Het vluchtelingen vraagstuk anders bekeken

Dit interview is 2 jaar oud, maar het onderwerp is zo onderbelicht dat het loont het nog eens onder de aandacht te brengen.

 

Verschillende Palestijnse woordvoerders hebben openlijk verklaard dat het 'recht op terugkeer' van de Palestijnse vluchtelingen hun troefkaart is om het verloren gegane grondgebied (Israël) terug te winnen voor de Arabische wereld, daar de terugkeer van de vluchtelingen en hun nakomelingen tot een Arabische meerderheid zou leiden.

Zij vergeten daarbij uiteraard voor het gemak even dat de vluchtelingen een gevolg waren van een door de Palestijnen en daarna de Arabische staten begonnen oorlog met als doel de Joden uit Palestina te verdrijven.  

 

Israël beschikt over een sterkere 'troefkaart', namelijk de Joodse vluchtelingen uit de Arabische wereld, die méér eigendommen hebben achtergelaten in hun landen van herkomst dan de Arabische vluchtelingen in Palestina, maar er is veel aarzeling om die uit te spelen. Eén van de redenen is dat Israël de Joodse vluchtelingen direct staatsburgerschap gaf en voor huisvesting zorgde, en zij daarom niet meer als vluchtelingen worden beschouwd. Bovendien wijzen veel Joodse vluchtelingen de slachtofferstatus af, en stellen dat ze uit overtuiging naar Israël zijn geëmigreerd. Gezien de omstandigheden lijkt dit echter niet waarschijnlijk. De meeste Joodse gemeenschappen waren eeuwenlang geworteld in de Arabische wereld, en ze moesten doorgaans al hun bezit achterlaten en hun rechten en staatsburgerschap opgeven toen zij hun geboorteland verlieten. De meeste Joden vertrokken niet uit Zionistische idealen, maar op de vlucht voor pogroms en discriminatie.

 

 

Wouter

__________________

 

The Jerusalem Report
issue of May 16, 2005 

'Israel's Trump Card'
by Matti Friedman
http://www.jrep.com/bin/en.jsp?enPage=ArticlePage&enDisplay=view&enDispWhat=object&enZone=Articles&enDispWho=Article^l860

 

 

In early April, the Israeli branch of the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC) announced it was shutting down. The government, it claimed, had reneged on a December 2003 promise to fund the group's documentation of property left behind by Jews fleeing Muslim lands in the years following Israel's establishment. WOJAC argues that 950,000 Jews were expelled from their homes in Arab countries, leaving behind property worth anywhere between $50 and $100 billion - a humanitarian disaster the group says was even greater than the exodus of 600,000-700,000 Palestinians from their homes inside what became Israel during the 1948 War of Independence.

 

WOJAC has been going about the work of tracking lost Jewish property in Arab countries for nearly 30 years. Iraqi-born Prof. Heskel M. Haddad, one of the organization's founders and head of its American branch, who is still hopeful the government will make good on its funding commitments, explains why documenting the Middle East's other refugee problem is crucial for Israel.

 

 

Q/ How did you come to represent the cause of Jewish refugees from Arab countries?

 

A/ In 1950, when I was 19, I fled Baghdad along with my parents, two brothers and three sisters. I was in medical school. My father had a successful store where he sold pipes and septic tanks and plumbing equipment. We left our house in the old Jewish ghetto with five suitcases, and nothing else. Within three hours we were in Israel. We were sprayed with DDT and taken to a resettlement camp near Beit Lid.

 

In 1973, years after I had moved to America, I wrote an article about the Middle East refugee problem in an academic journal. In it I discussed both Arab and Jewish refugees. When I met with Israeli politicians afterwards, they had no idea what I was talking about. They told me that Jews from Arab countries weren't refugees.

 

Q/ What was behind the Israeli reluctance to use the term?

 

A/ They wanted to believe that Jews left Arab countries and came to Israel because they were Zionists. But that isn't true. In Paris in 1976, I spoke to the 600 delegates at WOJAC's first conference. I asked them who would have left their home and come to Israel for ideological reasons. Not a single person raised their hand.

 

We were Zionists for 2,000 years, of course. It was in Babylon that we wrote, "If I forget thee, Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning." But the Iraqi Jewish community at that time was the richest in the world. Why would anyone go to Israel and leave all of their property behind? It wasn't Zionism. The Arab League colluded to expel all of the Jews. We left because we were forced out, and we are refugees, just as the Palestinians are.

 

Q/ How can you compare those Jews, who have settled and prospered in Israel and elsewhere, to stateless Palestinian refugees?

 

A/ If Israel hadn't given us citizenship, we'd have been in the same situation as them. In 1949, the Arab League decided that no one could grant citizenship to Palestinians. Only Jordan did. If the League rescinded that resolution, tomorrow there would be no refugees.

 

I met Anwar Sadat in 1978, and proposed just that. He said the Arabs would never accept such a proposal. I proposed it to Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League, and he said I merely wanted to dilute the refugee problem. But wouldn't diluting the problem make it easier to make peace?

 

Q/ Do Jewish property claims in Arab lands match the property left behind by Palestinians in what is now Israel?

 

A/ Jews left behind far more property than the Palestinians did. It hasn't all been documented, but we're talking about billions and billions of dollars. In Iraq, Jews owned 100,000 square kilometers of land. Israel itself is only 20,000 square kilometers. How much land could the Palestinians have left behind?

 

Q/ Is there any chance of actually reclaiming lost property in Arab countries?

 

A/ I have little hope of ever getting my house in Baghdad back. Iraq is vehemently anti-Jewish. Even the moderate newspapers there are extremely anti-Jewish. And the Shi'ite cleric Ali al-Sistani has issued a fatwa prohibiting land sales to Jews. But when Israel sits down with the Arabs, I want them to discuss our rights. Our claims will balance out the Palestinian claims. And then, with Israel having benefited from our property, we can ask the government to grant us partial compensation.

 

There will be no peace without a solution to the refugee problem. That is clear. And the only way to obviate the problem is through compensation. There are an equal number of refugees and their descendants on both sides - about 3.5 million. In effect, there was a population exchange - imposed by the Arab League.

 

I once met Morocco's foreign minister; he told me how well his country's Jews had lived. Why then, I asked, were only 4,000 left out of 350,000? There were pogroms, and they were forced out. In the end he agreed with me. I've met many Arab foreign ministers, and none have denied that we were forced out and left our property behind. So let's talk about compensation - about reparations, not repatriation. In this way, WOJAC can help the peace process.

 

A/ Why isn't the Israeli government cooperating?

 

Q/ I don't know. The funding for documentation that the government promised would cost it next to nothing, maybe $250,000. I spoke to Sharon before he was prime minister, and he saw the importance of this issue then, but I guess he's forgotten. This material will have tremendous value in peace negotiations. Also, U.S. support is important, and this is an issue that Americans understand - dispossession, forced expulsion. When I speak at conferences, people come up to me and say, "I knew about the Palestinians, but I had no idea that there were Jewish refugees." This is one of Israel's best trump cards, and it must not be wasted.