The Jews of Libya: Coexistence, Persecution, Resettlement, Second Revised Edition by Maurice Roumani

Author:Maurice Roumani [Roumani, Maurice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789761382
Google: 7mhUzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
Published: 2021-06-07T23:27:25.128115+00:00

The Pains of Displacement

The story of the absorption of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East during the first years of the state is not a pleasant one. One might even say that it sheds a bad light on the welcome that the European Jews who established the new State of Israel gave their brethren from North Africa. The endless debate in the Jewish Agency over the immigration and absorption of these Jews leaves little doubt how members of the Jewish Agency executive used discriminatory tactics in absorbing new arrivals simply by identifying them by country of origin and ethnic composition. One of these debates involved the allocation of housing for different immigrant groups. Yitzhak Rafael, now head of the Absorption Department, was reported as saying: “The Polish Jews have been living well. For them, the camps are much harder than for the Yemenites, for whom the conditions of the camp mean liberation. So I see good reason for giving the Polish Jews priority . . . These (Polish Jews) are not like the immigrants from Yemen, whose names you can hardly figure out.”6 Another member of the executive, Y. Braginsky, added: “There is a possibility that we may obtain one more camp, the one in Athlit, which is now occupied by Yemenites. We’ll take them out, shove them wherever we can, and then we’ll have a camp for three to four thousand people . . . We’ll take those houses which we have already allocated to the North Africans and the Yemenites and give them to the Poles.”7 I. Greenbaum, in the same debate, went even further: “Instead of putting the Polish Jews in this situation, it would be best to do it with the Jews of Turkey and Libya [author’s emphasis]. That won’t be hard for them . . . You should know that these people [from Poland] are coming from Upper Slesia, where each family had a 3 to 4-room apartment, German apartments, German furniture, all the comforts of a German city . . . There are doctors among them . . . Will you put a doctor into a camp like Bet Lid, or Pardes Hannah how do you think he will feel, what will he think.”8

Not all immigrants underwent the same process of absorption and hence the consequences of their absorption over the years differed as well. By the same token, the motivation of each immigration wave differed from one community to another. This can be said of groups from the Moroccans, the Tunisians and the Iraqis to the Persians, the Libyans and the Egyptians.9 Nonetheless, as a group they all shared some objective characteristics that distinguished them from their European counterparts who came before and after the state was established.

Most of the immigrants from Islamic countries who arrived in the early fifties had a lower level of education and were mainly blue-collar workers with large families. What set these two main groups apart were their aspirations, hopes and their identities. The European group

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