Mick Hartley

Here's an interesting development:

Israel's Knesset last [Monday] night passed a landmark bill safeguarding the rights of Jewish refugees from Arab countries by 35 votes to one.

The law, proposed by MK Nissim Zev of Shas, requires the Israeli government to raise the issue of Jewish refugees when negotiating Arab demands regarding Arabs who fled pre-state Israel during the War of Independence. Whenever the subject of Arab refugees is raised in talks, the law requires the Israeli government to raise the question of compensation for Jews forced to flee their homes.

“The State of Israel will not sign, either 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 U.N.’s refugee treaty,” the law states.

Bataween covered this at Solomonia (and at the Jewish Chronicle):

Up to a million Jews were forced to leave Arab countries and Iran in the decades following the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948, due to state-sanctioned persecution and violence. Today only some 4,000 Jews are left in the Arab world, bringing to an end a Jewish presence that in many cases pre-dated Islam and the Arab conquest by 1,000 years.

The bill has taken two years, since its initiation by MK Nissim Ze'ev of the Sephardi Orthodox Shas party, to become law. The new law aims to protect the rights of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and Iran in future peace negotiations in the Middle East. The bill defines a Jewish refugee as an Israeli citizen who left one of the Arab states, or Iran, following religious persecution. It stipulates that the Israeli government must include Jewish refugee rights, notably compensation, in all future peace talks.

Stanley Urman, the head of the advocacy group Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, welcomed the Knesset decision, saying: "The world must realise that Palestinians were not the only Middle East refugees; that there were Jewish refugees who also have rights under international law. This recognition is good for the State of Israel and it is good for the people of Israel."

Why is this bill so important? Because it holds the key to real peace in the Middle East. So many efforts at making peace between Israel and the Palestinians have run aground on the rock of the Palestinian 'right of return'. Not content with a Palestinian Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza, even the 'moderates' of the Fatah camp have been reluctant to recognise Israel as a Jewish state. The reason is that they are unwilling to drop their demand for the Arab refugees of 1948 – who now number upwards of four million if you include their descendants – to return to their homes in what is now Israel. This demand amounts to no less than the destruction of Israel by demographic means and the de facto creation of two Palestinian states, one in the West Bank, and one in place of Israel.

For too long the Arab refugees have occupied centre-stage in the Arab-Israeli drama. They are seen as the main victims of an Israeli injustice. By introducing the Jewish refugees into the picture – they and their descendants make up just under half the Jewish population of Israel – it will now be accepted that there were two sets of refugees, both with rights, who exchanged places in the Middle East.

Well…whether the Arab nations will now accept the other side of the Arab-Israeli refugee problem remains to be seen. Frankly that hope seems wildly optimistic at best. But it is surely an important and necessary development, both on the political and moral front: that one side at least is now committed to ensuring that the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab lands is linked to the issue of Palestinian refugees.

There's some more background here:

In April 2008, the U.S. Congress approved Resolution 185, supporting rights for Jews from Arab countries and stating that whatever rights are granted to Palestinian refugees in any future Israeli-Arab accord must be similarly accorded to Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

"We should have acted even before the US Congress," MK Ze'ev said after the conference, "but certainly now that the U.S. has recognized that the Jews and Arabs must be treated the same, certainly we should recognize that the Jews were robbed and were banished from their homes."

"In Damascus, we left all our property behind, including public and private property," one woman said at the conference. Another woman from Morocco said that the Arabs stole "our jewelry from off our necks," and another from Egypt said, “My grandfather owned two six-story buildings, and he wasn’t allowed to take a thing; we had to leave with just the clothes on our backs…”

Writing in a 2007 report published by the JJAC, Minister Cotler explained, "Let there be no doubt about it: Where there is no remembrance, there is no truth; where there is no truth, there will be no justice; where there is no justice, there will be no reconciliation; and where there is no reconciliation, there will be no peace.”

Knesset Speaker Ruby Rivlin told the conference, "The number of Jews living in northern Africa and the Middle East before 1948 was more than one million [and more than the highest estimates of the number of Arab refugees – ed.] … The same is true with the monetary demands: If the [Arab] refugees’ property was estimated at $4 billion in today’s money, the property of the Jewish refugees is estimated at $6 billion.”

Bataween's post at the Jewish Chronicle attracted the following pertinent comment on the plight of the Palestinian refugees:  

The Arab nations could have solved their plight by absorbing them, instead of using them as pawns against Israel.

A complaint that gets right to the heart of the dispute: after the 1948 war, Israel gave the Jewish refugees homes, while the Arabs gave the Palestinians camps. The Jewish refugees are now part of Israel; the Palestinian refugees are still, effectively, in the camps, with their very own dedicated UN agency to fund them.

Then, the inevitable riposte:

[W]hy should the Arab nations "absorb" them? Should Britain "absorb" refugees from other countries? The Palestinian refugees are not the other Arab nations' problem. They are the problem of the Israelis and the Palestinians.

To which one might answer:

Firstly, Arab Nationalism is a major and much-trumpeted factor in Middle-Eastern politics:

Its central premise is that the peoples of the Arab World, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea, constitute one nation bound together by common linguistic, cultural, religious, and historical heritage, which should be rejuvenated and politically united. Their use for Modern Standard Arabic as the main written language & the Islamic faith predominance, consequently meant for the ideology that they have a common culture.

A common culture, the same language: what could have been easier than absorbing a relatively small number of refugees from Palestine? Compared to the other major population transfers of the time – India-Pakistan, say, or the Greek-Turkish population exchange of the early Twenties, this would have been relatively small-scale. It doesn't work like that, though. When denouncing Israel, Egyptians and Jordanians and Syrians are quick to proclaim the unity they feel as Arabs with their Palestinian brethren, but that doesn't seem to extend to actually helping them in any concrete fashion. Only Israel can, and must, pay for their suffering. Palestinians, it seems, are more useful when they're being repressed under the Zionist jackboot, in the full glare of the world's media, than they might be as individuals and fellow Arabs.

Not good enough? Well then, secondly, Arab nations have now waged three wars against Israel, and in each case have been, more or less, defeated. In general, aggressors who have subsequently been defeated have been made to pay some price for their transgressions – except, it seems, when the object of the aggression is The Zionist Entity. Surely, after merely succeeding in worsening the plight of the Palestinians, some moral commitment have been expected to a solution which didn't involve the destruction of Israel.

And, thirdly, the Arab states, as we've seen, have benefited very nicely from the Jewish flight from their homelands: to the tune of about $6 billion, if we're to believe Knesset Speaker Ruby Rivlin, above. Israel might be said to have used whatever came their way from the flight of the Palestinians to provide homes for the Jewish refugees. The Arabs had no such expense.

Not that I'm advocating the absorption of the Palestinians into Arab nations. We're way past that point now. The two-state option remains the only feasible solution. But at least there's now some official acknowledgement that there were two sides to the refugee problem, and the Knesset bill ensures that we don't forget that fact.