The French embassy in Baghdad is housed in what was once a grand, white stucco building, with spacious grounds, date palms, fountains, enough bedrooms to sleep 12 and a swimming pool. That building has become a symbol of injustice as a descendant of the building’s original Jewish owners, brothers Ezra and Khedouri Lawee, is suing for millions in unpaid rent.
However, Philip Khazzam, a grandson of Ezra Lawee, is not suing Iraq; He is suing France.
The Lawees were among the 850,000 Jews forced to flee Arab countries and dispossessed of their homes and properties. The great majority of Iraq’s 150,000 Jews were airlifted to Israel in 1950-1951. They forfeited their citizenship in exchange for the right to leave the country after a vicious wartime pogrom and a period of persecution. Jewish property and assets were frozen.
In the 1950s, the Lawee family moved to Montreal and hired a caretaker to look after the now-vacant house in Baghdad. The family retained their title. In 1964, they found a tenant: France was looking for a property for its new embassy. Under the lease, a nominal rent was to be paid in Iraqi dinars, and another, more substantial sum, was to be paid in francs. It was a modicum of financial compensation for the Lawees’ effective expulsion from Iraq.
But after the 1967 Six-Day War, the Ba’ath party came to power in Iraq and demanded that France pay rent directly to the Iraqi treasury. The building had been sequestered.
When France reopened its Baghdad embassy in 2004, the Lawee descendants renewed interest in pursuing their case. Because of the shortage of land in Baghdad, they discovered that the property could be worth millions.
Philip Khazzam told The Globe and Mail: “All of a sudden, something hit me, and I realized this is not just about a property. … It’s not just the house, it’s human rights. And France has trampled all over human rights. And just the unfairness of the whole situation led me to take action.”
In 2021, he and several of his cousins hired an attorney, Jean-Pierre Mignard. Since almost no Jewish refugee has ever been compensated for stolen Jewish property from Arab governments, suing a “friendly, democratic country” like France may be the family’s best chance.
The Lawee case has a precedent: The Bigio family, Jewish refugees from Egypt who also settled in Montreal, are engaged in a long-running, still inconclusive, battle for justice against the giant multinational corporation Coca-Cola, which had taken over their expropriated bottling plant and assets in Egypt.
Mignard wrote a letter in the winter of 2024, fulminating against the French Foreign Minister, saying, “France has occupied a stolen Jewish property for 50 years in full knowledge of the fact and without ever having undertaken any moral or economic redress. This seems to me a scandal that we would do well to put an end to.”
Although Mignard initially received a sympathetic hearing, the French government’s response was ultimately to stonewall. Khazzam hoped that “France, the birthplace of the rights of man, would recognize an unjust situation and come to a settlement, do something decent.”
He is pressing France for $33 million in back rent and damages for its use of the building.
“Such a case has rarely, if ever, been resolved through the courts,” says Stanley Urman, executive vice president of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, which advocates for the rights of Jewish refugees. A recent report by his organization found that some $34 billion of assets, at today’s prices, were seized from Iraqi Jews alone.
“Philip Khazzam has a very unusual story, and it is to his credit that he’s taken it this far, despite many obstacles,” Urman said. “I think it would be an important precedent for the right of Jews to compensation and hopefully establish a precedent for similar cases to be adjudicated in the future.”
This case is a chance for France to “do the decent thing.” It would be the height of hypocrisy if France remained complicit in “trampling over the human rights” of almost a million Jews forced out of Arab countries.