The growth of Zionism and the subsequent battle for Palestine were used to stress the otherness and subversiveness of the Jewish population. The persecution, despoliation and expulsion of whole communities proceeded apace, ending only with the ejection of the Jews of Libya following the Khaddafi coup of 1969.
Yet when the issue of Middle East refugees is discussed, the group in question is always Arab.
The implications of this one-sided emphasis have been profound. While Arabs and their supporters loudly make the unconditional demand that Israel open its doors to a flood of emigrants and their descendants, no Muslim country is expected to do the same for Jews.
Indeed, in many instances the Jewish presence in certain areas antedates that of both Arabs (North Africa), and Islam (Yemen) by several thousand years, yet there is no large scale effort to make restitution to these shattered communities.
A visit to any library will yield an impressively large array of works devoted to the dilemma of the Arab runaways. In fact a whole ‘Palestine industry’ has arisen dedicated to the articulation of this group’s point of view while systematically ignoring that of the Jews.
The Israeli government, rather than making a case for its own victimized citizens and their progeny, simply allows the black silence to engulf the memory of the destroyed Levantine communities of the world’s oldest diaspora.
