Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

The first refugees of the 1948 war were Jews

We will be hearing a lot in the next couple of weeks about the "Nakba" and how hundreds of thousands of Arabs became refugees.

Probably the largest flight of Arabs occurred in Jaffa in April and May of 1948, and many websites have weepy articles about how the Jews drove the Arabs out of Jaffa, reducing its Arab population from 75,000 to less than 5,000.

What will not be mentioned is the fact that the first refugees from Jaffa were Jews.

In August, 1947, the Arabs started shooting at Jews in Jaffa. Since Jaffa was a predominantly Arab town, the lives of the Jews there were particularly precarious. Arab snipers shot from the minaret of a mosque in the Manshieh Quarter and forced 18 Jewish families to leave the city.

For three months, the families (except for the children) had to sleep outside, until accomodations were found for them in Tel Aviv.

The homes that belonged to the Jews were meanwhile occupied by Arabs.

Things quieted down in anticipation of the UN decision on partition, as the Palestinian Arabs used political means to make sure that the Jewish state would never come to fruition. But as soon as the UN voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab nations, the Arabs attacked immediately, and once again the Jews of Jaffa bore the brunt.

This time, about 5000 Jews (mostly Yemenites) lost their homes, and the Jewish authorities scrambled to find accommodations for them.

Meanwhile, the Jaffa Arabs who left in November and December of 1947 were hardly "refugees." They were upper-class Arabs who could afford to move to Amman and Damascus and Beirut, in anticipation of a repeat of the 1936-9 riots when they moved as well. Like in 1936, they expected to move back to their houses after things died down. By no stretch of the imagination can these people be regarded as "refugees" even though they are counted as such today.

Their move away from Jaffa affected the rest of the residents, though, as they closed their businesses and unemployment skyrocketed in the coming months. This was one of the major factors behind the mass flight from Jaffa in April and May, 1948.

But the first ones to be forced to leave their homes were not Palestinian Arabs, but Palestinian Jews.

Egypt kills Africans, Amnesty Int'l blames Israel

From Reuters (h/t Suzanne:)

Egyptian police shot dead a Nigerian migrant and wounded four Sudanese who tried to slip across the desert border into Israel on Tuesday, security sources said.

The death of the 25-year-old Nigerian man, who was shot in the neck, brings the number of migrants killed in escalating violence at the border this year to 12. Scores of others, mostly from Africa, have been detained.

London-based rights group Amnesty International says thousands of migrants try to cross into the Jewish state from Egypt's Sinai peninsula each year, with numbers rising since 2007.

New arrivals surged last year after Israel granted temporary work permits to around 2,000 Eritreans.

The migrants, including many from Sudan, are seeking work or asylum away from conflict at home and harsh living conditions in Egypt, where activists say African migrants face economic marginalisation and racism.

Amnesty has called for an investigation into the border killings and says Israel has pressed Egypt to reduce the flow of people crossing illegally.

Not a negative word from Amnesty about Egypt actually shooting Africans dead; after all, Amnesty and its liberal friends know that this is how Arabs act and therefore it is pointless to criticize them.

No, only Israel is to blame.

Algerians naming their daughters "Gaza Strip"

Firas Press reports that an Algerian town has started naming daughters "Gaza" in solidarity with Palestinian Arabs who live there.

Given the sewage problems there, let's hope that the babies don't suffer from severe diarrhea.

The teacher and bombmaker

Last week we reported on an Islamic Jihad rocket-maker who was also a UNRWA employee.

Now, Reuters has an "exclusive":

By day, Awad al-Qiq was a respected science teacher and headmaster at a United Nations school in the Gaza Strip. By night, Palestinian militants say, he built rockets for Islamic Jihad.

The Israeli air strike that killed the 33-year-old last week also laid bare his apparent double life and embarrassed a U.N. agency which has long had to rebuff Israeli accusations that it has aided and abetted guerrillas fighting the Jewish state.

In interviews with Reuters, students and colleagues, as well as U.N. officials, denied any knowledge of Qiq's work with explosives. And his family denied he had any militant links at all, despite a profusion of Islamic Jihad posters at his home.

But militant leaders allied to the enclave's ruling Hamas group hailed him as a martyr who led Islamic Jihad's "engineering unit" -- its bomb makers. They fired a salvo of improvised rockets into Israel in response to his death.

Qiq's body was wrapped in an Islamic Jihad flag at his funeral, pictorial posters in his honour still bedeck his family home this week, and a handwritten notice posted on the metal gate at the entrance to the school declared that Qiq, "the chief leader of the engineering unit", would now find "paradise".

That poster was removed soon after Reuters visited the Rafah Prep Boys School, run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees. Staff there said on Monday that UNRWA officials had told them not to discuss Qiq's activities.

