Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: infographic

Showing posts with label infographic. Show all posts

Monday, January 22, 2024

Infographic: Refugees from war in Syria vs. from Gaza

Eugene Kontorovich writes in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:

America Helps Make Gaza an Open-Air Prison

Refugees flee every other war, but Palestinians are kept prisoners of Hamas.

Gaza is unique among modern war zones. Despite being the center of a conflict fought in dense urban areas, it hasn’t produced waves of refugees leaving for neutral countries. This has been deliberate, the result of policies by Hamas and Egypt tacitly supported by the U.S.

Every prolonged conflict creates refugees. Months after the start of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022, 3.5 million Ukrainians had applied for temporary residence in countries such as Poland and Germany. The Syrian civil war produced five million refugees—nearly a quarter of the country’s prewar population. The U.S. invasion of Iraq produced two million international refugees, and a similar number of people were displaced internally. Fleeing a war zone and seeking asylum in a neutral country is a human right enshrined in the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention. If civilians hadn’t been allowed to flee past conflicts, their death tolls would have been even higher.

Yet three months after Oct. 7, fewer than 1,000 people—either foreign nationals or wounded—have been allowed by Egypt and Hamas to leave Gaza. In Israel this month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected the possibility of Israel helping Gazans who wish to escape the conflict to do so. But he also complained that the war’s toll on Gaza civilians was “far too high” and echoed earlier demands that Israel “do more” to reduce the collateral damage caused by Hamas’s hiding behind its population.

I had created this infographic to show the hypocrisy of the Arab and Muslim nations who allowed millions of Syria refugees to take refuge in their countries, compared to Gaza refugees.

Palestinians and the Arab world alike like to talk about Palestinian "sumud," or steadfastness - how they heroically stay on what they consider their land.

But Gazans want to leave. They are trying any and every means to find ways to exist Gaza. Their families are paying thousands of dollars to Egyptian brokers to in turn bribe officials to put their names on the lists of people allowed to leave. (That bribery system has been around from way before October 7.)

Egypt and Jordan have flatly stated they do not want any Palestinians to take refuge in their countries, ostensibly both for security reasons and to enhance Palestinian "sumud." But as this infographic shows, there was no such insistence to keep Syrian civilians out of their countries during that country's civil war.

Not that Arab countries welcomed the Syrians with open arms; there was resistance. But in the end, millions of Syrians were able to flee to other Arab or Muslim-majority countries. Many of them returned in recent years. And these countries had also allowed refugees from Iraq and other trouble spots.

But no one wants Palestinians.

Even when Palestinians want to leave.

Before the war, some 29% of Gazans said they would like to emigrate.

The news media simply doesn't want to highlight the hypocrisy in the Arab and Muslim world towards Palestinians - they claim that they support Palestinians but they simply do not want to save any of them.

And nothing shows that hypocrisy better than comparing how Muslim countries allowed millions of Syrians to take refuge - and not one says they will accept the Palestinians they claim to support.

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!

Latest Gaza memes, posters and cartoons

Previous ones here.

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!

More reasons the "apartheid" libel is utterly false and antisemitic (infographic)

Last week, Human Rights Watch's "Senior EU Advocate," Claudio Francavilla, wrote an op-ed in the EU Observer:

The recent spike in deadly attacks and repression in the occupied West Bank should surprise no one. Last year, Israeli forces killed more Palestinians than in any other year since 2005, when the UN began systematically recording fatalities: 151, including 35 children. A little over a month, a new year and another Netanyahu-led government, the situation is only getting worse.

Already, we see the bias - and indeed hatred - that animates so-called "human rights experts" who are effectively, if not explicitly, antisemitic.

Yes, there were more Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank (although not Gaza) last year since the Second Intifada. But Francavilla pointedly leaves out three crucial facts - facts that are missing in virtually all left-wing analyses and articles.

The first is that the vast majority of the Palestinians killed were members of armed groups and/or actively involved in hostilities at the time they were killed. Once this is realized, the entire calculus is turned on its head - Israeli forces aren't killing Palestinians but defending themselves and Israelis against Palestinian militants.

The second is that the Israeli actions were a response to the increase of Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians. The latest terror spree started in March 2022, and Israeli incursions into the West Bank were to stop them.

