Algemeiner(http://www.algemeiner.com)
The UN and Unequal Justice: The Case for Jewish Refugees From Arab Countries, 2 December 2014
The UN marked the 67th anniversary of the UN Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947, with an International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Indeed, the UN has declared the whole of 2014 as a year of solidarity with the Palestinian people. It is sometimes forgotten – and often not even known – that the UN partition resolution was the first-ever blueprint for a “two states for two peoples” solution. Regrettably, while Jewish leaders accepted the resolution, Arab and Palestinian leaders did not, and by their own acknowledgment, launched a war of aggression against the nascent Jewish state as well as a war against the Jewish nationals living in their respective countries.
Indeed, the documentary evidence demonstrates a series of repressive measures against Jews including denationalization, dispossession, arbitrary arrest and detention, torture and murder, and forced expulsion.
This double aggression resulted in two sets of refugees: Palestinian refugees resulting from the Arab war against the Jewish State, and Jewish refugees resulting from the Arab war against their own Jewish nationals.
Yet the false Middle East narrative – prejudicial to authentic reconciliation and peace between peoples as well as between states – continues to hold that there was only one victim population, Palestinian refugees; that Israel was responsible for the Palestinian nakba (catastrophe) of 1947-8; and that, as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has put it, as long as the crime of dispossession and refugeehood that was committed against the Palestinian people in 1947-48 is not redressed . . . there can be no peace.
This revisionist view of history ignores the fundamental fact that had the UN Partition Resolution been accepted, there would have been no 1948 Arab- Israeli war, no refugees, and none of the pain and suffering of these past 67 years. Indeed, the annual November 29 UN-organized International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People might well have been a day commemorating the 67th anniversary of the establishment of both the State of Israel and the State of Palestine.
Regrettably, as a result of this false narrative, the pain and plight of 850,000 Jews uprooted and displaced from Arab countries – the forced yet “forgotten exodus” as it has been called – has been expunged and eclipsed from both the Middle East peace and justice agenda for 67 years. It is a truth that must now be affirmed, acknowledged, and acted upon in the interests of peace, justice, and history.
The United Nations also bears express and continuing responsibility for this distorted Middle East narrative. In a word, since 1948, there have been more than 180 UN General Assembly resolutions that have specifically dealt with the Palestinian refugee plight. Yet not one of these resolutions makes any reference to the plight of Jewish refugees.
There are ten major UN agencies expending billions of dollars on behalf of Palestinian refugees. But there is not one UN agency – nor any money expended – on behalf of Jewish refugees. The entire year 2014 has been established as an International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People – but not one day for the Jewish People. So much for equal justice.
Thus the question: How do we rectify this historical – and ongoing – injustice?
First, the time has come – indeed it is long past – to restore the plight and truth of this forgotten – and forced – exodus of Jewish refugees to the Middle East peace and justice narrative. Indeed, the UN should take the lead in establishing a center of documentation and research to tell the 850,000 untold stories of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
Second, remedies for victim refugee groups – including rights of remembrance, truth, justice and redress, as mandated under human rights and humanitarian law – and referenced in UN World Refugee Day and especially for Palestinian refugees – must now be invoked for Jews displaced from Arab countries.
Third, in the manner of duties and responsibilities, each of the Arab countries – and the Arab League – must acknowledge their role and responsibility in their double aggression of launching a war against Israel and their human rights violations against their respective Jewish nationals. The culture of impunity must end.
Fourth, on the international level, the UN General Assembly – in the interests of peace, justice, and equality before the law – should include reference to Jewish refugees as well as Palestinian refugees in its annual resolutions; the UN Human Rights Council should address, as it has yet to do, the issue of Jewish as well as Palestinian refugees; and UN agencies dealing with compensatory efforts for Palestinian refugees should also address compensation for Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
Fifth, the annual November 29 commemoration by the United Nations of the international day of solidarity with the Palestinian people should be transformed into an international day of solidarity for a “two states for two peoples day” – as the initial 1947 UN partition resolution intended – and including solidarity with all refugees created by the Israeli conflict.
Sixth, jurisdiction over Palestinian refugees should be transferred from UNRWA to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. There was no justification then – and still less today – for the establishment of a separate body to deal only with Palestinian refugees, particularly when UNRWA has been itself compromised by its revisionist teaching of the Middle East peace and justice narrative.
Seventh, any bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations – and any and all discussions on the Middle East by the European Union, the Quartet, or any U.S.-proposed framework for peace agreements – which one hopes will presage a just and lasting peace – must include Jewish refugees as well as Palestinian refugees in an inclusive joinder of discussion.
Significantly, some Governments and Parliaments have made welcome progress on this question, such as the U.S. Congress in adopting legislation recognizing the plight of Jewish refugees and requiring that the issue be raised in any and all talks on Middle East peace. Recently, the Canadian government affirmed the Canadian Parliament’s recommendation for the recognition of the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Democratic parliaments should hold hearings on the issue to ensure public awareness and action, to allow for victims’ testimony, and to right the historical record.
