The fate of the thousands of Jews from Arab countries who fled their homes in the wake of the 1948 war has hardly been, it’s fair to say, one of the more prominent issues thrown up by the Israeli-Arab conflict. Even in the Jewish world, the story of the Mizrahi exodus has been barely visible and infrequently discussed.

Over the last few years, a coalition of Jewish organizations, organized under the rubric of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC), has boldly attempted to place the issue front and center. JJAC arguably achieved its most important victory so far when, in early April, the US Congress passed a resolution which recognized the suffering of these Jewish communities.

The resolution was important for several reasons. To begin with, it exploded the myth, widely-believed inside and outside the Arab world, that Jews in these countries enjoyed a life of perpetual tolerance and harmony; true, Arab antisemitism never descended to the exterminationist depths of Europe, but Arab Jews were well aware of their subordinate status. And there were occasional paroxysms of violence, for example the farhud which took place in Iraq in 1941, resulting in attacks and looting against the long-established Jewish community of Baghdad.

In addition, the resolution underlines the fact that the Palestinians are not the only refugee problem resulting from the 1948 war. Of course, Jews from Arab countries are not living in refugee shanty towns, like so many of the Palestinians, but that is because Israel’s focus, from the beginning, was on absorption, not political manipulation. Elderly Mizrahi Jews in Israel can relate the miseries they encountered in the ma’abarot, the transit camps where they were first housed, but for Palestinians in Lebanon and Syria, lousy living conditions and discrimination are an every-day reality: the price exacted, if you will, for being a visible symbol of the “right of return.” Indeed, one could say that, in political terms, the Jews from Arab countries have been victims of their own accomplishments.

With the Congressional resolution, though, that changes somewhat: the history which has thusfar been masked by the largely successful absorption process in Israel is now on view. So it is irritating to read a churlish piece in The Economist which portrays the resolution as another “questionable victory” for the “Israel lobby.”

The choice of language here suggests that, yet again, Israel’s powerful advocates in the US have muscled a branch of government into doing something that it otherwise wouldn’t do. Just as fanciful is the notion that the resolution could derail the peace process by placing two restitution claims - Palestinian and Arab Jewish - in conflict.

It is on this issue of restitution that The Economist just gets the resolution wrong. As Point of No Return observes:

It’s not a question of restitution, but of recognition. For too long the existence of the Jewish refugees has been ignored in the discourse on the Middle East conflict and has led to a lopsided and unbalanced narrative in which Palestinians are viewed as the sole victims…It is unfair to penalise Israel for not politicising the issue of the Jewish refugees, who were successfully absorbed with little fuss and who together with their descendants constitute half Israel’s Jewish population.

Achieving peace depends, in part, on a proper reckoning with the past and avoidance of the reductionist, demonizing historical narratives so beloved in the Arab world. In that sense, unveiling the truth about the dispossession of more than 800,000 Jews from Arab countries - from Libya in the west to Yemen in the east - contributes to, rather than detracts from, the peace process.