Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Palestinian refugees

Showing posts with label Palestinian refugees. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Newest EoZ memes and comics

These have been a hit on Twitter - and they are upsetting all the right people.

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The number of mega-large families supported by UNRWA is ballooning. Something isn't adding up.

The more you dig into UNRWA's own website, the sketchier it looks.

UNRWA has a population dashboard showing statistics of those it gives services to (much more than their already wildly inflated "registered refugee" count.)

It shows the size of families that it helps. And some of them are unusually large.

As of the first quarter of this year, UNRWA supports 1642 families of size 15-19, 167 sized 20-24, 36 sized 25-29 and 4 with over 30 members.

The number of mega-families supported, with more than 14 members, has skyrocketed since 2020, going up an astonishing 17%, from 1585 to 1851! The number of families from 10-14 members also went up a great deal, by 14%. At the same time the number of "refugees" only went up by 4.5%.

So what's going on?

There is an outside possibility that there are a few families with over 25 members, because UNRWA allowed men with multiple wives to register. And if the patriarch is a "refugee" then his wives and children are all considered "refugees" as well.

But there is also a good chance that families simply do not tell UNRWA when family members die. Why would they? UNRWA doesn't check, as far as I can tell - they seem to ask people to register deaths on the honor system using an app. Palestinians have been known to not report deaths of family members since the agency began.

Looking at it another way, the population dashboard claims that there are 480461 "refugees" over the age of 70 today (not counting the many non-refugees receiving UNRWA services.) The total number of UNRWA refugees in 1953 was 900,000.

Does it make sense that half the people of all ages living in 1953 are alive today?

They are saying that about 9% of all "refugees" receiving services alive today are over 70, when the population of Palestinians within the area of the British Mandate over 70 stands at about 2%.

UNRWA is not reporting anything close to accurate numbers, and they are exaggerating the number of people they serve a great deal.

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Document at UNRWA site admits UNRWA's definition of "refugee" is not valid in international law

The UN Human Rights Council issued a document last week by its reliably anti-Isrsel team of "experts" demanding that Palestinian "refugees" have the right to "return" under international law.

Right of return of Palestinian refugees must be prioritised over political considerations: UN experts

2022 marked the largest ever increase in the number of forcibly displaced persons worldwide, with over 108 million people across the globe uprooted from their homes, more than half are women and girls....

This reality is all too familiar for the Palestinian people, 75 years since the Nakba - the event that shattered Palestinian lives and severed their ancestral connection to their land during the establishment of the State of Israel. Since then, they have endured forced displacement, dispossession, and disenfranchisement, with their rights to self-determination, restitution, and compensation repeatedly denied. For 75 years, their cry for justice, embodied in the demand for the right to return, has resounded with unwavering determination.

For Palestinians, forced displacement has become part of their life for generations, tracing back to 1947-1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee massacres and mass expulsions and forcible transfers during the birth of the State of Israel. The majority, along with their descendants, are still in neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, while 40 per cent of them remain under occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since 1967. Progressively, Palestinian exile has scattered them across various nations globally.

Since 1948, both the General Assembly and the Security Council have consistently called upon Israel to facilitate the return of Palestinian refugees and provide reparations. Despite these repeated appeals, Palestinian refugees have been systematically denied of their right to return and forced to live in exile under precarious and vulnerable conditions outside the borders of Palestine.

The thing is, even the UN admits that these Palestinian Arabs are not legally considered refugees.

The UNHCR's Refugee Survey Quarterly in 2010 has an article by Riccardo Bocco, a professor at the University of Geneva, looking at the history of UNRWA. It is hosted at the UNRWA website, today. ASnd it admits what we have been writing here for years: the UNRWA working definition of "Palestine refugee" has nothing to do with international law.

In looking at who is a Palestinian refugee, there is no definitive response. The definition and the number of Palestinian refugees can differ according to the approach (administrative, juridical, political) used to define Palestinian refugees and also according to the social context of interaction between Palestinians (registered refugees or not) and others and the actors defining them. UNRWA, particularly at the beginning of its mandate, lacked a fixed definition; this changed mainly due to a need to delimit the number of relief recipients. When the Agency began its activities, it inherited a legacy of inflated registration: the United Nations Economic Survey Mission recorded approximately 720,000 people, while the number of recipients on the ration rolls of the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees (UNRPR) surpassed 950,000. It is the 1952 definition that has become the accepted one and has remained virtually unchanged: “a Palestine refugee shall mean any person whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period June 1, 1946 to May 15, 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict”.

Some remarks should be noted.... [T]he descendants of original registered refugees inherited UNRWA’s administrative title independently of the fact that they may have obtained a nationality and/or left the Agency’s fields of operation.

It is important to emphasize that the UNRWA definition of a Palestine refugee is an administrative one and does not translate directly into recognition by international law. Furthermore, a tacit understanding seems to prevail: UNRWA’s continued existence (and the associated Palestine refugee status) is directly linked to the realization of a permanent resolution to the Palestine refugee issue.

Four crucial facts are listed here:

1. Over 30% of the original "refugee" population UNRWA registered were not refugees, and took that status illicitly. They have never been purged.

2. The UNRWA definition of "refugee" is administrative, not legal, and has nothing to do with the legal definition of refugee under international law and the Refugee Convention.

3. UNRWA "refugees" and their descendants are still considered "registered refugees" even if they move away from UNRWA areas, even if they obtain citizenship elsewhere - not only Jordan but also EU countries and the US. This is a truly absurd situation that is impossible for any real refugee; it is axiomatic that one cannot be a refugee while simultaneously being a citizen of a state. But millions of Palestinians are. So we have an absurd situation where American multi-millionaire supermodels (whose father's family voluntarily walked away from their home in Safed in 1948) are still considered "Palestine refugees."

