I am particularly grateful to Treeplanter for providing this link. This Ha'aretz article exposes the falsehood and the motivation behind the latest zionist myth: "the systematic ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands".
Past Israeli governments had refrained from issuing declarations of this sort. First, there has been concern that any such proclamation will underscore what Israel has tried to repress and forget: the Palestinians' demand for return. Second, there has been anxiety that such a declaration would encourage property claims submitted by Jews against Arab states and, in response, Palestinian counter-claims to lost property. Third, such declarations would require Israel to update its schoolbooks and history, and devise a new narrative by which the Mizrahi Jews journeyed to the country under duress, without being fueled by Zionist aspirations. That would be a post-Zionist narrative.
This demonstrates the sheer immorality of analogising the movement of Arabs from Palestine and Arab Jewry to Israel. It is based entirely on political machinations. The factual incorrectness is put succinctly thus:
Any reasonable person, Zionist or non-Zionist, must acknowledge that the analogy drawn between Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews is unfounded. Palestinian refugees did not want to leave Palestine. Many Palestinian communities were destroyed in 1948, and some 700,000 Palestinians were expelled, or fled, from the borders of historic Palestine. Those who left did not do so of their own volition.
In contrast, Jews from Arab lands came to this country under the initiative of the State of Israel and Jewish organizations. Some came of their own free will; others arrived against their will. Some lived comfortably and securely in Arab lands; others suffered from fear and oppression.
The ethnic cleansing of the Arabs from Palestine was cut and dried, the exodus of Jews from the Arab states was anything but.
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