Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, June 20, 2011

Report: Hezbollah shocked at level of Israeli spies there

The Kuwait newspaper al Rai published a report on Sunday in which it stated that the intelligence war between Hezbollah and Israel has revealed shocking discoveries for the party’s leadership. The big shock for Hezbollah was the number and the quality of those spying for Israel within its ranks.

According to the report more than ten spies were discovered and some are from the front ranks of the party.

Some of those discoveries couldn’t be imagined al Rai said pointing out that Hezbollah discovered the Israeli spying cell within its ranks three months ago when it intentionally sent very crucial information to Israelis and put the suspects under tight surveillance.

NOW Lebanon reported that an unnamed Hezbollah source told its correspondent on Saturday that a “group of Hezbollah members were detained in the past few days for collaborating with Israel.” The source who spoke on condition of anonymity declined to disclose the number of those detained or their position in the party but revealed that that one of the collaborators is related to a prominent Hezbollah official and another is a “religious figure.”

Al Rai also said that Jnoubiyeh website confirmed the arrests of the Hezbollah members over spying for Israel.

According to al Rai one high ranking Hezbollah official that was discovered spying for Israel is Mohammad Atwi from the Nabatiyeh district in south Lebanon, who was responsible for organizing security within the party and coordinated activities with Iran and Syria.

Al Rai has not always been the most accurate at reporting things from Lebanon, but this story seems to be corroborated at least a bit.

If nothing else, adding to Hezbollah's paranoia can only be a good thing.

(h/t Yerushalimey)

It isn't only "Who Started?" - it is "Who wanted to live in peace?"

Last week, Shlomo Avineri wrote a nice essay in Ha'aretz called "The truth should be taught about the 1948 war." Excerpts:

In recent debates about the Palestinian "Nakba," the claim has been made that there are two "narratives," an Israeli one and a Palestinian one, and we should pay attention to both of them. That, of course, is true: Alongside the Israeli-Zionist claims regarding the Jewish people's connection to its historic homeland and the Jews' miserable situation, there are Palestinian claims that regard the Jews as a religious group only and Zionism as an imperialist movement.

But above and beyond these claims is the simple fact - and it is a fact, not a "narrative" - that in 1947, the Zionist movement accepted the United Nations partition plan, whereas the Arab side rejected it and went to war against it. A decision to go to war has consequences, just as it did in 1939 or 1941.

The importance of this distinction becomes clear upon perusing the op-ed that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently published in The New York Times. Abbas mentioned the partition decision in his article, but said not one single word about the facts - who accepted it and who rejected it. He merely wrote that "Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs."

That is like those Germans who talk about the horrors of the expulsion of 12 million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe after 1945, but fail to mention the Nazi attack on Poland, or the Japanese who talk about Hiroshima, but fail to mention their attack on Pearl Harbor. That is not a "narrative," it is simply not telling the truth. Effects cannot be divorced from causes.

The pain of the other should be understood and respected, and attempts to prevent Palestinians from mentioning the Nakba are foolish and immoral: Nobody prevents the descendants of the German refugees from Eastern Europe from communing with their suffering.

But just as nobody, even in German schools, would dream of teaching the German "narrative" regarding World War II, the 1948 war should also not be taught as a battle between narratives. In the final analysis, there is a historical truth. And without ignoring the suffering of the other, that is how such sensitive issues must be taught.

Dimi Reider in the anti-Zionist +972 magazine, takes issue with Avineri:

The problem with Avineri’s answer to the question of “who’s to blame for the beginning of the war in 1948″ is that politically speaking, the question itself is no longer relevant.

...But what caused the war isn’t and has never been the true challenge of the Nakba. The true challenge is what happened after the war was caused. Even if we accept Avineri’s argument that “they started”, it’s still unclear why Israel had to expel neighborhoods, towns and villages; and if, somehow, we accepted that, it’s very unclear why this had to be accompanied by massacres; and even if we accept (heaven forbids) that massacres and expulsions happen in wars, no amount of “they started” can excuse the still-standing ban on the refugees and survivors to return.

Since this is a little discussed aspect of Israel's War of Independence, and since Israel's detractors like to hold up "The Nakba" as one of the biggest single tragedies of the twentieth century, it is worthwhile to answer this.

While this is a much bigger topic than can be dealt with adequately in a blog post, I would like to republish a Palestine Post article by Dorothy Bar-Adon from August 17th, 1948, where she describes exactly why the Arab residents of Zer'in - her neighbors, who she knew by name and was on friendly terms with - should not be allowed back.

