Israel, Zionism and the Media

Tag: refugees

Before you vote for Palestinian statehood read this

This is a cross post with gracious permission from Elder of Ziyon 

Let there be no doubt about the true intention of the Palestinian statehood bid after this. [RC]

**********************************************************************************

Palestinian Arab “refugees” wouldn’t be citizens of “Palestine” – even if they live there!

Did you think that 63 years of Arabs using the “refugees” as political pawns would end if there was a Palestinian Arab state?

If you want to know the depths of cynicism of the Palestinian Arab leadership towards their people, you must read this article in The Daily Star Lebanon:

Palestinian refugees will not become citizens of a new Palestinian state, according to Palestine’s ambassador to Lebanon.

From behind a desk topped by a miniature model of Palestine’s hoped-for blue United Nations chair, Ambassador Abdullah Abdullah spoke to The Daily Star Wednesday about Palestine’s upcoming bid for U.N. statehood.

The ambassador unequivocally says that Palestinian refugees would not become citizens of the sought for U.N.-recognized Palestinian state, an issue that has been much discussed. “They are Palestinians, that’s their identity,” he says. “But … they are not automatically citizens.

This would not only apply to refugees in countries such as Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan or the other 132 countries where Abdullah says Palestinians reside. Abdullah said that “even Palestinian refugees who are living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”

Let’s read that again, shall we?

“Even Palestinian refugees who are living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”

People who live in camps in their own state would be barred, by their own leaders, from becoming citizens of that very state!

Why? Because, to Palestinian Arab leaders, the “refugees” are not an oppressed group who must be helped. They are human weapons in a never ending war against Israel. Giving them citizenship removes their status as weapons.

The most important issue to the Palestinian Arab leadership is not to end the suffering of their people, or achieving independence. It is to destroy Israel, using the nonexistent “right of return.” Nothing could be more obvious – yet most of the world refuses to believe that Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies could possibly be so indescribably cruel and callous to their own people.

Abdullah said that the new Palestinian state would “absolutely not” be issuing Palestinian passports to refugees.

Neither this definitional status nor U.N. statehood, Abdullah says, would affect the eventual return of refugees to Palestine. “How the issue of the right of return will be solved I don’t know, it’s too early [to say], but it is a sacred right that has to be dealt with and solved [with] the acceptance of all.” He says statehood “will never affect the right of return for Palestinian refugees.”

The right of return that Abdullah says is to be negotiated would not only apply to those Palestinians whose origins are within the 1967 borders of the state, he adds. “The state is the 1967 borders, but the refugees are not only from the 1967 borders. The refugees are from all over Palestine. When we have a state accepted as a member of the United Nations, this is not the end of the conflict. This is not a solution to the conflict. This is only a new framework that will change the rules of the game.”

And make it easier for Palestinian Arabs to achieve their real goal – the end of the Jewish state.

For 63 years, three generations of Palestinian Arabs are being brought up being told that they must return to a non-existent state that their ancestors came from, and nothing else is acceptable. And the potential establishment of a Palestinian Arab state would ironically make their wishes to become citizens even more remote.

If there is to be a Palestinian Arab uprising, it should be against leaders like these who are happy to tell their own people to stay in hell – and to be happy about it.

 

 

Why I’m an ashamed Jew

Yep, you read right.

I’ve had to admit it.

I can’t live a lie any longer.

I’m deeply, deeply ashamed.

Ashamed of being Jewish?

No way. I’m very proud to be Jewish and a member of the Jewish people.

Ashamed of Israel? Wrong again. I’m proud of Israel’s achievements. I worry about its policies, sometimes; I’m concerned, sometimes, about some of its actions and those of some of its citizens, but I could say the same for Britain and I’m still proud to be British.

So why am I ashamed?

I’ll tell you.

I’m ashamed of Jews who say they are ashamed to be Jews or Jewish.

I don’t hear Palestinians coming out to  declare they are ashamed to be Palestinian and denounce suicide bombs or missiles.

