Wednesday, June 30, 2010

  • Wednesday, June 30, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
As night follows day, the number of rocket and mortar attacks are increasing as Israel continues to loosen restrictions on Gaza.

Today, Israel plans to send more than double the amount of aid to Gaza that it has been sending - some 350 trucks. The types of items being sent in has also increased dramatically - here are the figures from last Thursday (via email):


Merchandise
Truckloads
Weight (tons)
Private Sector
Food
Rice
1
40
Candies
6
112
Produce (Fruits and Vegetables)
13
260
Meat, Chicken and Fish Products
4
58
Cakes
4
41
Dairy Products
5
66
Mixed\ Additional Food Products
16
339
Candies and Cakes
1
12
Sugar
3
103
Education items
Equipment For Schools
15
304
Toys and Equipment for School
1
7
Inputs to Agriculture
Fishing weirs
2
26
Wood Profiles for Hothouses
5
124
Parasols
1
15
Other
Aluminum
1
13
Bags
1
10
House wear
1
20
Kitchen wear
9
115
Wood Profiles
4
127
Medicine and Medical Equipment
3
21
Input to Agriculture
4
74
Glass
1
30
Toys
2
15
Hygiene Products
3
25
Clothing and Footwear
5
51
International Organizations
WFP
Dairy Products
1
14
UNRWA
Juice
2
50
Cooking Oil
13
230
ICRC
Hygiene Products
1
5
Overall Total
128
2,307

At the exact same time, the number of rocket and mortar attacks has increased just as dramatically:

6/21 Two attacks, at least 5 mortars
6/24 12 mortars (3 fell short) and one Qassam rocket
6/28 - 1 mortar
6/29 - Two mortars claimed
6/30 - Qassam, causing damage

Think there is a causal relationship?
  • Wednesday, June 30, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
UNIFIL has been doing a capacity testing operation across southern Lebanon, to see how well it could deploy troops if needed. Some southern Lebanese protested, throwing rocks and injuring one UNIFIL peacekeeper.

Interestingly, Hezbollah protested the operation itself, saying it was a violation of UN resolution 1701 - the resolution that expanded UNIFIL responsibilities. Hezbollah is apparently considering itself to be the only army with a right to work in southern Lebanon.

UNIFIL responded, saying that this was coordinated with the Lebanese army and is quite legal.
PA prime minister Salam Fayyad, in his weekly radio address, spoke about the growing movement to give more rights to Arabs of Palestinian descent who are stuck in Lebanese "refugee" camps with few rights.

While he said that he supported giving them more civil rights, he stopped well short of asking that they should have the rights of other refugees worldwide - the right of citizenship in the country in which one is born. Instead, he called for UNRWA to continue to perpetuate the issue of being a caretaker for them, insisting that people who have been stateless for decades remain so until a complete solution is found for these "refugees," which he called "the core of the Palestinian issue."

He pointed out that the PLO is responsible for the political life and security in the camps, which helps explain why no Palestinian Arab leader is keen on actually helping these people/pawns and why no one is even beginning to talk about what would happen to millions of these people if a Palestinian Arab state is declared - for they certainly cannot all fit in the West Bank and Gaza.

Inevitably, they would have to become citizens of Arab countries, and there is no reason why those who choose to do so today cannot start the process.

Well, there is one reason: because the Arab leaders and the PA all agree that it is better to leave them as pawns rather than give them the basic right to choose what to do with their own lives. A lot of the loud complaints about Israel is a smokescreen to hide this 60 year Arab conspiracy to deny millions of people their basic rights.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

  • Tuesday, June 29, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
Excerpts of a new article from the Carnegie Council:

Putting aside overheated rhetoric and pseudo-legal analyses, I asked a group of international law experts about the blockade of the Gaza Strip and the methods employed by Israel to enforce it. These are their answers:

Q. Did Israel commit piracy?
The short answer is no, states U.S. Navy Commander James Kraska, who teaches international humanitarian law (IHL, otherwise known as the Law of War) at the U.S. Naval War College. Article 101 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of Sea defines piracy as "a private act, typically with some sort of pecuniary interest. And by private, that means it's not going to be a governmental act," he explains.

Q. Are naval blockades a legal form of warfare?
Though it has a negative impact on enemy civilians and neutral third parties, blockading a state is a "legitimate method of naval warfare," says Marko Milanovic, a legal scholar at Cambridge University. However, the San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea (1994), considered to be the consensus view of customary law on the issue, does contain a few caveats.

