Palestine declared itself as an independent state in 1988 to the joy of the Muslim and Arab world. Algeria, Libya, Iraq and dozens of other countries rushed to recognize the country. They believed that this was the fair thing to do, even as they refused to recognize the Jewish State of Israel.
Much of the western world refuses to recognize a Palestinian state as they wait for Israel and the Palestinian Authority to negotiate a peace agreement. However, the Palestinian Authority has aggressively pushed for broader recognition and effectively broke through to many South American countries in the 2009 to 2011 time frame.
After multiple wars and terrorist attacks launched from Gaza, it is time for those South American countries to rescind their recognition.
On May 17, 2021, the Organization of American States (OAS), stated unequivocally that Hamas is a terrorist group that targets civilians:
“Hamas’s terrorist aggression is unlimited and always seeks civilian victims, seeks to escalate conflict dynamics and armed actions, as well as sowing terror among innocent populations, be they Israeli or Palestinian.
“The immoral and unworthy use of children and women as human shields, as well as the militarization of residential areas, constitute in themselves acts that deserve the most absolute repudiation and condemnation.”
These are plain facts but the OAS has not reflected on its own statement.
Hamas is not an outlier terrorist group but the leading political party in Palestinian parliament, having won 58% of the seats the last time elections were held. It controls the entirety of the Gaza Strip. It is predicted to win the presidency according to Palestinian polls if elections are held again.
As such, recognizing a State of Palestine today is to legitimize terrorism. It is not only immoral to do so but stands against the Inter-American Convention Against Terrorism, adopted by the OAS in 2002, which affirmed “the need to adopt effective steps in the inter-American system to prevent, punish, and eliminate terrorism through the broadest cooperation.“
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez pictured in 2009, when he abolished term limits, took over the banks, severed relations with Israel and recognized a State of Palestine.Things have only gotten worse.
It is time for the countries of Latin America to sever ties with “Palestine.”
Palestinian supporters who hate Israel use a variety of terms to whitewash the crimes and intentions of Palestinian Arabs. Below is a sampling with a review of the misdirection.
“Intifada”
The term “Intifada” means “Uprising.” It gives the sense that the movement is one of empowering the disenfranchised as a matter of protest rather than the reality of genocidal terrorism.
The “Second Intifada” which raged from roughly September 2000 to September 2004 witnessed Palestinian Arabs blowing up ice cream parlors full of children, school lunchrooms and buses. Over 1,000 innocent Israeli civilians were killed in the mayhem because the leadership of the Palestinians refused to accept anything less than 100% of their demands.
Intifada means war. It means terrorism. The call for an intifada is not a protest chant but an incitement to violence.
A pro-Palestinian rally in New York City on July 31 featured protestors chanting “globalize the Intifada” and other anti-Israel chants.
“Martyr”
The Palestinian murderers of Israeli civilians are described as “martyrs” by Palestinians. They are held up as idols for Palestinian children when schools, soccer tournaments and public squares are named for the terrorists. The mothers and fathers of the killers are showcased on television telling the Arab public how proud they are of the killer’s sacrifice. The Palestinian Authority pays the families of the terrorists monthly stipends for their “contribution” of killing the enemy.
For clarity, the term “martyr” actually means “a person who is killed because of their religious beliefs.” Using the term for Palestinian terrorists turns Israel into racist murderers rather than victims of jihadi genocidal maniacs.
“Slain attackers”
Much like the term “martyrs,” pro-Palestinian press prefers to call Palestinian terrorists killed while committing murder as “slain attackers.” The word “slain” is defined as “to kill violently, wantonly, or in great numbers.” In other words, according to anti-Zionist rags like The New York Times, it is Palestinian Arab “attackers” who are killed violently and wantonly by Israelis. Not only are Israelis racists (see “martyrs” above) but also mass murderers.
“Resistance”
The political-terrorist group Hamas calls itself a “resistance force.” It is a designated terrorist group by dozens of western countries because of the hundreds of attacks it has perpetrated on civilians around the world. Its foundational charter is an anti-Semitic screed which calls for the murder of Jews and destruction of Israel. The people of Gaza continue to support killing Israeli civilians in every poll.
The Palestinian “resistance” is to the mere presence of Jews which they have made clear in 100 years of riots and wars, even though Palestinian supporters will portray the Arabs as only protesting “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.“
“Desperate”
Palestinian apologists claim that Palestinians are “desperate” which is why they take such vicious actions against Israeli civilians. That’s outrageous. Desperate people gladly take whatever they can; entitled people refuse to take anything less than full demands.
Palestinians have refused every offer for peace for generations. They demand a country without a single Jew living in it. They categorically refuse to acknowledge that Israel is a Jewish State as part of a final settlement. A desperate people clinging for a chance at self-determination would never deny such things, unless their actual goal is to deny Jews of their own homes and country.
“Resorting to violence”
Anti-Israel opinion rags like The New York Times sometimes go beyond painting Palestinians as “desperate” people “resisting” Israeli occupation. It states that the political-terrorist group Hamas (which it never calls a terrorist group) has “resorted to violence.” The feeble-minded gray lady writes this despite the Hamas making its genocidal intentions public for the whole world to see.
