On World Refugee Day, Israelis and Palestinians demand recognition for their refugees
Moroccan-born MK: Arabs must ‘accept responsibility for driving out a million Jews’; Ashrawi: Israel must rectify ‘injustice’ to 5.3 million Palestinians
Haviv Rettig Gur is The Times of Israel's senior analyst.

On Thursday, the world marked the UN’s World Refugee Day, a day intended to take stock of the fate of millions of refugees around the world, and tens of millions of internally displaced persons fleeing persecution and, sometimes, mortal danger. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the day was an opportunity for officials on either side to exchange barbs highlighting the history and plight of each side’s respective refugee experience.
Yisrael Beytenu MK Shimon Ohayon, a Bar-Ilan University education professor whose family fled Morocco when he was a child in 1956, issued a statement Thursday calling on the Arab League to “accept their great responsibility for driving out almost a million Jews from lands [in] which they had lived for millennia.”
Israel has often noted that some 850,000 Jews fled Arab and Muslim countries in the years following the establishment of the Jewish state.
Ohayon, who chairs the Knesset Caucus for the Rights of Jewish Refugees from Arab Lands, accused the Arab League of using the ancient Jewish populations of Arab states “as weapons … against the establishment of the Jewish State.”
In his statement, he referred to laws drafted by the League “for its member states to withdraw civil and human rights from its Jewish inhabitants…. In 1947, the Political Committee of the Arab League drafted a law that was to govern the legal status of Jewish residents in all Arab League countries. … The law called for the freezing of bank accounts of Jews, their internment and [the confiscation of their assets]. Various other discriminatory measures were taken by Arab nations and subsequent meetings reportedly called for the expulsion of Jews from member states of the Arab League.”
It was time “for [the League] to own up to its role in the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish population from most of the Middle East and North Africa,” Ohayon said. “I call on the Arab League not just to take responsibility but also to provide redress to the Jewish refugees.”
On the other side of the conflict, PLO Executive Committee member Hanan Ashrawi urged the international community on Wednesday to hold Israel accountable “for its portrayal of our people’s loss as anything other than a violent mass expulsion and for the creation and continuation of the tragic refugee situation.”
She demanded that Israel “admit its culpability, and hence its responsibility for the rectification of such an injustice at the human, moral, political, and legal levels,” an apparent reference to Palestinian demands that Israel grant residency and citizenship to an estimated 5.3 million descendants of Palestinians who fled or were expelled in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
“The Palestine case is not a question of a disputed narrative, rights or territory; it remains an issue of indisputable justice and humanity,” she said.
Ashrawi has rejected Israeli demands for recognition of the Jewish refugee experience, arguing that Jews left Arab and Muslim lands largely of their own free will, rather than in the face of rampant persecution and danger. She has called on Arab states to allow Israeli Jews to return to their former homes.
Roughly half of Israel’s Jews are themselves, or are descended from, refugees from Arab and Muslim countries.
Also Thursday, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released its figures for Palestinian refugees, largely based on United Nations Relief Works Agency figures.
In all, some 5.3 million people were registered as Palestinian refugees by UNRWA as of January 1, 2013, according to PCBS. Some 42 percent of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza were classified as refugees. In Gaza, refugees make up two-thirds (67%) of the total population, and in the West Bank just over a quarter (27%), PCBS said.
Israel disputes the significance of the figures, as UNRWA rules for classifying an individual as a Palestinian refugee are far less stringent than those of the main global refugee agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.