Q. Can Israel blockade a foreign, non-state entity like Gaza?
In August 2005, Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from the Gaza Strip. However, since then, no independent state of Palestine has emerged—leaving the small evacuated territory in a weird legal limbo. This, in turn, makes adjudicating the Israeli naval action tricky because, while blockades clearly apply in the case of two states at war, the law falls silent with regard to non-state combatants like Hamas, notes Milanovic.

Now, were Gaza still under military occupation (as the UN considers it to be), there would be no problem blockading it. Indeed, Common Article 2 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that IHL extends to undeclared wars and occupied territory, says Wolff Heintschel von Heinegg, a law professor at the Viadrina European University. This being the case, the IHL rules governing naval blockades also apply to Gaza.

However, if Gaza is not occupied, as Israel claims, things get messy again......

...Just as it is not a foreign state, Gaza is also not an Israeli province in rebellion. Still, he says one could argue that if a state can employ a naval blockade in such radically different cases, then "you must also be able to blockade territory that is somehow in the middle..."


Q. Is the Israeli blockade a form of collective punishment?
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross have all decried the Gaza blockade as collective punishment. In doing so, they all look to Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states, "No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited…"

This prohibition has its roots in the experience of German reprisal killings during World War II, Bell notes. Keeping that in mind, to then argue that Article 33 applies to the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza is "bizarre," he says, adding that there "has never even been a claim in any legal forum … that economic sanctions of any kind or blockades of any kind constitute collective punishment."

The collective punishment argument is likewise critiqued by other academics. Von Heinegg, for example, contends that it "has no basis in the law" because the only limits set for blockades are in San Remo. To be illegal, the Israeli blockade would have had to be instituted—not to stop the importation of rockets—but just to starve Gazans. Or, if, intentions aside, the blockade were to kill hundreds of innocent Palestinians.

Neither is the case, he explains.

Q. Can Israel intercept a blockade-runner in international waters?
Speaking in a private capacity, Major John Dehn, a law professor at the West Point Military Academy, says that, if a state has instituted a legal blockade, then it can board neutral ships in international waters. However, there must also be a reasonable belief that "the vessel is trying to breach a blockade, and after prior warning they intentionally and clearly refuse to stop, or intentionally and clearly resist visit, search or capture."

In radio exchanges with Israeli navy personnel on May 30, the flotilla crew made it clear that they intended to run the Gaza blockade. Therefore, Israel was well within its rights to stop the boats.
Read the whole thing.

(h/t Yaakov Lozowick)
  • Tuesday, June 29, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
From Le Figaro (French):
The Saudi monarch, who met Tuesday Barack Obama in the White House, did not mince his words the recent trip by the French Minister of Defense Hervé Morin to Jeddah.  "There are two countries in the world who do not deserve to exist: Iran and Israel,"  said King Abdullah, on June 5. 

This diatribe against the two designated enemies of Arabia has been confirmed by two French sources, diplomatic and military, in Paris. It is unclear what the reaction of the Minister of Defence was, - he was surrounded by a handful of diplomats and high-ranking officers in the audience with the king, culminating a two-day visit to Saudi Arabia.
As the Philosémitisme Blog comments, "Of course Saudi Arabia has the right to exist and is a pure blessing for humanity."

(h/t Philosémitisme Blog)
  • Tuesday, June 29, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
This essay was written by Adam Levick, who blogs at Adam's Zionist Journey. He asked me to publish it here.

Nazi anti-Semitic caricatures during and preceding the Holocaust often portrayed Jews as an octopus-like creature, or some other beast – a category of anti-Semitism known as Zoomorphism. Such depictions would appear in official Nazi publications such as Der Sturmer. These cartoons would sometimes include images of a Jewish beast wrapping its tentacles around the world, representing the malicious control they were purported to exert on international affairs – consistent with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories codified in, among other sources, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Here is one such Nazi cartoon, circa 1938--An octopus with a Star of David over its head has its tentacles encompass the world.[i]

 
Nazi, Soviet, and, more recently, Arab anti-Semitic caricatures often portray Jews as spiders, cockroaches, and Octopuses – dehumanizing Jews by turning them into animals that are destructive, inhuman and evil. The cartoon below, by the notorious anti-Zionist cartoonist, Carlos Latuff, was posted on the “progressive” Jewish anti-Zionist blog, Mondoweiss recently[ii] – by a frequent Mondoweiss blogger named Seham[iii] – in reference to the Gaza flotilla incident.



