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Palestinian refugees in a Lebanese camp

Yesterday I suggested that (among other things) there needs to be a major change in world policy toward ‘Palestinian refugees’. Today I want to elaborate on this.

In 1948, somewhere around 600,000 Arabs (serious estimates range from 550,000 750,000) left their homes as a result of the war. It is a fundamental part of Palestinian mythology, abetted by the remarkable dishonesty of the so-called ‘new historians’ (see Efraim Karsh’s books on the subject, here and here) that these refugees were all forced out of their homes at gunpoint, but in fact most of them fled simply to avoid the expected war. Lack of leadership helped — wealthy Arabs left first, some to summer homes in Beirut — and in many cases they were encouraged to do so by the local leadership and by propaganda from the Arab nations.

The Palestinian narrative is based on the idea that Israel’s creation was a nakba, or catastrophe for the ‘Palestinian people,’ that it was a deliberate crime against them, and that Israel must make it right by accepting a ‘right of return’ for the refugees and all of their 4.5 million descendants, whereby they could “return to their original homes” inside Israel or receive compensation.

There are several inconvenient facts that this narrative ignores, in addition to the fact that there was no attempt to expel Arabs en masse. For one thing, the Palestinian Arabs initiated hostilities against the Jewish population in 1947 (I am ignoring the various ‘riots’ and pogroms that they perpetrated from about 1920), and their allies invaded the area with the exit of the British in 1948. If it is possible to assign responsibility for the war and the nakba, it is not the Jews that bear that responsibility.

It is also important, if we are discussing compensation, to recall that about 800,000 Jews were in one way or another forced out of Arab countries before, during and after the 1948 war, usually bringing only the clothes on their backs. Countries that had flourishing communities of hundreds of thousands of Jews lost almost all of them. For example, the Jewish population of Iraq went from 150,000 to 100 between 1948 and 2003.

It is also important to compare the way Palestinian refugees have been treated by international institutions with the way other refugee problems have been solved. Most refugee situations — like that of the millions, especially Jews that were made homeless by WWII as well as the Jewish refugees from Arab countries — were resolved in a few years, primarily by resettlement.

In the case of the Arab refugees, a special agency, UNRWA was created just for them. Refugee status — for the first and only time in the history of the UN — was made hereditary. Host nations refused to grant the refugees and their descendents citizenship, kept them in UN-funded camps, and in many cases denied them opportunities for education or employment that were available to non-Palestinians. The condition of the refugees in Lebanon has been compared to South African apartheid!

When Israel took control of the Gaza strip in 1967, Israelis were horrified by the conditions of the refugees in the formerly Egyptian-controlled camps. Israel actually built new housing for them, but the PLO and UN prevented the refugees from occupying it.

While the refugees and their descendents are not permitted to be absorbed by their host countries, UNRWA continues to support them on the international dole, providing aid to families on the basis of size — thus creating an incentive for ‘refugee’ families to have many children. UNRWA’s budget is in excess of $1.2 billion per year, much of which, naturally, is paid by the USA.

The Palestinian Authority has indicated that if they are granted statehood there will be no change in the status of refugees, even those that live in the area that they expect to become part of their state. They will not get Palestinian citizenship, and the UN will continue to support them. The only solution for them that is acceptable to the Palestinians and the Arab states is their ‘return’ to their ‘original homes’ in Israel.

Everyone, from Barack Obama and Ban Ki-Moon on down (or up) knows that a ‘return’ of up to 4.5 million hostile Arabs to Israel would simply be the end of Israel. And yet, although they know this, and although at the same time they purport to be committed to Israel’s security, they do not call for change in the pernicious Arab refugee system!

Everyone also agrees that a solution to the Isareli-Arab conflict will require a solution to the refugee problem.  So here is a restatement of my simple proposal to solve this problem for once and for all:

1. Palestinian refugee status will be given only to those Arabs who actually left their homes during Israel’s War of Independence. It will no longer be hereditary.
2. The remaining refugees will receive services from UNHCR, which serves all other kinds of refugees.
3. UNRWA will be abolished.
4. Former refugees will be given all the rights and privileges of citizens of their host countries. The system of ethnic apartheid which exists in Lebanon, Syria, the PA, the Gaza strip and (to a lesser extent) Jordan will be dismantled.
5. The UN may give humanitarian aid to the host countries in order to aid in the absorption of the former refugees, but will not directly maintain them. Aid will be carefully targeted, monitored and strictly limited in duration.

This will be a large undertaking, but it is absolutely necessary for there to be peace in the Middle East. Just as world Jewry collected funds to help the European Jewish refugees after WWII and the Jews from Arab lands after 1948, we can expect that the Arab countries will invest some of their petrodollars into helping their Palestinian brothers.