The reason is simple. The Arabs that she thought were her friends happily and lustily took up arms against the Jews. Their women encouraged them with war cries that the Jews in the valley below could clearly hear. The idea of allowing a hostile population back where they could again menace their Jewish neighbors was out of the question.

Read this article, and you can see that the Jews who didn't let their Arab neighbors back were not monsters, but were acting out of real fear and a very definite sense of self-preservation. This account is obviously not written by someone trying to rewrite history and fit it into 21st century ideas of morality; it was written by a real human being who had real feelings for the Arabs of the village.

The anecdote about the paralyzed Arab woman whose family deserted her when they fled, and who was taken care of by Jewish troops, says more than any number of history books about the 1948 war.

(This article originally mentioned on this blog in 2006.)

Correction: I had originally attributed the +972 article to Joseph Dana.)

Last minute chance to vote in the Blog-Off!

If you are a procrastinator, waiting to the very last minute to vote (hopefully for me) at the Israellycool Pro-Israel Blog Off Finals, your time is almost up.

Just imagine how much more I'd be able to blog with a brand new iPad! :)

I'm hoping to make the vote closer than it is.

Click on this link now and vote!

(If it doesn't work, try it with a different browser; people have been having problems all week.)

And...Happy Father's Day!

1960's style video of Mavi Marmara "peace activists"

Something to link to every time an Israel-hater says that "Israel killed nine peace activists in cold blood" on the Mavi Marmara.

Peace and love, baby.

Stunning IMAX aerial video footage of Israel

Jerusalem | Filmed in Imax 3D from JerusalemGiantScreen on Vimeo.

It looks good here, but click on the HD button and watch it, full screen, on Vimeo. Really, really beautiful.

A full-length version is going to be released as an IMAX 3-D movie in 2013.

(h/t Y. Medad)

80% of PalArab "refugees" have citizenship!

On the eve of World Refugee Day, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released some interesting numbers. From Wafa:

According to UNRWA records, registered Palestinian refugees totaled 4.8 million in 2010: 41.6% in Jordan, 23.2% in the Gaza Strip, 16.4% in the West Bank, 9.9% in Syria and 8.9% in Lebanon.

In the Palestinian Territory, refugees represent 43.4% of the total population in 2011, with 29.7% of them in the West Bank and 67.3% in the Gaza Strip.

The vast majority of "refugees" living in Jordan have had Jordanian citizenship since 1950, meaning that they cannot be considered refugees in any sense of the word - except for UNRWA's tortured definition.

But even more bizarre is the characterization of "Palestinian refugees" living in...Palestine! How can people be considered refugees if they live in their own purported country? The most they can claim to be are "displaced persons" which is a completely different thing.

If you add together the Jordanian "refugees" with citizenship and the Palestinian "refugees" who also are citizens of the Palestinian Authority, you see that about 80% of all so-called "Palestinian refugees" are nothing of the sort. You cannot be a citizen of a country and a refugee at the same time.

If UNRWA and the Palestinian Arab leadership and Jordan were interested in solving the so-called refugee problem, they would acknowledge these simple facts and work to mainstream those who still live in camps and depend on UNRWA services into their respective Jordanian and Palestinian Arab societies. Their refusal to do so shows, more than anything else, that the "refugee" problem is an artificial construct, a fake issue that is being exacerbated and prolonged by the very people who pretend that it is their primary concern.

The facts are clear. 80% of the so-called refugees, aren't. And the only reason they are still called refugees is to use them - some four million people, if you believe UNRWA's numbers - as pawns to help destroy the Jewish state.

If the US and EU truly want to see peace in the region, this issue must be dealt with head-on. The truth must be exposed, and these "refugees" must be properly categorized and their issues solved within the context of Jordan and the PA. Otherwise, all the calls for negotiations and Israeli concessions are a large shell game to conceal the truth of how the Arabs (and the UN) have been cynically using millions of people as political pawns.

Hamas not happy with "prisoner Facebook" story

Here's a funny item from Hamas mouthpiece Palestine Info:

The Gaza prisoner affairs ministry has called on local media not to reproduce Israeli media hype that Palestinian prisoners communicate with the outside world using social networking sites on the internet.

Israel tries to convince the world that the Palestinians enjoy all their rights while Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was captured in Gaza, is denied visits and access to family, the ministry’s media director Riyadh al-Ashqar said in a statement on Saturday.

