This month the United Nations marks World Refugee Day, a star-studded, multimedia campaign to raise awareness about the plight of refugees. Celebrities like Angelina Jolie have cut video spots that will be broadcast on television and spread on social media. Millions will participate in events spanning five continents, from concerts in London to a film festival in Beirut to a bike race in Ecuador. Yet mention of one group of refugees will be noticeably absent from any of these activities: the 850,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries during the past six decades. Their history remains one of the 20th century's greatest untold stories.
At the end of World War II, 850,000 Jews lived in Arab countries. Just 8,500 remain today. Their departure was no accident. After Arab leaders failed to annihilate Israel militarily in 1948, they launched a war of terror, incitement, and expulsion to decimate their own ancient Jewish communities.
In Iraq Jewish businessman Shafiq Adas, then the country's wealthiest citizen, was immediately arrested on trumped-up charges and publicly lynched. This was followed by bombings targeting Jewish institutions, arbitrary arrests of Jewish leaders, and massive government seizures of property. Within years virtually all of Iraq's 2,500-year-old Jewish community had fled, emptying the country of many of its greatest artists, musicians, and businessmen.
Similar scenes played out across the region, from Egypt to Syria to Libya to Yemen. State-sanctioned pogroms descended on Jewish neighborhoods, killing innocents and destroying ancient synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. New, draconian laws prevented Jews from public worship, forced them to carry Jewish identity cards, and seized billions of dollars in their property and assets. The total area of land confiscated from Jews in Arab countries amounts to nearly 40,000 square miles -- about five times the size of Israel's entire land mass.
The vast majority of these Jewish refugees came to Israel, nearly doubling its population. Most entered the Land of Milk and Honey with no milk, no honey, and no money. They were embraced with full citizenship rights and ambitious programs for integration, rising to the highest levels of society.
The years have passed, but the injustice inflicted upon these Jewish refugees continues. Many around the world have remained silent and complicit as Arab governments have sought to erase all memory of their stories.
Nowhere is this revisionist history clearer than in the halls of the United Nations. Year after year Palestinian refugees attract more attention and resources at the U.N. than Britney Spears at a paparazzi convention, yet not a single syllable about the Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries can be found in any of the 1,088 U.N. resolutions on the Middle East or the 172 U.N. resolutions dedicated to Palestinian refugees.
While Arab leaders have found a refuge from reality at the U.N., they have been unable to outrun the consequences of religious and sectarian persecution, incitement, and violence at home. In the rubble of Aleppo's former Jewish neighborhoods, Assad's Allawite-led regime continues to brutally suppress Syria's Sunni-led uprising. In Egypt mobs burn Coptic Christian churches in the same way that they attacked synagogues years ago. In Baghdad, where Jews once constituted a third of the population, Sunnis and Shiites remain pitted against each other after years of bloodshed.
Forging a peaceful future in the Middle East will require Arab governments to finally learn the lessons of their pasts. They must build inclusive societies that protect minorities and offer everyone a seat at the decision-making table.
The first steps toward true pluralism will come when Arab countries acknowledge the history of persecution and intolerance in their own lands. They should start by unearthing the 850,000 untold stories of Jews ripped from their ancient homes.
The historic Jewish presence in the Arab World must be recognized. The grave injustices inflicted upon them must be acknowledged. The crimes committed against them must be rectified.
Ron Prosor is Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations.
When she was little, her mother, my grandmother, was the nursing mother of a young Muslim baby, about my mother's age, because her mother couldn't feed her and there was no such thing as "breastmilk substitute".
She and my mom became good friends, but grew apart as the years passed because they went to different high schools.
Still, when the authorities in Libya gave the masses permission for 48 hours of violence, that young women, formerly breastfed by my grandma, pointed the crowd towards my mother's family hiding place, and urged them to "burn the place with a bottle of gasoline".
Even at 60, my mother remembers that heartless women TO THIS DAY, and she will never forget how cruel can Muslims be.
NEITHER WILL I.
What a bunch of nonsense.
Modern Israel only exists as a country since 1948, and Palestine doesn't exist at all (and has *never* existed) as a country.
