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Oh, those refugees whose property was taken

Oh, those refugees whose property was taken

More on the inconvenient history of refugees in the Middle East.

From the Times of Israel, Egyptian authorities reportedly seize 1.7 million documents proving Jewish ownership of assets in Cairo:

Egyptian authorities confiscated some 1.7 million documents reportedly proving Jewish ownership of land and assets in Cairo. The documents were reportedly about to be shipped out of the country to Israel, in what the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram is calling “the most dangerous case of security breach in history.”

The documents were found in 13 large cases, ready to be transported to Jordan and from there to Israel, Egyptian media reported Sunday.

Elaph, a Saudi-owned news site, reported that Egyptian police received notice that the packages were being held at a shipping company in the Nasser City district of Cairo. Upon arriving at the scene, police found over 1.7 million documents dating back to the 19th century, dealing with Jewish ownership of assets in Cairo. The documents, according to the security source speaking to the Saudi site, weighed over two tons.

Preliminary investigations have revealed that the documents were supposed to be used in an Israeli lawsuit involving Jewish property lost in Egypt’s 1952 revolution, the site reported. According to Elaph, Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi is personally following the case, which it said affects Egypt’s national security.

The documents were reportedly stolen on December 16, 2011, from a Cairo research institution, the Institut d’Égypte, during public riots that erupted following president Hosni Mubarak’s ouster.

Related, Israel double-dares Arabs to seek compensation for refugees.

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Comments

And the call goes out:

Paging Winston Smith, Mr. Smith the Eyptian office needs advice on document handling. Paging Mr. Smith.

This is actually sort-of good news: the Egyptian govt now officially has the docs. Of course, they’ll disappear, but at that point, when one govt had destroyed evidence, they don’t have much of a moral claim to demand that the other side do anything. It’ have been much worse if they’d been ‘lost in shipment’ or ‘burned in a fire’.

Not that there’ll ever be a propoerty settlement either way, of course.

    Pasturized in reply to radiofreeca. | October 30, 2012 at 3:01 pm

    I hate to say it but I can’t imagine that the Egyptians would suffer any negative consequences internationally from destroying the documents.

    To paraphrase the old dog bite argument routine the Egyptians will claim:

    1) the documents never existed
    2) they didn’t say what Israel claims they did
    3) they were Jewish forgeries.

Now, Professor Jacobson, don’t you know that bringing up Jewish property in Arab lands or that the number of Jews who fled those countries is roughly equal to the number of Palestinians who left Israel, for whatever reason…this is “divisive” and “unconstructive.”

When the left feels as deeply about the plight of the Karelian Finns or Sudeten Germans, I will believe that its sympathy for the Palestinians is real.

    LukeHandCool in reply to Alex Bensky. | October 30, 2012 at 1:06 pm

    I’d love to see the left’s reaction if Jews occasionally detonated themselves on a German bus or a Russian cafe, taking the lives of scores of innocent citizens … and citing historical grievances as the cause for their murderous actions.

    What would the left say? Talk about cognitive dissonance.

Only Jews or “white” people can be legitimately considered to be occupiers.

What is the statute of limitations for determining a state of occupation? How was and is control passed (or recovered) from one interest to another?

Jews rarely do suicide attacks. They’re smart enough to know that the purpose of war is to make the other guy die for their country.

Personally, my feeling is that it just took the Muslim Brotherhood a year to put together the (possibly) fake documents. Has no one really considered this? It’s sort of like Bob Bechtel on Fox’s The Five saying that he didn’t believe Benghazi was an uprising or riot but a planned terrorist attack.

I thik the MB would also want these documents to “show” how much of Egypt is owned by Israel as a way to whip the emotions of all those downtrodden Egyptians they need to put into harm’s way if they should go to war. Any pretext will do, but one that can be both economic and religious would be like manna from Heaven to the MB. I can just see them “finding” one which “proves” Israeli ownership of a mosque. That it beggers belief would be beside the point to them.