Today I want to address an area that has been overlooked for years.
The Arabs (Hamas and others) make a claim that they are against the “Zionist occupiers”. It’s been a successful claim that casts Israelis as Europe. But the idea that Israelis are all descendants of those Zionists (or holocaust survivors) is a claim that simply doesn’t stand up to closer scrutiny.
UNRWA registered some 750,000 Arab “refugees” who said they had lived in Palestine for two years before the 1948 war. The number has grown because the only way to get out is to return to the land they came from. There was no such UN organization established to deal with Jewish Arab refugees. That includes all Jews who fled, or were expelled, from countries in the Arab League. That includes Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. The number of Jews who went to Israel from those countries after 1948 is over 850,000. None of them were allowed to keep anything. All their property and assets were confiscated by the local governments.
Did you notice the numbers? More Jews were expelled or fled, destitute, to Israel than the total number of “Palestinians” that were registered with UNRWA. Even that number has problems that I’ll try to explain in a future post. Jews in Arab lands were ALWAYS a persecuted minority. Islam is NOT the most tolerant of religions. Many Arabs supported the Nazis The grand mufti of Jerusalem spent his time recruiting Muslim soldiers for Hitler. The Arabs supported Hitler mostly because they opposed Britain and France, but they willingly followed Nazi ideology and practice. The Arab revolts of 1936-1939 included real pogroms against Jews living in Arab countries. Probably the main reason such actions weren’t worse is because Hitler lost the war.
In any case, what should have taken place was a population exchange. India and Pakistan did so when they were granted independence. But the Arabs wanted to have their cake, and eat it, too. They kept the booty from the expelled Jews, and asked the rest of the world to pay for the UNRWA “refugees” while retaining them as a political weapon to use against Israel.
There has never been any compensation paid to the Jews who left Arab countries.
Wetherhorn 