Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Middle East Monitor

Showing posts with label Middle East Monitor. Show all posts

Monday, August 14, 2023

Since 1948, in any given situation, there seem to always be exactly 420,000 Palestinians

Here's an interesting coincidence.

The UN in 1994:

An estimate made by Abu Lughod indicated that the average number of indigenous Palestinians was about 420,000 in the West Bank and about 80,000 in the Gaza Strip by the end of 1948.

News wires, March 2004:

Schools and virtually every shop were closed in this city {Gaza City], where 420,000 people live.

Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, 2007:

Estimates of IDPs in Israel vary widely. There is no government or United Nations estimate. Sources for estimates are accademics, Palestinian NGOs and Israeli papers. The lowest estimate is 150,000 and the highest is 420,000, which includes the children and grandchildren of Arab villagers displaced in 1948, as well as Bedouin communities displaced later on.

Human Rights Watch, 2010:

Israel’s differential treatment in law, regulations, and administrative practice directly affect the roughly 490,000 Jewish settlers and 420,000 Palestinians in areas under its exclusive control in the West Bank (including in Area C and East Jerusalem).

Daily Sabah, 2018:

The 420,000 Palestinians who currently reside in East Jerusalem possess permanent residency ID cards and are treated as foreign immigrants by the Israeli government. (The article predicted that Israel would take away the residency permits of all those Palestinians, a prediction that, like all of them, never came close to being true.)

Eurasia Review, 2018, headline:

What’s Behind The ‘Disappearance’ Of 420,000 Palestinians In Lebanon?

WASH Cluster, State of Palestine, 2020:

WEST BANK: 482,509 of people suffering limited access to water; 420,000 persons consume less than 50 l/c/d.

OpenDemocracy, April 2020:

Palestinians in East Jerusalem: living under a deadly virus and a violent occupation: "There is inescapable and particular on-going acute anxiety about the future of these 420,000 Palestinians."

World Food Programme, August 2020:

In support of the MoSD’s response plan, which estimated that 70,000 families (420,000 people) have been affected by the spike in COVID-19 in Gaza...

UNRWA, 2021:

UNRWA is a lifeline to nearly 420,000 of the most vulnerable Palestine refugees in Syria.

Jeff Halper in Arena, June 2021:

Of the 150,000 Palestinians who remained in the country, the war displaced 30,000 to 40,000. Not allowed to return to their homes (which were either demolished or turned over to Jewish Israelis) and wanting to remain sumud (steadfast) near their lands, this population of internally displaced Palestinians has today grown to 420,000.

Middle East Monitor, July 2022:

The Nakba resulted in 750,000 Palestinians being driven from their homes; the 1967 Naksa saw another 420,000 forced to leave.

Al Jazeera, October 2022:

Since the attack, Israeli forces have imposed a continuing blockade on the area around Nablus, restricting the movement of about 420,000 Palestinians, including patients, elderly people and children, who must wait for hours before being able to cross.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, July 2023: (Video, 2:04:33)

“This year, actually over, since the beginning of my mandate [May 1, 2022], I have borne witness to a series of deeply distressing events. 420,000 Palestinians, including 91 children, and 56 Israelis, including five children, have been killed. ”

(She later walked this back, saying the number was 426.)

That's 14 separate times, in different contexts, that "expert" quoted a figure of 420,000 Palestinians.

I am not saying this is a conspiracy or anything like that. It is just a very strange coincidence for that number to pop up in such disparate ways.

420,000 seems like a more realistic, solid estimate than "400,000" or "450,000."

(h/t Irene)

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Palestinians complain that Israel halted furniture exports from Gaza. They won't mention the reason.

On May 5, Middle East Monitor reported:

Israeli authorities yesterday banned the export of furniture products from the occupied Gaza Strip.

The economic ministry said in a statement that the Israeli move aimed at "inflicting more losses on the enclave's industries that have been suffering due to the blockade."

The ministry called on the international community "to pressure Israel to allow freedom of import and export without restrictions so that the different industries in Gaza can prosper and overcome challenges resulted from the blockade."

So according to Gaza authorities, Israel just decided to stop furniture exports to punish them for no reason. And Arabic media also complains about the ban, which continued into June, asking the international community to pressure Israel to resume the exports and stop its arbitrary punishment of a specific industry.

But there was a reason.

On May 3, Israeli authorities foiled an attempt to smuggle guns, silencers and cartridges of bullets from Gaza to terrorists in the West Bank - inside furniture.

So now, Israeli authorities must update their procedures to ensure that future attempts to smuggle weapons in furniture are not successful.

Notice that the weapons appear to have been deliberately hidden in metal components, not only wood, so standard X-ray scanning might not catch them.

It will take time to come up with a solution that would catch any attempts to export weapons inside items like furniture.

Yet there is no anger for the would-be weapons smugglers, whose decision hurts all furniture manufacturers in Gaza. On the contrary, "human rights" NGOs are saying that Israeli attempts to stop weapons exports from Gaza is "collective punishment" - after all, it isn't a big deal when Jews get shot by West Bank terrorists, right?

Murdering Jews is not a violation of human rights - but a temporary ban on furniture exports is. And Israel is expected to tolerate its citizens being murdered under the pretext of "human rights."

