Eretz Israel is our unforgettable historic homeland...The Jews who will it shall achieve their State...And whatever we attempt there for our own benefit will redound mightily and beneficially to the good of all mankind.(Theodor Herzl, DerJudenstaat, 1896)
We offer peace and amity to all the neighbouring states and their peoples, and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all. The State of Israel is ready to contribute its full share to the peaceful progress and development of the Middle East.(From Proclamation of the State of Israel, 5 Iyar 5708; 14 May 1948) With a liberal democratic political system operating under the rule of law, a flourishing market economy producing technological innovation to the benefit of the wider world, and a population as educated and cultured as anywhere in Europe or North America, Israel is a normal Western country with a right to be treated as such in the community of nations.... For the global jihad, Israel may be the first objective. But it will not be the last.(Friends of Israel Initiative)
Showing posts with label Jewish Refugees from Arab lands. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jewish Refugees from Arab lands. Show all posts
“How do you relinquish control when there’s a virulent Jihadist ideology
and many Muslim leaders outside the region who say that not only
shouldn’t Israel be recognized, but it shouldn’t be there at all?”
That question regarding Israel's presence in the Disputed Territories, came out of the mouth of a British Muslim physician of Pakistani heritage, Dr Qanta Ahmed, who visited Israel in May.
Observes an article by Evelyn Gordon in Commentary magazine picking up on the interview Dr Ahmed gave to Ha'aretz:
'[Although] Ahmed, whose parents became refugees when the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan sent 10 to 12 million people fleeing in both directions (the Ahmeds fled to Pakistan) .... understands how wrenching refugeehood can be, she’s seen her own parents create new lives–and “I also see how people came to Israel, some of them barely surviving the Holocaust, to a land where they were not used to the climate and where they had no family, and yet somehow managed to build this extraordinary, complicated nation.”
While she never says it explicitly, the implication is clear: The Palestinians’ current plight is due less to Israel’s creation than to their own insistence on living in the past, and Arab countries’ insistence on keeping them there. Instead of building new lives for themselves as other refugees have done, they clung to the dream of eradicating Israel and “returning” to its territory–a dream that has precluded peace for 65 years now, and shows no sign of dying. In 2011, for instance, the PLO’s ambassador to Lebanon asserted that a Palestinian state would still deny citizenship to all Palestinian refugees, even those already living there, in order to preserve the demand for their “return” to Israel.
Moreover ... this issue shows Israel to be “a just and moral actor,” in sharp contrast to Arab states: While it absorbed the Jewish refugees and allowed them to build new lives, Arab states refused to absorb Palestinians: They denied them citizenship and kept them in squalid camps to preserve them as a weapon against Israel.
Finally, it sheds new light even on “the occupation.” Ahmed, for instance, considers it unjustified, but admitted there’s no obvious alternative: “How do you relinquish control when there’s a virulent Jihadist ideology and many Muslin leaders outside the region who say that not only shouldn’t Israel be recognized, but it shouldn’t be there at all?” That’s a problem too few Westerners are willing to acknowledge. Yet the refugee issue highlights this ongoing desire to eradicate Israel....'
In the first, Benny Morris begins his talk with a discussion of the controversy regarding refugee numbers and the way the Palestinian Arab refugee issue has escalated over time.
In the second (which is especially worth looking at) he describes the four stages in the genesis of the Palestininian Arab refugee problem. It will be seen that voluntary flight by the Arabs rather than deliberate expulsion by the Jews was the dominant factor in the creation of the problem. He also shows that the actions of the Israelis towards the Palestinian Arabs were motivated by the fact that the Arab nations wished to destroy the State of Israel and simply wouldn't compromise.
In the third he examines the absence of a coherent policy on the part of the Arab leadership regarding evacuation. He puts into context the atrocities that occurred on both sides. And he discusses the reasons for the perpetuation of the refugee problem, a discussion that continues into the fourth video.
"Justice for Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim countries has at long last become official Israeli government policy," writes Michelle Huberman, Creative Director of Harif, the the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa.
'It has taken more than sixty years, but here at Harif ... we are celebrating this momentous event.
No amount of grassroots campaigning could work without the official support of the Israeli government. And this week, that support came.
