Equal Refugee Status/Rights

 It's been an uphill slog, but finally some traction.  The issue of Jewish refugees simply is one that is of little interest to the world at large.  Largely because, although they start out as refugees, they end up being embraced by other Jews.  Israel had simply opened its arms to welcome all those Sephardic Jews who had lived for millennia in Arab countries and who were expelled at the creation of the State of Israel. 

They weren't held by their countries of origin, where their ancestors had lived for thousands of years, to be legitimate citizens of the Arab countries of the Middle East, the Persian Gulf and North Africa.  They were Yemeni, Sudanese, Iraqi, Syrian, Egyptian, Tunisian, Jordanian, Iranian, Lebanese Jews (among others).  To these Jews, the news that a Jewish State had been created in their midst was of passing interest; they considered themselves to be Syrian, Iraqi, Tunisian.

And that was just too bad, because the rulers of those countries considered them to be Jews, and as such, unwelcome to remain in Arab and Muslim countries.  So their goods were confiscated, they were given notice to vacate their properties, and their right to remain in the land of their ancestors was summarily revoked.  And their countries of origin assembled their armies and went to war against their historical country of original heritage.

There were 850,000 oriental Jews who were booted out of Arab/Muslim countries.  In contrast, Palestinians who refused to panic and listen to their Arab cousins urging them to temporarily leave their homes within the new State of Israel, promising that they could return in a few days' time when their combined armies had beaten the new State of Israel into submission and out of existence, numbered 600,000.

Those Palestinians who had determined that they would remain behind, and not abandon their homes within Israel are still there today, full citizens with the right to elect their own representatives to the Israeli Knesset, where those many of those representatives largely continue to sympathize with their West Bank and Gaza brethren, seeking to destabilize the state of which they have become parliamentarians.

The fearful Palestinians who fled the presence of Israel were never welcomed as refugees requiring haven in the countries of their Arab and Muslim brethren.  They were deliberately left as refugees, as a living canker of grievance and belligerence, determined by whatever means possible to continue waging war with the help of Arab states, and without it, as they organized their own irregular militias, pledging the destruction of Israel.

No Jewish refugees, despite a far larger number of involuntarily displaced Jews from Arab/Muslim countries.  A hatefully resentful assembly of refugees in shoddy refugee camps set up in those Arab countries that would refuse to give permanent haven and citizenship to those they had counselled to flee their residence in the land they continued to call Palestine, though 'Palestine' was a Jewish place long before it was an Arab place.

From that original 600,000 that fled, there now exists roughly five million descendants, clamouring for their 'right of return'.  And the world has responded to the plight of the Palestinians so ill done by by fate and by the insistence of Jews to their right to have a geography dedicated to their own existence, forever threatened by the outer world that saw little value in a Jewish demographic in their midst.

And while Arab leaders continue to demand that no peace settlement between the Palestinians and the Arabs in general and the State of Israel is conceivable without the agreement of Israel to Arab 'right of return' which in effect would accomplish what war could not, no mention is ever made of the Jewish refugees who became citizens elsewhere to get on with their lives and those of their children.

The Arab Palestinians represent the only refugee group that has remained within that status for such an impressively long period of time, a festering wound, refusing to heal itself.  To accommodate their state of self-imposed-stasis-seeking-revenge, the United Nations and the international community arranged very special accommodations suited specifically to their situation. 

The UN relief and works agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) employs 30,000 staff, many of them Palestinians.  It is an agency that exists separately from the United Nation's global refugee agency that looks after all the other refugees in the world that result from displacement due to war, state oppression, food shortages or any other catastrophic incidents, natural or man made that displaces people.

Billions of dollars have been spent in building accommodations for Palestinians, servicing their needs, providing them with the necessities of life.  They have made very little effort on their own initiative to lift themselves from poverty and squalor to proudly demonstrate that they have the capability to rule themselves.  Instead institutional agitation against Israel represents the foundational aspiration of an authority that purports to act in the best interests of the Palestinians.

Rather than exercising their judgement to be inspired to act in good faith and complete a series of peace-table negotiations so each can move on and reach for good neighbourly relations and future prosperity to enable both the State of Israel and a nascent Palestinian state to focus on providing the necessities for a prospering country rather than focusing on arms, the Palestinians continue to play the injured party.

The Palestinians feel no obligation, nor any moral need to apologize or relent or regret their vicious acts of violence against Israel, compelling that state to conduct itself in a military manner to protect itself and its people.  Instead, it uses clever ruses to portray itself as an ongoing victim, exporting the human resource of slander-mongering public relations, which the world happily laps up.

Finally, thanks to the work of North American Jewish politicians and academics and human-rights workers like Irwin Cotler and Henry Green, along with a coterie of American Jewish counterparts, the US. House of Representatives is preparing to give final approval to a bipartisan draft legislation insisting that Jewish refugees receive equal rights recognition to that of the Palestinians.

Mr. Cotler, a renowned human rights campaigner and formerly a Justice Minister in a Liberal-based Parliament, holds out hope that a number of other countries will enact similar legislation to recognize Jewish and other minority refugee rights (like the Arab Christian population that has also been hounded out of their countries of origin), equally with the Palestinians, at the very least.

And it would be appropriate if Canada would be one of the first countries to sign on to this initiative.