Egyptian-Jewish Emigrés in Australia By Racheline Barda

that highly embarrassing episode for the Israeli government, Laskier demonstrated that in spite of his empathy with the Zionist State he was not an apologist, and his coverage of the Lavon Affair was extensive and balanced. The last chapter of his book examined the deteriorating situation of Egyptian Jewry after the Suez War in 1956, highlighting the crucial role played by the Jewish Agency, the JDC, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the exodus and resettlement of the Jewish refugees from Egypt. One of the valuable aspects of Laskier’s work was his analysis of the role of the ICRC, which acted as the intermediary for the Jewish organisations, “as no Jewish organization—Zionist or non-Zionist—could function in Egypt itself”, and it was “the cooperation between the UHS and ICRC that made it possible to accomplish movements of population”.⁴⁵ The crucial part played by HIAS, with the complicity of the Spanish Embassy in Cairo, in securing the release from jail of nearly all the Jews imprisoned by Nasser in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War, was documented by Tad Szulc, an award-winning journalist and author, in his book The Secret Alliance, published in 1991.⁴⁶

The most incisive and provocative piece of scholarly work on the subject is undoubtedly Joel Beinin’s book, The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, published in 1998.⁴⁷ This book focused on two critical periods in the life of the Jewish community in Egypt: the period immediately preceding 1948 until the 1956 Suez War and its aftermath, and the period from 1957 with the community’s gradual deterioration until its nearly total disintegration after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The focus then shifted to the dispersion and re-establishment of Egyptian Jewish diasporas in Israel, France, and the United States. Beinin also discussed the crucial question of identity, either reconstructed or retrieved, based on what he called the contested memories of life in Egypt obtained through oral history. He sketched out the diverse ethnic, linguistic, ideological, and socioeconomic background of Egyptian Jews and their multiple identities. He pointed out the complex divisions among Sephardim, Ashkenazim, and Karaites, between the Egyptianised and the Europeanised, and between