On Tuesday, the deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon held a conference in Jerusalem to launch his ministry's report and recommendations for highlighting the issue of 870,000 Jewish refugees driven out of Arab countries.
Israel's Jewish population is made up of 52% Sephardim/Mizrahim who were forced to leave their homes and possessions in Muslim lands. Not not only have they never received compensation, but their plight has never been internationally recognised.
Hitherto, the Israeli government has been hesitant to raise the Jewish refugee issue, for fear that the Arabs would raise the Palestinian refugee issue. But the Arabs have never ceased raising the Palestinian refugee issue while the Israeli government has been silent.
"I would call this conference Yemoth Ha-Mashiah (The Days of the Messiah Coming)," Levana Zamir, president of the Jews from Egypt in Israel, told me after attending the conference. At this very emotional event, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon announced a new state policy regarding Jews who were forced to flee from their homes in Arab countries.
"We have to correct a historic injustice. But, in a very pragmatic way," Ayalon told the audience.... '
Gisèle Littman, aka Bat Ye'or ("Daughter of the Nile"), the nom-de-plume attached to her famous book Eurabia (2005) and other works, has given a fascinating interview on the subject of growing up Jewish in Egypt.
Of the situation of Egyptian Jewry in the immediate wake of the Suez Crisis of 1956, she recalls:
"The anti-Jewish apartheid system deepened. Jews were expelled from clubs, forbidden to go to restaurants, cinemas and public places. Many were immediately expelled from the country or thrown into jail. The secret police would come at night to arrest them. Others, like my mother, were under house arrest and their bank assets frozen. Their telephones were suppressed. Many Jews were isolated and could not communicate. Many left the country immediately, abandoning everything. I remember seeing their flats and beautiful villas ransacked. Each one was leaving in secret, fearing to be prevented from leaving their country which had become a jail.
Just before my mother was put under house arrest, I accompanied her to the bank where she quickly withdrew her jewels. We sold our flat for nothing since the pillage of Jewish homes had lowered prices. I choose twenty books among the hundreds we had and we sold all the rest. This was heart-breaking, as I always wanted to be a writer. I had accumulated many diaries since an early age, and later essays and literary criticisms. I realized that I was witnessing the agony of the Egyptian Jewish community and I made notes for a book. One night I burnt them all in the chimney. It was like dying. I knew we could only leave with two cases each and that the censors would read every piece of paper.
Families were dispersed in all directions. One sister went to London with her husband and child, another planned to go to Belgium, cousins went to Brazil, others went to Switzerland and France. As people were leaving secretly, I never knew whether I would be seeing them for the last time. I was living through the death of a world, not knowing if I would survive the next day. While the mob rejoiced in pillaging, I observed closely the inner destruction of family, friendships, bonds, society and the dignity and resolve of the victims.
By then, I had very few friends remaining. For me they belonged to a beloved and disappearing world that was dying with a part of my life, where everything being so transient also became so precious. In the last months preceding our departure, I walked alone throughout Cairo and Alexandria, their old quarters, their museums and every place that now was deserted of friends and family. For years I was fascinated by Egyptology, art and history. I knew I would never see these treasures again.
We left at night in secret. My father and mother could hardly walk. Thanks to a lawyer my father had at last sold a parcel of land. The proceeds from this sale, together with my mother’s jewels were sent out of the country through a clandestine channel. The Swiss consulate gave us a Nansen passport since Egyptian Jews were allowed to leave Egypt only on condition that they renounce their nationality and all their belongings in Egypt and never come back. We all signed such a declaration.
We had reservations on a KLM flight. We were kept at the airport for hours, our bodies searched, our cases emptied on the floor, insulted, humiliated and threatened by an Egyptian Sudanese officer who was cracking a whip (curbash) around us. My meager twenty Egyptian pounds were confiscated. Finally, they let us depart. We stopped at Amsterdam where my other sister came from Belgium, with her husband and baby to see us and tell us that money and jewels were safely deposited in a bank.
It was strange to see them in an Amsterdam hotel. We were now refugees, homeless, stateless, in a world where we knew no one. We were full of apprehension on the threshold of a new life, where we would destroy our past to build the future. It was my first night in exile."