After all, they do care about the Palestinians — don’t they?

Technorati Tags: Palestinian refugees

It’s a reality-based proposal, for once:

WHEREAS the PLO has shown itself to be a racist organization whose ultimate goal is to destroy Israel, and whose proximate intent is to ethnically cleanse Jews from their historic homeland; and,

WHEREAS the Palestinian Authority (PA) now includes Hamas as well, a just-as-racist terrorist organization that right now this minute is engaged in terrorism against Israel; and,

WHEREAS nevertheless the Gaza strip is separately governed and in fact the ‘President’ of the PA is not able to set foot there; and,

WHEREAS the ‘President’ of the PA’s term expired months ago and the PA can’t hold elections because Hamas would win them; and,

WHEREAS the only thing keeping the PA from being entirely overwhelmed by Hamas is the IDF; and,

WHEREAS everyone knows that the PA has no economy, no real institutions, is entirely dependent on huge amounts of money from the UN, EU and US (the Arabs also make promises but don’t pay), and cannot possibly constitute a viable state; and,

WHEREAS the PA states that it will not grant citizenship to Arab refugees, even those within its borders; and,

WHEREAS  the only function of ‘statehood’ is to provide a platform for continued legal, diplomatic and terrorist warfare against Israel; and,

WHEREAS the plan to grant statehood to what is in essence a bunch of terrorist militias and corrupt functionaries is not conceived out of actual concern for the welfare of Palestinian Arabs, but rather from an irrational antisemitic hatred for the Jewish state;

THEREFORE the civilized world:

a) rejects the idea of statehood for the PA, and calls for an immediate end to aid to the PA other than temporary humanitarian aid to residents;

b) outlaws the PLO as a racist and terrorist organization and demands that its terrorist militias disarm;

c) declares that the status of ‘Palestinian refugee’ only applies to those Arabs who left their homes in 1948 and not their descendents, with said descendants being granted the status of ‘normal’ residents of their place of residence;

d) calls for the abolition of UNRWA, and placing the 1948 refugees under UNHCR, like all other refugees;

e) declares that the Hamas regime in Gaza is a terrorist, racist, aggressor entity which shall be quarantined until the rogue Hamas regime is replaced and its military forces disbanded and disarmed;

f) reaffirms UN resolutions 242 and 338 and calls for three-party negotiations between Israel, Jordan and representatives of the residents of Judea and Samaria to determine the status of the territories based on demographic considerations and the need for all states to have secure and recognized boundaries;

g) declares that the state of Israel has a legitimate right of self-defense against aggression from Hamas, Hizballah or anyone else, and affirms that it will stand behind Israel if she is attacked;

h) affirms that Israel is the state of the Jewish people with all that entails, and that while it is required to protect the civil rights of all of its inhabitants (suffrage, housing, education, economic opportunity), it is not required to provide for expression of the nationalistic aspirations of ethnic minorities, except insofar as they may be permitted to emigrate if they choose;

i) demands that the UN abolish its “Division for Palestinian rights” and end its annual “Day of solidarity with the Palestinian People,” since these are simply expressions of the Arabs’ racist project to expel the Jews from the Middle East.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Israeli-Arab conflict, PLO, Hamas, UN

As we get closer and closer to the UN vote on Palestinian statehood, as relations between Israel and Turkey and Egypt deteriorate, the usual suspects are responding in the usual way — and even more so.

The NY Times’ Tom Friedman has gone over to “Israel lobby” conspiracy theories:

The crumbling of key pillars of Israel’s security — the peace with Egypt, the stability of Syria and the friendship of Turkey and Jordan — coupled with the most diplomatically inept and strategically incompetent [I would put ‘U.S.’ here — ed] government in Israel’s history have put Israel in a very dangerous situation.

This has also left the U.S. government fed up with Israel’s leadership but a hostage to its ineptitude, because the powerful pro-Israel lobby in an election season can force the administration to defend Israel at the U.N., even when it knows Israel is pursuing policies not in its own interest or America’s.

Oh, really? Please explain how the “powerful pro-Israel lobby” can swing a presidential election. The problem for President Obama here is that many Americans understand the Middle East too well. They get it that Israel is struggling against the combined forces of Islamism and Arab rejectionism. They get it that the US was attacked by Islamists, not Israelis, on 9/11 (while Palestinians cheered). And they get it that appeasement doesn’t work.

These Americans, 98% of whom are not Jewish and not members of Congress, are not influenced by “the Lobby.” Many of them are independents who will simply be morally outraged if the administration screws Israel.

