THE HISTORY OF WOJAC AND JJAC

In 1975, Mordechai Ben-Porat, the Baghdad-born Knesset member and a former Mossad emissary in Iraq, founded WOJAC. This organization saw its purpose as defending “former Jewish refugees before international forums debating the problems of refugees in the Middle East,” and argued that United Nations Security Council Resolution 242’s call for a “just solution to the refugee problem” referred to Arabs and Jews alike. Through conferences, public awareness campaigns, and governmental lobbying, WOJAC hoped to provide “moral” and “material” redress to Jews from Arab countries for injustices perpetrated against them. By arguing that Jews were an indigenous Middle East population that had suffered persecution, WOJAC helped transform individual Jewish communal and/or country narratives into a singular MENA Jewish narrative. This process paved the way for recognizing MENA Jews collectively as refugees, as well as for contesting that categorization.

As part of its attempt to gain recognition, WOJAC sought to be perceived as a homologue of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Around the time of WOJAC's founding in the 1970s, Ashkenazi–Mizrahi relations in Israel were fraught, and the Israeli establishment had worried that the new organization might further aggravate ethnic tensions. In this context, WOJAC's analogy to the PLO detracted domestic (Israeli) and international attention from the issue of compensation for MENA Jews. Naim S. Dangoor, an Iraqi Jew who was involved in the Iraqi Jewish community in London and became involved in WOJAC, worried that it was the Israeli state rather than WOJAC that would be seen as analogous to the PLO. He warned Ben-Porat that the “PLO must not be equated with Israel but only with Jewish refugees from Arab countries and even perhaps not on an equal footing. For while Jewish refugees are genuine, Palestinian Arab refugees were largely created and kept in artificial ways.”Footnote ⁷ Other WOJAC members worried about associations being made between the two organizations. They stressed that “there is no need to equate the position of WOJAC to that of the PLO,” and that, unlike the PLO and the emerging Israeli Black Panther movement, WOJAC was not a national liberation movement by which the Israeli political establishment should feel threatened. In fact, the Israeli government ultimately decided to fund the movement, perceiving that the risk of exacerbating ethnic tensions in Israel was worth the potential gain of offsetting Palestinian claims. Despite some reservations within WOJAC, the organization continued to draw comparisons to the PLO, as it believed that justice would only arise within a UN framework for peace in the Middle East.Footnote ⁸

A critical component of WOJAC's strategy was to peg MENA Jewish refugee claims to Palestinian claims. WOJAC saw political rights as a means of legitimizing its demands, but these rights were not defined in absolute terms; rather, they were seen to be contingent on Palestinian claims. Thus, when Ben-Porat raised the idea of political rights for MENA Jewish refugees in the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) on 1 January 1975, calling for attention to the “legal and political aspects of the rights of those Jews,”Footnote ⁹ he defined these legal and political aspects in terms of the rights to which he saw Palestinians as being entitled:

WOJAC was initially hesitant to refer to displaced MENA Jews in Israel and abroad as refugees. Instead, the organization used their experiences of the maʿabara, or transit camp—“familiar to the Arabs as ‘refugee camp,’” according to WOJAC—to illustrate the hardships that MENA Jewish arrivals faced in Israel: the overcrowded conditions, the “tin huts,” and the “shacks made of cardboard” in the middle of the desert.Footnote ¹¹ The second chapter of WOJAC's main publication, The Case of the Jews from Arab Countries: A Neglected Issue, which lays out the organization's platform, is entirely devoted to the transit camps. While not wanting to blame the State of Israel for these conditions, WOJAC pointed to the camps’ slow evacuation rate and the presence of rampant disease and illness. It was only after the passing of many years that Ben-Porat, in an address to the Knesset, would identify MENA Jewish immigrants living in the transit camps as refugees: “The State of Israel should provide equal treatment, in definition and in fact, to both refugee bodies, the Arabs and Jews [italics mine].” Ben-Porat hoped to publicize details on “life in the tents and transit camps,” the suffering of the refugees, and the “tremendous efforts invested in their initial absorption by the State of Israel, with meager resources.” He also sought to make clear that “they have not all yet been fully absorbed . . . many are still suffering no less than some of the Arab refugees.”Footnote ¹²

In twenty-five years of activity, WOJAC achieved some measure of success in depicting MENA Jewish refugee rights as an ongoing political matter rather than a humanitarian concern that had already been resolved. The organization was covered by multiple newspapers in Canada, Europe, and the United States, including The New York Times. Footnote ¹³ Moreover, it gained the encouragement of some US senators, who drew parallels between European Jews and “the victims of centuries of Arab pogroms,” and between MENA Jews and Palestinians.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet despite such gestures of support, no government recognized MENA Jews as refugees.

