Category: Israel and refugees

Gang violence in Palestinian “refugee camps”

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Cities such as Nablus are not “refugee camps” despite all the best efforts from western media to have us think so.  Now we hear that the poor “refugees” are shooting at each other.  Wonder why we don’t see stories about organized crime and gang violence in the so-called “occupied territories” very often in US news?  All we hear is how the Israelis persecute the “refugees.”

From The World Tribune:

RAMALLAH — The economic capital of the Palestinian Authority remains a center of unrest.

Despite increased security, the northern city of Nablus has faced threats from armed gangs linked to the ruling Fatah movement. Palestinian sources said most of the violence stemmed from organized crime and attempts to extort businessmen and other residents.

[….]

On Sept. 24, Fatah-aligned gunmen opened fire toward the Jaffa Cultural Center in a refugee camp east of Nablus.

[….]

The Balata refugee camp has long been the battleground of crime cells linked to Fatah and other Palestinian factions.

[….]

The sources said Nablus has been divided into areas controlled by Fatah and the rival Hamas movement. The city, supported by the United States in promoting Western-style culture and tourism in the PA, has been headed by a Hamas mayor.

And, your tax dollars support all this!

Why don’t we hear much about Islamic factions fighting each other in the so-called “occupied territories?”  It’s because it doesn’t fit the Lefts’ narrative of who the good guys and the bad guys should be!

Did George Bush consider taking 100,000 Palestinians?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I don’t doubt for a minute that this wasn’t discussed in the Bush White House, heck they were taking other large groups of refugees without Congressional approval.

Olmert says details and numbers were discussed.  Hadley says they didn’t get specific.  Abrams says it never happened. 

From the Jerusalem Post:

The idea of the US accepting 100,000 Palestinian refugees as part of a Middle East peace agreement was suggested by extremely senior figures in the Bush administration, not by Israel, sources close to former prime minister Ehud Olmert told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.

The reference to “extremely senior figures” is assumed to relate either to president George W. Bush himself or to his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.

The sources spoke to the Post after Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said that the administration envisioned that the US would participate in refugee resettlement activities, but could not have known in advance how many refugees the US might have been able to take in.

In a speech in Tel Aviv on Sunday, Olmert said he had reached an agreement with the US on accepting 100,000 refugees. Hadley’s former deputy, Elliott Abrams, denied this on Monday.

According to Hadley, the Bush administration discussed with Israel how the international community could assist in implementing a peace agreement, including how it could help the Palestinian refugees. Ideas discussed included compensation to refugees or to countries such as Jordan and Lebanon that would take them in, and aid in resettling refugees outside the Middle East who wanted to leave the region.

Abrams:  No President has that power?  Really?

“In that connection, we envisioned that the US would participate in any refugee resettlement activities, along with others in the international community, but that anything the US would do would be done through our normal immigrations process,” Hadley said.

“Therefore, there is no way to know in advance the number of refugees that the US might have been able to take, should any refugees have wanted to come to the US.”

When he spoke, Hadley was unaware of Abrams’s flat denial.

“President Bush did not, I am sure, promise or pledge to take 100,000 Palestinian refugees,” Abrams said. “The president knew, as everyone in the White House knew, that no president has the power to make such a commitment.

“We have immigration laws and they don’t allow that kind of move by a president. He would have had to ask Congress to change our laws.

Moreover, we would never have committed to a specific number anyway, nor did Olmert ask us to or raise that number.”

Then answer me this?  How could a lowly Asst. Secretary of State (Ellen Sauerbrey) make the committment to take 60,000 (a specific number) Bhutanese refugees without going to Congress?   Bottomline,  she did it and it can be done.  

Of course if Bush and Rice did decide to bring that many Palestinians to the US, I’m guessing Congress would have gotten involved because of the huge firestorm of public opinion it would have created.

I’m thinking Olmert is closer to being right:

Olmert’s office reacted to Hadley’s comments the same way it reacted to Abrams’s – by saying that the commitment was made at a higher level.

We all know that it would never have happened because by removing the thorn (the so-called refugees) from Israel’s side, Islamic extremists would have lost their power.  They need the ‘refugee’ problem to continue.  And, besides UNRWA needs your money.

To learn more about this topic, visit our category ‘Israel and refugees,’ here.

Endnote:  There was no talk of Congressional approval here when John Podesta and friends (citing earlier precedents) asked Obama to airlift 100,000 Iraqis.

A solution to the Palestinian “refugee” problem — pay them?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I don’t have time to comment on this, but I want to bring to your attention a piece on FrontPage Magazine by Dr. Martin Sherman, The Palestinian Problem: A Real Solution. So I’ll excerpt generously. The problem:

Any dispassionate evaluation of the events of the past two decades invariably leads one to accept the following conclusion: that the Palestinians seem far more focused on annulling Jewish political independence than attaining Palestinian political independence. That is to say, Palestinians are far more committed to the deconstruction of the Jewish State than to construction of a Palestinian one.

