The forgotten refugees — the Middle East Jews

You don’t hear about them very often, but now someone has taken up their cause.

In his work with Jewish refugees from the Middle East, Stanley Urman catches a lot of flak. The usual charge against him: stealing the Palestinian narrative.

As the executive director of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC), Urman says when it comes to refugees –– Arab and Jew –– no one has to steal anything. There was plenty of misery to go around.

Urman’s organization works on behalf of the nearly 1 million Jews exiled from Arab lands after the founding of Israel in 1948, and their descendants. Those Jews had their assets stolen and their communities erased, even after having lived for generations in countries like Iraq and Libya.

The reason you don’t hear a lot about these refugees is that Israel took in every one of them, so they are no longer refugees. Contrast that with the Palestinians, whom every Arab country refused to take in, preferring to keep them in refugee camps so they could use them for propaganda purposes. And the UN went along with the scheme.

Some blame must go the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, and its standards on refugees. “The [U.N.] established standards for every refugee –– protection, resettlement and rehabilitation –– except for Palestinians,” he said. “For UNRWA the mandate is only protection. That anomaly perpetuated the problem. Palestinians were used as pawns by the Arab world.”

Translation: After WWII, all refugees were resettled somewhere — and there were a lot of them. Only the Palestinians remained refugees for generations, in order to stir up the world’s hostility toward Israel.

I have to correct one thing from the article: It’s technically true that Jews had lived in Iraq “for generations.” Actually, it’s many, many generations, dating back 2600 years to the Babylonian captivity of 600 B.C., with some arriving as early as 700 B.C.  After the founding of Israel the Jews in Iraq were terribly persecuted and the vast majority, about 120,000, left. Their property was seized. There are now fewer than 100 Jews left in Iraq.

The Middle Eastern Jews who became refugees, along with their descendants, now number about 4 million. Their claims are now an issue in the Israel-Palestinian peace negotiations.

High on his agenda now is H.R. 185, a nonbinding congressional resolution in support of Jewish refugees from Arab countries. The late San Mateo Congressman Tom Lantos introduced the legislation.

The resolution stipulates that any U.S. negotiations on the claims of Palestinian refugees must also take into account the rights and claims of the exiled Mizrachi Jews.

Urman pressed to have the issue raised at December’s Middle East Conference in Annapolis, Md.

“We understand this issue was raised at Annapolis. And a statement from [Israeli Foreign Minister] Tzipi Livni referred to the issue of Jews from Arab countries,” he said. “We know during Bush’s visit to Israel, he raised the issue with [Israeli Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert.”

Here is our earlier post on the Jewish refugees.