“Impatient”
Doubling-down on a twisted portrayal of Hamas, The Times excuses violent flare-ups from Gaza as “localized expression of Palestinian impatience,” as it wrote on the front page of its May 6, 2019 paper. According to the anti-Israel paper, Israelis get shot because Gazans are impatient, not because they are the most anti-Semitic people in the world who are in favor of killing Israelis.
“Free Palestine”
Chants of “Free Palestine,” “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free,” and “we don’t want two states, we want all of it” are spun as simply a desire for equality in the holy land for Jews and Arabs. It is nothing of the sort but a call for the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel.
Liberal media inverts the “from the river to the sea” as actually the chant of Jewish extremists who want to annex the West Bank, an area that was part-and-parcel of the British Mandate which called for the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland there.
“Arab Land”
Sorry, but Israel is not part of the Arabian Peninsula. It’s also not part of the League of Arab States. It’s also not European nor African. It’s a little swatch of land connecting many continents.
Are the people who use this expression arguing that land itself has the DNA of a particular people? Would the same people say that Europe is “White Land” or Africa is “Black Land?” If someone were to argue that some lands truly are part and parcel of a specialized group of people, they would have to admit that the Land of Israel is “Jewish Land,” as Judaism is the only religion with a tie to specific land.
The term “Arab Land” is deliberately designed to sever the thousands of years of history that Jews have in the land. It is an example of the fictitious narrative that “Jesus was a Palestinian” and not a Jew, in an attempt to not just evict the current Jewish presence in the land but to expunge the entirety of Jewish history.
“Dignity”
Politicians state over and again that Israel deserves “security” while Palestinians deserve “dignity.” It seems like such a simple ask of Israel, to afford the Palestinians some semblance of dignity.
But if the parameters of Palestinian dignity is that Jews cannot have sovereignty, cannot live in the West Bank, cannot pray on the Temple Mount, cannot buy land from an Arab and demands the denial of Jewish history, why should that sort of “dignity” be endorsed, let alone entertained?
“Refugees”
Palestinian supporters have used and abused the term “refugees” for Palestinian Arabs in ways that have no bearing on the word, and in doing so, harm over 30 million actual refugees fleeing war zones today.
The Palestinian Arabs cared for by UNRWA are not refugees but stateless. They deserve to become citizens of either a new country or an existing country but that doesn’t make a child whose grandparents left a town five miles away during a war a “refugee.” Yet, these Palestinian “refugees” are taking billions of dollars of support when such monies can be used for children actually fleeing for their lives to foreign lands where they don’t speak the language and have no family support or infrastructure.
A “Viable” State
Anti-Zionist supporters of the Palestinians argue that there are certain minimum standards that a new country of Palestine must have in order to be viable.
As discussed above, “viability” means that there can be no Jews. “Settlers” undermine the foundation of the country for some reason. While Arabs can live in Israel without destroying the state, seemingly a Jewish presence in Palestine undermines the very viability of the country.
Similarly, a Palestinian state would need to be much wider than Israel is today. If Israel were to annex land up to the town of Maale Adumim west of Jerusalem, critics warn that Palestine would be cut in two and non-viable with a country only 15km wide at one point. Meanwhile Israel is that wide along its main population centers without the cry to widen Israel.
“1967 Borders”
People use the term “1967 Borders” even though the 1949 armistice agreements struck between Israel and Jordan as well as between Israel and Egypt specifically stated that those lines have no meaning and do not function as borders.
“Palestinian Citizens of Israel“
Israel afforded all Arabs the opportunity to be citizens when it declared statehood in 1948 and affords all Arabs in Jerusalem to become Israeli citizens today. Over 20% of Israel’s population is Arab.
Pro-Palestinians don’t like the notion of “Israeli Arabs” as they think it somehow acknowledges the liberalism of Israel being an open society. Instead, they opt for the very wordy “Palestinian Citizens of Israel” to market the proposition that their tie to the land of Palestine is permanent as is their identity which are distinct from Israel. Should a new state of Palestine ever be created, there is no question that these same Palestinian propaganda promoters would call the Jews in the country “Palestinian Jews,” (G-d forbid, if they are allowed to live there), not “Israeli citizens of Palestine.”
“Palestinian East Jerusalem”
The anti-Zionist media will have you believe that “East Jerusalem” exists today even though it only existed as an artifice of war for 19 years that ceased to be over fifty years ago. To extend the fiction, they will promote that it is a Palestinian city, even though there is no recognized country of Palestine and no part of the city was ever conceived to be Arab in the 1947 UN Partition Plan.
The anti-Zionist lexicon is not only attacking the Jewish state but sanitizing Palestinian Arabs of their anti-Semitism and terrorism in an attempt to wish a State of Palestine into being. Everyone should readily recognize the abuse of language that has become mainstreamed by anti-Israel voices.
