Showing posts with label Right of return. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Right of return. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 09, 2023



Recently, a group of hundreds of North American academics issued a statement linking the Israeli governments support for judicial reform with the "occupation" and saying Israel is guilty of apartheid and Jewish supremacism.

They called the Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria "the elephant in the room."

This prompts me to bring up the real elephants in the room - the elephants that these human rights pretenders always ignore and want everyone else to ignore as well

I have been calling out these elephants since 2005, updating the list every few years. These are the facts that everyone knows - and that are actively suppressed by the media, politicians, academia and "experts."

Here is the latest iteration of the inconvenient facts that no one wants to discuss:

Elephant 1: Terror groups control Gaza - and that will not change

Every peace plan and proposal includes Gaza in a Palestinian Arab state, and none of them has any provision on how to handle the fact that Gaza is a terrorist haven, in much worse shape since Israel uprooted the settlements there, controlled by Iranian-funded terrorist groups that are consistently and wholeheartedly against Israel's existence.   Peace is impossible with this elephant, so it is easier to pretend it isn't there - or, for some, to position the genocidal, antisemitic desires of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as somehow a brave fight for freedom.

Elephant 2: Palestinian Arabs consistently support terrorism

In the only fair, democratic elections in the territories, the Hamas terrorists were chosen by the people. Poll after poll shows that Palestinian Arabs support terror in Israel itself. (52% still support a violent intifada in 2019.) The elections and surveys proved that the conventional wisdom was wrong - and the conventional wisdom ignores and downplays this proof that peace is impossible, and it isn't Israel's fault.

Elephant 3: The current PA government was not elected

This corollary to Elephant 2 means that the people representing "Palestine" on TV and at the UN do not represent the people. Even if they sound moderate or compromising, they have no mandate. The current PA president is well past his term of office, and none of his prime ministers were ever elected  Negotiating with the PA is, literally, meaningless.


Similarly, the unelected PLO is the real power behind the PA. The PA officially reports to the PLO, and all negotiations are done by the autocratic, Fatah-dominated PLO, not the PA.

Elephant 4: The current PA government has almost no power - and no respect

Outside of Ramallah, the Abbas government has little popular support and little power. Terror groups are a very real threat to the PA in the West Bank and have been building their bases, which has now become obvious in recent years.  The PA has lost large swaths of the West Bank. The PA canceled the last elections because they would have lost to Hamas.

Elephant 5: The PA is being kept alive by artificial methods

The PA budget is bloated from "payroll" of non-working workers, including terrorists who receive a salary for not working. The PA may also still be paying Gaza workers who were kicked out of their government jobs in 2006 by Hamas.  The very basis of the organized Palestinian Arab workforce is a fiction being kept barely alive by external infusions of cash with no real plan to fix the problem.

Elephant 6: Fatah remains a terrorist group paid by the PA

Despite the claims that the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades has dismantled, it is a joke meant to appease the wishful-thinkers. The PA might arrest Hamas members in the West Bank, but there still remains - today - terrorist groups that report to Fatah. Here's the webpage of one of them. There has been no serious move by the PA to dismantle their own terror groups, and there are lots of PA security employees who join with terror groups like Lion's Den at night. 






Elephant 7: The PA's goal remains the destruction of Israel

Whether it is by "right of return" or not changing the Fatah charter or by printing map after map showing no Israel, even the most moderate Palestinian leader clings to the idea of destroying Israel, and looks upon a Palestinian Arab state as only one stage in the process. One only needs to look at the maps of "Palestine" in official PA documents and schoolbooks. 


2011 poll that remains criminally under-reported proves that when Palestinian Arabs say they want a two-state solution, it is only a stage towards their real goal of destroying Israel. 

And polls in 2019 confirm it.


Elephant 8: Jerusalem

Most Israelis want a unified Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty. Most Palestinian Arabs refuse to accept anything less than all of ("east") Jerusalem as the capital of a Muslim state. The positions are not compatible and a compromise will not reduce the chances for violence - it will increase it.

Jerusalem, under Jewish rule, has more religious freedom than at any time in its history. That would disappear in any "peace plan."  But "human rights activists" are remarkably uninterested in the rights of Jews. 

Elephant 9: Israeli concessions have encouraged more terror

The conventional wisdom is that if only Israel give Palestinians more of what they demand, it will help bring peace. But history shows the opposite.

Israel's far-reaching offers for peace in 2000 and 2001 had a very loud response: the second Intifada and thousands killed. Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon to UN-drawn lines resulted in Hezbollah becoming more powerful, with hundreds of thousands of rockets pointed at Israel and new provocations at the border, with one major war in 2006 and another threatened. Israel's withdrawal from Gaza did not result in peace but in the takeover of Gaza by terror groups. 

