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August 25, 2000/24 Av 5760, Vol. 52, No.50
Compensation for Jews who fled Arab countries
AVI MACHLIS
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Sasson Muallem, 97, who fled with his family from Iraq in 1971, and left a brick factory estimated to be worth $200 million today, sits in his Tel Aviv home. On his lap, he holds momentos of the past, including a photo of the factory and a book he wrote.
Photo by Brian Hendler/JTA |
For more than three decades after the creation of Israel in 1948, Samir Muallem and his parents tried to hold onto the sizable business assets of their Jewish family in southern Iraq.
In the early 1950s, many of his family members left for Israel, along with 650,000 Jews from Middle Eastern and North African countries.
Muallem and his parents stayed on, and were treated favorably by Iraqi authorities until 1967, when Israel's victory in the Six-Day War sparked an outburst of hostility against the few remaining Jews in the country.
Muallem's father, Sasson, was arrested and threatened with death. His uncle was forced to sign over the family-owned Technical Brick Company - one of the country's biggest brick factories - to the government for a pittance. Upon the father's release, they quickly fled to Iran, then headed for Israel.
"They had started rounding up Jews for interrogation and even liquidated some," says Muallem, 55, who estimates his father's stake in the brick company is worth $110 million today. "We just wanted to get out alive."
Now, 52 years after Israel's founding, the Muallem family is in the same boat along with masses of Sephardic Jews who were forced to flee after the establishment of Israel.
As the Israeli-Palestinian peace process enters its end game, their claims of property confiscation are coming up on the public agenda.
But even if peace breaks out, securing compensation from Arab countries will be no easy task, in part, say representatives of Sephardic Jews, because Israel and Jewish organizations never registered property claims properly.
President Clinton surprised many Israelis when, in an interview last month with Israel Television after the failed Camp David summit, he said the issue of compensation for Jewish refugees had been raised at the talks - and was even supported by the Palestinians.
"There is ... some interest, interestingly enough, on both sides, in also having a fund which compensates the Israelis who were made refugees by the war which occurred after the birth of the state of Israel," Clinton had said, suggesting the establishment of an international compensation fund as a solution.
But there is a problem: When Jews arrived in Israel during the 1950s, efforts to register private property left behind in Arab lands were minimal.
"It was a very strange thing," says Oved Ben-Ozer, chairman of the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries.
He estimates that only about 5,000 files were compiled when the immigrants arrived and were housed mostly in tent camps - where surveys could easily have been conducted.
"I don't know if it was negligence or intentional, but the government of Israel simply did not register the property left behind."
In 1969, Israel's Justice Ministry appointed Ya'akov Meron, a professor of Islamic law, to compile records and serve as the point man on the matter.
Meron says there were some records when he took the post, and he denies accusations that efforts were not made to register property.
However, in a telephone interview with JTA, Meron would neither say how many files exist today - nor what is the value of the claims.
Meron also declined to confirm reports in the Israeli financial daily Globes that there are an estimated 10,000 files, and that Jewish property left behind in Egypt and Iraq alone could be worth up to $4 billion today.
In the Arab-Israeli peace process, the issue of compensation for Jewish refugees was raised as early as the original 1978 Camp David talks between Israel and Egypt. The peace agreement included an unbinding clause calling for "mutual settlement of claims." But although some individual Egyptian Jews have petitioned Egypt, few succeeded and the issue was never seriously pursued by the Israeli government.
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