telling the whole story of the Middle East

In the New Republic ($$), Joseph Braude reports that a crucial bit of history that went down the memory hole is being resurrected:

ater this week, a bipartisan group of senators and congressmen are expected to introduce a resolution that…urges the president to make sure that, during international discussions on refugees in the Middle East, “any explicit reference to Palestinian refugees is matched by a similar explicit reference to Jewish and other refugees, as a matter of law and equity.” Sponsors of the measure include everyone from Rick Santorum on the right to Dick Durbin on the left, and a number of congressmen and senators in between.

The resolution constitutes a long-overdue acknowledgment of a tragedy which, for decades, Arab states have denied and the international community has ignored. Nine hundred thousand Jews have been forced to flee their homes in Arab countries and Iran since the years leading up to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. (Most left in two waves–immediately before or after Israel’s independence, and during the years following the Six Day War.) Some were deported outright; others faced widespread campaigns of violence and intimidation so unbearable as to render their ancestral homelands unlivable. …

Having served the Arab Middle East as government workers, professionals, merchants, and artists, the indigenous Jewish population left a profound economic and social void behind them as they fled for their lives–a void that some Arab countries still have not managed to fill, 60 years later. These states’ loss was Israel’s gain: Today, 52 percent of the Jewish population of Israel consists of emigres from North Africa and the Middle East.

Braude goes on to note his personal involvement in this story:

My mother was born into a Jewish family in Baghdad in 1944. Several of her siblings are old enough to have personal memories of the “Farhud.” My late grandfather and his oldest daughter and son–then twelve and eleven, respectively–were caught trying to flee the country in the late 1940s. The children spent six months in an Iraqi prison, which my aunt recalls as having been “full of Jews.” They were eventually released and flown out of Baghdad with their mother, four more siblings, and 120,000 other Jews in the celebrated airlifts to Israel of the early 1950s. My grandfather suffered a year longer in prison before joining them on his own. They said goodbye to their friends, their home, almost all their belongings, and 2,500 years of Jewish history in Mesopotamia. Like many Palestinians, they too became refugees. And yet, somehow, over the last 50 years, their history has been largely ignored.

So far, the comments over at TNR are positive.

But Braude and the bipartisan group of senators and congressmen who are sponsoring the resolution are messing with The One and Only True Narrative of the Middle East. I predict Walt & Mearsheimer-type*** fireworks.

The proposed resolution in Congress favors conditions in which the moral case for Israel’s existence can be made anew.

Good.

***Jeff Weintraub has continued to follow this story. I’ve been meaning to add some thoughts too. In the whole controversy, what bothers me most is that W&M have been slippery: when they were “misinterpreted,” their response has been to say: “I didn’t mean to say that.”

I don’t have it in front of me for reference–I’ll link later—but in their original paper, they dispensed with the moral case for the U.S. supporting Israel. They said that the moral case could not account for the U.S.’s continued support for Israel—and they implied that it should not account for it, either. Even Michael Massing, writing in the NYRB, called this “harsh.” In their letter to the LRB, however, M&W deny that they said there’s no moral case for supporting Israel.

That sticks in my craw. They are slick and slimy.