WOJAC was the first organization to broach the subject of the political rights of displaced MENA Jews, but its politics were constrained by the Israeli government's interest in countering the Palestinian right of return and its historical reluctance to acknowledge that MENA Jews were discriminated against upon arrival in Israel. Moreover, much like the case of certain Holocaust reparations advocates, WOJAC alienated non-Israeli MENA Jews when in its early years it proposed that the Israeli government had a right to collect claims on behalf of all MENA Jews and to use the funds as it saw fit. Consequently, individual MENA Jewish communities outside of Israel chose not to prioritize the issues of recognition and compensation.

By the late 1990s, facing funding pressures after the death of its primary donor Leon Tamman, WOJAC's activities had begun to slow down. In 1999, the organization disbanded. Over the next few years, it seemed as if the rights of MENA Jews would be dropped entirely from any organizational or governmental agenda. However, following the 2000 Camp David Summit talks, and in anticipation of a future Israeli–Palestinian negotiated agreement, the Conference of Presidents, the World Jewish Congress, and the American Sephardi Federation offered institutional and financial support for the creation of a new organization with a slightly different take on the refugee issue.

JJAC was founded in 2002 with the aim of furthering WOJAC's mission. Like its predecessor, its leadership encompasses a broad spectrum of Jews from different national backgrounds—Iraq, Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, and so forth—and residing on different continents. Unlike its predecessor, the organization carefully situates its refugee claims within international human rights norms, even when it raises concerns over what it perceives as the United Nations's preferential treatment of Palestinian refugees.Footnote ¹⁵ In addition to reframing the refugee issue, JJAC aspires to use it as a springboard for animated discussions about education, loss, and cultural transmission. For this reason, the organization's five main aims involve linkages between the refugee issue and personal and communal history. These aims include:

JJAC has been successful in achieving these objectives. It has also succeeded in persuading the American, Canadian, and Israeli governments to commit to raising the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries within the framework of a comprehensive peace agreement in the Middle East. On 1 April 2008, the US House of Representatives passed House Resolution 185 in which the US government raised for the first time the issue of recognizing dislocated MENA Jews as refugees:

This resolution was an impetus for other governments—Israel included—to recognize MENA Jews as refugees in the context of the conflict, meaning that the issue of reparations will likely be part of any future comprehensive peace agreement.

At JJAC conferences, advocates for MENA Jews—like their WOJAC predecessors—frequently reference the Palestinian case to support their own claims. Although former executive director and current executive vice president of JJAC, Stanley Urman, has reiterated that “there is no comparable history . . . that would allow any just [i.e., morally equivalent] comparison between the Palestinian refugees and Jewish refugees,”Footnote ¹⁸ he defends the constant references to Palestinians by arguing that MENA Jews and Palestinians “were both victims of the conflict.” JJAC departs from WOJAC by consistently referencing international law and human rights norms in drawing this parallel. For example, comparisons are frequently made between the number of UN resolutions and agencies devoted to Palestinians and the lack of both for MENA Jews.Footnote ¹⁹ Showing its commitment to the international sphere, JJAC has sent delegates to speak before various international organizations, including the UN Human Rights Council, the British House of Lords, and the British, Canadian, Israeli, Italian, and European parliaments. In their presentations, JJAC delegates have framed the MENA Jewish refugee issue within an international human rights and legal context, where the “international community,” which they see as capable of administering justice, is the primary intended audience:

Whereas WOJAC referred to the status of Palestinian refugees as the standard for justice, JJAC's frequent references to Palestinian refugees are intended to support the organization's platform of upholding international law uniformly. Appreciating why the international framework was efficacious for JJAC requires understanding how Jewish refugees have traditionally been defined by the Zionist establishment.

THE REFUGEE WITHIN THE ALIYAH CONTEXT

In this section, I show that the Zionist establishment's traditional reluctance to apply the term “refugee” to the MENA Jewish case relates to presumptions concerning ʿolim and refugees. In a Zionist context, ʿolim and refugees have often been defined in terms of commitment to Zionism and human agency. But depending on the temporal and political context, the term “refugee” has been either incompatible or compatible with the Zionist project. JJAC's preference for the UN definition of “refugee” has allowed it to avoid indeterminacy in the meaning of the word within Zionist contexts.