The mainstream narrative organizations (formerly known as “news outlets”) refuse to label Palestinian terrorist groups as such, preferring softer marketing terms like “extremist” and “militant.” To be clear, the United States and many governments specifically and officially designate foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) to “play a critical role in our fight against terrorism and are an effective means of curtailing support for terrorist activities and pressuring groups to get out of the terrorism business.“
Here is a list of the Palestinian terrorist groups.
HAMAS. This terrorist group is responsible for hundreds of attacks and murder of civilians. It’s foundational charter reeks of anti-Semitism and calls for the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel. It is highly popular among Palestinians, winning 58% of parliament in 2006 and its leader is projected to win the presidency according to recent Palestinian polls (should elections ever take place), amounting to millions of supporters. The political-terrorist group runs Gaza, and has launched repeated wars and skirmishes against Israel.
Palestine Liberation Front (PLF). Broke away from the PFLP-GC in mid-1970s. Later split again into pro-PLO, pro-Syrian, and pro-Libyan factions. Several terrorist attacks including the hijacking of the Achille Lauro and an attack near a beach in Tel Aviv.
Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Originated among militant Palestinians in the Gaza Strip during the 1970s as a series of loosely affiliated factions rather than a cohesive group. Committed to the creation of an Islamic Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel through holy war. Conducted suicide bombings against Israeli targets in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Israel. Has threatened to attack US interests in Jordan. Receives financial assistance from Iran and limited assistance from Syria.
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Marxist-Leninist group founded in 1967 by George Habash as a member of the PLO. Joined the Alliance of Palestinian Forces (APF) to oppose the Declaration of Principles signed in 1993 and has suspended participation in the PLO. Broke away from the APF, along with the DFLP, in 1996 over ideological differences. Has made limited moves toward merging with the DFLP since the mid-1990s. Committed numerous international terrorist attacks during the 1970s and against Israelis after the signing of the Oslo II Accords. Receives most of its financial and military assistance from Syria and Libya.
PFLP-General Command (PFLP-GC). Split from the PFLP in 1968, claiming it wanted to focus more on fighting and less on politics. Led by Ahmad Jabril, a former captain in the Syrian Army, who just died. Headquartered in Damascus with bases in Lebanon and cells in Europe, it receives logistic and military support from Syria and financial support from Iran.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (AAMB). Group aims to drive the Israeli military and Jewish residents from the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem and to establish a Palestinian state via terrorism, including shootings and suicide operations. At least five Americans were killed by the group. The group is more secular than HAMAS which is Islamist.
Army of Islam (AOI). Based in Gaza, it is viewed as even more extreme than HAMAS. It has conducted a number of kidnapping raids into Israel, including that of Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit.
The following Palestinian terrorist groups were removed from official designation:
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), it has a more moderate stance than many fellow organizations. For example, it was opposed to attacks against Jews and Israelis outside of Israel and it is not Islamist. While it committed several terrorist attacks in the 1970’s, the deep-Islamist turn of Palestinian society with the rise of HAMAS marginalized the group. It was the group primarily credited for advancing the notion of a “two-state solution” inside of the PLO which made the US drop the FTO designation in 1999.
Abu Nidal Organization (ANO). Group carried out terrorist attacks in 20 countries, killing or injuring almost 900 persons. Targets included the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, moderate Palestinians, the PLO, and various Arab countries. Major attacks included the Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985, the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul and the Pan Am Flight 73 hijacking in Karachi in September 1986, and the City of Poros day-excursion ship attack in July 1988 in Greece. Suspected of assassinating PLO deputy chief Abu Iyad and PLO security chief Abu Hul in Tunis in January 1991. The group went inactive with the death of Abu Nidal in 2002, and the US removed it as an FTO in 2017 when President Trump tried to prod Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to stop payments to terrorists (it didn’t work).
A day in Gaza City (Photo: AP/Khalil Hamra)
Palestinians have a remarkable number of terrorist groups dedicated to killing Jews and moderate Palestinians. It is equally remarkable that the press refuses to call them out.
Jews, Judaism, the holy land, and the country of Israel have always been distinct but connected things. They were inseparable in the Bible but history has torn at those bonds. While the Bible states that God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish patriarchs and their descendants, the modern reestablishment of the Jewish State as a secular one with many non-Jews as citizens has pulled Jews in various directions. One needn’t walk far to find a Jew who does not believe in God; who lives in the land of Israel but is not a Zionist; who is a devout believer in Judaism but doesn’t live in the holy land, and various other iterations.
The non-Jewish world has taken note and often enlists Jewish people who break from the historical collective to validate and promote their own biases. Just as anti-Semites like to showcase Jews who also don’t believe in the Old Testament, anti-Zionists parade Jews who despise Israel.
Organizations like the United Nations do much the same.
