Israel/Palestine
Related: About this forumDon’t forget what we lost, too
Compensation for Jews pushed out of Arab lands may become yet another issue
MUCH as Palestinian refugees and their offspring remember the orange groves and cinemas they lost in Jaffa when Israel was born in 1948, Jews who once lived in Iraq recite the qasidaslyrical Arabic poetryand recall the time when most of Iraqs banks and transport companies were run by Jews. Iraq has gone downhill since they forced us out, sighs a professor at a gathering of academics of Iraqi origin at Or Yehuda, a Tel Aviv suburb, slipping into Arabic. Mubki, lamentable.
American officials are unclear on the subject of whether they have formally raised the issue of Jews driven out of Arab lands as part of their proposed framework to establish an international fund to compensate Palestinians who fled the new state of Israel in 1948. But leaders of Israels Sephardic Jews (most of whom came from Arab lands) criticise their own negotiators for not raising the issue more forcefully.
Why does Israel ask for compensation for Holocaust victims but not for the Jews from the Arab world? asks Levana Zamir, leader of an association for Egyptian Jews in Israel. Because our leaders are Ashkenazi [European Jews], and we are Mizrahim [Orientals], she says. We had another kind of Shoah [Holocaust]. A million Jews [from Arab lands] lost everything.
http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21596578-compensation-jews-pushed-out-arab-lands-may-become-yet-another-issue-dont
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)oh wait..... Israel had some recently vacated property didn't it, and gosh those spaces got filled pretty quickly
To call holding a Palestinian state hostage to what other countries did 70-50 years ago duplicitous is polite at best
It's pathetic.
King_David
(14,851 posts)or 5 to 10 ?
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)or are ProIsrael pundits re-refugeeing them to score cheap political points
Calling Mizrahim "refugees," first of all, denies Mizrahim any opportunity to be Zionists in their own right. While it is true that European Zionist organizations only turned their attention to Arab Jewryat the time, around eight percent of the world Jewish populationin the 1940s, organic Zionist organizations were active in Tunisia and Morocco in the early 20th century. In fact, Yemeni Jews had already begun immigration to mandate Palestine in the early 1900s. As it happens, the Yemeni Jewish immigrants were treated like Palestinian laborers: European Zionist settlers believed they could subsist on so-called "Arab wages," and denied them any position of political power after independence.
Calling Mizrahim refugees has also strangely been linked to the Palestinian right of return. In 1976, the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries was founded, in large part to claim that Oriental Jews were banished from Arab countries and ought to have compensation rights. WOJAC's goal in claiming compensation rights was not to get any monetary compensation from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco or Tunisia, but to set these debts off against the ones owed to the Palestinians.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/10/the-mizrahi-jewish-refugee-problem.html
also
http://972mag.com/spineless-bookkeeping-the-use-of-mizrahi-jews-as-pawns-against-palestinian-refugees/56472/
King_David
(14,851 posts)Most were born in other countries.
The real sin is the other countries do not allow them citizenship they deserve in the lands they were born.
azurnoir
(45,850 posts)but thanks your only proving the point made in the daily beast article
Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)As is repatriation on the off-chance that the refugees wish to return well, the ones who haven't annuled their refugee status by accepting citizenship in another nation, that is...
R. Daneel Olivaw
(12,606 posts)I'm not so sure that you want to go down this path, King. Comparing what other countries in the region did to their Jewish populations vs the same thing that Israel did to the Palestinians (large scale expulsion) puts the latter in the same category as the former. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Wouldn't you agree?