Forget the realities of living in the Islamic Middle East in a state of dhimmitude. Forget the jizya tax. Forget the imposed humiliations and the mandatory occupations. Forget the caprices of Muslim rulers and “protectors” towards the Jews and Christians in their midst. Forget the periodic outbreaks of cruelty. Forget enslavement. Forget the kidnapping of girls, the marriages by capture, and the incarceration in harems. Forget the enforced conversions to Islam. Forget the expulsions. Forget the mass exodus of Jewish and Christian refugees.
James Watt, Britain’s Ambassador to Jordan, and Frances Guy, Britain’s Ambassador to Lebanon, seem anxious to convince us of an alternative “reality” of their own.
These two “gone native” envoys share an unfortunate track record of blunders in their blogs, which appear on the official website of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO).
Last year, Mr Watt (pictured), whom I believe it is fair to describe as an Arabist, displayed in several of his blogposts an outrageous denial of the facts of Jewish history and a concomitant lack of empathy with Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish People, and with the Jewish State.
On one post he mentioned that he was looking forward to reading Shlomo Sands’ The Invention of the Jewish People – a blueprint for delegitimisation if ever there was one. But he doesn’t seem to have needed any help from that book in accruing an anti-Israel attitude, comprising denying the right of the Jewish People to self-determination and of Israel to proper self-defence, for he’d already made such statements as these:
"No one is prepared – or very few – to take Zionist arguments at their face value any longer. Completely non-factual assertions – for example that a Jewish people was building Jerusalem 5,000 years ago - only serve to emphasise the absence of real content or reasoning. The strange thing is how long Western audiences tolerated such claims without challenging them: I think because they were hoping that a reasonable settlement with the indigenous Palestinian population would emerge in the course of things (and with some diplomatic heavy lifting)."
“The origin of the problem – the arrival of the Zionists in Palestine, with their commitment to avoiding any kind of integration into existing society, and their policy of importing their co-religionists from cultural and social backgrounds alien to Palestine, changed everything. So did the massive expulsion of huge numbers of Palestinians from their land. Their right to return, and to compensation, remains the central demand, backed by all Arab states and reflected also in the principles set out by the international community for peace."
“I offer my condolences to the families of those who were killed [aboard the Mavi Marmara], in what should have been an entirely avoidable tragedy... the entire world has had enough of the blockade of Gaza – a blockade which Israel should have long ago lifted under the terms of UN Security Resolution 1801, as well as other international law. And the world has had enough of the pretexts Israel uses to continue it.”
“Few observers would disagree with [David] Hirst [in the book Beware of Small States, which Watt had read with enthusiasm] that Israel has long committed itself to a policy of massive military deterrence, which is now becoming progressively more violent - and, by the account of its own officials, more ready to inflict civilian casualties on a large scale in pursuit of its political goals. Gaza showed that progression: more remote shelling and rocketing by the Israeli forces, with minimum risk to its own soldiers: ten lost their lives, and three Israeli civilians, while 1,330 Gazans (most of them civilians and 410 of them children) lost theirs. Compare that to the 43 Israeli civilians who died under Hizbullah rocket fire in July-August 2006, and 119 Israeli soldiers in the fighting, against over a thousand Lebanese civilians (one third of them children) and an unknown number of Lebanese combatants.”
As Melanie Phillips remarked when Watt’s blogposts came to public attention, thanks to a commenter on the blog Harry’s Place:
"Watt makes it clear he doesn’t think Israel has an overwhelming historic claim to its existence, thinks the Palestinian Arabs were indigenous to the land and that the idea that Israel was the Jews’ national home thousands of years ago is fanciful.
[H]e denies Jewish national self-determination .... [H]e denies Jewish and Middle Eastern history.... [H]e denies Jewish history and national self-determination and descends into rank bigotry....[H]e is peddling the Big Lie by Hamas, Hezbollah and the PLO that misrepresents Israeli defence as aggression and describes all Arabs killed by Israel as civilians whereas in fact most are terrorists .... [H]e is sympathising with the Turkish terrorists who were killed on the Mavi Marmara when they tried to lynch the boarding Israeli soldiers, and claiming that Israel’s reason for restricting the flow of goods into Gaza, that it is to prevent arms smuggling and weaken the grip of Hamas, is a lie ....
