Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: citizenship

Showing posts with label citizenship. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 01, 2023

Abbas once again tells Palestinians in Lebanon to go to hell

Today, Monday, President Mahmoud Abbas received a phone call from the head of the Lebanese Phalange Party, Sheikh Sami Gemayel.

The President discussed with Gemayel, during the phone call, the unfortunate events that took place in Ain El-Hilweh camp.

He stressed support for what the government and the army are doing in Lebanon in order to impose law and order.

The President stressed that the Palestinian presence in Lebanon is temporary until they return to the homes from which they were expelled according to international resolutions.

That last sentence is a coded message, saying that Abbas - as head of the PLO, and therefore ostensibly the leader of all Palestinians worldwide - would not ask Lebanon to give citizenship to Palestinians who have lived there, stateless, for 75 years.

Abbas has said this explicitly in the past, numerous times.

Which means that his official position is for Palestinians in Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and other Arab countries should not become citizens of those countries - they must remain without any national protection until Israel is destroyed or somehow forced to commit suicide via "return" to destroy it as a Jewish state.

The cynicism of this position is breathtaking. The closest thing the Palestinians have to a leader wants to use his own people as pawns, with no national rights in the countries where generations have been born, lived and died.

The cynicism does not end there, though. Because in 2005, Mahmoud Abbas had a completely different position, as reported then in AFP:

DUBAI, 12 July 2005 — Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas told Arab countries hosting Palestinian refugees to give them citizenship, insisting such a move would not compromise their right of return.

“I call upon every Arab government wishing to give citizenship (to Palestinian refugees) to do so. What is wrong with that?” he said in an interview with Dubai Television late Sunday.

But the Palestinian Authority president insisted that obtaining citizenship in a host-country should not compromise the right to return to their homeland of which many Palestinian refugees dream.

“This does not mean resettlement (of refugees). A Palestinian would return to his homeland whenever he is allowed, whether he carried an Arab or non-Arab citizenship,” he said. “A fifth-generation Palestinian living in Chile also wishes to return when allowed ... It is an emotional matter, not related to citizenship,” he added.

The Palestinian leader, who visited Syria and Lebanon last week — both host to hundreds of thousands of refugees, slammed claims that the Arab League had banned naturalization of refugees as “mere excuses”. “There is no decision ... the Arab League only recommended (not to grant citizenship) but this was not a decision,” he said.

Once upon a time, Mahmoud Abbas asked Arab countries to naturalize Palestinian "guests." But only a couple of years later, he changed his position to being against them becoming citizens.

What caused the about-face?

Chances are, Lebanon and Syria and maybe also the Gulf countries that host hundreds of thousands of Palestinians told him to shut up. They don't want Palestinians to become citizens. And probably Hamas took advantage and portrayed Abbas as being weak on the mythical "right to return."

Whatever the reason, Abbas switched from acting as a real leader that tries to help his people into a corrupt leader who simply wants to abuse his people for his own political purposes.

Abbas was right in 2005. Citizenship has nothing to do with "return." Palestinian citizens of Jordan are given the clear message that they will lose citizenship if "return" would become an option. And for whatever bizarre reason, even though most of them are citizens of a state, they are still called "refugees" by the international community.

And Palestinians, when given the rare chance to become citizens of other countries, eagerly take that option. So those who say that Palestinians prefer statelessness to becoming citizens of their countries are simply liars.

Each stateless Palestinian adds an infinitesimal amount of pressure on Israel. That is the only reason for insisting that Palestinians remain stateless. Which proves that to Palestinian leaders, their own people's lives are worthless.

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

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More "Apartheid:" Israel helps free Israeli Arab anti-Zionist activist from UAE prison

From Times of Israel:

An Israeli woman was released from prison in the United Arab Emirates on Saturday night and was flown back to Israel early Sunday, after UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan granted her amnesty as a personal gesture to President Isaac Herzog.

Fidaa Kiwan was serving life in prison for drug smuggling. She was originally sentenced to death in April 2022, but the Abu Dhabi Federal Appeal Court canceled the punishment and sentenced her to life behind bars in July.

Kiwan, a 44-year-old Haifa resident who owns a photography studio, reportedly came to Dubai for work at the invitation of a Palestinian acquaintance. She was arrested a short while later, on March 17, 2021, after a search of her apartment turned up the drugs. She claimed that the cocaine was not hers.

World Israel News fills in some details:

Kiwan, a staunch anti-Zionist, previously made headlines in 2010 for refusing to serve a uniformed IDF soldier in a café she once owned. The café eventually closed.

According to Hebrew language media reports, her brother, a one-time employee of public broadcasting station Kan, trashed a room at his workplace in which Israeli flags were displayed.

