Sunday, January 26, 2025
Elder of Ziyon
There is one word that the media is avoiding mentioning as much as possible: "voluntarily."
Nobody is proposing that Gazans be forced to leave Gaza if they don't want to. The idea is that they should be treated like any other people worldwide who can leave a war zone if they so desire.
As far as I see, none of the articles are mentioning this. AP notes that Egypt and Jordan already host many refugees from other conflicts, but instead of advocating that Palestinians be treated exactly the same way, it gives excuses as to why they should not.
The New York Times has to make up facts to justify the anti-Palestinian policies of other countries:
Millions of Palestinian refugees are living in camps in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and a few other countries in the Middle East. Since the start of the war, Egypt has said that it will not take in any more Palestinian refugees, and that any attempt to force Palestinians into their territory risks agreements that it has with Israel.
There is not one camp for Palestinians outside the UNRWA camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinian territories. Egypt has no camps, and neither does Saudi Arabia or the UAE or Qatar or Libya or anywhere else descendants of Palestinian refugees from 1948 have moved to. The people living there are not refugees according to the definition in the Refugee Convention. and UNRWA uses doubletalk to paper over this fact.
The media avoids mentioning that hundreds of thousands of people desperately tried to flee Gaza for safety during the war. Tens of thousands of those with the financial means paid huge bribes to Egyptian officials to become "VIPs" who were allowed to get temporary visitor visas.
Not once does the media or NGOs mention the basic fact: Palestinians have the human right to voluntarily seek better lives elsewhere, and this right that is being denied by every Arab country. Outrageously, this right is emphasized by human rights organizations for every war zone except Gaza.
If the media would mention the voluntary nature of the plan, it would damn the Arab countries who have different policies for Palestinians than for every group of refugees from places like Syria, Iraq and Sudan.
One could even say that these different policies for Palestinians and for everyone else is in some ways the very definition of apartheid.
People who pretend to care about Palestinians love to say how many times Gazans were forced to leave areas where Hamas used them as human shields. Their cynical pretense to care about human rights never extends to allowing Palestinians to leave Gaza to seek safety and asylum elsewhere - on the contrary, they frame this refusal by Egypt and Jordan as if they are protecting Palestinian human rights.
If the news articles would include the simple word "voluntarily," everyone would see that this is a human rights issue. That is the last thing the media wants its readers to know.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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