The story of the Middle East’s refugees is only half-told, according to a Bay Area group of about 30 Mizrachi Jews.
What’s missing from an account that generally focuses on Palestinians, they say, is the saga of some 900,000 Jews who were expelled from their native Arab lands over a 20-year period starting in the 1940s.
Hoping to set the record straight, members of JIMENA, or Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, will hold their first-ever conference this month in San Francisco. By educating the public, the group hopes to counter what they consider a growing climate of anti-Semitism and to add a new perspective to the Palestinian-Israeli debate.
“We feel we lived as refugees and our plight was totally ignored,” says JIMENA co-founder Gina Waldman, whose family was forced to leave Libya when anti-Jewish riots erupted there shortly after the start of the 1967 Six-Day War.
Like most of their fellow exiles, Waldman and her family fled with few belongings and were forced to rebuild their lives from scratch. Today, fewer than 8,000 Jews remain in the Arab world, according to JIMENA.
Noting that Israel alone absorbed 600,000 of those refugees, Waldman, a 55-year-old Tiburon resident, thinks Arab nations should follow that example when it comes to the Palestinians.
Instead, she asserts, Palestinians remain relegated to refugee camps as pawns by Arab leaders who “want to keep them hating the Jews.”
In the past year, Waldman and others have been telling their stories frequently to audiences at college campuses, synagogues and elsewhere. Waldman alone has spoken to 20 groups nationwide.
Organizers hope they will capture even more attention with the March 23 conference at Congregation Sherith Israel.
Among those scheduled to give personal accounts of exile are Waldman and Eric Benhamou, an Algerian Jew who now serves as chairman of Santa Clara-based 3Com Corporation.
One aim of the conference is purely instructive. JIMENA wants to reach out to “our own brothers and sisters — the Ashkenazi community that knows nothing about us,” Waldman says.
She thinks she and other Jewish exiles also can serve as potent representatives on the issue of “Islamic anti-Semitism” and on her community’s response to their plight.
“The people who live in Israel right now are the very descendents of the people who were thrown out because of Islamic anti-Semitism.
“We have a life. We were integrated. We don’t teach our kids to blow themselves up.”
Though JIMENA’s membership is small, the group’s message has caught the eye of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Relations Council and the World Jewish Conference, two agencies that are co-sponsoring the conference.
Avi Beker, secretary-general of the New York-based WJC, plans to deliver the program’s closing address.
Beker thinks the message of the grassroots group could play a significant role in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
“We’re doing justice to our history,” he said.
In his speech, Beker plans to criticize the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees for keeping Palestinians “captive in the camps” and turning those sites into an “instrument of the Arab world in their fight against Israel.”
The result, he contends, was that the camps have been turned into “fertile grounds” for suicide bombers.
Yitzhak Santis, director of Middle East affairs for the JCRC, sees a bitter irony in the situation, asserting that a young and struggling state of Israel embraced its people decades ago while the rich Arab countries today are refusing to do so. “Why have the Palestinians been treated so miserably by the Arab states, been forced to live in refugee camps for 55 years, for two full generations?
Stan Urman, executive director of the Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation and another conference speaker, said that through their personal testimonies, JIMENA members can help show the international community that “there were two populations displaced” by Arab-Israeli conflicts in the 1940s.
He labeled the international response as “differential” up until now, focusing on Palestinians and not the Jewish refugees. Any future peace talks, he says, should deal with both Palestinian refugees and Jewish refugees.