I don’t hear Arabs writing they are ashamed to be Arabs because of Al Qaeda or Sudan or Yemen.

I don’t hear Muslims forming groups of shame because of what Sunni does to Shia, or 9/11, or 7/7, or Madrid, or Mumbai.

I don’t know of any Ashamed Catholic groups forming because of the paedophilia apparently rife in Catholic clergy.

In fact I know of no other group of people who so often announce their ashamedness to be who they are as Jews do.

And you know what?

It makes me ashamed.

I’m an ashamed Jew who is ashamed of ashamed Jews. If that’s a paradox, so be it. And I’m not ashamed to declare my shame.

Shame on me!

I don’t see why Arabs or Muslims or Palestinians or Brits or Americans or Chinese or anyone else should be ashamed of what they are because of the actions of a few.

If I’m ashamed to be a Jew because I don’t like what Israel does, that is a form of self-hating, it’s bigotry – by golly, its anti-Semitic.

If I hate all of a group because of the actions of some, then I am a bigot. And if I am the target of my own bigotry then I’m a pretty sick bigot.

On the Andrew Marr program this morning on BBC 1, the eponymous Scottish interviewer had the (Jewish) actress Miriam Margolyes in the studio reporting on a recent visit to Israel and the West Bank.

We see her approaching a young Palestinian woman and asking through an interpreter whether she can see where she lives. The woman, carrying a young child, takes her to a canvas tent. Miriam is shocked and says ‘no-one should have to live like this’.

I absolutely agree with her. No-one in the West Bank should be living in a tent.

So why are they?

Miriam believes it’s because of the terrible Israelis who make her an ‘ashamed Jew’. Neither she nor Marr question why this woman lives like this. No-one asks why after 62 years a young woman whose grandparents left or were driven out of what is now Israel should be a refugee and have refugee status uniquely different from all other refugee groups in history.

Neither Margolyes nor Marr wanted to mention, or even wanted to entertain, the idea that refugee camps, so-called, exist for one reason and one reason only: to deliberately perpetuate the victimhood of Palestinians and to preserve the idea, which Margolyes and other ashamed Jews have swallowed whole , that it is Israel who is responsible for these conditions.

Margolyes appears unaware that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians live comfortably on the West Bank in normal housing. She seems unaware that despite the billions of dollars poured into the Palestinian economy people are still allowed to live in tents and camps.

There is no need for it.

Pakistanis are not living in tents three generations after their forbears fled India.

There are no refugee camps in Israel for the hundreds of thousands who were forced from their homes after 1948 from Egypt and Iraq and Syria and North Africa.

Marr asks ‘Do you think being a Jew gives you a different authority, ability to talk about [the Palestinian question]?’

‘The only authority I have is as a human being’, Margolyes replies. So far, so good.

Then she says that it should not make a difference being Jewish or not Jewish to be able to comment on the situation, but then says, somewhat in contradiction, that she is ’embarrassed and ashamed’ (that word again) because ‘my “lot” is doing “it” to them’.

She then says ‘that’s why I wanted to go there, to see for myself’. Fine. But it appears she had already made up her mind that ‘her lot’ were doing ‘it’ to ‘them’.

Marr asks for her reaction, and she then puts on a faux Arab accent and says that some said ‘why do you come? You are a Jew. We hate you.’ And then in her own voice ‘And I totally understood why’.

Yet, she doesn’t understand why at all. She doesn’t understand that this hatred predates the Jewish state. She doesn’t understand the daily diet of anti-Semitism that is fed to Palestinians in schools, newspapers and on TV.

Marr then asks a question which links the Holocaust to what he clearly believes is a given Israeli/Jewish paranoia. He asks that, given Margolyes and her generation know what it’s like growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust, does she not realise that Israelis feel hemmed in and beleaguered by Iran, suicide bombs and missiles.

She admits her sympathy. She knows what anti-Semitism is. But ‘treating people the way the Israelis are treating the Palestinians is not making things better’. In other words, the blame for the situation is all on the Israeli side.

