About a silent exile

Abstract

The author was born and raised in an Arab country that he left forever after a bloody pogrom, the third in the history of his family in just over twenty years. Over the course of two decades, between fifties and sixties, hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced to abandon their homes and possessions in every part of the Arab and Islamic world. The Jewish minorities had not participated in the war of destruction waged by the armies of the Arab League against the nascent State of Israel and were of no danger to anyone. They were in fact hostages. Their escape was a silent one, ignored by the international press. When the Jews disappeared from the Arab world, it was the turn of the remains of the ancient civilizations that had populated the Near East before the Arab invasions. Only recently has the enormous symbolic value for a more balanced vision of the conflict begun to be understood. Remembering the suffering of Jews in the Arab countries is a healthy reminder of the complexity of the problems and of reality. If one accepts that they too are an element of the complex and multi-faceted Middle Eastern mosaic, things appear in a different light.