Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, September 18, 2005

Tehran newspaper accidentally supports Jews' rights to Jerusalem

The "Islamic Republic News Agency", based in Iran, quotes from Iranian newspapers about various topics. One recent article quotes a "Kayhan International" editorial with the usual blather about Zionists usurping etenal Muslim lands and how disgusting it is for any Muslim to even think of having cordial relationships with "the Zionist entity."

But then comes this interesting paragraph, referring to Jerusalem:

Press blast Sharon for irrelevant words at UN on Beit ul-Moqaddas - Irna: "The daily concluded its editorial by stressing that 'It is an irony that those heads of Muslim states who shamelessly shook hands at the UN with the head of the usurper Zionist entity that lacks any legitimacy to exist on the map of the Middle East, felt no concern of either the Palestinian cause or the issue of Bait ul-Moqaddas which houses Islam's first qibla of Muslims, and which Sharon insolently referred to as the 'Temple Mount.''

Anyone witrh a passing knowledge of Hebrew would see an amazing resemblance between the word "Bait ul-Moqaddas" and the Hebrew words "Beit ha-Mikdash", which use the exact same Semitic root letters. The Beit ha-Mikdash is the Jewish Holy Temple, and the term pre-dates Islam by many centuries. Clearly Islam took the term, translated it (or possibly transliterated it) to Arabic, and now refers to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount by a variant of the Hebrew term.

Which means that in the early history of Islam (and, in fact, much more recently), Muslims freely admitted that the Jewish Holy Temple stood at the site of the Temple Mount, even though they absurdly try so hard nowadays to deny any Jewish connection to Jerusalem.

The term seems only to be used by Iranians; Arabs all seem to refer to the Temple Mount as "Haram al-Sharif" and to Jerusalem usually as Jerusalem, sometimes as Al-Quds (notice also the similarity of roots between Quds and the Hebrew Qodesh, "Holy." Jerusalem was known in antiquity as "Ir haQodesh", the Holy City, by Jews.)

It would be fun to ask an Iranian the etymology of "Bait ul-Moqaddas" and watch them try to spin it as an original Arabic or Persian term. Yet every time they use it, they are reinforcing the Jewish claim to the city that they try so hard to minimize.

About 60 members of rival Palestinian security units engaged in a shootout in the center of the West Bank town of Ramallah after two officers feuded over a parking space, security officials said. No one was hurt.

We have seen quite a few stories like this, where there are huge shootouts involving Palestinian "security" forces and no one getting injured. Is their aim that bad, or are they just not willing to admit to any casualties?

Either way, the idea that the finest of Palestinian Arab society along with dozens of their supporters shoot guns over a parking space speaks more about the prospects for peace than any number of pontificating pretend "Prime Ministers".

Haveil Havalim #37 is up

SoccerDad hosts this weeks' Best of the Jewish Blogosphere, this week misspelled in his title (though not in the content) as "Haveil Havlim."

Oh, and he very nicely mentions this article of mine, along with a unusually large number of other excellent posts from around the JBlogosphere. Check it out!

Best article on Palestinian demography 1880-1948

This article is, hands down, the best attempt by anyone to nail down the facts about how many people lived in Palestine before 1948. The group that wrote this has no political agenda I could detect on either side - many articles on the site are clearly not pro-Israel.

The major conclusions were:

1. The nature of the data do not permit precise conclusions about the Arab population of Palestine in Ottoman and British times,

2. Palestine was not an empty land when Zionist immigration began.

3. Zionist settlement between 1880 and 1948 did not displace or dispossess Palestinians.

4. Historic population data in Palestine during Ottoman times and during Mandatory times show significant discrepancies.

5. It is not possible to estimate illegal Arab immigration directly, but apparently there was some immigration.

5. There are large discrepancies between official population figures and the number of Palestinian refugees

6. There are serious discrepancies in reporting of the number of refugees by UNRWA.

7. The city of Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since about 1896

I found this article while trying to find out the facts about land ownership before 1948. So many times, anti-Zionists point out that Jews only owned 6-8% of the land in Palestine, implying that Arabs owned 92-94%. I was wondering how much of the land was privately owned by Arabs, how much by the British (and Ottomans beforehand), and what other categories there were.

