New Media

Shortly I first arrived in Vancouver, one of my first freelance journalism gigs here was writing for the Western Jewish Bulletin (which today is called the Jewish Independent). So it’s particularly heartwarming to see my novel, A History of the Middle Eastside, covered in that worthy publication. Thanks for the feature, people.

Explained Narvey to the Independent, “Two clichés I’ve often heard when discussing the politics of the Middle East, whether in formal surroundings or over pints at the pub: ‘It’s a rough neighborhood’ and ‘It’s complicated.’ So I ran with that: ‘What if I write a novel that breaks down the 20th century of the region into a simple parable of street gangs stabbing each other over turf?’

“I thought back to Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. I was also reading Michael Chabon’s incredible novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. I thought that writing in that style, with the story set in a surreal world of gangsters and the underworld, might be both entertaining and also accessible for a mainstream audience.”

He added, “If you like a rip-roaring tale of action, it works straight up as a pulp fiction gangster novel. If you’ve already got a pretty thorough grounding in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and world diplomacy in the 20th century, or want to learn a bit more about it, it works on a deeper level as well. I like the idea that it can educate, though from what I’ve heard from some of my readers, it can also feed into preexisting biases. It is what you make of it.”

Buy a copy of A History of the Middle Eastside on Amazon

As Darfur and Rwanda have undermined the international meaning of the phrase “Never Again”, does this expression still have relevance? To Israelis, it absolutely does, though the creed has a much more specific interpretation in this country and among the diaspora:

The phrase, “Never again”, can be taken to mean that we are united in opposing the genocide of any group or nation in a new Holocaust (though Darfurians rightly wonder at why the rest of the world chose not to live up to that creed). But for Jews, it has other meanings as well: never again will they put their security in the hands of those who could and often did make the choice to abandon them in their time of need. Even among those who spilled horrendous blood and treasure to defeat the Nazis, the Israelis wonder why these allies did not, for instance, bomb Auschwitz and destroy a camp where a few hundred prison workers were able to apply industrial methods to murder thousands of people per day.

Update: The full article is also published in the Mark: Never Again?

We learned this week that Canada is the first Western nation to pull the plug on UNRWA, the United Nations-run relief operation for Palestinian refugees of the West Bank and Gaza. The government has been quick to clarify that relief is still on the way. It will now be dedicated to specific projects like food aid; hopefully with enough oversight to prevent mismanagement and inadvertent support to a terrorist organization.

The government’s move is also a not-so-subtle indictment of a broken refugee support program that has arguably only perpetuated Palestinian misery and held up the Middle East peace process. As we look forward, the international community might take a lesson from the other side of the border from the UNRWA camps to Israel, which may fairly take the title of most successful refugee camp in modern history.

The Forgotten Refugees
When someone uses the phrase, “refugees” in the context of the Middle East, we typically think of the Palestinian refugees who lost their homes during the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967. The common narrative also holds that when we talk of Jewish refugees, we’re talking about white, European Jews who escaped the Holocaust to seek some measure of safety not only in the Holy Land, but also in the USA, Canada and elsewhere. But these narratives overlook a movement of nearly one million Jewish refugees from Arab countries during those same years, roughly equivalent in number to the original Palestinian refugees. They were largely persecuted, second-class citizens set upon by their neighbors and governments.

“We call these people the forgotten refugees,” says Regina Waldman, founder of JIMENA, an organization seeking recognition for these people in the context of an overall settlement in the Middle East. Waldman was herself a refugee from Libya in 1967, surviving anti-Jewish riots and other violence that claimed the lives of her friends and neighbors before escaping the country. Waldman wants to see a regional peace deal that puts Palestinians’ claims “on an equal footing with the Middle Eastern and North African Jews”.

“When the Six-Day-War broke out between Israel and its Arab neighbors, I was 19 year old,” Waldman remembers. “My mother called me at work to tell me that thousands of people had taken to the streets rioting and burning Jewish properties… Killing people, rampaging and burning Jewish properties went on for days. I lived in hiding for a month before returning home.”

