The Forgotten Refugees

At 17, as a result of the 1947 United Nation’s (U.N.) vote to partition Palestine, my grandmother had to flee her country in order to escape violence and persecution. -Climbing over rooftops to avoid notice, my grandmother left her family and risked her life to cross the border from Syria into Lebanon, eventually making her way to Italy.

My grandmother is only one of approximately 850,000 Jews dispossessed and displaced from Muslim countries of the Middle East, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf before 1948. Her family had lived peacefully and prosperously in Aleppo, Syria for generations, but after the partition of Palestine, Jews living in Syria, as well as in other Muslim countries, were persecuted through government legislation and action that deprived them of human and civil rights, nullified their citizenship, and seized their property. My grandmother was separated from her family, but many other Jews were tortured, murdered, detained, and expelled. The once-thriving Jewish communities of these Muslim countries that had existed for 2,500 years are now gone. My grandparents can’t return to their former home, and it is unsafe for me to travel to Syria, the place of origin of much of my family heritage, and a place where Jews are still unwelcome.

It is important to remember the tragedy of the Jewish refugees as the students in the Harvard Nakba Committee commemorate the 1948 dispossession of Palestinian Arabs from Israel next week. While the Palestinian refugee crisis is a tragedy in its own right, the committee has chosen to commemorate the dispossession of approximately 750,000 Palestinian Arabs by adopting the reckless, revisionist history of Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, an apologist for terror (he once stated, “I support Hamas in its resistance against the Israeli occupation though I disagree with their political ideology”) who directed the effort by the Association of University Teachers to boycott Haifa and Bar-Ilan universities. In the invitation to their event, the Nakba Committee quotes Pappé’s book, “Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine:” “On May 15, 1948, leaders of the Zionist movement declared the formation of the State of Israel on the land of Palestine. They proceeded to implement their long held plan to ethnically cleanse the indigenous majority Palestinian Arab population from Palestine in order to constitute a Jewish majority-dominated state. War ensued.”

Pappé misleadingly decontextualizes the Palestinian Arab displacement. While the Nakba Committee has adopted Pappé’s conspiracy theory that Zionist leaders planned to ethnically cleanse Israel of Palestinian Arabs in 1948, they conveniently ignore the Zionist acceptance of a two-state solution and the subsequent Arab rejection of the U.N. Partition Plan. The Palestinian refugee crisis was not the result of a carefully orchestrated Zionist plan to dispossess Palestinian Arabs, but the consequence of an invasion launched by five Arab countries against Israel, the same countries that targeted their own Jewish communities.

Moreover, war didn’t “ensue.” it was initiated by countries determined to “wipe Israel off the map.” While some Palestinian Arabs fled their homes out of fear of the Israeli army, many were encouraged to leave by their own leaders, assured they would soon return after an Arab victory. When this victory failed to materialize, these Palestinians were kept in refugee camps ¬and denied absorption by the same Arab governments that had encouraged them to leave.. Even in Gaza, now sovereign Palestinian territory, refugee camps endure, preserved by the same leaders vehemently demanding a refugee right of return.

This singular focus on the dispossession of the Palestinian Arabs and the culpability of Israel, without acknowledgment of the injustice done to these refugees by their own leaders or of the violence inflicted upon Jewish populations in Muslim countries, hinders constructive discussion of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Commemorating the Nakba has become another means of mourning the creation of the State of Israel, an event that Hamas and many of Israel’s neighbors still seek to reverse today through rocket attacks, kidnappings, and suicide bombings. While continual demands are made for a refugee right of return, the demand is focused exclusively on the right of all Palestinian refugees and their descendents to return to their former homes, and would mean, in effect, the demographic destruction of the Israeli state.

This April, the US House of Representatives took the first step toward remedying this imbalanced demand for a refugee right of return. They passed United States House Resolution 185, which affirmed that U.N.’s Resolution 242’s call for a “just settlement of the refugee problem,” resolving that any just resolution must address the rights of both Arab and Jewish refugees and that the United States must grant equal recognition to these refugees. In passing this resolution, Congress underscored the importance of addressing the wrongs done to all victims of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is time for the student groups on Harvard’s campus to do the same.



Danielle R. Sassoon ’08 is a history and literature concentrator in Dunster House.