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A sharp response to the effort to link Palestinian refugees and Jewish ones

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There’s a great piece on refugees in the Times of Israel, by the Israeli son of Egyptian Jewish refugees. Daniel Haboucha rejects the recent effort by Israel’s deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon to tie the Jewish refugees’ plight to that of the Palestinians refugees created by the Nakba in 1948. Haboucha concludes, “Danny Ayalon does not speak for me.”

The first paragraphs I excerpt call both refugee groups “victims of Zionism.” The last paragraph addresses my mother’s question to me, Why didn’t the Arab states absorb the Palestinian refugees? 

[E]fforts to equate my “plight” today with the plight of a Palestinian of my age who grew up in a refugee camp (mere kilometers from my beautiful Jerusalem apartment) are manifestly absurd….

in drawing a direct parallel between the Jews who were forcibly dispossessed by Arab governments and the Palestinians, the Israeli government finally appears to be acknowledging its role in creating the Palestinian refugee crisis, with all of the political and diplomatic consequences this implies…. Israel’s founders knew long before 1948 that the establishment of a Jewish state in the heart of the Arab world would spell catastrophe for the Jews living in the region. In declaring Judaism to be a nationality, Zionism transformed Jews in Arab countries from members of a deeply rooted religious minority into “enemy nationals.” When made aware of the impending danger faced by the Jews of Iraq in the 1940s due to mounting hostility toward Zionism, David Ben Gurion felt responsible for the harm he suspected would befall them; he referred to these Arab Jews as potential “victims” of the Zionist movement (quoted in Meir-Glitzenstein “Zionism in an Arab Country” p. 140)….

Ayalon and his supporters note, correctly, that the Palestinian refugee problem could have been similarly put to rest had there been political will to integrate the refugees into other countries. In advancing this argument, however, Ayalon (himself the son of an Algerian refugee) fundamentally misunderstands — or willfully ignores — the nature of the problem. The Palestinian Nakba, as [Yehouda] Shenhav notes, is not a historic individual trauma rooted in personal loss; rather it is the ongoing, collective trauma of an entire nation being dispossessed of its homeland. Proposed solutions that fail to acknowledge and address this cannot hope to resolve the issue. While Jewish refugees have little interest in returning to their former homes (many Arab countries have indeed already invited them to return), Palestinian refugees are seeking collective redress through repatriation or remedial self-determination.

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Great to hear an Israeli Jew say all this. A victim speaking up for himself and for
the Palestinian victims of Zionism.

Would be better if a high-ranking founding-father-type would say it. You know, the guys who perpetrated the great robbery and who orchestrated the displacement of Palestinians out and of Jews from Arab countries in.

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That isn’t all.

Israel desperately wanted Jews to leave Arab states and come to Israel. They were needed to fill the empty lands left by the departed Palestinians, and prevent the Palestinians from realizing the right of return promised by the UN.

Israel made great efforts to make this happen, including recruiting native Jews to make terrorist provocations in Arab countries. This definitely happened in Egypt, and has been alleged to have happened in Iraq. But beyond that, there was a tremendous public relations campaign.

That is not to say that there weren’t injustices committed both by Arab governments and private citizens. However, there is a vivid contrast between Palestinian and Jewish refugees. Israel really wanted the former to leave, and the latter to come.

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@- Philip Weiss,

You linked Rachel Corrie to Anne Frank, so what’s the FF-ing difference?

Anne Frank hid from the Germans and spend most of her time holed up in the attic of a non-destroyed home in Amsterdam, but Rachel Corrie went to Germany to face a Tiger Tank and was crushed by it. Get your priorities straight. Honor to whom honor belongs.

Last and final message.

P.S. Obama will win the election and Iran will not be attacked.

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Jonathan Cook @- http://www.jkcook.net/Articles3/0597.htm#Top :
“This month, the Israeli foreign ministry and US Jewish organisations formally launched the initiative, staging a conference in New York a few days before the opening sessions of the General Assembly. Israel’s choice of arena – the UN – is not accidental. The campaign is chiefly designed to stifle the move announced by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in his General Assembly speech last week to begin seeking UN status for Palestine as a non-member state. After opposition from the US forced the Palestinians to abort their bid for statehood at the UN Security Council last year, Mr Abbas is expected to delay making his new request until November, after the US presidential election campaign to avoid embarrassing President Barack Obama. Mr Abbas’s move has spurred Israel to take the offensive. Anyone who doubts that the Israeli government’s concern for Arab Jews is entirely cynical only has to trace the campaign’s provenance. It was considered for the first time in 2009, when Mr Netanyahu was forced – under pressure from Mr Obama – to deliver a speech backing Palestinian statehood. Immediately afterwards, Mr Netanyahu asked the National Security Council, whose role includes assessing strategic threats posed by the Palestinians, to weigh the merits of championing the Arab Jews’ case in international forums. The NSC’s advice is that Arab Jews, known in Israel as Mizrahim and comprising a small majority of the total Jewish population, should be made a core issue in the peace process. As Israel knows, that creates a permanent stumbling block to an agreement. The NSC has proposed impossible demands: contrition from all Arab states before a peace deal with the Palestinians can be reached; a decoupling of refugee status and the right of return; and the right of Arab Jews to greater compensation than Palestinian refugees, based on their superior wealth. Israel is working on other fronts too to undermine the case for Palestinian refugees. Its US lobbyists are demanding that UNRWA, the UN agency for the refugees, be dismantled. And bipartisan pressure is mounting in the US Congress to count as refugees only Palestinians personally displaced from their homes in 1948, stripping millions of descendants of their status.”

