Don’t Allow Arab States to Inherit the Property of Expelled Jews

When Jews were driven from the Arab lands, they left synagogues, documents, religious objects, and much else behind them. Now, writes Lyn Julius, the governments of those countries are asserting legal claim to these items:

Synagogues can’t be moved and clearly it is better for Arab states to preserve them as memorials to an extinct community than not at all. However, these states are also declaring Torah scrolls, communal archives, and books to be part of their cultural heritage. For instance, the Egyptian government claims that all Torah scrolls and Jewish archives, libraries, communal registers, and any movable property over 100 years old are “Egyptian antiquities.” However, Jews consider Torah scrolls their exclusive property. . . . Fleeing Jews have often prioritized scrolls and books over their personal possessions.

In Egypt, registers of births, marriages, and deaths of Jews from Alexandria and Cairo dating back to the middle of the 19th century were once kept in the two main synagogues in each city. But in 2016, government officials took away the registers to be stored in the Egyptian National Archives. Egyptian Jews living abroad cannot even obtain photocopies of certificates, often the only formal Jewish identification they have to prove lineage or identity for burial or marriage. Repeated efforts since 2005 to intercede with the Egyptian authorities have come to nothing.

The Egyptian case is symptomatic of a larger problem. Since 2004, the United States has been bound by law to impose import restrictions on archaeological and ethnological material that constitutes a country’s cultural heritage and has signed memoranda of understanding (MOUs) to this effect with Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and Libya.

It is understandable that the international community should wish to prevent the looting and smuggling of ancient artifacts and their sale on the international art market. That is how Islamic State financed much of its conquest of northern Iraq and Syria. But there is a distinction between theft for financial gain and the legitimate salvage of Torah scrolls or [religious] books [by Jews who left them behind while fleeing persecution].

Read more at JNS

More about: Egypt, International Law, Jews in Arab lands, Middle East, U.S. Foreign policy

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF