Showing posts with label Palestinian Arabs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Palestinian Arabs. Show all posts

Wednesday, 18 May 2011

Love of the Land: Abbas demands something for nothing

Abbas demands something for nothing




Fresnozionism.org
17 May '11

http://fresnozionism.org/2011/05/abbas-demands-something-for-nothing/


As we get closer to September and a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood, Mahmoud Abbas has taken the opportunity to explain why he thinks justice requires yet another slice to be taken from the only Jewish state and given to his amalgamation of two vicious terrorist organizations. After Hamas has told us that even total Israeli withdrawal to 1949 lines won’t bring peace, Abbas explains here that this is his position as well.

The Abbas piece is remarkable for its distortions of the historical record, including the heart-wrenching account of how a little boy who would grow up to be Palestinian President was ‘expelled’ from Tzfat (see also here for a version of the article with lies replaced by truth).

One of the biggest lies Abbas tells is that the Palestinian Arabs should have had a state in 1947, but implementation of the UN partition agreement was derailed by the Zionists. He writes,



In November 1947, the General Assembly made its recommendation and answered in the affirmative. Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued…


Minutes after the State of Israel was established on May 14, 1948, the United States granted it recognition. Our Palestinian state, however, remains a promise unfulfilled.



Abbas does not tell us that both the Palestinian Arab leadership and the rest of the Arab world rejected partition on the grounds that all of Palestine should be under Arab sovereignty. He does not tell us that the Palestinian Arabs have rejected offers of a state no less than six times between 1937 and 2008 (and once in 1919).

So why, if they did not want a state until now, will this time be different? Because this time they think they will be able to gain control over a large, strategic territory without having to commit to recognition of Israel, and without having to give up their claim on the rest of the land, in particular, the right to settle millions of Arab ‘refugees’ in Israel.

Israel would never agree to cede territory in return for a promise of belligerency, and — at least so far — the US has not tried to force it to do so. As a result, negotiations between Israel and the PLO have always failed. Abbas may say that “negotiations remain our first option,” but the PLO has only been prepared to negotiate surrender, not compromise. And no matter what concessions Israel has offered, they have not included giving up its right to exist.

Abbas believes that after the world makes Israel leave the territories, it can make Israel sit still and accept the return of the so-called ‘refugees’ (95% of whom are not refugees in any normal sense), and — probably after a bloody war — become another Arab state:



Palestine’s admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal matter, not only a political one. It would also pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Court of Justice …


… Once admitted to the United Nations, our state stands ready to negotiate all core issues of the conflict with Israel. A key focus of negotiations will be reaching a just solution for Palestinian refugees based on Resolution 194, which the General Assembly passed in 1948.



The Arab interpretation of resolution 194 is that every descendant of the 600,000 Arabs that fled Israel in 1948 (about 4.5 million claim this status) is entitled to ‘return’ to Israel and take possession of his property, or be compensated. This wasn’t the intent of the resolution, which referred only to actual refugees and required that they be prepared to ‘live in peace’ with Jewish Israelis. And it would also cover the approximately 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries, who most likely wouldn’t want to return but would be happy for compensation!

Since 1967 the presumption of the West has been that land will be exchanged for peace, recognition and an end of all claims against Israel. The Abbas plan finally makes explicit what some of us have been saying all along, that the PLO never intended to give up its dream of replacing Israel with an Arab state of ‘Palestine’.

It’s time for the White House to recognize this and firmly oppose the attempt to give the PLO something for nothing.

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Love of the Land: Abbas demands something for nothing

Wednesday, 13 January 2010

Love of the Land: Prisoner statistics fun

Prisoner statistics fun


Elder of Ziyon
12 January '10

A Palestinian Arab organization has released the shocking information that 197 Arab prisoners have died in Israeli prisons since 1967, thus proving Israeli human rights violations against its Arab prisoners.

Terrible!

Until you look at the normal mortality rate for Palestinian Arabs. According to the UN, the normal mortality rate is 3.7 per thousand. if we assume that Israel has imprisoned an average of 5000 Arabs (probably a low number) at any time over the past 42 years, then the number of expected deaths over that time period would be 777.