In fact, before 1948, there was not even such a thing as a "Palestinian people".
All Arabs were just known simply as "Arabs", and "Palestine" was a generic, non-ethnical name for that patch of land (it was arbitrarily chosen by the British, who in turn copied it from the Ancient Romans who used to call that general area "Province of Palestine" over 2000 years ago when it was still inhabited by Jews and not a single Arab had settled there yet).
Until the end of World War I, the land had belonged to the Ottoman Empire (which was neither Arab *nor* Jewish).
After World War I, the term "Palestinian" was used as a generic identifier for "people who currently live in the patch of land which the British dubbed Palestine", i.e. it was used for Jewish and Arab and all other inhabitants alike.
In 1923, the eastern 80% of the British mandate of Palestine was separated off, purged of Jews, and established as a pure-Arab country (now known as "Jordan").
Accordingly, the name "Palestinian" then shifted to only include the inhabitants of the remaining western 20% of the land, but it was still used for *all* inhabitants independently of their ethnicity and origin.
(This is especially staggering, seeing as how the majority of those Arabs who happened to live in that land by 1948 and are now hence called "the Palestinians", only immigrated into the land *after 1850* from other Arab countries - i.e. during the same time when most of the Jewish inhabitants immigrated.)
And so began the narrative of the "Palestinian people" whose "ancient homeland" was "invaded" by the "evil Jews", which Anti-zionists have repeated over and over again so many times that the majority of the world's media audience has started believing it.
(The current generation of Palestinian youth seriously believes it as well, since they have been force-fed this propaganda since birth.)
The 1948 War of independence started on May 15 1948, when the one day-old country of Israel was simultaneously attacked by all its neighboring Arab states. It lasted 13 months. Why then are Arab Palestinian refugees defined as only those displaced BEFORE the beginning of war, not those displaced DURING the conflict? Easy: the Arabs were forewearned by their leaders and were offered shelters by their neighbors, resulting in a massive Arab Palestinian exodus before May 1948. But no one would offer Jews shelter prior to the creation of Israel on May 14th, so the exodus of Jews from Arab lands, including the Arab partition of Palestine, occurred during the war and, thus, after May 1948. The UNRWA definition, adopted after the end of the conflict, was carefully crafted so as not to be textually racist, yet to exclude Jews.
Thus, the 1,500 Palestinian Jews of East Jerusalem who were forcefully expelled by the Jordanians soon after they took that territory missed the UNRWA cut-off date by a few days and have never been recognized as Palestinian refugees.
For millennia, Jews have embodied the concept of refugee, yet the UN has never granted refugee status to any group of Jew anywhere at any time.
Your hatred of Israel is making you go crazy.
So sad that people believe such lies Jews move when they are persecuted. The persicution of the Jews in Iraq began in the In the 1930s. In the 1930s, the situation of the Jews in Iraq deteriorated. Previously, the growing Iraqi Arab nationalist sentiment included Iraqi Jews as fellow Arabs[citation needed], but these views changed with the introduction of Nazi propaganda and the ongoing conflict in the Palestinian Mandate. Despite protestations of their loyalty to Iraq, Iraqi Jews were increasingly subject to discrimination and harsh laws. On August 27, 1934 many Jews were dismissed from public service[citation needed], and quotas were set up in colleges and universities. Zionist activities were banned, as was the teaching of Jewish history and Hebrew in Jewish schools[citation needed]. Following the collapse of Rashid Ali's pro-Axis coup, the Farhud ("violent dispossession") pogrom of June 1 and 2, 1941, broke out in Baghdad in which approximately 200 Jews were murdered (some sources put the number higher[citation needed]), and up to 2,000 injured—damages to property were estimated at $3 million. There was also looting in many other cities at around the same time. Afterwards, Zionist emissaries from Palestine were sent to teach Iraqi Jews self-defense, which they were eager to learn. (Simon, Reguer, and Laskier, p 364)
In 1972, the News Media never knowledge the Arabs in the Middle East as Palestinians.
