As the expectations for a serious movement towards a Palestinian-Israeli settlement seem to be growing by the day, a little-known group, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC), is trying to ride the coat tails of the upcoming US-sponsored Mideast peace "meeting" in Annapolis later this month.

The five-year-old US-based organisation has scheduled a two-day conference in New York earlier this week to drum up support for its long-dormant cause but hardly their announcement was released than Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told them to cool it. He said it was "premature" to raise the issue of Arab Jews who "settled" in Israel at this stage. But he assured them that when the Palestinian refugee issue is eventually on the table, Israel would "reaffirm its commitment to resolving the rights of Jewish refugees from Arab countries as well".

According to the estimates of this Jewish advocacy group there are about 850,000 Arab Jews, the largest number coming from Morocco, who live in colonies in Israel after the Zionist state was founded in 1948. Raising its profile, the JTA news agency reported, it "could provide the Israeli government a powerful bargaining chip to offset claims by Palestinian refugees".

But this is like mixing apples and oranges. Unlike the Arab Jews, the Palestinian refugees, totalling about 750,000, were either driven out of their homeland, 72 per cent of which is nowadays Israel, or left Palestine because of fear in the wake of several massacres by Jewish terrorists in Arab towns and villages. Their exceptional case has international recognition and support.

In 1948, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194 which "resolves that (Palestinian) refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return..." In fact, November 29 has been internationally recognised as the UN Solidarity Day with Palestinian refugees.

The case of Arab Jews who migrated to Israel and numbered in the 1980's "well over half of Israel's Jewish population," according to the Encyclopedia of The Modern Middle East and North Africa, is basically different. Their proximity to Israel made it easier to entice them over and in some cases they had no other choice.

In Iraq, for example, Naeim Giladi, an Iraqi Jew who was in the Zionist underground in Iraq and now a US citizen, writes in The Link, a US publication, that "about 125,000 Jews left Iraq for Israel in the late 1940s and into 1952, mostly because they had been lied to and put into a panic by what I came to learn were Zionist bombs". He elaborated, "The terrible truth is that the grenades that killed and maimed Iraqi Jews and damaged their property were thrown by Zionist Jews."

These actions were corroborated by Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former senior officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in his book, Ropes of Sand. "ln attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorise the Jews," he wrote, "the Zionists planted bombs in the US Information Service library and in synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel..."

But on arrival in Israel, the Arab Jews were soon to face discrimination from the Establishment Jews who came from Europe, a situation that led to the establishment in 1971 of a protest movement of second generation colonists from the Arab countries and who adopted the name Israeli Black Panthers, much like their counterparts in the US, the African-American Black Panthers. They were one of the first organisations in Israel which sought social justice for the Mizrahi Jews.

On the other hand, Israel capitalised, whenever it suited its policies, on the presence of Arab Jews in neighbouring states. In 1954, a cell of young Egyptian Jews, activated by the Israel Defence Force, placed explosives in American facilities in Cairo, according to the Encyclopedia of The Modern Middle East and North Africa, with the intent of "souring relations between Egypt and West in order to delay the British withdrawal from Egypt". The failed operation, called the Lavon Affair, was named after the then Israeli defence minister Pinhas Lavon.

Interestingly, two Arab governments, Morocco and Iraq, have invited Israeli Jews to return to their country of origin, and some Moroccan Jews are known to have visited their former homeland. Arab governments would do well to allow their former citizens to return either to re-settle there or receive compensation for their abandoned property.

But what is good for the goose should be good for the gander. Palestinians, too, should be allowed to return to their former homeland, re-settle there or receive compensation for their lost properties. Hopefully, the upcoming Annapolis meeting will shed some light on the intentions of all the participants.

George Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com.