Ah, but you might object, prisoners are usually young and healthy, and their mortality rates should be much less than the general population!

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: Prisoner statistics fun

Tuesday, 27 October 2009

Love of the Land: Notes From the Eternal and Undivided Capital of the Jewish People

Notes From the Eternal and Undivided Capital of the Jewish People


Rachel Abrams
The Weekly Standard
26 October 09

A young eastern European girl survives the Holocaust, but she has lost all. First, perhaps, like so many countless others, her father is shot in the street before her eyes among scores of men rounded up in the ghetto in which her family has been living in starvation and rising terror; next, possibly, her mother dies of dysentery in the train to Auschwitz; later, maybe, when they arrive at the camp she is separated from her two brothers and they are never seen again. How does she survive and make it to Palestine? Somehow. She doesn’t speak of it, and it does not in any case seem to be the question that plagues her. In time, she marries, creates a new family, watches as her refuge becomes the State of Israel. The question that does interest her, and which she continues to ask herself, over and over again, and with which she haunts everyone among the living around her, is why she alone of all her family survived. Her son grows up; the question permeates his life. It enters the army with him, accompanies him as he rises through the ranks to become a major general. On the day on which he is named to one of the highest posts in the Israeli military, she, his mother, sits through the ceremony, then comes to him and tells him: “Now I know. Now I know why I survived.”
***
My sister, who has lived here for three decades and has just sent her third and fourth children to the army, called information a while ago to get the number of a Jerusalem restaurant. “What?” demanded the operator. “Why are you going to that restaurant? It’s terrible!” It’s better in Hebrew. But still.
***
"The fate of Jerusalem will be determined only by confrontation and not by the negotiating tables," says a survivor of a different stripe, Hamas “leader” Khaled Meshaal, from his hidey hole in Damascus, as a day of rioting by Palestinian Arabs on the Temple Mount ends. "Jerusalem is all of Jerusalem . . . . The Arabs and Muslims are [the city's] residents, and the Zionists have no claim over it." How much of this is due to the Obama Middle East policy? An un-keepable promise is made to the Palestinians that a negotiation in their favor will take place in exchange for little beyond words from their mouths (their word is their bond). Their response to the slow dawning upon them that this is a chimera is rage. A bunch of “Muslim youths” occupy the al Aqsa Mosque—one of their holiest sites—and from the windows of that sacred precinct stone and firebomb Israeli police. "I call for angry protests in Palestine and in the Arab world,” says Meshaal. “We must send a message to the world: In light of the settlements and actions in Jerusalem, there are no negotiations and we must rethink our steps."
***
Israelis are more and more openly expressing their disgust with the latest and most dangerous incarnation of the so-called peace process. They worry, with growing intensity with every escalation of violent Arab rhetoric and rage, that in the end the process will have wrought not peace but the Third Intifada. And who can argue with that? I can't help wondering, though, as I listen to the muezzin's call to morning prayers, just what question it is the Arabs are answering when they raise their children to fight for a state this way.


Love of the Land: Notes From the Eternal and Undivided Capital of the Jewish People

Sunday, 13 September 2009

Love of the Land: Israel Can And Must Act In Her Own Best Interests.


Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero – “Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future.” Horace.

Ted Belman
Israpundit
12 September 09

As I read Ettinger’s excellent piece, I was reminded of other historical facts having to do with limiting Jewish settlement, emigration or immigration. Even before the British Mandate, Britain was actively limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine. Stalin also prevented Jewish emigration. The Mandate didn’t change much. Britain continued to limit immigration and so so did Russia/USSR right up to its downfall. Remember the “Let my people go” campaign in the seventies.

Haj Amin el Husseini, the grand Mufti of Jerusalem and confidant of Hitler, led a full scale Arab revolt against the Jews between 1936 and 1939 causing much Jewish bloodshed. In response the Peel Commission was set up and recommended limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine. Just what the Arabs wanted. In fact, the Peel Commission even recommended the abolition of the Mandate and recommended two states. Ben Gurion fought hard to maintain Jewish immigration and even supported partition while most of the Zionist movement did not. To his chagrin, friends of Zionism in England including Churchill, Lloyd George persuaded the British Parliament to vote against partition.