On November 10, 1975, the United Nations passed a series of anti-Israel initiatives. The most famous one, UN Resolution 3379, known as the “Zionism is Racism” resolution, was ultimately removed due to the efforts of the United States. Unfortunately, UN Resolution 3376 remains, which created the Committee for the Inalienable Rights of Palestinians. That committee granted Palestinian Arabs unique “inalienable rights” compared to every group in the world, granting them the right to “national independence and sovereignty.” The Kurds, Yazidis, Roma, Rohingya Muslims and hundreds of other actual peoples have no such rights according to the UN. Only a group of Arabs whose grandparents lived in the holy land precisely in the 1946-8 timeframe have special rights to independence and sovereignty. Imagine granting the right to national independence and sovereignty to Italian Catholics whose grandparents lived in New York between 1934 and 1936!
That fiction has festered and created alarming alliances.
On July 1, 2021, this committee founded on bogus rights met to discuss “Israel’s Systematic ‘Demographic Engineering’… in “East Jerusalem.” The historic place known as “East Jerusalem” existed for a mere 19 years as an artifice of war and ceased to exist over fifty years ago.
No matter. Lies beget lies and are most comfortable consorting with lies.
The international conference on the “Question of Jerusalem” ran on the theme “Forced demographic change in Jerusalem: Grave breaches and a threat to peace.” The conclusion to the question was announced at the outset and alarm bells were rung about Arabs supposedly being replaced in Jerusalem by Jews. The fact that the Arab population in Jerusalem skyrocketed by 3.4 times between 1980 and 2019 while the Jewish population in the city only grew by only 1.9 times was never mentioned because fiction acts as fact when operating in the Lie Zone.
In its ongoing attempt to rewrite history based on lies, the conference’s opening remarks were given by Rosemary DiCarlo, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, speaking on behalf of Secretary-General António Guterres. She said “that measures to change Jerusalem’s status and demographic composition are without legal validity and should be firmly rejected by the international community,” advocating for Jews to be purged from the eastern part of the city to recreate the Judenfrei “East Jerusalem” as enacted by the Jordanians in 1949. Not understanding her own biases and actual facts, her comments suggest that the UN position is that Arabs should be evicted from Jerusalem to bring the ratio of Jews back to 74% of the city as existed in 1967, instead of the 61.7% that exists today (today’s level is the lowest since 1946).
Cheikh Niang from Senegal who chaired the phony forum bemoaned Jews moving to Silwan as a major obstacle to peace. I guess no one ever told him that it was Jews from Yemen who founded Silwan 140 years ago, before the Jordanian Arabs routed them from their homes.
Samir Bakr, Assistant Secretary-General of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation for Palestine and Al-Quds Affairs chimed in that “Jerusalem has been an integral part of the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967,” failing to acknowledge that eastern Jerusalem was part of Jordanian territory and that all “Palestinians” in Jerusalem were Jordanians from 1954 to 1988 when Jordan pulled its citizenship. There was never “Palestinian territory” until Israel gave the Palestinian Authority territory in 1996.
To ensure a sense of validity at the cockamamie committee, a Jew was brought in to elaborate on the supposed injustice and “threat to peace” her people were committing.
Lara Friedman, the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FEMP), kicked off an extensive panel discussion about supposed Israeli crimes. FEMP, with “peace” in its name sounds like an unbiased organization devoted to harmony. It is actually an anti-Zionist organization specifically devoted to attacking Israeli policies which funds like-minded organizations.
Lara Friedman, President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, an anti-Israel organization marketed as a peace-seeking foundation.
Friedman echoed the sentiments of prior speakers that Israel engages in “a systematic policy of demographic engineering with total impunity,” similarly failing to discuss actual population statistics which undermines the entirety of the smear.
She then gave a warped rendition of the history of Jerusalem in 1948 and 1967, skipping the unhelpful points of the Jordanians expelling all of the Jews from eastern Jerusalem and granting Jordanian citizenship to residents “not being Jewish” in the anti-Semitic purge. Obviously she neglected to mention that Jews have been the continuous majority in Jerusalem for over 150 years, since the late 1860’s.
Friedman then added that “Palestinians inside Israel after 1948 were given Israeli citizenship, but Palestinians in East Jerusalem were not, leaving them in the legal limbo of permanent resident status.” This is malarkey as US President Joe Biden would say.
Citizenship for Arabs in eastern Jerusalem
After the 1948-9 Arab-Israel war, Israel took the western part of the city and Jordan took the remainder, including Greater Bethlehem which was also supposed to be an international city according to the 1947 UN Partition Plan. The Arabs in the eastern part of Jerusalem were given Jordanian citizenship by Jordan which illegally annexed the area. Of course Israel did not give “Palestinians in East Jerusalem” Israeli citizenship in 1948-9 as Jordan had seized it.
When Israel reunited Jerusalem in a defensive war after the Jordanians attacked Israel again in 1967, it amended its citizenship law in 1968 to account for the Jordanian Arabs which came under Israeli rule. It immediately gave all of these Jordanians permanent resident status and put in place clauses 4a and 5, to enable these non-Israelis to become Israeli citizens under certain conditions.
