Turkey should apologize for the deaths of 766 Holocaust refugees whose Deputy MV Struma boat was sunk in February 1942 after the country refused to allow their boat to remain in port for repairs, said Knesset Member Moshe Feiglin.

The ship was towed away to the Black Sea, where it was a sitting duck for a mine or a Soviet torpedo.

Feiglin posted the demand on his Facebook page after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s won an apology from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for the deaths of nine Turkish terrorists who clubbed and kidnapped IDF commandos trying to stop their boat from reaching Hamas-controlled Gaza in May 2010.

Erdogan also is demanding $ 1 million compensation for each of the nine terrorists killed in the clash.

Feiglin, who heads the Jewish Leadership faction of the Likud, wrote, “The truth is that we don’t need an apology. And also not financial compensation. The Jewish people have a special skill. They know how to remember.”

Jews piled on the ship in Romania in December 1942 but their journey to Israel, which was then under the British Mandate, was scuttled when the boat docked at Istanbul.

Britain refused to give the referees visa and Turkey refused to allow them to enter the country.

After two months of being stuck in the port, Turkey towed to the ship into international waters, where it was sunk either by a mine of by a Soviet torpedo.

In an account of the boat’s hapless voyage written in “The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism,” Bernard Wasserstein wrote, “It was a rough night in the Black Sea on February 24, 1942. Ten kilometers or so from the shore, a 75 year-old, 240-ton converted yacht, carrying 767 Jewish refugees from Romania, exploded, probably after being hit by a torpedo, fired in error by a Soviet submarine.

“The vessel sank with the loss of all except one of the passengers. The Struma had left Constanza [Romania] on December 12, 1941, bound for Palestine. But on arrival at Istanbul three days later, her engine broke down and she was unable to proceed. While engineers tried unsuccessfully to restore the ship to seaworthiness, the Turkish and British governments wrangled about the onward passage of the refugees.

“The Turks refused to allow them to land unless they had guarantees of admission to some other country. The British refused to grant them certificates to enter Palestine. The failure of the two governments to agree culminated in the boat being towed out to sea and abandoned to the waves…

“The only force used in the episode was that applied by between one and two hundred Turkish policemen who overpowered resistance from the debilitated refugees and supervised the towing of the rotten, still engine-less hulk out beyond territorial waters. They then abandoned the passengers to near-certain death.”

Would Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. have called on the world body “to tell the 850,000 untold stories of Jewish refugees from Arab countries…” had the Palestinians not made the return of their “refugees” to Israel a foundational point for the securing of a comprehensive peace agreement with the Jewish state?

“We are 64 years late, but we are not too late,” said Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon last Friday.

So why now?

Sadly, it appears that the Israeli foreign policy establishment has given up on convincing the international community as to the essential rightness of the Zionist enterprise. Rather, by attempting to push the issue of Jewish “refugees” from Arab lands to the top of the U.N.’s agenda, Israelis abdicating the moral high ground in favor of sinking into a battle of victimhood narratives with the Palestinians.

Such a lack of conviction bespeaks a general sense of malaise emanating from Jerusalem, where Israel’s leaders have evidently thrown up their hands and embraced the belief that the best defense against anti-Israel bias is a compelling story of mass expulsion.

Now, Minister Ayalon is absolutely correct in asserting that “this issue was never emphasized enough…We have decided to bring it up, to flush out the truth.” It’s a crying shame, not to mention a blight on the records of successive Israeli administrations, that the greatest single demographic upheaval in the modern history of the Middle East was a story largely left untold inside of Israel.

As such, it is altogether appropriate that the Israeli national zeitgeist make room for the largely-forgotten history of Jewish refugees who were summarily expelled from Arab lands.

For while much thought, research, ink and media coverage has been dedicated in recent years to the European Holocaust, the wave of anti-Semitism and violence that swept Arab states in the wake of Israel’s establishment has long been given short shrift.

However, the politicizing of this dark chapter in Jewish history is but a rather lame attempt to stem the growing tide of pro-Palestinian sentiment that has seemingly swept across our world.