4. UNRWA has a conflict of interest between staying in business and a sane definition of "refugee." . This is a major reason why it does not have any cessation clauses as UNHCR does. "Palestine refugees" are forever.

All of these facts are damning,. And they are on UNRWA's own website, today.

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The absurdity of "Palestine Refugees," illustrated by Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera published this graphic to illustrate who has been a refugee for the past 75 years.

Notice that the Palestine stream is the only one (besides "Others") that keeps getting bigger and bigger. Every other individual refugee situation either disappears eventually or, in the case of Afghanistan, cycles to an extent.

The UNHCR annual report gives all the proof we need to show how UNRWA should be dismantled.

Of course, if we would apply the Refugee Convention definition of refugee to Palestinians, there wouldn't be 5.9 million. There wouldn't be 30,000.

And even if you include descendants of refugees, the number would still be roughly one million, since nearly 5 million are either full citizens of another country (Jordan - 2M), they live in British Mandate Palestine (West Bank/Gaza- 2.2M) or they have already moved to other countries (most from Lebanon ~300K and many from Syria ~200K.)

Instead of 17% of world refugees being Palestinian, it is between 0-3% by any sane definition.

When statistics are subjective with different rules for different people, they are meaningless. And when they are weighted to damn only the Jewish state, they are antisemitic.

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UNRWA gives free services to 775,000 who aren't refugees even by its own definition!

This table is from the UNRWA Registered Population Dashboard, showing who receives UNRWA services.

We've discussed many times how the UNRWA definition of "refugee" is completely at odds with the official UN definition of refugee, drastically inflating the number of real refugees they raise funds for. They include descendants of refugees that UNHCR would never consider refugees, they include two million Jordanian citizens, they include well over two million Palestinians who are citizens of the Palestinian Authority.

We've seen how their "registered refugee" metric includes hundreds of thousands of people who no longer live in their areas of operation but whom UNRWA still counts as receiving services.

We've seen how hundreds of thousands of today's UNRWA "registered refugees" were not even refugees under their own definition when it started, but UNRWA registered them anyway and today hundreds of thousands of UNRWA's "Palestine refugees" didn't even descend from real refugees in 1948.

But this chart shows even more duplicity.

According to UNRWA, they provide services to over 770,000 people who aren't refugees even according to its own bizarre and counterfactual definition.

Doing some digging, I found the definition of "non-refugee" spouses and children.

UNRWA definition of “other eligible population” includes: (i) “Non-Refugee Wives” – women who are (or were) married to registered Palestine refugees, and as such are eligible to register to receive UNRWA services; (ii) “Non-Refugee Husbands” and “Non-Refugee Descendants” (including legally adopted children) – husbands and descendants of women who are Registered Refugees and are (or were) married to a non-refugee. They are also eligible to register to receive UNRWA services. Once they are registered with UNRWA, persons in this category are referred to as Married to Non-Refugee (MNR) Family Members.

So being married to a "refugee" makes one eligible to access free UNRWA health and housing. Which would have made Palestinian "refugees" very attractive marriage partners! According to this, some 450,000 non-refugees have married UNRWA aid recipients - an astonishing number.

Moreover, even if the spouses get divorced, he or she can keep getting those benefits forever - and so can their descendants! Not a bad deal!

What about "frontier villagers," "Jerusalem poor" and "Gaza poor"?

UNRWA’s Commissioner-General (then Director) stated in his annual report to the General Assembly in 1961: "The Agency’s definition of a refugee eligible for assistance is narrowly drawn and stipulates the loss of both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 hostilities. Substantial numbers of Palestine Arabs do not qualify for Agency relief on the technical grounds that they did not lose both home and means of livelihood, i.e. they may have lost their source of income and may be wholly destitute, but did not lose their home. This category has become known as 'economic refugees' and includes frontier villagers in Jordan, some destitute inhabitants of Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, and certain Bedouin expelled after 1948. The General Assembly has more than once confirmed that, despite the undoubted need of these unfortunate people, the Agency’s mandate does not extend to them.

That was 1961. Since then, "The present Agency position is that, while registered for the purposes of receiving UNRWA services, these persons are not counted as part of the official registered Palestine refugee population. Except for descendants through the male line, UNRWA does not accept new applications from persons wishing to be registered in these categories.

So if a person was considered a "frontier villager" or "Jerusalem poor" in 1950, even though they weren't refugees and the UN consistently said they are not to receive UNRWA services during the 1950s, today their descendants can continue to receive UNRWA benefits as a poverty stricken Palestinian - even if they live in a mansion in Ramallah.

Do the UNRWA donors even know that UNRWA spends 11% of its budget on people who aren't "refugees" even under its own definitions?

The problem is, as we've mentioned before, that, unlike UNHCR, UNRWA has no means to remove anyone's "refugee" status. The vast majority of UNRWA's "Palestine refugees" are not refugees in any sense. And now we see that even non-refugees continue to receive UNRWA services forever.

There are more non-refugees under UNRWA's own definition receiving services today than there were real refugees in 1948. That shows, in a nutshell, why UNRWA must be abolished.

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Finally, an Arabic article that describes the anti-Palestinian racism in Lebanon

Israeli Arab news site Arab48 has an article that discusses the plight of Palestinians in Lebanon and why they risk their lives to take dangerous boat trips to Europe.

Outside of rare NGO articles and articles by Palestinians in some maverick Lebanese outlets, it is the first Arabic article I've seen that calls out Lebanon's bigotry against Palestinians instead of pretending that they are friends.

The Palestinian camps in Lebanon have been witnessing a continuous and silent migration for decades, which intensified in the last decade.

