The Warped Mirror: Selective sympathy

It was hard to overlook the ambivalence in some of the media reports and the commentary that covered the inaugural congress held by the group Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC) in London last week. The BBC's coverage was rightly criticized on "Z Word" and the excellent blog "Point of No Return" because of the apparent eagerness to provide "balance", which meant that much of the reporting was devoted to casting doubt upon the legitimacy of the issues raised by JJAC. 

Given this coverage, it is hardly surprising that the reactions in cyberspace illustrated that it was news for some, and unwelcome news at that, to learn that the implacable hostility with which the Arab world reacted to the establishment of Israel in 1948 not only resulted in a war that turned some 700 000 Palestinian Arabs into refugees, but also led to the expulsion and dispossession of some 850 000 Jews from Arab countries.

An article by Lyn Julius in the Guardian that reported positively on the work of the JJAC led to a lively debate between those who agreed with the author and those who were critical. Among the critics, it was not difficult to find people who didn't even seem to notice that their arguments were based on blatantly obvious double standards. One poster who clearly had no doubt that Palestinian refugees had all the right to demand compensation and even a "right of return" summarily dismissed the expulsion of Egypt's Jews simply by exclaiming: "Wars create refugees." Apparently, it didn't occur to this poster that if his "insight" was applied to the Palestinian refugees of 1948, they would have as few rights as he wanted Egypt's Jews to have. And then he crowned his "reasoning" with the conclusion: "it cannot be a positive contribution to the peace process to have out there and on the table the barefaced lie that possibly 850,000 Jews are entitled to some compensation which is  - hey!  - a bigger number than the admitted number of Palestinians kicked out of Israel."

Indeed, it is a bigger number, and the loss in property and deeded land is much larger. But that is not the main concern of the JJAC: as the must-read testimony of Prof. Irwin Cotler before a Joint Briefing for Members of the House of Commons
and the House of Lords of the Parliament of Great Britain  illustrates, the JJAC's primary concern is the long overdue acknowledgement of the fact that "the pain and plight of 850,000 Jews uprooted and displaced from Arab countries - the forgotten exodus - has been both expunged and eclipsed from both the Middle East peace and justice narratives these past sixty years."

Moreover, as Prof. Cotler argued:

this revisionist narrative has not only eclipsed - and erased - the forgotten exodus from memory and remembrance, but it denies also that it was a forced exodus, and one that resulted from both the double rejectionism and double aggression. ... Simply put, the Arab countries not only rejected a Palestinian State and went to war to extinguish the nascent Jewish state, but also targeted the Jewish nationals living in their respective countries, thereby creating two refugee populations - the Palestinian refugee population resulting from the Arab war against Israel; and the Jewish refugees resulting from the Arab war against its own Jewish nationals."

But while there seems to be some willingness to acknowledge that Jewish refugees from Arab countries should have the right to demand compensation for their material losses, there is apparently very little willingness to reconsider what Prof. Cotler rightly calls the "revisionist narrative". In a commentary entitled "Another side to the Jewish story"  Rachel Shabi asserted that many Jews left their ancient communities in Arab countries voluntarily; in her view, one could also argue "that Zionism both caused Palestinians to leave their homes and brought Middle Eastern Jews to Israel". Israel should therefore share responsibility for the "backlash" that led to the expulsion and dispossession of Jews from Arab countries:

"Jewish Agency officials knew that their activities in Palestine could imperil Jews in the Middle East . . . They chose to carry on with those actions and committed to 'rescuing' those Jews if things did take a turn for the worse. If Zionist officials themselves worried about a backlash in the Arab world, how can Israel then be absolved of responsibility for the Jewish exodus from those countries?"

Obviously, this is again an example of blatant double standards: since this argument justifies holding members of one group of people responsible for the actions of other members of this group elsewhere in the world, the internment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor would have been perfectly acceptable; and when it comes to our own times, Ms. Shabi's reasoning could serve to justify "a backlash" against Muslim minorities in the West.

Another rather peculiar argument was advanced by David Cesarani who argued that the "Jews from Arab lands who settled in Israel deserved compensation, from Israel. And, to a large extent, they got it. The Mizrachim are now a well-integrated and affluent pillar of Israeli society." He also concluded that "although there is an overwhelming case for examining the dispossession and displacement of Jews from parts of North Africa and the Middle East, and indeed a case for restitution and reparation for a proportion of them, it is not appropriate to place this quandary in the context of solving the Middle East conflict."

Cesarani did not really explain why the two groups of refugees who were displaced and dispossessed within the context of the same conflict should be treated so very differently - one group as the focus of attention, the other group ignored as presenting too much of a "quandary". It is of course true that the Jews who were expelled from their ancient communities in the Arab world found refuge in the still fledgling Jewish state, and that they contributed to, and eventually shared in its prospering. But the hardships they had to endure at the time they were made refugees were no less of a traumatic experience for them than the similar trauma experienced by the Palestinian refugees. The fact that the Palestinians were condemned to remain in the charge of UNRWA for six decades was undeniably the choice of the Arab states that had started the war that produced these refugees, and while the international community did nothing to alleviate the plight of the Jewish refugees, it devoted considerable means to take care of the Palestinian refugees.

Whatever the JJAC campaign will ultimately achieve, it already has achieved something by exposing the utter hypocrisy of those who doubt Israel's legitimacy and, at the same time, excuse the persecution of Jews in Arab countries as a "backlash" and insist that it is Israel which should be held responsible for the plight of the Palestinian refugees who fled a war started by Arab states bent on crushing the just established Jewish state.