The brothers lived together with their families in the opulent property, complete with date palms and fountains, until they were forced to flee in 1951 as the Iraqi government began nationalising Jewish property and stripping Jews of their citizenship.
They emigrated to Montreal, where Philip Khazzam, Ezra’s grandson, is based today.
Speaking to the Canadian Jewish News earlier this year, Khazzam said of his grandfather’s and great-uncle’s life before they left Iraq: "They had a nice life there. There was a country club right next to the house where they had tennis courts, and my mother used to go and walk over with her racket and go and play at the country club.”
France first installed its Baghdad embassy in Beit Lawree in 1964, according to the brothers, when the family still maintained some control of the property, thanks to a former employee who served as a caretaker there. For 10 years, France secretly paid rent to the family, it is understood, even when Saddam Hussein came to power in 1968, when Paris also began paying rent to his regime.
The payments to the Lawree family stopped abruptly in 1974, according to Ezra, whose brother died in 1967.
Ezra, who died in 1987, claimed that, by way of explanation, the French would only say that the Iraqis had sequestered the building.
In an interview with Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper published this week, Khazzam, 65, explained that he began looking into what the property in Bagdhad was worth on a whim, and was shocked to learn that, despite decades of unrest, it was likely to be millions.
The story of how the home came to be seized continued to whirl away in the back of Khazzam’s mind until, he said: “Something hit me, and I realised 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, Khazzam and two of his cousins hired a lawyer, Jean-Pierre Mignard, who was immediately struck by his country’s “inexplicable” conduct in the matter.
Mignard said: “Where I’m scandalised is that the Lawees were dispossessed of their property because of their religion, because they are Jewish. France never should have accepted that.”
In his earlier interview with the Canadian Jewish News, Khazzam said: “I had a father who was extremely principled to a fault, sometimes to his detriment. He always wanted to do himself the right thing, and he appreciated when people did the right thing. And I saw such an injustice, and I felt it’s just not right.”
The French government has allegedly ignored the family's requests for reparations (Photo: Getty)Getty Images
The government’s approach to Khazzam and Mignard appears to have been evasive after the lawyer appealed to senior figures in the French foreign service to offer “moral and economic redress”
Consequently, after years of apparent stonewalling, they launched a lawsuit demanding $22m (£16.4m) in back rent and $11m (£8.2m) in damages. They have now offered to enter into mediation as a way of resolving the impasse; the government had until May 15 to respond and did not. The tribunal will now set a date for a hearing.
Acknowledging that some might argue that the situation his family faced could be transplanted on to Israel, the birth of which left hundreds of thousands of people displaced from their homes, Khazzam said: “This is a case of personal property that was stolen from us, a little bit like Nazi art. And if we are going to talk about the Palestinian issue, I’m only saying that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s apples and oranges. This is personal property. It’s a difficult issue, of course … There’s also an issue of unjust enrichment.”
A spokesperson for the French Ministry of European and Foreign Affairs declined to comment on an active judicial case.