Since 1948, the Palestinians of the camps in Lebanon have been suffering from a policy of isolation and deprivation, due to the racism of the sectarian political system, whose refusal to “settle” the Palestinians ...means keeping them in isolation and deprivation, blocking them from practicing any profession or activity in the country, until the Palestinians find another place to turn to other than Lebanon. In other words, the refusal to settle the Palestinians in Lebanon does not correspond to their right of return to Palestine, but rather a lack of welcome.

It is true that the position on the issue of Palestine and the Palestinians is divergent and contradictory between the Lebanese political forces. The position of Hezbollah and the left cannot be compared to the position of the Lebanese Forces and the right, for example. However, both of them are partners in producing the same system, and the same "sectarian political" system, which sees any attempt to integrate the Palestinians into Lebanese public affairs as a breach of what Lebanon ridiculously calls its "delicate balance." Considering that the settlement of the Palestinians may make a certain Lebanese sect prevail over the rest of the other sects in terms of influence and number. Lebanon settled some Palestinians immediately after they fled to it in 1948, but it was a limited settlement, limited to Christian Palestinians, mostly because of their wealth, while the vast majority of refugees succumbed to isolation and deprivation.

Lebanon did not ratify the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees, nor its 1967 Protocol, which explains its refusal to grant refugee status or permanent residency to refugees. Although this does not apply to Palestinian refugees due to the specificity of their status, the Lebanese state has accepted Palestinian refugees and called them "displaced", in order to evade its responsibilities towards them.

In general, the conditions of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon has remained dire, even in light of the periods of Lebanon's stability and prosperity. Emigration was taking place in full swing, since after the Nakba. This is not to mention the periods of civil-sectarian strife in Lebanon, and the Israeli invasion of it in 1982, during which the Palestinians paid a heavy price in terms of massacres, displacement, deportation and uprooting. What do we think of Lebanon today, as a collapsed and plundered country at the level of the state and the regime? Who cares about the Palestinians and their tragedy, if Lebanon does not care about the Lebanese themselves?

So, the catastrophe of asylum in itself, and then the tragedy of the Palestinian camp with the sectarianism of the Lebanese regime, and the racism of its society, with its decades of isolation and deprivation, is from the Lebanese side. On the other hand, the Palestinian leadership and the PLO abandoned the refugees, for whom the Palestinian cause is no longer concerned or intended, even though the refugees are the first line of definition of the Palestinian cause. In addition to this, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees UNRWA has gradually retreated in the last two decades from providing support, aid, and funding to refugee camps.

The overwhelming majority of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon possess only a Lebanese travel document, and only a few of them obtained a passport issued by the Palestinian Authority. This closes the doors of regular immigration to refugees, leaving their only hope at sea! Is there hope in the sea?

The rest of the article describes the dangers of taking a sea voyage, and how even landing in Cyprus or Greece doesn't mean their asylum would be accepted - because Lebanon is considered a "safe 'country and Palestinians are not officially persecuted there.

Notice also that the article blames the Palestinian leadership for abandoning Lebanon. They could provide passports to ease their exodus. But they refuse to.

Such an honest Arabic article could only be written in Israel. Arab media outlets would never want to antagonize a fellow Arab state and upset the narrative of eventual Palestinian "return" from Lebanon. Palestinians in Europe or North America are too invested in ensuring that everything they publish blames Israel exclusively for all their problems.

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The world says no to UNRWA's demanding money, yet no one is discussing the obvious solutions

Last Friday, UNRWA held a donor's conference at the UN headquarters in New York. The agency's head laid out its financial problems in his opening remarks.

Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) sounded the alarm about the Agency’s deepening funding crisis. Addressing this year’s Pledging Conference for UNRWA convened by the President of the General Assembly, Commissioner-General Lazzarini warned of the risk of the Agency’s collapse.

“While we are grateful for the pledges announced, they are below the funds that the Agency needs to keep over 700 UNRWA schools and 140 clinics open from September onwards,” said Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini.

Some of the Agency’s most committed donors have indicated they will substantially decrease their contributions in 2023.

Today, according to reports, UNRWA announced how many new pledges it received.

The answer is - close to zero.

Sama News reports:

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees UNRWA announced shocking data today, noting that it received $13 million in new pledges during the donors' conference held in New York last Friday.

UNRWA said in a statement today, "Most of the pledges referred to in the conference were merely confirmation of the amounts already received and spent in the first five months of 2023. As expected, donors are using the pledging conference to publicly confirm the support they have already provided to UNRWA this year."

Some of the announced donations, according to the UNRWA statement, were "a public confirmation of the amounts previously discussed and agreed upon with UNRWA. This money has not yet been received, but will be transferred to the agency in the coming months. We've already factored these funds into our financial projections for the rest of the year. This money has already been calculated, and the issue of receiving it will not change our financial situation, as some of the financing pledges referred to are for the year 2024 and beyond. "

UNRWA stressed, "In short, and unfortunately, only about 13 million US dollars have been announced...This funding will help reduce the expected deficit this year. Since we need about 70 million US dollars per month to cover our basic costs, this amount will not be enough to sustain the services after September.”

I could not find this announcement on the UNRWA platforms as of this writing, but it rings true. Donors have been getting tired of forever increasing demands by UNRWA - and since UNRWA has no mechanism to take people off of their rolls, it will keep increasing forever.

We've discussed before what must be done. Some 2 million "refugees" live in Jordan as Jordanian citizens. They should not be getting a dime. Jordan is a sovereign nation and provides education and health care to its citizens; nearly all of the UNRWA recipients there are full citizens, and there is no reason for the world to pay for their shelter, doctors and schooling.

Jordan instead keeps the Palestinian and non-Palestinian citizens in separate schools, separate medical facilities and to an extent separate living areas.

