First, maybe it's not politically correct to say so, but the United Nations has never been a friend of the Jews. The United Nations has made sure that every single time they have made a resolution about the Palestinians—over 190, I believe—there has never been one single, solitary resolution about us. Twice the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has recognized us as refugees, but never once has the UNHCR recognized us in any other way or given us the benefit of a resolution. When it comes to issues of refugees, people always look to the United Nations as being the expert. I think that has a lot to do with erasing, so to speak, our history from the face of the earth.
The other part, and again this is a personal opinion, is we never looked at ourselves as victims, and we felt very ashamed of our history. I can only speak from personal experience. When my family got out and they established themselves in Israel or in other places, they felt that what had happened to them was very shameful. They lost a lot of their dignity. They lost a lot of their pride. They lost their culture. They felt pain and they didn't want to revisit it.
In fact, surprisingly enough, in the same vein as you're talking about, my organization, Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, has just now started with another group, Sephardi Voices, a program where we are doing videos of witnesses, people such as myself from every Arab country. It took 40 years for us to speak out because it was so painful. That may not be the only reason, of course. But I know that at first my mother would not tell her story, and she has a much more dramatic story than I do. It wasn't until two years ago that I was able to convince my mother to sit in front of a video camera and tell her story.
I think part of it is psychological. It may not have been the right way to go about it. Did we do it the right way? No. Should we have spoken out at first? Yes. I sometimes was asked by Libyan Jews, “Aren't you afraid that Gadhafi might come after you?” After all, Gadhafi was alive while I was doing this work. I had received some threats, letters. Two of my Libyan Jewish friends who escaped to Rome were killed by Gadhafi. There was always this fear of speaking out. Unfortunately, I think that is also part of what happened.
I think because we were absorbed so successfully in our business ways, and because we have a life and we're not sitting in a refugee camp, the flame was not on all the time. After all, we are successful. I think Israel in many ways looked at it that way too: “Well, you're citizens of Israel now. We're proud of you. You're part of our accomplishment. You're no longer refugees.” Or at least they don't look at us that way, but I think that legally we are refugees and our narrative and our rights need to be in a place where they belong.