After her Kiwan’s arrest in Dubai, she initially resisted help from Israeli officials because of her political views. However, she eventually reached out to Israeli authorities for assistance.

Her family vocally accused the Israeli government of racism, claiming in a press conference that officials weren’t doing enough to help her case because of her Arab ethnicity.

President Isaac Herzog personally asked UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan to pardon Kiwan and he agreed, according to a statement from Herzog’s office.

Kiwan’s release came on the first day of Ramadan.

The president of the Jewish state put a great deal of his own political capital on the line to save the life of an anti-Zionist Arab - because she is a citizen of Israel and that is the government's job.

(h/t iTiIL972)

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!

Palestinian PM claims Israeli law to strip citizenship from terrorists is illegal under international law. Of course he is lying - and a hypocrite.

From Times of Israel:

The Knesset approved a law on Wednesday to strip convicted terrorists with Israeli nationality of their citizenship — provided they receive funding from the Palestinian Authority or an associated organization.

The law, an amendment to Israel’s 1952 Citizenship Law, applies to both Israeli citizens and permanent residents incarcerated following a conviction for terror, aiding terror, harming Israeli sovereignty, inciting war, or aiding an enemy during wartime, and enables the interior minister to revoke their status after a hearing.

The law enables citizenship to be revoked even if the person lacks a second citizenship, provided they have a permanent residence status outside of Israel. Once citizenship is revoked, the person would be denied entry back into Israel.

The Palestinian prime minister Muhammad Shtayyeh reacted angrily, claiming the law is "racist" and illegal:

Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh said in a statement that this decision is a racist practice and a flagrant violation of international law and international humanitarian law. calling on the United Nations, the United States, and the European Union to denounce the resolution, and to put pressure on Israel to force it to cancel it .

Is it illegal to revoke citizenship of terrorists? Of course not. Western nations do it all the time. The US Department of Justice has an entire section for pursuing denaturalization for terrorists and other criminals. The UK, France and Britain have laws to strip citizenship away from terrorists, and the European Court of Human Rights has upheld their decisions.

There are two potential arguments against stripping citizenship.

One is that this law is discriminatory, since it only applies to Palestinians and not Jewish terrorists. But that is only because the only recipients of Palestinian Authority payments are Arabs - if Jews would be convicted of terrorism for the Palestinian cause, and if the PA would pay them, the law would apply to them as well. Similarly, any Israeli Arab in prison can refuse to accept payments from the Palestinian Authority and therefore be immune from being denaturalized. The fact that they accept money from those who want to see Israel destroyed is a pretty good argument that they are not good citizens.

The second argument is that stripping nationality, leaving someone stateless, is illegal altogether. There is a UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness written in 1961 that never received a majority of UN votes - but even many of its signatories included reservations that made it clear that they maintain the right to revoke citizenship for specific acts by citizens. For example, Austria said, "Austria declares to retain the right to deprive a person of his nationality, if such person enters, on his own free will, the military service of a foreign State."

Shtayyeh's calling denaturalization "illegal" and "racist" is especially hypocritical. Only a day beforehand, he called on Western nations to revoke the citizenship of Jews (and only Jews!) who live across the Green Line. Arabs who moved across the Green Line are, of course, not "settlers."

There would be a further irony if critics refer to the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness to claim that this is illegal. Because nearly all Arab states refuse to sign that convention - if they did, they would be required to provide citizenship to children born to Palestinians there, and the Arab League says that Palestinians should remain stateless!

Once again, we see that "critics of Israel" aren't basing their critiques on international law, or morality, or really any framework that doesn't prove that they are hypocrites. The only consistency they show is antisemitism.

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!

The Economist reveals the extent of Jordanian apartheid against Palestinians

From The Economist:

...Surely, Western officials say, for the right price, currently estimated in the tens of billions of dollars, the Jordanians will help John Kerry, America’s secretary of state (pictured above with King Abdullah) to fix a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by absorbing the 4.5m Palestinians who live in the kingdom, including the 3.5m who are now Jordanian citizens.

Or will they? Indigenous Bedouin from Jordan’s East Bank, who number about 3m, worry that America’s plans to persuade Palestinian leaders to strip generations of refugees of their claimed “right of return” to what is now Israel would reduce Jordan’s original inhabitants to a permanent minority. Tribal leaders fret that the refugees, barred from Israel, would campaign for full rights in Jordan, over time turning the kingdom into a second Palestinian state. The Bedouin would lose their preferential access to government jobs. They might also be deprived of the skewed electoral system that has hitherto ensured that they control Jordan’s parliament. “Kerry is destroying our home,” says a Jordanian analyst. “He is trying to solve one conflict by creating another.”