Ashqar added that Israel also uses such rumors to justify the prison authority’s frequent violent raids on prisoners’ cells in search of mobile phones.

Ashqar expressed surprise that Palestinian news outlets would reproduce such reports despite the ulterior motives behind them.

Note that Ashqar doesn't deny that Palestinian Arab prisoners are on Facebook, just that he wants to censor Arab media from mentioning it.

The good part? The story was not broken by Ma'ariv (which published it on Wednesday) - but by Al-Arabiya, which printed it last Monday!

So it was Arab reporters who came up with this Zionist propaganda to begin with!

(h/t Gaia K)

Poster: How can you make peace with those...

...who treat each other like this?

(from an idea by Y. Medad, h/t to Adam L. for better wording)

UNRWA summer camps shut down, Hamas camps in full swing

I reported on Friday that some Gazans, upset that UNRWA has not rebuilt their homes, have been blocking UNRWA from performing its services - and threatened to block UNRWA's Summer Games program.

On Saturday, the protesters made good on their threat:

Homeless families in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday shut down UNRWA summer camps in protest over the agency's failure to reconstruct homes destroyed during the Second Intifada.

Gaza residents also closed UNRWA's emergency department, social services office and ration stores, said Atiyya Radwan, who heads a committee of families whose homes have been destroyed.

Now as bad and counterproductive as UNRWA is, alternate providers of services are worse.

And, right on cue, Hamas is moving in to fill the vacuum.

Hamas announced Saturday that its own summer camp program, which they use as a breeding ground for terrorists, is in full swing and so far has 50,000 campers.

Hamas camps have been known for paramilitary activities as well as routinely teaching kids to hate.

For some reason, the protesters are not complaining against Hamas building mosques instead of houses on otherwise empty land.

US consulate rescinds invitation to anti-semitic PalArab cartoonist

A Palestinian Arab political cartoonist, Majed Badra, had been invited by the US Consulate to go to the US and participate in an international political cartoonist convention.

At the last minute, the US Consulate rescinded the invitation, when they became aware that some of his cartoons were, pretty explicitly, anti-semitic.

Badra objects to this, saying that he has nothing against Judaism and that his cartoons are only against Israel, not Jews. He is complaining that he had already cleared his schedule to go to the US.

Interestingly, in the past two weeks, he pulled all content from his website. Perhaps he is not as convinced that his work can stand up to scrutiny as being purely political.

Luckily, some of his cartoons can still be found elsewhere on the web.

A grab-bag of links

I have too many windows open and I'm not sure who recommended all these pages, plus I don't have time to do a normal linkdump, so....

http://www.israellycool.com/2011/06/13/pro-israel-blog-off-final/ Vote!

http://www.melaniephillips.com/unscrupulous-optimists-and-the-harm-they-cause-us

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/the-truth-should-be-taught-about-the-1948-war-1.368167

http://www.giyus.org/2011/06/these-are-the-faces-of-the-new-anti-semitism-please-report.html

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/egyptian-judge-denies-plans-to-charge-american-israeli-accused-of-spying-1.368134

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/06/unrwa_protesting_too_much.html

Syrians getting shot today - last second shows two with legs blown off: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcVBfEohpRQ

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/269836/israel-palestine-and-brthe-peace-pieties-barbara-lerner?page=3

http://freeisraelnow.blogspot.com/2011/06/genocidal-racist-arab-leader-ahmad.html

How come "peace activists" only pressure one side for peace?

There is a new advertising campaign in various US cities on public transit:

This organization, the Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine (which carefully does not disclose the names of the people behind it and launders its charitable contributions through the Illinois Justice Foundation)

It claims that it is for "peace" and that the only way to get there is to stop US aid to Israel. This will, they say, force Israel to be more flexible in its approach to peace with Palestinian Arabs.

This is a recurring theme with so-called "peace" organizations. Their entire existence is only to pressure one side to make concessions.

If they are so interested in peace, shouldn't they be demanding that both sides make compromises?

Has Americans for Peace Now ever called to pressure Congress to reduce aid to the PA when Abbas walked away from negotiations?

But the problem is even worse than the bias that all these so-called "peace" organizations exhibit. The deeper problem is the absolute lack of pressure from any source demanding that Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies to make peace.

Where is the Palestinian Arab equivalent of Peace Now? Where are "Muslims for Peace" who are writing Arabic op-eds demanding "peace now"? Where's "A-Street" - the Arab equivalent of J-Street, an organization that claims that the US is coddling the PA with too much aid? Where are the leftist Arab newspapers slamming Saeb Erekat for yet more excuses to keep Palestinian Arabs in misery?

