Israel's advent altered outlook for Middle East Jews

(This is the first story in a special series running this week to mark Israel's 60th anniversary)

By Alistair Lyon, Special Correspondent

SIDON, Lebanon (Reuters) - A ruined cemetery lies by the sea in Sidon, the worn Hebrew inscriptions on the headstones a reminder of Lebanon's once-thriving Jewish minority, which has all but vanished since the state of Israel emerged 60 years ago.

The graveyard sits in wasteland across the road from an unstable mountain of garbage piled over rubble collected from buildings destroyed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

"The Israeli troops came and looked after the cemetery," recalled Mohammed al-Sarji, a Sidon environmentalist and film-maker. "After they left in 1985, it was neglected."

The 1948 war at Israel's creation, which forced some 700,000 Palestinians to flee their homeland, hardened Arab attitudes to deep-rooted Jewish minorities across the Middle East.

Hundreds of thousands of Jews were displaced. Some migrated voluntarily from mainly Muslim countries to the newly proclaimed Jewish homeland. Others were forced out by dispossession, discrimination or violence. Thousands stayed on.

Israeli statistics show more than 760,000 Middle Eastern Jews had moved to Israel by 2006, with more than 40 percent arriving in the first three years of the state's existence.

Over the last six decades of Middle East tension, Jewish communities have dwindled to insignificance in Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Yemen, but cling on in countries such as Tunisia, Morocco and non-Arab Iran and Turkey.