Israeli concessions are regarded not as goodwill gestures that should be reciprocated but as weakness that must be taken advantage of. 

And that is exactly what would happen if Israel withdraws from areas in Judea and Samaria.

Elephant 10: Palestinian Arab "unity"

No peace plan can work unless Hamas and the PA/Fatah, along with other terror groups, reach some sort of unification agreement. This is not possible in the foreseeable future. Moreover, Hamas is powerful enough that any such agreement must include a hardening of PLO positions that would be completely incompatible with the basic minimum standards for peace - renunciation of terror, recognition of Israel and acceptance of previous agreements.

Elephant 11: "Refugee camps"

The only reason there are still "refugee camps" in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are to keep Palestinians in misery - to make them pawns in photo-ops and to create new generations of terrorists. Real fighters for human rights would insist that "refugees" become full citizens of the countries they have lived in for generations - but they argue the opposite. Real human rights advocates would insist that the camps in PA and Hamas controlled territory be dismantled and normal housing built - but they don't. People who hate Israel are eager to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians because they want to destroy Israel with the fictional "right of return." Israel will never agree so these people are left in misery, forever.

See also Elephant 16.

Elephant 12: Economics

Some 30 years after Oslo, the economy in the territories is still close to non-existent and wholly dependent on foreign aid. Not only is there no free market, there is no incentive to build one as the very mentality of Palestinian Arabs and their leaders is one of welfare rather than responsibility. All the plans to create a Palestinian Arab state do not consider Day 2 and how such a state would be able to sustain itself. The expected influx of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Lebanon and Syria would make it even worse. It would take at least a generation to turn the poisonous attitude of entitlement around.

Elephant 13: Gaza demographics

Gazans have no room to expand as their numbers continue to grow at among the fastest rates in the world.  Theoretically they could move to the West Bank but only a small percentage would. This is another Day 2 powder keg that is being ignored in the interests of a "solution" of a "Palestinian state." 

Elephant 14: Palestinian Arab leaders never showed interest in independence

The West assumes that the goal is an independent Palestinian Arab state where Arabs no longer have to live under "occupation." But the actions and words of Palestinian Arab leaders have never borne that goal out; they have not worked towards building the institutions and infrastructure that would be necessary in an independent state. Their insistence on "right of return" and "Jerusalem" as issues that must be resolved before independence betray their thought processes - inconsistent with independence (neither of which require those two issues to be resolved) and consistent with a desire to destroy Israel in stages.


Elephant 15: A unilateral Palestinian Arab state would be militarized

There is no way that a new Palestinian Arab state would remain demilitarized for any length of time. The Palestinian government could invite a friendly Muslim nation to position anti-aircraft weapons within its territory; to shoot missiles at El Al planes landing a few miles from the Green Line, or to get a few thousand tanks poised to cut Israel in half.

Iran already effectively controls Lebanon, Syria and to a large extent Gaza They would use the nascent state of Palestine to position themselves on the West Bank as well. Just like the PA ran away from Gaza at the first sign of trouble, so would they lose their state to Iranian proxies and Islamic terrorists.

The PLO's will to defend themselves is not nearly as strong as their will to destroy Israel, a desire that has been inculcated in them for generations. Palestinian Arab nationalism is a fundamentally weak and externally-imposed construct. Iran is poised and anxious to take advantage of the chaos that would follow a unilaterally declared state, even if at the moment they are distracted.

But the West is ready to risk Israel for that elephant as well.


Elephant 16: The so-called "right to return"

The PA is showing no interest in integrating the Palestinian Arabs outside of the territories into their state. On the contrary; the "refugee camps" in PA controlled territory continue to grow, rather than shrink. Clearly, the PA expects the bulk of the  "diaspora" to go to Israel, not a Palestinian Arab state, and decades of incitement both within and without the territories have brainwashed generations of Arabs to not accept anything less than a "return" to a land that most of them have never stepped foot in. (UNRWA has been a major promulgator of this lie.)


Elephant 17: Corruption and human rights abuses are still endemic in the PA

Despite the publicized successes, the PA remains mired in corruption, hardly a model for an independent state. The 2008 Global Integrity Report rated the West Bank as close to the bottom in its corruption ratings and more Palestinians have rated local corruption among the worst in the Arab world. It hasn't improved

The PA is a dictatorship. Mahmoud Abbas controls the PLO that the PA reports to, the judiciary, the legislative branch and the executive branch. There is no independence or checks and balances. 

Women are discriminated against by law. Press freedom remains low; the justice system is opaque, and whistle-blowers are forced to go to the Israeli press to expose corruption. Prisoners are tortured. And except for rare occasions, these abuses are ignored.