A Jewish community that had lived in that country for over 2,000 years, albeit under second-class Dhimmi status, was wiped out as Jews fled lynchings, mob violence and torture and imprisonment by the government. This process was repeated across the region in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran.

One Group Finds Haven, Another is Rejected
Most of the refugees were resettled in Israel. For many, their first stop looked much like refugee camps elsewhere: a sprawling tent city in the middle of a wasteland. But these traumatized survivors would have a vastly different outcome than their counterparts elsewhere, particularly the Palestinians. The refugee tent cities were way-stations, not permanent residences. “All of these people were absorbed into Israel and became part of the society, and without even taking a nickel from the United Nations,” Waldman noted. Israelis ignored the obvious difficulties for a tiny relatively poor state to take in so many refugees at once, understanding that the priority was to give people with a common heritage a home and a chance for better life.

In contrast, where Palestinians attempted to find homes among their Arab neighbors, they were nearly always turned back, despite the ancient links of culture, ethnicity, religion, trade and even close family ties that formerly bound them to other countries in the region. Notably, many Palestinian refugees have migrated quite successfully to countries well outside the Arab world such as Canada. But for the Palestinians who remain in the camps, they have inherited a United Nations welfare state. They’ve received billions of dollars since 1948. Meanwhile, conditions in the Palestinian territories remain atrocious.

Canada’s decision on changing its funding vehicle for Palestinians works as a wake-up call to the international community that we don’t want to keep reinforcing failure. We want to see better outcomes. Hopefully, when a solution does come, it will recognize the claims of all the refugees, including the forgotten ones.

NEW MEDIA EDITOR’S NOTE: If you are a Jewish refugee from the Arab world, the people at JIMENA would be grateful if you would share your personal story with them. They have a growing collection of personal stories of the refugees who immigrated to Israel and other countries. You can contact them here.

A Record of the Forgotten Refugees

Canada’s bulky new citizenship guide has come under some controversy for its fairly explicit declaration of Canadian values (and condemnation of “barbaric cultural practices”). Still, perhaps the document didn’t go quite far enough in detailing the sort of behavior that will not be looked kindly on by our fellow citizens — not least, our border services personnel.

He also had nearly $1 million in gold coins on him, though he had declared only $10,000, to avoid paying tax on the funds. That’s according to his lawyer. So, assuming he has no ties to militant extremists, our newest potential citizen is only a confessed tax evader. How nice for us.

Read the full article in the Vancouver Sun’s Community of Interest

Letters to the President is a documentary showing the harsh and repressive life that Iranians endure under the repression of Ahmadinejad and the Mullahs. Since Iranians understand that corrupt and incompetent local officials have nothing to offer, the populist Ahmadinejad receives hundreds of thousands of letters from desperate people begging for scraps from a benevolent dictator. They have about as much hope of getting a positive response as from writing a letter to Santa Claus, but in the absence of real democracy or economic opportunity, the tradition persists.

After catching a screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival, the director stuck around to ask questions. “Given what some of the brave young people in the film are saying about Ahmadinejad’s regime, are you hopeful about the future for Iran?” I asked.

Director Peter Lom shook his head, noting that many young people had been co-opted by the hardline government, such as those who joined the Basji (the paramilitary volunteer militia accused of killing and torturing 2009 election protesters). And it’s not just in Iran — here in Canada, Lom said his Iranian assistant director had been threatened in Farsi by the moderator of a publicity event for the film.

Still, as Lom says, the brutality of the Iranian regime has shown all but the most brainwashed dead-enders that “the Emperor has no clothes”. Anti-colonialism and anti-Americanism plays well around the world, but Ahmadinejad and the theocracy can no longer distract the Che Guevara T-shirt crowd from the fact that they are no longer revolutionary. The regime and it’s supporters are counter-revolutionary. And the democratic revolution won’t be stopped forever.

Marg bar dictator.