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A group of Iraqi Jews land in Israel after fleeing their homeland in the 1950s. With report, group highlights flight of Jewish refugees from Arab world, By Rachel Pomerance, June 24, 2003 NEW YORK, June 24 (JTA) — Maurice Soussa was a high school student in Baghdad when Iraq´s most prominent Jew was brought down in a ferocious frenzy. Shafiq Adas was charged with spying for the new Jewish state, Soussa said. The Ford dealer, whose five partners were all Muslim, had his property, worth an estimated at $100 million at the time, confiscated. Since no lawyer would defend the Jew, the case was heard in a military court. The next day, Adas was hanged in his own courtyard. Crowds came to Adas´ estate to gawk at the dead Jew, Soussa says. It all happened in the summer of 1948. Fifty-five years later, Soussa relayed the story at a press conference here on Monday to release a document charging Arab countries with systematic persecution of Jews amid the creation of the State of Israel. The document, published by Justice for Jews from Arab Countries — a group formed in September by a coalition of Jewish organizations — lists human rights violations in several Arab countries where Jews lost the right to vote or even their citizenship and suffered pogroms, confiscations and intimidation. Leaders of the Justice for Jews group flew to Israel to hand the report to President Moshe Katsav on Tuesday. The group will meet with Israeli government ministers later in the week. Through quotes from Arab leaders on the partition of Palestine and newspaper articles around 1948, the document builds the case that Arab countries colluded in their persecution of the Jews, hoping to force them to emigrate and steal their property. "From the sheer volume of such state-sanctioned discriminatory measures, replicated in so many Arab countries and instituted in such a parallel fashion, one is drawn to the conclusion that such evidence suggests a common pattern of repressive measures, if not collusion, against Jews by Arab governments," the report states. More than 850,000 Jews left Arab countries after the 1948 Arab-led war on Israel. Similar numbers of Arabs fled Israel around the same time. While Israel absorbed the Jewish refugees, Arab countries kept the Palestinians in camps and refused to give them citizenship, using their plight as a weapon in the political struggle against the Jewish state. Today, the number of Palestinian refugees and their descendants tops four million, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides them with services. Palestinians demand that the refugees and their descendants be granted a "right of return" to the homes they fled inside Israel. Israel, which has indicated that it would offer the refugees compensation, sees that as tantamount to a call for the Jewish state´s destruction, since the influx of so many Arabs would negate Israel´s identity as a Jewish state. Peace negotiations broke down over the right of return issue in 2000. Now, some feel that Israel should use the claims of Jewish refugees as a bargaining chip in future negotiations. Jewish groups recently have begun highlighting the issue, hoping to seek redress if peace talks resume. Last spring, then-Justice Minister Meir Sheetrit announced that his ministry was preserving and computerizing more than 10,000 claims from previous compensation initiatives that had been abandoned. The ministry had partnered with the American Sephardi Federation, a co-founder of Justice for Jews, to collect claims from Jewish refugees. Now Justice for Jews is hoping the evidence compiled in the 39-page document will advance their cause. It marks the "opening of the second stage" of a campaign — which began last year with the group´s formation — to highlight the Jewish refugee issue, said Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which helped found Justice for Jews. The group will be "taking the report to the White House, leaders in Congress, the State Department, as well as to leaders in Britain, Israel and Canada in the next few days," Hoenlein said. "We have a commitment that there will be hearings in Congress based on the report." Avi Beker, secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress, which also co-founded the group, delivered testimony on the subject in Congress earlier this month. The document is "clear evidence that there was really a systematic effort to expel Jews from Arab countries and to take their rights as part of the Arab-Israeli conflict," Beker said. Irwin Cotler, a member of Canada´s parliament and honorary chairman of the group, accused Arab countries of "a pattern of ethnic cleansing." Beker, whose group will hold a conference on the issue this weekend in London, added that Justice for Jews got a jolt of prestige from honorary chair Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "In this particular part of the world, almost all of the attention has been devoted to one side," Holbrooke said at the press conference, staged