This ugly caricature of the Jewish state manages to both employ Nazi-like anti-Semitic imagery of a beastly and monstrous Jewish collective while simultaneously asserting that the Jewish state has become the new Nazi Germany. (Note the Jewish Magen David on the Israeli flag is morphed into a swastika) Such insidious depictions of Israel and Israelis are mostly seen on extremist websites, and is a phenomenon known as Holocaust inversion[iv].

Indeed, narratives which characterize the Jewish state as morally equivalent to Nazi Germany have been codified as anti-Semitic by both the European Union[v] and the U.S. State Department[vi]. As Manfred Gerstenfeld noted, “The core motif of classic anti-Semitism was that Jews embody the most extreme malevolence. During the post-war era, the Nazi regime has become the paradigm for absolute evil. Comparing Israel's conduct to its actions is a new mutation of this ancient theme.” As historian Robert Wistrich has observed, “Anti-Zionists who insist on comparing Zionism and the Jews with Hitler and the Third Reich appear unmistakably to be de facto anti-Semites, even if they vehemently deny the fact! This is largely because they knowingly exploit the reality that Nazism in the post-war world has become the defining metaphor of absolute evil. For, if Zionists are "Nazis" and if Sharon really is Hitler, then it becomes a moral [indeed, “progressive”] obligation to wage war against Israel.”[vii]

Latuff is a Brazilian political “activist” and cartoonist with an impressively large portfolio of work – much of which openly express anti-Semitic themes. Some of his caricatures seem to suggest that Israel is a unique and immutable evil in the world[viii]. His work includes imagery frequently suggesting this moral equivalence between Israel and Nazi Germany – and he has explicitly acknowledged that this indeed his political view[ix].

Latuff's work has been posted on various radical left websites and blogs, as well as several terrorist affiliated websites such as 'The Islamic Front for the Iraqi Resistance' (JAMI) magazine[x], the Lebanese newspaper "Al Akhbar"[xi]. Norman Finkelstein's official website has featured Latuff cartoons[xii]. Latuff’s notoriety includes his participation in the 2006 Iranian International Holocaust Cartoon Competition[xiii] - for his cartoon comparing the Israeli West Bank security barrier with the Nazi concentration camps. Latuff placed second in the contest.

Ian Black, writing for The Guardian, a newspaper not exactly known for its Zionist sympathies, noted that Latuff was among those cartoonists “drawing, without inhibition, on judeophobic stereotypes in the service of the anti-globalisation movement.[xiv]

Latuff also has employed racist themes in service of his critiques of President Barack Obama[xv].

That such a cartoon would appear on the pages of Mondoweiss[xvi], funded by The Nation Institute,[xvii] is, sadly, not particularly surprising to anyone familiar with the blog. Mondoweiss is an openly anti-Zionist Jewish blog and consistently advances, among other classical antisemitic tropes,[xviii] the argument that Jews exercise too much power over U.S. policy[xix] [xx]and that Jewish “progressive” voices on the Middle East are censored by the organized Jewish community. The viciousness and hatred towards Israel, and the state’s Jewish supporters, can’t be overstated. The main blogger, Philip Weiss, states that “Zionism privileges Jews and justifies oppression, and this appals me.” Weiss has complained that the “suffering of Palestinians that has been perpetrated politically in large part by empowered American Jews who are all over the media and political establishment.” He has openly called for a quota on Jews who work in the media. Weiss refers to Zionism as an ideology of “apartheid and ethnic cleansing.”

Weiss, like fellow liberal, Glenn Greenwald, demonstrating a bizarre left-right anti-Zionist alliance, also has contributed to Pat Buchanan’s paleo-conservative magazine, The American Conservative[xxi]. Weiss’s alliance with Pat Buchanan seems quite consistent with the blogger’s frequent tropes suggesting the existence of an organized Jewish community so powerful as to render the U.S. President impotent to confront its mendacity. In one post, Weiss complains that the U.S. President’s desire to oppose Israel “colonization” has been “nullified politically because of the Jewish presence in the power structure.” He goes on to warn darkly that, “[One fifth] of [the U.S. Senate] are Jews, even though Jews are just 2 percent of the population. Over half of the money given to the Democratic Party comes from Jews. Obama’s top two political advisers are Jewish, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod. The news lately has been dominated by Obama’s aides Kenneth Feinberg and Larry Summers. And what does it mean that the Treasury Secretary gets off the phone with Obama to confer immediately with Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman and Jamie Dimon of Morgan (Dimon’s Jewish; Blankfein would seem to be)? As I have frequently said, the biggest money game in town on the Republican side is Sheldon Adelson, a Zionist Jew.”[xxii]Such a passage would suggest that the hideously anti-Semitic cartoon posted by Mondoweiss blogger, Seham, isn't an anomaly. Weiss genuinely seems to see Jewish tentacles wrapped around the Obama Administration.
  
