Honig: who will pay Jewish refugees?

 Egyptian Jewish refugees arriving in Piraeus en route to Israel, 1950s (photo: JDC archives)

 Sarah Honig is my favourite Jerusalem Post columnist, but her piece on John Kerry's proposed compensation for Jewish Refugees from Arab lands is a little off-base. Yes, the proposal could be playing to the antisemitic stereotype of the Jew who would sell his soul for money - but there is no denying that compensation for Jewish refugees - by no means a new concept - is their due. I do not share Sarah's cynicism that no-one will pay. Uncle Sam will end up paying the lion's share - but the Arab world must dig into their pockets too.  Unless the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing show contrition, there can be no genuine reconciliation between Jews and Arabs. And an apology would cost them nothing.

The point of departure here is that Jews - be their background Mideastern or otherwise - are greedy. If only offered enough payback, Israel’s “hardliners” will let go of all their mistrust of the Arabs, among whom they or their ancestors lived and from whom they had to flee for fear of their lives.

Thus – to bait those covetous Jews – the notion of compensating Jewish refugees from Arab lands was inserted into Kerry’s so-called framework for a peace agreement.

At first glance it looks like an unassailable proposition. If anything, it should be cheered. Here, so it would seem, is the first tangible acknowledgement of our long-time contentions that there had been no Arab calamity in 1948 but in effect an exchange of populations.

Some 600,000 Arabs fled what was to become Israel – in many cases at the prompting of their leaders. This resulted directly from a war the Arabs had instigated to annihilate Israel. Their misfortune was that the genocide they planned had backfired and the Jews, slated for extermination, had the temerity to win and remain alive.

In fact, these uncooperative Jews remained alive enough to absorb into their midst over 800,000 Jews who fled Arab lands. Unlike the Palestinians, these Jewish refugees did not start a war, did not aim to massacre their neighbors or destroy the countries where they had constituted the oldest continuous communities, long predating both the Arab conquests and Islam.

These were genuine refugees rather than frustrated aggressors who had ascribed their own homicidal fervor to their intended victims.

The so-called Palestinian refugees, furthermore, weren’t on the whole local Arabs anyhow. Many were itinerant Arab laborers drawn to this country by the Zionist Jews who made the desert bloom and the land habitable. For the benefit of those who forget, this was the remote, malaria-ridden, depopulating hinterland of the decaying Ottoman Empire. The Jews, who longed for this forlorn place – their one and only historic home – literally watered the wasteland with their blood, sweat and tears.

Word then got round the entire Arab sphere that there’s opportunity to be had here – the term used was “prosperity.” Arabs started flocking in from Iraq, Syria, Egypt and all the way to Libya and the Maghreb.

The British mandatory government, which callously collaborated in the Nazi “final solution” by barring the entry to this country of desperate Jewish refugees from Hitler’s hell, flung the gates open for Arab economic migrants (see Joan Peters’ matchless From Time Immemorial). The UN later unabashedly defined as a Palestinian refugee any Arab, no matter from where, who sojourned temporarily here for two years before the 1948 Arab attack on day-old Israel.

No such benign attention was focused on Jews fleeing Arab countries. Indeed no attention whatsoever was paid them. They, like the displaced post-Holocaust European Jews, were looked upon as detestable bothers whose very plight upset the global applecart and destabilized the Mideast. Jewish tragedies evoked no compassion. It’s as if Jews were anyhow, from the dawn of history, portable and destined to rootlessness and wandering.

So obviously no heartstrings were tugged by the fact that refugee Jews from Arab jurisdictions had left far more land and way more property behind than did the diverse Arab transients who ran away from Israel, plainly expecting the Jews to mete out to them all that they had boastfully declared they would do to the Jews.

Arab hardship was lamented while Jewish suffering was, as per usual, overlooked (if not actually disdained). Making matters worse was that beleaguered newborn Israel, where there wasn’t enough of anything and where the most basic foodstuffs were severely rationed, welcomed the refugees as repatriated brethren.

The reverse occurred across the armistice lines. Arab refugees were segregated in camps, not allowed to assimilate or to economically rehabilitate. A special UN agency – UNWRA – was set up uniquely for them and for them alone. Their refugee status was perpetuated over the generations. The Jews, in contrast, were never regarded as refugees.

Israel is held accountable for the Arab displacement, despite the fact that it implored the Arabs to stay and not to attack. Consequently, in Kerry’s view, Israel must in the very least compensate dispossessed Arabs. To make this palatable, it appeared prudent to also throw in compensation for the Jews who streamed penniless into Israel from all corners of the Mideast.

But is it fairness Kerry is after? The truth is quickly exposed via a simple question – who will pay? Whereas Israel must make reparations to the Arabs (because they had failed to defeat it), who will pay the Jewish refugees?

Surely it won’t be the Palestinians – not that we know who among them would pay even if they were trustworthy peace partners, which they clearly are not. Will jihadist Gaza pay? Will terror-glorifying Ramallah? Seriously? Even if all the goodwill in the universe suddenly descended upon them, they will surely shirk responsibility for what Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, etc. had done.

And surely Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Tripoli, Sana’a, etc. (all in the dire throes of internecine turmoil) will assert that they aren’t sides to any deal between Ramallah and Jerusalem.

Technically they would be darn tootin’ right. Washington cannot foist any sort of financial onus on them. Obama (considering the deficits with which he has lumbered his own country) would surely not endorse a payout to Jewish refugees from depleted American coffers. That’s not how far his “sharing the wealth” ethos extends.

The long and the short of it is that nobody will compensate the Arab realm’s Jewish refugees. Obama knows it. Kerry knows it. So why make promises that can’t possibly be kept? Well, of course Kerry’s entire misnamed peace framework is a promise that can’t be kept.

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