"Every time Palestinian leaders sit down at the negotiating table, or give a public speech, they never fail to raise the plight of the 700,000 Arab-Palestinians displaced when they refused to accept Israel's existence in 1948.
For too long, the State of Israel and the global Jewish community have done too little to memorialize and honor the other side of that story - the 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries...
It is important to note that .... when Israel was established in 1948, the Arab governments not only fought the new state, they also turned against their Jewish communities that had lived in peace with their neighbors for generations. Facing murderous anti-Jewish riots and government confiscation of wealth, nearly 1 million Jews were forced to flee the places their families had called home for generations, leaving behind everything they had.
Yet these hundreds of thousands of families did not end up in refugee camps isolated from the rest of society. They do not have a special U.N. agency lobbying on their behalf. And the reason is simple: Unlike the Arab countries that refused to absorb the Palestinian refugees, the State of Israel opened its doors to fellow Jews...
We have proven to the world that when nations act responsibly, there is absolutely no reason for a refugee crisis to last for more than a few years. Now is the time for the community of nations to enact fair and practical solutions for the rest of the world's refugees and put an end to the artificial wound of Palestinian refugees that has festered for way too long."