Elephant 18: Palestine would be Judenrein

Statements by PA leaders make it clear that their state of Palestine would not have any Jewish citizens allowed within. Jews whose ancestors have lived in Judea and Samaria, whether for decades or for millennia, will be legally barred from living in Palestine - an extraordinary display of state antisemitism that is completely at odds with the Western standards that the nascent state of "Palestine" is pretending to live up to. 

Elephant 19: The Muslim world's antipathy towards Israel

Although this is weakening, most of the Arab world and the Muslim world remains overwhelmingly against the idea of a Jewish state in the midst of supposedly Muslim lands. Iran remains in de facto control of southern Lebanon and Gaza; ordinary Jordanians and Egyptians remain among the worst antisemites in the Arab world. The Abraham Accords have been a tremendous counterweight to this, and things are better than they have been in the past, but the Arab people themselves are still overwhelmingly antisemitic and anti-Israel. The threat from radical Islam remains potent in Arab and Muslim states. No concessions would change that.

Elephant 20: Mahmoud Abbas will die and there is no plan for the day after

Mahmoud Abbas has no successor. Polls show that if elections were held today, the new president of the PA would be a convicted terrorist now in Israeli prison. Iranian-funded error groups are poised to take over. Even if Abbas would sign a real peace agreement today, that paper would be next to worthless after he is gone.


Israel has to navigate these challenges every day. Rarely does the media mention them, instead insisting on a simplistic narrative where only Israel is responsible for peace. This pretense that Palestinians have no responsibility of their own - a fiction that Palestinian leaders go to great lengths to promulgate - is ultimately racist against Palestinians. 



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Tuesday, August 01, 2023

From Sama News:
Today, Monday, President Mahmoud Abbas received a phone call from the head of the Lebanese Phalange Party, Sheikh Sami Gemayel.

The President discussed with Gemayel, during the phone call, the unfortunate events that took place in Ain El-Hilweh camp.

He stressed support for what the government and the army are doing in Lebanon in order to impose law and order.

The President stressed that the Palestinian presence in Lebanon is temporary until they return to the homes from which they were expelled according to international resolutions.
That last sentence is a coded message, saying that Abbas - as head of the PLO, and therefore ostensibly the leader of all Palestinians worldwide - would not ask Lebanon to give citizenship to Palestinians who have lived there, stateless, for 75 years. 

Abbas has said this explicitly in the past, numerous times

Which means that his official position is for Palestinians in Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and other Arab countries should not become citizens of those countries - they must remain without any national protection until Israel is destroyed or somehow forced to commit suicide via "return" to destroy it as a Jewish state.

The cynicism of this position is breathtaking. The closest thing the Palestinians have to a leader wants to use his own people as pawns, with no national rights in the countries where generations have been born, lived and died.

The cynicism does not end there, though. Because in 2005, Mahmoud Abbas had a completely different position, as reported then in AFP:

DUBAI, 12 July 2005 — Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas told Arab countries hosting Palestinian refugees to give them citizenship, insisting such a move would not compromise their right of return.

“I call upon every Arab government wishing to give citizenship (to Palestinian refugees) to do so. What is wrong with that?” he said in an interview with Dubai Television late Sunday.

But the Palestinian Authority president insisted that obtaining citizenship in a host-country should not compromise the right to return to their homeland of which many Palestinian refugees dream.

“This does not mean resettlement (of refugees). A Palestinian would return to his homeland whenever he is allowed, whether he carried an Arab or non-Arab citizenship,” he said. “A fifth-generation Palestinian living in Chile also wishes to return when allowed ... It is an emotional matter, not related to citizenship,” he added.

The Palestinian leader, who visited Syria and Lebanon last week — both host to hundreds of thousands of refugees, slammed claims that the Arab League had banned naturalization of refugees as “mere excuses”. “There is no decision ... the Arab League only recommended (not to grant citizenship) but this was not a decision,” he said.
Once upon a time, Mahmoud Abbas asked Arab countries to naturalize Palestinian "guests." But only a couple of years later, he changed his position to being against them becoming citizens.

What caused the about-face?

Chances are, Lebanon and Syria and maybe also the Gulf countries that host hundreds of thousands of Palestinians told him to shut up. They don't want Palestinians to become citizens. And probably Hamas took advantage and portrayed Abbas as being weak on the mythical "right to return." 

Whatever the reason, Abbas switched from acting as a real leader that tries to help his people into a corrupt leader who simply wants to abuse his people for his own political purposes.

Abbas was right in 2005. Citizenship has nothing to do with "return." Palestinian citizens of Jordan are given the clear message that they will lose citizenship if "return" would become an option. And for whatever bizarre reason, even though most of them are citizens of a state, they are still called "refugees" by the international community. 

And Palestinians, when given the rare chance to become citizens of other countries, eagerly take that option. So those who say that Palestinians prefer statelessness to becoming citizens of their countries are simply liars. 