The exclusion and denial of rights and redress to Jewish refugees from Arab countries continues to prejudice authentic negotiations between the parties and a just and lasting peace between them. Let there be no mistake about it: Where there is no remembrance, there is no truth; where there is no truth, there will be no justice; where there is no justice, there will be no reconciliation; and where there is no reconciliation, there will be no peace – which we all seek.
・Irwin Cotler is a member of the Canadian Parliament and the former Minister of Justice and Attorney of Canada. He is a Professor of Law (Emeritus) at McGill University and co-author of Jewish Refugees from Arab Lands: The Case for Rights and Redress.
(2)‘Palestine’: The Real Apartheid State , 2 December 2014
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, now serving the tenth year of his four-year term, recently defamed Israel’s “apartheid government.” Speaking in Cairo last weekend at an emergency session of the Arab League, he announced: “We will never recognize the Jewishness of the state of Israel.”
Abbas seemed especially riled by the “Jewish state” bill currently under Knesset consideration. Proposed by Prime Minister Netanyahu, it would appropriately identify Israel as “the Nation-State of the Jewish people.” Israel, Netanyahu asserted, is “a Jewish democratic state. . . . Both principles are equal and must be given equal consideration.” National rights for Jews, he emphasized, embrace equal rights for every citizen – Muslims, Christians, Druze and Bedouin alike, who collectively comprise more than 20% of the Israeli population.
No Middle Eastern Arab nation would even imagine, no less implement, such sweeping guarantees of equality for all its citizens within such a multi-religious, multi-cultural nation. By now, to be sure, there would be no need even to include Jews, nearly all of whom were cruelly driven out of their homes and deprived of their livelihoods and assets many decades ago by raging Arab mobs and their oppressively anti-Semitic rulers.
Indeed, Abbas is hardly qualified to identify an apartheid regime until he is prepared to scrutinize his own Palestinian Authority in a mirror. His published Ph.D. thesis notoriously asserted that Zionists were the “basic partner in crime” with Nazi Germany. He has played duplicitous word games with the Holocaust. Ostensibly labeling it a “heinous crime,” he nonetheless blamed Zionists for helping to perpetrate the deaths of (merely) one million – not six million – Jews. On more than one occasion the Palestinian leader has proclaimed his determination that not a single Jew would ever be permitted to inhabit the (blatantly racist) Palestinian state that he yearns to establish. He still avidly embraces the notorious United Nations canard (1975) that Zionism is “racism,” which even that morally compromised body revoked sixteen years later.
Perhaps it is time to finally abort the charade of peace-loving Palestinians. Mahmoud Abbas is inspired by such stellar exemplars of co-existence as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (who fled to his promised land of Nazi Germany and the warm embrace of Adolph Hitler); and Yasser Arafat, who refined terrorist attacks against innocent civilians into an art form of horror. Abbas is their worthy successor, explicitly yearning for an apartheid state of Palestine that is judenrein. Unlike his predecessors, because he is politically and personally weaker than both, Abbas knows how to present the soft face of Palestinian terrorism. But he surfs on the rising tide of anti-Semitism, masquerading as anti-Zionism, that is propelled by radical Islamists and their beguiled fellow travelers worldwide. Politicians, journalists and professors – and legions of gullible students – employ every despicable trope of anti-Semitism to support their zealous determination to delegitimize the world’s solitary Jewish state.
If Israeli politicians were not so ambivalent about asserting legitimate Zionist claims to the biblical homeland of the Jewish people, such Abbasian nonsense could at least be challenged, if not quashed. Under the original international Mandate for Palestine, the Jewish National Home was to be reconstituted in what now comprises Israel, Jordan and its former West Bank. But to provide a kingdom for the Hashemite Prince Abdullah, British Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill unilaterally lopped off the land east of the Jordan River for Britain’s wartime ally. But Jews were guaranteed the right of “close settlement” between the Jordan and Mediterranean. That right has never been rescinded under international law.
At the very least, the Israeli government should challenge wildly falsified Palestinian “refugee” claims that provide UNRWA with its phony life support system. The actual number of refugees in 1947-48 (including those urged by their own leaders to depart) was between 590,000-625,000. But because all descendants of Palestinian refugees, now numbering close to 5 million, are also identified as “refugees” that number will continue to increase exponentially. UNRWA, after all, wants to stay in business, nurture hatred of Israel, and provide jobs for Palestinians. Best estimates indicate that between 30,000-50,000 actual Palestinian refugees are still alive. They could easily be absorbed by Israel. Presto! Palestinian “refugee” problem solved.
Not so fast. Mahmoud Abbas knows the perfect charade to flaunt before a world audience avid to demonize the democratic nation state of the Jewish people. Sadly, whether Israeli leaders can get their own act together to assert the rightful historical and moral claims of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland remains uncertain.
・Jerold S. Auerbach is a frequent contributor to The Algemeiner.
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