ENDLESS CATASTROPHE
Editorial
Jerusalem Post, May 15, 2011
‘Nakba Day” has expanded into “Nakba weekend,” and judging from the potential diplomatic and military fallout in the wake of the turmoil in the north, now threatens to occupy our attention for days to come.
But while the developments in Majdal Shams and Maroun a-Ras set this year’s “Nakba” apart from previous years, the preferred way to commemorate the supposed “catastrophe” visited on the Palestinian people from the creation of the State of Israel has remained the same: violence, incitement and provocation.
Early Sunday, a 22-year-old man from Kafr Kasim chose to commemorate the failed attempt 63 years ago to violently snuff out the emerging Jewish state at birth with more death and destruction.… He climbed into the cabin of his semi-trailer and embarked on a collision spree along a two-kilometer strip of highway in Tel Aviv, using his huge vehicle as a deadly weapon. When his truck was finally forced to a stop when it collided with a bus, the driver nevertheless continued his rampage, clubbing a young woman.
By the time he had been subdued, the truck driver, who was only moderately wounded by an incensed crowd, had left behind him one dead and at least 17 injured, one of them critically.
In the north, meanwhile, Bashar Assad, in a cynical attempt to distract the Arab world’s attention from the atrocities and human rights abuses he is perpetrating against his citizens—including hundreds shot down in the streets during demonstrations, and thousands who have disappeared—orchestrated an intentional provocation in the most unlikely of places.
Hundreds of Syrians, many of them living in refugee camps as Palestinians (because Assad refuses to integrate them into Syrian society), were bused in coordination with Syria’s military forces to the border with Israel on the Golan Heights. From there, they descended en masse on the quiet town of Majdal Shams, a Druse village whose citizens are generally loyal to Israel and who reject commemoration of Israel’s establishment as a “Nakba.”
In the ensuing anarchy that included rock-throwing and violent confrontations, IDF soldiers opened fire in an attempt to prevent the Syrians from overrunning the border. Unfortunately, at least one Syrian was killed and more were wounded.
IDF soldiers seemed to have reacted reasonably judging from the circumstances. The border in the north stretches well over 200 kilometers. The army could never hope to position the requisite amount of soldiers needed to confront hundreds of infiltrators. The 30 to 40 soldiers who were in Majdal Shams reacted as appropriately as they could. And they were responding to a new phenomenon apparently inspired by the sorts of “Arab Spring” demonstrations that have taken place in Egypt and Tunisia.
On the Lebanese border in the town of Maroun a-Ras, as hundreds of additional Palestinians moved toward the border, three to five Palestinians were shot dead. In the south, on the border with Hamas-ruled Gaza, similar attempts were made to infiltrate Israel. Inside Israel, riots broke out around Jerusalem from Kalandiya to Silwan, A-Tur and Isawiyia, though these disturbances were “usual” for annual “Nakba” demonstrations.
This year’s “Nakba” provides additional bitter evidence that, far from preparing its people for peace with Israel, the Palestinian leadership continues to encourage the most extremist, intransigent positions. Palestinians have been encouraged to focus solely on their own suffering and victimization rather than coming to grips with their own tragic historical mistakes. These include rejecting the 1947 UN partition plan and launching an unsuccessful war against the nascent Jewish state, continuing to reject peace proposals including those put forward in 2000 by prime minister Ehud Barak and in 2008 by prime minister Ehud Olmert, and voting a Hamas majority into their parliament in 2006.
Just this weekend [Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud] Abbas, supposedly representing the more moderate Palestinian leadership, vowed that the PA would never neglect the “right of return.”
Since Abbas knows that full implementation of this “right” would put an end to the Jewish majority in Israel, he was implicitly calling for an end to Israel as a Jewish state. In parallel, a high-ranking official in Fatah declared this weekend that his organization’s political program is identical with Hamas’s. As for Hamas’s program, its Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh marked “Nakba Day” by predicting “the collapse of the Zionist project in Palestine.”