Why do European states fund so many "pro-peace" organizations whose entire purpose is so one-sided? Why aren't they searching out and encouraging peace-minded Arabs to do equivalent pressure on the PA and Hamas that so many dozens of organizations are dedicated to doing for Israel?

The sad fact is that Arab intransigence has paid off. The very idea of pressuring the Palestinian Arab leadership to make necessary compromises for peace is viewed as a non-starter. Years of sloganeering that "the settlements" are the "obstacle to peace" without acknowledging daily incitement, refusal to negotiate and all the other shortcomings of the PA position has resulted in a huge victory for the Arab side. Those who might try to call for pressuring the PA to negotiate with (as opposed to demand things from) Israel in Arab countries and the PA would be putting their very lives in their hands by even bringing up the topic.

Jews, on the other hand, are endlessly willing to give, and give more, and then give even more. So it is easier to demand that they be the only side to make substantive and concrete concessions.

This is not because Israel "holds all the cards," as the other side would claim. This exact same mindset of only pressuring one side was obvious before Israel was founded, as the British happily acceded to Arab demands about Jewish immigration and land purchasing, when the Jews held no cards whatsoever. The logic then was the same as it is now: Jews are reasonable and can compromise; Arabs are crazy and cannot be pressured without risking riots and bloodshed.

That is the real calculus of "peace." If we pressure Israel, maybe there will be peace. If we pressure Arabs, there might be bombs in our cities next month.

It is no contest.

So now anti-Israel organizations like this one can take advantage of this implicit Western mindset and cloak their hate in nice, liberal terms like "peace."

(The question of how reliable a local peace treaty might be when one party is widely but silently recognized as a threat to world peace is a question that no one dares to tackle.)

Palestinians attend Friday prayers at a new constructed mosque in the former Israeli settlement of Netzarim which was dismantled in 2005, close to Gaza city on Jun 17, 2011

Palestinian Prime Minister in Gaza Strip, Ismail Haniya delivers speech during Friday prayers at a new constructed mosque in the former Israeli settlement of Nate Sarim which was dismantled in 2005, close to Gaza city on Jun 17, 2011

There was once a beautiful synagogue in Netzarim:

Within minutes of Israel's evacuation, the Arabs burned it down and celebrated its destruction:

It looks like there is no problem finding building materials in Gaza, when the desire is there. And what greater purpose can be served in Gaza than building a brand new mosque in the place that hundreds of Jews lived a few years ago?

I haven't seen any new housing complexes built in the destroyed Jewish communities of Gaza. Mostly they have been used for terrorist training, some agriculture, and now this.

This new mosque was not built because of a pressing humanitarian need. It was built to insult Jews.

The "humanitarian aid" of "The Audacity of Hope": Letters!

Via a great article in The Telegraph, you can see a link to an interview with nutcase Alice Walker who will be on the US flotilla vessel called "The Audacity of Hope."

In the preface to that interview we find the exact contents of what the moonbat Americans and Canadians will be bringing with them to Gaza: letters from Americans to Gazans.

And from looking at the web page of US to Gaza, which is sponsoring the ship, we find out that the letters have already been emailed to Gaza for Gazans to make a public display out of them.

I'm sure that the starving Gazans will chew on the letters thoughtfully.

(h/t Israel Muse)

Palestinian Arabs celebrate even when Jews die in accidents

The horrific gas explosion in Netanya last night that claimed four lives is being covered by the Palestinian Arabic media - and the commenters are overjoyed.

From the pro-Fatah Palestine Press Agency we have "Allah is great" and "Prasie be to Allah."

At Firas Press Agency we see a person who wanted to repeat "Praise be to Allah" 9 times, plus someone who adds "Good news!" and another who called the victims "Jewish oppressors."

Egypt's Al Ahram obsessed with "spy" story

Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram, which is the most popular Egyptian daily, has been obsessed with the story of Ilan Grapel.

Every day there are multiple stories with new and more bizarre accusations.

Today we have:

An analyst who tries to prove that Grapel's actions could only be explained by his being a spy, as tourists would never act the way he did. (Of course, Arabists and adventurers would act exactly the way he did.)

Another article claims that a US embassy staffer told Grapel "You are in big trouble" and that Al Ahram obtained documents that Grapel filled out requesting a renewal of residence saying he was a Muslim.

