Trading undeserving for deserving refugees: Afghan Jews and European displaced persons, 1945-1949
Two weeks into 1947, Vaad Leumi (Jewish National Council) president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi wrote to Mandate Palestine’s high commissioner, Alan Cunningham, after receiving news from Peshawar and Bombay regarding an allegedly large number of Afghan Jewish refugees in India. A delegation of Palestine’s Jewish citizens originally from Afghanistan had recently warned Ben-Zvi that between 300 and 400 Afghan Jews – clustered in temporary housing in India and cared for by the charity of others – faced immediate danger as they waited on immigration certificates for Palestine.
According to the delegation, the Indian government intended to deport the Jewish refugees back to Afghanistan within days, endangering their lives. The threatened removal of the refugees from India did not, in fact, take place ‘within days.’ Months later, well into the spring of 1947, as India’s political leaders and British colonial officials inched closer to what would ultimately be partition, Palestine’s Chief Sephardi Rabbi Ben-Zion Meir Ouziel petitioned the high commissioner for immigration certificates to resolve the situation of these ‘300 fugitives’ from Afghanistan. As Rabbi Ouziel wrote, these Afghan Jews originally left for India under government pressure, danger of death by starvation, and the threat of imprisonment.
In reality, Palestine officials had no certificates for these Afghan Jews and no intention of recognising them as refugees. The British-led administration refused to set a precedent for allowing any Jewish (and in particular, non-European Jewish) refugee or stateless person to expect permission to migrate freely into Palestine. British officials dangled the plight of Afghan Jews in India as a pawn in the face of Zionist bodies in Palestine. Their strategy worked: it forced religious and secular Zionist leaders to grapple with the circumstances of the late 1940s in order to decide whether European Jewish displaced persons and refugees in camps in Europe and Cyprus were more deserving of the limited number of immigration certificates for Palestine than Afghan Jewish refugees in India. The British government’s 1939 White Paper laid out restrictions on the number of Jews who could legally enter Palestine with immigration certificates over the next five years: it capped that number at 75,000. By the end of the Second World War in 1944, the British government allowed 1500 certificates to be given to Jews each month, with the expectation that the recipients would come from European camps.
According to the reports communicated to Rabbi Ouziel, the situation of the Afghan Jews in India in the late 1940s was dire: a single synagogue in Bombay accommodated many refugees. Despite this assistance from Bombay’s own Jewish community, petitions to Ouziel from Palestine’s Afghan Jews wrote that those in India ‘are pining away’ in misery, ‘threatened with death or slow decay, unless we enable them soon to reach Palestine.’ One letter received by Ouziel from a member of Bombay’s Jewish community warned that if the refugees returned to Afghanistan ‘no one of the 250 souls . . . will live to tell the tale of their miserable life in Afghanistan. Many among them would definitely commit suicide rather than go back to a living hell.’
The Afghan refugees elicited sympathy from secular and religious leaders alike, but the level of attention given to their plight paled in comparison to Jews in the European camps under the management of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). British colonial officials were not unfamiliar with the situation of central Asian Jewish communities. In the 1930s, amidst Stalinist purges in the Soviet republics including Uzbekistan, Jews faced arrest, exile, and loss of livelihoods and began to leave central Asia. In neighbouring Afghanistan, the indigenous Jewish population too suffered increased levels of persecution as the government carried out a policy of removal and resettlement of communities. Numerous Jews in central Asia fled south into Afghanistan and, along with Afghan Jews, traveled south towards India or west toward Iran. Some had no passports and others had their passports and citizenship revoked.
The Committee of Afghani Jewish Immigrants in Tel Aviv noted that ‘the position of these refugees is not better than those of Europe who are receiving Immigration Certificates.’ Palestine’s immigration department director proposed that the Afghan Jewish refugees could be granted permission to transit from India if the administration reduced the number of monthly immigration certificates earmarked for Jews in displaced persons camps or for those detained in Cyprus. The director pointedly noted that the admission of Afghan refugees in the place of such ‘deserving’ European Jews would likely become ‘a drag on the resources’ of the government.
In countering the requests of Ben-Zvi and Ouziel, the mandate administration insinuated that to take an opportunity away from Jewish Palestinian residents to apply for limited immigration certificates on behalf of their relatives in displaced persons camps, all for the sake of Afghan Jews who had not experienced the horrors of either the Holocaust or the European camps, would be a disastrous decision for the Jewish community. The administration’s offer transformed the issue of the Afghan Jews from a conflict between the Zionist leadership and the Palestine government, into an internal Zionist dilemma over whether the Cyprus or European camps deserved to have their certificate quotas re-allotted.
Ben-Zvi responded that the Vaad Leumi found it impossible to agree to a deduction from either quota. The Jewish Agency, meanwhile, asked for an allocation of certificates for Afghan Jews to come from the displaced camps quota. The Agency wrote that the plight of the Afghan Jews ‘may not be worse than the plight in which Jews in European camps find themselves, [but] there is serious risk that their state may be considerably worsened if sent back to Afghanistan.’ Ben-Zvi argued that the displaced camps must receive priority. As Yishuv leadership squabbled over which persons deserved the certificates, the India and Foreign Offices agreed upon the extreme unlikelihood that the Indian government would deport Bombay’s Afghan refugees.
The war that led to the creation of the Israeli state and the dispersal of over 750,000 Palestinian Arabs as refugees in 1948 meant that this issues of ‘deserving’ Jewish refugees was never resolved with the British. It remained a point of contention until the moment Britain left Palestine amid the fighting. In the year after declaring independence, the Israeli government received nearly all the thousands of Jewish detainees in Cyprus. Jews from camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy could also freely migrate to the new state. But it would not be until April of 1949 that the Afghan Jewish refugees began to leave India. The initial group consisted of seventy Jews who received visas for Israel.
While the plight of these Jews may be little-known, the late interwar and wartime history of refugees such as Afghanis, Kurds, Libyans, Armenians and others offers deeper perspectives on how communities and groups could (or could not) advocate for themselves as refugees in the years immediately after the end of the Second World War. That these Afghan and Central Asian refugees and stateless persons fell into the cracks between the new international refugee regimes and aid programmes underscores the multiple ways that individuals and communities claimed refugee protections at the end of the Second World War.
These Afghan Jewish refugees do not advocate for themselves within the very file in the Israel State Archives from which this official discourse of their plight comes. Their own voices are not heard in this archive; however, they are spoken for by a host of religious and secular organisations and individuals in the Yishuv and the Zionist movement. While their interlocutors referred to them as refugees, British officials in Palestine and in Whitehall saw them as stateless, transients, or potential Soviet sympathisers.
For its part, the British administration in Palestine recoiled from the possibility that stateless persons, refugees or not, could come under their remit. In the archival silence around this group’s own experiences in exile, we can ask whether the history to be gleaned from this file has less to do with the Afghan Jews’ own voices, and more with the way the events of the immediate post-Second World War led to a certain framing of ‘deserving’ refugees and victims.
The header image is from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee archives. It shows a detention camp in Cyprus from the 1940s.
Further reading:
Koplik, Sara. A Political and Economic History of the Jews of Afghanistan. London: Brill (2015).
Lewis, Mary Dewhurst. ‘The Strangeness of Foreigners: Policing Migration and Nation in Interwar Marseille.’ French Politics, Culture and Society 20 (2002).
O’Halpin, Eunan. ‘The Fate of Indigenous and Soviet Central Asian Jews in Afghanistan, 1933-1951.’ Holocaust and Genocide Studies 30 (2016).
