Time To Compensate Jewish
Refugees From Arab Lands
For far too long, Arab nations and Iran have not been called to account for their role in forcing hundreds of thousands of Jews to flee their homes in Arab countries, mostly without enough time to take their possessions or sell their property, following the founding of the Jewish state in 1948.
Out of the estimated 850,000 Jewish refugees who fled or were expelled from Arab countries and Iran, the majority were resettled in Israel at great expense to the Jewish state. The Arab nations and Iran did not offer any compensation or financial assistance to aid in the resettlement efforts, and those same nations unilaterally confiscated the Jews’ possessions.
Arab nations, meanwhile, have scandalously distorted the history of “Palestinian refugees” while entirely ignoring their own complicity in creating the so-called Palestinian “refugee” crisis by demanding that local Arabs vacate so invading armies could conquer the newly established State of Israel. This while the very real Jewish refugee crisis of the late 1940s and early 1950s, also created by the Arab states, remains largely forgotten.
Now Israel seems poised to finally hold the Arab world and Iran responsible for this historic injustice by demanding some $250 billion in restitution for the property and assets that the Jews left behind when they were forced to flee those countries.
After decades of letting the Arab nations and Iran off the hook, Israel’s expected move could not come soon enough and must be fully supported by the international community, including the Trump administration.
Gila Gamliel, Israel’s Minister for Social Equality, stated, “One cannot talk about the Middle East without taking into consideration the rights of the Jews who were forced to leave their thriving communities amid violence.”
“The time has come to correct the historic injustice of the pogroms (against Jews) in seven Arab countries and Iran, and to restore to hundreds of thousands of Jews who lost their property what is rightfully theirs,” Gamliel said. “All the crimes that were carried out against those Jewish communities must be recognized.”
The absorption of the Arab world’s Jews into the newly formed Jewish state is one of the greatest and most under-reported success stories of the Zionist movement. It is also one of the more shameful moments in the histories of Morocco, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Libya and Iran. Reparations are the very least those countries can do to begin to repent for the crimes that they committed against their former Jewish communities.
Especially in light of the Arab world’s shameful role in propagating the Palestinian “refugee” issue.
Austria’s Foreign Minister
Promotes Palestinian Extremist
Karin Kneissl, Austria’s foreign minister, is taking heat from the country’s Jewish community for hosting notorious Palestinian extremist Hanan Ashrawi and dubbing her the “Palestinians’ voice of reason.”
On New Year’s Day, Kneissl took to Twitter to express her “sincere pleasure” in welcoming “the Palestinians’ voice of reason,” Ashrawi – and her husband Emile – to Vienna’s New Year’s concert performed by the Vienna Philharmonic.
Ashrawi wasted no time in using her Vienna trip to smear Israel as a “rogue state” that “enslave[s]” Palestinians during an interview with an Austrian radio station. Ashrawi further lamented Austria’s record of not always siding with the Palestinians at the United Nations.
Ashrawi is founder of the anti-Israel activist group Miftah. NGO Monitor, a watchdog on extremist nonprofits, notes that Mifta has accused Israel of committing “massacres,” “apartheid,” “summary executions” of Palestinian youth and “Judaizing” Jerusalem. It has also accused Israel of “ethnic-cleansing of Palestinian-Israeli Arabs.”
In a 2001 speech to the World Conference Against Racism, Ashrawi referred to the creation of Israel as a “Nakba” or “catastrophe.”
At the height of the deadly Palestinian intifada campaign of suicide bombings and shootings, Ashrawi wrote the following in October 2001 of the carnage: “I see it as an expression of the will to resist, of the spirit of a people that will not succumb to coercion and subjugation. … Popular protests and acts of resistance – political, human resistance – are necessary to demonstrate the people’s will.”