across from the United Nations. "Let´s remember that there were refugees on both sides." Some left-wing Jewish groups also are attentive to the issue: The Tikkun Community articulated a similar message in a Middle East peace resolution the group submitted to members of Congress. The resolution calls for reparations for both Jewish and Palestinian refugees "to make it fair and to make it clear that the peace process is not only about making things good for Palestinians. It´s also about making things good for Israelis," said Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine and national chairman of the Tikkun community. But Lerner said it´s important that Jews not use the Jewish refugee card as a way of dismissing Palestinian claims. Jewish assets confiscated by Arab countries are estimated at more than $100 billion, according to Justice for Jews. While the United Nations has devoted 101 resolutions to the plight of Palestinian refugees, none has dealt with Jewish refugees, the group´s report states. "The legal case of displaced Jews to redress is as strong as, if not stronger than, the case of Palestinian refugees," the document states. "Justice in the Middle East requires acknowledgment of the historical narrative and rights of Jews uprooted from Arab countries," it says, listing possible remedies such as litigation in countries where Jews were displaced or a compensation fund established under an Arab-Israeli peace agreement. "There is no way to have a peace in the Middle East if the Palestinians and the Arabs are to continue to demand a ‘right of return,´ " said Beker, whose group has followed the issue for a decade but intensified its work in the last few years. There was an "exchange of population in the Middle East, and the Arabs are responsible for the two refugee problems," Beker told JTA, blaming the Arab countries for ejecting their Jews and for keeping the Palestinians as perpetual refugees.
Hyperlinks and emphasis added by PAC Click here to return to our home page. Also see: The Other Refugees, Erik Arnold,
July 13, 2004, Arutz Sheva -
Part I,
Part II Jewish Property in Muslim Countries: $100 Billion, The Jewish Post of New York A group from Washington D.C. Justice for Jews from Arab Countries is demanding compensations amounting to $100 billion from Arab or Muslim countries because of loss of property or money by 900,000 Jews who lived there before 1948. According to this new organization only 8,000 Jews live in Arab or Muslim countries today. In Libya, for example, only 6 Jews. Most of these Jews from Arab countries or North-African countries have made aliyah to Israel. Most of them left because of persecution and Muslim anti-Semitism. Arabs tend to blame Zionism for this reality, as if Jews were accepted in the Muslim world as citizens and not just as victims or Dahimi in the Muslim terminology. For example, just learn the history of Jews in Yemen. This new organization approaches the issue from legal vantage point according to HA’ARETZ and its leader Stanley Urman. The issue of compensation was launched by many organizations or leaders such as Mordecai Ben-Porat in Israel, Dr. Heskel Haddad in the U.S.A. For example, they argued that Jews in Iraq left $2 billion in bank deposits. Jews owned a lot of land and real estate in Iraq. They lost everything in 1951, when they fled to Israel. Some fled to Great Britain. Recently, American Sephardic Federation under the leadership of Leon Levy and Vivian Romani launched a special educational campaign in order to teach Sephardim, victims of Muslim-Arab countries, about their rights. So: Muslim countries such as Libya, Arab countries such as Iraq, must pay! I should note that the issue of compensation from these countries is relatively new on the Jewish agenda because Israel, for many years, wanted to cover it up fearing that the Arabs would produce their demand for compensation for their Palestinian refugees. Of course, it was Israel’s illusion. Furthermore, there is not even one iota of moral equation in this issue. Since Jews in Muslim or Arab countries never ever declared war on their countries. They did not attack their regimes. They did not, like the Palestinians, murder children and women of their gentile counterparts. They were loyal to their countries! The situation in pre-1948 Palestine was different since Palestinians declared war on the Yishuv and their goal then and today has been crystal clear: to dismantle Israel, the Zionist state.
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Turkish 'Tolerance' of Jews: A Sobering Historical Assessment, By Andrew G. Bostom The recent tragic synagogue bombings in Istanbul, targeting the small remnant Jewish community there, have been accompanied, somewhat understandably, by hagiographic assessments of Jewish existence under Turkish suzerainty, dating back for over half a millennium. In fact, in the Turkish Ottoman Empire -- over more than five centuries of Muslim theocratic governance under Shari'a law -- the existence of the Jews was quite precarious.
