This Week: Exploding Two Myths: “Palestinian Refugee Issue” and “Zionist Entity”
“The Palestinian Refugee Issue”
Among the “10 Misleading Media Expressions” in Lee’s and my anti-Israel media bias Powerpoint slide show is the mainstream media’s frequent mischaracterization of one of the core peace process issues as being “the Palestinian refugee issue.”
Aside from “the Palestinians” not being “the Palestinians,” what’s misleading about “the Palestinian refugee issue” is that more indigenously Middle-eastern Jews were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands in the Arab-Israeli wars and their wake than Arabs left tiny Israel. That Israel absorbed these Middle-eastern Jewish refugees while Arab “hosts,” including in Arab-controlled areas of a Palestine they never left, still today confine descendants of those Arabs in Western-supported “refugee camps” does not transform a two-sided refugee issue into a “Palestinian refugee issue.”
As with others of our “10 Misleading Media Expressions,” the fact that Western publics do not know about these Middle-eastern Jewish refugees – and their enormous significance to both the media war and the very nature of Israel – is partly the fault of us Jews. An Israel Hayom article this week quoted a Jewish Mideast refugee organization official stating:
“For decades, the State of Israel ignored the stories of Jews from Arab countries and thus allowed pro-Palestinians to focus the awareness only on the Palestinian refugees . . . .”
It also quoted an Israeli cabinet minister:
“Throughout the 70 years of the State of Israel’s existence, the story of Mizrahi [Middle-eastern] Jews has been absent from the history of the Jewish people. We must correct that.”
Such correction included this statement Thursday by the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs:
“On 30 November, Israel and the Jewish world remember the fate of more than 850,000 Jews who were forced out of Arab countries and Iran in the 20th century….
“Current research estimates that the number of Jews living in Arab countries and Iran totaled more than 850.000 at the time of Israel’s independence. Some scholars even think the number is closer to one million. In the North African region, 259,000 Jews fled from Morocco, 140,000 from Algeria, 75,000 from Egypt, and another 38,000 from Libya. 135,000 Jews were exiled from Iraq, 55,000 from Yemen, 34,000 from Turkey, 20,000 from Lebanon and 18,000 from Syria. Iran forced out 25,000 Jews.
In the early years of this media watch, the mainstream media’s imbalances against which I railed were not only its multi-magnitude exaggeration of the number of Arabs who left tiny Israel (e.g., Knight-Ridder [of less than Blessed Memory] in the Philadelphia Inquirer, 1/4/01, A1: “nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants”) , but the contrast between the media’s frequent vivid descriptions of the manner in which Arabs left Israel – “uprooting … expulsion and exile … forced from their homes … forced to leave … forced out … expelled … driven from … forced from their lands … forced from lands … driven out … driven from their homes … fled their homes” – versus that of the mere two same-date-range references I found to the departure of the Jews from Arab lands – they “emigrated” (K-R in Inq, 1/8/04), they “left” (AP in Inq, 4/18/03).
“The Zionist Entity”
But the rock-bottom significance of these Israel-absorbed Jewish refugees from Arab lands and Iran runs far deeper and far more fundamentally than that they more-than-offset the half-million or so Arabs who left tiny Israel. The descendants of these immigrants from Arab countries now account for a majority of Israel’s Jewish population. To those endless canards that the Jewish homeland is “the Zionist entity … a colonial European implant in the Arab Middle East that doesn’t belong there … a post-Holocaust compensatory entity that should have been created in Europe – why should the Palestinians suffer,” these Middle-eastern Jews with their thousands-of-years Middle-eastern roots, along with the homeland Jewish Yishuv that never left, are the indigenous answer.
Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Thursday this week, 11/30/17:
“The descendants of these immigrants from Arab countries now account for a majority of Israel’s Jewish population. The Jewish exiles who were forced to flee their homes overcame personal and communal tragedy and not only persevered, but thrived; many have risen to important positions in the national government and in the public and private sectors. They have made an invaluable contribution to the fabric of Israeli society, and their vibrant cultures are an integral part of the colorful mosaic of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. It is time for the world to hear their story.”