For Israel to make any kind of headway by way of ‘hasbara’ (public relations efforts for Israel) it need only remember and repeat these immutable facts regarding the genesis of the Palestinian “refugee” issue:

Settling for approximately one-quarter of the land mass that had been promised by the original partition plan, Jewish leaders made strenuous efforts to encourage their Arab neighbors to stay on and help build up the new state of Israel.

A large majority of local Arabs responded to the call for coexistence by violently rejecting it.  Egged on by a bellicose leadership that darkly warned that its bullets wouldn’t distinguish between Arabs and Jews, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs summarily packed up and took off, having been reassured that they would be able to return once the foreign Zionist entity had been snuffed out.

What followed was an invasion by seven Arab countries. Had the Arabs accepted the two-state solution, as formulated by the UN in 1947, it is quite likely that war would have been avoided and a separate Palestinian country would have come into existence.

That a refugee problem arose as a result of the invasion is an irrefutable fact. Yet, the births of many sovereign nation have resulted in mass displacement and other social upheavals. Unique to the saga of the Palestinian refugee, however, is the phenomenon of the magically multiplying refugees. From close to 750,000 in 1948, today Palestinian refugees number over 5 million.  Is there any other displaced group on earth that passes their refugee status on genetically?

And while Palestinians around the Middle East have subsequently been used as pawns in a decades-long attempt to destabilize and delegitimize the sovereign state of Israel, Jewish immigrants – that’s right, “immigrants” – from Arab lands were absorbed into Israeli society, where many of their progeny would go on to assume prominent roles within Israeli society.

By referring to Jewish immigrants from Arab lands as refugees, Israeli Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon is inadvertently providing fodder for extremists across the Arab world who argue that all Jewish immigrants should return to their “home” countries since Israel is neither their country nor their ancestral homeland.

Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan/Brooklyn) recently traveled to Israel where he joined Israeli and international leaders to call for better recognition of the rights of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

“I am proud to have visited Israel this week to speak about the absolute necessity of recognizing the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab countries,” said Nadler. “It is simply wrong to recognize the rights of Palestinian refugees without recognizing the rights of nearly one million Jewish refugees who suffered terrible outrages at the hands of their former compatriots. We must not retreat from the obvious injustice these Jewish refugees face, and we must continue the effort to emphasize that the plight of all refugees must be considered equally and fairly in any final peace agreement.”

Speaking at the Justice for Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries Conference, which was cosponsored by the Israeli government and the World Jewish Congress, Congressman Nadler discussed his work in Congress to ensure that the U.S. leads the way in acknowledging the terrible injustices visited upon Jewish refugees from the Middle East and to ensure equal treatment for Jewish refugees.

Congressman Nadler passed a congressional resolution on the issue back in 2008 and, most recently, he has introduced bi-partisan legislation, H.R. 6242, that calls on the Administration to report to Congress on its progress in pursuing justice for Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

Jerrold Nadler has served in Congress since 1992. He represents New York’s 8th Congressional District, which includes parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

A new poll released at an international conference on Justice for Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries shows that a great proportion of Arab Israelis (54%) than Jewish Israelis (48%) believe issues pertaining to Jewish refugees from Arab countries deserve as much attention as those pertaining to Arab refugees from Israel’s war of independence.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told attendees, “The Arab world has neglected Arab refugees for decades and has used them as a battering ram against Israel, while Israel, which was just born as a nation-state, has absorbed and resettled the Jewish refugees from Arab countries and turned them into productive citizens.”

Before 1948, there were close to one million Jews living in the Arab world, while today only a few thousand still remain. During the four years following the establishment of the state of Israel, violent anti-Semitic riots broke out across the Middle East and restrictive government measures were put in place, which forced ancient Jewish communities, some thousands of years old, to dissolve. Driven from their homes and properties, 856,000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries and Iran, fleeing mostly to Israel but also to the United States, Europe, Canada, and elsewhere.

The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) has launched a new campaign to mark this tragedy in cooperation with the World Jewish Congress and the Ministry of Pensioner Affairs. Called ‘I Am a Refugee,’ the international campaign seeks to bring the forgotten and often overlooked stories of Jewish refugees from Arab countries to both Israel and the international community.

