THE OTHER REFUGEES OF THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT: From Dr. Mitchel Bard of Myths and Facts:

MYTH #258

"Palestinians were the only people who became refugees as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict."

FACT

Although much is heard about the plight of the Palestinian refugees, little is said about the Jews who fled from Arab states. Their situation had long been precarious. During the 1947 UN debates, Arab leaders threatened them. For example, Egypt’s delegate told the General Assembly: “The lives of one million Jews in Muslim countries would be jeopardized by partition” (New York Times, November 25, 1947).

The number of Jews fleeing Arab countries for Israel in the years following Israel’s independence was nearly double the number of Arabs leaving Palestine. Many Jews were allowed to take little more than the shirts on their backs. These refugees had no desire to be repatriated. Little is heard about them because they did not remain refugees for long. Of the 820,000 Jewish refugees between 1948 and 1972, 586,000 were resettled in Israel at great expense, and without any offer of compensation from the Arab governments who confiscated their possessions (Arieh Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984, p. 276). Israel has consequently maintained that any agreement to compensate the Palestinian refugees must also include Arab reparations for Jewish refugees. To this day, the Arab states have refused to pay anything to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were forced to abandon their property before fleeing those countries. Through 2005, at least 115 of the 774 UN General Assembly resolutions on the Middle East conflict (15 percent) referred directly to Palestinian refugees. Not one mentioned the Jewish refugees from Arab countries (Jerusalem Post, December 4, 2003).

The contrast between the reception of Jewish and Palestinian refugees is even starker when one considers the difference in cultural and geographic dislocation experienced by the two groups. Most Jewish refugees traveled hundreds — and some traveled thousands — of miles to a tiny country whose inhabitants spoke a different language. Most Arab refugees never left Palestine at all; they traveled a few miles to the other side of the truce line, remaining inside the vast Arab nation that they were part of linguistically, culturally and ethnically.

This article can be found at The Jewish Virtual Library

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