Abe Wisse Schachter has this opinion piece on non-Palestinian Middle East refugees in today's New York Post: (With thanks: Israel B)
(June 12, 2006): OK, politics makes for strange bedfellows - but the pairing of lefty Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan) and righty Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) has got to take the cake. The cause? Middle East refugees. Specifically, non-Palestinian Middle East refugees - Jews and Christians.
As Nadler put it in a press release, "When the Middle East peace process is discussed, Palestinian refugees are often addressed. However, Jewish refugees [from the 1948 war, when the Arab states attacked the just-declared state of Israel] outnumbered Palestinian refugees, and their forced exile from Arab lands must not be omitted from public discussion on the peace
process. It is simply not right to recognize the rights of Palestinian refugees without recognizing the rights of Jewish refugees," said Nadler.
So along with Sens. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and Reps. Michael Ferguson (R-N.J.), Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), Nadler and Santorum have introduced a bill to instruct U.S. diplomats how to handle the debate over Middle East refugees in international forums.
Under the resolutions, when the subject of Middle East refugees is raised at, say, the United Nations, U.S. representatives must ensure "that any explicit reference to Palestinian refugees is matched by a similar explicit reference to Jewish and other refugees, as a matter of law and equity."
The fate of Palestinians who fled or were forced out of the Jewish state in 1948 has been touted as a major issue ever since - a problem that, it's argued, Israel is responsible for solving.
Ignored is the fate of all the Jews who at the same time were expelled or forced to flee from their homelands - the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa. (..)
Jews who had lived for generations in countries like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Morocco and Libya were made to leave their birth countries as soon as Israel was declared, most without their belongings or having been compensated for their lost property or lost income.
In fact, the two situations aren't parallel - and the difference is pretty telling. The Jewish refugees were resettled - mostly in Israel, the United States and elsewhere - and have become citizens of those countries. In other words, friendly nations helped them move on with their lives.
Not so, the Palestinians: Back in '48, the United Nations took up the task, not of resettling them in other Arab nations, but of maintaining them in refugee camps. For six decades, their "friends" have sacrificed these Palestinians' future in order to keep the grievance alive as a political issue.
The Arab League issued instructions barring the Arab states from granting citizenship to Palestinian refugees (or their descendants) "to avoid dissolution of their identity and protect their right to return to their homeland." Jordan is the only country to grant citizenship rights to Palestinian refugees; its population is now more than half "Palestinian." And the United Nations has kept on obliging this Arab intransigence - so that today there are some 4.1 million "stateless" Palestinians (mostly the descendants of the original refugees) living in wretched towns (they're only called camps) across the Middle East.
Few Jews would want to return to the Arab states that exiled them or their ancestors. Meanwhile, the Arab world's intransigence has worked - insofar as most world diplomats now assume that the fate of millions of Palestinian refugees must be decided by Israel and the Palestinian Authority as part of any comprehensive peace settlement.
Raising the profile of "Jewish refugees" may be a longshot for shifting those expectations, but Santorum sees it as necessary: "For any comprehensive Middle East peace agreement to be credible, durable and enduring, [to] constitute an end to conflict in the Middle East and
provide for finality of all claims, the agreement must address and resolve all outstanding issues, including the legitimate rights of all peoples displaced from Arab countries."
Pushing for actual justice in Mideast diplomacy? Well, it's worth a try.
Read article in full (registration required)
No comments:
Post a Comment