And then, lo and behold, the old ignorant trope comes out. ‘What people forget over there is that the Palestinians were not responsible for the Holocaust.’

Arghhh!  I’m so ashamed. What the hell has the Holocaust got to do with the situation? Is she suggesting that Israel exists because of Holocaust guilt? Is she suggesting that the Palestinians are paying for the crimes of Europeans? If so, she is ignorant of her own people’s history.

‘They were not the enemy at that time’, she says. But THEY WERE! The Mufti of Jerusalem was a friend of Hitler and organised Muslim Nazi brigades in Yugoslavia. He assured Hitler that he would solve the Jewish Question in Palestine. Hamas and the PLO are the ideological progeny of the Muslim Brotherhood and its anti-Semitic policies.

Margolyes and other ashamed Jews need to educate themselves. I am sick of being ashamed of them.

What is she saying now? Oh yes, the Israelis should understand and accept that they owe reparation to the Palestinians just like the Jews expect it from the Germans.

So she, perhaps unwittingly, makes a moral equivalence between the way Jews were treated in the Holocaust and  the way Palestinians (who have been hell-bent on another Holocaust for 100 years, and certainly 60) have been treated by the Israelis.

Who attacked Israel in 1967?

Why was the PLO formed in 1964 before there was any ‘Occupation’?

The Israelis are behaving ”so cruelly’. Yes, sometimes all those with power over others behave cruelly. Maybe she should understand why Israelis might do so to Palestinians who want to kill them, and blow up their children on buses and in their beds. Why can she only see one side to this conflict?

Even Marr has to remind her about suicide attacks and rockets. And then we get the real answer to Margolyes ashamedness. She is not a two-state solutionist. She wants  ‘those people to be back in their own villages, which is what they want.’

How ignorant is this. They just want to go back to their villages. But their villages are Haifa and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and Eilat and Beersheva. Margolyes is clearly advocating the end of the Jewish state as a deluded one-stater who believes the Palestinians, who she admits hate the Jews, just want to go back peacefully to their homes.

How often do we see people in the media like Miriam Margolyes, Jews and non-Jews, well-meaning, decent people who just do not understand. They live in their cosy left-wing bubbles dreaming of world peace where all will be luvvies.

Sorry Miriam. You are a very nice woman and a wonderful actress, but you are a deluded Jew.

Go read some history. Go read the PLO charter and the Hamas charter. Don’t pose as a woman of peace when you clearly want a second Holocaust – because if you don’t, then you need to wake up out of your deluded lefty dreams, you and all the ashamed Jews.

Until you do so, I will continue to be an ashamed of ashamed Jews Jew.

The practical absurdity of a Palestinian Right of Return

In the current round of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority one of the sticking points will certainly be the Palestinian claim to a Right of Return for Palestinian refugees.

The Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister argued today in the Jerusalem Post that no such Right existed:

The so-called Palestinian ‘right of return’ is legal fiction. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, the supposed source for this ‘right’ does not mention this term, is not legally binding and, like all other relevant United Nations resolutions uses the intentionally ambiguous term ‘refugees’ with no appellation.

This is also taken up on the Zionism and Israel Information Center website:

Palestinian advocates claim that the refugees of 1948 have a right guaranteed in international law to return to Israel. In fact, there is no such law. The Fourth Geneva Convention, often cited in this context, does not stipulate a right of return for refugees. UN Resolution 194, also cited as the basis for this “right” is a resolution of the UN General Assembly. Such resolutions are not binding in international law. No nation has the obligation to admit enemy belligerents. Moreover, Resolution 194 does not insist on a Right of Return. It says that “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so.”

The refugees were not Israeli citizens. They did not want Israeli citizenship. Beyond the dry provisions of the law, in this case admission of several million refugees would soon create an Arab majority in Israel. The people who advocate “Right of Return” also favor abolishing the Israeli Law of Return that permits Jews to immigrate to Israel freely. Israel would cease to be the national home of the Jews, and the Jewish people would lose the right to self-determination. Clearly “Right of Return” cannot be implemented in any case if it contradicts a different fundamental right that is anchored in international law.