How much longer will Palestinians allow themselves to be captives to extremism and intransigence, and pawns to rogue states such as Syria? The only path to their independence lies through reconciliation with the State of Israel. That was the message of the international community in 1947. For how many more years are they going to reject it?
FIVE LETTERS THAT SPELL MIDDLE EASTERN MISERY
Michael S. Bernstam
National Post, Janusary 7, 2011
…The narrow confines of the 139 square miles of the Gaza district feature eight separate Palestinian refugee camps.… These refugee camps were established in 1949 and have been financed ever since by the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Far from seeking to help residents build a new and better life either in Gaza or elsewhere, UNRWA is paying millions of refugees to perpetuate their refugee status, generation after generation, as they await their forcible return to the land inside the State of Israel.
Though pundits and foreign-policy experts focus on the question of settlements or the current temperature of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, UNRWA’s institutionalization of refugee-cum-military camps is…the principal obstacle to peace in the Middle East. The chances of achieving peace and security in the Middle East will continue to be remote as long as UNRWA is, in effect, underwriting a self-destructive Palestinian cycle of violence, internecine bloodshed and a perpetual war against Israel.
For 60 years, UNRWA has been paying four generations of Palestinians to remain refugees, reproduce refugees and live in refugee camps. It is UNRWA that put them in refugee cages and watched the number of inhabitants grow. The Palestinian refugee population in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza has exploded from 726,000 in 1950 to 4.8 million in 2010. About 95% receive some form of UNRWA care. The unprecedented nature of this guardianship is rooted in the unusual nature of this institution. UNRWA is a supranational welfare state that pays its residents not to build their own nation-state; for, were they to do so, they would forfeit their refugee status and its entitlements of cash, housing, health care, education, credit and other largesse.…
All refugees except the Palestinians fall under the jurisdiction and care of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Only actual refugees qualify for aid under the UNHCR and only on a short-term basis.… The UNHCR’s mandate is to resettle and integrate all refugees in their historical homelands, or in new host countries. But Palestinians were provided with a different sort of relief.
The UNRWA charter specified that the Palestinians who lived in British Mandate Palestine during the years 1946-48 and who subsequently fled in 1948-49 qualified for refugee status—together with all their descendants. This open-ended definition of refugees applies for generations to come. It bestows housing, utilities, health care, education, cash allowances, public works and social services for multiple generations from cradle to grave. In practice, this means multigenerational refugee camps and ghettoes in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. Close to one-third of today’s refugees, about 1.4 million, live in 59 refugee camps. There is no longer any room in UNRWA’s mandate and agenda for resettlement and integration.
UNRWA’s mandate created, in effect, a multigenerational dependency of an entire people.… Only the triumphant return of the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren to the ancestral land will mark the final deliverance in this ideology. Until then, the permanent refugee welfare state means permanent war, as it is fueled by a particular “right of return” claim—the argument that Palestinians should be given title to the land they occupied before Israel’s independence.
To see its pernicious demographic and physical meaning, consider what this claim is not, and then what it is.
First, it is not the right of return of actual refugees (as opposed to descendants) that was created by international conventions since 1948 to prevent deportations and to mitigate the conditions of concurrent refugees who fled the ravages of war. Nor is it the right of return of historical ethnic diasporas to their own nation-states. Nor is it the establishment of new nation-states where there were none. Rather, the claim of the Palestinian right of return is intended for one historical ethnic diaspora of the descendants of perennial refugees to repopulate another people’s existing nation-state, Israel.… This is…a reconquest after a lost war, a claim of the right of retake.…
A change in the Palestinian incentive structure is necessary for both peace and statehood. Palestinian sovereignty will only be achieved by liberation from UNRWA and, like peace, cannot be truly achieved without this liberation.… One possible first step is to merge [the UNRWA] with the UNHCR. Such a measure could allow UNRWA to be abolished immediately. If the new, merged agency adopted UNHCR’s program of short-term emergency relief, it would signal the beginning of the end of the world body’s support for continuance of the Palestinians’ agony. Alternatively, UNRWA could be held in place and phased out gradually.