Sounds like apartheid, doesn't it? But this apartheid is funded by the entire world!

There is similarly little reason for UNRWA in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority has its own schools and fairly good medical facilities, Palestinian "refugees" should be allowed to use them like every Palestinian. UNRWA funds could be redirected to the PA for a couple of years to take care of the logistics of combining the two systems, but there is no reason for the world to fund Palestinian "refugees" who live within the borders of British Mandate Palestine - they are not refugees under any reasonable definition.

Of course, nearly all UNRWA aid recipients are not refugees. But before dismantling UNRWA altogether, lets solve its financial problems in a reasonable way without causing undue hardship on those who really are dependent on UNRWA services, in Lebanon, parts of Syria and Gaza.

No one is asking these questions, at least not out loud. But without asking these questions and making the decisions to treat Palestinians just like anyone else in need, using the same criteria and the same eligibility, then things would become far worse for the Palestinians that UNRWA is supposed to be supporting.

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75 years ago: Arab leaders considered Palestinian refugees in 1948 to be "fifth columnists"

During the War of Independence in 1948, on a few occasions the Palestine Post could not publish the newspaper properly. The editors nearly always managed to get something out, even if it was typewritten.

That is what happened on June 7, 1948.

But one of the stories includes an important quote that I have not seen elsewhere, possibly because of the newspaper looking the way it did.

"ARAB REFUGEES ARE FIFTH COLUMNISTS"

The Arab radio stations are broadcasting appeals to Arab refugees from Palestine to return to their homes. The Arab authorities are offering financial support to those who come back, while men of military age are promised exemption from duty.

In Cairo, Azzam Pasha [secretary general of the Arab League - EoZ] has stated that the refugees constituted a fifth column in the Arab states, where they are spreading despondency and alarm.

The closest I could find was a second hand quote from Aharon Cohen, in his book "Israel and the Arab World" (1964), where he says that Arab leaders were very critical of "fifth columnists and rumormongers" behind the flight from Israel.

The juxtaposition of the two reports in the newspaper shows the contempt that the Arabs leaders had for Palestinian Arabs and how much they wanted to rid their countries of them.

Which is still true today.

The only difference is that soon after 1948, the Arab leaders came up with a better sounding plan. They still wanted to get rid of the refugees whom they considered cowardly and a threat to their own stability - but they started couching their desire to rid themselves of them as being "pro-Palestinian" because they supported "return" and avoided naturalization - ostensibly for the Palestinians' own good.

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"Pro-Palestinian" activists sure don't care about the suffering of Palestinians in Iraq

There are thousands of Palestinians still living in Iraq with essentially no rights. They have been attacked, and many killed, by Iraqis since 2003. They are not recognized in Iraq as a refugee group. Other Arab countries refuse to allow them to immigrate.

The Safa news agency interviewed Baghdad-based journalist Hassan Al-Khaled who said that there are some 6,000 Palestinians in Iraq, 70% of whom live below the poverty line. He aid that there is no joy this Eid al-Fitr for them.

In 1948, many Palestinians were forced by Iraqi forces to join them and fight against Israel. After their defeat, they were allowed to go to Iraq, where they were treated decently. That all changed after the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein, who had given them huge privileges.

In 2020, UNHCR dropped their rent subsidies for the Palestinian families, throwing them into an even deeper crisis.

Al-Khaled complained about the lack of relief associations or organizations that help Palestinians in Iraq, saying, "If there are any, the amount assistance they provide to the refugees is not enough for everyone."

Think about that. There are hundreds of NGOs in the Palestinian territories, and hundreds more that claim to aid Palestinians worldwide - and this journalist is not aware of a single NGO that provides aid to Palestinians in Iraq.

Meanwhile, Arab countries refuse to allow them to enter, even as hundreds of thousands of other refugees from Iraq have been allowed in. They use Israel as an excuse to keep Palestinians in misery in Iraq. HRW wrote in 2006:

The PLO and the Arab League have rejected in principle and actively discouraged in practice local integration or third-country resettlement of Palestinian refugees. Their view is that local integration or resettlement would negate the right to return of the resettled refugees. The Arab countries hosting large Palestinian refugee populations point to Israel's legal obligation to permit the refugees' return to justify their refusal to integrate the Palestinian refugees and afford them rights equal to their own citizens.

Jordan and Syria have (with some exceptions) refused entry to Palestinians who attempt to flee Iraq, in violation of the international legal prohibition against refoulement. When these two countries made temporary exceptions to their policies of refusal, they conditioned admission of Palestinian refugees on their confinement to camps, for example al-Ruwaishid camp in Jordan in 2003, and al-Hol camp in Syria in 2006. Because of the widely observed policy against resettlement of Palestinian refugees, these camp residents have already waited longer than other refugees fleeing Iraq, such as the Iranian Kurds, for access to third-country resettlement.

Just as with Lebanon, when Palestinians are brutally mistreated by an Arab nation, all of the "pro-Palestinian activists" are suddenly silent. The reason is because they are not pro-Palestinian at all, but anti-Israel. And using Israel as an excuse to actively keep Palestinians in misery - policies that are meant to hurt Palestinians because doing so might indirectly, one day, help weaken Israel - proves that this "anti-Israel" attitude is really antisemitism.

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Palestinian homes in Lebanon are literally falling apart. No one cares, because there is no way to blame Jews.

The homes of Palestinians in Lebanese "refugee camps" are literally falling apart.

The Union of Palestinian Right of Return Committees in Lebanon issued a statement this week holding the UNRWA Administration and the Engineering Department responsible for the collapse of houses on its residents in the Palestinian camps.