The Hebrew term for “Jewish immigrant,” ʿoleh, means literally one who “ascends” to the Land of Israel, signifying the importance of living in the land. In contrast, the word for “Jewish emigrant,” yored, refers to one who “descends” from the Land of Israel, on par with being an apostate or a traitor. Until 1948, ʿolim were seen as immigrants who are ideologically committed to working the land in Palestine. They were initially the transitional generation between the diasporic Jew, or “Old Jew,” and the “New Jew,” or “sabra,” the nickname given to Jews born in the Land of Israel.Footnote ²¹“New Jews” were supposed to supersede “Old Jews” of the Diaspora, who were looked down upon as bourgeois and weak. Writing about the sabra, the Israeli historian Oz Almog describes this character as “born and bred on his own land, free of the inhibitions and superstitions of earlier ages; even his physique was superior to that of his cousins in the old country.”Footnote ²²

The status of sabras in society only grew following the Zionist victory in the 1948 war, which was attributed to them more than their foreign-born compatriots.Footnote ²³ In the decade following the war, however, the popularity of the sabra ideal declined, as did the expectation that new immigrants be staunch nationalists or kibbutznik socialists. The slow erosion of the sabra in the popular imagination was due to a number of factors, including the arrival of Jews from Arab countries. Few MENA Jews were “absorbed by the kibbutzim and became sabras in the full sense,” while those who did adopted the “dominant Western-Ashkenazi-secular culture.”Footnote ²⁴ Although the myth of the sabra has arguably faded, the ideological commitment to Israel once associated with this figure has persisted as an ideal, and it is expected from all ʿolim.

In the organizational literature of dislocated MENA Jews, ʿolim and refugees have traditionally been treated as mutually exclusive categories for two reasons. Referring to MENA ʿolim as “refugees” may be seen to contradict the Zionist narrative that they yearned to immigrate and were saved by the Zionist establishment. Accordingly, WOJAC's introduction of the refugee designation called into question not only the motivation of individual “refugees,” but also the raison d’état. Even when the deployment of the term “refugee” could serve Zionist interests, both government officials and “refugees” used it only sparingly and with great caution. For instance, although Ben-Porat believed that the MENA Jewish refugee claim could assist Israeli state interests in Israeli–Palestinian negotiations by neutralizing Palestinian claims, he often referred to MENA Jews as refugees in a de facto rather than a de jure manner.Footnote ²⁵ Indeed, Ben-Porat's hesitancy to insert the word “refugee” in the name of his organization (he ultimately did not) underscored the tension between serving Zionist interests and correcting the Zionist establishment's historical narrative of the MENA Jewish arrival:

Additionally, in his correspondence with the Israeli government, he sought to emphasize the coercive nature of the departure without undermining the Zionist credentials of MENA Jews:

While the suggestion that MENA Jews were refugees may have neutralized Palestinian claims, it also threatened the raison d'etat.Footnote ²⁸

The ideological implications of how to define forced migration are also apparent in the internal discourse of other WOJAC members. The latter maintained that their departure from Arab lands was voluntary and for love of Zion. Shlomo Hillel, a government minister and former Zionist activist in Iraq, explained: “I don't regard the departure of Jews from Arab lands as that of refugees. They came here because they wanted to, as Zionists.”Footnote ²⁹ Hillel understood ʿaliyah as a “right” for which the Jews of Arab countries “were ready to pay any price: loss of property, detention and torture, and even their lives.” He argued that “in Zionist parlance, there are two terms used of [sic] ʿaliyah. Pioneering aliyah and mass immigration. That of the Jews of the Arab states was both.”Footnote ³⁰ Similarly, a report of WOJAC's Third International Conference noted “the reluctance of Israel, including its Oriental Jews themselves, to describe the immigrants from Arab countries as refugees and apply this term to them, preferring to consider them as immigrants motivated by Zionist ideals.”Footnote ³¹

Equivocating on the “refugee” label, the Yemen-born WOJAC member Shimon Avizemer struggled to reconcile the roles that discrimination and Zionism played in prompting Jews to leave MENA regions. In one instance, he referred to the discrimination as a catalyst for Zionism and “immigration” to the Land of Israel. In other instances he emphasized exchange of populations and referred to displaced Jews as “the Jews who left Arab countries as refugees and settled in Israel and other countries,” or as “Jews originating from Arab countries.”Footnote ³² The preoccupation of government officials and MENA Jewish activists with the implications of the refugee label for Zionism underscores the stark division between the refugee and the ʿoleh.

The division between these two categories is also apparent in the Zionist perception of refugees as passive, in contrast to the “active” ʿolim. For displaced MENA Jews, the risk of being labeled passive was compounded by the Zionist establishment's Orientalist association of this attribute with Arabs.Footnote ³³ The desire to eschew passivity is apparent not only among former WOJAC members, many of whom emphasized the “voluntary” nature of their departure, but also within Israeli scholarship on MENA Jewry. In her discussion of the differences between WOJAC and the Babylonian Jewish Heritage Centre (also founded by Ben-Porat), Esther Meir-Glitzenstein addresses this question of agency: “The depiction of the immigrants as refugees and deportees undermines the museum founders’ demand, in the name of Iraqi Jewry, for recognition of and compensation for the sacrifice that they made, because, according to WOJAC, it was not a voluntary sacrifice but a forced one.”Footnote ³⁴ Meir-Glitzenstein assumes that compensation or recognition is contingent on the nature of the sacrifice, even as the categorization of Iraqi Jews as either immigrants or refugees does not change the fact that they lost their citizenship and their assets and experienced hardships in transit camps.

