Thursday, September 04, 2014
Elder of ZiyonPalestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has rejected an Egyptian proposal to resettle Palestinian refugees in a large tract of land in the Sinai Peninsula to be annexed to the Gaza Strip.1600 square kilometers is over four times the size of the Gaza Strip today, perhaps the annexed part would look like something like this:
Speaking to a gathering of his Fatah party in Ramallah Sunday, Abbas said that an unnamed senior Egyptian official recently approached him and suggested settling Palestinians in an area 1,600 square kilometers (618 square miles) large adjacent to Gaza, reviving an idea originally proposed by former Israeli national security adviser Giora Eiland.
“They [the Egyptians] are prepared to receive all the refugees, [saying] ‘let’s end the refugee story’,” Abbas was quoted by Ma’an news agency as saying.
The Palestinian leader noted that the idea was first proposed to the Egyptian government in 1956, but was furiously rejected by Palestinian leaders such as PLO militant Muhammad Youssef Al-Najjar and poet Muin Bseiso who “understood the danger of this.”
“Now this is being proposed once again. A senior leader in Egypt said: ‘a refuge must be found for the Palestinians and we have all this open land.’ This was said to me personally. But it’s illogical for the problem to be solved at Egypt’s expense. We won’t have it,” Abbas said.
I have no idea if any Egyptian official really floated this idea to Abbas. Countries generally don't offer their land for free (with the glaring exception of Israel,) even if that land has a major terrorist problem.
But the important part of the story isn't whether the offer is real or fictional. The important part is that Abbas is bragging about rejecting a solution to the "refugee" problem.
Which proves that Abbas doesn't care about the "refugees" but only about destroying Israel.
When the PLO talks about the fictional "right of return" the West usually scoffs and says that they aren't being serious and that they really want a two-state solution. But the idea of flooding Israel with Arabs and making it into another Arab state is the keystone of Fatah's plan to destroy Israel in stages, and it has never changed.
We've seen PLO officials say that any "refugees" that come from Arab countries to "Palestine" would not become citizens. We've seen Abbas reject saving the lives of Syrian Palestinians unless they keep their "right" to move to Israel. We've seen Abbas insist that Lebanese Palestinians must not become citizens of the country they were born in, but must remain stateless instead.
And now Abbas is bragging about rejecting free land to house these poor, stateless "refugees." (Without consulting them, of course.)
Abbas' position is clear: The "refugees" only exist in order to ultimately destroy Israel. They must remain stateless and miserable or else they are useless to him. Actually helping the "refugees" is his lowest priority; cynically using them for political ends is his highest priority.
The point of a Palestinian Arab state is not to alleviate the suffering of stateless Palestinians. If it was, Abbas would embrace all of these plans - to naturalize them in Arab countries if they want, to bring them in to areas under his control to be protected, and certainly to provide them with land he doesn't have so they have room to live.
Yet Abbas consistently chooses to increase the misery of the people he supposedly leads rather than help them.
Mahmoud Abbas' position is clear: any solution to the so-called "refugee' problem must come at the expense of Israel. The Palestinian Arab leadership priorities have not changed in the slightest since Yasir Arafat founded Fatah in the 1950s: destroying Israel is far, far more important than helping Palestinian Arabs, the everlasting pawns of the Middle East.
(h/t Ian)
