Are we witnessing a new vogue in restoring Jewish sites in the Middle East? The renovated Maimonides synagogue in Cairo will be officially inaugurated in March to much fanfare. The Maghen Avraham Synagogue in the heart of Beirut is being rebuilt. Across Morocco and Tunisia, holy sites and synagogues are getting a facelift.

What is going on?

Nobody can pretend that these restored sites are ever going to be working synagogues. Like Hitler's project for a Jewish Museum in Prague, they are monuments, perhaps not to an extinct race - most Jews escaped from these countries with their lives - but an extinct Jewish civilisation and way of life in Arab countries, predating Islam by a thousand years. Once spruced up, these synagogues will be nothing more than symbols. They will never again become the beating heart of a revived Jewish community. Fewer than 50 Jews live in the whole of Egypt; mostly old ladies married to Muslims or Christians. Ditto in Lebanon, the home of Hezbollah and Bourj al-Barajneh, where anyone openly identifying as a Jew risks life and limb.

There are two main reasons why Arab countries might suddenly show an interest in their Jewish heritage.

First, synagogues are good public relations for the regime in power. The unsuccessful candidate to head UNESCO, Egyptian culture minister Farouk Hosni, played on the restoration of the Maimonides synagogue to distract from his antisemitic slips-of-the-tongue about burning 'Israeli' books.

No matter if the country has no more Jews, a synagogue restoration project advertises 'Arab tolerance' and pays lip service to pluralism. "Look, we even have Jews here!" it proclaims. "Tolerance of Jewish cultural remains can be exchanged for Western goodwill and aid without necessitating any messy engagement with actual Israelis," as one journalist puts it.

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In much discourse about the Middle East, there is a widespread myth that Jews are interlopers from Europe and the US - white westerners who came to ‘colonise' and 'steal land' from the ‘native' Palestinian people to whom it rightfully belongs. This myth, drawing on Marxist terminology,  gained increasing legitimacy after 1967 when Israel annexed East Jerusalem and ‘conquered' the West Bank. The notion of 'occupation' and the use of the word ‘settlers' reinforce the concept of Israeli ‘colonisation' of  ‘Arab' land.

Aside from assuming that the Palestinians must be the true natives because they look authentically ‘brown', the colonialism myth supports another myth: Jews are not a people, deserving of the right to self-determination, but a religion. Thus anti-Zionists habitually talk about of US citizens of the Jewish faith, Germans of the Jewish faith and even Arabs of the Jewish faith.  At the time of the French Revolution, Clermont-Tonnerre said of the emancipation of Jews: "We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals." The Jewish community would somehow disappear, leaving only French citizens of Jewish religion or ancestry.

Lately, the notion that Jews are not one people but a motley collection of converts has been given a boost by Tel Aviv Professor Shlomo Sand, whose bestselling book, The Invention of the Jewish People, is now out in English. Sand's theories build on the work of Arthur Koestler, who popularised the idea that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the Turkic tribe, the Khazars. Both men undermine the legitimacy of Israel by inferring that Jews have no link to Palestine.  Genetic studies, however, discredit Koestler's theory: they find that Jews from East and West have more in common with each other, and are genetically closer to non-Jews of Middle eastern origin - the Kurds in particular - than they are to the non-Jewish populations they lived amongst.

Last June President Obama articulated another myth: Israel was created as a penance for the Holocaust in Europe. This myth obscures the truth that every Arab state is equally a creation of western colonialism. It also ignores the fact that the institutions of a Jewish state-in-waiting were established decades before Ben Gurion read out Israel's declaration of independence.

We often hear or read about Israel being populated by pork-munching non-Jewish Russians and settlers from Brooklyn. But these groups are marginal. You almost never hear that 40 percent of Israel's Jews trace their ancestry from Muslim and Arab lands. The vast majority of these Jews merely moved from one corner of the ‘Arab' world to that Middle Eastern coastal sliver known as Israel.

Until their expulsion 50 years ago, Jews had been settled in Iraq, for example, since the Babylonians exiled Jews from Jerusalem almost 3,000 years ago. In the early 20th century, Baghdad was the most Jewish city in the world, after Salonica and Jerusalem. The Jews can be said to have as legitimate a claim on Baghdad as Palestinians on Jerusalem.