For Yehouda Shenhav, the refugee label is “offensive” not only to Jews from Iraq but also to Jews from Arab countries generally because it connotes passivity.Footnote ³⁵ In his view, the effort to have MENA Jews recognized as refugees

For non-Israeli readers of Shenhav, it is unclear why MENA Jews, particularly those who have made their homes outside of Israel, should be offended by the suggestion that they were not eager to move to Israel.

In their coverage of Israel, writers of popular nonfiction and in the media also deploy the refugee–ʿoleh dichotomy. In an opinion piece for The Guardian, Rachel Shabi, the bestselling author of We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel's Jews from Arab Lands, assumes that the definition of the refugee must preclude illegal migration. Responding to JJAC's refugee campaign, she argues that

Shabi's suggestion is that whereas the category of the refugee contains only the expelled, no MENA Jews were coerced into leaving their countries of origin. The association between refugees, passivity, and Zionism is even clearer later in the editorial: “Broadly, you could say that any Middle Eastern Jew (‘Oriental’ or ‘Mizrahi’ Jew) who defines their [sic] migration to Israel as ‘Zionist’ cannot also be a refugee: the former label has agency and involves a desire to live in the Jewish state; the second suggests passivity and a lack of choice.”Footnote ³⁸ The passivity attributed to refugees stems from the assumption that refugees have no choice as to whether to leave. As Shenhav puts it,

Despite acknowledging complex historical circumstances, Shenhav insists that refugees are only those who neither seek nor are offered assistance to flee, a conception very much at odds with other historical precedents, including German Jews.Footnote ⁴⁰

Crucially, in their depictions of refugees, Shenhav, Meir-Glitzenstein, and Shabi, as well as the prominent Oxford historian of the Arab–Israeli conflict Avi Shlaim (discussed shortly), discursively construct the category of the refugee as passive or lacking agency, attributes they see as a challenge to traditional Zionist ideals. In so doing, they negate the possible legitimacy of refugee claims by those who took an active role in their own departure. The flaw in this reasoning becomes immediately apparent when one applies it to the Palestinian case by suggesting, for example, that Palestinians who fled in anticipation of the 1948 war cannot be considered refugees. Once the refugee as a category of person has been defined as passive, the claims of MENA Jewish organizations advocating refugee recognition can be dismissed on the basis that MENA Jews ostensibly would not wish to be associated with passivity. For Shenhav and Meir-Glitzenstein, the contradiction between “active” and “passive” is resolved by depicting MENA Jewish organizations as Zionist, for if they are Zionist they cannot represent refugees. By framing the question in terms of agency, Shenhav and likeminded objectors ultimately discourage public deliberation over the legitimacy of the justice claims.

In sum, the Zionist construction of the category ʿolim has imputed passivity to the category of the refugee. In WOJAC's literature we find activists who, within the Zionist framework, attempt to negotiate the passivity of the refugee with the question of voluntary emigration. Strangely, the question of whether Zionists or non-Zionists who take an active role in their own departure can also be refugees does not emerge for contemporary scholars of MENA Jewry. By reinforcing this dichotomy, these scholars seem to undermine the ability of organizations such as WOJAC to represent MENA Jewry. The questions of how MENA Jews might reconcile the categories “Zionist” and “refugee,” and whether MENA Jews can be considered refugees under international law, remain unexplored.Footnote ⁴¹

THE REFUGEE WITHIN THE HOLOCAUST CONTEXT

If the notion of passivity plays a critical role in discourse on ʿaliyah, it figures just as prominently in Holocaust survivor discourse. The sabra's disdain for diasporic Jews only intensified with the Holocaust, and sabras treated survivors with particular insensitivity and contempt, closely associating them with the refugee. It was arguably this association that deterred MENA Jews from identifying as refugees during the first few decades of Israeli statehood. I argue, however, that the decline of the stigma associated with the Holocaust survivor in the 1980s, and the desire to be incorporated into Israeli national memory and the hegemonic global Ashkenazi community, has encouraged MENA Jews to link their refugee recognition claims to those of Holocaust survivors. Whereas WOJAC's invocations of the Holocaust had once only complicated matters, since the 1980s these invocations have proven to be assets.

