It’s one thing to re-write history, but quite another to pretend as if a major historical event – involving a well-documented case of ethnic cleansing – never occurred.
A July 25th edition of the Guardian’s Data Blog, edited by Mona Chalabi, was titled ‘What happened to history’s refugees?‘ Here’s the strapline:
People have been forced to leave their countries since the very notion of a country was created. We take a look at some of the largest human movements in history to find out why people left their homes, where they went and what became of them.This ambitious project includes Israelites: Canaan (740 BC), Edict of Fontainebleau (France 1685), Muhacirs (Ottoman Empire 1783), Pogroms (Russia 1881), WWI (Europe 1914), WWII (Europe 1945), Nakba (Palestine 1948), and others. (...)
Did you notice an historical omission?
The Guardian completely whitewashed the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees between 1948 and 1967!
Jewish Refugees, 1948
…under the heavy weight of Anti-Jewish governments and policy, nearly one million Jews [beginning in 1948] from the Middle East and North Africa had their property confiscated, basic human rights stripped, and were systematically persecuted and victimized. Ultimately these Jews were forced to flee their homes and surrender their nationalities, becoming the “Forgotten Refugees” of the Middle East and North Africa.JIMENA reminds us that, though “UN Resolution 242 asserted that Jews fleeing Arab countries were ‘bona fide’ refugees” the international community, the media and educational systems have continuously ignored their plight.
Revisionist history of the Middle East conveniently excludes the fact that over half of Israel’s Jewish population live there not because European atrocities during World War II, but because of Anti-Jewish Arab governments who dispossessed and displaced their native Jewish populations following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Adopted narratives of the Arab-Israeli conflict fail to address the fact that Israel was the largest refugee camp in the Middle East, providing safe haven to some 650,000 dispossessed Middle Eastern and North African Jewish refugees whose ancestors had a continuous presence in the region for over 3,000 years.
Of the 800,000 or so Jewish refugees between 1948 and 1972, more than 200,000 found refuge in Europe and North America while 586,000 were resettled in Israel, ”without any compensation from the Arab governments who had confiscated their possessions.” Further, unlike Palestinian refugees who were displaced by war, a definitive report, co-authored by Irwin Cotler, concluded that Jews’ expulsion was part of an intentional and coordinated effort by Arab rulers:
These massive human rights violations were not events that occurred coincidently or haphazardly; nor were they the result only of state-sanctioned patterns of repression in each of the Arab countries, though this would be bad enough; rather, as the evidence discloses, they were the result of an international criminal conspiracy by the League of Arab States to target and persecute the Jewish populations in their respective countries.It’s one thing to parrot the Palestinian narrative of the “Nakba”, but what the Guardian did was to completely erase from the historical record the well-documented (and completely undisputed) forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of innocent Jews.
The Guardian’s ideologically inspired animosity towards the Jewish state has crossed a line, and the paper’s editors need to be held accountable for such completely ahistorical propaganda.
Read article in full
maybe Ms Chalabi left out the massive flights of refugees in India-Pakistan in 1947 because it would show how minor the palestinian Arab refugee experience was in comparison with others. It would also lead back to British responsibility for creating a condition that terrorized masses of people into fleeing.
ReplyDeleteOf course, in the Land of Israel, the first refugees, the first victims of ethnic cleansing, were Jews. As far back as 1920, an Arab pogrom in Jerusalem drove Jews out of their homes in the Old City. Then were pogroms against Jews in Jaffa, Hebron, Safed [Tsfat], Tiberias, etc. These incidents driving Jews out of their homes took place years before the rise of the State of Israel, in 1920. 1921, 1929, 1936-38, etc. In the Israeli War of Independence Arabs drove Jews out of their homes starting in December 1947. Check it out in the "palestine post". forerunner of the JPost of today. Check other papers of the time, including the Arab press.
I am very sorry to say that "THE GUARDIAN" has always been antisemitic!
ReplyDeleteNot "always", Anonymous 1. See the microfiched page from an old US Jewish newspaper reporting on a column in the Guardian titled "British paper asks free state in Palestine", dated Aug 29, 1942
ReplyDeletehttp://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00010090/00654
Yes, when it was the Manchester Guardian under the editorship of CP Snow it was pro-Zionist. Those were the days!
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, can I refer to you as Anon 2 if the other Anonymous is Anon 1?
She also never mentions the Holocaust and the obsession with all non-combatants who were Jewish by many on both sides of World War 2, resulting in the removal of most of European Jewry, including the murder of 6 million, which was the world impetus for all the human rights groups and the UN following.
ReplyDeleteBut, almost as big as leaving out the OVER a million Jews who were second-class citizens until they were murdered and chased out of the Ottoman Caliphate. The testimony of Dieter von Wisleczeny a vice-Fuehrer and administrator of Jewish affairs for Eichmann for Hungary, Slovakia and Greece at his trial in the US. He testified that the Mufti of Jerusalem the political leader of the Arabs of south Syria was one of the main instigators of the Holocaust.