A key component was renouncing citizenship of any other country. It was only twenty years later in 1988 that Jordan stripped the Arabs of the West Bank of Jordanian citizenship after finally renouncing claim to the region. Since that time, these former Jordanians/ new stateless “Palestinians” could apply for Israeli citizenship provided they passed a number of other tests such as Hebrew fluency, no criminal record and swearing allegiance to Israel, according to Clause 5. Few applied due to these conditions but the numbers have grown. Clause 4a makes it even easier to become an Israeli and many have applied, hoping to be integrated into a first-world society. Thousands of Arabs living in eastern Jerusalem are now Israeli citizens.
The conference absurdities continued, such as Michael Lynk, United Nations Special Rapporteur, saying that Israeli Jewish settlers in eastern Jerusalem make it impossible for “Palestinians to return East Jerusalem as the capital of their own State,” adding yet a new twist that Palestine is an actual state and it’s not just Palestinian Arabs who want to “return” to Israel, but East Jerusalem itself wants to return as the capital of Palestine, as if that actually ever existed in history.
The false narratives around Israel-Palestine continue to gain mouthpieces at the anti-Israel United Nations, progressive campuses and media, and on social networks. The anti-Zionists are all too willing to accept Jewish anti-Zionists cloaked as lovers of peace as their allies, to buttress the fiction as the new version of history.
Napolean once said “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” Anti-Semites and anti-Zionists are actively and broadly rewriting history with outright lies burning the People of the Book figuratively, as a possible prelude to doing so literally in the shadow of the Holocaust.
The world has a long history of telling Jews where they can and cannot live. Jews were not only barred from certain professions in the countries in which they lived but were limited in where they could have a home. Russia had its ‘Pale of Settlement’ and Europe had its ghettoes. Today, the United Nations supports Arabs’ wishes for Jews to be barred from living in half of the Jewish holy land.
The absurd whines of ‘Judaizing’ Jerusalem coming from Muslim countries is to be expected. Their wish to delegitimize the ancient history and deep roots of Jews to a city they also consider holy has a selfish motivation. While it doesn’t give them a pass for the anti-Semitism of denying Jews their history and culture, it can at least be rationalized.
But what can possibly be the motivation of The New York Times writing about the ‘Judaization’ of Israel itself?
As the latest May 2021 Gaza war came to a close, the Times ran a piece on May 23rd “Before Rage Flared, A Push To Makes Israeli Mixed Towns More Jewish.” The Times bemoaned how many “right-wing” Jews were leaving the West Bank and settling into mixed Arab-Jewish Israeli towns, making them more Jewish. Somehow the paper which repeatedly criticizes Jews living east of the 1948 Armistice Lines is now even upset when the Jews leave and move west of the ’48 Lines, if they seek to live amongst Arabs.
Jews in the central Israeli city of Lod, near the country’s main airport. (photo: Dan Balilty/The New York Times)
The Times has been educating its readers that Jews should remain in their ghettoes, even in the United States. It wrote in a sympathetic manner how the Black community in Jersey City and other New Jersey towns felt that Jews were aggressively pushing into their Black communities. For the progressive media, it was not surprising that several Black people shot and killed Jewish residents. As President Obama’s press secretary Josh Earnest said of Jews moving into homes in Jerusalem which they had legally purchased, those Jews have an “agenda [which] provokes tensions.” For progressives,it is the presence of Jews which causes the problem, not the non-Jewish hatred of incoming Jewish neighbors.
Even inside of Israel, the anti-Zionist rag bemoans the presence of Jews which it can only picture as right-wing nationalistic racists, in sharp contrast to Arabs who have a rightful aspiration to a Jew-free country as well as being independent or a majority inside of Israel. The progressive mantra of a two state solution is 1.5 states for Arabs and 0.5 of a state for Jews. And even that, might be too much for those ‘right-wing’ Jews.
Progressive politicians and the left-wing media are using three terms interchangeably regarding Arab residents of Jewish Israeli-owned homes in the Sheikh Jarrah section of Jerusalem. Doing so is not only inaccurate but inflammatory.
Here is a primer to understand the difference of the terms:
Eviction is the act of removing a single entity (person/ family) from a single location.
Expulsion is the act of removing a single entity from an entire region.
Ethnic Cleansing is the act of removing an entire ethnic/ religious group from an entire region.
The situation in Sheikh Jarrah is an eviction. It pertains to Arab squatters who have not paid rent to their landlords for several years. These tenants are not being forced from the neighborhood and are free to move into adjacent apartment buildings inside of Jerusalem. The Israeli courts, which have jurisdiction on the matter whether someone believes that the eastern section of Jerusalem is Israel or believes Israel is responsible as the “Occupying Force,” ruled that the evictions are legal.
This case is discrete. Israel is not involved in a massive expulsion of Arab residents from Jerusalem. As proof, from 1980, the year Israel formalized Jerusalem as its eternal undivided capital in its Basic Laws, until 2019, the Arab population in Jerusalem grew 3.4 times, dwarfing the Jewish population growth rate which was only 1.9 times over that period. The number of households (homes/ apartments) for Arabs rose 188% since 1990 compared to just 64% for Jews. Further, all Arab residents can apply for Israeli citizenship and these past few years have seen a spike in Arabs becoming Israelis.
