This is cross posted by Bataween at Point of No Return, a site devoted to providing information on the Middle East’s forgotten Jewish refugees
I’m aghast. Incensed. Furious.
On Tuesday, The Guardian (international edition) devoted 80 percent of its front page and five inside pages to the Palestine Papers. No less than 14 pieces on the Palestine Papers appeared on The Guardian website, Comment is Free.
The editorial spin is that the Palestinian Authority’s purported ‘concessions’ ceding parts of Jerusalem to Israel and the ‘right of return’ for all but 100,000 Palestinian refugees would have been an outrageous betrayal of the Palestinian people’s aspirations.
The Palestinians are said to be making generous concessions on Jerusalem: yet the old city and East Jerusalem, whole districts of Baghdad (where Jews were 40 percent of the population), Tripoli, Alexandria, Cairo, Fez, Meknes, Tunis, Sana’a, Damascus, and dozens of other cities were brutally emptied of their Jews in the last 50 years. These Jews do not deserve justice in the eyes of The Guardian.
The Jews have more than paid any price – they have lost land equivalent to four times the entire surface area of Israel, they have had assets seized and stolen by Arab governments (worth twice as much as Palestinians have lost). On top of all that they have suffered ethnic cleansing.
Yet the Palestinians, who lost a war they started (to eradicate Israel), have the temerity to demand a ‘right of return’ to their homes after 60 years, whereas an exchange of population with a roughly equal number of Jews (who couldn’t go back to their homes in Arab lands, even if they wanted to) is what occurred. What The Guardian does, by encouraging the Palestinians to adhere to their maximalist demands, is to make a humanitarian solution for Palestinian refugees in their host countries more remote than ever, and give extremists every incentive to keep the conflict going.
Where is your sense of justice, Guardian? Where is your sense of perspective, CiF? Why are the Jews of the Middle East always absent from the debate on your pages? Why do Arab rights always trump Jewish rights in your warped and simplistic view?
Rant over.