It is an old cliché that diplomats are sent abroad to lie for their country. But one inevitable effect of Watt’s demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel through such distortions and bigotry is to whip up yet more genocidal hatred throughout the Arab and Muslim world.
The British Government says it is committed to a two-state solution. Why is its Ambassador to Jordan suggesting that the state that already exists is illegitimate? Is this the British Government’s position? If not, why is it allowing its Ambassador to Jordan to represent such an obnoxious view? Will Foreign Secretary William Hague repudiate these distortions and the vicious hostility Watt displays towards Britain’s ally? Or are we to conclude that these are beliefs that he himself shares?" http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/6132169/camels-were-never-this-vicious.thtml
Now, in the wake of the New Year’s Eve atrocity in Alexandria that left 23 Coptic Christian churchgoers dead and another 100 or so injured, Mr Watt http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/watt/entry/living_in_harmony reflects on the Arabic concept of al-ta'ayush (co-existence). Its spirit, he tells us, “is part of the human and cultural richness of Arab civilisation”. It ‘conveys clearly the sense of “living in harmony”, rather than simply “existing together’ and its spirit “is part of the human and cultural richness of Arab civilisation”.
Uh huh.
“It is a term in common use in those Arab societies where Christians and Muslims live together (and as Jews did too not long ago). Those societies treasure ta’ayyush. They know it is a prize that calls for daily efforts and constant care. They know the disaster and grief that follows if those efforts fail.”
Note the dishonest comment about the Jews. Watt (whose second wife, Amal Saad, comes from an Arab family in Lebanon) implies that they lived alongside Arabs in harmonious paradise. He tells us nothing of dhimmitude, nothing of persecution, nothing of some 750,000 Jewish refugees from Arabic lands who fled to Israel.
Let him see this, for starters:
By coincidence (I assume) Frances Guy has been posting on a similar theme.
You may recall that in July 2010 Ms Guy (pictured), on her blog, blithely revealed her admiration for Sheikh Fadlallah, the Holocaust-denying Hezbollah terror merchant, who had just passed away:
“One of the privileges of being a diplomat is the people you meet; great and small, passionate and furious. People in Lebanon like to ask me which politician I admire most. It is an unfair question, obviously, and many are seeking to make a political response of their own. I usually avoid answering by referring to those I enjoy meeting the most and those that impress me the most. Until yesterday my preferred answer was to refer to Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, head of the Shia clergy in Lebanon and much admired leader of many Shia muslims throughout the world. When you visited him you could be sure of a real debate, a respectful argument and you knew you would leave his presence feeling a better person. That for me is the real effect of a true man of religion; leaving an impact on everyone he meets, no matter what their faith. Sheikh Fadlallah passed away yesterday. Lebanon is a lesser place the day after, but his absence will be felt well beyond Lebanon's shores. I remember well when I was nominated ambassador to Beirut, a Muslim acquaintance sought me out to tell me how lucky I was because I would get a chance to meet Sheikh Fadlallah. Truly he was right. If I was sad to hear the news I know other peoples' lives will be truly blighted. The world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints. May he rest in peace.”
Despite an outcry, she kept her job.
More recently, last September, Ms Guy blogged:
“There are nearly 60 Palestinian veterans in Lebanon who served with the British army during the 2nd World War. The tragic irony of their situation is heart-wringing. After loyally serving the Union Jack, in 1948 they were forced to flee their homes when the state of Israel was created. Some of them have been in refugee camps in Lebanon ever since. ... I am proud that a system is in place to give these brave men some comfort. I am less proud that 60 years after their flight from their homes, diplomacy has so far failed to find a solution to the Arab Israeli conflict. The Royal Commonwealth ex-services League is helping nearly 20,000 veterans all round the world. As they say, these people weren't forced to join up, they chose to. That's why the league is trying to help them. Their quiet dignity in the midst of hardship and poverty is to be admired and respected.”
In a speech made in Beirut on Armistice Day (reported in the Jordanian press and elsewhere in the Arab world), she was less guarded in her language, describing these men as being “chased out” of their homes by the Israelis.
