Sunday, May 1, 2011
I am a refugee
I am a refugee
By DANNY AYALON
09/01/2010 22:28
As a descendant of a family forced out of Algeria, my father and I – and the millions of other Jews from families who were expelled from Arab countries after 1948 – are entitled to redress.
As a sitting member of a democratic government, it might appear strange to declare that I am a refugee. However, my father, his parents and family were just a few of the almost one million Jews who were expelled or forced out of Arab lands. My father and his family were Algerian, from a Jewish community thousands of years old that predated the Arab conquest of North Africa and even Islam. Upon receiving independence, Algeria allowed only Muslims to become citizens and drove the indigenous Jewish community and the rest of my family out.
While many people constantly refer to the Arab or Palestinian refugees, few are even aware of the Jewish refugees from Arab lands.
While those Arabs who fled or left Mandatory Palestine and Israel numbered roughly 750,000, there were roughly 900,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands. Before the State of Israel was reestablished in 1948, there were almost one million Jews in Arab lands, today there are around 5,000.
An important distinction between the two groups is the fact that many Palestinian Arabs were actively involved in the conflict initiated by the surrounding Arab nations, while Jews from Arab lands were living peacefully, even in a subservient dhimmi status, in their countries of origin for many centuries if not millennia.
In addition, Jewish refugees, as they were more urban and professional, as opposed to the more rural Palestinians, amassed far more property and wealth which they had to leave in their former county.
Financial economists have estimated that, in today’s figures, the total amount of assets lost by the Jewish refugees from Arab lands, including communal property such as schools, synagogues and hospitals, is almost twice that of the assets lost by the Palestinian refugees. Furthermore, one must remember that Israel returned over 90 percent of blocked bank accounts, safe deposit boxes and other items belonging to Palestinian refugees during the 1950s.
EVEN THOUGH the number of Jewish refugees and their assets are larger than that of the Palestinians, the international community only appears to be aware of the latter’s plight.
There are numerous major international organizations devoted to the Palestinian refugees. There is an annual conference held at the United Nations and a refugee agency was created just for the Palestinian refugees. While all the world’s refugees have one agency, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Palestinians fall under the auspices of another agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
UNWRA’s budget for 2010 is almost half of UNHCR’s budget.
Equally impressive is the fact that UNHCR prides itself on having found “durable solutions” for “tens of millions” of refugees since 1951, the year of its establishment. However, UNRWA does not even claim to have found “durable solutions” for anyone.
If that is not distorted enough, let’s look at the definitions and how they are applied: normally the definition of a refugee only applies to the person that fled and sought refuge, while a Palestinian refugee is the person that fled and all of their descendants for all time. So, according to the UNRWA definition of conferring refugee status on descendants, I would be a refugee.
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 to, the Arab refugees should find their national aspirations being met by a Palestinian state.
WITH DIRECT negotiations about to resume between Israel and the Palestinians, the spotlight will be returned to this issue. The so-called Palestinian ‘right of return’ is legal fiction. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, the supposed source for this ‘right’ does not mention this term, is not legally binding and, like all other relevant United Nations resolutions uses the intentionally ambiguous term ‘refugees’ with no appellation.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, still seen as the primary legal framework for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict asserts that a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement should necessarily include “a just settlement of the refugee problem.”
No distinction is made between Arab refugees and Jewish refugees.
In fact, one of the leading drafters of the resolution, Justice Arthur Goldberg, the United States’ Chief Delegate to the United Nations, said: “The resolution addresses the objective of ‘achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem.’ This language presumably refers both to Arab and Jewish refugees.”
In addition, every peace conference and accord attended or signed between Israel and its Arab neighbors uses the term “refugees” without qualification.
During the famous Camp David discussions in 2000, president Clinton, the facilitator and host of the negotiations said: “There will have to be some sort of international fund set up for the refugees. There is, I think, some interest, interestingly enough, on both sides, in also having a fund which compensates the Israelis who were made refugees by the war, which occurred after the birth of the State of Israel. Israel is full of people, Jewish people, who lived in predominantly Arab countries who came to Israel because they were made refugees in their own land”.
In 2008, the US Congress passed House Resolution 185 granting, for the first time, equal recognition to Jewish refugees, while affirming that the US government will now recognize that all victims of the Arab-Israeli conflict must be treated equally.
I am proud of the fact that the Knesset passed a resolution in February of this year that will make compensation for Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries after 1948 an integral part of any future peace negotiations. The Israeli bill stipulates that “The state of Israel will not sign, directly or by proxy, any agreement or treaty with a country or authority dealing with a political settlement in the Middle East without ensuring the rights of Jewish refugees from Arab countries according to the UN’s refugee treaty.”
Before 1948 there were nearly 900,000 Jews in Arab lands while only a few thousand remain. Where is the international outrage, the conferences, the proclamations for redress and compensation? While the Palestinian refugee issue has become a political weapon to beat Israel, the Arab League has ordered its member states not to provide their Palestinian population with citizenship; Israel absorbed all of its refugees, whether fleeing the Holocaust or persecution and expulsion from Arab lands.