No one from the United Nations attended the funeral or has paid their respects to the family, relatives said, adding that Qiq's widow and five children had heard nothing about a pension.

Spokesman Christopher Gunness said UNRWA, which spelled its teacher's surname al-Geeg, was looking into the matter.

It is amazing that the UNRWA cannot confirm whether a person was an employee five days after the fact. (My email to them asking for confirmation has not been answered.)

The Israeli army said its April 30 attack at Rafah, close to the Egyptian border, hit a workshop used for making rockets and other improvised weaponry. An Israeli intelligence source told Reuters that Qiq was involved in developing rockets and mortars.

Yet Qiq, a physics graduate with eight years' experience of teaching at UNRWA schools, was also described by colleagues as a rising star in education. Relatives said he was promoted to run the school last year, with the title of deputy headmaster.

Israel has long alleged that militants use UNRWA vehicles and facilities. The United Nations has denied those charges, although some UNRWA employees have had prominent political roles in groups like Hamas -- such as teacher Saeed Seyam, who was interior minister in the Hamas-led government elected in 2006.

While many in Gaza are open about political allegiances, the threat of the kind of Israeli action that cost him his life on April 30 meant Qiq's double role was kept very secret indeed.

Surrounded by Islamic Jihad mourning posters at the family home, his sister Naima insisted: "He's only a teacher and head of the school. School was his life. He had no time to work with Islamic Jihad." Other family members nodded in agreement.

At the school, a 17-year-old who gave his name as Shadi read a poster for his former teacher and said simply: "Nobody knew."

At the bombed-out workshop 3 km (2 miles) from the school, damaged cars can be seen through now-locked gates. A 35-year-old man who gave his name as Abu Mohammed said he had found Qiq dying inside after helicopters fired a missile at the building.

"He was still alive, but he died shortly after," he said.

Relatives recalled with pride that Qiq had met John Ging, UNRWA's Gaza operations director. But while fellow teachers had come to pay their respects, they saw no U.N. representative.

Qiq's sister said his wife and five children were worried by the lack of news on any pension payment: "Awad did a lot for UNRWA," she said. "The family hoped UNRWA would support them."

At least Reuters printed enough to prove pretty conclusively that the relatives were lying about not knowing that he was an Islamic Jihad member. How many 33-year old teachers would decorate their houses with heroic Islamic Jihad posters? They know what to say to the press, and they are ever-mindful of the UNRWA pension.

Palestinian Arab newspaper site hacked

One of my favorite Arabic news sources, Palestine Press Agency, has been hacked by someone named "Master Mind."

It appears that the hacker is an Arab himself (the source code for the page indicates that the hacker is an MS-Word Arabic user.) Since PalPress is very anti-Hamas, it is possible that a Hamas hacker got to it. But there is no political message there, just a tag by the hacker.

A couple of weeks ago the Bank of Israel website was hacked by apparent Algerian hackers, but they seemed to be more skilled than this guy. No self-respecting hacker would put up a defaced page created with Word!

That "tiny percentage of radical Muslims" again

I've already had a number of posts on the book "Who Speaks for Islam?" as I (and others) have shows the duplicity of the authors as they try to downplay the number of radical Muslims in the world.

The authors defined the 7% of Muslims who considered the 9/11 attacks "completely justified" to be "politically radicalized" and they used the term "moderate" for the other 93%.

In a new article by Robert Satloff, he blows a few more holes into the book - but he also gets a hold of the all-important data: how many Muslims mostly or partially justified 9/11?

The answers are not quite as comforting as the authors implied. In addition to the 6.5% who felt that 9/11 was "mostly" justified, we find out:

The cover-up is even worse. The full data from the 9/11 question show that, in addition to the 13.5 percent, there is another 23.1 percent of respondents -- 300 million Muslims -- who told pollsters the attacks were in some way justified. Esposito and Mogahed don't utter a word about the vast sea of intolerance in which the radicals operate.
And then there is the more fundamental fraud of using the 9/11 question as the measure of "who is a radical." Amazing as it sounds, according to Esposito and Mogahed, the proper term for a Muslim who hates America, wants to impose Sharia law, supports suicide bombing, and opposes equal rights for women but does not "completely" justify 9/11 is . . . "moderate."

So over one out of every three Muslims worldwide, 36.6%, can find some justification for 9/11; and about 80% of those were defined as "moderate" in this book.

Which means that there are nearly a half-billion Muslims worldwide who would be considered supporters of terror by any reasonable definition, not "only" the 91 million that the authors claim.

This is consistent with other polls over the same time period, notably the Pew Global Attitudes Project which has found declining but still significant support for suicide bombings among Muslims in various countries - 70% in Palestinian Arab territories, 31% in Lebanon, "only" 8% in Egypt.

