Love of the Land: Debunking the Gaza Seige Myth

Debunking the Gaza Seige Myth

Jacob Shrybman
Huffington Post
03 May '10

This May, thousands of activists on a convoy of ships, one of which is named after the extreme left-wing American activist, Rachel Corrie, killed in the Gaza Strip in 2003, plan to sail to the coastal territory in the context of breaking the widely popularized myth of the Gaza siege.

On March 18th, just three days after a man was killed by a Gaza rocket in the Negev, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited the Gaza Strip and told the people of Gaza: "We stand with you." Ban called for an end to the so-called Israeli siege of the terrorist-controlled territory, saying it was causing "unacceptable suffering of human beings."

Without questioning the apparent Gaza suffering, one has to ask what siege Ban is referring to, when, in 2009 the IDF Spokesperson reported that 738,576 tons of humanitarian aid was transferred into the Strip.

The UN claims there is a siege when it has given $200 million to Gaza following a military operation that left 1,300 dead and wounded among a population of less than 1.5 million, and yet has only given $10 million to Haiti after the natural disaster there claimed the lives of an estimated 230,000. Of course, that is without noting that Haitians have not been attacking an innocent nearby civilian population for nine years.

International humanitarian aid has been flowing freely into the Strip for years, and in no way stopped after Operation Cast Lead, as 30,576 aid trucks entered the territory in 2009 while in the same period, 4,883 tons of medical equipment was also transferred to it. This past month during the week of April 11-17th 500 trucks of over 17,000 tons of humanitarian aid entered the Gaza Strip.

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Love of the Land: Debunking the Gaza Seige Myth

Love of the Land: Blast from the Past: Power

Blast from the Past: Power

Jon
Divest This!
12 April '10

As we await what comes next at UC Berkeley, I thought I'd dredge out some real old stuff, things I wrote years ago when divestment came-a-calling at Somerville, Massachusetts. It's interesting to note that now that BDS is attempting to use the paddles of life to resurrect itself, how little their arguments (or required rebuttals) have actually changed...

Does anyone ever wonder why the Palestinians, alone among peoples without a state, have their own seat at the UN (an organization that spends almost a quarter of its time fighting on their behalf)?

Why does the Palestinian refugee problem have its own international organization (UNWRA) with annual budget of $350 million, while every other refugee in the world (almost twenty million at last count) are lumped together in the "other" category, supported by the United Nationals High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)?

Why is Palestinian statehood one of the planet's top foreign policy goals, yet independence of for Kurds, Tibetans and Basques has been permanently removed from the international agenda? Why is Palestinian suffering on the West Bank being debated in universities, cities, towns and churches unendingly as Sudanese bury two million people unlamented?

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Love of the Land: Blast from the Past: Power

Love of the Land: Canada pulls the plug on UNWRA

Canada pulls the plug on UNWRA

Bataween
Point of No Return
29 January '10
Posted before Shabbat

This week, the most momentous news to come out of the Middle East in a long time slipped out, virtually unnoticed: Canada's decision to stop funding the Palestinian refugee agency UNWRA. If other western nations follow suit and UNWRA is forced to cease operating, Arab states will be forced to sette the Palestinian refugee problem one way or the other - either by jihad or resettlement. Hopefully it will be the latter, and the Jewish refugee issue will be thrust to the fore as a model of integration. Jonathon Narvey blogs at the National Post:

We learned this week that Canada is the first Western nation to pull the plug on UNRWA, the United Nations-run relief operation for Palestinian refugees of the West Bank and Gaza. The government has been quick to clarify that relief is still on the way. It will now be dedicated to specific projects like food aid; hopefully with enough oversight to prevent mismanagement and inadvertent support to a terrorist organization.

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Love of the Land: Canada pulls the plug on UNWRA

Love of the Land: Help, not hate

Help, not hate

National Post (Canada)
25 January '10

(Note:UNWRA and UNRWA are used interchangeably)

Since last fall, the federal Conservative government has been withdrawing taxpayer funding from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that use their grants to take sides against Israel in the Middle East conflict. Now comes word that last week, Ottawa told the United Nations it would no longer fund the world body's Palestinian refugee agency. From now on, Canadian aid to Palestinians will be directed to specific projects. We will no longer give lump-sum aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA), since most of that money simply goes straight into the Palestinian Authority's (PA) general treasury, where it might be used for humanitarian projects or might be used to arm and train terrorists.

This is a bold move for Ottawa, which is the first Western government to cut off funding for UNWRA.

Although UNWRA has long been a biased player in the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is seldom criticized for its incitement of anti-Israeli hatred and violence by Palestinians. It has funded textbooks that deny the right of Israel to exist and paid teachers who call on Palestinian children to push the Jewish state into the sea. It harbours radical Islamists and anti-Semites on its payroll and was even caught in 2004 using its own ambulances to ferry terrorists away from Israeli sites they had just attacked.

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Love of the Land: Help, not hate

Love of the Land: The Palestinian Issue – A New Paradigm: Focusing on the Humanitarian rather than the Political

The Palestinian Issue – A New Paradigm: Focusing on the Humanitarian rather than the Political

Dr. Martin Sherman
Jerusalem Summit

A. Assessment

1. The conventional-wisdom paradigm for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has failed woefully, bringing nothing but misery and despair to both sides – but particularly to the Palestinians as individual human beings.

2. This conventional paradigm has attempted to solve the conflict by means of a Political Approach involving the establishment of a self governing Palestinian entity on territories in Judea Samaria and Gaza which have been under Israeli control since 1967 i.e. on the basis of a "Land for Peace" approach.