Here is what I found out from this article:

Population and Land Ownership prior to the UN Partition Resolution
An Anglo-American commission of inquiry in 1945 and 1946 examined the status of Palestine. No official census figures were available, as no census had been conducted in Palestine in 1940, so all their surmises and figures are based on extrapolations and surmises. According to the report, at the end of 1946, About 1,220,000 Arabs and 608,000 Jews resided within the borders of Mandate Palestine. Jews had purchased 6 to 8 percent of the total land area of Palestine. This was about 20% of the land that could be settled and cultivated. About 46% of the land was registered in the tax registers to Arab villages, to Arabs living on the land, or absentee owners, and about the same amount was government land. However, most of this land was not privately owned. The Arabs of Palestine had received much of their land in leases conditional upon cultivation or used land that was part of village commons.

So based on this, it appears that Arabs privately owned somewhere between 1% and 22% of the land in Palestine before 1948, depending on the meaning of the word "most" in the sentence above. The other "Arab" land was not owned by them, but was leased conditionally from the British.

In other worlds, it is even possible that Jews owned more land than Arabs did before the 1948 war!

This discounts the fact that the British tried very hard to stop Jews from buying and privatizing land - if it wasn't for that, Jews would undoubtably have come to privately own much more. Even so, it is an illuminating fact amongst the rhetoric.

Must-read article on Palestinian Arabs in 1961

Via Oceanguy comes this amazing article from neo-neocon.

An article in Atlantic Monthly from 1961 shows how the Palestinian Arabs were being exploited mercilessly by the Arab nations, blaming Israel and the West for all their problems - exactly like they still do.

A tiny excerpt:

Although no one knows exactly how many refugees are scattered everywhere over the globe, it is estimated that since World War II, and only since then, at least thirty-nine million non-Arab men, women, and children have become homeless refugees, through no choice of their own....The world could be far more generous to these unwilling wanderers, but at least the world has never thought of exploiting them. They are recognized as people, not pawns. By their own efforts, and with help from those devoted to their service, all but some six million of the thirty-nine million have made a place for themselves, found work and another chance for the future. To be a refugee is not necessarily a life sentence.

The unique misfortune of the Palestinian refugees is that they are a weapon in what seems to be a permanent war. Alarming signs, from Egypt, warn us that the Palestinian refugees may develop into more than a justification for cold war against Israel...today, in the Middle East, you get a repeated sinking sensation about the Palestinian refugees: they are only a beginning, not an end. Their function is to hang around and be constantly useful as a goad.

And the author's conclusion:

I had appreciated and admired individual refugees but realized I had felt no blanket empathy for the Palestinian refugees, and finally I knew why...It is hard to sorrow for those who only sorrow over themselves. It is difficult to pity the pitiless. To wring the heart past all doubt, those who cry aloud for justice must be innocent. They cannot have wished for a victorious rewarding war, blame everyone else for their defeat, and remain guiltless....

Arabs gorge on hate, they roll in it, they breathe it. Jews top the hate list, but any foreigners are hateful enough. Arabs also hate each other, separately and, en masse. Their politicians change the direction of their hate as they would change their shirts. Their press is vulgarly base with hate-filled cartoons; their reporting describes whatever hate is now uppermost and convenient. Their radio is a long scream of hate, a call to hate. They teach their children hate in school. They must love the taste of hate; it is their daily bread. And what good has it done them?

There is no future in spending UN money to breed hate. There is no future in nagging or bullying Israel to commit suicide by the admission of a fatal locust swarm of enemies. There is no future in Nasser's solution, the Holy War against Israel; and we had better make this very clear, very quickly.

Palestinian militants punched a new hole in a border wall between Gaza and Egypt on Thursday and hundreds of civilians streamed across, defying efforts by official to plug gaps in the frontier, witnesses said.

