Category: Israel and refugees

Israel will build barrier along border with Egypt

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Agence France-Press (AFP) reports today:

JERUSALEM – The Israeli government on Sunday approved the construction of a barrier along the border with Egypt in a bid to curb the infiltration of illegal immigrants, a government official said.

A government committee approved the construction of three barriers along the 250-kilometre (155-mile) desert frontier that would block the main infiltration routes, the official said.

The project, which was put forward by the military, was expected to cost between US$1 billion (S$1.4 billion) and US$1.5 billion, he told AFP.

Israel will still admit asylum seekers, but wants to put a stop to the flood of people, many said to be people coming to work rather than refugees, and also including drug smugglers. Egypt has clamped down on and even killed people coming illegally into the country, while Israel is more humane and has a good economy too — so that’s where the people are going, of course.

Israel has struggled to put a lid on the influx of human traffic. According to the interior ministry, some 300,000 illegal aliens – including 100,000 migrants, tourists who overstayed their visit and Palestinians – live in Israel which is home to seven million people. But human rights groups say that these figures are inflated.

It’s not hard to believe these numbers, though I have no way of knowing the reality. Israel is a little first-world nation in the midst of heavily populated third-world ones, many of whom violate human rights routinely. Why wouldn’t it attract a lot of people, who can reach Israel’s borders by foot?

For more information see our category “Israel and refugees,” or click here for a listing that is mostly limited to this issue of the Egyptian border.

Update 1/12/10: There is a longer article in the UK Independent today. True to the Brits’ current hatred of Israel, it focuses on the Israeli left’s criticisms of the government’s position on the refugees from Africa. This is the pattern of so much media coverage of Israel: It quotes every possible criticism of Israel, without ever contrasting Israel’s actions with those of other countries. This article, for example, includes this sentence:

To justify its often harsh approach, the Israeli government has been repeatedly playing on the core fears of public opinion.

What harsh approach? Not wanting every migrant that wants to cross its borders? That sentence is not a quote from a leftist critic; it’s the reporter’s idea of objective journalism.  Here’s the rest of the paragraph:

Tzahi Hanegbi, the chairman of the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defence committee, told Israel Radio yesterday that there is no alternative to building the fence. “The infiltration of the migrants is threatening the very existence of Israel and its character,” he said. The country defines itself as both a Jewish and democratic state, something its leaders believe depends on maintaining the country’s present clear Jewish majority.

But critics call the policy nationalist and racist. (Some racists: Israel has gone to great lengths to fetch the Ethiopian Jews, resettle them in Israel, and teach them to adapt to the modern world.) They claim the government is just trying to frighten the public.

Here’s how laughably biased this is:

The fence decision comes as the government readies to push through the Knesset draconian legislation specifying prison sentences of five to seven years for “infiltrators” and Israelis who assist them. It also follows revelations that Israeli troops have heightened their cooperation with Egyptian counterparts at the border. According to an army response submitted recently to the Israeli supreme court, at one sector of the frontier, Israeli troops fire flares to “draw attention” of Egyptian soldiers to border sites where refugees and asylum seekers are crossing.

Egyptian forces killed 39 people trying to cross into Israel during 2008 and 2009, according to Amnesty International.

I see. Israel builds a fence, sends up flares, and puts infiltrators in prison, while Egyptians kill them, but Israel is the bad guy. 

The last few paragraphs, in contrast, are a fair and informative history of the problem.

Israel’s African refugees keep coming

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’re still getting hits on a story I posted a year ago, Asylum seekers head for Israel, so I thought I’d post this update I came across, How refugees cope in Israel, by blogger Michael Horesh. It’s a short summary of the situation of the refugees who come across the Egyptian border after traveling from farther south in Africa. Here’s some of it:

In the past decade, the country has absorbed 17,500 refugees from Sudan, Darfur and Eritrea. According to UN stats and quoted in the hebrew newspaper “Yediot”:-

  • 1,500 are minors
  • 7,500 are from Eritrea and 6,500 from Sudan
  • Around 16,000 are Muslims

Many quite simply walked to Egypt, entered Sinai, and then reached Israel across the porous desert border with Egypt. And the numbers continue to grow every month.

Horesh points out that the governments of the refugees’ countries are hostile towards Israel. Yet the refugees deliberately head for Israel, because they know they will be treated decently there. (Egypt, by contrast, has shot would-be refugees trying to cross the border.)

