by Semha Alwaya In discussions about refugees in the Middle
East, a major piece of the narrative is routinely omitted, and
my life is part of the tapestry of what's missing. I am a Jew,
and I, too, am a refugee. Some of my childhood was spent in a
refugee camp in Israel (yes, Israel). And I am far from being
alone. This experience is shared by hundreds of thousands of
other indigenous Jewish Middle Easterners who share a similar
background to my own. However, unlike the Palestinian Arabs, our
narrative is largely ignored by the world because our story --
that of some 900,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries
dispossessed by Arab governments -- is an inconvenience for
those who seek to blame Israel for all the problems in the
Middle East. Our lives in the Israel of the 1950s were
difficult. We had no money, no property; there were food
shortages, few employment prospects. Israel was a new and poor
country with very limited resources. It absorbed not only
hundreds of thousands of us, but also an equal number