Weiss has even taken positions which seem to flirt with the political dynamic known as the Red-Green Alliance, as exemplified by British politician George Galloway[xxiii]. In one post Weiss openly expressed support for the terrorist group, Hezbollah. In addition to the group’s open and repeated call for the destruction of Israel, Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has a long and well-documented record of engaging in extreme expressions of anti-Semitism. He has stated, “If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”[xxiv] He also said, "If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew.”[xxv] A few days before the Lebanese elections in 2009, Weiss said, “I hope Hezbollah wins….Nobody else seems to care for the poor people in Southern Lebanon.”[xxvi]
 
While Mondoweiss doesn’t have a fraction of the traffic of some of the more popular progressive blogs – such as Daily Kos and MyDD – it simply can’t be dismissed as a marginal voice within the progressive blogosphere. Its creators and contributors have posted on the most widely read blog in the U.S., The Huffington Post. Also, the influential Talking Points Memo (the 12th most popular political website[xxvii]), via its TPMCafe site, now syndicates Mondoweiss’s posts.[xxviii] The Nation Magazine, which funds Mondoweiss, has been one of the standard bearers of liberal Democratic thought for years, and is the 24th most popular political website overall.

New Israel Fund (NIF) – a powerful “progressive” foundation which purports to “work to strengthen Israel's democracy and to promote freedom, justice and equality for all Israel's citizens” – recently posted a link to an essay on Mondoweiss which praised NIF and their President, Daniel Sokatch. The Mondoweiss link appeared prominently on their home page, under their “NIF in the News” section.[xxix] While NIF can’t be held responsible for what others write about them, it is curious that the foundation would at least appear to tacitly endorse such an openly and viciously anti-Zionist blog such as Mondoweiss. It also raises some serious questions about frequent claims by NIF and its progressive Israeli supporters that they are “vehemently opposed to BDS and the broader delegitimization campaign against Israel” – positions which, NIF must be aware, are passionately championed by the bloggers of Mondoweiss.[xxx]
 
One of the most inaccurate characterizations of Jews, like the bloggers at Mondoweiss, who routinely express contempt for their fellow Jews, and the Jewish state, is that they are “self-hating.” In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The bloggers at Mondoweiss and their fellow political travellers see themselves as upholding Jewish ethical standards that have been abandoned by the vast majority of Jews in favor of what they would likely characterize as a crude and unenlightened desire to maintain the Jewish nation-state – an antiquated particularism which stands in opposition to what they see as their more “universal” moral values. (Of course, no other national particularism other than Zionism seems to offend Mondoweiss’s belief in universalism – certainly not Muslim particularism, represented most clearly by the 57 nations who are members of the Organization of Islamic Conference – that is, 57 self-described Islamic states.)

Philip Weiss is not a self-hating Jew. Rather, he is a moralizer who has described his anti-Zionism as consistent with the “great idealistic Jewish tradition.” As Anthony Julius has stated, “moralisers have a good conscience and is satisfied by his own self-righteousness. He is not a self-hater; he is enfolded in self-admiration. He is in step with the best opinion. He holds that the truth is to be arrived at by inverting the "us = good" and "other = bad" binarism. He finds virtue in opposing his own community. It is not enough for him to disagree, or even refute; he must expose the worst bad faith, the most ignoble motives, the grossest crimes.”[xxxi]

The “Halo Effect” is a term generally defined as a cognitive bias whereby the perception of a person or group is influenced by the perception of another trait. Halo effects happen especially if the perceiver does not have enough information about all traits, so that he makes assumptions based on one or two prominent traits. This phenomenon has been used by Professor Gerald Steinberg to explain the tendency by many to blindly assume the benevolent intentions of NGOs – many of whom “appropriate [the moral] rhetoric of universal human rights to pursue highly particularistic, political and ideological goals, [and thus avoid] serious analysis and accountability.”[xxxii]

For genuine progressives, and committed anti-racists, the tendency to overlook the clear and unambiguous record of visceral hatred towards Jews and Israel routinely expressed by blogs such as Mondoweiss – due to their veneer of tolerance and universalism – represents another manifestation of the power of the “Halo Effect.” The failure of otherwise thoughtful and sober minds to closely re-examine this political façade represents an utterly appalling intellectual and moral abdication.