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The weird right of return coalition,
The German left opposes the right of return of all European post WW2
refugees. Our left could learn from them. The years following WW2 saw several waves of refugees. In Europe eleven million ethnic Germans living in areas lost to Poland and Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the war were unceremoniously given one-way tickets and told never to return. Within a few short years they were totally absorbed into Germany, ceased being refugees and disappeared as an issue from the headlines. No UNRWA, no refugee camps, just Germans living in Germany. How different from the Palestinians, who were deliberately kept refugees, in order to develop into a festering sore to be blamed on Israel. The Germans had a better claim to demand a right of return, or alternatively of compensation. They became refugees after a war, unlike the Palestinians who became refugees during a war they had initiated, and coerced the Arab world into joining. In addition, it should be remembered that there was a mutual wave of refugees in the Middle East, as entire Jewish communities, numbering at least as much as the Palestinian refugees were forced to flee their homes, leaving behind assets worth at least those abandoned by the Palestinians. The German left, true to its ideals of historic détente and pacifism, has always rejected any talk of right of return or compensation. It claims that any such attempt would re-ignite dormant nationalistic passions best forgotten, and that even though many of the refugees were not Nazis, a new reality has been created, and must be respected. Any attempt to do otherwise would be seen as a provocation. The BDV (organization of German refugees) received whatever scant public support it has from the right hand corner of the German political map. With the recent enlargement of the EU, which now includes those countries from which the Germans were evicted, the BDV has attempted to re-air the issue. Erkia Steinbach, a lone voice on the Bundestag’s backbenches has been making a lot of noise over the matter, but no one is taking notice. The demand for compensation, couched as “historic justice” is seen as a non-starter, which could only bring back the “bad old days” Germany and Europe have spent the last fifty years forgetting and dismantling. However when it comes to the
Middle East, every thing becomes topsy-turvy. Elements of the German left,
which regards itself as so progressive and peace loving, make common cause
with the disciples of
the pro-Hitler Mufti, in supporting the right of the
Palestinians to return to a home they have not lived in for over fifty
years. Whoever favors peace should unambiguously reject any talk of right of return for what it is, a massive provocation and rejection of reality that can only encourage strife and hinder peace. Israel’s noisy but marginal post-Zionist anti-Zionist minority just doesn’t get it. Instead of rejecting a cause that is inherently incompatible with peace and accommodation, they insist on making common cause with Germany’s ultra- right wing fringe, mindlessly parroting same lines regarding the Palestinians the ultra-right wing nationalists in Germany say regarding German refugees, the need to right a historic wrong, achieve historic justice and so on and so forth. And as usual, we see our lunatic left wing fringe lined up with the ultra-extremist lunatic right wing. Both of them support the right of return, the former of Palestinians to ancestral homes in Jaffa and Haifa they have not lived in for fifty years, the latter of Jews to return to the ancestral cities of Shechem (Nablus), Bethlehem and Hebron. They talk about righting historic wrongs, but implement policies that lead to the robbing and humiliation of the Palestinians. One can understand a common denominator between the Israeli and German ultra-nationalist right-wingers, a common denominator between fellow zealots. What on earth the Israeli post-Zionist ultra-left is doing in bed with them defies human understanding. Interestingly, many of the Israeli left who support the right of return reject claims by descendents of Jewish refugees from Arab countries for compensation, saying this is a provocation, and that they need to understand the need to sacrifice for the greater good. An interesting concept, is it not? This week Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder visited Poland. He put and end to any lingering tension or suspicions over the issue, saying a resounding no to any talk of right of return or compensation. The basis of the understanding between Sari Nusseibah and Ami Ayalon is based on the same basic understanding. If they were the leaders of their respective nations we would be much better off.
