The letter that never got published

Today is 14 May. To coincide with what the Palestinians refer to as their 'Nakba' Day, the New York Times saw fit to publish a report by their Israel correspondent Jodi Rodoren, giving the oxygen of publicity to the nihilistic NGO Zochrot. Zochrot have just launched a new 'phone app' to identify the sites of 400 Arab villages destroyed in the 1948 war of independence.The NYT are following the Guardian, who did their promotional piece last week. In response, CiF Watch put up this post, questioning the revisionist and peremptory mention of the 'Jewish Nakba'. Predictably, the Guardian chose not to publish a letter from Lyn Julius, drawing attention to the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands.

CiF Watch writes:

On May 4th we posted about an article by Guardian Middle East editor Ian Black that whitewashed the radical anti-Israel agenda of the NGO, Zochrot.  However, what we didn’t address at the time was Black’s characteristic whitewash of the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands in the following passage of the article:

Zochrot’s focus on the hyper-sensitive question of the 750,000 Palestinians who became refugees has earned it the hostility of the vast majority of Israeli Jews who flatly reject any Palestinian right of return. Allowing these refugees – now, with their descendants, numbering seven million people – to return to Jaffa, Haifa or Acre, the argument goes, would destroy the Jewish majority, the raison d’etre of the Zionist project. (Israelis often also suggest an equivalence with the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who lost homes and property after 1948 in Arab countries such as Iraq and Morocco – although their departure was encouraged and facilitated by the young state in the 1950s.)

We were going to comment on Black’s historical revisionism today when we learned that Lyn Julius - one of the more knowledgeable commentators on the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries – had submitted a letter to the Guardian in response which (unsurprisingly) the paper declined to publish.  
Here’s her letter:

Ian Black’s article (Remembering the Nakba: Israeli group puts 1948 back on the map) promotes a fringe Israeli NGO’s sick objective: the destruction of the state of Israel through the Palestinian ‘right of return’, while virtually ignoring the ‘Jewish Nakba’ of 856,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries at the same time.
Wringing their hands about depopulated Palestinian villages, Zochrot remain ignorant, silent and unmoved by the depopulation of scores of Arab cities of their age-old Jewish communities.
There are almost no Jews living in Baghdad, Alexandria, Tripoli, Sana’a and Damascus  today. While the Palestinians were the tragic by-product of a war their leadership launched and lost, a larger number of Jews became refugees through an Arab policy of scapegoating and ethnic cleansing.
The mass airlifts of these persecuted Jews to Israel were in fact rescue missions.
Antisemitism prevents any possible return of Jews to Arab countries.
Imagine if a Zochrot equivalent operated in Baghdad, where Jews were once the largest single ethnic group.
On second thoughts, don’t. The Jews would be run out of the city and would be lucky to escape with their lives.

Finally, here’s a graph by the group ‘Justice for Jews from Arab countries‘ quantifying the extent of the forced Jewish exodus.


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