  • Tuesday, June 29, 2010
  • Elder of Ziyon
An excellent piece by Barry Rubin:
Israel is subject daily to scores of false claims and slanders that receive a remarkable amount of credibility in Western media, academic, and intellectual circles even when no proof is offered.

Palestinian groups (including the Gaza and Palestinian Authority regimes), associated local and allied foreign non-government organizations, Western radical and anti-Israel groups, and politically committed journalists are eager to act as propaganda agents making up false stories or transmitting them without serious thought or checking.

So the key question is to understand the deliberateness of this anti-Israel propaganda and evaluating the credibility of the sources.

Some of these are big false stories—the alleged killing of Muhammad al-Dura and the supposed Jenin massacre—others are tiny. Some—like the claim Israel was murdering Palestinians to steal their organs-- get into the main Western newspapers while others only make it into smaller and non-English ones.

Taken together, this campaign of falsification is creating a big wave not only of anti-Israel sentiment but of antisemitism on a Medieval scale, simply the modern equivalent of claims that the Jews poisoned wells, spread Bubonic Plague, or murdered children to use their blood for Passover matzohs.
Here are three actual examples of well-educated Westerners believing such modern legends reported to me recently by colleagues:

--A former classmate, one told me, claimed that the Palestinians are living in death camps, being starved, etc. Asked to provide facts and provided with evidence to the contrary, he could provide no real examples. Finally, he remarked, `The truth is always somewhere in the middle.’”

--Hundreds of American college professors signed a petition claiming that Israel was supposedly about to throw hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of the West Bank though there was zero evidence of any such intention and, of course, nothing ever happened.

--A British writer of some fame claimed, on the basis of an alleged single conversation with a questionable source, that Israel was preparing gas chambers for the mass murder of Palestinians. When asked if she was really claiming this would happen, she stated that it wasn’t going to happen but only because people like her had sounded the alarm to prevent it.

There is no limit. When stories are proven wrong, the damage remains, apologies are non-existent or muted, and no lesson is learned because the same process is soon repeated.

 Here is one example plucked from today’s mail. The Palestinian Authority Health Ministry claim Israel has seized seven oxygen machines intended for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and paid for by the Norwegian government. It said that a protest was being made to Norway. The story was picked up by several European newspapers. No evidence or specifics—what Israeli agency held them up? What dates? What hospitals were these for?--was provided.

Asked to look into the oxygen machine story, an Israeli official did so and pointed out that there are no controls over such imports into the West Bank so there would be no basis for holding up anything going there. As for Gaza, those directly involved in the process of sending in aid note that no applications to import such machines has been filed, there is no record of any such machines arriving, and thus nothing had been held up.

In short, the story is completely false, presuming that the Palestinian Authority health ministry won't provide documents and specifics. But that isn't going to happen as it will just be on to the next false story, hoping for a bigger media response.

Having seen so many such stories disproved over the years—as Israel’s credibility, while not perfect, has compared favorably with that of any Western democratic state—one might think a lesson would be learned. But as the great American journalist Eric Severeid remarked many years ago, nothing can protect someone when the media sets out deliberately to misunderstand and report falsely about them.

 Honorable journalists and scholars should take note and approach these false stories more skeptically. They should also reexamine their stereotypes and remember that their political views should be kept as much as possible out of their professional work.

Not so long ago, the above points would have been taken for granted as the most basic and obvious principles. They need to be relearned.
Read the whole thing.
(h/t sshender)
Thousands attended a rally in Beirut on Sunday demanding the government giving Lebanese Palestinians their civil rights.

The arguments that Lebanese politicians are using to justify their endemic discrimination against Palestinian Arabs are hilariously specious. They will all claim to love the Palestinian Arabs, but then they add that big "but:"

For example:

Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun stressed on Tuesday granting Palestinian refugees in Lebanon their rights, but noted that this requires funds that are unavailable.

