The forgotten refugees: Shame on France!

This month, the UN General Assembly will convene a Conference in New York under the euphemistic title: “International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution”. It will be chaired by France and Saudi Arabia. It will be neither “peaceful”, nor it will advance a “two-state solution”.

It has nothing “peaceful”. It promotes the elimination of the State of Israel under the “2-step” approach adopted by the Muslim world. What is this “2-step” approach?

First step: the establishment of an ephemeral “Palestinian State” in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. As a reminder: This had been already accepted by the Israelis and rejected by the Palestinians in year 2000 (President Clinton’s proposal), because it included also the requirement of a formal recognition by the Palestinians to an “end to the conflict”.

Second step: The elimination of the State of Israel under the euphemistic motto of “A just resolution of the problem of Palestine refugees in conformity with the United Nations General Assembly resolution 194, from December 1948”. This is the “right of return” of the original Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, and of their descendants, to the pre-June 1967 Israel. This is what the Palestinians and the Muslim world understand and mean by the “right of return”. This is what is being chanted and meant by the mobs with their “Free Palestine from the River to the Sea” banners, roaming in the college campuses and in the European cities.

France’s President Macon is either a fool or a hypocrite. He knows the meaning of implementing UNGA’s Resolution 194 of December 1948, that this Conference explicitly endorses.

Shame on France for sponsoring this Conference in New York and signing in on “the right of return”! Shame on France for co-chairing this Conference!

President Macron knows the history of the Jews in the Muslim countries, their persecution for centuries as “dhimmis”: The persecution and pogroms suffered by the Jews in the Arab countries during the 19^th and 20^th centuries were witnessed and documented by the French, and were reinforced by France itself, by Marshall Philippe Pétain, during World War II. Macron cannot claim ignorance.

About 3,500,000 Jews living today in Israel – half of the Jewish population in Israel – are Jewish refugees from the Arab countries or descendants of these refugees, who fled the centuries-old persecutions as “dhimmis” in Muslim countries.

I am sorry to disappoint antisemites and romantic Zionists alike: The mass migration of the Jews from the Arab countries to Israel was not the result of a Zionist Machiavellian conspiration – as the antisemites and Arabs claim – nor the result of messianic ideas held by Jews in the Diaspora about Zion – as the romantic Zionists claim. Mass migration, as the one experimented by Israel after it declared its independence in 1948, happened because the Jews in the Arab countries were an oppressed minority, and this oppression became insufferably high, forcing them to leave, leaving everything behind, and they moved to the only place in the world that accepted them: Israel. This is the essential characteristic of a massive migration. This is the basic characteristic of any mass migration in the world: oppressed groups migrate in mass when their situation in their country of origin becomes unsustainable, and there is another country willing to accept them. There is no mass migration without oppression.

Jews were an oppressed minority in the Muslim countries. Zionism was not the source of antisemitism, as modern antisemites claim: It is the other way around. Zionism – the movement of reconstituting Jewish life in Israel – was the modern response of the Jews to the centuries-old antisemitism in the Christian and Muslim countries.

(Source: From map in Martin Gilbert’s book: “In Ishmael’s House: A history of Jews in Muslim Lands”)

The Table above shows the mass migration of Jews from the Arab countries and Iran. The numbers in the Table show the number of Jews who were compelled to leave from each Muslim country between 1948 and 1972, and found refuge in Israel. A total of 618,000 Jews migrated to Israel from the Arab countries.  Jews were ethnically cleansed from the Arab countries: there are no Jews remaining there. Today, these Jews and their descendants constitute half of the Jewish population of the State of Israel.

As in all other large conflicts in the world since World War I – that resulted in exchange of populations and hundreds of thousands of refugees – irredentist claims of “right of return” should be summarily dismissed, and the focus should be in a humanitarian resettlement of these refugees and their descendants in their present countries of residence. This was the policy adopted by the world for all the national conflicts, especially those involving a population exchange. With one exception: the Arab-Israeli conflict. The status of the Arab Palestinians as refugees has been perpetuated by the Arab countries, as a tool in their long-term war aimed at eliminating the State of Israel, and returning the situation to pre-1948. As a reminder: until June 1967, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were in Arab’s hands, and they could have implemented a Palestinian State there if just they had wished to do so, without even requiring Israel’s permission or acquiescence.

The US Congress should denounce this Conference held in New York: This Conference will add fuel to the recent wave of antisemitism in the US. As a minimum antidote, the Congress will act wisely if it will reaffirm now, in year 2025, the HR 185 Bill, passed by Congress in year 2008, stating that “Middle East refugee resolutions which include a reference to the Palestinian refugee issue must also include a similarly explicit reference to the resolution of the issue of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries.”