Friedman says that it’s Netanyahu’s fault for not ‘responding’ to the challenges facing Israel:

Mr. Netanyahu has a strategy: Do nothing vis-à-vis the Palestinians or Turkey that will require him to go against his base, compromise his ideology or antagonize his key coalition partner, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, an extreme right-winger. Then, call on the U.S. to stop Iran’s nuclear program and help Israel out of every pickle, but make sure that President Obama can’t ask for anything in return — like halting Israeli settlements — by mobilizing Republicans in Congress to box in Obama and by encouraging Jewish leaders to suggest that Obama is hostile to Israel and is losing the Jewish vote. And meanwhile, get the Israel lobby to hammer anyone in the administration or Congress who says aloud that maybe Bibi has made some mistakes, not just Barack.

A few minor points:

First, Jews in the US are a small proportion — 1.7% in 2007 — and at least half of them will vote for Obama regardless of his position on Israel. Some of them are in swing states (Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania) but many are in states which are unlikely to go Republican, like California. The “Jewish vote” is not a big deal.

Second, could we leave the settlements alone? Israel is not building new settlements or expanding the boundaries of old ones. The most it is doing is allowing construction within existing settlements, and it tried a 10-month freeze on that without results. This issue never was a barrier to negotiations, until the “inept and strategically incompetent” Barack Obama made it so. The media have been exceptionally dishonest about this, always referring to “settlement construction,” which any reasonable person would understand as building new settlements.

Third, Israel offered to express regret for the deaths of several Turkish IHH terrorists, but would not agree that it was at fault when its soldiers defended themselves, and would not agree to open the gates to unlimited transit of weapons into Gaza by ending the blockade. Turkey would not accept less.

Fourth, the US has done little to stop Iran’s nuclear program. In fact, by not supplying Israel with refueling aircraft and “bunker buster” weapons, it reduced Israel’s power of deterrence, which encouraged Iran.

Fifth, is Friedman really blaming Bibi for “mobilizing Republicans?” Can’t they mobilize themselves? What else is it possible to blame him for?

And one major point: the failure of bilateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority is not due to Netanyahu’s concern for his ‘base’, but rather due to the Palestinians’ refusal to negotiate without preconditions that amount to giving up the store. To a great extent, this situation is Obama’s fault, for allowing the Palestinians to think that they could get more from American pressure than they could from negotiations.

Friedman must be getting tired if the best he can do is trot out the Israel Lobby, along with pathological Israel-haters Stephen Walt,  Glenn Greenwald and Philip Weiss.

Friedman’s suggestion for a solution is that Israel (preferably with a new, more pliant, government) should make a “peace overture that fair-minded people would recognize as serious, and thereby reduce its isolation.” So after Israel

1. returned the Sinai to Egypt (and now the treaty is in question),
2. allowed the murderous PLO to return from exile and set up a government,
3. transferred weapons to the PA ‘police’,
4. withdrew its troops from southern Lebanon (and got a war in return),
5. evacuated all the Jews, living and dead, from Gaza (and got a war in return),
6. adopted the idea of a Palestinian state in the territories,
7. withdrew from much of Judea and Samaria,
8. released Palestinian prisoners to strengthen Mahmoud Abbas,
9. removed many checkpoints and roadblocks from Judea/Samaria,
10. provided humanitarian aid to the Gaza strip while Hamas bombarded it with rockets,
11. made offers of up to 97% of the disputed territories plus swaps and major concessions on Jerusalem in 2000 and 2008 —

after all of this, and while the PA still has not changed those parts of its charter calling for the destruction of Israel, still insists on a “right of return” for refugees, still broadcasts anti-Israel and antisemitic incitement in its media, mosques and educational system, and adamantly refuses to recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people — now Tom Friedman thinks Israel should make yet another ‘peace overture’!

Technorati Tags: Israel, Thomas L. Friedman, Palestinians

About six weeks ago I caught PLO official Nabil Shaath (former PM of the Palestinian Authority) explaining that the Palestinians do not, and will not, accept the idea of two states for two peoples.

Shaath gave an interview on Army Radio yesterday and made three notable statements:

1. Asked why the Palestinian leadership refuses to recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people, Shaath responded that the Jewish people, on their own, decided “that they have really built their state that is not only for the Jewish people because 22 percent of Israelis are not Jewish.”

Jewish tradition is clear about the need to treat the ‘stranger that resides in your midst’ justly. It is therefore possible to have a Jewish state, a homeland for the Jewish people, whose national symbols and national character are Jewish, which nevertheless has some non-Jewish inhabitants who are treated fairly. Indeed, it would not be a truly ‘Jewish’ state otherwise!

But Shaath cannot understand this, because his idea of a national state is one that will expel everyone who is not a Palestinian Arab.

2. Presented with statements attributed to the Palestinian Authority envoy to the United States last week that a Palestinian state would be without Jews, Shaath said that Maen Areikat “never said ‘Jewish free,'” but rather “that at the beginning of our peace, we want to separate.”

