With the declaration of Israel as a reborn Jewish State, about a million Jewish nationals were sufficiently persecuted, and some murdered, robbed or forced out of their dwellings with the loss of all their properties. The survivors with some foreign assets fled to the United States, other American countries, England and its colonies and to France from the North African countries. Nearly 900,000 of the poorer survivors were rescued by Israel and became born-again Israelis.
Of these would-be or forced Zionists about 300,000 arrived from Morocco, 130,000 from Iraq, 55,000 from Tunisia, 52,000 from Aden and Yemen, 38,000 from Egypt, 37,000 from Libya, 26,000 from Algeria, 11,000 from Syria, 5000 from Lebanon and some more from non-Arab Islamic countries in Africa and Asia.
That sad fact should have moved a fair, just and friendly world to arrange an equitable exchange: The forced exodus of Jews from Arab and other Islamic pogromists should have justified the removal of the Arabic equivalent population from part of the original and formerly British Mandate, so that no Arabs would have remained west of the Jordan River unless they volunteered to live as aliens among the Jews, the way Jews lived under Arab rule even before the Prophet Mohammed began to make their life a hell.
Israel never considered that best "final solution" which would have averted all future Israel-Arab wars, created security for the survivors of the holocausts in Europe and the near East and would have been acceptable in preference to the reliance on the goodness of human understanding and the seizure of a great opportunity for all concerned.
Only Golda Meir of Jewish and other world leaders had the courtesy to answer a long letter of the poor doctoral candidate at that time. Her humanism expressed itself in her love for the remotely related Arabian brothers and sisters. She represented the will of the Zionist Labor-Socialists to live with them and to elevate their lives in all economic, social and political aspects. Now these Arabs are coming to Israel's former home to roost.
A separation of fighting roosters is still possible except in those Kibbutzin where Arabs of modern and liberal "Islamism" live with their Jewish friends and families. It seems that even the hundred Kossovo Mohammedans accepted by Kibbutz Maagan Michael prefer fighting for a better Israel than to line up with their fellow-religionists of ferocious fanaticism. Why do so many Jew-baiters in the USA, in Europe and elsewhere favor those who use terrorism as a weapon of mass destruction?
Hamas assassins & anti-Semites may begrudge the beneficial influence of the Ben Gurion University of the Negev (south) across unfriendly borders. Together with Arab & French scientists, they are working on the desalination of ground waters deep under the Gaza Strip without being hampered by bloodthirsty Hamas assassins. They will also soon profit from that Jewish university's latest invention of a solar laser, to be used by surgeons where there is no reliable electricity supply.
Also, Hamas didn't interfere when 3 of this mixing-races-&-religions Jewish university sent 3 Christian, 3 Jewish & 3 of its Muslim students to Bethlehem for the distribution of toys to Arab kids assembled on Manger Square. The real shocker is that ever more Bedouins cross into Israel to study at this Labor-sponsored Jewish university. 25 new Bedouins there decided to join the Israel Defence Force to fight against marauding & murdering Hamas outlaws, their in-laws & ferocious anti-Zionists. Apparently, the 17 Jewish army veterans of Bedouins origin who will now study tuition-free have proved good missionaries for a good cause. Unfortunately, they had to have new names in order to protect their family & like-minded friends. At this very slow rate of an increase of cooperation beyond borders & fences, it will yet take many generations before civic-minded, decent Jews, Arabs and neo-Nazis call off the prevailing jihad. However, a thousand Druze "Arabs" proudly attend Zionist schools, are reliable officers in the Israeli Defence Force & wish that all Jews would equal their patriotic endeavors, just a little flicker of light in the long, dark tunnel.
P.S. During the cruel days of 1948, I worried about the possible fate of the Algerian-Jewish friend I made in Rome in 1937, Abrahamy Gaëtan-Touitou from Biskra, Algérie. He was a well-to-do wholesale dealer in dates and other dried fruits. (dattes). Some 40 years later I learned that he and his family were among those lynched by good Moslems while the French Foreign Legion (then mostly former Nazi SS men) stood by laughing. My Nazi source that never had learned to master the French language even when he had retired to a little rich Atlas resort, laughed again because we conversed in fairly fluent German.
On our 2nd encounter in front of the hall in Milan where Mussolini had founded the Fascist Combatants, he explained that his wealthy "Rif" wife allowed him to roam about the world in his old age, but he wouldn't explain if he had divorced the wife of his youth with their 3 children in Germany. Yet, he still was to me part of the evidence that Nazi murderers who had escaped into the French Foreign Legion and various already independent Middle East countries linked Hitlerism with the designs of all Arabs against Israel and all Jews everywhere.
Week 31 - April 21, 2004 - Pride in Prejudice