The real problem is that Lebanon severely restricts building materials into the camps, which are overcrowded and getting worse. Apparently the committee doesn't want to upset the Lebanese authorities so they prefer to blame UNRWA.

A report by a Palestinian human rights group in Lebanon last December says that hundreds of Palestinian families have seen their ceilings collapse. The report prepared by the Palestinian Association for Human Rights noted the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon still live in camps that cannot be expanded despite being there for seven decades. They note the imposition of strict restrictions by the Lebanese authorities on the entry of building materials in the camps.

"Anxiety has become part of the lives of refugees and their daily bread for their children, for fear of their homes falling over their heads and sudden disasters that they cannot bear the consequences of, as happened with the family of the Palestinian refugee Muhammad Atta Azzam from Rashidieh camp, whose roof suddenly collapsed" last November, the report said. In October, the roof of another house in Burj al-Barajneh camp, south of Beirut, collapsed on a family while they were sleeping, and it is getting worse.

There was another recent Arabic article about the number of dilapidated houses in various Lebanese camps.

Outside of one French media outlet, I could not find any mention of this in English.

Now, imagine this was happening in Gaza. There would be numerous stories about this, all of them blaming Israel (not UNRWA as most of these articles do.) In fact, UNRWA would convene an emergency international donor gathering, and nations around the world would pledge to fix these buildings. we woul see charities asking for money to help the Palestinians - all with an undercurrent of blaming Israel.

Is it because they care about Palestinians, or because they love to find excuses to paint Israel in a bad light? What we see in Lebanon proves that it is most definitely the latter.

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As soon as @Amnesty started their "Apartheid" campaign, they STOPPED mentioning Lebanese/Jordanian discrimination against Palestinians

In 2007, Amnesty International wrote a 5-page report describing the institutionalized and legal discrimination against Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon.

It ended off with these recommendations for the Lebanese government:

To this end, the Lebanese authorities should:
 urgently repeal or revise all laws and policies that directly discriminate against Palestinian refugees;
 take immediate steps to improve conditions in the camps and gatherings;
 register all non-ID Palestinian refugees under Lebanese jurisdiction without delay;
 end the discrimination facing Palestinians in the labour market;
 ensure that adequate health care is available to all;
 ensure that all children have equal access to education.

That report, 16 years ago, was the last time that Amnesty dedicated a report to the plight of Palestinians in Lebanon.

Nothing has changed since then. The discriminatory laws are still in place, Palestinians still cannot own land, they still are banned from many jobs, they still have no access to Lebanese health care, babies born are not given citizenship.

By any definition, including Amnesty's own definition, this is apartheid against Palestinians in Lebanon. But Amnesty never calls it such, and it has not considered this issue worth a follow-up report since the first decade of the century.

Amnesty would briefly mention Arab discrimination against Palestinians in their annual reports on every country. From their annual report on 2014:

Thousands of Palestinian long-term refugees continued to live in camps and informal gatherings in Lebanon, often in deprived conditions. They faced discriminatory laws and regulations, for example denying them the right to inherit property, the right to work in around 20 professions, and other basic rights.

And for 2019:

Lebanon also continued to host tens of thousands of long-term Palestinian refugees, who remained subject to discriminatory laws excluding them from owning or inheriting property, accessing public education and health services, and working in at least 36 professions. At least 3,000 Palestinian refugees who do not hold official identity documents faced further restrictions, denying them the right to register births, marriages and deaths.

2020:

Over 470,000 Palestinian refugees were registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, including 29,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria. The 180,000 of them estimated to be still living in the country remained subject to discriminatory laws, excluding them from owning or inheriting property, accessing public education and health services and from working in at least 36 professions.

But when you look at the Lebanon entry of Amnesty's latest annual report, covering 2021, there is not a word about discrimination and mistreatment of Palestinians in Lebanon.

Nothing has changed. The overcrowded camps are still there, the discriminatory laws are still there. Amnesty's decision not to mention that which had been in every annual report until now must be deliberate.

Perhaps it was a mere clerical error, an oversight, a regrettable mistake?

Let's look at Amnesty's annual reports on Jordan concerning the non-citizen Palestinians who live there.

2019:

On 14 October, the Ministry of Labour raised from 11 to 39 the number of professions barred to non-Jordanian nationals seeking employment. Among them were long-term Palestinian refugees not holding Jordanian citizenship, most of whom were from the Gaza Strip; they continued to be denied other basic rights and services, too.

2020:

Palestinian refugees from the Gaza Strip continued to be excluded from basic rights and services as they do not have Jordanian citizenship.

But in the latest 2021 report, there is not a word about Jordanian discrimination against hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are not citizens. And they are still suffering from the same discrimination they were the year and decades before.

Why would Amnesty excise any mention of Arab human rights abuses against Palestinians in its 2021 report when they were mentioned in previous reports, and their situation has not gotten any better?

Here's why.

Amnesty released its 2021 annual report in March, 2022. This was shortly after Amnesty issued its report falsely accusing Israel of "apartheid" against Palestinians.

As soon as Amnesty issued its anti-Israel report, in which it had invested so many hours and so much money, it removed any mention of Jordan and Lebanon treating their Palestinian residents far worse than Israel does!

This is unlikely to be a coincidence. Amnesty's libel against Israel would have been diluted by their mentioning how Arab nations officially discriminate against Palestinians who have lived within their borders for decades. They did not want people to point to their own reports showing that Arabs really are guilty of apartheid against Palestinians, with discriminatory laws aimed specifically at them. 2022 was the year that Amnesty dedicated to attacking Israel - even creating T-shirts and swag and encouraging "stunts" to get publicity for their crusade.

Amnesty is not soberly reporting on accusations of Israeli human rights abuses. It is enthusiastically promoting an anti-Israel campaign. Mentioning that their fellow Arabs treat Palestinians worse than "racist, Jewish supremacist" Israel would damage that message.