I will add my comment that people who know little about Israel usually have no idea how tiny the country is: it’s 12,877 square miles, smaller than New Jersey. Here’s a map showing Israel compared to neighboring countries. And even this map overstates Israel’s size because it includes Gaza and the West Bank. It’s fairly densely populated, with about 7.5 million people. Yet Israel is taking in thousands of refugees, mostly Muslims. How many Muslim countries do you think have taken in Jewish refugees?

Remember the Christian Palestinian refugees at Christmas time

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Daniel Schwammenthal reports in the Wall Street Journal on The Forgotten Palestinian Refugees:

Meet Yussuf Khoury, a 23-year old Palestinian refugee living in the West Bank. Unlike those descendents of refugees born in United Nations camps, Mr. Khoury fled his birthplace just two years ago. And he wasn’t running away from Israelis, but from his Palestinian brethren in Gaza.

Mr. Khoury’s crime in that Hamas-ruled territory was to be a Christian, a transgression he compounded in the Islamists’ eyes by writing love poems.

“Muslims tied to Hamas tried to take me twice,” says Mr. Khoury, and he didn’t want to find out what they’d do to him if they ever kidnapped him. He hasn’t seen his family since Christmas 2007 and is afraid even to talk to them on the phone.

Speaking to a group of foreign journalists in the Bethlehem Bible College where he is studying theology, Mr. Khoury describes a life of fear in Gaza. “My sister is under a lot of pressure to wear a headscarf. People are turning more and more to Islamic fundamentalism and the situation for Christians is very difficult,” he says.

The reporter points out that the western media rarely report on the plight of Christians in Gaza and the West Bank. It doesn’t fit into their narrative of everything being Israel’s fault. And it is rare for Palestinian Christians to speak out about their situation. Most of the time they try to keep a low profile so as not to antagonize their Muslim neighbors, and deny any suffering.  The article highlights this attitude:

Samir Qumsieh, the founder of what he says is the holy land’s only Christian TV station, also stresses that there is no “Christian suffering” and that the Christians’ problems are not orchestrated by the PA. Yet his stories of land theft, beatings and intimidation make one wonder why, if the PA doesn’t approve of such injustices, it is doing so little to stop it?

Christians have only recently begun to talk about how Muslim gangs simply come and take possession of Christian-owned land while the Palestinian security services, almost exclusively staffed by Muslims, stand by. Mr. Qumsieh’s own home was firebombed three years ago. The perpetrators were never caught.

“We have never suffered as we are suffering now,” Mr. Qumsieh confesses, violating his own introductory warning to the assorted foreign correspondents in his office not to use the word “suffering.”

The article is datelined Bethlehem. Christmas is a good time to point out that Bethlehem was a Christian city for almost 2,000 years, with its holy site of the Church of the Nativity, built on the site of Jesus’s birth. Mr. Qumsieh pointed out that Christians are abandoning Bethlehem (which is located in the West Bank) in droves.  Sixty years ago they were about 80 percent of the population there, and now they’re down to 20 percent. Of course Muslims have no respect for Bethlehem’s status as a city important to Christians. In fact, they desecrated the Church of the Nativity without a qualm in 2002 when a group of Palestinian gunmen took it over during an Israeli action, using priests and nuns as human shields. (One account of that incident is here.)

Palestinian “refugees” are thriving

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

You know the story of the pitiful Palestinians, right? Crowded in concentration-camp-like conditions, dependent on handouts from the UN and developed countries, focused only on hatred of Jews.

Not so, according to a stunning story  by Tom Gross at National Review today. (It first appeared in the Wall Street Journal Europe.) It begins:

It is difficult to turn on a TV or radio or pick up a newspaper these days without finding some pundit or other deploring the dismal prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace or the dreadful living conditions of the Palestinians.

….Nothing could be farther from the truth. I had spent that day in the West Bank’s largest city, Nablus. The city is bursting with energy, life, and signs of prosperity, in a way I have not previously seen in many years of covering the region.

As I sat in the plush office of Ahmad Aweidah, the suave, British-educated banker who heads the Palestinian Securities Exchange, he told me that the Nablus stock market was the second-best-performing in the world so far in 2009, after Shanghai.

You probably haven’t heard about the increased ease of movement, either:

And perhaps most important of all, we had driven from Jerusalem to Nablus without going through any Israeli checkpoints. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu has removed them all since the Israeli security services (with the encouragement and support of Pres. George W. Bush) were allowed, over recent years, to crush the intifada, restore security to the West Bank, and set up the conditions for the economic boom that is now occurring.

