What Britain owe the Jewish People

 

by Daniel Winston

In my previous article in these pages, I argued that Britain broke its legal obligations to the Jewish people under the Mandate at the very moment those obligations meant the difference between life and death, and that it owes a moral and financial debt it has never acknowledged. 

Here is the full accounting. It is a debt no one has ever been asked to pay, and Britain is not the only debtor.

Counting only documented deaths, documented confiscations and formulas that governments themselves have accepted, Britain, seven Arab states and Iran owe the Jewish people and the State of Israel roughly $738 billion.

 A fuller accounting of Britain's betrayal runs into the trillions. 

Against this stands the Palestinian Arab claim of $400 billion and more for what Arabs left behind in 1948. That number rests on a genocidal war of annihilation the Arabs launched, on an exodus of local Arabs meant to clear the field for it, and on a bill for hurt feelings.

For 75 years the world has read only one set of books, and mostly misread it. It is time to open all of them.

I use three yardsticks, none of them my own invention. I price lives at the value of a statistical life that the United States Department of Transportation applies in its own regulatory work, currently $14.2 million.

 I price the absorption of refugees by the formula Israel itself presented to the occupying powers in 1951, when it sought reparations from Germany: $3,000 per refugee. That is about $37,200 in today's money, or roughly $341,000 once compounded at a modest 3 percent real interest over 75 years. For property, I rely on the estimate Israel's government reached in 2019 with an international accounting firm: about $250 billion across seven Arab states and Iran, including $35 billion for Tunisia and $15 billion for Libya. 

Those two figures imply $330,000 to $395,000 per Jewish resident, so wherever no specific number was released, I apply a more conservative $300,000 per person.

Britain comes first, because Britain was the trustee, and the White Paper was only the most notorious of the many moral outrages it committed as custodian of Mandatory Palestine.

-Some 1,370 Jews died on refugee voyages that Britain blocked or diverted, among them the Struma, the Salvador and the Patria. That comes to $19.5 billion.

-Britain held 53,510 Holocaust survivors behind barbed wire on Cyprus, where some 400 died. 

Counting only those deaths adds about $5.7 billion. The true cost of the camps was far greater, and I leave it unpriced here. 

People who had just survived the Nazi camps lost months and years behind British wire. Britain also kept the last 10,200 internees, mostly men of fighting age, locked up until early 1949, denying the newborn Jewish state soldiers it desperately needed while it fought for its life.

-Roughly 600 Jews were killed in Mandatory Palestine between 1920 and 1939. More than 150 were killed in Tripoli in 1945 and 1948 while Britain governed Libya, and 82 in Aden in 1947, many of them shot by the very Levies the British governor sent in to restore order. That adds about $11.8 billion. Apply Israel's 1951 formula to the half million survivors Britain tried to keep out, and the bill grows by $171 billion.

Britain's documented floor is about $208 billion.

That is only the floor. Price the Jews who could have reached safety between 1939 and 1945 had Britain honored Article 6 of the Mandate, anywhere from 250,000 to one million lives. Then add the 77 percent of the Mandate handed to Emir Abdullah, and the British-officered Arab Legion that shelled Jerusalem in 1948. The full bill runs from $3.8 trillion to $15 trillion. Britain cannot plead poverty or ignorance, only that no one has yet presented the invoice.

The Arab states, and later Iran drove out their Jews and kept what they left behind.

Iraq's Jewish community was 2,600 years old. In 1941 it endured the Farhud, in which mobs murdered some 180 Jews while British troops waited outside Baghdad. In 1950, Baghdad let Jews leave only if they surrendered their citizenship, and in 1951 it froze the assets of everyone who had registered to go, so that some 120,000 people left with almost nothing. In 1969, the Ba'athist regime hanged nine Jews before cheering crowds. For 135,000 Jews, Iraq owes about $89 billion.

Egypt sequestered Jewish property in 1948, the year bombs in Cairo's Jewish quarters killed 70 Jews. After Suez in 1956, it expelled thousands more and forced many to sign their property over to the state on the way out. For 75,000 Jews, Egypt owes about $49 billion. In Libya, mobs killed 18 Jews in 1967, and in 1970 Gaddafi seized every remaining Jewish asset and cancelled every debt owed to a Jew. Libya owes about $28 billion.

Syria burned the synagogues of Aleppo in 1947 and froze Jewish bank accounts. In 1949, grenades thrown into the Menarsha synagogue in Damascus killed 12 Jews, eight of them children, and the regime then held the remnant as hostages for four decades. For 30,000 Jews, Syria owes about $19 billion. Yemen enforced the Orphans' Decree, seizing Jewish orphans for forced conversion, and the 50,000 Jews airlifted out in Operation Magic Carpet left behind the property of one of the most ancient Jewish communities on earth. Yemen owes about $35 billion.

Morocco never formally expelled its Jews, and its present king deserves credit for honoring their heritage. But in 1948, rioters in Oujda and Jerada murdered 44 Jews. Independent Morocco then made emigration to Israel illegal, and in 1961 the Egoz sank while smuggling Jews out under that ban, drowning 44 people, half of them children. Only then did King Hassan II let the Jews go, and only for a fee of up to $250 a head. A government that charges ransom for its citizens' freedom cannot claim they left freely. For 265,000 Jews, Morocco owes about $171 billion.