Each stateless Palestinian adds an infinitesimal amount of pressure on Israel. That is the only reason for insisting that Palestinians remain stateless. Which proves that to Palestinian leaders, their own people's lives are worthless.




Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Sunday, July 30, 2023

A new poll from the Palestinian Center for Policy and  Survey Research of both Israelis and Palestinians finds that while both sides have hardened their positions towards the other, the Palestinians are far more rejecting of any framework that allows Jews to have any rights in the land.

An absurd 84% of Palestinians say that "the suffering of Palestinians is unique throughout the human history." Clearly no one teaches history in Palestinian schools. (80% of Israeli Jews say this about Jews, but they have a couple of thousand years of evidence behind that opinion. The worst event in Palestinian history wouldn't make it into the top 10 of the worst things in Jewish history.)

90% of Palestinians say "Since Palestinians are the victims of ongoing suffering, it is their moral right to do anything in order to survive." To Palestinians, "anything" means even the most immoral crimes against humanity. While 68% of Israelis felt the same way about Jews, I am certain that they interpreted the question differently than Palestinians do: Jews would not include genocide against others in that "anything," but I am fairly sure that Palestinians do.

The moral divide is stark in the responses to the question of whether each group wants to promote good relations with the other. Most Israelis do; the vast majority of Palestinians do not.


Israelis want to co-exist with Palestinians; Palestinians do not want to co-exist with Israelis. How much more obvious can it be that Palestinians do not support any sort of peace with Israeli Jews?

The Palestinians' idea of their "vital goals" is also something instructive - and largely unreported. While 36% said an Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines and a Palestinian state were vital goal, nearly as many said the "right of return" of Palestinians to the hated Israel is a "vital goal" - meaning they don't want their own people to live in their own state, and would prefer that they are used as a means to destroy the Jewish state.

But beyond that, 19% said that building a state based on "religious values"  was a vital goal - more than double the mere 9% who said that democracy is a vital goal. Meaning that more than twice as many Palestinians want a state based on the Quran than one based on democratic values.
These extremist, rejectionist positions are always swept under the rug in Western reporting and "expert analysis," which still claims that most Palestinians want a two state solution. 




Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 



Monday, June 26, 2023

The UN Human Rights Council issued a document last week by its reliably anti-Isrsel team of "experts" demanding that Palestinian "refugees" have the right to "return" under international law. 

Right of return of Palestinian refugees must be prioritised over political considerations: UN experts 
2022 marked the largest ever increase in the number of forcibly displaced persons worldwide, with over 108 million people across the globe uprooted from their homes, more than half are women and girls....

This reality is all too familiar for the Palestinian people, 75 years since the Nakba - the event that shattered Palestinian lives and severed their ancestral connection to their land during the establishment of the State of Israel. Since then, they have endured forced displacement, dispossession, and disenfranchisement, with their rights to self-determination, restitution, and compensation repeatedly denied. For 75 years, their cry for justice, embodied in the demand for the right to return, has resounded with unwavering determination.

For Palestinians, forced displacement has become part of their life for generations, tracing back to 1947-1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee massacres and mass expulsions and forcible transfers during the birth of the State of Israel. The majority, along with their descendants, are still in neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, while 40 per cent of them remain under occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since 1967. Progressively, Palestinian exile has scattered them across various nations globally.

 Since 1948, both the General Assembly and the Security Council have consistently called upon Israel to facilitate the return of Palestinian refugees and provide reparations. Despite these repeated appeals, Palestinian refugees have been systematically denied of their right to return and forced to live in exile under precarious and vulnerable conditions outside the borders of Palestine.   

The thing is, even the UN admits that these Palestinian Arabs are not legally considered refugees.

The UNHCR's Refugee Survey Quarterly in 2010 has an article by Riccardo Bocco, a professor at the University of Geneva, looking at the history of UNRWA. It is hosted at the UNRWA website, today.  ASnd it admits what we have been writing here for years: the UNRWA working definition of "Palestine refugee" has nothing to do with international law.

In looking at who is a Palestinian refugee, there is no definitive response. The definition and the number of Palestinian refugees can differ according to the approach (administrative, juridical, political) used to define Palestinian refugees and also according to the social context of interaction between Palestinians (registered refugees or not) and others and the actors defining them. UNRWA, particularly at the beginning of its mandate, lacked a fixed definition; this changed mainly due to a need to delimit the number of relief recipients. When the Agency began its activities, it inherited a legacy of inflated registration: the United Nations Economic Survey Mission recorded approximately 720,000 people, while the number of recipients on the ration rolls of the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees (UNRPR) surpassed 950,000. It is the 1952 definition that has become the accepted one and has remained virtually unchanged: “a Palestine refugee shall mean any person whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period June 1, 1946 to May 15, 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict”.

