The newspaper "Israel Today" reported that the Israeli National Library began publishing the oral history of the "Sephardic Voices Initiative", which is the first digital collection that documents the life stories of Jews who were living in Arab countries and Iran, in the context of the Israeli government’s endeavor to implement what it calls the “plan” Nationalism for the Restitution of Jewish Property "which was approved by Tel Aviv in 2017.
And the Israeli newspaper itself published last month exclusive details from a secret Israeli government report that seeks to assess the size of property left by Jews who immigrated from Iran and several Arab countries, with the aim of asking the authorities in those countries to pay compensation for these properties. The classified government report put the value of those properties at $ 150 billion.
The oral history that the Israeli National Library began publishing includes a digital archive that includes video clips and audio of interviews with families of Sephardic Jews (Eastern Jews) who lived in Arab and Islamic countries, before the Zionist movement in the 1950s to recruit 850 thousand Jews after the establishment of Israel.
Sephardic is a Jewish group hailing from Spain and Portugal, expelled from Spain in the middle of the fifteenth century after the fall of Islamic rule in Andalusia, and then headed towards the areas of the Ottoman Empire, before it ended up in Israel during the Jewish immigration that came to it after its establishment in 1948.
Today, the term Sephardic refers to Jews who do not belong to a Western Ashkenazi origin in Israeli society. This group includes the Jews of the Arab East and the Muslim world who immigrated to and occupied occupied Palestine.
Archive contents
"Israel Today" quotes the international director of the "Voices of Sephardic Jews" initiative, Henry Green, as saying that he is grateful for the adoption of the collection of interviews, documents and photos on the life of the Sephardic Jews while living in Arab and Islamic countries.
Green - a professor at the University of Miami-American - added that so far 400 of the 2000 interviews have been done, and the project is aspiring to be completed.
The Israeli narrative - which occupies the Palestinian lands and the lands of other Arab countries - is based on the fact that the Jews who "expelled" or fled from Arab countries and Iran in the late 1940's and 1950's left property worth billions of dollars. The Israeli government's plan is to seek compensation from these countries for these "lost property".
This plan allocated an initial budget of four million dollars, and entrusted the Minister of Social Equality, Gila Gamliel, to oversee the plan and follow up procedures with Jewish communities from the Arab world and with the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to document pictures of contracts and documents related to property belonging to Jews.
Beginnings of work
Work on this project began in 2002, and work on it stopped before it was resumed by Minister Gamliel in 2017, and coordinated with the Israeli National Security Council, which established an international network tasked with assessing property left by Jews in Arab countries and Iran.
It is not known until the methodological time on which the occupation authorities relied on the evaluation of these properties, but the newspaper "Israel Today" mentioned - according to the secret report - that the value of the property of Sephardic Jews who migrated from Iran is estimated at 31.3 billion dollars, and the value of the property of those who migrated from Libya accounted for 6.7 billion, while the property of Jewish immigrants from Yemen was estimated at 2.6 billion, and the property of Jewish immigrants from Syria at 1.4 billion.
We have not heard any official Arab comment on the insolence of Zionist demands to pay compensation of 150 billion dollars to the property of Jews in Arab countries‼ ️ |
In 2010, the Israeli government issued a law stipulating that any peace agreement with the Arab states should include a provision to compensate the Jews for what they "lost" in those countries. Tel Aviv promotes that a "historic mistake" must be corrected by ensuring that all refugees in the Middle East region, including "Jewish refugees", are guaranteed equal treatment in accordance with the requirements of international law.
The occupation authorities' account adds that between 1948 and 1967, more than 850,000 Jews were expelled or fled from Iran and several Arab countries, for 600,000 of whom meant Israel, and the rest went to stability in the United States and Europe. Since 2014, Israel has celebrated on November 30 of every year what it calls the day of immigration and expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and Iran.