The third is that armed militias such as the "Lion's Den" were allowed to form over the past 18 months. Their members - many of whom are also members of the ruling Fatah party - publicly strut through the streets of Jenin and Nablus under the noses of the Palestinian Authority that is obligated under existing agreements to combat them.

Cause and effect are ignored by Human Rights Watch, in its zeal to paint the Jewish state as evil - and as "apartheid:"

The government has also responded to Palestinian attacks on Israelis with collective punishment, a war crime in the occupied territory, including razing attackers' family homes.

It is an amazing sentence. He doesn't refer to Palestinian attacks on Jews as war crimes or even as collective punishment. Israel's response to terror, meant to end such attacks, are the only "war crimes" HRW's Francavilla is interested in addressing.

These abusive and discriminatory practices by Israeli authorities are not new: they further a policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians and take place in the context of systematic oppression of Palestinians, which collectively amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

This conclusion, reached by Human Rights Watch and other international, Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups, legal and UN experts — among many others — should make it impossible for the EU to continue to pretend that the repression of Palestinians is a temporary phenomenon best addressed in the context of the "peace process."

Earlier today I created an infographic to show the deception used by the three major so-called human rights organizations in creating new definitions of apartheid specifically to give Israel, and only Israel, that label.

B'Tselem, Al Haq and the UN, don't bother to use any legal definition of apartheid and simply make the assertion of Israeli apartheid with no proof. HRW and Amnesty - as well as the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard - try to shoehorn the definitions of apartheid in international law to fit to Israel by selectively taking texts from other documents out of context.

The latter groups base their arguments on the assumption that Israel's treatment of Palestinians who are not citizens of Israel differently from Jews are based on a national ethos of discrimination against Palestinians.

We've shown how the papers issued by HRW and Amnesty lie about the facts. To make their basic argument stick, that Israel discriminates against Palestinians based on "national origin," they must prove that Israel discriminates against Arab Israelis as well. To do that, they must egregiously lie.

HRW falsely claims Israeli Arabs do not have the same voting rights as Jews do and that Israeli Arabs cannot move beyond the Green Line, only Jews.

Amnesty falsely claims that not forcing Arab Israelis to join the army is evidence of discrimination (what about Haredi Jews?), and that Israel's raising the threshold of votes needed for small parties to enter Knesset discriminates against Arab parties (when in fact all of the parties who failed to reach the threshold in 2021 were Jewish parties.)

B'Tselem and HRW use as "proof" of apartheid the fact that Palestinian Arabs cannot travel freely in Israel while Israeli Jew can travel to parts of the West Bank. But Israeli Arabs and even non-Israeli Arab residents of Jerusalem have far greater freedom of movement than Israeli Jews do - they can go literally anywhere from the river to the sea, while Jews cannot enter areas A and B of the West Bank, and are severely restricted from the Temple Mount.

If that is your definition of apartheid, then it is apartheid against Jews!

Even beyond that, if you define Israel's policies as based on "national origin" and not citizenship, then you start to go down a bizarre slippery slope that ends in antisemitism.

Israel defines itself as the Jewish state. Its existence is based on the concept that Jews need a single place to live, in their ancestral homeland, where they will not suffer any discrimination whatsoever. Where there is no penalty for following Jewish law in observing the Jewish Sabbath and holidays. where Jews do not suffer discrimination on where they can raise their families. Where Jews can flee persecution to safety without having to remain stateless. This is not "Jewish supremacy" - this is Jewish survival. It is an oasis where Jews can freely be Jews in a way that they simply cannot be in any other country on Earth.

The "human rights groups" are claiming that the entire concept of a Jewish state and a place where Jews can walk freely without fear is wrong and "apartheid." That is antisemitism.

Beyond that, they claim that Israel is discriminating against Palestinians based on their "national origin." But they cannot point to any laws that favor Jews (primarily the Law of Return) that specifically discriminate against Palestinians as opposed to the entire world minus a tiny minority. As with jus sanguinis laws in other countries, these laws favor those of the same national origin versus everyone else; there is no discrimination against any specific group.

If that is apartheid, then most countries with jus sanguinis nationality laws are also guilty of apartheid.

But only the Jewish state is given that label.

Moreover, this also means that, according to these "human rights groups," even Jews whose families lived in Palestine for hundreds of years (or indeed since the days of the Second Temple) do not have a Palestinian "national origin." If they did, then Israel should be discriminating against them as well! Yet Palestinians who moved to the region as late as 1947 from Syria or Egypt do have a "national origin" of - Palestine!