Today's News Media will never knowledge the Palestinians for what they are, Arabs!
Also, again speaking from a military perspective, it may have something to do with the vast amount of cameras and satellite intel access that Israel has (thanks to billions of US tax dollars), plus drones, and other aircraft, that constantly "surveil" the area, picking out... let's call them "targets".
A man (terrorist, if you want to call him that) carrying a weapon in an open area would probably be spotted rather quickly, bringing down a drone strike, etc...
And, I don't have the pics in front of me, but I seem to remember reading that quite a few ISRAELI military bases, outposts, guard shacks, etc. (let's call them "targets", just to be funny) are "near civilian areas"... A little bird reminded me that the HQ of Mossad or military intelligence, or one of those spy groups is in fact located in the heart of a major Israeli city...
So... why does Israel put rockets and planes and tanks and soldiers, all legitimate "targets" of a resistance movement, near civilian areas, thus increasing the likelihood of collateral damage???
1. Israel don't have any presence in Gaza strip, so why the terrorist are still firing rockets to civilian areas? you can respond as a civilian or as a military man. i think it named as a"terror".. remember 9/11? it was a resistance movement also?
2. US didn't gave to Israel a nickle for free, and amount of cameras and satellite intel access are paid only from Israeli defense budget, not US! by the way, US also helping to several Arab countries, including Saudis, i don't remember that Israel attacked US.
3. im sorry to say that but if you are a military man, you probably not a sharp one, maybe a jar-head... because if you saying that attacking civilians without any reason as a resistance movement, you justify terror.
Truth and reconciliation is a noble exercise that can bring closure to a traumatic event. However, Prosor demands it for one-side only. While he makes his egregious demands, Israel is already stoking the flames for another war in Lebanon. Below is an excerpt from Haaretz (5th July 2012):
[The commander of the IDF's 91st Division, Brigardier-General Hertzi Halevy] "The Goldstone report will pale in comparison to what will be here next time. There is no choice but to fight against the enemy where he is, and that is in the heart of a populated area. "
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/senior-idf-officer-israel-is-preparing-for-the-next-lebanon-war-1.449126
How many more refugees will there be escaping Israel's murderous rampage in Southern Lebanon? Does Israel not remember the fact that it murdered over 1000 civilians in its shameful 2006 Invasion?
That was the point of this article and you missed it entirely.
What needs to be recognised by 'the West' are the grave injustices committed by Europeans/Americans on the peoples of the MIddle East since the dawn of the 20th century.
Had Modern Political Zionism never caught on the Levant would've been a lot more peaceful. Consequently, Jews, Muslims and Christians would've lived in peace together. The onus is on Israel to publicly recognise the ethnic cleansing of Palestine during 1947-1948, as well as the practices of evictions, house demolitions and expulsion from land that occurred and occurs in the OPTs from 1967 onwards. There needs to be a public apology for this, and a recognition that the aims of Zionism had always been to displace the non-Jewish population of Palestine.
If you can't see that, Toots, then you don't see much.
No one really takes the UN seriously any more.
It's become a cesspool of third world autocracies united in one agenda to disrupt and corrupt any meager movement towards freedom and liberal democracy.
It is now a circus where Iran is appoint to the Commission on Women's Rights and the worst abusers of human rights such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria, China, etc., are appointed the overseers of the world's human rights.
The organization is far beyond its shelf life and free democracies would do well to form an entirely new organization and send the old one packing to meet in Mogadishu.
Although they exceed the numbers of the Arab refugees, the Jews who fled are a forgotten case. Whereas the former are at the very heart of the peace process with a huge UN bureaucratic machinery dedicated to keeping them in the camps, the nine hundred thousand Jews who were forced out of Arab countries have not been refugees for many years. Most of them, about 650,000, went to Israel because it was the only country that would admit them. Most of them resided in tents that after several years were replaced by wooden cabins, and stayed in what were actually refugee camps for up to twelve years. They never received any aid or even attention from the UN Relief And Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, or any other international agency. Although their plight was raised almost every year at the UN by Israeli representatives, there was never any other reference to their case at the world body.