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Palestinian expert on international law Dr. Anis Fawzi Qasim said that it would be naive to call upon Arab Jews to return to their home countries. "The Jews in Israel are better off than the Jews in the Arab world," he said, asking: "What exactly [would they be] returning to?" Dr. Qasim, who resides in Jordan, was a member of the advisory committee to the Palestinian-Jordanian delegation to the 1991 Madrid Conference. His remarks aired on Al-Quds TV on November 3, 2017.
Host: "Some people ask how come the Arabs have not called upon the Arab Jews to return from Palestine to their countries. Former Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki made such a call. When he was president, he called upon the Tunisian Jews in the Israeli entity to return to Tunisia."
Dr. Anis Fawzi Qasim: "Such a call, although seemingly logical, reasonable, and desirable, is, in fact, very naive. The Jews in Israel are better off than the Jews in the Arab world. I recall that Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, legislated a law to that effect, and one Jew indeed returned to Iraq, and for that, he suffered greatly, not because he was a Jew, but because the general atmosphere was oppressive to everybody. There were no liberties and no constitutional or legal guarantees. Someone who returns to the Arab world – what exactly is he returning to? The Arab world is not capable of accepting even its own sons. What we have is immigration in the opposite direction: Scientists and intellectuals from the Arab world are moving abroad. This means that the atmosphere in the Arab world is stifling."
Host: "Right."
Dr. Anis Fawzi Qasim: "So it would be naive to call upon the Jews to return from Israel to the Arab countries. The Jews have no incentives to return to the Arab world."
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