So they erased all human rights abuses against Palestinians that they couldn't blame on Israel.

Which proves that Amnesty is not the impartial arbiter of human rights it pretends to be. At least when it comes to the Middle East, it is an anti-Israel propaganda outlet. It happily throws Palestinians in Lebanon and Jordan under the bus. To them, demonizing Israel is a far more important mission than mere human rights.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

03/09 Links Pt2: Ilan Halimi’s murder and the whitewashing of Muslim antisemitism; America's Tradition in Fighting Boycotts of Israel; El-Kurd Destroys His Own Credibility With ‘Apartheid Israel’ Confession

From Ian:

Ilan Halimi’s murder and the whitewashing of Muslim antisemitism

Seventeen years ago, a Parisian gang calling itself “the Barbarians” lured a twenty-three-year-old cell-phone salesman named Ilan Halimi onto its turf, tortured him for three weeks while reciting Quranic verses, and then left him to die by the roadside. Halimi’s murder is often seen as the beginning of the current era of anti-Semitic violence in France. Eleanor Krasne comments on the repeated failure of the French government, and even of Jewish leaders, to confront the sources of such violence:

The French authorities initially neglected to explore the anti-Semitic nature of the crime, but after a three-week search, they finally caught the gang’s leader, Youssef Fofana. When the case went to trial, Fofana wore a t-shirt that said “Allahu Akbar,” and when asked to state his identity said, “My name is Arab, armed African rebellion Salafist barbarian army, and I was born on February 13, 2006 in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois.” In other words, Fofana boasted of his allegiance to Salafism, a political-religious movement within Islam that seeks to establish a global caliphate. . . . Fofana was also saying that he was “born” the moment Ilan Halimi died.

Muslims are not solely responsible for French anti-Semitism, nor is every Muslim an anti-Semite. However, radical Islam’s role in French anti-Semitism must not be overlooked. Yet . . . French and American organizations that . . . advocate for Jews seem to shy away from confronting the radical Islamic theology behind these attacks, particularly when commemorating Ilan Halimi’s murder.

Confronting modern-day anti-Semitism in France means confronting the ideology behind it. France is home to 450,000 Jews and a growing community of over three million Muslims. Simone Rodan Benzaquen, the American Jewish Committee’s director in France, wrote in 2017 that Islamic anti-Semitism in France is a result of a variety of factors, “including manipulation of the Palestinian cause, failure of integration into French society, radical preachers and the funding of mosques, and satellite television stations broadcasting a steady stream of anti-Semitic discourse.”

Unfortunately, Benzaquen is correct, and other organizations must join her in facing the reality of Islamic anti-Semitism in France.

ITP: Another Gaping Hole in the Islamist Antisemitism Con

In its statement promoted by CAIR's national office, CAIR-New York Executive Director Afaf Nasher also noted "the disturbing rise in anti-Asian bigotry nationwide."

"All Americans, regardless of their background," he said, must be able to walk down the street without fear of a racist attack."

This is true. Correspondingly, there has been a disturbing rise in antisemitic bigotry in New York city and nationwide. A Times of Israel analysis of NYPD data found an anti-Jewish attack every 33 hours in New York. Masoud presents a clear example of the danger such blind hate about Jews and the Jewish state can pose.

But CAIR cannot bring itself to acknowledge, let alone condemn him. This is an organization with a decades-long record of antisemitism, including co-founder and Executive Director Nihad Awad's repeated insinuations that Jews are "pushing the United States" to advance policies "at the expense of American interests."

In 2014, as ISIS rampaged and Hamas terrorism instigated war in Gaza, Awad called Israel "the biggest threat to world peace and security." Awad also believes Tel Aviv is "occupied" territory. His San Francisco director Zahra Billoo believes pro-Israel Jews are out to hurt Muslims and should be shunned entirely. CAIR stands behind her.

CAIR claims it merely criticizes Israeli policy, as if the question whether a country should exist is a policy up for debate.

Was Masoud merely criticizing Zionists? His "veil of 'anti-Zionism' is pathetically thin in this case," prosecutors wrote. "As an initial matter, the defendant is not an equal opportunity anti-Zionist. He did not attack 'Evangelical Christians . . . who identify with the State of Israel' ... Instead, he repeatedly attacked Jewish men."

In October, CAIR condemned antisemitic material left outside homes in Wyoming.

"Those targeting the Jewish community with antisemitic hate must be repudiated by all Americans," CAIR national spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said. "The mainstreaming of bigotry in any form must never be tolerated or excused."

But CAIR mainstreams antisemitism when it stands by frothing haters like Billoo, and when it cannot muster the nerve to condemn an ideological ally like Sadaah Masoud. Antisemitism can't be viewed conditionally. If you can't even bring yourself to condemn premeditated beatings of random Jews, you can't expect to be believed when say you oppose antisemitism by condemning leaflets.

America's Tradition in Fighting Boycotts of Israel

In 1975, President Gerald Ford called for regulations prohibiting U.S. companies from "complying in any way with [the Arab] boycott," and declared emphatically that the United States would not "countenance the translation of any foreign prejudice into domestic discrimination against American citizens." Congress quickly heeded the call, passing not one but two pieces of critical bipartisan legislation: the Ribicoff Amendment assessed steep tax penalties against U.S. companies that participate in the Arab Boycott, and the Export Administration Amendments of 1977 directed the president to prohibit American companies from joining the Arab boycott. In signing that law, President Jimmy Carter acknowledged that the Arab Boycott, though nominally focused on Israel, was in fact "aimed at Jewish members of our society." The U.S. Office of Antiboycott Compliance has been enforcing this regime ever since, on the bipartisan understanding that the boycott of Israel constitutes a tool of discrimination, not protected expression.

