted, meant that Moroccan Jewry had slumped from some 270,000 in 1948 to a mere 22,000 twenty years later. Even the best intentions and commitment to the rule of law were insufficient to prevent turning yet another Arab country into a Jewish wasteland, although, with some 6,000 Jews today still living under royal protection, Morocco can boast what is now the largest community of Jews resident in an Arab country.

It is true that the causes and timing of each exodus differ, but no doubt attaches to the fact that the vast majority of Arab Jewry left under conditions of threat and persecution, more than half as a result of the passions unleashed in their societies by Israel’s creation. They differ from Palestinian refugees in having left, not under conditions of war, but under those of political and social repression, and in having a country willing to receive them as citizens. Their experiences in even the most liberal Arab societies were of a type unlikely to induce either a desire to return or an enthusiastic welcome from their former countrymen and should forever dispose of the surreal assertion to the contrary uttered with a straight face by Palestinian spokesmen.

Arab nationalism, with or without the Arab-Israeli conflict, with or without proximity to the wars produced by it, has depopulated each and every Arab Jewish community. This has not prevented an Israeli law of return from serving as the focus of outrage for societies that long ago propelled their own Jews in Israel’s direction. The accusation of ethnic cleansing which some level at Israel — a country with an enfranchised Arab citizenry totalling today over 1 million people and approximately 20 per cent of its population — is certainly germane to the case of Jewries depopulated by the consequences of policy or popular sentiment in Arab societies. What this will mean in terms of balancing compensation claims of Palestinians and Jews, in the event of a peace settlement that looks a receding prospect, remains to be seen.