The entire thrust of the book - that Muslims are just like everyone else - is shown to not only be inaccurate but to be a deliberate lie on the part of the authors.

Tunnel collapse!

From AP:

Palestinian officials said Monday two Gaza men were killed when a cross-border smuggling tunnel collapsed on them.

The Gaza Health Ministry says five other people were wounded in Monday's collapse. One body was found soon after the collapse and the other several hours later. Security officials said the tunnel was under construction at the time.

Our count of Palestinian Arabs violently killed by their own actions this year rises to 68.

Al Jazeera: Israel forcing Gazans to burn 1.5 million chicks alive

This is one of the more ridiculous pieces of propaganda I've seen yet, as Palestinian Arabs claim that they must burn 1.5 million chicks alive because they have no electricity for incubators.

It makes one wonder how people managed to raise and feed chickens before there was electricity. It also raises the question of why a supposedly starving people cannot eat 1.5 million chicks.

PETA has yet to weigh in on the situation.

Meanwhile, those peace-loving Gazans shot 11 mortars towards the Nahal Oz crossing today alone, where they get their fuel from.

Technical note

All morning I have not been able to get to Imageshack, which had been my preferred image hosting site for at least three years. Many of my pictures are not appearing on the site, which is frustrating. I changed hosts for my latest previous re-posting of "Plastics" so I could show the images, but if things don't fix themselves I might be spending a lot of time fixing old posts.

"Plastics" (repost)

As Yom Ha'atzmaut is this week I will be reposting some of my earlier articles that highlight how amazing the State of Israel is.

This post was originally written in September, 2005, and has been slightly expanded. It is an old favorite of Soccer Dad's (and I imagine that EBoZ will like it too.)
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Israel in 1946 was in that strange state between World War II and statehood. It was still unclear if the world would allow the Jews to establish their own sovereign nation. Jews and Arabs still lived under occupation, and the British had control over both groups in practical day-to-day matters.

But the Jews were always looking towards building their own country, their own infrastructure, their own future - no matter what the politicians or generals or bureaucrats did.

Here is one small example that is not so small.

The Jews realized that they live in a tiny area with practically no natural resources. Anything they would create would have to be made from only the crudest of ingredients together with brainpower. And in the 1940s, twenty years before Mr. Mcguire was to give his famous advice to Benjamin Braddock in "The Graduate", one of the brightest areas of research and manufacturing growth was in...plastics.

The amount of planning necessary to build an entire industry from scratch is immense. To even think of doing it during a time of terror and war could almost be thought of as foolhardy. Yet the Weizmann Institute continued on in its plastics research throughout the decade, gaining important partners and allies:

As partition and war loomed, threatening the Jewish state before it could even have a chance, the Jews of Palestine continued to do what they had to do: to prepare for the day after. From a research and development initiative, these Zionists started to think bigger, moving from research into creating an entire new industry:

The foresight that a few Palestinian Jews had in 1946, that they kept planning and laying the groundwork for during the War of Independence, allowed them to move from R&D to actual products while the embers of conflict were still glowing:

Two groups of people, both with ostensibly the same aims of their own independent country - yet how they went about actually building it could not be more different. One group chooses terror and hate, while the other just quietly builds what has to be built - no excuses, no whining, just results.

The truth about 1948

Midstream Magazine has an article this month by David Guttman, who fought with the Palmach in 1948. While the article is not online, it is an expanded version of one he had written for FrontPage a few years ago.

The Midstream article expands on the severe paucity of guns and ammunition in the first phase of the war. But three main points from both articles are critical:

Some facts I can swear to:

A. The Palestinians initiated the war that led to their Naqba. Troops from Tel-Aviv eventually conquered Jaffa, but it was Arab fighters in Jaffa who, from the towers of their mosques, first fired into Tel-Aviv, and turned the intercity border areas into a battleground.

B. The first refugees were not Arabs but Yemenite Jews, from the Tel Aviv-Jaffa No-Man's Land that Arab aggression had created. Unlike the Palestinians, theirs was only a temporary refugee status. Instead of packing them away and forgetting them in squalid refugee camps, their Ashkenazi compatriots took them into their own neighborhoods. For the most part the Yemenites camped out in Tel Aviv apartment lobbies, and used the cooking and sanitary facilities of the permanent residents. When Jaffa fell to Irgun soldiers, they went back home.

C. The Palestinians fled for many reasons and from many threats, both real and imaginary, and that thousands upon thousands fled when nobody pushed them. As an example, when my unit occupied the abandoned British police station at Sidn'a Ali in the Sharon Plain, British troops were still stationed in the vicinity, and we had to train and patrol with our few guns (antiquated or homemade) concealed. Nevertheless, the Arabs of Sidn'a Ali were long gone, way before we could have pushed them out, and while the Brits were still in place to protect them from us. Needless to say, in the absence of any Palestinian targets (save for some abandoned camels) we committed no rapes.