Parliamentarians from Jordan’s East Bank (ie, non-Palestinians) intent on scuppering Mr Kerry’s plan say the Palestinians must uphold their right to return to Israel. Campaigners are denounced as American collaborators for calling for more rights for those 1m Palestinians resident in the kingdom who still do not have Jordanian nationality. When Mustafa Hamarneh, a Jordanian MP of Palestinian origin, suggested giving the children of Palestinian refugees access to Jordanian state education, health care and a driving licence, he was labelled a Zionist agent.

Here we see in plain English that the only reason Jordanians say they support the "right or return" is because they want to kick out their Palestinian citizens!

The Economist is wrong when it ways that some 1 million Palestinian Jordanians do not have citizenship - the number I have seen, which makes far more sense, is about 165,000, only comprising those who came from Gaza after the 1967 war. It is clear that the Bedouin want to discriminate not only against the relatively few non-citizens, who have next to no rights already, but against the Jordanians of Palestinian origin who have been full citizens for over six decades!

Notice also how even handed The Economist is in reporting on Jordanian apartheid against Palestinians - a discrimination that the Jordanian political leaders are quite open about and proud of. None of the rancor that accompanies stories about Israel shows up here, even though the alleged victims are the same.

It sure seems like The Economist is only "pro-Palestinian" when that position happens to also be anti-Israel.

13,000 Gazans eagerly became Egyptian citizens in two years

You know how the Arab world (and their apologists) has been insisting for years that Palestinian Arabs have no desire to become citizens of any other country because they don't want to lose their "Palestinian" identity? (This includes, of course, becoming citizens of the "State of Palestine.")

The only problem is that every time a loophole opens that allows them to become citizens of Arab countries, they have jumped at the opportunity. It happened in Lebanon in the 1950s and again in the 1990s.

Now, an Egyptian law that allows children of Egyptian mothers to become Egyptian citizens has resulted in over 13,000 Gazans claiming and earning Egyptian citizenship in the last two years. Thousands more have applied for citizenship.

Anyone who claims to be "pro-Palestinian" who says that Palestinian Arabs must not be allowed to become citizens of Arab countries, if they so desire, is a hypocrite. Human rights advocates must demand that Palestinian Arabs be given the same rights that other Arabs have of applying for citizenship in any other Arab country, let alone their host countries that the vast majority were born in.

Now, Arabs claim the Magna Carta provides the "right to return"

In the UN on Wednesday:

The Palestine refugees would not disappear into thin air, the representative of Lebanon stated, urging that they be given the right to return. That right was acknowledged in the Magna Carta in 1215 and codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, implementing international humanitarian law and resolutions seemed to be inconvenient for Israel, but acting according to law and normality was not a matter subject to convenience.

The Magna Carta? This was a new one on me.

Since Lebanese representatives to the UN tend to simply parrot talking points, I found the likely source for this idea that the Magna Carta discusses a "right to return" all the way back from 1979.

It was mentioned in a document prepared for the UN's "Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People." And the text there shows that duplicity by the "pro-Palestinian" crowd is hardly a recent phenomenon.

The document, called "An international law analysis of the major United Nations resolutions concerning the Palestine question" by William Thomas Mallison and Sally V. Mallison, states:

Historically, the right of return was so universally accepted and practiced that it was not deemed necessary to prescribe or codify it in a formal manner. In 1215, at a time when rights were being questioned in England, the Magna Carta was agreed to by King John. It provided that: "It shall be lawful in the future for anyone... to leave our kingdom and to return, safe and secure by land and water..."

So let's look at the Magna Carta, and see what is hidden behind the ellipses.

42. In the future it shall be lawful for any man to leave and return to our kingdom unharmed and without fear, by land or water, preserving his allegiance to us, except in time of war, for some short period, for the common benefit of the realm. People that have been imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of the land, people from a country that is at war with us, and merchants - who shall be dealt with as stated above - are excepted from this provision.

Ah, so it only applies to people who are citizens of the country they left! And it clearly does not apply to members of a entity that is hostile to the country.This is hardly a universal "right of return," and the authors of this paper knowingly quoted only a small excerpt to promote a ridiculous assertion - one that is now confidently shouted at the UN.

It also obviously doesn't apply to descendants.

1979 anti-Israel writers were no less deceptive than their more modern counterparts.

What about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

It says

Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

But this also only applies to citizens or nationals of that country. The text was meant primarily to stop nations from preventing nationals from leaving, and the "return" clause was only added to strengthen the right of citizens to leave. See CAMERA's analysis. Regrettably, the 1963 UN document that is the source for this is not online as far as I can tell.

