Former United States Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg called here for the creation of an international juridical commission to catalogue the losses suffered by former Jewish inhabitants of Arab countries.
Delivering the keynote address at the three-day second international conference of the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WO JAC), which opened yesterday, Goldberg said that a definitive report, compiled by leading Jewish and non-Jewish jurists, was essential if appropriate redress were ever to be made for the dispossession of the former Jewish populations of the Arab world.
Goldberg, a former Ambassador to the United Nations, urged the conference to speak up for the 6,000 Jews of Syria and the 60,000 Jews in Iran, who he said were in “virtual house arrest.” He added “for too long your voice has been silent.”
Conference organizers said that about 800,000 Jews lost their homes in Arab countries, roughly the same number as the Arabs displaced as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. “In both cases those who were uprooted and their descendants number about two million today,” a WOJAC spokesman said.
ANOTHER CONFERENCE AIM
While the conference is attempting to bring into focus the Jewish exodus from Arab countries, comparable to the Arab flight from Palestine, another aim, according to conference organizers, is “to let by-gones be by-gones, and to work for a resolution of the sufferings of both parties to the Arab Israeli conflict and to promote peace in the Middle East.”
The WOJAC called for recognition of the shared sufferings of these peoples in order to encourage peace and understanding, “and to open the road to a Middle East settlement based on mutual recognition.”
The primary force behind the conference is Mordechai Ben Porat, a Minister Without Portfolio in the Israeli Cabinet, who recently launched a proposal for rehabilitating Palestinian refugees currently living in camps in the West Bank. Ben Porat, originally from Iraq, intends to make this idea a theme of the conference.
Goldberg, in his address yesterday, recalled his role in drafting United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, and said that its call for a just solution of the refugee problems was deliberately phrased in such a way as to take account of the mass Jewish exodus from Arab lands as well as the Arab flight from Palestine. Restitution for Arab Jewry was also explicitly provided for in the Camp David accords, he said.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