I couldn’t help but think of that speech, and whether she’s been bamboozled, when I read in a newspaper report from 1945, as quoted by me in a recent post http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/01/palestine-government-did-its-best-to.html, that the Palestinian Arabs serving in units of the British Army proved restless and unreliable, mutinying often, deserting along with their rifles and ammunition, joining without authorisation a VE Day procession in Beirut in which they displayed a picture of the traitorous Mufti, and committing acts of hooliganism. After a subsequent similar disturbance they were discharged on the ground that “their services were no longer required”, so that whereas 15,000 Palestinian Jews remained under British arms, “few if any Arabs” did.
In her latest blogpost http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/roller/guy/entry/cedars_of_lebanonMs Guy has been pondering the symbolism of a celebrated arboreal species. “The Cedars of Lebanon as symbol is poignant,” she writes. “It is an indigenous species that is listed as endangered. Quite – where do so many different confessional groups live in relative harmony?”
Well, it’s not too clear from that strange phraseology what inspired the leap from plant to people, but it would appear Ms Guy is trying to spin us the fiction is that Lebanon is a country in which Muslims and non-Muslims get along just fine, better in fact than in any other country.
The facts fail to support her.
During the 1940s there were about 24,000 Jews in Lebanon, about 3000 in 1975, and there are virtually none today – only aged survivors. Although Lebanon was the only Arab nation whose Jewish population increased following the Declaration of the State of Israel (when Lebanon had a Christian majority, be it noted), many Jews left the country after the 1958 Civil War. The situation of Lebanese Jewry deteriorated with the coming of the Civil War that began in 1975, and in 1982 radical Islamists captured and killed eleven of the community’s leaders.
As for that country’s Christians, Brigitte Gabriel (who comes from that background) has given a harrowing account of how they were reduced from 65% of the population in 1975 to less than 20% today, owing to persecution by militant Islamists, including Palestinian incomers, massacres, and polygamous marriages producing numerous offspring. She tells how tolerant, multicultural, open-bordered, progressive, entrepreneurial Christian-majority Lebanon – “the Paris of the Middle East” – became “a terrorist infrastructure, a hotbed of Islamic Jihad”.
Ms Gabriel also describes the torture and murder of Christians in Lebanon (even of leftist Christians who had aided the Muslim cause) including the nicety of tying one leg of infants to their father and one to their mother and then separating the parents so that the infants were torn apart.
She tells of the deliberate fouling of churches with human excrement and urine – and how the Bible was used as toilet paper.
The Bible as toilet paper, eh? Could that be why Frances Guy isn’t overly keen to give the Bible its due as a sourcebook for those Cedars of Lebanon?
There can be few people who grew up in the Judeo-Christian tradition who are completely unaware that the mighty Lebanese cedar is mentioned several times in the Bible. Cedar wood was used in the interior of Solomon’s Temple, for example.
This beautiful line from the Psalms is particularly famous: “The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon.”
Of the cedar Ms Guy writes: “It grows to be majestic and it has contributed to so many different civilisations; the Phoenicians used it for ships; the Egyptians for ships and its resin for mummification; the Ottomans and the British were more prosaic but the railways benefitted.”
Alarmed at the thought that Ms Guy believes that the ancient Israelites are as off-limits with her hosts as their descendants in the Zionist Entity are, I left the following comment beneath her post: “Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem was built of cedar, which figured prominently in Israelite civilisation, especially for building purposes, and there are numerous references to the cedar in the Bible.”
Short and perhaps not so sweet – from the standpoint of a British diplomat grovelling to the Arab world.
But fair dues to Ms Guy, for my comment has now appeared.
This article by Professor Shmuel Trigano is a must-read in the light of the ruthlessly waged campaign of delegitimisation of Israel using the Nakba, the “Right of Return” demand, and the“Born in Sin” allegation as weapons. Professor Trigano is a Fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris-Nanterre. He is director of the College of Jewish Studies at the Alliance Israélite Universelle, editor of Pardes, a journal of Jewish studies, and founder of L'Observatoire du Monde Juif, a research centre on Jewish political life.
Between 1920 and 1970, 900,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and other Muslim countries: from Morocco to Iran, from Turkey to Yemen, including places where they had lived for twenty centuries. The 1940s were a turning point in this tragedy; of those expelled, 600,000 settled in the new state of Israel, and 300,000 in France and Canada. Today, they and their descendants form the majority of the French Jewish community and a large part of Israel's population.