He added after the FPM's weekly meeting that they cannot be granted right of ownership in Lebanon, and said that houses for Palestinians should be built in refugee camps, similar to those that were constructed at the Nahr al-Bared camp.

The MP stressed: "We cannot scatter the refugees throughout the Lebanese territories because if they lose their communication then they will lose their cause."
In other words, they must remain confined in squalid "refugee camps" and not be allowed to purchase land in the rest of Lebanon because if they are treated the same as other Lebanese, they would lose their Palestinian identities!

If Palestinian Arab nationalism is so weak that it cannot survive a nation treating its members like human beings, how strong was that nationalism to begin with?

Another MP is more explicit:
In an interview with OTV on Saturday MP Nematallah Abi Nasr , a member of the Free patriotic Movement said that he is concerned that the extended presence of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon would lead to their naturalization.

“Keeping the Palestinians in Lebanon kills the country and grants Israel a favor,” Abi Nasr said.

He said that the issue of granting foreigners property rights in Lebanon should be well-studied.

It is not acceptable to grant the Palestinians civil rights while there are still armed Palestinian factions in the country ,” the MP added.
That's funny - there is an armed Hezbollah faction in the country; should that mean that Shiites should lose their property rights?

Prime Minister Hariri used different code-words in his remarks but said the same thing:

Prime Minister Saad Hariri on Tuesday said Lebanon has a duty to fulfill towards Palestinians' civil rights and vowed not abandon the Palestinian right of return.
"Lebanon has to ensure the safety of residents on its territory," Hariri told a conference at the Grand Serail under the title "Achievements: vision and future" at the invitation of the Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee.

Hariri, however, stressed that "building the Lebanese state is a priority."

"This small country has paid price in blood for the Palestine cause, and Lebanon is still committed to the cause," Hariri said.

Equally, Hariri, said, Palestinians living in Lebanon should realize the importance of stability in Lebanon for their cause.
 “But in Lebanon’s duties toward the Palestinians, there is no window of naturalization,” Hariri also said, adding, “We confirm our commitment to rejecting naturalization and to deal with the issue of weapons in and outside the Palestinian refugee camps.”

What he is saying is that there is no way that Lebanon will allow the Palestinian Arabs to gain equal rights, because that might destabilize Lebanon. Therefore, by denying them those rights, Hariri is saying that this preserves their fake "right of return." You see, it is for their own good!

Lebanon has reason to be worried about Palestinian Arabs, of course - Fatah was in no small part responsible for the Lebanese civil war. Even so, the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs  would jump at the opportunity to become normal, productive members of Lebanese society. They were born there, their parents were born there, and they have never set foot in "Palestine." And for most of them there is very little likelihood that this will change.


There are two subtexts in this drama that everyone in the Middle East knows very well, but they keep hidden from the Western world.


The first is that no Arab country likes the Palestinian Arab people enough to want to actually give them equal rights. The Arab League says that every Arab country must allow any Arab to become a citizen - unless they are Palestinian. Individual Arab countries have their own reasons not to allow PalArabs to become citizens. In Lebanon, the reason is obvious - it would upset the delicate (and, by now, fictional) demographic balance between Christians, Shiites and Sunnis. Other countries would be worried about an influx of relatively educated (thanks to UNRWA) and relatively liberal new citizens which could challenge existing dictatorships. The bottom line, though, is that Arab nations have no desire to integrate hundreds of thousands of their bretheren."


The second subtext is that Palestinian Arab nationalism is weak. The public excuse used to oppose naturalization is that this would dilute or destroy the Palestinian Arab "cause," which is a ridiculous argument on the face of it - unless you are worried that most Palestinian Arabs would happily integrate into their new societies and never agitate to "return" to a land that most of them never lived in. If their sense of a national self was so strong, then citizenship in other countries would not be considered a threat to that sense of solidarity. In reality, there is no such sense - it is a fiction that is peddled to the West. To the extent that it exists at all, it is a recent phenomenon and it is only alove due to the misery that PalArabs have been living under in their host countries.


The massive effort to hide these truths from the world is the reason that Palestinian Arabs are stateless today. The solution to their problems must acknowledge this reality, as well as the real aspirations of the stateless and how their needs have been actively opposed by the Arab leaders for decades.


This entire new Palestinian Lebanese civil rights movement, which was ironically sparked by the flotilla, has the potential to truly expose the first truth to the world. That is a start.

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