Holocaust survivors—the embodiment of “Old Jews” in Zionist discourse—were long depicted as lacking the capability and willingness to defend themselves. Almog Oz explains that “for the veteran members of the Yishuv, the catastrophe in Europe made all the more stark the differences between the Diaspora Jew, who was ostensibly led ‘like a lamb to the slaughter,’ and the new Jew, the pioneer and Sabra, a proud and self-respecting Jew who heroically withstood the nation's enemies and even defeated them.”Footnote ⁴² In the early state period, as the Israeli establishment was fostering a sabra ideal, survivors stood in as the reverse of this ideal, even though they made up a sizable portion of the population. Survivors had arrived in Israel not as aspiring New Jews, but as refugees—a category that came to be defined pejoratively in terms of the survivor. As historian Tom Segev explains, “people sincerely feared meeting the survivors face to face, with their physical and psychological handicaps, their suffering and terror. . . . The Holocaust survivors came from another world and, to the end of their days, they were its prisoners.”Footnote ⁴³ The stigmatization of the category “refugee” through its association with survivors should be recognized as a factor in the initial reluctance of MENA Jews to identify with it. Though this relationship is remarkably absent in MENA Jewish refugee scholarship, the survivors’ social marginalization and, paradoxically, political centrality in Israeli and Jewish American political discourse powerfully inhibited MENA Jewish demands.

European Jews and their children blamed survivors for the Holocaust, which they saw to be a direct result of their passivity. They encouraged survivors to suppress their past or overcome it in solitude. It was not until the 1980s that first-generation books by and about survivors were published. The Holocaust then “became part of the national ethos, the consensus, a required subject on matriculation exams, and an educational journey for Israeli youth.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Incidentally, only when survivors felt comfortable speaking publicly about their experiences did demands for reparations become widespread.

In parallel to this transformation, MENA Jews who arrived in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s, mindful of the importance of the Holocaust, quickly noticed how Holocaust refugees—or pelitim (literally, “refugees”), as they were called—were “vilified” in society,Footnote ⁴⁵ but they did not see the Holocaust as part of their own history. Israeli sociologist Hanna Yablonka found that as MENA Jews in Israel moved from socioeconomic periphery to center during the 1980s and the 1990s, they more and more identified with the Holocaust as a formative event in national Jewish memory.Footnote ⁴⁶ As she describes it:

MENA Jews’ reluctance to appropriate the term refugee may have been due in part to the presence of Holocaust survivors in Israeli society. The Mizrahi journalist Shaul Bibi recounts,

The mere presence of Holocaust survivors thus constrained and conditioned the political demands of MENA Jews.

As a result of the survivor stigma, WOJAC members avoided associating themselves with the term pelitim for the first decade and a half of the group's existence. In 1987, for example, Ran Cohen, an Iraqi Jew who became an Israeli cabinet minister, could proclaim: “I am not a refugee. I did not come to this country as a refugee. I stole across borders. I underwent a great deal of torment. So did my family. So did my friends. And I have no need for anyone to define the Jews of the East as refugee Jewry. For some reason, that definition is applied only to European Jewry.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Cohen was hardly alone in not wanting to identify with a category associated with Holocaust survivors and passivity. The status of survivors undoubtedly affected the willingness of MENA Jews to refer to themselves as refugees.

As the stigma of the survivor began to disappear in the 1980s, so too did the stigma of the refugee. The erosion of the latter stigma created an opening for MENA Jews in Israel to identify as refugees and, consequently, situate themselves within Israeli national memory as a community that, similar to European Jews, experienced persecution. The drawing of analogies between these two experiences was initially contested. Ben-Porat himself, recognizing both the Holocaust's uniqueness and the MENA Jewish desire to be included in Israeli national memory, grappled with its appropriateness. Eventually, however, some MENA Jews, understanding the centrality of the Holocaust in Israeli public consciousness and wanting to draw attention to their own suffering, pursued the analogy—referencing, for example, the 1941 attack on Baghdad's Jewish community, referred to as the fārhūd.Footnote ⁵⁰ The prominent London-based Iraqi Jewish newsletter The Scribe even devoted several articles to Sephardic Jews who perished in the Holocaust.Footnote ⁵¹