Oh, so crushing terrorists makes a place safer, does it? Imagine that. There’s a lot more about the prosperity of the West Bank, and how Israelis are helping to bring it about, with training by agricultural and other experts. And:

Two weeks ago, the Jewish National Fund, an Israeli charity, helped plant 3,000 tree seedlings for a forested area the Palestinian planners say they would like to develop on the edge of the new city. Israeli experts are also helping the Palestinians plan public parks and other civic amenities.

It’s not just this reporter’s impressions either. Here’s an official figure:

Palestinian economic growth so far this year — a year dominated by economic crisis elsewhere — has been an impressive 7 percent according to the IMF, though Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayad, himself a former World Bank and IMF employee, says it is in fact 11 percent, partly helped along by strong economic performances in neighboring Israel.

So why did Palestinian president Abbas turn down an Israeli offer last year to create a Palestinian state? You’d never guess from reading the mainstream media.

In June, the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl related how Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas had told him why he had turned down Ehud Olmert’s offer last year to create a Palestinian state on 97 percent of the West Bank (with three percent of pre-1967 Israeli land being added to make up the shortfall). “In the West Bank we have a good reality,” Abbas told Diehl. “The people are living a normal life,” he added with a candor he rarely employs when addressing Western journalists.

Nablus stock exchange head Ahmad Aweidah went farther in explaining to me why there is no rush to declare statehood, saying ordinary Palestinians need the IDF to help protect them from Hamas, as their own security forces aren’t ready to do so by themselves yet.

And the conclusion:

The truth is that an independent Palestine is now quietly being built, with Israeli assistance. So long as the Obama administration and European politicians don’t clumsily meddle as they have in the past and make demands for the process to be completed more quickly than it can be, I am confident the outcome will be a positive one.

Israelis and Palestinians may never agree on borders that will satisfy everyone. But that doesn’t mean they won’t live in peace. Not all Germans and French agree who should control Alsace Lorraine. Poles and Russians, Slovenes and Croats, Britons and Irish, and peoples all over the world, have border disputes. But that doesn’t keep them from coexisting. Nor — so long as partisan journalists and human-rights groups don’t mislead Western politicians into making bad decisions — will it prevent Israelis and Palestinians from doing so.

But I suppose we’ll continue to hear the pitiful pleas for more aid to help out in the financial crisis. In fact, my Google alert on Palestinian refugees is full of such stories, but this inspiring story of reality on the ground has not appeared there.

White House gate crashers connected to radical Palestinian group

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’ve been switching off Fox News whenever they start one of their silly reports on Tareq and Michaele Salahi, the couple who crashed a state dinner the other day.  They’ve been treating it like gossip, with perhaps some questions about security. But now I’m paying attention after reading a post from Gateway Pundit on various connections of  these gatecrashers. First comes a 2005 photo of the couple at an event for the polo cup, with President Obama at the center of the group.  Then comes a link to American Power, which has this to say:

Tareq Salahi, the polo-playing intruder, is a Palestinian nationalist with ties to the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) , a pro-Palestine lobby demanding the “right of return” for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants. The “right of return” has long been considered the backdoor to Israel’s destruction. But not only that: ATFP President Ziad Asali is an America-basher who blamed 9/11 on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Asali was a lead U.S. official to PLO terrorist Yassir Arafat’s funeral in 2004. And in a position paper in 2007, the ATFP called for a power-sharing agreement at the Palestinian Authority, which would have included the State Department’s designated-terrorist group, Hamas.

Gateway Pundit goes on to cite the Canada Free Press saying that the ATFP has removed references to Salahi’s membership from its website. And Discover the Networks says Rashid Khalidi, Middle East Studies professor at Columbia and a militant Palestinian rights activist was vice president of ATFP. Khalidi is an old friend of Barack Obama’s.

So there are two links to President Obama. It looks as if there is more to this than just a case of uninvited guests crashing a White House dinner. My first thought when I read about the links to radical Palestinian rights people was that perhaps they were testing White House security with an eye to something bigger. But the connections with Obama don’t fit in. Very puzzling, and probably very significant.

Note from Ann:  Here is a post I wrote last fall about that 2003 dinner when Rahshid Khalidi was leaving for Columbia University—you know the dinner that was filmed and the Los Angeles Times is still sitting on the film.  We know that Khalidi and Obama knew each other well and we know that the dinner was put on by the Arab American Action Network.  Someone should check with the Los Angeles Times and see if the Salahis “crashed” that dinner too!