How does one explain this exodus? It is the blind spot of contemporary political consciousness and an object of denial. There is not even an expression to name this major event. "The Forgotten Exodus" is the most commonly used term. But it actually masks the nature and impact of this historical event. "Forgotten" by whom, other than ideologues? "Exodus" is an apt description of the situation but not of its causes, which the adjective "forgotten" occults even more. For those who underwent the expulsion have not forgotten it at all. Moreover, it is also an important historical fact.
This is a major transnational phenomenon. Jewish communities were expelled either in their entirety or almost so. Communities of some significance remain in Iran, Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia. All the countries that expelled Jews have one thing in common: they belong to Islam (including Turkey and Iran, which are not Arab countries). However, it is hard to view this exodus as a whole. It largely took place over a thirty-year period (1940-1970) and covered a huge geographical area, from Morocco to Iran, from Turkey to Yemen.
In the countries that expelled Jews, a combination of six legal, economic, and political measures aimed at isolating Jews in society was instituted:
denationalization;
legal discrimination;
isolation and sequestration;
economic despoilment;
socioeconomic discrimination;
and pogroms or similar acts.
....
Anti-Semitism would have developed even without the existence of the state of Israel because of Arab-Islamic nationalism, which resulted in xenophobia. In the twentieth century, hostility toward Jews was spreading well before Israel's creation: in Yemen, Syria, Mandatory Palestine, Turkey, and Algeria.
It is the custom to say that Zionism was responsible for this development. But Zionism is to be understood, in the worldview of the Islamic mind, in another perspective. With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of intolerant Arab nationalism, long-dominated nations (such as the Armenians and the Jews) sought independence. This was understood by the Arab world as a rebellion not only against the new Arab nation-states but also against Islamic law, which puts non-Muslims in the inferior status of a dominated nation: the dhimmis.
Both the Armenians and the Jews were subjected to violent repression. The former were massacred by the Ottoman Empire in 1894-1895 – around 300,000 victims – and suffered a genocide – 1,200,000 victims – by the Turks in 1908. The latter in Mandatory Palestine suffered pogroms in 1920, 1929, 1936, and 1939. And the Jews in Muslim countries ... were forced to leave. Hardly any Jews remain in the abovementioned countries, and the number of Christian Arabs is now dwindling in them as well.
The new Arab anti-Zionism contained classic anti-Semitic policies, as demonstrated by the "Statute of the Jews" that could be compared to the Vichy Statute of the Jews, except that it developed over a long time, in a huge geographical area, and at different periods. Jews were accused of being co-responsible with Israel for the war that the Arab states declared against the new state and then lost. Regardless of their ideological affiliation - communist, nationalist, Zionist, religious, and so on - they were subjected to special laws specifically aimed at Jews. They were expelled from all Arab-Muslim countries because a collective responsibility was imputed to them. This is typical anti-Semitic reasoning.
The Jews from Arab-Muslim countries were powerless. They had no army. They did not take part in the conflict. They were not responsible for triggering hostilities between the Arab states and Israel. That the Yishuv, the quasi-Jewish state that developed in Mandatory Palestine, became a state according to the United Nations Partition Plan was not also responsible for the war except for the scandal of its existence. Instead, the cause of the situation was the intolerance and imperialism of the new Arab states: before these attained independence, there were indeed no such states. Before the Western colonial empires there was another Islamic colonial empire, the Ottoman one. Palestine never existed as a political or cultural entity. The new nation-states – Israel included – were a product of the Western colonial empires and all were "invented." Why were these Jews in Arab countries persecuted and expelled if not as a result of an anti-Semitic ideology and policy? It was a continuation of the traditional Islamic anti-Judaism but defined in reference to the symbol of the rebellion of the Jewish dhimmis: Zionism.
The fact that these events have been obscured has served in the campaign to delegitimize Israel, and therefore to a large extent, the same population that suffered this oppression. The fate of Palestinian refugees, their proclaimed innocence, and the injustice they endured form the main thrust of this delegitimization.
About 600,000 of the Jews forced out of Islamic countries in those years attempted to reconstruct their life in Israel. They have suffered more than the Palestinian refugees and undergone greater spoliations.