Palestinian police stood by as about 50 gunmen from Hamas and the Palestinian Resistance Committees rammed a dump truck into the cement wall, knocking down several large slabs.
...
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, visiting the southern border town of Rafah, said he gave security forces orders to prevent further border infiltrations.

'I have given them instructions to prevent violations whatever they are,' he said.

Meanwhile...

Mahmoud az-Zahar, the most prominent political leader of Hamas, admits openly that al- Qaeda is putting down roots in Gaza. ((Il Corriere della Sera-Italian, 13Sep05), quoted by Daily Alert)

It is interesting to watch the world leaders and press in denial, still regarding Abbas and something other than a joke, pouring money into the PA black hole and pretending that Abbas actually has any influence over Gaza.

And there were some encouraging words from Egypt:

Egyptian Ambassador Mohamed Assem Ibrahim assured Israel that the situation on the border would be addressed and law and order restored. When asked about the weapons-smuggling tunnels, Ibrahim said, "you can be sure that people do not need to smuggle weapons into Gaza, there are enough there already."

No worries, mon!

Pragmatism from Pakistan

An interesting editorial from Karachi.

By Irfan Husain

A year or two ago, I had made the point that recognition of a state is not a badge for good behaviour. Rather, it is an acknowledgement of a reality. The truth is that there are a lot of very unpleasant countries out there, and if we only talked to states we liked, our cost on foreign missions could be reduced substantially. Frankly, if recognition were to be conferred on the basis of civilised behaviour, Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave would be far less crowded.

Currently, our official position is that we would recognise Israel when it vacates the West Bank and a Palestinian state comes into being. But what kept us from normalising ties with the Jewish state between 1948 and 1967, the year in which it occupied Gaza and the West Bank? For nearly 20 years, we referred to Israel as "the illegal Zionist entity," although it came into being with the blessings of the United Nations.

Granted, there were many horrors associated with the birth of Israel, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are still suffering as a direct result. Their plight is largely responsible for the anger and bitterness that have radicalised two generations of Muslims. But the creation of Pakistan was not exactly pain-free: at Partition, nearly 40 per cent of Sindh’s population comprised Hindus.

How many remain today? Today, Hindus from Sindh are scattered around the world, often doing remarkably well, but even their children talk nostalgically of Hyderabad and Karachi. For their sake, I am glad they have not witnessed the sad state these cities have been reduced to.

Population transfers are messy, painful events, and from the comfort of hindsight and physical distance, one can afford to be philosophical about such matters. Certainly millions of Palestinians have every right to feel cheated, abused and oppressed. But time moves on. Individuals can rail against the injustices of the world, but states and governments have to deal with realities as they exist at a given time.

The fact is that for nearly two decades, we refused to recognise Israel because Arab countries had decided not to. And yet Turkey, another non-Arab Muslim country, opened diplomatic ties with the Jewish state soon after its creation because it perceived that it was in its interest to do so. We have denied ourselves the benefits of enlightened self-interest because of our fuzzy notions of the ummah, that nebulous, ill-defined and incoherent Islamic brotherhood that supposedly cuts across man-made state borders.

The reality is very different. Never were a people more divided than Muslims are today. Indeed, more Muslims have been killed by their fellow Muslims than from any other cause. By and large, Arab countries have generally acted in their own interest without caring what the "ummah" might think. Thus, Egypt and Jordan opened diplomatic relations with Israel when it suited them. Other Middle Eastern states trade and talk with Israel all the time. Israeli tourists flock to Morocco and other destinations in the Maghreb.

Even Pakistan’s leaders have been pragmatic when they needed to be. One of the minor revelations in the Hamoodur Rahman Commission report is the fact that during the disastrous 1971 war, when Yahya Khan asked Nixon for military assistance, he was told that the quickest way would be for him to accept Israeli Skyhawk fighter bombers. Desperate, Yahya Khan accepted the offer. However, the war was over far too quickly for the planes to arrive.

