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When there were Jews in nearly all the Arab countries.
Are you claiming that Jews could go back to Iraq? To Jordan? To Egypt?
As to Morocco:
When most Moroccan Jews welcomed the French declaration of the Moroccan Protectorate 1912, frustrated Muslims reacted by massacring Jews in the Fez mellah. Jews became Moroccan citizens under the Protectorate, though they were not afforded political equality. A fierce independence rebellion broke out in 1947 on the heels of subsequent Vichy French and Allied occupations of North Africa. The independence movement succeeded in 1955. As Morocco’s new Muslim government became more friendly with the Arab League, the Jewish position grew more uncertain; Jews tried to escape from Morocco but government troops captured and jailed them. In 1961 King Hassan II gave the Jews the right to emigrate, and a substantial percentage did.
and
During World War II, for example, King Mohammed V refused a request by the pro-Nazi Vichy France regime to round up the country's Jews for deportation.
Several years later, Moroccan Jews, like others in the Arab world, were attacked by the local population during the period surrounding the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Maurice M. Roumani’s book, “The Case of the Jews from Arab Countries: a Neglected Issue,” elaborates, describing the massacre of dozens of Moroccan Jews:
... bloody riots broke out in June 1948 against the Jews in Oujda and Djerada in Morocco. In Oujda, within three hours, five Jews had been killed, 30 seriously injured, shops and homes sacked. In Djerada, the Jewish population of 100 suffered 39 deaths and 30 severely wounded, the remainder less seriously.
and:
far larger number of Jews left the Arab and Muslim countries, due directly to the conflict, or to persecution of Jews in Arab and Muslim countries which intensified as a result of the conflict. In Iraq, Jews suffered a bloody pogrom in 1941, the Farhud, instigated by the Palestinian Grand Mufti Hajj Amin El Husseini and his coterie of Nazi-sympathizers. They were subjected to further persecutions following the outbreak of hostilities in 1948. Allegations that some of the violence against Iraqi Jews was instigated by Zionists are apparently groundless. In Morocco, the position of the Jews was perhaps one of the best among all Arab countries. Nonetheless, emigration was forbidden for several years when Morocco achieved independence in 1958, and was only resumed in 1967 and anti-Semitism was rife. In 1965, Moroccan writer Said Ghallab wrote regarding the attitude of his fellow Muslims toward their Jewish neighbors:
The worst insult that a Moroccan could possibly offer was to treat someone as a Jew....My childhood friends have remained anti-Jewish. They hide their virulent anti-Semitism by contending that the State of Israel was the creature of Western imperialism....A whole Hitlerite myth is being cultivated among the populace. The massacres of the Jews by Hitler> are exalted ecstatically. It is even believed that Hitler is not dead, but alive and well, and his arrival is awaited to deliver the Arabs from Israel.
(Said Ghallab, "Les Juifs sont en enfer," in Les Temps Modernes, (April 1965), pp. 2247-2251)
The condition of Jews in other countries was generally worse. Anti-Zionists have tried to obscure and ignore this persecution, and to claim that Jews from Arab countries were "victims" of Zionism in some way, but there is apparently no truth to their claims. (for example: Zionism for the Ages gives a clear picture of how Jews were victimized by the Egyptian government and society.)
In most cases, Jews were not allowed to take out their property, and in many cases they were forced to leave. This Exodus did not take place all at once in 1948 in all countries. In Egypt, Jews lingered on until they were forced to leave after the 6-Day war in 1967. The table below summarizes the data. Not all of the Jews who left Arab or Muslim countries may be considered refugees, but over 600,000 were apparently forced to leave without their property and are refugees. In addition to the numbers shown in the table below, there were about 100,000 Jews in Iran in 1948. At the time of the Khomeini revolution in 1979, there were about 80,000. About 55,000 found life impossible under the Islamist revolution and fled Iran, leaving abut 25,000 in 2004. Of course the current population of such refugees and their descendants must be numbered in the millions.
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