In sharp contrast, an example of ethnic cleansing can be seen by what the Jordanian Arabs did to Jews in Jerusalem from 1948 to 1954. First they invaded Israel and killed or expelled all of the Jews from the “West Bank” region they illegally seized. They destroyed 58 synagogues in the Old City of Jerusalem and barred any Jews from even visiting their holiest location during their duration of illegal rule. And they annexed the entire area including eastern Jerusalem, passed a law making it illegal to sell land to Jews and granted citizenship to anyone “not being Jewish.“
That’s actual ethnic cleansing, which is a very different dynamic than Arab residents of Jerusalem have experienced under Israeli rule.
But the alt-left is doing its utmost to paint Israel as racist:
Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) said that Israel “is practicing ethnic cleansing.“
Ilhan Omar (D-MN) said “This [Jerusalem] deputy mayor is describing ethnic cleansing here, yet everyone is [sic] the West is pretending that’s not what’s happening to Palestinians.“
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke about “the expulsions of Palestinians.“
The New York Times wrote about “the plight of six Palestinian families facing expulsion from their homes.“
These lies have inflamed the passions of radical jihadists. Hundreds of people have died and millions of dollars of damage has been done in large part because of the incitement.
Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, who has has often been accused of anti-Semitism, lead the false charge against Israel of an “ethnic cleansing” of Jerusalem Arabs. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
Progressive politicians and the far left media have a direct hand in the deaths and injuries of hundreds of Arabs and Jews in and around Israel over the past weeks. While their lies and smears caused horrific damage thousands of miles away, it is a price the alt-left is willing to pay to boost their bona fides with anti-Zionist extremists who support them and keep them in positions of influence.
Over Jerusalem’s 4,000-year history, it has been attacked and ransacked dozens of times. In modern times, the city was divided for 19 years, from 1949 to 1967, after the Jordanian army invaded Israel, evicted all of the Jews from Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem, annexed the region and granted Jordanian citizenship to all Arabs, specifically excluding Jews. After the Jordanians attacked Israel again in June 1967, Israel took the region that Jordan had illegally seized and removed the barbed wire and roadblocks which had split the city, unifying Jerusalem once again. The Jewish State officially annexed the city in 1980.
The United Nations, which had wanted Greater Jerusalem and Greater Bethlehem to be an international Holy Basin, neither part of a Jewish State nor an Arab one, still uses the term “East Jerusalem” even though the demarcation has long been erased. Pro-Arab publications like the New York Times have called it “Arab East Jerusalem,” adding a non-Jewish adjective, either to note that the eastern part of the city is 60% Arab and only 40% Jewish, or to distance the Jewish Temple Mount, the holiest place for Jews, from the public sphere. Or both.
As the number of Jews continues to grow throughout unified Jerusalem, the left-wing anti-Zionist publication took yet a new pro-Arab step on April 24, 2021, calling the eastern part of the city “Palestinian East Jerusalem,” in an article which inverted the Arab attacks on Jews and response of Jews to those attacks (but that’s standard reporting for the Times.)
April 24, 2021 article in The New York Times now calling “Palestinian East Jerusalem”
For clarity, Israel granted all Arabs living in Israel in 1948 citizenship and has allowed any Arab living in Jerusalem to apply for Israeli citizenship when it officially annexed the eastern part of the city. Thousands of Jerusalem Arabs have already taken Israeli citizenship and many more have applied and are in process. However, the New York Times has now opted to distance Arabs in Jerusalem from Israel by declaring that they are Palestinian and that the area is occupied Palestinian territory. This is a complete lie, as the area was never Palestinian, just illegally occupied Jordanian territory and the Arabs are either Israeli citizens or residents.
The article written by Isabel Kershner attempted to further the fabrication of a “Palestinian East Jerusalem” with statements like:
“Jews and Palestinians then split off into gangs and roamed the streets on their respective sides of the city…”
“… a main thoroughfare which that runs along the dividing line between East and West Jerusalem.“
These statements are ridiculous. There hasn’t been a dividing line in Jerusalem for 44 years as Jerusalem is a single unified city. Some of the largest Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem are in the so-called “Palestinian” side of the city.
For the Times, those facts need to be challenged as often as possible.
In the same article, the paper noted that “Israel annexed East Jerusalem after capturing it in the 1967 Middle East War,” failing to state that Israel didn’t capture it from “Palestine” which didn’t exist, nor that Israel took it from Jordan which had illegally annexed it, nor that Israel took it in a defensive battle. Instead, the Times added that “most of the world considers it occupied territory [by Israel].” An ill-informed reader is left with the false impression that Israel illegally seized Palestinian land.
Conversely, when speaking of the Palestinians claim for the eastern half of the city with quotes of “East Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Palestine,” and that Fatah “praised the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem for defending the city and the Aqsa mosque, the revered Muslim holy site,” it again called the Arabs of Jerusalem as “Palestinians,” noted that Jerusalem was holy to Muslims (the article never said anything like that for Jews) and did not have any counter-narrative as it did in regards to Israel reunifying the city.