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Palestinians and the 'right of return', Israel doesn't have to affirm bogus Palestinian refugee claims to resolve this issue, Alan Dershowitz, Cambridge, Mass., April 16, 2007 Among the major barriers to peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis is the so-called right of return. In its broadest formulation, this "right" belongs to some 4 million alleged descendants of the 700,000 or so Palestinian Arabs who left what is now Israel as the result of the war that began when Israel declared statehood in 1948. Palestinians say the Israeli government used the war as an excuse to chase a significant percentage of its Arab population out of the newly formed Jewish state. Palestinians call this war and its aftermath "al Nakba" – "the catastrophe." Israelis insist this catastrophe was self-inflicted. By attacking Israel in a genocidal attempt to push the Jews into the sea, the combined Arab armies created the refugee problem. Israel acknowledges that it forced out some local Palestinians who lived in areas critical to the defense of the new state. But Israel insists that many other Palestinians left of their own volition or at the behest of Arab leaders who promised that the Palestinians would return triumphantly after Israel was defeated. What is beyond dispute is that many of the refugees – regardless of how they became refugees – were placed in miserable camps and kept there for half a century by the Arab nations in which they sought refuge. The millions of other refugees who were forced to leave their homes in the decades following World War II – the Sudeten-Germans, the Greeks and Turks, Pakistanis and Indians, and the 700,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries – have all been integrated and normalized. Only the Palestinian refugees have been kept in camps by their Arab hosts. The reason was and is entirely political: to maintain resentment and to hold open the empty promise of a triumphant return that would achieve demographically what the Arab nations have been unable to achieve militarily – destruction of the Jewish state. Israel sees the right not as an individual, humanitarian claim, but rather as a collective, political assertion designed to turn Israel into another Arab state. In 1949, Egypt's foreign minister candidly acknowledged: "It is well known and understood that the Arabs, in demanding the return of the refugees to Palestine, mean their return as masters of their homeland, and not as slaves. More explicitly: they intend to annihilate the state of Israel." That is why Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert may have been correct in principle when he announced recently that he would never accept a right of return by Palestinian refugees and their descendants. His argument was simple: The Palestinians, aided by the surrounding Arab countries, started a war against the new state of Israel in an effort to destroy it; had they instead accepted the partition – the two-state solution – Israel would have accepted the presence of significant numbers of Palestinians in the new Jewish state. But once the Palestinians started a genocidal war, the inevitable consequence was the creation of refugees. Even if some were in fact forced to leave by Israeli military commanders, such actions were in response to the attack by the Arabs. The best proof of the correctness of Mr. Olmert's view is to imagine what would be happening today if the shoe were on the other foot. Imagine if the Palestinians had won and many Israelis had been forced to leave, while others left of their own volition or as the result of fear. Now imagine those Jews seeking a right of return, either in the immediate aftermath of the war or 60 years later. It is inconceivable that a Palestinian state would grant Jewish refugees a right of return. Certainly that would be true if the number of Israeli refugees and their descendants threatened to outnumber the Palestinian population. How can a right of return go only one way? Has Yemen offered its Jewish refugee population any right of return or compensation? Has Egypt? Has Iran? Has Iraq? Has Syria? Of course not. Of all the post-WWII refugee claims, the Palestinian claim is the weakest, and yet it has received the widest and most vocal support from the United Nations and the international community. Having concluded that Olmert was right as a matter of principle, I also believe that he may have been wrong as a matter of tactics. The Palestinian narrative, whether factually correct or incorrect, is a reality in the minds of most Palestinians. Earlier Israeli prime ministers recognized that and were prepared to compromise principle for a pragmatic peace. They indicated a willingness to accept some symbolic right of return coupled with compensation. As current Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres once put it: Don't destroy our enemies' dream; just don't let them turn it into our nightmare. This issue is of great importance in light of the Saudi peace plan, which is ambiguous on the issue of refugees: demanding a just resolution, but not specifying the details of such a resolution. A just resolution could include a guaranteed right of all refugees and their descendants to return to this newly established Palestinian state, while also allowing those actual refugees – but not their relatives – who can prove they were ejected, to be reunited with families that now live in Israel or to be reasonably compensated for their financial losses. A numerical cap would have to be placed on the number of refugees allowed to move to Israel and their entry would be subject to security requirements. A reciprocal right should be accorded to Jewish refugees from Arab countries. For peace to be achieved, pragmatism must be balanced with principle. The right of return should be implemented so as to protect Israel against demographic annihilation without denigrating the Palestinian narrative. • Alan Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard University, is the author of "The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved."
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