During the Afghan war, the CIA bought Soviet arms captured by Israel in its various wars with Arab armies, and transferred them to Pakistan for onward supply to the mujahideen. This was obviously done with Zia’s blessings, and yet he was the grand patron of the religious parties. None of the MMA leaders, today trying to make political capital out of the Kasuri-Shalom meeting in Istanbul, uttered a squeak then.

When the mullahs pretended such rage over President Musharraf’s initiative, they found it difficult to rally many people behind them. Their demonstrations were more pro-forma than passionate. The truth is that for most people, this is a non-issue. Even the poor, illiterate silent majority realise that Israel is a reality that has come to stay, whether Pakistan recognises it or not. Hence their indifference to the religious right’s ineffectual protests.

At the end of the day, we cannot forever subordinate our policies to suit other nations. The fact is that we have no territorial dispute with Israel. Diplomatically and strategically, we ignore its existence to our peril. Foreign policy should be conducted on the basis of cold calculation and pragmatism, and not be motivated by idealism and ideology.

Arab countries should make a gesture towards Israel after its withdrawal from Gaza by talking with their Middle East neighbour to chart a future for the region, Qatar's foreign minister has said.

'Arab countries must take a step towards Israel through an international meeting or a meeting between Arab states and Israel and the co-sponsors of peace, particularly the United States, in an attempt to come up with a clear vision to the period after Gaza,' Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor Al Thani said in a speech on Wednesday at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

Praising the Israeli pullout after 37 years of occupation in Gaza, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim said Arab countries should respond, stressing that 'it is very important that there be a clear vision after this step'.

Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim said the Gaza pullout could bring normalisation of relations with Israel to prominence, but he acknowledged the issue remains 'controversial' in the Arab and the Islamic worlds.

This is interesting. The Pakistani overtures strike me as being just a cynical attempt to gain favor from the US, but this sounds like he really means it.

My guess is that there will be some sort of temporary "peace dividend" from the Gaza withdrawal, but it will disappear pretty quickly as the Arabs retrench and start amplifying their next set of never-ending demands from Israel.

Leonard Nimoy on drugs

This has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of this blog, but I just saw this video and it has got to be proof that Nixon spiked the US water supply with acid around 1969. Shatner's song stylings don't seem quite so embarrassing next to this.

Israel's military has assessed that Palestinian weapons smuggling from neighboring Egypt has significantly increased since the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

Military sources said hundreds of weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles, anti-tank rockets and bomb components, have been smuggled over the last three days from the Sinai Peninsula to the Gaza Strip. The sources said Palestinian insurgents brought the equipment from Egypt in wake of the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

So far, more than 10,000 Palestinians have crossed the Gaza border and made their way to towns in eastern and northern Sinai. The sources said they included hundreds of operatives from Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, some of whom directed the flow of Palestinians into Sinai.

'In the first moments of Israel's abandoning of Gaza they smuggled weapons,' Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Yuval Steinitz said. 'The ink on the agreement has not even dried and the Philadelphi route [Egyptian-Gaza border] is being used for massive weapons smuggling.'"

More details:

Black-market prices for weapons dropped sharply, with AK-47 assault rifles nearly cut in half to $1,300 and even steeper reductions for handguns.

News of the smuggling came as Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas tried to impose order after the Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza this week. Militant groups scoffed at a new Palestinian Authority demand that they disband after parliamentary elections in January, saying they would not surrender weapons.

Egypt had assured Israel it would prevent weapons smuggling once its troops took over from Israel along the Gaza frontier, and Cairo and the Palestinian Authority pledged to seal the once-heavily defended border by Wednesday evening.

And more:

Hundreds of people continued to cross the border between Gaza and Egypt unhindered on Thursday despite efforts by police on both sides of the frontier to assert control.

Around 30 Palestinian police and 20 Egyptian border guards took up positions at dawn on the main road straddling the border, previously blocked by a mound of earth, but just hours later they failed to stop a group of Palestinians.

Children in school uniform, men and women also crossed the border as Palestinian police were preparing tea a short distance away.

An AFP correspondent was also allowed to cross the border through a hole in the border wall before returning minutes later.