What can you possibly call that except 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!

A new chart of UN bias against Israel (update)

Palestinians are celebrating the UN passing 6 anti-Israel resolutions yesterday by lopsided margins.

These are in addition to three others passed last week.

The Palestinian representative to the UN, Riyad Mansour, thanked the international community for their "tremendous support in favor of the Palestinian cause and its resolutions."

UN Watch has been keeping a database on UN resolutions since 2015. Here is my updated chart using their data of the number of General Assembly resolutions condemning specific countries in that time period.

Outside the seven countries shown here, the UN has not condemned anyone else in that time period.

The UN is a joke, illustrated in one diagram.

UPDATE: UN Watch tells me that the latest 10 resolutions against Israel over the past couple of weeks have not yet been included in their database, so the reality is even worse than shown here!

Arab population growth in Palestine 1882-1947 double that of Egypt, Syria

There has long been a controversy about whether the large population growth of Arabs in Palestine that coincided with the beginning of Zionism was natural or the result of massive immigration.

The British officials at the time, and later demographers, insist there is no evidence of large Arab immigration. Some people, like Joan Peters and Fred Gottheil, bring evidence for such immigration from neighboring Arab countries to Palestine. Gottheil in particular showed that even within Palestine, the Arabs would move near where the Jews were concentrated, because the economic opportunities were coming from Jewish areas - and there is no reason to think that Arabs outside Palestine weren't similarly attracted to the booming economy that came from the Jews.

I thought that a comparison of Arab population growth in Palestine to that of its neighbors in Egypt and Syria would help shed light on this question. After all, if Palestine's Arab population growth was way faster than its neighbors in the north and the south, it sure sounds like something unique was happening with the Arabs in Palestine - and immigration is the most likely explanation, since there wouldn't be much of a cultural reason for a baby boom (and no contemporaneous descriptions of one that I am aware of.)

In fact, Palestine's population remained steady from the 16th century to the 19th. Only in the 19th century did it start to increase significantly.

Here is my chart of population grown of Palestine, Egypt and Syria for the years that Palestine had censuses:

We can see that the Palestinian Arab population exploded at double the rate (480%) of those of its neighboring countries Egypt (250%) and Syria (201%)..

If the actual natural growth in Palestine would have mirrored that of Egypt and Syria, then that implies that nearly half of the Arabs living in Palestine in 1948 - over 600,000 - had immigrated since 1882.

If true, that means that half of today's "Palestinians'" ancestors lived in Palestine for fewer years than Israel has existed.

The UN Human Rights Council is obsessed with condemning Israel - and @HRW's Ken Roth wants to keep it that way

Here is a chart (based on a database at UN Watch) of how often every country has been condemned at the United Nations Human Rights Council since it was formed in 2006.

Israel is condemned more than the next four-most condemned countries, combined. Israel is the only country to be condemned every single year. Israel has never been condemned less than five times in any year. Some of the world's worst human rights abusers - China, Russia, Turkey, Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia - have never been condemned once.

In short, the UNHRC is a cesspool whose members are human rights abusers themselves that protect each other while incessantly attacking Israel.

The Trump administration properly withdrew from this travesty of an organization. The Biden administration has just re-joined. At the State Department, the spokesperson was asked why, and couldn't come up with a coherent explanation, although he said the US will oppose the the UNHRC's bias against Israel, with its only standing agenda item targeting a single country.

Enter modern antisemite Ken Roth.

His response to the US re-joining the UNHRC, partially to try to stop its anti-Israel obsession was this:

The US government complains that it doesn't like a UN Human Rights Council agenda item focused solely on Israel-Palestine. If that's not just about protecting Israel from valid criticism, then sponsor resolutions on Israel under other regular agenda items.

Roth sees this chart and doesn't say, hey, the UNHRC really should not have so many anti-Israel resolutions and perhaps start condemning real rights abusers.

No, he wants the UNHRC to continue to issue just as many condemnations of Israel as it has been, every year, whether under its permanent anti-Israel agenda item or not.

Given that Human Rights Watch is as obsessed with Israel as the UNHRC is, this is perhaps not so surprising. But it proves yet again that HRW is just as much of an antisemitic cesspool as the UNHRC.