With all the talk of Israel as an “apartheid” state, amid the calls that Israel must “acknowledge” the Palestinians who fled or were expelled in 1948 and after, it is important to remember the flow of refugees in the other direction: from Arab lands to the Jewish state. It is often forgotten that nearly one million Jews fled or were expelled from Arab countries following Israel’s establishment. And while international bodies and neighboring Arab states preferred to exploit the Palestinian refugees’ suffering, Israel applied itself, sometimes imperfectly but never cynically, to transforming discarded Jews into citizens. And for every Palestinian who claims redress or return based on his or her losses in 1948, there are Jews who can make similar claims on property and assets in the lands where they, their parents, or their grandparents once lived.

The argument has usually rested on the margins of the Middle East debate, within Israel as well as beyond. But with an Arab “peace” initiative that continues to put the Palestinian “right of return” front and center, it is an argument that needs to be made with more frequency and insistence.

Congress is currently considering bipartisan resolutions that urge the president to make sure that any Mideast peace deal addresses the situation of Jewish refugees from Arab lands. The non-binding resolutions introduced last week were sponsored, in the U.S. House of Representatives, by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), Rep. Michael Ferguson (R-NJ), and Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-NY).

In the Senate, they were sponsored by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), and Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.).

According to the House version, U.S. diplomats should “make clear that the United States government supports the position that, as an integral part of any comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace, the issue of refugees from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf must be resolved in a manner that includes recognition of the legitimate rights of and losses incurred by all refugees displaced from Arab countries including Jews, Christians, and other minority groups.”

This is not a diplomat’s exercise in “I am rubber, you are glue.…” It is a legitimate attempt to restore historical memory and neutralize the one-sided version of events that so often dominates Mideast discourse and cripples progress in negotiations. The Palestinians’ unconditional demands for a full “right of return” to Israel spell nothing less than the demographic destruction of the Jewish state. Recognizing claims of loss and redress on both sides could restore sanity to the peace process and set the stage for the breakthroughs reasonable people on all sides yearn for.