Europe murdered the Jews, so why are the Palestinians paying for it?

The fuller answer

Nobody needs to authorise you to answer this one. It turns up at dinner tables, in seminars and on phone-ins, and it is usually meant sincerely. Somebody has done a moral sum and does not like the answer they got. Take the question seriously, because most of the time it deserves it, and because the reply lands harder when you do.

The claim holds one true thing and one false thing, and they are easy to mix up. Separating them is the whole exchange.

Start with the dates, because they settle the false part

The chronology in the claim is wrong, and anybody in the room can check it in a minute.

Jewish communities lived without a break in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias through the Ottoman centuries. About 4,200 Jews lived in the land in 1806, supported from Europe by the halukkah, a fund institutionalised in 1810. By 1882 the community numbered around 24,000, in a total population of roughly 300,000.

Then the modern movement began, and it began in the 1880s. Petah Tikva was founded in 1878. The first Bilu group reached Jaffa in July 1882, the year Rishon LeZion was founded and the year Leo Pinsker published Auto-Emancipation. Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat in 1896. The Basel Programme was adopted at the first Zionist Congress on 30 August 1897.

The population figures follow from that. About 94,000 Jews by 1914. The British census of 1931 counted 174,610 Jews in a total population of 1,035,821, close to seventeen per cent.

Hold on to that last one. The 1931 census was taken before Hitler took office in January 1933. A national movement, fifty years of immigration and a community of nearly 175,000 people were in place before the Nazi party held power anywhere. By 1939 the figure had reached 449,000 and by 1947 it was 630,000, so the growth after 1933 was real and large. It was growth in something that already existed.

The claim needs a Jewish state to be an idea that occurred to the world in 1945. It was not.

Then ask who actually came

This is the fact that changes the shape of the conversation, and hardly anybody brings it.

Around 851,000 Jews were living in Arab countries in 1948. That is the size of those communities, not a count of people who left. By 2018 about 3,330 were left. Iraq had 135,000 and now has fewer than ten. Libya had 38,000 and now has none. Egypt had 75,000, Morocco 265,000, Algeria 140,000, Tunisia 105,000, Syria 30,000, Yemen and Aden 63,000 between them. Counting Iran, the World Jewish Congress puts the total at about a million before the 1960s, with some 15,000 remaining.

These were not recent arrivals. Jews had lived in Babylonia since before the common era. The first record of Jews in Yemen dates from the third century.

They did not leave quietly. A pogrom in Baghdad on 1 and 2 June 1941, the Farhud, killed between 150 and 180 Jews and injured about 600, seven years before Israel existed. A mob in Tripoli killed more than 140 Jews on 5 November 1945. In Aden in 1947, police joined a pogrom that killed 82. In 1950 Iraq legalised emigration on condition that Jews forfeited their citizenship. The airlift called Operation Ezra and Nehemiah then moved about 110,000 to Israel between May 1950 and August 1951, part of the 121,633 Iraqi Jews who reached Israel between 1948 and 1951. Operation Magic Carpet flew nearly 50,000 out of Yemen between June 1949 and September 1950. Egypt expelled almost 25,000 in 1956 and confiscated their property.

Now the arithmetic. Between 1948 and the end of 1952, 738,891 people reached Israel. Of those, 377,251 came from countries in Asia and Africa and 340,842 from Europe. Iraq alone accounted for 124,226. Pew’s survey of Israeli Jews, published in 2016, found 48 per cent identifying as Sephardi or Mizrahi and 45 per cent as Ashkenazi.

So hand the question back. Which European crime were the Jews of Sana’a paying for? Half of the people who arrived in those first years came from Arab and Muslim countries, expelled by governments with nothing to do with Berlin. The claim does more than get the dates wrong. It writes those families out of their own history, and it is worth saying that plainly.

What is true, and concede it without flinching

Yes. The Holocaust transformed international support for a Jewish state, and the 1947 vote happened when it did partly because of it. Denying that is both false and unnecessary.

More than 250,000 Jewish displaced persons were living in camps in Germany, Austria and Italy between 1945 and 1952. Earl Harrison reported to President Truman in August 1945 and recommended resettlement in Palestine. In 1946 the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry recommended 100,000 immediate certificates. They were for Jews who had been victims of Nazi and Fascist persecution. Britain refused, and more than 100,000 people were brought in unlawfully between 1945 and 1948. The General Assembly voted for partition on 29 November 1947, by 33 votes to 13 with 10 abstentions.

None of that turns a movement fifty years old into a European reparation. It explains why the international community moved in 1947 rather than in 1937. Those are two different claims, and letting the first carry the second is where the error sits.

“But the Palestinians still paid”

Here is where the honest version of the question lives, and the answer is not that nobody paid.

Palestinians were displaced in 1948, that displacement is unresolved, and nothing above answers it. Somebody can accept every date in this entry and still hold that the cost fell on people who had done nothing to earn it. That is a serious position and it deserves a reply rather than a longer list of dates.

The reply has two parts.

The first is that a national movement is not reducible to compensation. It had its own history, its own arguments and its own population on the ground before anybody offered it anything. You can think it was wrong, or wrongly carried out, and the compensation framing still fails as a description of what it was.

The second is that the framing quietly turns every Jew into a European. Around half of Israel’s Jewish population descends from people who were never European at all. They were expelled from countries that kept their houses and their bank accounts. Ask what is owed to them, and by whom, and the tidy moral ledger inside the question stops balancing.

One caution, because this can backfire. Use the point about Jews from Arab countries as a trump card and it will be misheard. It reads as an argument that Palestinians deserved what happened because other Arabs did something else. That is not the argument, and a triumphant tone will get it heard that way. Keep it as evidence about who the Israeli population is, never as a bill handed to the person in front of you.

The related move of treating Jews anywhere as answerable for the state is covered in the entry on collective responsibility.

The lines

“The first Zionist immigrants arrived in the 1880s. The British counted 175,000 Jews there in 1931, before Hitler was in power. This didn’t start in 1945.”

“About half the Jews in Israel come from families that left the Arab world, not Europe. Iraq took their citizenship by statute in 1950 and froze their bank accounts in 1951. Which European crime were they paying for?”

“You’re right that the Holocaust changed the world’s mind. It changed the timing. It didn’t invent the movement.”

“There were 135,000 Jews in Iraq in 1948 and fewer than ten now. Nobody calls that Europe’s fault.”

“I’m not telling you the Palestinians lost nothing. They lost a great deal. I’m telling you the ledger in your question has the wrong names on it.”

Carry four things

Write two lines with a real day in them.

Action. “On Saturday morning after breakfast, I will write four things on a card and keep it in my wallet: 1882, 1897, the 1931 census figure of 174,610, and 377,251 from Asia and Africa.”

Coping. “If somebody says the dates don’t answer the moral point, I will agree that they don’t, say that Palestinians lost a great deal, and then ask what they think is owed to the Jews expelled from Baghdad.”