They became citizens of the countries of refuge (Israel and France especially), while Palestinians were ostracized from the Arab nations. Unlike Israel, the Arab states have refused to integrate (Palestinian) refugees in the hopes of keeping hotbeds of conflict alive.
Today, 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Palestinian Arabs, while the few thousands of Jews still living in Arab and Muslim states (almost exclusively Iran, Morocco, Turkey, and Tunisia) are tiny quasi-dhimmi minorities, probably destined to disappear. Except in Turkey, they depend on a despotic or monarchic regime that needs them for specific interests in international politics. Since 1922, a Palestinian Arab state has already existed on the territory of Mandatory Palestine: Jordan, with 75 percent of its population Palestinian. The Palestinian Authority rules part of the remainder in what became "Cisjordania" after its annexation by Transjordan in 1948, which then became Jordan.
The Palestinians' fate is mainly the result of the policy of their leadership, who have always rejected the further division of Mandatory Palestine (as proposed in 1937 and 1947). The creation of Transjordan in 1922 apparently was not sufficient. Arabs from Palestine were the allies of the five Arab states that attacked the newly created state of Israel: Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon, as well as the Arab League. Even today, both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas reject the division of the land, denying Israel its natural right to a national existence while defining Palestine as exclusively Arab and Islamic.
The Jewish people are a people with a long history – contrary to the Palestinians – and have the right of sovereignty in a land that has been the seat of three Jewish states since earliest antiquity. Zionism is the culmination of a process of self-determination, from a dominated nation in the Arab-Muslim world to an emancipated one within this world – that is, in the Middle East. There has been a population exchange. Israel's "original sin" is a fiction. These are the historical and political facts on which Jewish discourse must be founded. It is time to take back the initiative and restore the Jewish narrative.
“The plight of Arab refugees, consequent upon the war that was started by the Arab League, has not only aroused genuine humanitarian concern,” remarked the London Jewish Chronicle in December 1948, “but has also formed the pretext of much unscrupulous propaganda against the Jews.” Sounds familiar?
If there is ever an issue which is going to prove a sticking point in the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, it is the notion of Haq el-Auda, the claimed right of return for the 725, 000 (some sources say 750,000) Arab refugees of 1948 – and not only for as many of them as are still alive but their descendants, a total of 5,000,000 people. One of the questions in the August AWRAD (Arab World Research and Development) poll of 3001 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza was : “With regards to the peace process and reaching a final status agreement, which issues do you consider to be Very Significant, Of Some Significance, Of Little Significance, Of No Significance, or I don’t know?” The issues identified were: Establishing an independent and sovereign Palestinian state (Very Significant – 91.7%); The status of Jerusalem (Very Significant – 91.0%); Security for Palestine (Very Significant – 86.2%); The rights of refugees (Very significant – 83.2% ); Settlements in the Occupied Territories (Very Significant – 81.3%). And as I stated in my last post, 87.5% of respondents consider it “Essential” that refugees be given the “Right of return and compensation”. But at the same time, 45.7% of respondents believe that “No change in the status of refugees will take place”.
It’s just as well that their demands are tempered by pessimism – perhaps realism is a better word. Although Bibi Netanyahu is surely more pragmatic than is often suspected, he’s hardly likely to give way on this one. To put it bluntly, Israel bears no culpability for the refugee situation, and it cannot be expected to solve it in the way most respondents (and extremist partisans of the Palestinians around the world) want. Had the Arabs accepted the hand of friendship proffered by the little Jewish State on its establishment in 1948 instead of – with the intention of obliterating Israel – immediately waging what proved for the aggressors a disastrous war, there would be no “refugee problem”, and the Palestinian Arabs would have their own state.
‘For too long the public have been treated to all sorts of articles and announcements from a wide variety of sources in which the recurring theme has been that the appalling plight of the Arab refugees is the fault of the Jews, and scarcely a voice has been raised in protest. Even a prominent Jew has gone so far as to write that “these women and children would not be dying of starvation and exposure if the Israeli State had never been founded”’, observed the Jewish Chronicle (16 November 1948).