In 1938, Ben Gurion commented on Chamberlain’s “Peace in our time” and said “They handed Czechoslovakia over. Why shouldn’t they do the same with us?”

Shortly thereafter Ben Gurion made his case to Malcolm MacDonald, the Colonial Secretary, who suggested, that the Arab and Muslim world could rise up and threaten the British Empire and therefore to prevent this, Britain had to make sure that the Jews in Palestine remained a minority. In other words Britain was against the creation of a Jewish state.

During the war, the world conspired to prevent Jews from escaping Europe to Palestine. Britain, even after the war, actively attempted to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine. Remember the DP Camps in Cypress and Exodus.

It was due to Jewish resistance after the war that the British turned the matter over to the UN which ultimately voted for the partition that the British Parliament had turned down.. Ben Gurion preferred half a loaf to no loaf and so declared the State of Israel.

The Law of Return was quickly passed welcoming all “Jews” to come to Israel. All you needed to be eligible was one Jewish grandparent.

After the Six Day War in ‘67 the World attempted to prevent Jewish settlement of Judea and Samaria even though Jews had the legal right to do so stemming from the British Mandate. Neither Res 242 nor the Oslo Accords made mention of restricting such settlement, so the international community tried to brand the settlements as illegal pursuant to the Geneva Convention. Many legal scholars beg to differ with this and argue convincingly that the Convention doesn’t make settlements illegal.

Prior to the Roadmap, in response to atrocities the Arabs committed with their suicide bombers, Senator Mitchell rewarded them by recommending a settlement freeze just like the Peel Commission did. This freeze was incorporated into the Roadmap which came into existence in 2003.

Another refrain that developed particularly after the Roadmap, was that no one, meaning Israel, should do anything, meaning settle the land, to prejudge the outcome. Of course the Arabs could do anything they wanted to prejudge the outcome and the US cooperated with them. A case in point is opening her Consulate in Jerusalem to serve the Arabs while at the same time refusing to open her Embassy in Jerusalem to serve the Israelis. The US also supports illegal Arab construction and condemns Jewish construction, legal or otherwise.

The demand in the Roadmap that Palestine be “viable” and “contiguous” also prejudges the outcome as does the demand that Jerusalem be divided.

And now Obama is demanding a settlement freeze. Fortunately he doesn’t have the support in the US or in Israel to bring it about.

As Ettinger points out, Israel can and must resist the pressure and act in her own best interests.


Love of the Land: Israel Can And Must Act In Her Own Best Interests.

Friday, 28 August 2009

Love of the Land: An Open Letter

An Open Letter



President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Sir:

In your Cairo speech [June 4, 2009] you referred to the West Bank as "occupied" by Israel. You implied that the Palestinian Arabs were being denied the sovereign rights to their homeland. But the West Bank was never a sovereign state to Palestinian Arabs. In the ancient world, Judea and Samaria belonged to what was then a sovereign Jewish state, a state from which the Jews were repeatedly driven by foreign conquerors: among them Babylonians, Romans, and Christian crusaders. However often they were driven from their ancient homeland, Jews always returned.

The millennial claims of the Jews contrast with the fact that the Palestinian people of today have no such historic claims. In fact, the Palestinians whose national identity you recognize did not exist before 1967. The West Bank was conquered in 1948 by Jordan, which subsequently annexed it and then later de-annexed it. It was de-annexed when the King of Jordan discovered he had added to his kingdom Palestinians who wanted to overthrow his monarchy. For the same reason, Israel does not want to add enemies to its body politic.

During the 19 years that Jordan controlled the West Bank, not a word was heard of a Palestinian people. After Israel's victory in 1967, Palestinian nationalism was a creation of the larger Arab world, which saw in a Palestinian state a platform from which to launch Israel's ultimate destruction. But they recognize that that victory will never come until America's support of Israel is sufficiently undermined.

Read All at :

Love of the Land: An Open Letter

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