Danger to Jews in Arab Lands

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“The world, it seems, does not learn from past mistakes. When Hitler came to power and publicly declared his determination to liquidate Jewry, his announcement was met with ominous silence by the statesmen of the world. Germany was a great power and whose business was it to interfere in the internal affairs of that country?

National sovereignty was a sacred cow whose sanctity must not be defiled even by a whisper. It was only after the democracies felt the touch of Hitler’s sword that their statesmen awakened to the dangers implicit in Nazi thinking. It was only then that our propaganda apparatus was focused on the threat Nazi ideology held to world civilization.

Only a few years have passed since the defeat of Germany, and our democracies again are displaying that complacency which made the rise of nazidom and Hitlerism possible. And again the core of the trouble is the so-called ‘non-interference-in-foreign-affairs’ principle. A case in point is what is happening to the Jews in the Moslem countries.

Ever since the Arab League declared war against Israel in defiance of a United Nations decision, the Jews in those countries have been subjected to pogroms, horrors, blackmail, threats of extermination and confiscation of property in the good old Nazi style.

Only this week it was reported that several rulers of the Arab countries are planning to confiscate Jewish property as indemnity for Arab losses in the war, throw Jews into camps and give their homes to Arab war exiles from Israel.

The fact that those Jews, as citizens, are entitled to equal protection of the laws is conveniently dismissed, since the action is based on the Nazi concept that Jews have no rights. We have learned much about the horrible word ‘genocide’ during the U. N. debate on that subject.

But what is happening to the Jews in the Arab states today is ‘genocide,’ albeit on a smaller scale than in Germany. And again the so-called moral forces in the world are tied by the convenient concept of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states. The situation of the Jews in the Arab countries is a precarious one, a dangerous one.

They are faced with physical and economic starvation. They can be saved only if the United Nations acts its role as the moral conscience of the world.”

Context added by this archive

The earliest use of the word in this archive, in 1948, and it is used of Jews in Arab countries — written while the U.N. debate on the Genocide Convention was still going on, and citing that debate.

Cite this clipping

"Danger to Jews in Arab Lands," Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, 6 August 1948, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1948-042. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1948-042