Some remarks should be noted.... [T]he descendants of original registered refugees inherited UNRWA’s administrative title independently of the fact that they may have obtained a nationality and/or left the Agency’s fields of operation

It is important to emphasize that the UNRWA definition of a Palestine refugee is an administrative one and does not translate directly into recognition by international law. Furthermore, a tacit understanding seems to prevail: UNRWA’s continued existence (and the associated Palestine refugee status) is directly linked to the realization of a permanent resolution to the Palestine refugee issue.
Four crucial facts are listed here:

1. Over 30% of the original "refugee" population UNRWA registered were not refugees, and took that status illicitly. They have never been purged.

2. The UNRWA definition of "refugee" is administrative, not legal, and has nothing to do with the legal definition of refugee under international law and the Refugee Convention.

3. UNRWA "refugees" and their descendants are still considered "registered refugees" even if they move away from UNRWA areas, even if they obtain citizenship elsewhere - not only Jordan but also EU countries and the US. This is a truly absurd situation that is impossible for any real refugee; it is axiomatic that one cannot be a refugee while simultaneously being a citizen of a state. But  millions of Palestinians are.  So we have an absurd situation where American multi-millionaire supermodels (whose father's family voluntarily walked away from their home in Safed in 1948) are still considered "Palestine refugees." 

4. UNRWA has a conflict of interest between staying in business and a sane definition of "refugee." . This is a major reason why it does not have any cessation clauses as UNHCR does. "Palestine refugees" are forever.

All of these facts are damning,. And they are on UNRWA's own website, today. 






Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Monday, November 28, 2022





Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 



Sunday, September 25, 2022

Continuing on listing Mahmoud Abbas' lies at the UN on Friday.

Since its inception, Israel has committed brutal crimes against our people, when it destroyed 529 Palestinian villages, expelled their residents from them during and after the 1948 war, and expelled 950,000 Palestinians, more than half of the Palestinian people at the time, from their homes, according to the records of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).  and committed more than fifty massacres since 1948 to this day, which claimed the lives of tens of thousands of children, women, the elderly and innocent people, and everyone remembers the massacre of children in the war on Gaza last year, which killed 67 children.    
Every single one of these numbers is a lie. 

Some of the supposed villages listed in one database had zero population - and zero area - in 1948, but somehow magically they have "refugee" descendants!



Most historians (Morris, Khalidi) estimate far fewer depopulated villages and towns. 

Most Palestinian Arabs were not expelled in 1948, they left on their own out of fear.

UNRWA doesn't claim 950,000 refugees - it said there were 725,000. Even that is an exaggeration.

50 massacres by Israel? Only 15 rate mention in Wikipedia, where anyone can post anything. 

Tens of thousands of children, women, the elderly and innocent Palestinians killed by Israel?  That is absurd. You can do the math here.

Even the claim of 67 children killed in Gaza in 2021 is a lie (the UN says fewer), but nearly all were killed when Israel aimed at legitimate targets of war.

We do not accept that we remain the only party that adheres to the agreements we signed with Israel in 1993, agreements that no longer exist on the ground, due to Israel's continued violation of them.  
The Palestinians certinly do not adhere to the most basic parts of the Oslo process, starting with the initial 1993 letter signed by Arafat claiming to end all support for terror. I recently listed many violations by the Palestinians of Oslo agreements. I haven't seen the Palestinian list of Israeli violations so I cannot easily show how that is a likely lie. 

Therefore, I present today to this UN organization, the title of international legitimacy in this world, with a formal request to implement General Assembly resolution 181, which formed the basis for the two-state solution in 1947, as well as resolution 194 calling for the right of return of Palestine refugees. 
The entire Arab world unanimously rejected both of those resolutions. Israel accepted both of them (194 with reservations on which specific refugees could be returned.) Now, Abbas says he wants to implement them, seven decades later?

This is a joke. 

UNGA 194 did not call for the "right of return." It quite specifically did not use the language of rights. Israel allowed many to return and offered to allow many more - and this was rejected. 

The "right of return" is a myth that is meant to destroy the Jewish state. And that is exactly what Abbas is demanding now. Isn't it strange that a purported national leader demands that his people go to his enemy that he considers an apartheid state? Either he knows the apartheid libel is a lie or he doesn't cre much about his own people's welfare.

Perhaps I need to remind you that Israel's commitment to implement these two resolutions was a condition for the acceptance of its membership in your esteemed international organization.
This is yet another Palestinian lie. There is no conditional language in the resolution accepting Israel as a UN member state. 
All glory to the righteous martyrs of the Palestinian people who enlightened the path of freedom and independence with their pure blood.
Unlike the rest of the speech, this is not s lie.

This statement, and his subsequent language honoring prisoners, is explicit support for terrorism and terrorists. 