(UPDATE: Ian found it online, with free registration from Calameo. Ingles' entire monograph is suffused with references to the right of return of nationals. Several times during his discussion he refers to "the right of a national to return to his country." In addition he discusses the matter of how countries may strip nationality from those who leave their country over a long period of time; again the point being that he is only speaking of nationals of the country in the context of return. Beyond that, the language added to the UDHR for "return" being only to strengthen the right to leave was added by Lebanon:

The Lebanese amendment was to add, at the end of paragraph 2, the words
"and to return to his country".

In submitting his amendment, the representative of Lebanon pointed out that
the text under discussion:

"... was intended to cover all movements inside and outside of a given
State. According to that article, any person had the right to leave any
country, including his own. The ideal would be that any person should be
able to enter any country he might choose, but account had to be taken of
actual facts. The minimum requirement was that any person should be able
to return to his country. If that right were recognized, the right to leave a
country, already sanctioned in the article, would be strengthened by the
assurance of the right to return. Such was the object of his amendment."

And, again, it clearly does not include descendants of those who left. That is an innovation that is uniquely applied to Palestinian Arabs, with legal arguments that are at least as specious as these are.

Abbas again tells Lebanese Palestinians to go to hell

Palestine Press Agency reports that Mahmoud Abbas, on a visit to Lebanon, reiterated that he insists Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon should remain stateless forever, or at least until Israel is destroyed:

The presence of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon is temporary and subject to Lebanese law, and access to civil rights to live with dignity in Lebanon does not at all mean resettlement. We categorically reject the principle of resettlement.

Here, Abbas is repeating what he said in 2008:

We would not accept any settlements that would lead to a demographic change in Lebanon. This is totally unacceptable ... We won't accept a settlement that obliges Lebanon to naturalize even one Palestinian.

And again:

We assure our Lebanese brothers that the resettlement of refugees in their country is rejected. We will not accept it.

In 2009, he vehemently came out against the idea of Lebanon issuing passports to their Palestinian Arab "guests."

In 2005, however, Abbas had no problem with offering citizenship for Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon - and he was castigated for that by the self-appointed terrorist leaders in Lebanon.

The Lebanese Palestinians have consistently chosen to become citizens when they had a chance.

As I have previously written on this topic:

Generations have grown up in Lebanon, raised families, and died, but their supposed "leader" is more interested in them keeping their stateless status rather than giving them the simple choice of allowing them to be more integrated into the land of their birth.

Mahmoud Abbas, that supposedly moderate leader of the PA, the PLO and Fatah, who claims to represent millions of people of Palestinian Arab descent, has once again told his people to go screw themselves rather than give them the option of happiness as full citizens of other Arab lands. He arrogantly claims to know what is best for his people, and is dead-set against giving them the option of making their own decisions.

Because he knows that the majority them would not choose to put their families through the hell that they have gone through thanks to the decisions of Arab leaders over the past six decades.

Palestinian Arabs who choose to become citizens of Arab countries will, by and large, never choose to move to an eventual "Palestine." They will identify only peripherally as "Palestinian." They will lose their value as pawns to corrupt, arrogant "leaders" who pretend to know what is best for them, and whose power derives from their very misery.

Moreover, if Arab countries would give PalArabs full citizenship, a significant number of Palestinian Arabs in the territories - hundreds of thousands, if not over a million - would happily move to Saudi Arabia or Kuwait or Dubai. (Ironically, they would also have a positive influence on most of their host Arab countries, as they tend to be better educated and harder working, and Gulf countries import many workers from Indonesia and Africa, causing many problems that could be avoided if Palestinian Arab workers replaced them.)

The operative word here is "choice." Palestinian Arabs are not given the power to choose where to live, and Arab nations specifically deny them the ability to become citizens that they give all other Arabs.

Yet there are no "pro-Palestinian" organizations tha lobby on behalf of real Palestinian Arabs. They all repeat the lie that they can best help them by fighting Israel, militarily or politically. It is a myth, and one that is easily disproven - it has not helped them one bit in 63 years. "Human rights" organizations may mention some of these problems in isolation but they do not push for the simplest, fairest and cheapest solution to the problem of millions of stateless people.

Abbas, the one person who pretends to represent his people the best, tells his suffering would-be constituents that their six-decade old problem is "temporary."

This is a travesty of human rights.

The way to tell if someone is truly pro-Palestinian Arab or is simply using the Palestinian Arabs as pawns to help destroy Israel is to ask him one simple question:

Do you support giving all Palestinian Arabs the choice to become full citizens of any Arab country that they desire, according to the existing naturalization rules that they have for other Arabs?

This is the question that needs to be asked of every Arab leader, every Palestinian Arab leader, every NGO, every human rights organization. It should be hammered in during every interview. They must be forced to answer the question clearly and forcefully.

Unless they can answer that question in the affirmative, the inescapable conclusion is that most people who pretend to be "pro-Palestinian" are nothing more than liars and hypocrites who support discrimination against the very people they claim they want to help.