And the federal government was not alone in its anti-boycott effort. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, at least 13 states—red and blue—took aggressive legislative steps to prevent U.S. companies from joining the Arab boycott. New York's rule was strikingly similar to the anti-BDS laws of today. In fact, it went further, prohibiting "discrimination," "boycotting," or "blacklisting" based on "national origin" or because a person has done business with Israeli firms. When Gov. Michael Dukakis signed the Massachusetts bill into law, he explained that he wished to send an "unequivocal message" that Massachusetts would "not stand for this type of blatant discrimination" against its Jewish residents.

Today's anti-BDS laws spring from the same pair of political judgments that animate this 50-year tradition of anti-boycott legislation. The first is that the boycott isn't speech, but instead economic conduct that can be freely regulated, consistent with the First Amendment. And the second is that, in the case of Israel, the boycott constitutes discrimination, and not desirable social action.

The tradition of anti-boycott legislation lives on because its historical foundations are fundamentally true. The first boycott against the Jews of Israel took place in the 1890s, and its organizers—the Arab political associations of Mandatory Palestine—could not have been clearer about their anti-Jewish objectives: "Don't buy from the Jews," they declared, "come and bargain with the Arab merchant... We must completely boycott the Jews." And in 1933, as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem grew in political prominence, he called for systematic boycotts against the Jews of Palestine and urged Nazi Germany to do the same.

BDS's appeal to "history and tradition" should ring hollow. For 50 years, state and federal law makers have regulated Israel boycotts, on the understanding that they were conceived in antisemitism and cannot escape its taint. In the court of history, it's the state lawmakers, and not the activists, who enjoy the upper hand.

Another Palestinian killed in clashes - but no one cares about him. Here's why.

Another Palestinian has been shot dead during clashes.

Although this happened last week, it is barely mentioned in Palestinian or international media. His name is not published in lists of Palestinians killed this year. In fact, his name has not been published at all.

Because it happened in Lebanon.

One person was killed and several others wounded in overnight clashes in south Lebanon's restive Ain al-Helweh Palestinian refugee camp, a Palestinian official said Thursday.

The clashes pitted members of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah movement against Islamist groups in the camp, located near the coastal city of Sidon, said senior Fatah official Mounir Makdah.

"One person was killed and seven wounded," he told AFP, adding that "all Palestinian forces are working to put an end" to the violence.

Clashes between rival groups are common in Ain al-Helweh, which is home to more than 54,000 registered Palestinian refugees who have been joined in recent years by thousands of Palestinians fleeing the conflict in Syria.

An AFP correspondent said shooting had mostly subsided around dawn but that sporadic gunfire could still be heard later in the morning.

The situation remained tense and armed men deployed to the streets of the camp, while schools run by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, were closed.

By long-standing convention, the Lebanese army does not enter Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, leaving the factions themselves to handle security.

So here we have an area completely controlled by Palestinians, effectively a micro Palestinian state, and where they regularly shoot each other.

Imagine what a Palestinian state would be like!

Not only has the victim not been identified in the media, but also which faction shot him. All those details are not important when Israel isn't involved.

Here's video of what they camp sounded like during the clashes:

As of today, UNRWA schools and health clinics in the camp remain closed because of the tension. The media doesn't seem too upset over that, either. And the UNRWA Twitter feed hasn't mentioned a word.

It is almost like a conspiracy of silence when Jews aren't involved.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

11/29 Links Pt2: What happened to the 1947 UN Partition Plan?; The Failed British Double-Cross of Israel; Kanye walks out of interview after being questioned about antisemitic beliefs

From Ian:

What happened to the 1947 UN Partition Plan?

Today, Nov. 29, 2022, is the 75th anniversary of the 1947 UN Partition Plan – UN General Assembly resolution 181 - which divided the geographical area to the west of the Jordan River, into two states: A Jewish state and an Arab state. In its essence, the Partition Plan was a fundamental breach of the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which placed that entire area under the governance of Great Britain, for the sole purpose of creating a Jewish state on all of the land.

The 1922 Mandate for Palestine had already taken the entire geographical area then referred to as “Palestine” and divided it in two: The eastern part of Palestine - the Arab country - was placed under the rule of the Hashemite family and changed its name to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The western part of Palestine was to become the Jewish state.

Despite the breach of the Mandate, the Jewish leadership of the day – represented by David Ben Gurion - accepted the plan. The Arab leadership and countries, on the other hand, rejected the plan and immediately started planning how to eradicate the Jewish state before it even came into existence.

75 years later, speaking at the UN, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has now decided to accept the plan and even demand its implementation:
“Therefore, I present today to this UN organization, the title of international legitimacy in this world, with a formal request to implement General Assembly resolution 181, which formed the basis for the two-state solution in 1947…”

[WAFA, English edition, Official PA news agency, Sept. 23, 2022]

In making this demand, Abbas ignores a number of fundamental realities.

First, Abbas is demanding the implementation of a plan that has been defunct for 75 years. Living up to their promises, even before the British Mandate came to an end on May 14, 1948, the Arab countries attacked the nascent Jewish state.

[Boston Evening Globe, May 1, 1948]

While Israel managed to survive and expand in a war in which 6.000 Israeli men, women, and children were killed, a full 1% of the population most of the areas allocated for the Arab state - Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip - were occupied by Jordan (which was not yet recognized by the UN as a state) and Egypt, respectively.

In its original charter from 1965, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which is now headed by Abbas, disavowed its connection to the areas provisionally allocated for the Arab state openly declaring:
“This Organization [The PLO] does not exercise any territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or in the Himmah Area”.