I don't know why the Sidn'a Ali people fled, but they did leave a caretaker in place, as a sign that they intended to return once those pesky Jews had been ethnically cleansed. They did not flee because they feared Jewish thugs, but because of a rational and reasonable calculus: the Jews will be exterminated; we will get out of the way while that messy and dangerous business goes forward, and we will return afterwards to reclaim our homes, and to inherit those nice Jewish properties as well.

They guessed wrong; and the Palestinians are still tortured by the residual shame of their flight. Their shame is so great because in their eyes running from Jews was like running from women; and because there were so many Sidn'a Alis. To relieve their shame they stridently and continually demand that their unsavory history be rewritten and reversed.

This is the real "Nakba." While some Arabs were indeed driven from their homes, and some indeed left at the behest of their leaders, the vast majority voluntarily left out of fear of fighting combined with the expectation that they would return as victors; with the idea that if things don't work out they could always integrate into the neighboring Arab countries and start anew.

But their neighbors had other ideas.

Hamas has killed almost 60 "Mohammeds"

Firas Press (Arabic) reports:

A media spokesman for the Fatah movement issued a list of nearly sixty people carrying the name of the prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) who they said that Hamas killed in Gaza between the elections in December/January 2006 until their coup on June 13, 2007.

The article goes on to list all of them.

Apparently, profaning the name of Mohammed is much worse for Islamists than actually killing people with that name.

UNRWA runs out of fuel - guess whose fault it is?

Once again, the UNRWA in Gaza will have to curtail some of its operations due to a fuel shortage.

Whose fault is it?

AFP writes:

The UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees is to suspend its food aid distribution in Gaza on Monday because of a lack of fuel caused by the Israeli blockade, a spokesman said on Sunday.

Sounds like Israel's fault, right?

Reuters adds a little more info:

The United Nations is set to halt delivery of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip on Monday because its vehicles have run out of fuel, a U.N. official said.
Gaza has been facing a fuel shortage because of Israeli restrictions on supplies and a strike by Palestinian fuel distributors.

Slightly better , but go down a few more paragraphs to the end of the article and all of a sudden you learn a couple of tiny, salient facts:

An Israeli official said some diesel fuel intended for Gaza's power station had passed through on Sunday, but the transfer was halted when militants attacked the Nahal Oz fuel depot on the Israeli side of the Gaza border with mortar bombs.

The official added that as well as diesel for electricity and cooking gas, Israel was prepared to transfer petrol and diesel for vehicles but he said Gazans were not able to take delivery.

The Gaza fuel association said it went on strike to protest over Israel's supply limits which were cut back sharply after Palestinian militants attacked the Nahal Oz depot last month killing two Israeli civilians.

One would think that Gazans, supposedly so desperate for fuel, shooting mortars at their fuel suppliers would be somewhat more newsworthy than a throwaway paragraph at the end of a story implying Israel is withholding fuel to cause a humanitarian crisis. In fact, Israel tried to send the needed amounts over and were stopped by terrorists. Shouldn't that be made clear in the lede?

But then again, AFP and Reuters might have a little bit of an agenda.

UK Holocaust-denying professor loses job

Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom, a professor of astronomy at University College, London, has been fired for his rather interesting views.

For example, he wrote about visitors to Auschwitz:

Let us hope the schoolchildren visitors are properly taught about the elegant swimming-pool at Auschwitz, built by the inmates, who would sunbathe there on Saturday and Sunday afternoons while watching the water-polo matches; and shown the paintings from its art class, which still exist; and told about the camp library which had some forty-five thousand volumes for inmates to choose from, plus a range of periodicals; and the six camp orchestras at Auschwitz/Birkenau, its the theatrical performances, including a children’s opera, the weekly camp cinema, and even the special brothel established there. Let’s hope they are shown postcards written from Auschwitz, some of which still exist, where the postman would collect the mail twice-weekly.

Not surprisingly, he is also a 9/11 (and 7/7) "truther" claiming that both attacks were done at the behest of Zionists.

No doubt he will bitterly complain about his loss of "freedom of speech," although no one is stopping him from continuing to publish at "revisionist" sites like CODOH.

Palestinian Arab lie #82,512

Spotted at a "Comment is Free" article at the Guardian, which should probably be renamed Comments are Worthless...

Last week in Gaza, Israel not only continued depriving the people of fuel and cooking gas, it held back supplies to UN agencies such as Unrwa - the agency devoted to the health, education, food supplies and more of Gaza's poor and deprived population. In hindering the operations of the UN, Israel was hindering the Quartet, of which the UN is a part.

Of course, it was Hamas that stopped fuel from going to UNRWA, not Israel - a fact that even UNRWA admits, and excuses.