At the 2012 “Justice for Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries and Iran” conference in Jerusalem, the MENA Jewish stance on the Holocaust was less equivocal. Explicit comparisons between the Holocaust and the plight of MENA Jewry appeared to be socially acceptable. Thus, Meir Kahalon, the Director General of the Central Organization for Jews from Arab Countries and Iran, could declare that “the Shoah [Holocaust] happened in Europe; the Shoah also happened in North Africa, in Tunis.”Footnote ⁵² Highlighting the death of “witnesses,” Kahalon compared the dwindling numbers of Shoah survivors, who were dying without having the chance to offer their testimony, to the MENA Jews who were also vanishing without having their stories recorded. Yet he lamented the disparity in the amount of attention dedicated to European and MENA Jewish experiences: “there's Yad Vashem—anyone who comes to Israel goes to Yad Vashem. But nothing for us, we haven't received money to build something similar.” In the past, MENA Jews had felt that the presence of survivors inhibited the kinds of claims they could make, and that their experiences could not be compared to those of survivors. This situation clearly changed after survivors came to be accepted within Israeli and American Jewish public consciousness.Footnote ⁵³ The links MENA Jews have drawn between themselves and Holocaust survivors has strengthened their claims before both Israeli and non-Israeli Jewish audiences. These links have also propelled the Israeli government to compensate Tunisian, Libyan, Moroccan, Algerian, and Iraqi Jews for the persecution they endured during the Holocaust.Footnote ⁵⁴

THE REFUGEE WITHIN THE ISRAELI–PALESTINIAN CONTEXT

Discourse produced by MENA Jewish refugees has also frequently compared MENA Jews to Palestinians. As a result, critics of MENA Jewish refugee claims assume that MENA Jewish refugee proponents represent Zionist interests exclusively. Given how the Zionist establishment has used this analogy to oppose Palestinian demands, the suspicion of these critics is understandable and not necessarily unfounded.

In some instances, MENA Jews seek the analogy with Palestinian refugees as a way of demonstrating fidelity to the Zionist project. Ironically, by calling themselves refugees, they are able to prove that they are ʿolim, provided that the analogy to Palestinians aids Israeli state interests. In part for this reason, prominent left-leaning MENA Jewish scholars have felt compelled to disregard any claims made by MENA Jewish organizations. This dismissal is based on two assumptions: that the parallels serve maximalist state interests and not MENA Jews; and, relatedly, that what benefits the Israeli state cannot benefit MENA Jews. Shenhav, for instance, has insisted that “WOJAC wasn't established in order to help Mizrahi Jews but rather to create a deterrent to block demands from the national Palestinian movement—primarily the demand to compensate refugees and the right of return.” “WOJAC,” he went on, “which had tried to put into use the term ‘Jewish refugees,’ had failed.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Shenhav has claimed that neither Israel nor WOJAC was interested in recovering MENA Jewish property; both sought to use property as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Palestinians in order to obviate the Palestinian right of return.Footnote ⁵⁶

This position is supported by the early stance of some of WOJAC's executive members, who argued that Israel should be responsible for collecting claims and should use them in negotiations with Palestinians. In its early years, WOJAC saw the analogy to Palestinians purely in terms of its neutralization of Palestinian claims for compensation. As Meir-Glitzenstein explains, “The Israelis [members of WOJAC] were willing to forgo individual compensation, adopt the ‘offset policy’ of the State of Israel, and essentially agree to the ‘nationalization’ of compensation by the state. Here, too, the Zionists sought to continue to serve the Israeli establishment.”Footnote ⁵⁷ However, a point that has received little attention is that there was much internal controversy surrounding this stance, with some MENA Jews rejecting the right of the state to collect claims on their behalf. Those most opposed, including Heskel Haddad (based in New York), Raffaelo Fellah (based in Rome), and Naim Dangoor (based in London), all lived outside of Israel. In 1978, Haddad, as a member of WOJAC's executive council, expressed this view to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who referred to Haddad as “president of the Arab Jews.” Over the ensuing four decades, Haddad's stance, which he reiterated prior to the 2000 Camp David Summit talks, remained the same.Footnote ⁵⁸

Like Haddad, Naim Dangoor had a long history of opposing Israel's right to collect MENA Jewish claims. He not only published critiques of the idea, but also accused the Israeli government—and later WOJAC—of cynically exploiting the property rights of MENA Jews. Dangoor sent letters of complaint to Israeli and WOJAC officials and, when they went ignored, threatened legal action. In these letters, he described himself as both a member of WOJAC and a representative of non-Israeli Jews from Arab countries. Time and again, in his correspondence, at conferences, and through publications, Dangoor emphasized that the rights of individual MENA Jews were not be used only to counter Palestinian claims. In The Scribe, he wrote, “We fear that, in an effort to reach a quick settlement regarding compensation, Israel will simply throw in the Jewish claims to offset the Palestinian claims. That would be unfair.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Dangoor's sentiments were shared by his colleague Raffaelo Fellah, who served as president of the World Association of Libyan Jews and was a member of the World Sephardic Federation. In February 1993, Fellah had his first of several meetings with Libyan President Muʿammar al-Qadhafi to discuss compensation. These meetings prompted al-Qadhafi to issue a promise in 2004 to compensate Libyan Jews for the property they had lost.Footnote ⁶⁰

