What Is a "Refugee"? The Jews from Morocco versus the Palestinians from Israel

[Mosby]

Last edited Mon Mar 12, 2018, 06:55 PM - Edit history (1)

The Arab exodus from Israel in 1948 was the direct result of a genocidal war declared against the newly established Jewish state by all of its Arab neighbors, including the Arabs of Israel. Approximately 700,000 local Arabs were displaced.

Approximately the same number of Jews were displaced from their Arab homelands during this period. Nearly all of them could trace their heritage back thousands of years, well before the Muslims and Arabs became the dominant population. The most significant difference is between how Israel dealt with the Jews who were displaced and how the Arab and Muslim world dealt with the Palestinians who had been displaced by a war they started. Israel integrated its brothers and sisters from the Arab and Muslim world. The Arab world put its Palestinian brothers and sisters in refugee camps, treating them as political pawns — and festering sores — in its persistent war against the Jewish state.

The time has come – indeed it is long overdue – for the world to stop treating these Palestinians as refugees. That status ended decades ago. The Jews who came to Israel from Morocco many years ago are no longer refugees. Neither are the relatives of the Palestinians who have lived outside of Israel for nearly three quarters of a century.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12014/refugee-jews-morocco-palestinians-israel

[TubbersUK]

1. The Gatestone Institute?

The Gatestone Institute (formerly Stonegate Institute and Hudson New York) is a right-wing[2][3][4] think tank that publishes articles, particularly pertaining to Islam and the Middle East. The organization has attracted attention for publishing false articles.[5][6][7] Gatestone was founded in 2012 by Nina Rosenwald, who serves as its president.[8] Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John R. Bolton is its chairman.[9][10

Gatestone has been criticized for affiliating itself with Geert Wilders, who says that he "hates Islam"[18] and has been described as "anti-Muslim".[10][19] In 2012, Gatestone Institute hosted a talk by Wilders.[10] In 2016, Gatestone paid for Wilders’s flights and hotels on trips to the United States.[19][20] The Guardian noted that Gatestone publishes the writings of Geert Wilders.[18]

Inaccurate reporting
In 2011[23] and 2012,[6] Gatestone published articles claiming that Europe had Muslim "no-go zones", describing them variously as "off-limits to non-Muslims"[6] and "microstates governed by Islamic Sharia law".[23][24] The claim that there are areas in European cities governed by Sharia is false,[6][23] although many of the areas deemed as "no-go zones" have high levels of unemployment and crime.[24] Gatestone's claims were picked up by many outlets, including FrontPageMag,[23] and Washington Times.[24] The idea of no-go zones originated from Daniel Pipes,[23] who later retracted his claims.[6]

On November 18, 2016, Gatestone published an article that said the British Press had been ordered to avoid reporting the Muslim identity of terrorists by the European Union. Snopes rated the claim "false". Snopes pointed out that the report only made a recommendation and it was issued by the Council of Europe, not the European Union.[7] Gatestone subsequently corrected the article and apologized for the error,[25] before removing it entirely from its website.

The Gatestone Institute published false articles during the German federal election of 2017.[26] A Gatestone article, shared thousands of times on social media, including by senior German far-right politicians, claimed that vacant homes were being seized in Germany to provide housing solutions for "hundreds of thousands of migrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East."[5] The German fact-checker Correctiv.org found that this was false; a single house was placed in temporary trusteeship, and had nothing to do with refugees whatsoever.[5] Gatestone also cross-posted a Daily Mail article, which "grossly mischaracterized crime data" concerning crime by refugees in Germany.[27]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatestone_Institute

[Mosby]

2. the writer is a democrat.

And it's an opinion piece.

Care to comment about the substance?

[Sophia4]

3. I have met quite a few Jewish people who left Morocco and other places in the Middle

East.

Some were in France during the mid 1960s.

This is a part of the story of the Middle East that is not told often or loudly enough. It has been forgotten.

[Igel]

4. And yet that's quite beside the point.

The point seems to be the usus of the word "refugee."

It's a fairly common trope outside of certain circles. When does refugee status end? Can one be born a refugee? If you're a child refugee, is your grandchild a refugee?

In certain circumstances--okay, one--your grandchild or even great-grandchild is a refugee. In all others, you stop being a refugee during your lifetime.

The tacit point is that in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, and Egypt citizenship has been denied to Palestinian refugees and their descendants for political reasons ultimately rooted in racism and a view as to the appropriateness of Jewish control of much of Palestine; and with that denial went employability, the franchise, and numerous other rights the denial of which we find reprehensible. In the case of Syria and Lebanon the decision was also overtly political, in that Syria was Alawite controlled and having even a greater percentage of Sunni citizens would be a ethno-religious problem; and in Lebanon the political system was set up based on confession, that is, along denominational lines, with 1/3 of power going to Xian, Shi'ite, and Sunni politicians in a purely identity-based way--with the problem that not all groups had the same fertility rates, so that some out-reproduced the others. However, an influx of Sunni Palestinians in Lebanon would have upset the confession cart and explicitly defied the fiction that the three groups were evenlyr represented, forcing more representation to be given to Sunnis. There's a reason Lebanon hasn't had a census since before I was born (and I'm no spring chicken)--and, in fact, when my parents weren't yet in elementary school.

That said, I've known many people who said they were refugees in the US. Many had been here 10 or 20 years--some far more. One was a Nazi death camp survivor. Others from the USSR or eastern Europe. Some from Vietnam or Cambodia or Cuba. But the relevant thing, the semantics that matter here, is in the tense, based on time relations and not sequence of tenses rules in English.. Not a one that had been here and given up hope of going home claimed they were still refugees. Even if they'd just been here for a year or less and I was helping them learn English because their Cambodian or Spanish or Russian wasn't enough.

[Sophia4]

5. You'd be surprised at the number of refugees who arrived here from Eastern Europe

after WWII many of whom were ethnic Germans chased out of the homes they had been born in.

And then there were the refugees from Eastern Europe who would have been considered citizens say in Poland or Ukraine or another Eastern European country but for being expelled or running away to avoid Communism.

And then there were the refugees who fled to South America from Europe. And refugees who fled from Central America in the 1980s.

I'm just thinking of the examples of waves of immigrants that I have personally known in my lifetime. This includes of course Jews who survived or escaped the Holocaust including many who came here or went to South America or Israel.

We are a world with many refugees.

Jewish refugees after WWII were very common.

Refugees are everywhere. In my family we have refugees from various parts of the world. That's just in my family.

One set of refugees is not more privileged than another in my view. They all try to find homes and to be accepted in the country they move to. It takes a while for them to realize and accept the fact that they and their children will probably never go back to the country they called "home."

If Americans studied their family histories, they would discover to their shock in many cases quite a number of refugees -- especially from religious persecution. That is very true in my family.

[sabbat hunter]

6. I agree with the

gist of the opinion piece. It is too bad that it is associated with the piece of shit Gatestone institute.