MY RIGHT, YOU'RE WRONG

A refugee has lessons for Arabs (Richard Z. Chesnoff, August 5, 2003, Jewish World Review)

An amazing reunion took place in Tel Aviv the other day. After being separated for 52 years, 79-year-old Salima Moshe Nissim of the southern Iraqi city of Basra embraced her 83-year-old sister, Marcel Madar. Madar had immigrated to Israel in 1951, when more than 130,000 Jews fled Iraqi anti-Semitism. Nissim stayed behind. Now, finally, there she was in Israel, one of six aging Iraqi Jews flown there this week in a top-secret exodus coordinated by the U.S. Army, the Jerusalem-based Jewish Agency and New York's Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

Twenty-eight other elderly, ailing Iraqi Jews remain behind for now, the final remnant of a great community that thrived in Mesopotamia - now known as Iraq - for more than 2,500 years. [...]

Iraq's Jewish community was not the only one to disappear from the Islamic world after 1948. Some 600,000 Jews fled homes in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Afghanistan and Iran.

You won't find any of these Arab Jews in refugee camps today. Most were almost immediately resettled in tiny Israel, where they've become part of the nation's life. When was the last time you heard of an Arab-born Jew getting on a Palestinian bus with a suicide bomb?

I say that because at about the time Jews left Arab lands, some 600,000 Palestinians fled the war the Arabs had launched against the newborn state of Israel. Rather than being resettled, most have been forced by their Arab brethren to fester in refugee camps around the Mideast. Palestinians say there are as many as 4 million such refugees today.

The answer to their woes is not a right of return to Israel, where they would destroy its character as a Jewish state. The answer is to learn from the Jews: Care for your brethren, resettle them, improve their lives, live in peace.

The repatriation is a great story and we oppose the right of return for Palestinians precisely because it would destroy Israel's Jewish character, but Mr. Chesnoff's argument is nonsensical. In what way does a Jewish right of return to Israel after thousands of years demonstrate that the Palestinians should not seek to exercise a similar right after mere decades? And why should they care about a distinctively Jewish Israel? The question of Palestinian return to their former lands will be determined by brute force and demographics, not by right reason or Israeli exemplar. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 7, 2003 9:42 AM