These three WOJAC activists each criticized Israel's right to collect claims and would go on to criticize WOJAC. Thus, during this organization's formative years, some of its most important members opposed Israel's compensation policy. The dissent of Haddad, Dangoor, and Rafah is repeatedly marginalized, however, in critical scholarly depictions of WOJAC, which portray the organization as an extension of the Israeli government.Footnote ⁶¹ Had these three individuals disappeared from public life, perhaps the oversight would be understandable. But this has not been the case. Haddad, for example, despite a fallout with the now-retired Ben-Porat, currently serves as president of WOJAC in the United States and the organization's UN representative.Footnote ⁶²

MENA Jewish scholars such as Shenhav reject analogies between MENA Jews and Palestinians for several reasons. One of these, already discussed previously, is the perception that MENA Jewish and Israeli interests are incompatible. In this vein, Shenhav has argued that WOJAC “was not formed to assist Mizrahi Jews; it was invented as a deterrent to block claims harbored by the Palestinian refugee movement.”Footnote ⁶³ Shenhav also assumes here that under no circumstances would MENA Jews want to be referred to as refugees. WOJAC's claims apparently “infuriated” many Mizrahi Jews and “Zionist Jews from around the world,” whose dignity was “trampled” by the organization.

Meanwhile, scholars have found troubling the comparison to Palestinians owing to the disparity between the two groups’ historical circumstances. For MENA Jews the comparison can be offensive, for it is seen to associate them with unproductiveness or undesirability. In MENA Jewish refugee discourse, integration and productivity have emerged as key sites of difference between MENA Jews and Palestinians. Speaking at the JJAC conference, Gina Waldman, a JJAC member and founder of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa—an American organization devoted to “educating and advocating on behalf of the 850,000 Jewish refugees from the Middle East and North Africa”—asserted that “Israel became the largest and most successful refugee camp in the Middle East because it integrated us and gave us dignity and hope . . . but not without difficulty.” Likewise, the current prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, emphasized the difference between Israel's treatment of Jewish refugees and Arab countries’ treatment of Palestinians. Whereas the Arab world “used Palestinians as a battering ram” and “turned refugees into pawns,” he argued, “Israel turned refugees into productive citizens.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Even as Netanyahu appears to be denying agency to MENA Jewish citizens, he sees them as productive and implicitly contrasts this productivity with the passivity of Palestinians (“pawns”). This type of rhetoric goes a long way toward explaining why some dislocated MENA Jews are reluctant to be called refugees.Footnote ⁶⁵

THE REFUGEE WITHIN THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT

Until now, I have argued that MENA Jewish refugee politics are predicated on particular assumptions within Zionist contexts about what being a refugee entails. JJAC's success, I argue, lies in the organization's move to extract MENA Jewish refugee claims from the Zionist context and insert them into the domain of international refugee law.

Within the international state system and international law, the refugee is a bureaucratic and legal category applied to individuals or groups of people caught in the interstices between sovereign powers. In the modern period, when lands became divided into states with defined borders, expulsion from one state necessitated permission of entry into another, making one state's treatment of its own citizens “a matter of legitimate concern for all other states in the international system.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Though expulsions across borders have occurred frequently throughout history, the refugee as a category of person, dependent on contemporary institutions and bureaucracies, was invented during World War I. Provided the refugee was not in her territory of origin, she could demand rights to repatriation and/or compensation from the refugee regime. The definition of the refugee entitled to these rights is now enshrined in the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees:

While a multitude of UN resolutions address the rights of refugees, MENA Jewish refugee proponents draw on UNSCR 242 to justify their claims. This resolution, adopted in the aftermath of the 1967 war, discusses a “just settlement of the refugee problem,” but does not refer explicitly to Palestinian, Arab, or Jewish refugees. The application of the term “refugees” to both Palestinian and Jewish cases was affirmed by US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in 1977.Footnote ⁶⁸ Due to the ambiguity of UNSCR 242, and the Vance draft letter's referral to both “Arab” and “Jewish” refugees, JJAC saw that MENA Jewish refugee claims could be reasonably grounded in international law. In 2012, JJAC and the Israeli deputy foreign minister at the time, Danny Ayalon, hosted a conference calling for the legal recognition of Jewish refugees from Arab lands, which garnered much attention in the Arab and Israeli press. Despite the convergence between JJAC's and Israeli national interests, JJAC did not abandon its original goal of representing displaced MENA Jews.