Here we are already beginning to explore the practical absurdity of any such Right.

As indicated above, allowing ‘refugees’ to return, assuming that were practical or even practicable would effectively destroy the Jewish nature of the State of Israel, and Israel would cease to be a guarantor of the safety of Jews worldwide, which was one of the major factors in its establishment. And I am not referring here to the Holocaust; any student of Jewish history can list a very long litany of Jewish persecution for the last 2000 years, and they could also reference the current growing antisemitism in Europe and around the world. The need for a state of the Jewish people is as urgent now as at any time in history.

But let’s assume there is a Right of Return for Palestinian refugees. Let’s assume that they can now return to the homes or villages across Israel where they or their forefathers once lived 62 years ago.

1. How would any individual Palestinian prove his/her claim to his/her ancestor’s residency in any particlualr home or village?

2. What would happen to the current residents of those properties? They may not all be Jews, of course.

3. We are assuming that the ‘refugees’ want to become Israelis? Why would they? Why would they want to become citizens of a country that their leaders, media and education system has taught to loathe and despise? Has anyone asked? If not,  what is the basis for the Palestinian Authority’s insistence that this is a non-negotiable agenda item?

4. How would Israel accommodate several million new citizens?

5. As Israel has never been compensated for the 900,000 Jewish refugees who were forced out of, or fled, Arab lands after 1948, why should Israel now have to foot the bill for several million people who need homes, schools, hospitals, sanitation, water, food?

5. How can Israel be expected to accept within its borders millions of people with an historic grudge against the state who have demonstrated for several decades that they are willing to shoot, bomb, attack and sabotage Israelis and Israeli infrastructure with the ultimate aim of destroying the very state they are now asking to become citizens of?

Is it not patently obvious that the Palestinian so-called Right of Return is nothing but the expression of an on-going desire to destroy Israel and remove the Zionist entity?

As Danny Ayalon puts it in the article cited above:

Before 1948 there were nearly 900,000 Jews in Arab lands while only a few thousand remain. Where is the international outrage, the conferences, the proclamations for redress and compensation? While the Palestinian refugee issue has become a political weapon to beat Israel, the Arab League has ordered its member states not to provide their Palestinian population with citizenship; Israel absorbed all of its refugees, whether fleeing the Holocaust or persecution and expulsion from Arab lands.

Can Mahmoud Abbas really be a genuine believer in a two-state solution when one of the most cherished and immoveable pillars of the Palestinian Authority, Fatah and the PLO is the Right of Return?

How can a peace settlement be based on the negation and denial of the rights of one side?

A limited return based on humanitarian grounds such as the reunification of families might be a possibility.

Beyond that, the Right is and always has been an instrument of delegitimisation and an excuse for scuppering peace.

I would not be at all surprised if it were again.

Back to Ayalon:

EVEN THOUGH the number of Jewish refugees [from Arab lands] and their assets are larger than that of the Palestinians, the international community only appears to be aware of the latter’s plight.

There are numerous major international organizations devoted to the Palestinian refugees. There is an annual conference held at the United Nations and a refugee agency was created just for the Palestinian refugees. While all the world’s refugees have one agency, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Palestinians fall under the auspices of another agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

UNWRA’s budget for 2010 is almost half of UNHCR’s budget.

Equally impressive is the fact that UNHCR prides itself on having found “durable solutions” for “tens of millions” of refugees since 1951, the year of its establishment. However, UNRWA does not even claim to have found “durable solutions” for anyone.

What is also impressive is the Palestinians’ and their supporters’ success in completely obliterating the story of the fate of Jews from Arab lands whilst perpetuating their own refugees for more than six decades.

What constantly surprises me is why the practical absurdity of the Palestinian Right of Return has rarely, if ever, been examined and no comprehensive survey of Palestinian ‘refugees’ intentions has ever taken place.