“The truth is surely quite otherwise. The plight of these unfortunate people is a direct result of the chaotic condition into which the British Government allowed Palestine to drift when its troops were withdrawn last May, and for which the United Nations must bear a large share of responsibility through its failure to establish an effective regime to succeed the Mandatory Government. Long before the last British troops left the country this newspaper joined the ranks of those who warned the Government and the United Nations that a vast toll of human suffering was inevitable unless effective steps are taken to enforce the November 29 resolution. It is patently unjust to saddle Jews with the responsibility for what has occurred, and naive for Jews to be misled into thinking that the responsibility is collectively theirs.”
The Spectator (19 November 1948), carried an article entitled “Refugees and the Jordan”. Its author, Michael George Ionides (1903-78), a British irrigation expert who was Director of Development in the administration of Transjordan from 1937-39, laid responsibility for the refugees’ plight not at Israel’s but at Britain’s door. He outlined a scheme for settling the refugees on the territory east of the River Jordan – in Transjordan – declaring: “so far as the refugees in the Arab parts of Palestine and in Transjordan are concerned, irrigation of the Jordan Valley terraces is the only possible hope for their future existence. There is none else.”
He acknowledged that there would be difficulties in implementing this scheme, but declared: “What of that, when half-a-million refugees face starvation, disease, and death – this winter, next winter, and the one after that, till something is done? Mulberry came off. So has the Berlin airlift. So can a Jordan Valley Relief Project – if we will it.”
As we all know, it did not eventuate.
Cruelly, cynically, cravenly, corruptly, Haq el-Auda is being held over Israel like a Sword of Damocles – the perceived suffering of people in refugee camps is the potent symbol of Palestinian victimhood which threatens Israel as surely as does war and terror. That is, of course, why the vengeful Arab states have never integrated the Palestinians or alleviated their suffering - to use them as pawns, as weapons against Israel. As is blatantly obvious to friends and enemies of Israel alike, such an influx as demanded – that of 5,000,000 persons – would ring the death knell of Israel as a Jewish State. In any case, I understand that under international law the progeny of a resettled refugee population has no right to return to the land that the original refugee generation left. The progeny are not, despite Arab-speak, refugees.
As the Jewish Chronicle editorialised on 20 August 1948:
“A very different problem is presented by the plight of Jewish Communities in Arab lands. This is acute and urgent, though little has been said about it in the British Press, which prefers to harp on Jewish transgressions, real or imaginary. For every word of editorial comment on the mass arrests of Jews in Egypt, or the brutal killing of Jewish tourists, at least twenty have been devoted to the isolated case of the abominable Deir Yassin massacre. This is understandable, since the pro-Arab school is badly in need of an explanation for the almost incomprehensible mass flight of Arabs from the land from which they were supposed to be so deeply attached. It is nonetheless regrettable, for it hides a very real problem.”
What would be their fate, the paper wondered,
“if the wave of fanaticism rises with every defeat suffered by the Arab forces in Palestine? Zionism now ranks with Communism in the eyes of the Arab authorities, and the measures taken to impress this fact upon the Jewish Communities range from simple imprisonment and confiscation of property – with a substantial rake-off going to persons in authority – to looting, mob violence, small-scale pogroms, and the imposition of the death penalty for such crimes as attempting to escape to Palestine. It is not surprising that many Zionists see in these incidents the harbingers of coming massacres, and insist upon the necessity to remove these communities – if necessary, by way of exchange for the Arab population which has fled from Israeli territory.”
Between 1949 and 1954 about 800,000 (some estimates say 900,000) Jews were forced by persecution and threat on the part of humiliated Arab regimes smarting at Israel’s failure to be vanquished to leave the Muslim lands in the Middle East and North Africa in which Jews had lived for hundreds and even thousands of years. These were the refugees of whom most of the world is unaware – the forgotten refugees, and whereas the Arab nations – with all the land at their disposal and all their petro-dollars failed to rehome the Arab refugees – the nascent Jewish State, despite all the other calls on its resources, ensured their welfare, education, and absorption.
Recently, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon (Jerusalem Post, 9 September 2010), whose grandfather fled Algeria when on becoming independent of France it granted citizenship only to Muslims, took a leaf out of the Arabs' book by stating “I Am a Refugee”, and summarised the situation well when he wrote, inter alia: “However, I do not consider myself so; I am a proud citizen of the State of Israel. The Jewish refugees found their national expression in Israel; so too, the Arab refugees should find their national aspirations being met by a Palestinian state.”