The Arabs are relative newcomers to the region; the ‘Arab' world is a misnomer. By the time the Arabs had conquered land largely inhabited by Jews and Christians in the 7th century, the Jews had been settled there for 1,000 years. People in the West tend to apply a common misconception to all Jews,  borrowing the Christian notion that Jews have been punished to wander from land to land with no country to call their own. But not only have Jews always lived in Palestine,  there was continuity of Jewish settlement in the Middle East and North Africa for 2,000 years.   If only native inhabitants are titled to political rights, the Jews are as indigenous as any people living in the Middle East can be.  

That Jewish presence came to an end in the last 50 years. The Arab League determined to wreak revenge on defenceless Jewish citizens in Arab lands if the partition of Palestine went ahead. On the day when five Arab armies invaded the new Jewish state, the Arab League secretary, Azzam Pasha announced: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."

The Arab governments actually declared two wars in 1948. The military war against the fledgling Jewish state of Israel they lost, but they declared a second war, against a million Jewish citizens. This war they won easily, through a policy of intimidation, repression, persecution and sporadic outbreaks of violence. The result is that only 4,500 Jews are left in Arab countries.

Jews ‘stealing Arab land' is an offensive inversion of reality. Jews in 10 Arab countries were stripped of their rights and in most cases dispossessed of their property. The World Organisation of Jews from Arab Countries estimates that Jews in Arab countries lost many more billions of assets as the Palestinians, and four times as much land as the size of Israel itself. 

Seen in these terms, Arab antisemitism created Israel no less than the Holocaust. The Arabs owe the Jews big time. It's time the world stopped viewing the conflict through a distorted, Eurocentric lens.

On November 11 Jewcy published a piece by Isaac Binkovitz applauding a project to renovate the Maghen Avraham synagogue in Beirut. "Although it would be a miracle if the community were ever to regain even a mere half of its numbers from just a generation ago", he writes, "Lebanon gives us reason to hope. ... For me it is a story which speaks to the ability of Jewish culture to survive in many corners of the world."

Given that there are no more than 20 Jews in Lebanon, and these are too frightened to reveal themselves as Jews, even Binkovitz's cautious optimism seems misplaced. The Jewish community in Lebanon is finished. A profusion of armed Islamic groups targets Jews and Israelis simply for being Jews. Until there is peace between Arabs and Israelis, there is no guarantee that Jews will ever feel safe in Lebanon. It may take a very long time indeed before the few beleaguered Jews in Lebanon are emboldened to come out of the closet, let alone identify openly as Jews within the precincts of the Maghen Avraham synagogue.

While Binkovitz is ready to admit that Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews of Arab lands were nearly universally expelled, and large Jewish communities in Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Iraq, Yemen and Syria were violently uprooted - curiously, he idealises Lebanon.

Lebanese Jews remained largely undisturbed through these decades, despite Lebanon's 1958 civil unrest and American intervention. In fact, Lebanon's 24,000-member Jewish community in 1948 actually grew as it absorbed Jews fleeing other Arab countries. This growth continued until the start of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975.

The vast majority of Lebanese Jews - and the numbers seem to be closer to 10 - 14,000 than 24,000 - actually fled the repercussions of the Israel-Arab conflict, notably after the Six Day War in 1967, and not after the civil war of 1975. A revisionist history by Kirsten E Schulze, the author of Jews of Lebanon, the only book about Lebanon's Jews to be published in English in the last few years, tries to present all Lebanese, whatever their religion, as victims of the 1975 civil war. But while all sects were depleted through war and exodus, Schulze does not explain why the Jewish community was the only one to be wiped out.

One of the prime movers behind the project to rebuild Maghen Avraham synagogue is a Shi'a Muslim named Aaron-Micael Beydoun. Beydoun started a website called the Jews of Lebanon. Visitors to the site were under the misleading impression that it was by and for Jews of Lebanon, whereas it represented only the thoughts of Beydoun himself. In fact Lebanese Jews in the diaspora have given Beydoun and his website a wide berth.

Beydoun has a political agenda. His aim to exploit the Jews to project the illusion that the multi-confessional system still exists. Yet thousands of Lebanese have left Lebanon, southern Lebanon is a stronghold of Hezbollah, and the influx of Palestinian Arab refugees in 1970 and the 1975 civil war has upset its delicate political and population balance between Maronite and Greek Orthodox Christians, Shi'a Muslim, Sunni and Druze.

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