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Algerian Islamists try again to make "normalization" illegal

From Middle East Monitor:

Algerian lawmakers, on Tuesday, submitted a Bill criminalising normalisation with Israel, including articles prohibiting travel or any direct or indirect contact with Tel Aviv, Anadolu News Agency reports.

Youssef Ajesa, a lawmaker from the Movement of Society for Peace, told Anadolu Agency that he "lodged on behalf of his party's group of deputies (65 out of 462) the Bill to the Parliament."

The Movement of Society for Peace is an Islamic party that forms the largest opposition bloc in the Algerian Parliament. The party's leadership, however, has constantly confirmed its support for the country's foreign policy.

Ajesa said "his parliamentary bloc tried to include other groups to contribute to the Bill, but it did not receive a response, so I took the initiative to present it in its name."

The Bill includes seven articles that aim to "criminalise normalisation with the Zionist entity (Israel)" as well as forbidding any contacts with Israel or travelling to and from Israel.

What is not mentioned is that Algerian parties have submitted similar bills in the past and they (surprisingly) failed.

Apparently, this bill is meant to copy Iraq's draft bill from last week to criminalize any contacts with Israel, a "crime" that could be punished with the death penalty.. The Iraqi parliament legal committee discussed the bill yesterday ahead of its second draft reading.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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The Flood Libel returns - with a new twist

From Middle East Monitor:

Israel yesterday opened one of the gates of its rainwater stores east of Gaza, allowing rainwater to flood large swathes of Palestinian land, Ma’an reported.

The Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture said in a statement that the water drowned “hundreds of dunams of agricultural lands and damaged barley and wheat crops.”

According to the statement, the water storage area was located in the east of Shuja’iyya neighbourhood in the east of Gaza city.

This absurd accusation was popular a few years ago. In 2015 AFP even published the accusations. Juan Cole and HRW's Sarah Leah Whitson doubled down. But when the truth was pointed out, AFP didn't just issue a correction, but it published a full debunking of the libel and made an accompanying video showing it was a complete lie.

The accusation of Israel opening floodgates has since died down - until now.

(The Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture referred to is the Hamas version, not the PA version. )

But then Middle East Monitor goes even further

Israel builds a number of reservoirs to stop rainwater from running through the Gaza valleys in winter. These prevent Palestinians in the enclave from storing rainwater to irrigate their crops and to fill underground wells.

Israel builds reservoirs in the desert just to deprive Palestinians of rainwater??

Just more lies about Israel being reported and retweeted by the usual crowd of Israel haters.

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Absurd article posted by fake academic Juan Cole blames Israel for "ethnic cleansing" of Palestinian Christians

The Hamas-supporting Middle East Monitor (MEMO) site has an article by the always ridiculous Ramzy Baroud, claiming that Israel is engaging in "ethnic cleansing" against Palestinian Christians.

After quoting lots of statistics on the disappearance of Christians and blaming Israel, not Muslims or the PA, the article brings its only piece of "evidence:"

A study conducted by Dar al-Kalima University in the West Bank town of Beit Jala and published in December 2017, interviewed nearly 1,000 Palestinians, half of them Christian and the other half Muslim. One of the main goals of the research was to understand the reason behind the depleting Christian population in Palestine.
The study concluded that “the pressure of Israeli occupation, ongoing constraints, discriminatory policies, arbitrary arrests, confiscation of lands added to the general sense of hopelessness among Palestinian Christians,” who are finding themselves in “a despairing situation where they can no longer perceive a future for their offspring or for themselves”.

There are three problems with this study.

One is that it is biased against Israel. One of the authors, Bernard Sabella, was at the time also a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. There is no way that this study would look objectively at Muslim persecution of Christians, well documented not only in the territories but also throughout the Middle East.

And when Christians think that the survey is associated with the government, they are unlikely to say anything that might upset the government.

Two is that in order to prove Israeli "ethnic cleansing" of Christians, it would mean that Israel is somehow targeting Christians more than Muslims. Yet this same study showed that Palestinian Muslims shared nearly the exact same level of fear as well as optimism as the Christians surveyed.

If they suffer equally, and the Muslims aren't persecuting the Christians, then why are only the Christians leaving and not nearly as many Muslims?

The third issue is methodological. If one wants to understand why Christians are fleeing the PA-controlled areas, you don't ask the people who are still there - you ask the people who left!

To be sure, part of the reason more Christians leave than Muslims because Christians were more middle class and had more economic opportunity to leave, as well as welcoming communities to go to where there are already many established Palestinian Christians, in the US and South America. But it is just as certain that there has been many cases of reported persecution of Christians by Muslims.

The most hilarious part of this absurd article is that after invoking this ridiculous report as the be all and end all on proof of Israeli persecution of Christians, it adds:

Unfounded claims that Palestinian Christians are leaving because of religious tensions between them and their Muslim brethren are, therefore, irrelevant.

I've published many articles over the past fifteen years documenting how Muslims have been attacking Christians in the West Bank and Gaza, forcing the Christians to look to live elsewhere. This study does not refute that at all.

Another problem with the article itself is that if Israel wants to persecute Christians, why is the Christian population in Israel itself steady and growing?

It is no surprise that MEMO publishes this garbage. Interestingly, eleventh-rate professor Juan Cole was so enchanted by this piece of bad reporting that he copied the entire thing to his blog.

(h/t Dan)

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