For over 55 years, the home my grandfather and great uncle built for our family in Baghdad has been occupied by the French Embassy. Not a dime of rent has been paid to the family. This talk shares our decades-long fight to wrestle compensation from the Macron government and/or compel the French to either purchase of vacate the property, restituting it back to us, its rightful owners. This case reflects a story much larger than our own. From 1948 onwards, almost 100,000 Jews fled Iran, leaving behind homes, businesses and entire lives. The hope is that our claim can help open a path towards recognition and restitution for them as well.
Philip Khazzam is a Montreal-born McGill University graduate with a distinguished background in international business. After joining the family’s nuts and dried fruits import company in 1982, he founded his own thriving enterprise in 2000 and recently completed the sale of a major stake to a leading European competitor. Today, he shares a compelling and deeply personal story: his family’s multi-decade legal quest for compensation from the French government for unpaid rent on what was their family home – the French Embassy compound in Baghdad – a property his family was forced to abandon over 55 years ago. Through his representation by prominent human rights attorney Jean-Pierre Mignard, his case raises important questions about justice and restitution for the thousands of Middle Eastern Jews displaced between 1948 and the present. His fight may illuminate a path forward for others who lost homes and livelihoods in one of history’s most significant diasporas.
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