"We have stopped the flow and we are bringing the situation under control now," a senior Egyptian security official in the area told Agence France Presse on condition of anonymity.

Overnight, unidentified people blew a second hole through a concrete wall by Israel on the border, allowing people to cross easily.

Egyptian authorities in Rafah on Wednesday urged Palestinians who had entered Egypt illegally to return to Gaza.

More Muslim respect for holy places

Palestinians placed a pipe bomb near Rachel's Tomb, south of Jerusalem. No injuries or damages were reported. IDF troops found a second bomb nearby and blew it up in a controlled manner.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

Abbas:

'We are not going to tolerate chaos after today.'

Abbas to disarm "resistance groups":

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas plans to disarm resistance fighters in the near future, beginning with his own Fatah group's armed wing, a top Abbas aide has said. Although the aide, Rafiq Husseini, provided no timetable, it was the first indication that Abbas would begin to deal with the issue.

Abbas addresses the Palestinian Arabs:

“After today, we are not going to hesitate to put an end to all the negative signs and violations of law and order.”

Abbas has said that after January 25 parliamentary elections, which Hamas plans to contest for the first time, the group would no longer need weapons.

There is one thing Abbas is ready for today, however - for Israel to give in to more demands:

Abbas Ready to ‘Engage Immediately’ in Final Status Negotiations

Victimology

This excellent article by Omni Ceren about how the press blames Israel for Palestinian crimes is a springboard to a topic I have touched on before.

Whenever otherwise reasonable people speak about the problems between Israelis and Palestinians they have unspoken assumptions that are, quite frankly, bigoted - against Palestinians.

For example, just try to suggest to a politician or editorial board writer that Jews should live as free citizens in a Palestinian state the same way Arabs live freely in a Jewish state. Such a thing is, of course unthinkable, but the reason it is unthinkable is because everyone knows, liberal and conservative alike, that Palestinians would murder Jews who live in their midst. Things would go back to the way they were in the 1930s as I have documented in my many Palestine Post-ings articles.

A similar thing happened this week. Everyone knew that Palestinians would destroy the synagogues as soon as they could. It didn't enter anyone's mind that Palestinians could possibly practice self-restraint, or even that Palestinian "policemen" would be able to stop the mob (or themselves) from their celebration of the destruction of Jewish symbols.

In other words, it is simply not fathomable to anyone that Palestinians would act like mature human beings, even when it is in their own self-interest. This is the subtext of all discussions about the feasibility of peace between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, whether it is stated explicitly or not (and usually it is not.)

Because the fact that Palestinians will act without restraint is so obvious, liberals clearly believe it as well. But since such a worldview is so abhorrent to "enlightened" minds they must find a way to live with such bigotry and yet explain it to make it palatable. Hence the ideas of victimology gain currency - that the reason "oppressed people" act like animals is the fault of the perceived "oppressors." Never mind that many truly oppressed people never start acting like animals - facts are not important when they reveal inconvenient truths.

From here it is only a short stroll to justifying suicide bombings, desecrations of holy sites, and really any crime that can be thought of. Since the victims are no longer responsible for their actions, according to the advocates of victimology, anything they do is no more their fault than a rabid dog biting someone. That the supposed champions of Palestinian Arab rights think of their pets as animals is ironic, but as long as they can blame the oppressors it is somewhat more palatable.

So we are left with a situation where one side is expected to act like adults, one side is expected to be able to make concessions, one side is expected to be able to be empathetic with the enemy - but no such expectations exist for the other side.

A good definition of an adult is someone who takes responsibility for his own actions. The way to raise a child to become an adult is to teach him responsibility. One who never has learned responsibility is destined to stay immature. And the cult of victimology imposed by the West is the reason that so many Palestinian Arabs feel they can act in the most depraved manner without any fear of consequences.

The day that the West looks at the orgy of looting and destruction that accompanied Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and gets sickened by it is the first day on the track towards Palestinian Arab maturity, and a possibility for real peace between real partners. Until that happens, while the Palestinian Arabs are expected and allowed and encouraged to act like animals, the idea of a true peace between Jews and Palestinian Arabs is just a joke.