And no one at the UN or the media called him out on this.






Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Wednesday, December 09, 2020



I originally wrote this for publication in a major media site, but they do not publish from pseudonyms, so here it is.
____________________________________________


On December 4, Time magazine published an article partially entitled "Here’s What You Need to Know About BDS" by Sanya Mansoor. 

BDS stands for the demand to Boycott, Divest from and Sanction Israel. The Time piece pretends to be an objective look at the controversial movement to treat Israel as a pariah state, but it is a one-sided and inaccurate, reading more like a press release for the BDS movement than an informative article. 

It turns out that "all you need to know" leaves out a lot of important information. 

Here is an accurate description of BDS' history, goals and philosophy.

How did BDS start?

 BDS advocates claim that it was started in 2005 by a group of Palestinian civil society organizations  and that it is a Palestinian-led movement.  

In fact, the strategy was created in 2001 during the NGO Forum of the infamous Durban Conference, the United Nations World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance - an event that was so anti-Israel and antisemitic that even the conference secretary-general, Mary Robinson, said included "horrible anti-Semitism." 

The NGO Forum published a lengthy statement, of which paragraphs 424 and 425 are the blueprint for the BDS movement that would be declared four years later:

424. Call for the launch of an international anti Israeli Apartheid movement as implemented against South African Apartheid through a global solidarity campaign network of international civil society, UN bodies and agencies, business communities...

425. Call upon the international community to impose a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state as in the case of South Africa which means the imposition of mandatory and comprehensive sanctions and embargoes, the full cessation of all links (diplomatic, economic, social, aid, military cooperation and training) between all states and Israel. 
However, even this was preceded and inspired by the League of Arab States boycott of Jewish-owned businesses in the Middle East that started in 1945 and is actually still in force today in Syria and Lebanon.

What are BDS' goals?

The movement claims not to care as to whether there is one state or two states in the area of what used to be British Mandate Palestine. 

However, it demands the so-called "right to return" of the descendants of Palestinians displaced in the 1948 war, a right that simply doesn't exist anywhere else - there were between 10 and 20 million people displaced after World War II and no one seriously claims their descendants have the right to return to their ancestors' homes.

The so-called "right to return" has been used to keep Palestinians stateless and without protection for over seven decades. The reason, as Arab leaders have admitted candidly, is to use them as cannon fodder against Israel. It is one unyielding demand by the Palestinians - not to have the Palestinian diaspora come to build a Palestinian state but to have them "return" to Israel by the millions and ensure an Arab majority there.

In short, BDS does not and cannot accept the concept of a Jewish state. It would accept one Arab majority state or two Arab majority states, but it vehemently opposes the existence of any Jewish state - even as there are plenty of states that identify themselves as Arab states (and Muslim states) without anyone accusing them of apartheid or racism. 

Is BDS antisemitic?

BDS leaders insist that they are not antisemitic. However, their demand for "return" and their refusal to accept Jewish self-determination while insisting on Palestinian self-determination shows that they are the ones who are discriminating against Jews. 

Beyond that, the BDS movement and their allies in the far Left insist that Jews are held to standards that no one else is held to. Jews who wish to become leaders in feminist, LGBTQ or other causes must renounce Zionism - the right of Jews to a homeland of their own. Jews who want to become student leaders are examined to see if they support Israel's existence, and saying they do makes them suspect at best, disqualified at worst. Israeli Jews who want to speak on campus are likewise subjected to litmus tests to have the simple right to speak. 

BDS says that they want the world to boycott Israeli businesses, but in fact the entire list of businesses listed by BDS groups are owned by Jews. Even though there are Arab owned businesses in Israel and in the disputed territories, only Jewish businesses are targeted. 

For all practical purposes, BDS is an ant-Jewish movement. Even the German parliament recognizes this fact, and they know a thing or two about what boycotting Jewish businesses looks like.

Is BDS pro-Palestinian?

The BDS Movement claims that it follows the will of the Palestinian people, listing some 170 "civil society" organizations - many of which had only one or two people -  that signed on. 

Ilan Pappe, a prominent BDS supporter and critic of Israel, has suggested that the international anti-Israel NGOs created BDS and part of the fiction was to pretend that it was a Palestinian-led movement - and it is important to maintain that fiction. 

The BDS movement and its leaders have very little to say about improving Palestinian lives, whether in the territories or in places like Lebanon and Syria. 

It goes without saying that most Palestinians do not boycott Israeli goods themselves, including luxuries like chocolates and ice cream. 

The highest-paying Palestinians work for Israelis, with an average income of double what they can make domestically according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. A significant part of the Palestinian economy is dependent on workers in Israel. BDS wants all of these people to lose their jobs with no plan on how new jobs could replace them.