The question arises as to why this international framework has remained so appealing to advocates of MENA Jewish refugee rights. I suggest that international law offers a way for these advocates to distance the refugee question from debates and associations within Zionist contexts, for it defines refugees in a way that is intended to be neutral and free from moral judgment. The difference between the Zionist discursive realm and that of international law becomes clear through the case of Avi Shlaim. Shlaim has argued that Middle Eastern Jews “left their native lands not as a result of officially sanctioned policies of persecution but because they felt threatened by the rising tide of Arab nationalism.”Footnote ⁶⁹ In describing his own departure from Iraq, he asserts, “We were not persecuted but opted to leave because we felt insecure. So, unlike the Palestinians who were driven out of their homes, we were not refugees in the proper sense of the word.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The “proper sense of the word” is not explained with reference to a standard definition. Instead, Shlaim's reader is to infer that the true meaning of “refugee” is one who experienced the same form of expulsion that occurred in the Palestinian context.Footnote ⁷¹ Yet longstanding proponents of MENA Jewish refugee claims allow for the possibility of diverse circumstances around departure. Writing two decades prior to Shlaim, Dangoor maintained that “in whatever manner the Jews left the Arab countries they arrived in Israel as refugees.”Footnote ⁷² Similarly, Lyn Julius, the founder of “The Point of No Return,” a popular website devoted to Jewish refugees from Arab Countries, criticized the Israeli government in the mid-1980s for its vested interests in quashing the refugee issue: “The undisguised truth (suppressed by the Israeli government during the 1960s and 1970s for various reasons) is that the majority of MENA Jews left as refugees, many of them destitute.”Footnote ⁷³

If the normative recourse for internationally displaced persons who seek refugee recognition is to appeal to the UN definition, then one might expect that the question of MENA Jewish refugee recognition could be deliberated in this non-Zionist context as well. Yet this has clearly not been the case. The shift to the international realm, and the reframing of the issue in terms of international law, justice, and human rights, has not diminished accusations against WOJAC, JJAC, or other refugee proponents. Their claims still offend a minority of MENA Jews and many leftist scholars invested in the issue. Shenhav, for example, spoke out against JJAC within the first year of its creation, arguing that “the intensive campaign to secure official political and legal recognition of Jews from Arab lands as refugees has been going on for the past three years [since 2000]” and has “trampled their [Mizrahim] dignity.” Recalling the Strasbourg Jewish community's objection to the term “refugee” in the 1970s, Shenhav maintained that “such remonstration precisely predicted the failure of the current organization, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, to inspire enthusiasm for its efforts.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Contrary to Shenhav's prediction, JJAC has achieved a measure of success in the United States and Israel, whose governments recognize that MENA Jews constitute a refugee group as a result of events in the Middle East and North Africa. But the organization's frequent references to Palestinians and its “fārhūdization” of Jewish history suggest that the figure of the MENA Jewish refugee must still accommodate traditional archetypes central to the Zionist project in order to appeal to Jewish audiences.

As I have underscored, the international campaign to have MENA Jews recognized as refugees has revealed the discursive complexity of the refugee question in Zionist contexts and the fact that the bulk of the criticism against the campaign is grounded on particular definitional presumptions concerning the refugee. In some instances, MENA Jewish claims in the international context have been defined in terms of Palestinian refugees in the hope of creating “symmetry in public opinion” between the Palestinian refugees and MENA Jews.Footnote ⁷⁵ On other occasions, the international question has been framed within the ʿoleh–refugee dichotomy, with MENA Jews who are Israeli citizens being shamed for seeking refugee status. One evocative example comes from an essay titled “Exploiting Jews from Arab Countries” by Lara Friedman, the Washington lobbyist and director of policy and government relations at Americans for Peace Now (the “sister movement” to Peace Now, Israel's preeminent peace movement and the most influential left-leaning Zionist organization in the US). Friedman draws attention in her piece to the international definition of the refugee but argues that this definition is insufficient:

Friedman's assertion that the international definition must be “more than this” is indicative of a broader expectation that MENA Jews’ claim for international refugee recognition be buttressed with sentiment, revealing how assumptions undergirding the ʿoleh–refugee dichotomy have been smuggled into the international discourse.

In typical refugee cases, those who flee home because they feel threatened on the grounds of race, religion, or political beliefs are normatively considered refugees. And those refugees may make their home in a new country, grow to love that country, and have no desire to return to their original home. But in MENA Jewish refugee discourse, Israel is oftentimes treated as an exception. Consider Friedman's response to her own rhetorical question: “Is Israel the homeland of the Jews—the place where full citizenship is the birthright of any Jew born anywhere, or is it a generic country that magnani-mously gave what has turned out to be permanent refuge to a group of foreigners (who happened to be Jewish) fleeing persecution in their native countries of the Arab world? It can't be both.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Although within a Zionist paradigm the mutual exclusiveness of these statements may seem clear, outside of this paradigm one statement does not preclude the other.