The campaign, led by Deputy Foreign Minister, Daniel Ayalon, whose own father’s family was forced to flee Algeria, aims to highlight the injustices that were done to the Jewish refugees, via Facebook and online sources. “The time has come to correct an ongoing historical injustice that has affected half of the population of Israel,” said Deputy FM Ayalon on the MFA website.

Jews living in Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, Iran, Morocco, Egypt, Yemen and Syria lost their legal status, properties and homes, which in many cases were seized by the government.  On the I Am a Refugee Facebook campaign page, personal stories, photos, video documentaries, and documents have been uploaded of Jewish life and escape from these different Middle Eastern countries.  In one pre-World War II photo, a class of Jewish youngsters can be seen in a Benghazi synagogue, while another photo depicts a Jewish wedding in Aleppo, Syria in 1914. In others, Iraqi and Kurdish Jewish refugees are seen arriving to Israel in the 1950s, while other photos show life in the Israeli transit camps that absorbed these refugees.  An uploaded video documentary tells the story of a Jewish family’s exodus from Egypt.

According to MFA website, the personal stories that appear on the Facebook page will be presented at a conference in New York when the United National General Assembly convenes at the end of September.

Ayalon has asked Jewish refugees and their families to take an active part of this campaign via Facebook, to “tell the world your personal story, which is an inseparable part of the Jewish people and the story of the re-establishment of the State of Israel.”

This past June, the United Nations marked World Refugee Day, where only one group of refugees—the Jewish refugees from Arab countries– was noticeably absent, according to a recent Huffington Post article written by Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Proser. “The historic Jewish presence in the Arab World must be recognized. The grave injustices inflicted upon them must be acknowledged,” Prosor wrote in response to the UN oversight.

The I Am a Refugee campaign aims to open the way to international acknowledgement and recognition of the Jewish refugee issue. This coming Monday, an international conference of jurists and experts on the refugee matter will be held in Jerusalem, to continue to advance this campaign.

The Knesset conference on Compensation for Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries, hosted by MK Nissim Zeev (Shas), raised the profile of his cause and will lead to the creation of a Knesset caucus.

Speaker Reuven Rivlin, Vice Prime Minister Benny Begin, Israeli MKs, foreign leaders, and diaspora groups of Arab-country origins filled the Knesset’s Jerusalem Hall for a few hours to discuss their views and exchange ideas.

Speaker Rivlin said that a peace treaty with any of our neighbors will be impossible without the compensation of the Jews expelled during the Jewish-Arab wars. He said that the theft of Jewish money, property, and belongings can’t be tolerated and must be resolved in any signed agreement.

Vice Prime Minister Begin (Likud) used the occasion to slam Fatah. MK Lia Shemtov (Yisrael Beitenu -Y.B.) echoed Rivlin’s sentiments, saying there can be no peace with our neighbors without compensation for the Jewish refugees, adding that the compensation must be full and 100%.

MK Orly Levi-Abekasis (Y.B.) said that it is a humanitarian need to compensate Jewish refugees. She stressed that even in countries where Jews weren’t killed, all of their property was left behind. She added that many Jews died on the way to Israel and asked: ‘who will compensate their families?’ She charged that the plight of the Jewish refugees is never discussed and they currently have no rights. She concluded that justice requires us to compensate Jewish refugees for everything that was left behind.

MK Einat Wilf (Independence) said there are only 30,000 Arab refugees from the Jewish-Arab war, not 5 million, as the United Nations’ UNRWA claims. She said a baby born in Gaza is not a refugee. She stated the world only knows half of the story, noting there are Jewish refugees, not just Arab refugees, and stressing that any settlement must include compensation for both sides. She said there is an ethnic cleansing of Christian cities in Muslim countries because the Jewish cities were already cleansed sixty years ago. She concluded that any compensation must go both ways because there were victims on both sides of the Jewish-Arab war.

Vice-Chairman of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Fiorello Provera, Italy’s outgoing Interior Minister, and a Swedish parliament member were among the European dignitaries who spoke and supported the initiative.