Shameless Israeli Propaganda at the WaPo

"US envoy Martin Indyk... told [Jewish leaders] that a final peace treaty [between Israel and the Palestinians] could provide for compensation to Jews forced out of Arab countries after the founding of Israel in 1948. That would give descendants of those refugees living in Israel a potential financial stake in a deal long assumed to also provide compensation for Arabs who left land in what is now Israel." (Proposal for Israeli borders, Anne Gearan, Washington Post/Sydney Morning Herald, 1/2/14)

Putting to one side, if you can, one's cynicism at the decades-old farce of an Israeli-Palestinian 'peace' process brokered by Israel's "true friend" (Obama's description), and focusing solely on WaPo journalist Anne Gearan's choice of words here, one is compelled to ask how she can be allowed get away with the following two grievous misrepresentations: "Jews forced out of Arab countries" and "Arabs who left land in what is now Israel"?

The truth, of course, is the very reverse. To write that "Arabs" simply "left" Palestine in 1948 is, of course, now standard fare for mainstream reporters who, for whatever reasons, bend over backwards to obfuscate the fact and extent of Zionist ethnic cleansing at the time.

But to top that with the fiction that the post-1948 Israeli government-engineered immigration of Arab Jews to Israel was an equivalent Arab ethnic cleansing is to enlist directly as a spear carrier in Israel's current propaganda campaign to undermine the legitimate claims of Palestinian refugees.

I've exposed this kind of dishonesty before, of course, and you need only click on the 'Arab Jews' label below for the details. For those interested, here are two more items on the subject which give the lie to Gearan's (& Indyk's) shameless partisanship:

"In January 1952, about half a year after the official conclusion of the operation that brought Iraq's Jews to Israel, two Zionist activists, Yosef Basri and Shalom Salah, were hanged in Baghdad. They had been charged with possession of explosive materials and throwing bombs in the city center. According to the account of Shlomo Hillel, a former Israeli cabinet minister and Zionist activist in Iraq, their last words, as they stood on the gallows, were 'Long live the State of Israel.' It would have been only natural for Iraqi Jews in Israel to have reacted with outrage to news of the hanging. But on the contrary, the mourning assemblies organized by leaders of the community in various Israeli cities failed to arouse widespread solidarity with the two Iraqi Zionists. Just the opposite: a classified document from Moshe Sasson, of the Foreign Ministry's Middle East Division, to Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett maintained that many Iraqi immigrants, residents of the transit camps, greeted the hanging with the attitude: 'That is God's revenge on the movement that brought us to such depths.' The bitterness of that reaction attests to an acute degree of discontent among the newly arrived Iraqi Jews. It suggests that a good number of them did not view their immigration as the joyous return to Zion depicted by the community's Zionist activists. Rather, in addition to blaming the Iraqi government, they blamed the Zionist movement for bringing them to Israel for reasons that did not include the best interests of the immigrants themselves." (From The Jews of Iraq, Zionist Ideology, & the Property of the Palestinian Refugees of 1948: An Anomaly of National Accounting, Yehouda Shenhav, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 1999, p 605)

"'It is far from the first instance of tampering with, exploiting, and deleting our history, but it is the straw that broke the camel's back, and so... we formed the Committee of Baghdadi Jews in Ramat-Gan.' That is how writer, poet and activist Almog Behar described a decision by a group of Jews from Arab and Kurdish backgrounds to speak out forcefully against renewed Israeli government propaganda efforts to counter Palestinian refugee rights by using the claims of Jews who left Arab countries for Israel in the 1950s. Israeli diplomats, Haaretz reported last week, 'have been instructed to raise the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries at every relevant forum. This part of a new international campaign to create parity between the plight of Jewish and Palestinian refugees, Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon announced on Monday.'

"'The way the Israeli establishment uses our history from the 1950s is not in order to give us our rights back, but in order to get rid of the rights of the Palestinians, and avoiding a peace agreement with them,' Behar wrote to The Electronic Intifada. The idea is that Palestinian refugee and property rights are negated by equivalent claims from Jews from Arab countries, thus absolving Israel of having to make any restitution to Palestinians. Jews who left Iraq and some other Arab countries in the 1950s for Israel were deprived of their property and citizenship. But in an extraordinary statement posted on Facebook last week, the newly-formed Committee of Baghdadi Jews in Ramat-Gan, of which Behar is a founding member, hit back: 'We are seeking to demand compensation for our lost property and assets from the Iraqi government - NOT from the Palestinian Authority - and we will not agree with the option that compensation for our property be offset by compensation for the lost property of others (meaning Palestinian refugees) or that said compensation be transferred to bodies that do not represent us (meaning the Israeli government).'

"The statement went on to demand an investigation of Israel's complicity in the departure of Iraqi Jews from their homeland including terrorist acts against Jews: 'We demand the establishment of an investigative committee to examine: 1) If and by what means negotiations were carried out in 1950 between Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri as-Said, and if Ben-Gurion informed as-Said that he is authorized to take possession of the property and assets of Iraqi Jewry if he agreed to send them to Israel; 2) who ordered the bombing of the Masouda Shem-Tov synagogue in Baghdad, and if the Israeli Mossad and/or its operatives were involved. If it is determined that Ben-Gurion did, in fact, carry out negotiations over the fate of Iraqi Jewish property and assets in 1950, and directed the Mossad to bomb the community's synagogue in order to hasten our flight from Iraq, we will file a suit in an international court demanding half of the sum total of compensation for our refugee status from the Iraqi government and half from the Israeli government.'

"The role of Israel and Zionist undercover agents in helping precipitate the departure of Jews from Iraq has long been suspected. Naiem Giladi, an Iraqi Jew who joined the Zionist underground as a young man in Iraq and later came to regret his role in fostering the departure of some 125,000 Jews from Iraq, wrote that 'Zionist propagandists still maintain that the bombs in Iraq were set off by anti-Jewish Iraqis who wanted Jews out of their country.' But 'the terrible truth,' Giladi said, 'is that the grenades that killed and maimed Iraqi Jews and damaged their property were thrown by Zionist Jews'." (From Iraqi Jews reject 'cynical manipulation' of their history by Israel, Zionists, writer Almog Behar tells EI, Ali Abunimah, electronicintifada.net, 17/9/12)