To further its jaundiced narrative, the Times wrote about “an extremist Jewish supremacy group,” and “young, Jewish supporters of the Jewish supremacist organization Lehava,” continuing its narrative that Israeli Jews are racists. This is in sharp contrast to Palestinian Arabs who are portrayed as innocents who were prevented from gathering at a “festive meeting place… during Ramadan” by police. The facts that Palestinians are the most anti-Semitic group in the world, voted a Holocaust denier to the presidency and a terrorist group with a charter which reads like a combination of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion to 58% of its parliament, never make it into the pages of the anti-Zionist Gray Lady.
The New York Times has taken yet another anti-Israel step in the Arab-Israeli conflict to fabricate a narrative that eastern Jerusalem is an actual Palestinian city, uniquely holy to Muslims, besieged by a racist Jewish State.
Mahmoud Abbas still remains the acting president of the Palestinian Authority, having started his four-year term back in 2005. He has refused to hold elections since then, fearing he would lose, and now, sixteen years on and 85 years old, the moment of truth is upon him.
In January 2021, Abbas said that he would hold presidential and parliamentary elections in 2021 even though he has always faired poorly in Palestinian polls. In a two-way race between Abbas (head of the Fatah party) and Ismail Haniyeh of the terrorist group Hamas, it is a toss-up as to who will win. According to the March 2021 PCPSR poll, Abbas would get 47% of the vote to 46% for Haniyeh but the December 2020 poll had Haniyeh with 50% and Abbas at 43%. Other questions in the poll indicated that Palestinians believed that there would be negative ramifications if Hamas was elected which may have helped Abbas’s numbers.
The majority of Palestinians think Abbas is corrupt and want him to step down. Their preferred candidate to replace him is a convicted terrorist named Marwan Barghouti who is serving five life terms in an Israeli jail for the murder of five people during several terrorist attacks. From his cell, Barghouti declared that he is considering a run for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority, and if Abbas doesn’t name him as his heir apparent of Fatah, he will run on his own ticket and put forward his own slate for legislative elections.
Seafood Market restaurant in which three Israelis were killed in March 2002 was one of several terrorist attacks attributed to convicted terrorist and one of the leaders of the Second “Intifada,” Marwan Barghouti
According to the same Palestinian poll, should Barghouti run on his own, he gather 48% of the vote, Haniyeh would net 29% and Abbas just 19%.
The polls leave Abbas with a choice: 1) he can run for president and hope that Barghouti doesn’t run and be in a neck-and-neck race with Hamas; 2) run for president and show up last in a three horse race with Barghouti and his slate being victorious; or 3) name Barghouti as his successor and retire.
It seems that Abbas will pick the fourth choice: delay the elections again. That’s an option likely to appeal to the Biden Administration which is trying to donate American taxpayer dollars to the Palestinians, which would likely get complicated if Abbas names a convicted terrorist as head of the Palestinian Authority. But Abbas is 85 years old and should he opt to name a wild card like Mohammad Shtayyeh (who refuses to recognize Israel and endorses the pay-to-slay program) he will likely both be retired and watch Fatah get ousted by Hamas.
The world must ponder what to make of a society that will soon be headed by either a convicted jailed terrorist or the leader of a terrorist organization. Regrettably, it is still unlikely to internalize the reason of why there has been no progress in “peace talks” with Israel.
The Biden Administration announced that it is going to send $150 million of American tax dollars to UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. This “temporary” agency was established after the Arab war to destroy Israel in 1948-9, to care for “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” It has continued to extend its mandate for decades, now caring for grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those “persons.”
Several parties voiced their disapproval with the United States’ UNRWA donation. Former Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said “UNRWA, is among the most corrupt and counterproductive of all UN agencies. President Trump was right to abandon it.” Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan added “We believe that this UN agency for so-called ‘refugees’ should not exist in its current format.“
UNRWA office in Jerusalem. (photo: First One Through)
To consider how the U.N. has handled “so-called ‘refugees'” in this “counterproductive” agency, imagine two Arabs leaving Palestine during the 1948-9 Arab-Israeli War. One had come to Palestine from Iraq in 1925 and the other from Syria in 1935, both settling in Jaffa. The Iraqi-Palestinian owned his home and his business and was reluctant to leave everything he had built but concluded that the war zone was too risky and returned to Iraq in 1949. The Syrian-Palestinian was renting his home and worked on a farm outside of town. He returned to Syria early in the war, assuming that the five invading Arab armies would finish the Zionists in short order and he could return to a Jew-free city, maybe even under the flag of Syria.
At war’s end, the Zionists were able to hold onto land – more than suggested under the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan and less than allocated under the British Palestine Mandate – and had no interest in allowing the return of those Arabs which wanted to see Israel destroyed.
The Iraqi-Palestinian Arab decided to abandon his Jaffa home and business and started life anew among his cousins in Iraq. However, the Syrian-Palestinian opted to not start again in his old neighborhood where he lived fifteen years earlier, and instead decided to take the free housing, food, education and medical services offered by the United Nations as part of its UNRWA initiative. His grandchildren continue to live as wards of the world because of that decision.