3. Dispassionate assessment of the history of the conflict and its current development will strongly suggest that persisting with attempts to attain a political solution on the basis the conventional paradigm are at best futile - and at worse harmful. Accordingly, alternative modes of resolution must be pursued.

B. Analysis

1. Analysis of Palestinian deeds and declarations over the years make it difficult to avoid the conclusion that they are in effect both unwilling and incapable of achieving and maintaining statehood.

(a) Palestinian Unwillingness: This is reflected in the fact that the Palestinians have rejected every single viable proposal which would have afforded them a state - from the 1947 partition plan to the 2000 Barak proposals.

(b) Palestinian Incapability: The Palestinian national movement has enjoyed conditions far more favorable than almost any other national independence movement since WW-II - widespread international endorsement of their cause, unmitigated support of a superpower in the decades of the Cold War, highly sympathetic coverage by the major media organizations, and over a decade of Israeli administrations who have acknowledged (and at times even identified with) the Palestinians declared national aspiration. In spite of this, the achievements of Palestinian national movement have been more miserable than almost any other national independence movement – bringing nothing but privation and penury to its people.

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Love of the Land: The Palestinian Issue – A New Paradigm: Focusing on the Humanitarian rather than the Political

Love of the Land: Putting First Things First-Sovling The Arab Refugee Problem

Putting First Things First-Sovling The Arab Refugee Problem

Rael Jean Isaac and Ruth King
Mideast Outpost
September 09

Editors Note: In the September 2003 Outpost we published the first version of this article entitled “Putting First Things Last: The 55 Year Failure to Address the Arab Refugee Problem.” The failure is now 61 years old and we felt it was time to say it again: the integration of the refugees into Arab countries is a prerequisite for any meaningful agreement. We published an updated version of our 2003 article on the Family Security Matters website on August 12, 2009. We reprint that article—slightly expanded—because this issue has been neglected by Jewish organizations almost as badly as by diplomats, Middle East experts and the media. If Jewish organizations, each time the issue of settlements was raised, would say “No, the core issue is refugees, with their claimed ‘right of return,’ What are you doing to resettle them in Arab countries?” they could force a shift in the terms of the debate.

The Rogers Plan of 1969, like all subsequent and ill-fated efforts to resolve the Arab-Israel conflict, tabled the issue of the Palestinian "refugees," leaving it for "final status" negotiations. "It is our hope," said the Rogers Plan, "that agreement on the key issues of peace, security, withdrawal and territory will create a climate in which these questions of refugees...can be resolved as part of the overall settlement."

But this is to put first things last. As the passage of time has made abundantly clear, the issue of "refugees" remains the defining obstacle to any reconciliation in the region. Pretending to negotiate, without addressing this issue at the outset, is like operating on a patient and leaving a growing cancer intact. Had it been confronted in 1949, the prospects for finding a subsequent modus vivendi between Israel and the Arabs would have been vastly improved.

President Obama has promised a fresh perspective on issues, to bring "change" in the old ways of doing things. There is no better place to start than by confronting the core issue of the Arab refugees head on—and putting responsibility for solving it on the only ones who can do so, the Arab states.

When the problem of the Arab refugees was at last put on the table at Camp David in the year 2000, the issue blew up the tattered remnant of the Oslo "peace process." Then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak thought he had a winning formula. Israel would make a virtually total territorial withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines. In return, all that would be asked of the Palestinian Authority was to abandon the "right to return," i.e. to eliminate, via demography, the Jewish state. If the Arab-Israel conflict was susceptible to solution via "land for peace," Barak should have had a deal. But Arafat refused to give up the "right to return" and launched outright war, including the most deadly series of terrorist attacks in Israel's history.

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Love of the Land: Putting First Things First-Sovling The Arab Refugee Problem

Love of the Land: Naqba Is As Naqba Does

Naqba Is As Naqba Does

Posted by Rachel Abrams
The Weekly Standard
1 September 09

Israel’s education minister, Gideon Sa’ar, yesterday announced that when third-graders file into their classrooms for the first day of school tomorrow and open their Arabic-language textbooks, they will no longer find “al-naqba” in their pages. The phrase, which roughly translates as “devastation on a par with the Holocaust,” and is invoked by Arabs throughout the Middle East to describe the establishment in 1948 of the “Zionist entity,” was inexplicably approved for use in the textbooks a couple of years ago (another Israeli government, another education minister) but has now been un-approved. “The creation of the State of Israel cannot be taught about as a catastrophe inside the country's schools,” said a ministry spokeswoman.

Israeli Arabs are “dismayed and outraged.” Atef Moaddi, head of the Follow-up Committee on Arab Education in Israel, told the Jerusalem Post: “For Israeli Arabs, who consider themselves a part of the Palestinian people, the Nakba is not up for debate, it is a historical fact.” Added Sawsan Zaher, of the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel,

Prohibiting Arab students from studying about the Nakba is illegal and violates international law, which obliges states to enable national minorities to learn and study about their own history, culture and tradition.

Of course, no one -- not even the “naqba”-averse Netanyahu government -- is advocating excising the story of what happened at the founding of the State of Israel, which was disastrous indeed for the Arabs expelled from their homes and forced into exile in the aftermath of a war launched by their leaders against the Jews. On the contrary, “What Israeli Arabs experienced during the [1948 War of Independence] was certainly a tragedy,” Sa’ar said. “But the word ‘Nakba,’ whose meaning is similar to ‘Holocaust’ in this context, will no longer be used.”

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Love of the Land: Naqba Is As Naqba Does