Are Jews a Minority in Iraq?

It's hard to believe that this has to be debated...

One month before the deadline for the creation of the new Iraqi constitution, a debate on whether to include Jews as an official minority has broken out in the National Assembly, members of the assembly have told The Jerusalem Post.

"There have been suggestions that when it comes to minority rights, we specify who are the minorities," Saad Jawad Qindeel, a Shi'ite member said in a phone call from Baghdad. "They [the Iraqi Jews] should not be included as a minority because their number is too small."

Qindeel, who is also the head of the political bureau of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq – one of the country's most popular Shi'ite groups – said this view has official endorsement.

"According to the UN international convention defining minorities, there must be a minimum number," said Qindeel. "The Jews are fewer than that number. I think there are only 60."

There are in fact fewer than 20 Jews remaining in Iraq, all of them in Baghdad.

The granting of minority status to Jews would afford them a measure of state protection, ensure they were represented in government and mean that Jewish holy days were recognized.

Dr. Joshua Castellino, a lecturer at the Irish Center for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland in Galway, told the Post that international human rights law does not specify a minimum number for a group to be considered a minority, only that it should number fewer than the majority.

"There can't be a minimum number," said Castellino. "The idea is if the group is small and the reason for this is either genocide or through policies of persecution that led them to flee abroad, then it would not be appropriate for the state to say there are too few to warrant minority status."

In fact it is their small number that warrants Jews minority status, said Castellino, who is working on his second book about minorities.

"In general, the Iraqi Jews' low number is more of a reason to extend them minority status as basic recognition of their existence in Iraq and as a means of further protection," he said.

Yet while only a few bachelors and old people remain in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Jews of Iraqi descent live abroad. Many of them even voted in Iraq's National Assembly elections in January, although they have not seen their native country for decades.