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Brussels -- EU "We lost everything we had, we could not event take our family photos," declared Edwin Shuker, a displaced Jewish refugee from Iraq, at a hearing in the European Parliament in Brussels on July 1. The hearing was the first of its kind and was initiated by "Justice for Jews from Arab countries", an international organization seeking justice for the estimated one million Jews who have been displaced from Arab countries since 1948.

The speakers expressed outrage over the fact that "the rights of Jewish and Christian refugees today are virtually unrecognized by the Europeans." Professor Carole Basri, an attorney who teaches law at the University of Pensylvania, said that the criteria for ethnic cleansing is one that can honestly be used to describe the political measures that were put in to place, to displace the Jewish population in Arab countries in spite of the fact that those individuals have never posed a military threat.

European Coalition for Israel (ECI) first met with this group at the United Nations in Geneva in April and has since stayed in contact with them in order to lend support to the cause. The group recently reached an important milestone when the US Congress passed a bill stating that the President and US officials participating in Middle East discussions must ensure that any explicit reference to Palestinian refugees is matched by a similar explicit reference to Jewish and other refugees, as a matter of law and equity.

European Coalition for Israel believes the same policy should also apply to the EU and will do its utmost to ensure that the fate of Jewish and other refugees from the Middle East is taken into account in all official EU discussions on the subject of peace in the Middle East.

Source: www.ec4i.org