Israel’s Forgotten Plan to Settle the Claims of Palestinian and Jewish Refugees

In 1950 and 1951, some 100,000 Iraqi Jews—most of whose assets had been frozen by the Iraqi government—immigrated to the Jewish state. In response, Israeli leaders began to investigate the possibility of an agreement with the Arab countries whereby any property abandoned by Palestinian refugees would be exchanged for property lost by Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Eylon Aslan-Levy writes:

One week [after Iraq announced the freezing of assets], the Israeli foreign minister, Moshe Sharett, addressed the Knesset. The government of Iraq, he argued, had “opened an account with the government of Israel,” and forced the Jewish state to link this account to one that already existed: [that of] the Arab refugees from Israel’s War of Independence. “We shall take into account the value of the Jewish property that has been frozen in Iraq,” declared Sharett, “when calculating the compensation that we have undertaken to pay the Arabs who abandoned property in Israel.”

This principle has been a centerpiece of Israeli policy ever since. . . . In August 1948, Israel had told the UN mediator Folke Bernadotte that any peace treaty with the Arab states should pay “due regard to Jewish counterclaims” for “havoc and destruction.” . . .

[What’s more], this linkage was not entirely Israel’s idea: its strongest support came from Baghdad. In 1949, [the Iraqi prime minister] proposed an organized Jewish-Arab population exchange to a UN commission, offering a compulsory transfer of 100,000 each way, in which Iraq would confiscate Jewish property as compensation for Palestinian property. This came after Arab states suggested to the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP) an “exchange of their [Jewish] population against the Arab Palestinian refugees.” Egypt specifically mentioned a possible “exchange of Jews and Arabs.”

Britain rejected Iraq’s proposal. . . . The UNCCP [likewise] refused to endorse it. . . . Arab governments . . . never replied [to formal letters about the subject]. Israel eventually unblocked Arab bank accounts at the UNCCP’s request, after the Israeli UN ambassador Abba Eban’s plea that “equal concern” be given to Jewish refugees fell on deaf ears.

Read more at Tower

More about: Abba Eban, Iraqi Jewry, Israel & Zionism, Mizrahi Jewry, Palestinian refugees, United Nations

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society