However, no matter how convincingly one can show that the Palestinians as a national entity have failed to create their own national destiny, a stark reality remains: there are hundreds of thousands of essentially disenfranchised Palestinian families residing both in Israeli territory and in the wider Arab world.

The solution is threefold. First, eliminate UNRWA, the UN’s agency devoted solely to Palestinian refugees.

As Daniel Pipes has pointed out, the persistence and scale of the Palestinian refugee problem is, to a large degree, an artificial construct. The UN body under whose auspices all the refugees on the face of the globe fall — except for the Palestinians — is the UN Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). A separate institution exists for the Palestinians — the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. UNHCR and UNRWA have widely different definitions for the term “refugee” and widely divergent mandates for dealing with them.

According to the High Commission’s definition, the number of refuges decreases over time, while according to the UNRWA definition, the number increases. This “definition disparity” brings about an astonishing situation: If the High Commission criterion was applied to the Palestinians, the number of refugees would shrink dramatically to around 200,000 – i.e., less than 5 percent of the current number of almost 5 million according to the UNRWA definition.

Moreover, while the mandate of the UNHCR permits the body to seek permanent solutions for refugees under its auspices, UNRWA is permitted only to provide ongoing humanitarian aid for the ever-increasing population of Palestinians. Accordingly, while UNHCR operates to dissipate the problems of the refugees under its auspices, UNRWA activities serve only to prolong their refugee status and thus, their predicament. Indeed, rather than reduce the dimensions of the refugee problem, UNRWA has actually functioned to perpetuate the refugee status of the Palestinians from one generation to the next. It has create an enduring and expanding culture of dependency, while cultivating an unrealistic fantasy of returning to a home that no longer exists.

Second, eliminate Arab discrimination against Palestinians.

Throughout the Arab world, the Palestinians are subject to blatant discrimination with regard to employment opportunities, property ownership, freedom of movement, and acquisition of citizenship. For example, Saudi Arabia in 2004 announced it was introducing measures to ease the attainment of Saudi citizenship for all foreigners who were residing in the country except Palestinians, half a million of whom live in the kingdom.

When approached on this issue of discrimination against the Palestinian residents in Arab countries, Hisham Youssef, spokesman for the 22-nation Arab League, openly acknowledged that Palestinians live “in very bad conditions,” but claimed the policy is meant “to preserve their Palestinian identity.” He went on to explain with perhaps unintended candor: “If every Palestinian who sought refuge in a certain country was integrated and accommodated into that country, there won’t be any reason for them to return to Palestine.”

But according to a survey conducted by the well-known Palestinian pollster, Dr. Khalil Shikaki, most Palestinians were less interested in being nationalist standard-bearers than in living fuller lives. This view resonates strongly with opinion samples gathered by the leading Arab television stations Al-Arabiya and Al Jazeera of Palestinians living in the various Arab states, the vast majority of whom very much want to become citizens in the their respective countries of residence.

And third, allow Palestinians to choose their courses individually or as families, not as a total entity directed by leaders who do not have their best interests at heart.

After decades of disastrous failure, it should be clear that there is little chance of resolving the Palestinian issue if we continue to consider Palestinians as a cohesive entity with which contacts are conducted via some sort of “leadership.” Efforts should therefore be devoted exclusively towards individual Palestinians and towards allowing them, as individuals, free choice as to how to chart their future.

These efforts should be channeled in two major ways:

  • Generous monetary compensation to aid the relocation and rehabilitation of the Palestinian residents in territories outside the confines of the 1967 “Green Line,” presumably — but not necessarily — in the Arab/Moslem world.
  • Making the offer of compensation and relocation directly to the heads of families and not through any collective Palestinian entity or organizational framework.

It should be stipulated that an offer of financially-induced relocation made to a Palestinian political leadership would be vehemently rejected. But the approach suggested here would be made directly by an Israeli (or possibly an appropriately constituted international) entity, to the individual recipients. The scale of the offer would be on the order of the average lifetime earnings in some relevant host country for each family head — i.e. the GDP per capita of such a country multiplied by at least say 40-50 years. (As a comparative yardstick, this would be equivalent to an immigrant bread-winner arriving in the US with 2-2.5 million dollars.)

…. A November 2004 survey commissioned by the Jerusalem Summit and conducted by a reputable Palestinian polling center and in conjunction with a well-know Israeli institute to gauge Palestinians’ willingness to emigrate permanently in exchange for material compensation. Significantly, the poll showed that only 15% of those polled would absolutely refuse to accept any such inducements, while over 70% stated that they would be willing to take the bargain.

What this would mean to the host countries:

For the prospective host countries the proposal has considerable potential economic benefits. The Palestinians arriving at their gates will not be impoverished refugees, but relatively prosperous individuals with the equivalent of decades of local per capita GDP in their pockets. Indeed, for every hundred Palestinian families received, the host country could count on around fifteen to twenty million dollars going directly into the private sector. Absorbing 2,500 new Palestinian family units could mean the injection of up to half a billion into local economies often in dire need of such funds.

