Jewish Property Claims Against Arab Countries

Clear, rigorous, and elegant, this book will stir up enormous discussion. It may even serve as a guide to peace negotiations in the Middle East. -- Yehouda Shenhav, professor of sociology and anthropology, Tel-Aviv University, and author of The Arab-Jews: Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity For far too long the injustices done to Jews who lost property in Arab countries between 1948 and 1965 have been ignored or exploited for political profit. For this meticulous study Michael R. Fischbach scoured Israeli, Arab, and other archives. By documenting the different policies adopted by Arab countries toward Jewish property and compensation for its expropriation, and by examining the obstacles raised by Israeli governments and front organizations to prevent Jews from Arab countries from reaching compensation agreements with those who actually took their property, Fischbach has made a lasting contribution to our understanding of these complex issues. Jewish Property Claims Against Arab Countries provides the basis for fair and politically productive settlements of the claims of both Palestinians and Jews against governments whose policies have deprived them of their homes, their livelihoods, and their fortunes. This is old-school, archive-based history at its best. -- Ian S. Lustick, Bess W. Heyman Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

In the twenty years that followed the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, 800,000 Jews left their homes in Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, and several other Arab countries. This book reconstructs the circumstances in which Jewish communities left the Arab world.In the twenty years that followed the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, 800,000 Jews left their homes in Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, and several other Arab countries. Although the causes of this exodus varied, restrictive governmental measures and an outburst of anti-Semitic feeling during and after the war were major factors. Some of these "Mizrahi" Jews, most of whom were not active Zionists, were forced to leave behind property of great financial and ancestral value-property that was sometimes seized by the governments of the countries they fled. In this book, Michael R. Fischbach, who has dedicated years to studying land and property ownership in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict, reconstructs the circumstances in which Jewish communities left the Arab world. Conducting meticulous and exhaustive research in the archives of Washington D.C., Jerusalem, London, New York, and elsewhere, Fischbach offers the most authoritative estimates to date of the value of the property left behind. He also describes the process by which various actors, most importantly the State of Israel, linked the resolution of Jewish property claims to the fate of Palestinian refugee property claims following the 1948 war. Fischbach considers the implications of contemporary developments, such as America's invasion of Iraq, Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and Libya's attempt to shed its international pariah status, which have impacted pending claims and will affect claims in the future. Overall, he finds that many international Jewish organizations have supported the link between the claims of Mizrahi Jews and those of Palestinian refugees, hindering serious efforts to obtain restitution or compensation.