The process is not important. What is important is the change in mission. The new mandate should be resettlement, integration and naturalization. The task is, in short, to transform 4.8 million people from dependent refugees into productive citizens.…
In Jordan, more than 1.8 million of the nearly two million registered refugees are already naturalized citizens of that country. Another 170,000 have permanent residency rights. Both citizens and permanent residents are integrated into the labour market and are isolated from other Jordanians primarily by the stigma of refugeeism. These Jordanian-Palestinians prefer to send their children to Jordanian schools that teach English and computer science rather than to UNRWA schools that teach historical mythology and use maps without Israel.
In Syria, since 1957, Palestinian residents have had the same rights as citizens in employment, commerce and social services. They lack formal citizenship and full property rights because the Syrian government, in a concordat with UNRWA, committed itself to “preserve their original nationality,” that is, to keep them trapped in their permanent refugee status and the ensuing claim on retaking Israel. Without UNRWA, this obstacle to integration would weaken even if the Syrian hostility toward Israel remains intact.
Lebanon is the most difficult case. Of 414,000 registered refugees, only 70,000 are citizens. Others do not enjoy employment rights, cannot own land and do not qualify for public education, health care and welfare. However, the transfer of the array of social and financial services and facilities from UNRWA to the Lebanese authorities would contribute to integration and help create jobs.…
The end of UNRWA would automatically nullify the pernicious issue of the right of return-cum-retake. It is unsolvable in the presence of UNRWA, because it implies the repopulation of Israel with millions of perennial paramilitary refugees. But once UNRWA is discarded, the refugee status expires instantaneously or after a transition period, and the right of return becomes a non-issue due to immediate and actually pressing needs.…
Instead of perpetuating the dead end that the international welfare state for the Palestinians represents, ending UNRWA’s horrific six-decade reign would instantly create the conditions for an honest, meaningful and viable peace process to begin in the Middle East.
(Michael S. Bernstam is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.)
JEWISH REFUGEES FROM ARAB COUNTRIES
Jacqueline Shields
Jewish Virtual Library, May 16, 2011
Although much is heard about the plight of the Palestinian refugees, little is said about the Jews who fled from Arab states. In 1945, there were more than 870,000 Jews living in the various Arab states. Many of their communities dated back 2,500 years. Throughout 1947 and 1948 these Jews were persecuted. Their property and belongings were confiscated. There were anti-Jewish riots in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Iraq.… Approximately 600,000 Jews sought refuge in the State of Israel. They arrived destitute, but they were absorbed into the society and became an integral part of the state.…
Little is heard about the Jewish refugees because they did not remain refugees for long. Of the 820,000 Jewish refugees, 586,000 were resettled in Israel at great expense, and without any offer of compensation from the Arab governments who confiscated their possessions. During the 1947 UN debates, Arab leaders threatened the Jews living in their countries with expulsion and violence if partition were to occur. Egypt’s delegate told the General Assembly: “The lives of one million Jews in Muslim countries would be jeopardized by partition.” Following the 1947 United Nations vote to partition Palestine, Arab violence against Jews erupted throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
On January 18, 1948, the president of the World Jewish Congress, Dr. Stephen Wise, appealed to U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall: “Between 800,000 and a million Jews in the Middle East and North Africa, exclusive of Palestine, are in ‘the greatest danger of destruction’ at the hands of Muslims being incited to holy war over the Partition of Palestine.… Acts of violence already perpetrated, together with those contemplated, being clearly aimed at the total destruction of the Jews, constitute genocide, which under the resolutions of the General Assembly is a crime against humanity.”
The United States, however, did not take action to investigate these pleadings.
