Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun responds to “The Exodus Obama Forgot to Mention”
Often forgotten, the some 800,000 Middle Eastern Jews fled or were summarily expelled for being Jewish in the 20th century, were the topic of “The Exodus Obama Forgot to Mention” by André Aciman in an op-ed published by The New York Times, June 8, 2009.
Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun responds.
The article reminds us of another level of complexity in the Middle East — the flight of some and expulsion of others of the 800,000 Jews who had to leave Arab lands in the 20th century, often having their property confiscated, often fleeing with justified fear for their lives, most of whom found refuge in the newly created Zionist state of Israel.
The account given by Andre Aciman has been challenged by some historians who point out that these Jews may have themselves been victims of Western colonialism: the colonial powers traditionally attempted to create or exacerbate exisitng ethnic divisions in each colonized country so that the colonized peoples would fight against each other, often using a domestic minority as one of its local surrogates.
In some Arab countries, France and England used the Jews in this role, and Jews willingly embraced the benefits of the privileges offered, in part because under Islamic rule they had usually been second class citizens without the same political rights as Muslims and with special tax burdens. The anger that Jewish collaboration with the colonial power generated among Muslims was exacerbated by Arab resentments about how Palestinians were being treated in the process of creating a Jewish state in Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s.
Though Jewish refugees to Israel were often treated in a discriminatory manner by the dominant European/Ashkenazi Jews who were the major pioneers of the new Zionist reality, and that accounts for some of their subsequent identification with the anti-socialist, anti-Labor party Likud, it is also the case that the anger that these refugees felt at the way they had been treated by Arabs while they lived in Muslim lands contributed to their even-now-persisting tendency to support militarist political parties in Israel and to explain that support by reference to their own experience of discrimination in Arab lands.
This history, of course, is the subject of great contention, and Aciman fails to discuss its complexities, but his raising the issue as one that cannot be ignored is essentially correct. Unfortunately, this history has been misused by some neo-cons and right wing Zionists to claim that Israel has no responsibility to Palestinian refugees because the Arab countries should have been as successful in integrating the Palestinians into Arab societies as Israel was in integrating Jewish refugees from Arab lands.
By trying to reduce the situation to a mere “population transfer,” those right-wingers obscure the particular historical experience of Palestinians and their deep connection to the land of Palestine, not to mention the fact that it was not “Arabs” who failed to integrate them, but rather specific Arab leaders who were themselves deeply aligned with and supported by Western colonial and imperial powers who had their own reasons to keep the Arab/Israeli tensions high and who supported the Arab oligarchs in using Palestinians as a distraction for the Arab masses so that they would not concentrate on the role of those oligarchs in perpetuating poverty in oil-rich Arab lands.
That Obama did not challenge those oligarchs in any direct way, and that he did not do more to support those in Arab lands who continue to suffer from the oppression of governments like those in Egypt and Saudi Arabia which the U.S. supports is another story to be addressed separately, but cannot be forgotten when raising the issues of how to understand the situation of Palestinian refugees and why they cannot be morally equated to the situation of Jewish refugees from Arab lands, not least because Jews do not yearn to return to Arab countries to resume their lives there while Palestinians do wish to return to their lives in Palestine.
Yet Tikkun has always maintained that the plight of Jews who fled Arab lands is a legitimate issue to be raised in any final settlement of the larger Arab/Israeli conflict, and we believe that compensation packages for those Jews from Arab lands who remain in conditions of poverty today in the State of Israel should be one of the elements of a comprehensive reparations agreement whose primary focus should be the compensation of Palestinian refugees and their families.
