Ben Cohen's
response to
my recent piece systematically
proves every point I make about Israel's cynical new campaign to raise
the issue of Jewish refugees. In particular he demonstrates that this is
not about defending the rights of Jewish refugees, since no substantive
demands on their behalf are made, but simply about using them to try to
obliterate the claims of Palestinians. It's one of the oddest cries for
"justice" I've ever encountered, since it seeks merely to deny the
claims of others.
Cohen thinks the source of my "umbrage" is a conference. It's not.
It's a much broader campaign, organized by the Israeli Foreign Ministry,
to raise the issue globally as part of Israel's political strategy.
Israeli diplomats around the world, for example, have been instructed to raise the issue at
every possible opportunity. Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who
makes no secret of his hostility to a peace agreement and support for
the occupation, is leading the campaign.
Bona fide efforts by Jews from the Arab world to recuperate their
history are legitimate and desirable. There is nothing to be gained by
covering over aspects history that I described as "a stain on Arab
honor." Cohen suggests I repeat an "oft-heard claim of Arab
propagandists that Jews lived in harmony and equality with their Arab
and Muslim neighbors until the Zionist movement started meddling." In
fact I argued the contrary: that while Israel's government was
enthusiastic about the mass migration, growing hostility to Jewish
communities in the Arab world after and before the creation of Israel made normal life impossible.
If the issue of Palestinian refugees did not persist and was not a
final status issue, the Israeli government would not be launching this
campaign. Cohen claims I am "fixated… with the notion of an Israeli
plot." It's not a plot. It's a well-publicized, announced campaign, with
obvious political and diplomatic intentions.
Cohen's repetition of crude hasbara talking points is demonstrated by
his dismissal of "the hoary myth of the 'Nakba,'" in contrast to "the
horror of the ethnic cleansing" of Jews from the Arab world. This is the
essence of the campaign: to downplay and dismiss the sudden and
crushing destruction of Palestinian national society and the
displacement of most of its residents in 1948, while describing the far
more complex and protracted migration of Jews from Arab states to
Israel, under multiple circumstances with many different experiences, in
the most reductive and emotionally charged language possible.
Cohen's main point is that, "We'll give up our refugee status… if you
give up yours." Or rather that's what he wants Palestinians to say to
Jewish Israelis of Arab origin. Like the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Cohen
wants Palestinians to drop what both parties agreed would be one of the
four major final status issues: the question of the Palestinian
refugees. That's the purpose behind the campaign, dovetailing with many
other efforts to achieve the same effect.
It's telling that this is the only indication of what "justice" for
Jewish refugees, to which Cohen refers many times, might look like. He
doesn't ask for their right of return to their countries of origin,
because they don't want that. He doesn't raise the issue of their
property rights, because that would also beg the question of who owned
what in Palestine on the eve of the creation of the Israeli state. It
would imply the right of Palestinian owners to all the property seized
by Israel's "Absentee Property Law" of 1950 and other actions that
expropriated the lands and other possessions belonging to what had been
the country's majority inhabitants in 1948: the Palestinians.
So, "justice" for Jewish refugees doesn't mean restoring any of their
own rights to property, return and so forth. Instead this is just
cynically using their narrative to deny Palestinians the ability
negotiate over their own refugee issue. The message is in effect: Drop
this issue, even though we agreed to negotiate over it in 1993.
As a question of history, memory and narrative, raising these issues
is a perfectly reasonable project, although it doesn't sit very well
with the broader Zionist narrative. But as an effort to eliminate a
core, long agreed upon, final status issue (the Palestinian refugees) or
suddenly introduce a new one (Jewish refugees), the campaign
perfectly reflects the politics of its leader, Ayalon. His argument is,
in essence, that Jews must have their state—Israel—as a refuge, but
Palestinians shouldn't have one of their own. That's the idea of
"justice" that informs this campaign.
Ayalon's hostility to Palestinian statehood, and insistence that
there is no occupation and that Israel has full national rights in all
of the territories under its control, are the obvious subtext. Cohen's
response to me confirms, not dispels, that undisguised reality.
*********
Hussein Ibish is a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. His most recent book is What’s
Wrong with the One-State Agenda? Why Ending the Occupation and Peace
with Israel is Still the Palestinian National Goal. He has a PhD in
comparative literature from The University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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