Tunisia never issued an expulsion order either. Instead, it expropriated the old Jewish cemetery of Tunis, abolished the Jewish Community Council, bulldozed the Jewish quarter and nationalized Jewish firms. In 1967, a mob sacked and burned the Great Synagogue of Tunis. President Bourguiba apologized, but an apology resettled no one. A community of 105,000 is today about a thousand, and Tunisia owes about $71 billion.

Iran is not Arab, but it belongs here. In May 1979, after a sham trial lasting minutes, the new regime executed Habib Elghanian, the leader of Iran's 80,000 Jews, and confiscated his family's property. By one count, it has since executed 11 more Jews and murdered 14. Most of the community fled, leaving behind property Israel's government valued at $31.3 billion. Iran owes about $59 billion.

Together, these eight states owe about $522 billion. My country-by-country property figures total about $249 billion, almost exactly the government's own $250 billion. With Britain's floor added, the documented total is roughly $730 billion.

Now set that ledger beside the one the world prefers to read. The Palestinian Arab claim of $400 billion and more collapses on contact with its causes, its arithmetic and its morality.

Start with the causes, and dispense with the fiction that the Arabs who left Palestine (a geographic term) in 1948 were passive victims. The war they stepped aside for was not a border dispute. In October 1947, Arab League secretary-general Abdul Rahman Azzam told the Egyptian newspaper Akhbar al-Yom that a war over a Jewish state would be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre, to be remembered alongside the Mongol massacres and the Crusades. The acting chairman of the Arab Higher Committee promised that Palestine would be consumed in fire and blood if the Jews received any part of it.

The leader of the Palestinian Arab national movement, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, had spent the Second World War in Berlin as Hitler's guest, recruiting Muslims for the Waffen-SS and urging listeners over Nazi radio to kill Jews wherever they found them. Barely three years after the gas chambers went cold, the Jews of Palestine were told plainly what awaited them, by men who had watched it done in Europe and cheered it on.

Against that backdrop, leaving was not innocence. It was an active role of collusion. Five Arab armies invaded to carry out that threat, and Arab leaders asked the Arab population to clear the field so the armies could fight unencumbered and then bring them home in triumph. Khalid al-Azm, Syria's prime minister in 1948, later conceded in his memoirs that the Arab governments had called on them to leave, and that "we brought destruction upon a million Arab refugees." Mahmoud Abbas wrote in 1976 that the Arab armies had "forced them to emigrate," and recalled in 2018 that they were promised a return within a week.

A return to what? To a country whose Jews, by the invaders' own declared aim, would no longer be there to object. Every Jewish home, field, shop and orchard would be waiting for the victors. Those who stepped aside did not simply escape a war. They cleared the ground for a promised massacre and expected to inherit its plunder. That is not victimhood. It is collusion, and it was the only kind a civilian population without an army of its own could offer.

Many did more than step aside. Palestinian Arab irregulars under Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini besieged the Jews of Jerusalem and tried to starve them out, and local militias fought alongside the Arab Liberation Army across the Galilee. In Haifa, Britain's last High Commissioner reported that evacuation was being urged from higher Arab quarters, while the city's Jewish leaders pleaded with their Arab neighbors to stay.

Israel's Declaration of Independence invited its Arab inhabitants to remain as full and equal citizens. That offer was refused in favor of the invaders' promise. There were expulsions, as in every war, but a handful of exceptions cannot turn the would-be heirs of a genocide into its victims. No court on earth lets a man clear the way for an armed robbery, walk away empty-handed because the robbery failed, and then sue the intended victim for his trouble and loss of anticpated profit.

Then there is the arithmetic, where the Arabs’ poetic claim moves from dishonest to absurd. The only independent valuation ever made, by the United Nations Conciliation Commission in the early 1950s, put abandoned Arab property at about £120 million, roughly $4 to $5 billion today. Even the Palestinian Arab economist Atif Kubursi, whose work underlies the largest claims, put material losses at about $22.5 billion in 2000 prices. His total reached $327 billion only after he added compensation for "psychological damage and pain," about $290 billion of it, or nearly nine-tenths of the figure. The bulk of the Palestinian claim, in other words, is not for houses or land at all. It is an invoice for the disappointment of having bet on a massacre that never came.

Israel released the great majority of blocked Arab bank accounts after 1948, while the Arab states returned almost nothing.

The deepest difference is moral. The Jews of Baghdad, Cairo, Tripoli, Casablanca and Tehran threatened no one. They cleared no field for an army sworn to exterminate their neighbors and waited to inherit no one's plunder. They were stripped of citizenship, robbed by statute, and driven out by governments against which they had never taken up arms. Israel took them in, while the Arab states kept the Palestinian Arabs in camps for three generations as just another weapon in their glandularly anti-semitic war.

If 1948 produced a population exchange, Israel completed it and the Arab world refused to, and the Jewish side of the books is many times larger.

None of this means Baghdad or Damascus will wire money next week. But Israeli law already requires that compensation for Jewish refugees from Arab lands and Iran be part of any peace agreement, and that law should become policy rather than decoration. Every time a diplomat raises Palestinian Arab property claims, this ledger belongs on the table beside it. Egypt and Morocco, both at peace with Israel, can lead with formal acknowledgment. Britain, which has no excuse of poverty, can begin by paying.

Israel took in the refugees the Arab states and Iran created and the survivors Britain tried to keep out, rebuilt their lives at its own expense, and never sent anyone the bill. The Palestinian Arab leadership has spent 75 years billing the world for a war it chose and a massacre it was promised. The books are now open, and they show who owes whom. It is time for the debtors to pay.