- Jewish Holocaust Expert says Arabs owe billions of dollars
to Jews for the Zionist theft of Palestine
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- The chutzpah of these people. First, they barge into
Palestine, murdering, bombing, raping, demolishing and stealing their way
to an Eretz Israel, now they demand they be paid for their crimes.
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- How is this different from a gang of thugs, breaking
into your home, raping your wife, shooting your son, kidnapping your daughter
and trashing the place out, then demanding that YOU, the victim, pay the
gangsters for their time and trouble?
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- Is the figure given the final figure or will compound
interest and the inevitable shakedown tactics of their descendants be added
to the alleged cost?
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- Article from the http://www.forward.com/articles/13134/
- Forward
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- Study Estimates Assets Of Arab Lands' Jews
- By Marc Perelman
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- In the first effort to methodically calculate the amount
lost by Jews who fled Arab countries after the creation of Israel, a Holocaust
restitution expert estimated that the losses amounted to $6 billion.
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- The study, performed by Sidney Zabludoff and published
this month in a journal published by the conservative Jerusalem Center
for Public Affairs, estimated that Jewish losses were significantly more
than the amount lost by Palestinian refugees from Israel.
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- Close to 1 million Jews were forced to leave Middle Eastern
and North African countries after the creation of Israel - a fact that
has become a political volleyball as Palestinian refugees have pushed for
compensation for their own expulsion from Israel.
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- Zabludoff peppers his paper with political references
and proposals, and it seems likely that his figures will encounter protest
from Palestinian groups. He estimates that the 550,000 Palestinian refugees
lost $3.9 billion.
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- Palestinian critics argue that speaking of restitution
is an insidious way of ruling out the possibility of a return to Israel
- and Zabludoff is explicit in his paper that there should not be a right
of return for Palestinian refugees.
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- "This is an insidious argument, because the advocates
of Jewish refugees are not working to get those legitimate assets back
but are in fact trying to cancel out the debt of Israel toward Palestinian
refugees," said Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University's Edward Said
professor of Arab studies.
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- Advocates for Jewish refugees are already seizing upon
the new data to advance their cause.
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- "Just as the issue of Holocaust restitution became
a priority for Jewish advocacy a decade ago, this issue needs to become
a priority now," said Elan Steinberg, vice president of the gathering
of American Jewish Holocaust Survivors & Their Descendants, who worked
with Zabludoff on restitutions at the Word Jewish Congress in the late
1990s. "It brings something that had been hidden in the Jewish consciousness
to light."
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- After years of neglect, Jewish groups have become increasingly
vocal on the issue through an umbrella group called Justice for Jews From
Arab Countries, which has pushed a variety of measures in Congress and
at the United Nations that recognize the fate of Jewish refugees.
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- Last month, it scored a symbolic victory when the House
passed a resolution demanding that any explicit reference to Palestinian
refugees be matched by a similar reference to Jewish refugees.
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- "The issue of refugee assets has taken prominence
in recent years, since the Palestinians began asking to replicate the Holocaust
restitution mechanisms and the Israeli government responded by bringing
up the issue of Jewish refugees in Arab lands." said Michael Bazyler,
a law professor at Whittier Law School and the author of "Holocaust
Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America's Courts."
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- Zabludoff, a former CIA and Treasury Department official,
reached the estimates without using any actual figures from North African
and Arab countries. Instead he extrapolated the refugees' per capita assets
from earlier research on Palestinians and applied them to Jews after finding
that they matched the pre-World War II figures for Eastern European Jews.
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- Zabludoff's figures for Palestinian refugees were drawn
from calculations made by a number of previous researchers. He said the
difference between the Jewish and Palestinian totals was due not only to
the higher number of Jewish refugees but also to the fact that Jewish refugees
tended to be more urban and involved in trade activities.
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- He told the Forward he had undertaken the work on his
own and that he did not receive any instructions or financial support from
Jewish groups.
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- No comparable estimates of refugee assets have been published
previously. For instance, the Palestinians have often added to property
losses psychological damages and lost income, reaching figures between
$180 billion and $290 billion (in 2007 dollars), according to a study by
Palestinian scholar Sami Hadawi. The World Organization of Jews From Arab
Countries, for its part, has collated Jewish community assets and individual
ones in coming up with a $100 billion figure.
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- "Sid is a reference in the field of assets evaluation,"
Bazyler said, noting that the Israeli government had endorsed his figures
about Holocaust-era assets. In the paper, Zabludoff is not shy about stating
the policy proposals that he sees arising from his research.
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- The refugee issue "remains as a bargaining chip
for Arab and Palestinian negotiators who continue to emphasize the issue
via their political drumbeat. The only way to move toward the reality of
how such events have been handled in the past is to stress the clear fact
that there were more Jews who fled Middle Eastern and North African countries
than Palestinians who left Israel," Zabludoff writes.
- To address the Jewish and Palestinian refugee grievances,
Zabludoff proposes to create a $10 billion global fund, essentially extending
to Jewish refugees a long-discussed mechanism for Palestinian refugees.
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- "What I would like to see is that instead of being
framed as a political issue, it is addressed as a restitution issue,"
he told the Forward.
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