Monday, November 05, 2007
Asymmetrical refugees
An advocacy group is reminding us that Jews did not necessarily leave Arab lands for Israel voluntarily:
[A] Jewish advocacy group has scheduled a meeting in New York on Monday to call attention to people it terms “forgotten refugees.”
The organizing group, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, says it is referring to the more than 850,000 Jews who left their homes in Arab lands after the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948....
He said that a particular focus of the campaign would be the United Nations, where Palestinian concerns got regular attention and Israel was frequently the object of condemning resolutions. “The U.N. has participated in expunging this experience from the Mideast narrative and from the U.N. narrative,” Mr. Cotler said.
The campaign is aimed at assuring that mention of Jewish refugees is included in future General Assembly and Human Rights Council resolutions and commemorations.
Good luck with that. It will be easy for the anti-Zionists to defeat because today there is essentially no such thing as a Jewish refugee. Why? Because the Jews are competent at resettling and integrating their refugees.
The story of the Jewish expulsions in 1948 and subsequent integration is worth remembering, though, because it reminds us that there are only two explanations for the failure of the Arab countries similarly to integrate Palestinian Arab refugees. Either they were not competent to do so, or they deliberately confined them as refugees for political or geopolitical purposes. In the first case we might wonder why the world holds Israel responsible for the effects of Arab incompetence and Jewish competence -- both groups started with around 800,000 refugees, but the Jews wove themselves into Israel's national fabric while the Arabs remained "refugees" in law, at least, and multiplied by a factor of five within two generations. If, however, we believe that Arabs deliberately avoided integrating Palestinians for political or geopolitical gain, we should ask why the world does not condemn such deliberate and callous cruelty.
In both cases the answer seems obvious: the world simply holds Israel to a different and more demanding standard than any Arab state.
1 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon Nov 05, 11:12:00 PM:
"the world simply holds Israel to a different and more demanding standard than any Arab state." The hell you say...
While we're pipe dreaming, maybe the expelled Middle Eastern Jews can get some "right of return" action to the various countries where they had lived before being forcibly re-settled in Israel. Oh - and let's not leave out my more direct Eastern European Jewish ancestors. I'm pretty sure I have claim to a couple tracts of land somewhere in Poland.
Of course, we'll all be Europe bound on various rights of return since we'll need places to live after we're required to vacate our US land - once the Native Americans figure out that they can play gander to our US State Department supported peace processing goose.