On May 16, 1948, a New York Times headline read “Jews in Grave Danger in all Muslim Lands: Nine Hundred Thousand in Africa and Asia face wrath of their foes.” The story reported of a law drafted by the Arab League Political Committee “which was intended to govern the legal status of Jewish residents of Arab League countries. Their bank accounts would be frozen and used to finance resistance to ‘Zionist ambitions in Palestine.’ Jews believed to be active Zionists would be interned and their assets confiscated.…”
Roughly half of Israel’s [current] Jew[ish population compromises descendants of] Jewish refugees from Arab countries.… Israel has consequently maintained that any agreement to compensate the Palestinian refugees must also include Arab compensation for Jewish refugees.
The Treatment of Jews in Arab Countries Prior to Expulsion
SYRIA
Jews had lived in Syria since biblical times.… In 1943, the Jewish community of Syria had 30,000 members. In 1945, in an attempt to thwart efforts to establish a Jewish homeland, the government restricted immigration to Israel, and Jewish property was burned and looted. The government then froze Jewish bank accounts and confiscated their property.…
Following Syrian independence from France in 1946…attacks against Jews and their property increased, culminating in the pogroms of 1947, which left all shops and synagogues in Aleppo in ruins. Thousands of Jews fled the country, approximately 10,000 to the United States, and another 5,000 to Israel, and their homes and property were taken over by the local Muslims.
For the next decades, those Syrian Jews that remained were, in effect, hostages of a hostile regime.… Jews were stripped of their citizenship, and experienced employment discrimination.… The community lived under siege, constantly under surveillance of the secret police.
The last Jews to leave Syria departed with the chief rabbi in October 1994. Prior to 1947, there were…three distinct communities: the Kurdish-speaking Jews of Kamishli, the Jews of Aleppo with roots in Spain, and the original eastern Jews of Damascus, called Must’arab. Today, only a tiny remnant of these communities remains.
EGYPT
…In 1945, with the rise of Egyptian nationalism and the cultivation of anti-Western and anti-Jewish sentiment, riots erupted; 10 Jews were killed, 350 injured, and a synagogue, a Jewish hospital, and an old-age home were burned down. On July 29, 1947, an amendment was introduced to the Egyptian Companies Law which made it mandatory for at least 75% of the administrative employees of a company to be Egyptian nationals and 90% of employees in general. This decree resulted in the loss of livelihood for many Jews.
The establishment of the State of Israel led to further anti-Jewish sentiments. Between June and November 1948, bombs set off in the Jewish Quarter killed more than 70 Jews and wounded nearly 200. 2,000 Jews were arrested and many had their property confiscated. Rioting over the next few months resulted in many more Jewish deaths.
In 1956, the Egyptian government used the Sinai Campaign as a pretext for expelling almost 25,000 Egyptian Jews and confiscating their property. Approximately 1,000 more Jews were sent to prisons and detention camps. On November 23, 1956, a proclamation signed by the Minister of Religious Affairs, and read aloud in mosques throughout Egypt, declared that “all Jews are Zionists and enemies of the state,” and promised that they would be soon expelled.
Thousands of Jews were ordered to leave the country. They were allowed to take only one suitcase and a small sum of cash, and forced to sign declarations “donating” their property to the Egyptian government. Foreign observers reported that members of Jewish families were taken hostage, apparently to insure that those forced to leave did not speak out against the Egyptian government.
By 1957 the Jewish population had fallen to 15,000 [from a high of 63,500 in 1937]. In 1967, after the Six-Day War, there was a renewed wave of persecution, and the community dropped to 2,500. By the 1970s, after the remaining Jews were given permission to leave the country, the community dwindled to a few families. Today, nearly all the Jews in Egypt are elderly, and the community is on the verge of extinction.
