FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

By Vic Rosenthal 

Israel is not the US. Everything in Israel happens faster, time is compressed, everything is more intense. In the early 1980’s when the VCR came to Israel, everybody bought one in the first two weeks. There’s a story (possibly apocryphal) that somebody inspecting a ship bound for Israel could not believe its manifest, which stated that the cargo was made up entirely of VCR’s. How could such a small nation need that many VCR’s?

An Israeli acquaintance emailed on Tuesday that everyone in the country was consumed by the Winograd ‘earthquake’. Politics, like everything else in the country is speeded up and amplified, so this isn’t surprising, despite the fact that the contents of the report weren’t unexpected. But I’m not sure that the objective failures described in the report were the most serious problems that the war uncovered.

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Arab Knesset member Azmi Bishara, about whom I’ve written before (also here) has been accused of spying for Hezbollah during the war:

In one of the most grievous cases of espionage in Israeli history, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) revealed Wednesday that former Balad chairman Azmi Bishara was under investigation for allegedly spying on behalf of Hizbullah during the Second Lebanon War by providing the guerrilla group with targets for their rockets as well as classified military information.

According to the allegations against Bishara, the former MK transferred to Hizbullah information, predictions, assessments and recommendations about the political echelon, the IDF and the Israeli public during the Second Lebanon War. — Jerusalem Post

In addition, Bishara is accused of “being in contact with intelligence operatives of other countries”, and of having “received detailed missions from Hizbullah which he carried out”. He is alleged to have received hundreds of thousands of dollars for his activities; security sources decline to release the name of the country in which the money originated.

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Although exact numbers are impossible to come by, there were something like 600,000 Palestinian Arabs that became refugees in 1948. We all know how the Arab nations have done their best to prevent the implementation of any solution for these people and their descendants, who now number as many as 5 million, except for the impossible ‘right of return’ to Israel.

In all of the discussion about refugees, little is said about the Jewish refugees who fled Arab countries, starting in 1948. This is primarily because Israel and world Jewry — in contrast to the Arab world — facilitated their resettlement, mostly in Israel but also in other places.

In 1948, there were about 856,000 Jews living in various Arab countries. Today there are only a few thousand. Many of these became refugees as they fled to escape pogroms, torture and murder, and many lost all of their possessions in the process.

It seems to me that any compensation provided to the Arab refugees — who after all fled during a war that was started by the Arab nations — needs to be balanced by compensation of these refugees as well.

In order to document what happened to these Jewish refugees, both for the sake of history and so they can be compensated, an International Rights and Redress Campaign has been established.

It’s imperative, before eyewitnesses are gone and memories fade, that those Jews who fled Arab countries document their experiences and their losses. They can do this at the site linked above, where there are forms available in multiple languages.

The Arab nations, who like to talk about Palestinian human rights, are the worst rights violators of all. It’s time to pursue justice for Jewish refugees.

Technorati Tags: refugees, Jews, Jewish refugees