Indeed, while Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip and Jordan controlled Judea and Samaria (which it renamed “The West Bank”), from 1948 to 1967, they and the other Arab countries refrained from creating what could have been the “Palestinian” Arab state.

The Failed British Double-Cross of Israel

When the warrior poet Avraham “Yair” Stern founder and leader of Lohamei Herut Israel (Lehi, “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel”) who believed that the British had to be forced out with assassinations and bombs and would never leave voluntarily, was killed after being captured and handcuffed by British detectives on Feb. 12, 1942, no Jew could celebrate his death.

But the leaders of the Jews of British Mandatory Palestine, already then led by David Ben-Gurion, viewed Stern’s death as a gain for the national cause rather than a loss—and not only because the poet and his followers were reckless political dilettantes: Some fantasized alliances with Mussolini, even the Nazis, as well as Arab nationalists in a common anti-British cause.

At a time of maximum danger—Rommel seemed to be on the verge of conquering Egypt, with Palestine next—Ben-Gurion and his allies doggedly pursued cooperation with the British in spite of bitter disappointments. Perhaps the worst of these was the May 1939 White Paper which limited the immigration of Jews to 75,000 over five years, sentencing countless European Jews to death at the hands of the Nazis. Yet Ben-Gurion believed, and rightly so, that the British were the least-bad allies the Jews could have.

Nor did Ben-Gurion have much choice. The Americans had refused to enter the war even after the Germans had conquered most of Europe. They still refused to act when the Germans seemed on the verge of defeating Russia, which would soon mean Britain’s defeat, too. On Dec. 2, 1941, German tanks were 14.7 miles from Moscow’s Red Square. America was only at war when Stern died in 1942 because the Japanese had attacked them.

It was unimaginable that the Americans would intervene on behalf of the Jews in the distant Middle East—indeed the U.S. only lifted its total weapons embargo on Israel in August 1962!—to allow the sale of defensive antiaircraft missiles, seven years after the Soviets had agreed to deliver bombers to Nasser’s Egypt (part of a huge Soviet weapons gift package misrepresented as “Czech” at the insistence of the CIA to avert hostility from their own man Nasser: That always-wrong agency was betting on Nasser’s mighty Arab nationalism rather than on seemingly puny Israel).

When Avraham Stern was killed, the communists still gave all their loyalty to Stalin. According to Ben-Gurion and the majority of Jewish leaders in Palestine, Churchill was still the best bet the Jews could have, even after the exposure of his crass duplicity toward the Yishuv. Having vehemently condemned the May 1939 White Paper to please his Jewish benefactors while out of office and short of ready cash, Churchill refused to change the policy once he became prime minister—thus denying escape from death to millions, and incidentally preventing my father, mother, two brothers, and myself from leaving Arad, Romania, to reach safety by a comfortable Orient Express ride to Istanbul and thence Haifa. A 5-inch-by-2-inch Palestine entry slip was enough to obtain Bulgarian and Turkish transit visas, but the British refused to issue them, even in 1944—by which point detailed eyewitness accounts and impeccable documentation of the operation of every part of the Nazi killing machine had reached London and Washington.

In spite of all that, on the evidence available at the time, Ben-Gurion was still mostly right and Avraham Stern was still mostly wrong. The British did eventually, and very reluctantly, agree to the U.N.’s termination of their mandatory rule on May 15, 1948, thus allowing the Jews to fight for their state. The qualifier is necessary because a factor in the British decision was the terrorist attacks inspired by Stern, including the July 22, 1946, bombing of the British headquarters in the King David Hotel whose 91 killed set a deadliest-attack record that lasted for decades.

I Was Robbed of 70% of the Land of Israel

Jordan ruled over Judea and Samaria, Egypt ruled over Gaza and Syria ruled over the Golan Heights. For those that do not understand the importance of the sentence above, it means that all the lands that the Arabs call “occupied” were under Arab control between 1948-1967! Was there peace?

It was Jordan, Egypt, and Syria that built the refugee camps and stuck their own Arab brothers and sisters in them to create a refugee problem in order to bash Israel. If creating a new State called Palestine was the goal and all the Arab countries are in favor of such a State, why didn’t Jordan Egypt and Syria help the “Palestinian” Arabs start a State during those 19 years (1948-1967).

Israel liberated Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan from Arab States occupation and it has nothing to do with an Arab people who call themselves (since 1964) Palestinians. We never occupied an Arab place called Palestine and there never was an Arab place called Palestine before Israel that could have been occupied.

You are probably saying this is enough to completely destroy the anti-Israel propaganda, but it gets much better (or worse). Today, Jordan is ruled by a king.

Over 75% of Jordan’s population are Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians”! So why hasn’t the majority of “Palestinians” taken over? Because Jordan does not give them full rights!

In fact, Jordan has the largest “Palestinian” refugee camps!

Where is the UN? Where is UNWRA? Where are the SJWs? Where are all the Leftists who care about Human Rights?

Just to sum up, Jordan sits on 77% of British Palestine and has a majority of over 75% of Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians”. Why aren’t the Arabs, who so want to create a Palestinian State, not fighting over 77% of the Land where they are a 75% majority? Why are they fighting over a small sliver of 23% where they are the minority? The answer is simple.

This has never been a struggle to build a new state called Palestine, it’s a struggle to destroy the one called ISRAEL.

Now, can we start fighting for truth and stop giving into false diplomacy that is based on lies?

#OTD in 1947, Jews around the world celebrated as the @UN adopted Resolution 181 in favor of creating independent Jewish and Arab states.

These are all of the countries that voted in favor:

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— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) November 29, 2022

Find out why UN Resolution 181 remains very relevant today for 3 critically important reasons????https://t.co/IbF6B2PsZX
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 29, 2022