Compensation
The official position of the Israeli government is that Jews from Arab countries are considered refugees, and it considers their rights to property left in countries of origin as valid and existent.
In 2008, the Orthodox Sephardi party, Shas, announced its intention to seek compensation for Jewish refugees from Arab states. In 2009, Israeli lawmakers introduced a bill into the Knesset to make compensation for Jewish refugees an integral part of any future peace negotiations by requiring compensation on behalf of current Jewish Israeli citizens, who were expelled from Arab countries after Israel was established in 1948 and leaving behind a significant amount of valuable property. In February 2010, the bill passed its first reading. The bill was sponsored by MK Nissim Ze'ev (Shas) and follows a resolution passed in the United States House of Representatives in 2008, calling for refugee recognition to be extended to Jews and Christians similar to that extended to Palestinians in the course of Middle East peace talks.
The type and extent of linkage between the Jewish exodus from Arab countries and the Palestinian Exodus has also been the source of controversy. Advocacy groups have suggested that there are strong ties between the two processes and some of them even claim that decoupling the two issues is unjust.
Holocaust restitution expert Sidney Zabludoff has published a calculation that the losses sustained by the Jews who fled Arab countries since 1947 amounts to $6 billion, in contrast to the losses of the Palestinian Arab refugees which he estimates at $3.9 billion (both sums in 2007 dollars).
Read more about this topic: Jewish Exodus From Arab And Muslim Countries
Famous quotes containing the word compensation:
“The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In compensation for considerable disgust, despondency, and boredom—such as living in solitude without friends, books, duties, or passions necessarily entails—we are given those quarter-hours of deepest communion with ourselves and nature. Those who completely barricade themselves from boredom, barricade themselves from themselves as well: they will never get to drink the most refreshingly potent draught from the their own innermost fountain.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“I do not want to be covetous, but I think I speak the minds of many a wife and mother when I say I would willingly work as hard as possible all day and all night, if I might be sure of a small profit, but have worked hard for twenty-five years and have never known what it was to receive a financial compensation and to have what was really my own.”
—Emma Watrous, U.S. inventor. As quoted in Feminine Ingenuity, ch. 8, by Anne L. MacDonald (1992)