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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/07/you-don-t-have-to-live-like-a-refugee.htmlSep 7, 2012
Recently Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon announced on twitter that
he was launching a new “viral campaign” about Jewish refugees and
migrants in Israel from the Arab world. From his official perch, Ayalon
has jumped into a debate that already engendered much back-and-forth, including on Open Zion, when it was introduced in the U.S. Congress in late July.
This
new effort is part of a broader pattern on the part of some Israeli
officials and their supporters to raise the issue of Jewish refugees
from the Arab world to "counterbalance" or offset the issue of the
Palestinian refugees. These efforts are also linked to Israeli-inspired efforts in the U.S. Congress to redefine Palestinian refugees to
include only those who were alive during the 1948 war and to defund the
UN agencies that care for the refugees. There is a broad-based campaign
to try to render the Palestinian refugee issue irrelevant as a final
status issue so that Israel need make no concessions because of it.
It's
long been a shibboleth of Israeli hasbara that there was “an exchange
of populations” between Israel and the Arab world of roughly similar
sizes, and therefore Palestinian refugee claims are moot. But the analogy is flawed in many ways and the new campaign is politically and diplomatically pernicious.
There is no doubt that the mistreatment of Jews in many Arab states in
the decades following, and to some extent preceding, the establishment
of the State of Israel represents a terrible stain on Arab honor. In
many Arab states, persecution, anti-Semitism, violence and even
expulsions contributed to the exodus of Jews from the Arab world. But
the mass migration unfolded over many decades, and a great many
different experiences and factors contributed to the profoundly
regrettable emptying of the Arab world of most of its Jewish citizens.
The analogy is both a red herring and a sleight-of-hand.
It's
a red herring because when they first started negotiating in Madrid and
Oslo, the parties agreed that there were four key final status issues:
borders, security, Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees. Until recently,
no Israeli government attempted to raise the issue of Jewish refugees
and migrants from the Arab world in Israel in the negotiations, just as
Palestinians have avoided bringing up issues involving the Palestinian
citizens of Israel.
It's a sleight-of-hand because the political impact of the
dispossession of the Palestinian refugees is precisely the opposite of
the “ingathering” of the Arab Jews in Israel. The Palestinian Nakba of
1948 was the destruction of a national society. The migration of Arab
Jews to Israel, by contrast, and especially from the Zionist
perspective, was the realization of a national agenda. However painful
and ugly the circumstances at times were, it was the realization of the
very purpose of the Israeli state. And these Arab Jews make up a huge
percentage of the Jewish Israeli majority, so their presence in Israel
has been and is essential to the fulfillment and maintenance of the
Israeli national project.
For this reason, Israel strongly encouraged Jewish migration from the
Arab states, and was heavily involved in promoting it through various
means. There is an ongoing and heated debate about whether an
Israeli-supported Jewish underground movement planted bombs against
Jewish targets in Baghdad in 1951 in order to sow fear and prompt
Jewish flight. Given the 1954 Lavon affair in which Israeli agents
attacked Western targets in an effort to try to poison Western-Arab
relations, it's not unthinkable these accusations could be true (in
2005, the surviving conspirators in the Lavon affair were officially
honored by Israeli President Moshe Katzav). But it's also not
particularly relevant, since anti-Jewish sentiment and behavior in Arab
societies, including Iraq, were independently making normal life
difficult and sometimes impossible.
There has never been a groundswell movement for Jewish refugees and
migrants from the Arab world to return, and Israel has rarely raised
the issue except to try to counteract the Palestinian refugee question.
There is a fundamental contradiction between regarding ingathering and
“aliyah" as a glorious fulfillment of the promise of Zionism on the one
hand and as a terrible human tragedy on the other.
The negotiating process is already overburdened with difficult
emotional issues. During the Annapolis meeting in November, 2007, the
Israeli delegation attempted to raise, for the first time, the question
of the "Jewish character" of the state of Israel. Neither the
Palestinians nor the Bush administration acquiesced to the introduction
of this question. Both the Palestinians and the Americans understood
that it had profound implications for the Palestinian refugee question.
And they understood that in normal diplomatic relations, states define
themselves without demanding a recognition of their “character” from
their neighbors as a condition for peaceful relations.
However, since returning to office in March 2009, Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu has harped on the issue so incessantly that he may
have succeeded in making it a de facto fifth element, yet another
complicating factor that makes achieving a final status agreement all
the more difficult. It's probably the case that, thanks to his efforts,
some kind of language will have to be found to satisfy Israelis on that
issue, although it will almost certainly have to come at the end, and
not the beginning, of final status negotiations.
Both the Jewish refugee issue and the “Jewish character” of the Israeli
state are clearly efforts to undermine one of the few remaining aspects
of Palestinian leverage in the negotiations. For decades, everyone
serious about the achievement of a workable two-state solution has
understood that the most difficult political issues facing Israel and
the Palestinians are Jerusalem and refugees, respectively. There has
been an implicit assumption that a quid pro quo of painful concessions
on these issues is a sine qua non for achieving a peace agreement. All
the Israelis and Palestinians who have been serious about negotiations
have understood this from the outset.
So it's difficult not to see Israeli efforts to secure an end run
around the refugee issue, foreclosing it as a practical matter of
negotiations, as linked to a desire to stonewall on Jerusalem. However,
since no Palestinian leadership is likely to accept an arrangement in
which the Palestinian capital is not based in East Jerusalem, these
efforts are fundamentally incompatible with the actual realization of a
peace agreement.
Deputy Foreign Minister Ayalon—who in the past launched an online campaign to
deny there was any occupation of Palestinian lands at all—and his boss
and party leader Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman haven't been coy
about their lack of enthusiasm regarding peace with the Palestinians.
The history of the suffering of both Palestinians and Jewish Arabs must
be honestly confronted, recognized and honored. But deliberately trying
to introduce ever more final status issues, and delve even deeper into
the painful histories that peace must overcome, is willfully and
deliberately unhelpful. No wonder the new campaign about the Arab Jews
is being championed by those Israeli leaders who make no secret of
believing that a peace agreement with the Palestinians is neither
achievable nor desirable.
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