The Muslim refugees who want to get INTO Israel

In Darfur, Sudan, as the world is well aware, there has been a genocidal assault on the region’s population by the Afro-Arab Islamists who rule the country. Most Darfurians are Muslim. It is difficult to estimate numbers killed but they are in the hundreds of thousands and at least 2 million have been displaced and reside in refugee camps in neighbouring Chad or at the mercy of the Janjaweed militia within Sudan itself.

It is no exaggeration to say that this horror is the clearest and most terrible example of genocide and ethnic cleansing in the world in the past 10 years, yet it receives relatively little attention from the world and its media.

The Arab and Muslim world, which you would have thought would be making strenuous efforts to end this conflict and the murder and rape of hundreds of thousands of its fellow Muslims, just sits on its hands. Why? Well the Muslim world doesn’t exactly have a great track record when it comes to defending Muslims being murdered by other Muslims (Iran-Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine for example). 

So why do I write about this on a blog about Israel?

Well, for one, the plight of the Palestinians, especially in Gaza, has attracted an unprecedented wave of anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and Jew hatred across the world. There have been marches, convoys of  aid (Viva Palestina being a case in point), attacks on Jews and Jewish property in many countries, and widespread media vilification of Israel. Yet the comparison between what is happening in Darfur and what is happening in Israel shows a gross exaggeration and a gross misfit between the level of hate spewed out in Israel’s direction compared to what should be an even greater level of hate and outrage directed at the Sudanese government.

But listen to this: you are a Sudanese Muslim surrounded by Muslim countries. You want to leave Sudan and seek refuge elsewhere so you can rebuild your life and save your family. Where would you go? How about Israel? Yes, Israel, that so-called racist apartheid state that everyone is so fond of demonizing. Hundreds of Sudanese Muslims, who are citizens of an enemy state, are arriving in Israel after being smuggled across the border with Egypt. 

Why do they want to come to Israel and what happens to them when they arrive there?

Firstly, Egypt, a Muslim state, has a policy of returning all Sudanese refugees. No absorption centres in Egypt then, just wretched camps where Sudanese wait to be repatriated to almost certain death as they are sent straight back into the hands of their oppressors.

So the Sudanese move on and cross illegally into Israel where they are at first detained as enemies of the state. But they are treated humanely, picked up by the IDF and taken to holding camps awating judgement. Human rights groups, lawyers and many sympathetic Israelis have fought for these people to be allowed to stay. The Sudanese goverment meanwhile states that any Sudanese citizen who has sought refuge in Israel and returns will be considered a Mossad spy and executed – nice.

Israel, under the International Laws, that everyone seems to believe it so flagrantly breaches as a matter of national policy, is obliged to absorb them. Many can now be found working on kibbutzim and moshavim. So let me spell this out to the ‘Israel is racist/apartheid’ brigade. BLACK MUSLIM SUDANESE REFUGEES ARE BEING GIVEN REFUGE AND WORK IN ISRAEL. I capitalise that to hammer home the point.

But wait, there are several problems. If Israel is seen as an easy touch, will it not be invaded by Sudanese hordes. Israel is a small country unable to absorb so many foreigners. And they are Muslims; what about demographic time-bombs and all that?  

These questions must wait whilst Israel abides by its oblgations to genuine refugees. They will not be held for 60 years in ‘refugee camps’, those that stay will be absorbed, taught Hebrew, given shelter, work, a home, safety and respect. Oh yes, there are racists in Israel too who don’t want more immigrants especially more Muslims, but they forget when they too were refugees from genocide, they forget their own people’s Exodus from Egypt.

The canard that is trotted out by all the anti-Zionists is that only Jews are allowed to emigrate to Israel, that Israel is an apartheid state. So why would it allow in black people? Why would it allow in Muslims? How many Sudanese has Syria or Lebanon or Jordan or Saudi Arabia or Libya allowed in? How many Iran?

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/02/16/news/ML-Israel-Sudanese-Rebel.php
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1065201.html
http://atheonews.blogspot.com/2009/02/darfur-rebel-leader-visits-israel-to.html