Another person impacted by the Arab-Israeli War was not an Arab but a Jew. He came to Palestine from Yemen at the end of the 19th century and moved to Jerusalem. The Jordanian army routed him from his home during the war and he returned to Yemen. Not long after, the anti-Semitism in Yemen became intolerable and he and his family moved to Canada.
All three of these individuals were “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict,” but only one got services from UNRWA. The Palestinian Jew and Iraqi-Palestinian Arab each lost their homes and livelihood and were offered nothing from the United Nations. Only the Syrian-Palestinian Arab who chose to not move to his hometown in Syria, became a special grantee class. As long as he and his descendants remained a grantee, there was a U.N. promise that they would get property and/or money from the country which was transforming Jaffa and the surrounding region it controlled into an economic and technological miracle.
Today, the grandchildren of that Palestinian Jew and the Iraqi-Palestinian Arab are both successful businessmen and pay less attention to politics than they do to football. They think about the United Nations as much as they contemplate a hangnail from five years ago.
But the grandchildren of the Syrian-Palestinian have built their entire way of life around the largess of the United Nations and its promise that it will force Israel to hand them money or land as long as they continue to take UNRWA’s free education, medical services and housing. The U.N. is mother’s milk, a teat which has fed their entire family for generations with more gifts to come.
Watching these three “refugees” is an elderly fifth generation Palestinian Arab who had participated in the 1936-9 riots to keep the Jews out of Palestine and lobbied the British to halt their immigration as the Holocaust started in Europe. He headed to Gaza as the first tanks from five Arab armies invaded Israel. His roughly 60km trip from Jaffa to Gaza is about the same as from Manhattan to Stamford, CT. Had there never been a war and he had decided to relocate to Gaza (as several cousins did before the 1948-9 War), he would receive neither cries of empathy nor charity, but today he has over 100 descendants living for free in UNRWA housing around Gaza.
If the U.N. is attempting to resolve the lost property of people who fled the war zone, why should it matter whether they are registered as “refugees” and take services from UNRWA? Shouldn’t the Iraqi-Palestinian Arab and Palestinian Jew be entitled to consideration? Why should the Syrian-Palestinian get so much compensation when he never owned property?
The UNRWA policy leads one to conclude that its goal is not about money and property but to physically relocate a select sub-segment of the persons impacted by the war – only Arabs – into the Jewish State. Such UNRWA policy is in direct conflict with the stated U.N. goal of a two-state solution, one Arab and one Jewish, by injecting nearly 6 million Arabs into the Jewish State. One cannot be simultaneously in favor of two states and maintaining UNRWA.
There are significant issues to consider in the Arab-Israeli Conflict but the matter of Palestinian “refugees” has long been artificially manufactured. It is well past time to shut it down.
Jim Wolfensohn, former head of the World Bank, died this week. The New York Times wrote about his life’s work in a long obituary. As is commonplace for the legacy paper, it retold his final acts of generosity to conceal the behavior of its Victims of Preference, Palestinian Arabs.
In the concluding sentences of a 2000-word article, the Times wrote the following:
“His last major undertaking was in the mid-2000s as a special envoy for a diplomatic group known as the Quartet — made up of the United Nations, the United States, the Russian Federation and the European Union — which was seeking an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal in which Israel would disengage from the Gaza Strip. If the deal were struck, he was to help coordinate revitalization efforts once the Palestinian authorities had taken over the area, the U.N. said at the time.
However, the negotiations failed.
“The Middle East,” Mr. Wolfensohn grimly observed, ”turned out to be my mission impossible.”
A casual reader would assume that Wolfensohn was simply one more person who tried to help the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The peace deal described above would have had Israel “disengage from the Gaza Strip” and then his work of coordinating “revitalization efforts” would commence. As “negotiations failed,” Wolfensohn did not actually coordinate any efforts to help the Palestinians.
Not so.
Israel did “disengage from the Gaza Strip” and Wolfensohn coordinated an effort which had Jewish donors around the world buy the Israeli greenhouses and equipment left in Gaza to hand to the Palestinians to jump start their economy. Wolfensohn donated $500,000 of his own money to the purchases.
A Palestinian carries a plastic roll he took Tuesday from a greenhouse, background, at the evacuated Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim in the Gaza Strip.Emilio Morenatti / AP
Amid al-Masri, head of the Palestine Economic Development Company’s (PEDC) greenhouse project said the looting “will undermine our efforts to privatise the project as we hoped and also it could frighten investors aiming at other projects.” Indeed, the project designed to restart the Gaza economy once again proved the failure to launch at the start.
James Wolfensohn’s generosity towards the Arabs of Gaza went unmentioned by The New York Times, as to have done so would have required showing the theft and ineptitude of the local population and Palestinian Authority. For the pro-Palestinian legacy media, better to whitewash Arabs shooting themselves in the foot with some generic language about the intractable conflict.
