Who will compensate Jewish refugees from Arab lands?
Despite a willingness by US envoy Martin Indyk to consider compensation for Jewish refugees as part of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, no Arab country or the United States has the financial means to make it happen.
In December 2003, just days after deposed President Saddam Hussein was captured, I went to Iraq as a journalist.
“If you get to Hilla,” my mother told me, “look for our house on the banks of the Euphrates.”
I wasn’t born in that house, a home that my parents never stopped longing for ever since they immigrated to Israel in 1951 in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. Nor was I going to Iraq to search for my roots. Still, curiosity got the best of me and led me to the town where my parents were born. I had pictures of the house taken 50 years earlier, and with that I was able to locate the home they abandoned with everything still in it so that they could immigrate to Israel.
The city of Hilla, known in ancient times as Babylon, is located about 50 kilometers (31 miles) southeast of Baghdad. It is still scarred by the marks of all those wars that Saddam led his people through over the years, from the war with Iran to the Gulf War.