In fact, when BDS pressure succeeded in getting Sodastream to move its factory from the West Bank to the Negev, hundreds of Palestinians lost their well-paying jobs. BDS leaders were happy at this "victory."

Given the assumption that Israel is not going to be destroyed in the foreseeable future, BDS advocates have a choice: work towards helping Palestinians within this reality, or working towards the destruction of Israel anyway, to the detriment of the people they claim to represent. 

Invariably, BDS chooses the latter. 

The BDS apathy towards actual Palestinian lives goes well beyond Israel and the territories. Palestinians in Lebanon who have lived there since the 1950s are banned, by law, from many jobs. They cannot buy land. They cannot build new housing even in overcrowded camps. Yet you would be hard pressed to find a BDS advocate that demands that Lebanon offer basic human rights protections to their Palestinian residents. On the contrary, Lebanese bigotry against Palestinians is ignored and silenced, since the BDS narrative is that Israel is the only evil that may be discussed. 

Even more horribly, during the first months of the Syria civil war, Israel offered to allow Syrians of Palestinian heritage to move to the West Bank to save their lives, if only they would sign a paper saying that they forego the "right to return" to Israel proper. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas angrily rejected the offer, saying that it was better for the Syrian Palestinians to die in Syria. He didn't offer the Palestinians of Syria a choice of their own, but made their choice for them. No BDS group objected to this decision that may have contributed to the deaths of thousands. 

Does BDS support peace?

BDS advocates are emphatically against any peace initiatives that treat Israeli Jews as human beings. They denounce anyone who participates in peace initiatives, whether it is bereaved Israeli and Palestinian mothers speaking to each other or sports programs for Palestinian and Israeli youth. 

The Muslim Leadership Initiative, which allows Muslims to learn Israel's point of view, had its participants boycotted by the BDS leaders.

Their intransigence extends even beyond that. When popular artists decide to perform in Israel, while the official BDS movement doesn't support threats, the effect is the same - some artists are bullied into canceling their shows, and the BDS movement celebrates these as victories. 

Do American Jews support BDS?

BDS advocates claim that they have dozens of Jewish progressive organizations on their side, and use them as proof that they are not antisemitic. Yet every poll shows that the number of anti-Zionist Jews is minuscule in the US.

A 2018 Mellman poll of Jewish voters found that while plenty of Jewish Americans had plenty of criticisms of Israel, only 3% of them self-identified as "generally not pro-Israel." Although the question wasn't asked of that minority, but many or most of that 3% would not identify as an actively anti-Zionist subset.  It can be assumed that only those very few who self-identify as anti-Zionist would wholeheartedly support BDS. 

So while anti-Zionist Jewish groups like "Jewish Voice for Peace" and "IfNotNow" manage to get a large amount of press relative to their actual numbers, they are on the fringes of US Jewish life today, and their influence among Jews is similar to the all-but-forgotten anti-Zionist "American Council for Judaism," an anti-Zionist group that likewise gained publicity but very few adherents in the 1950s. 

Is BDS successful?

By the standards of actually harming Israel economically or diplomatically, the answer it clearly no. Israel's economic growth is the envy of the world and it has relations with more nations than ever before. Only in the UN is Israel still somewhat of a pariah. 

Yet using the yardstick of whether BDS has managed to demonize Israel in the eyes of the world since 2001, the answer is certainly yes. After all, this very Time magazine article quoted BDS leaders, without comment, saying flatly that Israel is a racist and apartheid state - an absurd statement given that some 20% of Israeli citizens are non-Jews, mostly Arabs, and they have equal rights under the law and enjoy more freedom than anyone living under Arab rule. When major media parrots false or contested BDS claims as facts not worth checking, it shows huge inroads in BDS attempts to brainwash the world to hate Israel, especially youth. 

Ironically, it is the same Arab world which started the idea of boycotting Jews in Israel to begin with that is the biggest threat to BDS today. Israel's treaties with the UAE and Bahrain, along with unofficial ties with Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states, has hurt BDS and its claims of being the only solution. Emiratis walking around Tel Aviv and enjoying the company of Zionist Jews - while still working to help Palestinians - reveal a model of peace and prosperity that is transforming the Middle East, a model where BDS is not only irrelevant but positively backwards. 

BDS is not progressive, it does not support peace, and it is increasingly aligned only with Iran and its allies. This is the truth about BDS that its adherents don't want the world to know.