He goes into the economics of the offer in detail — how Israel could do it, what it would mean if other countries helped, and so forth. There are some objections I can think of right off, but it’s worth talking about. Maybe not discussing in public, because “world opinion” would find a way to condemn Israel for such a plan. But it’s worth discussing within Israel.

Why the Palestinian “refugees” are not refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Sol Stern has written the best brief account I’ve ever read of the origins of the Palestinian “refugees.” It shows the change over time of the way the story is presented in the west, as the truth that was understood at the time the “refugees” were created has become a tissue of lies.  It’s called The Nakba Obsession and it’s in the summer issue of City Journal. I’ll give you the beginning here; if you’re interested in this subject, read the whole thing.

A specter is haunting the prospective Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations—the specter of the Nakba. The literal meaning of the Arabic word is “disaster”; but in its current, expansive usage, it connotes a historical catastrophe inflicted on an innocent and blameless people (in this case, the Palestinians) by an overpowering outside force (international Zionism). The Nakba is the heart of the Palestinians’ backward-looking national narrative, which depicts the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 as the original sin that dispossessed the land’s native people. Every year, on the anniversary of Israel’s independence, more and more Palestinians (including Arab citizens of Israel) commemorate the Nakba with pageants that express longing for a lost paradise. Every year, the legend grows of the crimes committed against the Palestinians in 1948, crimes now routinely equated with the Holocaust. Echoing the Nakba narrative is an international coalition of leftists that celebrates the Palestinians as the quintessential Other, the last victims of Western racism and colonialism.

There is only one just compensation for the long history of suffering, say the Palestinians and their allies: turning the clock back to 1948. This would entail ending the “Zionist hegemony” and replacing it with a single, secular, democratic state shared by Arabs and Jews. All Palestinian refugees—not just those still alive of the hundreds of thousands who fled in 1948, but their millions of descendants as well—would be allowed to return to Jaffa, Haifa, the Galilee, and all the villages that Palestinian Arabs once occupied.

Such a step would mean suicide for Israel as a Jewish state, which is why Israel would never countenance it. At the very least, then, the Nakba narrative precludes Middle East peace. But it’s also, as it happens, a myth—a radical distortion of history.

Hat tip: Ron Radosh

Old documents discovered: Palestinian “refugees” say they were not driven out of Israel

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I want to bring to your attention this item by Ruth King at her blog. It’s about interviews conducted by John Roy Carlson, the pen name of an Armenian-American investigative reporter who went undercover among Nazi groups in America in the 1930s.

Then, in 1948, presenting himself as an Armenian American, he traveled to the Middle East and – incredibly – fought in Israel’s War of Independence – on the Arab side!  Of course, he was undercover yet again, reporting honestly – but secretly – about the genocidal nature of the war against the Jews and lauding the Zionists’ courage and sacrifices.  Decades before Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” – so demeaned today among Islamists and their fellow travelers – Carlson understood the threat of Jihad not only to the nascent Israel, but to the West as well.  One of his chapter headings reads, The World of the Koran: “Islam Uber Alles.”

Then she goes on to report:

Now, another, unpublished and untitled manuscript has emerged from the Derounian collection housed at the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research.  It was written in the early 1960′s and consists of interviews and observations on the Arab world from Beirut to Baghdad.  Perhaps the most fascinating excerpts from the book have to do with Carlson’s sojourn in Amman, Jordan.  He interviews a number of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war and, most importantly, UNRWA officials, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, established in 1949 exclusively for the benefit of Palestinian Arab refugees.  No other refugee group since then has been assigned a special UN agency.  Currently UNRWA’s budget is close to half a billion dollars.  All other refugees fall under the jurisdiction of the UNHCR (United Nations High Committee for Refugees).   Perhaps most controversial of all, UNRWA has become the unofficial trough for HAMAS.  In the words of former UNRWA General Counsel, James G. Lindsay,

“UNRWA has taken very few steps to detect and eliminate terrorists from the ranks of its staff or its beneficiaries, and no steps at all to prevent members of organizations such as Hamas from joining its staff. UNRWA has no preemployment security checks and does not monitor off-time behavior to ensure compliance with the organization’s anti-terrorist rules. No justification exists for millions of dollars in humanitarian aid going to those who can afford to pay for UNRWA services.”

There are some examples of the interviews — photos of the typed pages. I can’t copy them here, but the gist is that Arab families left because they didn’t want to live among Jews, or because they were told they could return and they didn’t want to be where there was fighting (remember, the Arabs started the war). Carlson asked specifically whether the Jews drove them out. He said he asked the question a hundred times and didn’t find anyone who claimed they were driven out.

Update: Here is the original source for this story, JStreetJive.