People like my father, the hundreds of thousands who came to Israel and the millions of Israelis descended from these refugees are entitled to redress. It is vital that this issue return to the international agenda, so we don’t once again see an asymmetrical and distorted treatment of Arabs and Jews in the Israeli-Arab conflict.
The writer is Israel’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs.
'Include Jewish refugees from Arab lands in talks'
'Include Jewish refugees from Arab lands in talks'
12/14/2010 22:09
Foreign Ministry pushing to include Jews who fled from Arab countries in core issue discussion with the US about refugees.
With the Palestinian refugee issue one of the core issues expected to be at the center of the US's new diplomatic push, the foreign ministry is actively engaged in an effort to ensure that Jewish refuges who fled Arab lands are not forgotten.
Deputy Foreign Ministry Danny Ayalon, who is leading the push to include Jewish refugees in the core issue discussion with the US about refugees, said "it is vitally important to return this issue to the international agenda. It is a matter of justice, closure and righting a wrong."
Ayalon, whose father came to Israel after being forced out of Algeria, said this issue has "a practical as well as a moral aspect. The demands from the two sides are asymmetrical, the Palestinians talk of rights and justice [for Palestinian refugees], yet the rights and justice of the Jewish refugees from Arab lands have been ignored and suppressed for too long. "
In an article Ayalon wrote in September in The Jerusalem Post entitled "I am a refugee," Ayalon said that while some 750,000 Arabs fled or left Mandatory Palestine, there were some 900,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands.
"We are going to make an effort now to bring to the forefront the plight of the Jews from the Arab countries,” he said.
The foreign ministry, in an effort to place this issue high on the international agenda, has appointed an official to coordinate the matter. He has met over the last few weeks with historical and legal experts, and is preparing a detailed position paper that will be entered into the discussion on the refugee issue.
“We will make sure that this will be an important and integral part of the negotiations for a final settlement," Ayalon said. "Just as the Arab refugees is an issue, so is the Jewish refugees.”
The Foreign Ministry recently sent a cable to all Israel's representations abroad calling on the country's envoys to bring the issue up with the leadership in the capitals where they are serving.
Diplomatic officials said the reason for raising the issue is not necessarily to receive compensation for the Jews who left the Arab countries, though this could be a factor when the Palestinians demand reparations from Israel for Palestinian refugees, but rather to seek redress, and an acknowledgement by the world that in 1948 there was not only a Palestinian refugee issue, but a second one, involving Jews who – unlike the Palestinians – were fully absorbed.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has made clear that the core issues he believes should be addressed first in the indirect talks being conducted by the US are refugees, recognition of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, and security. The Palestinians, however want to focus first on borders and Jerusalem.
Why did Jews go to Israel from other Middle Eastern countries?
Why did Jews go to Israel from other Middle Eastern countries?
Following the 1947 United Nations vote to partition Palestine, Arab violence against Jews erupted throughout the Middle East and North Africa where more than 870,000 Jews were living (1945 estimate). Many of the Jews resided in communities with a continuous Jewish existence for 2,500 years or more.
Even before the November 1947 UN vote, Arab delegates to the UN, in particular those of Egypt and Iraq, had hinted at their intentions in speeches, warning that Partition might endanger Jews in Arab lands, intensify antisemitism and lead to massacres of Jews. These veiled threats must have had a chilling impact on Jews in Arab lands where memories of the pro-Nazi stance of the local Arab governments and nationalists were still fresh, especially in Iraq, Syria and Egypt, as well as in Libya where Arab mobs had accepted the occupying Germans’ invitation to plunder the Jews. And recall the incitement to murder Jews issued over Radio Berlin during World War II by Haj Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem. These facts make obvious nonsense out of claims that Jews were expelled from Arab countries only because the Palestinian Arabs were expelled from Palestine.
In Iraq, new laws made Zionism punishable by death. In Aleppo, Syria, 300 Jewish homes and 11 synagogues were burned to the ground, and half of the city’s 4,000 Jews fled elsewhere. In Aden, 82 Jews were killed. Pogroms accompanied by confiscation of Jewish property and belongings was the norm in Arab countries. From 1948 on, Jewish communities that had survived in Arab countries since antiquity dwindled to a few families or became extinct.
Aproximately 600,000 Jews sought refuge in the State of Israel. Since their belongings were confiscated as the price of leaving, they arrived in Israel pennyless, but they were welcomed and quickly absorbed into Israeli society. In reality, an exchange of populations took place between Jews leaving Arab countries and Arabs leaving Jewish Palestine. But while the Jewish refugees quickly became productive citizens of their new home country of Israel, the Palestinian Arabs were forced by their politically motivated leaders to fester as “refugees” for generations.
Israel absorbed the Jews who fled Arab countries and millions of refugees from Nazi and Soviet Europe in the same time. After brief periods of adjustment, the Jews fleeing life-threatening conditions in other lands became indistinguishable from other Israelis. Today tiny Israel, with relatively few resources, has no “refugee problem” while the wealthy Arab countries, with vast lands and oil riches, cannot find a way to help the Palestinian Arabs.
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