But Areikat did say, quite explicitly, that Jews would not be permitted to live in ‘Palestine’, in an interview in Tablet magazine last year. And he said it in the context of explaining a similar statement about ‘separation’. He was speaking in English on both occasions. He was not misquoted, quoted out of context or mistranslated.

3. Asked whether settlers would be allowed to live in a future Palestinian state, [Shaath] added, “If [settlers] decide to accept Palestinian citizenship and buy the territory that they have and live as individual citizens, then why not?”

Why not? Well, for one thing, because PA residents are forbidden by law — on pain of death — to sell land to Jews.

Technorati Tags: Nabil Shaath, Israel, Palestinians

Police and Zaka volunteers remove the body of murdered American tourist Kristine Luken, December 18, 2010

So what’s new?

The trial of three Palestinian Authority (PA) Arabs charged with the sadistic murder of a Christian tourist and the attempted murder of her Israeli friend began Sunday in the Jerusalem District Court…

The attack took place December 18 at Khirbet Hanut in the Mata Forest, near Beit Shmesh, where Kaye Wilson, a dual Israeli-British citizen, and a visiting friend, Kristine Luken, had gone on a hike. Luken did not survive that day.

Wilson told the court Sunday of the horrific ordeal as the accused men sat in the defendants’ bench and looked on. Luken’s brother, Dean Luken, flew in from Texas to attend the hearing.

The attackers approached the women in the forest and tied them up. They later confessed to Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) interrogators that they had come there with the intent of murdering Jews.

“I saw Kristine being murdered in front of my eyes,” said Wilson, describing how one of the killers gingerly removed her Star of David necklace and then stabbed her. She played dead in order to save her life, while Luken was dying. “She screamed. I did not want him to hurt me. I tried not to utter a sound. It was difficult because the pain was great but I tried to play dead. I heard Kristine uttering her last gasps. I was not sure if I was alive,” she told the court. –  IsraelNN

A pity that the trial couldn’t be held in Texas, where the death penalty for murder is regularly carried out. If found guilty in Israeli court, the murderers will likely be sentenced to long, perhaps life, prison terms. Sounds good, except that they are likely to be released in a lopsided ‘prisoner exchange’, an operation to ‘bolster Abbas’ against Hamas, or just in a general amnesty when the state of ‘Palestine’ is declared.

Even one of the convicted killers of five members of the Fogel family, Hakim Awad, the one who did the stabbing, received only five life sentences.

Israel’s jails are full of Arab murderers of Jews. Murder is a political act, just like stealing Jewish cars or farm animals can be. There are literally hundreds of cases like this — innocent people shot, stabbed, burned, stoned or beaten to death (like Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran, 13 and 14 years old, in 2001).

In March 2004, an Arab student named George Khoury was shot dead while walking in Jerusalem. The killers were members of Fatah’s al-Aqsa brigades who were looking for “Jewish settlers” to kill and mistook Khoury for a Jew. Yasser Arafat called the young man’s prominent father and personally apologized. The al-Aqsa Brigades issued a statement saying that they regretted the case of “mistaken identity” and that Khoury was a martyr for the cause. I doubt that there will be an apology to Luken’s family.

It is top priority for the government of the soon-to-be state of ‘Palestine’ to free all Palestinians in Israeli prisons, whom they consider political prisoners or at most prisoners of war:

The PA president said that recognition of statehood with pre-1967 borders is necessary for renewed negotiations with Israel. “We need to have full [UN] membership within [pre-1967] borders in order to go to negotiations on a basis adopted by the world so that we may discuss the permanent issues of Jerusalem, borders, refugees – and our prisoners in Israeli prisons.” — Mahmoud Abbas, September 16, 2011

One of the issues that has prevented a prisoner-exchange deal with Hamas for Gilad Shalit is the Hamas demand for the release of numerous murderers. Although ridiculously unfair “prisoner exchanges” have been the rule for the past few years — including one that released the vicious child murderer Samir Kuntar — apparently the demands this time were over the top, even for an Israeli government under tremendous pressure to get Shalit out of Hamas’ hands regardless of the price.

The judges in the case of Fogel murderer Hakim Awad considered sentencing him to death:

“A case such as this tempts the use of such a punishment,” the judges wrote in their decision. “The imprisoned criminal, whose life would be taken after being sentenced to death, might turn into a martyr, a shaheed in their terms, with all the meanings that are attached to it.” — JTA

I admit that I don’t understand this. There are plenty of Palestinian Arab ‘martyrs’ to serve as inspiration for more. The PA constantly names streets, schools, camps and playgrounds after them to make sure that they do inspire others, especially young people. One more wouldn’t hurt.

Technorati Tags: Israel, murder, Arabs, Kristine Luken, Hakim Awad