Rich history of synagogue desecration by Arabs

This week's gleeful destruction of Gaza synagogues by Palestinians is a continuation of a long tradition of synagogue destruction, and attempted destructions, throughout time. Just in the decades of the 30s and 40s shows a large number of outrages committed by Arabs towards Jewish places of worship, both in Palestine and in surrounding Arab nations.

The justifications given by Arabs and their apologists are strikingly familiar.

In 1936, Tiberias' Jews were under siege from their Arab neighbors, and their shuls were targets as well: (All articles from the Palestine Post):

The situation did not improve, and things got violent again in 1939:

In case you may be wondering whether this was not a deliberate act, the British House of Commons were alarmed enough to address this issue the week after. It is very clear that these are terror attacks against Jews.

But the problem was hardly localized in Tiberias. Here is an account of a synagogue bombing in Jerusalem in 1938.

In Haifa, another synagogue was destroyed, in the wake of Jewish flight from Arab terrorism earlier in 1938:

This was not a localized problem in Palestine. Cairo Jews were victims of two attempted synagogue bombings in 1939, a few days after the Tiberias incidents:

And these were immediately followed by two bombs in Beirut:

World War II brought an apparent respite from synagogue attacks by Arabs - they seem to have left that job up to the Nazis for the war years. But the Arabs learned a lot from the Nazis, as their attacks against Jews intensified and mimicked the Nazi destruction during the Holocaust. This remarkable article shows the details of anti-Jewish riots in Cairo in 1945, including the joy throughout the Arab world at the killing and destruction and the bizarre justification by the Muslim terrorists who were behind it (click for larger image):

As the UN Partition plan was getting approved, the Arab hate for all things Jewish intensified. In Syria, an Arab mob destroyed a celebrated ancient synagogue, along with a priceless manuscript of the Hebrew Bible that scholars have used as a standard reference text.

Not only Aleppo but also synagogues and Jewish communities in Kuwait, Derna and Aden were attacked:

During the 1948 war, the famous Hurva synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem was destroyed in a very public and symbolic manner by the Jordanians.

But that was only the first - in the end, all vestiges of Jewish life in Jerusalem were utterly obliterated by the bloodthirsty and hateful Arab terrorists.

Finally, after the war ended, the Arab hatred of everything remotely connected to Judaism did not end. Back in Damascus, a synagogue bombing killed 11 Jews. The Syrian government appeared to be displeased at this massacre - not so much because of the dead Jews or destroyed synagogue, but because it could have affected the truce talks between Israel and her neighbors.

Then as now, morality never seems to enter the picture when Arabs speak out against terror.

"Palestinian police on Tuesday blocked off abandoned settlements and chased after scavengers in a first attempt to impose law and order after chaotic celebrations of Israel's pullout from Gaza, but the overwhelmed forces were unable to halt looting of the area's prized greenhouses.

The greenhouses, left behind by Israel as part of a deal brokered by international mediators, are a centerpiece of Palestinian plans for rebuilding Gaza after 38 years of Israeli occupation. The Palestinian Authority hopes the high-tech greenhouses will provide jobs and export income for Gaza's shattered economy.

During a tour of Neveh Dekalim, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei implored Palestinians to leave the structures intact, even as people scavenged through debris elsewhere in the settlement.

"These greenhouses are for the Palestinian people," he said. "We don't want anyone to touch or harm anything that can be useful for our people."

Just minutes away, crowds of looters in the Gadid settlement overwhelmed hundreds of guards trying to protect the greenhouses. Guards acknowledged that in many cases, they were unable to stop the looting.

"They are taking plastic sheeting, they are taking hoses, they are taking anything they can get their hands on," said Hamza Judeh, a Palestinian policeman.

If casinos in Vegas and London would accept the bets, you could make a fortune wagering that Palestinian Arabs will always do something counterproductive for their future. It is a sure thing.