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RE: “Israel’s founders knew long before 1948 that the
establishment of a Jewish state in the heart of the Arab world would spell catastrophe for the Jews living in the region. In declaring Judaism to be a nationality [what Uri Avnery calls the “white lie” – J.L.D.], Zionism transformed Jews in Arab countries from members of a deeply rooted religious minority into ‘enemy nationals’.” ~ Daniel Haboucha

MORE ON ZIONISM’S “WHITE LIE” FROM URI AVNERY (VIA BERNARD AVISHAI), Feb. 2010:

[EXCERPTS] The Israeli Interior Ministry recognizes 126 nations, but not the Israeli nation. An Israeli citizen can be registered as belonging to the Assyrian, the Tatar or the Circassian nation. But the Israeli nation? Sorry, no such thing.
According to the official doctrine, the State of Israel cannot recognize an “Israeli” nation because it is the state of the “Jewish” nation. In other words, it belongs to the Jews of Brooklyn, Budapest and Buenos Aires, even though these consider themselves as belonging to the American, Hungarian or Argentine nations. Messy? Indeed.
THIS MESS started 113 years ago, when the Viennese Journalist Theodor Herzl wrote his book “The State of the Jews”. (That’s the true translation. The generally used name “The Jewish State” is false and means something else.) For this purpose he had to perform an acrobatic exercise. One can say that he used a white lie.
Modern Zionism was born as a direct response to modern anti-Semitism. Not by accident, the term “Zionismus” came into being some 20 years after the term “Antisemitismus” was invented in Germany. They are twins. . .
. . . Herzl understood that the new reality was inherently dangerous for the Jews. In the beginning he cherished the idea of complete assimilation: all the Jews would be baptized and disappear in the new nations. As a professional writer for the theater, he even devised the scenario: all Viennese Jews would march together to St. Stephen’s cathedral and be baptized en masse.
When he realized that this scenario was a bit far-fetched, Herzl passed from the idea of individual assimilation to what may be called collective assimilation: if there is no place for the Jews in the new nations, then they should define themselves as a nation like all the others</b, rooted in a homeland of their own and living in a state of their own. This idea was called Zionism.
BUT THERE was a problem: a Jewish nation did not exist. The Jews were not a nation but a religious-ethnic community. . . Herzl had to ignore this difference. He pretended that the Jewish ethnic-religious community was also a Jewish nation. In other words: contrary to all other peoples, the Jews were both a nation and a religious community; as far as Jews were concerned, the two were the same. The nation was a religion, the religion was a nation.
This was the white lie. There was no other way: without it, Zionism could not have come into being. The new movement took the Star of David from the synagogue, the candlestick from the Temple, the blue-and-white flag from the prayer shawl. The holy land became a homeland. Zionism filled the religious symbols with secular, national content. . . The first to detect the falsification were the Orthodox Rabbis. Almost all of them damned Herzl and his Zionism in no uncertain terms.
When Herzl originated the Zionist idea, he did not intend to found the “State of the Jews” in Palestine, but in Argentina. Even when writing his book, he devoted to the country only a few lines, under the headline “Palestine or Argentina?” However, the movement he created compelled him to divert his endeavors to the Land of Israel, and so the state came into being here.
When the State of Israel was founded and the Zionist dream realized, there was no further need for the white lie . . .
. . . [W]hy do the words “Jewish state” appear in our [Israel’s] Declaration of Independence? There was a simple reason for that: the UN had adopted a resolution to partition the country between an “Arab state” and a “Jewish state.” That was the legal basis of the new state. The declaration, which was drafted in haste, said therefore that we were establishing “the Jewish state (according to the UN resolution), namely the State of Israel.”…
. . . LIKE MOST of us at the time [of the founding of Israel in 1948], David Ben-Gurion believed that Zionism had supplanted religion and that religion had become redundant. He was quite sure that it would shrivel and disappear by itself in the new secular state. He decided that we could afford to dispense with the military service of Yeshiva bochers (Talmud school students), believing that their number would dwindle from a few hundred to almost none. The same thought caused him to allow religious schools to continue in existence. Like Herzl, who promised to “keep our Rabbis in the synagogues and our army officers in the barracks,” Ben-Gurion was certain that the state would be entirely secular. . .
. . . BUT THE white lie of Herzl had results he did not dream of, as did the compromises of Ben-Gurion. Religion did not wither away in Israel, but on the contrary: it is gaining control of the state. The government of Israel does not speak of the nation-state of the Israelis who live here, but of the “nation-state of the Jews” – a state that belongs to the Jews all over the world, most of whom belong to other nations.
The religious schools are eating up the general education system and are going to overpower it, if we don’t become aware of the danger and assert our Israeli essence. Voting rights are about to be accorded to Israelis residing abroad, and this is a step towards giving the vote to all Jews around the world. And, most important: the ugly weeds growing in the national-religious field – the fanatical settlers – are pushing the state in a direction that may lead to its destruction. . .

SOURCE – http://bernardavishai.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html

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