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Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Government Press Office (Israel) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
“I could never live in Israel,” is something people often drop in conversation. In some respects, they mean this as a compliment. They’re calling me brave. At the same time, they’re calling me foolhardy and worse, because what they really want to know is how anyone could choose to raise children in a dangerous neighborhood: could put their children’s lives at risk.
I could do what some do and answer with statistics that prove it’s more dangerous to live in New York than in Jerusalem. Statistics are infinitely malleable that way. But that would be dishonest. The fact is, in New York, there aren’t a lot of people getting killed in horrible ways because they’re Jewish.
In Jerusalem, on the other hand, if someone is the victim of violence, God forbid, it’s almost always because that person is Jewish.
Which is kind of crazy, if you think about it, and in some ways, defeats the purpose of living in the Jewish State. Isn’t the idea to escape antisemitism? To live and breathe free in our own land?
If peace isn’t arriving any time soon, what’s the point of sticking out one’s neck to live in a place where you might be blown up, stabbed, stoned to death, or rammed by a truck because of your religion?



Where’s the advantage in that??
After all, I might have stayed in Pittsburgh. My mom has, in the past, wondered at my Aliyah, “Israel is for people who have no other place to live, persecuted people, poor people. People from places like Morocco, France, and Russia.”
A lot of Israelis agree with her. These Israelis have no love for Western immigrants. We look like show-offs, brandishing our bravado. Trying to be oh-so-tough and Israeli. We’re not fooling THEM, the real Israelis. The ones who don’t speak Hebrew with cringe-worthy American accents.
But I’m here in Israel a long time now. I’m what’s called a “vatik.” A veteran.
I know it’s dangerous. I know it’s a dangerous place to raise children.
And still: I choose to live in Israel. I choose to raise my 12 children here.
In spite of the danger.
Because some things are more important than even life itself.
The land, for instance.
If someone dies, God forbid, in order to strengthen the Land of Israel, this is a huge mitzvah. It’s a mitzvah no one aspires to and everyone dreads. But a mitzvah all the same.
Which is the difference between Jews who come to live in and raise families in Israel, and the 700,000 so-called Arab “refugees” who fled Israel in 1948.

The Economist, October 2, 1948: "Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit ... It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."
Near East Arabic Radio, April 3, 1948: "It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees to flee from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem, and that certain leaders . . . make political capital out of their miserable situation . . ."
Nimr el Hawari, Commander of the Palestine Arab Youth Organization, in his book Sir Am Nakbah (The Secret Behind the Disaster, Nazareth, 1955), quoted Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said as saying "We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down."
Golda Meir famously traveled to Haifa to try to convince the fleeing Arabs to remain during the Arab offensive on Haifa. But they didn’t listen. They were afraid they’d be accused of being traitors. By the time the fighting in Haifa was over, more than 50,000 had turned tail and fled to neighboring countries.
A British police report from that time notes that "every effort is being made by the Jews to persuade the Arab populace to stay and carry on with their normal lives.”
You see? They weren’t expelled. They fled. They fled at the behest of the invading Arab armies, even though Israeli leaders begged them to stay, and pledged their safety. They were afraid.
And it wasn’t just Haifa. It happened everywhere in Israel. The few Arabs who did stay were granted full citizenship after the war ended. Because they stayed the course.
The rest fled because they put their lives and their safety ahead of the land, ahead of their beautiful homes . . .

(photo credit: Dov Epstein)
(photo credit: Dov Epstein)
(photo credit: Dov Epstein)


. . . many of which now, as a result, belong to Jews: Jews who stayed the course, stayed in Israel, risking their lives.


Now it’s understandable that Arabs put their lives ahead of the land. They don’t have that tie to Eretz HaKodesh, the Holy Land. Jerusalem isn’t mentioned in the Quran. Many Arab inhabitants of the Israel of 1947, had only a brief history there. They arrived because the Jews were beginning to arrive. The Arabs were poor. They hoped that following the Jews might mean riding Jewish coattails to prosperity.
Arab hopes were indeed born out. They made money, prospered. Built solid homes. They still prosper in a sense, pretending to be refugees, getting gazillions in aid, getting money to kill Jews.
The Jews prospered, too. They prospered because they stayed. They won the wars, won the land, got the beautiful homes the Arabs built and left. Left because the Arabs had their priorities straight: life, not land.
Yes, for them, life is more important than land. But religion is king above all. Jews and Arabs have a symbiotic relationship in that respect: Jews are willing to die for the land. Arabs are willing to die killing Jews.
Yet the Arabs fled the land at the first sign of trouble. It’s not their abandoned homes they mourn, as their crocodile tears are shed for the TV camera, as they hold out a key, the symbol of return. Because if they really cared so damned much about the land and their homes, they would not have left in the first place.



Left of their own volition.
Which is why they must now pretend they are refugees, that they were expelled. Because the truth doesn’t look so great: Jews stayed the course, stayed in Israel, no matter what. But the Arabs turned tail and fled. Except for the small number who stayed. They received Arab citizenship, a prize from a democracy that wants to live with the Arabs in peace. They got citizenship because they placed Israel above their most genuine fears and concerns.
As did I.




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