IRAQ
…After the establishment of Israel in 1948, Zionism became a capital crime. In 1950, the Iraqi parliament finally legalized emigration to Israel, provided Iraqi Jews forfeited their citizenship. Between May 1950 and August 1951, the Jewish Agency and the Israeli government succeeded in airlifting approximately 110,000 Jews to Israel in Operations Ezra and Nehemiah. At the same time, 20,000 Jews were smuggled out of Iraq through Iran. A year later the property of Jews who emigrated from Iraq was frozen, and economic restrictions were placed on Jews who remained in the country. In 1952, Iraq’s government barred Jews from emigrating, and publicly hanged two Jews after falsely charging them with hurling a bomb at the Baghdad office of the U.S. Information Agency. A community that had reached a peak of 150,000 in 1947, dwindled to a mere 6,000 after 1951.
Persecutions continued, especially after the Six Day War in 1967, when the remaining 3,000 Jews were arrested and dismissed from their jobs. Those who were arrested, some were hanged in the public square of Baghdad, others died of torture.
MOROCCO
…In June 1948, bloody riots in Oujda and Djerada killed 44 Jews and wounded scores more. That same year, an unofficial economic boycott was instigated against Moroccan Jews. In 1956, Morocco declared its independence, and by 1959 Zionist activities became illegal. In 1963, more than 100,000 Moroccan Jews were forced out from their homes and moved to Israel. During this year, more than 30,000 Jews [also] left for France and the Americas.… [Before the founding of Israel in 1948, there were about 250,000 Jews living in Morocco; today, fewer than 7,000 remain].
YEMEN
The first historical existence of Jews in Yemen is from the third century CE. In 1922, the government of Yemen reintroduced an ancient Islamic law that decreed that Jewish orphans under age 12 were to be converted to Islam. In 1947, after the partition vote, Muslim rioters, joined by the local police force, engaged in a bloody pogrom in Aden that killed 82 Jews and destroyed hundreds of Jewish homes.… Early in 1948, looting occurred after six Jews were falsely accused of murdering two Arab girls. 50,000 Jews were forced out of Yemen in 1948. By 1959 over 3,000 Jews from Aden arrived in Israel, many more fled to the US and England. Today, there are no Jews in Aden. There are an estimated 350 Jews in Yemen today.…
TUNISIA
The first documented evidence of Jews living in what is Tunisia dates back to 200 CE.… In 1948, the Tunisian Jewish community had numbered 105,000, with 65,000 living in Tunis alone. Jews suffered greatly in 1956, when the country achieved independence. The rabbinical tribunal was abolished in 1957, and a year later, Jewish community councils were dissolved. In addition, the Jewish quarter of Tunis was destroyed by the government. Anti-Jewish rioting followed the outbreak of the Six-Day War, and Muslims burned down the Great Synagogue of Tunis. These events increased the steady stream of emigration to Israel. Today, an estimated 2,000 Jews remain in Tunisia.
LIBYA
The Jewish community of Libya traces its origin back some 2,500 years to around the third century BCE. At the time of the Italian occupation in 1911, there were approximately 21,000 Jews in the country, the majority in Tripoli.… During the British occupation [following WWII], there were a series of pogroms. A savage pogrom occurred in Tripoli on November 5, 1945, where more than 140 Jews were massacred and almost every synagogue in the city was looted. In June 1948, rioters murdered another 12 Jews and destroyed 280 Jewish homes. When the British legalized emigration in 1949, more than 30,000 Jews fled Libya.
Thousands of Jews fled the country to Israel after Libya was granted independence and membership in the Arab League in 1951.… After the Six-Day War, the Jewish population, only 7,000, was again subjected to pogroms in which 18 people were killed, and many more injured, sparking a near-total exodus that left fewer than 100 Jews in Libya.… By 1974, there were no more than 20 Jews, and it is believed that the Jewish presence has passed out of existence.
ALGERIA
…On the eve of the civil war that gripped the country in the late 1950s, there were some 130,000 Jews in Algeria, approximately 30,000 of whom lived in the capital. Nearly all Algerian Jews fled the country shortly after it gained independence from France in 1962. After being granted independence in 1962, the Algerian government harassed the Jewish community and deprived Jews of their principle economic rights.…