A third is a lengthy interview with a security officer giving details on how the brilliant Egyptian security team managed to track down this spy who was using his own name and freely talking to everyone without trying to hide anything.

Al Ahram confidently publishes a disclaimer of sorts at the end of one of the articles:

Pending completion of investigations

Al-Ahram will continue to publish all information and documents about the Israeli spy case, as it has been doing in recent days. The days after the conclusion of the investigation and the start of the trial will determine whether the Al-Ahram has been truthful and accurate or otherwise.

Other Egyptian papers are allowing at least a small degree of skepticism. But in poker terms, Al Ahram is "all in" and will now ensure that the most bizarre rumors will be plastered all over its pages to make sure that any possible "trial" will support its yellow journalism.

I don't know what the US is doing to get Grapel out of there, but this is a case of life and death, with Arab pride on the line. Every day that is wasted can literally be a death sentence for him. It is time to mobilize and write to the State Department to insist that this is the highest priority.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian woman in this photo with Grapel was interviewed on Egyptian TV. She revealed that Grapel told her he fought in the Lebanon war, that he studied in Tel Aviv and in the US, that his Arabic accent was Lebanese, he invited her to Israel but warned that "there was racism there."

He once told her that they will be allies one day. She asked, "Against whom?" He said "Iran." She replied, "forget it, that's impossible."

UN Watch again blasts the UN's hypocrisy

From UN Watch:

UN Watch's Hillel Neuer's speech after the usual "human rights" advocates - including Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Venezuela, and Iran - slammed Israel this week, as usual, at a UNHRC meeting in Geneva.

Mr. President,

History will record that the highest human rights body of the United Nations met today for no objective reason. Nothing in recent events, nothing in logic, nothing in human rights justifies today’s debate.

Our meeting is automatic—the consequence of a decision adopted four years ago, shortly after this council was created, to keep a permanent agenda item on one country only: Israel.

History will record that at a time when citizens across the Middle East were being attacked by their own government—by rifles, tanks, and helicopters—the UN focused its scarce time and attention on a country in that region where this is not happening; the only country in the region which, despite its flaws, respects the right to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion; the only country in the region with free elections, an independent judiciary, and the equal treatment of women; the only country where gays are not persecuted, arrested or stoned to death, but, on the contrary, march in their own annual parade, as they did in Tel Aviv three days ago.

Mr. President, that is why the logic of this agenda item represents the opposite of human rights, and why it embodies the pathologies that so discredited this council’s predecessor.

Indeed, this item is so unjust, so biased, so selective, so politicized, and so contradictory to this council’s own principles of equality and universality, that it was condemned by the Secretary-General himself, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, on 20 June 2007, the day after its adoption.

And so we ask: In its recent 5-year review, despite everything happening in the Middle East, why did the Council decide to perpetuate this item, an act that will be finalized this week by the General Assembly?

Mr. President,

History will record that when citizens were being persecuted or massacred by their own governments—in Syria, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain and elsewhere—the UN chose to turn a blind eye to the victims, and instead endorsed the cynicism, hypocrisy and scapegoating of the perpetrators.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Gazans protesting UNRWA, threaten to shut "Summer Games"

Protesters in Gaza are blocking people and vehicles from entering the UNRWA headquarters in Khan Younis.

They say that UNRWA has failed to rebuild their homes after Cast Lead.

Israel has been allowing building materials into Gaza for UNRWA and other approved projects since last year.

The protesters say that they might block UNRWA's "Summer Games," where hundreds of thousands of Gazan children attend free UNRWA-run summer camps.

As we mentioned before, it is a strange logic that Palestinian Arabs have - "if I don't get what I demand, then nobody gets anything."

That's a sure path to a successful state!

The Economics of Settlement (George Gilder)

A must read article at the American Spectator (thanks to all those who sent it in.) Excerpts:

The root cause of Middle Eastern turmoil, according to a broad consensus of the international media and the considered cerebrations of the deepest-thinking movie stars, is Israeli settlers in what are described as the "occupied territories" on the West Bank of the Jordan River. Even such celebrated and fervent supporters of Israel as Alan Dershowitz and Bernard-Henri Lévy put the settlers beyond the pale of their Zionist sympathies. Remove the settlers, according to these sage analyses of the scene, and the problems of the region become remediable at last.

Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute adds to these political concerns a coming environmental catastrophe, also presumably aggravated by the Israeli settlers and their hydrophilic irrigation projects. He sees the Middle East as severely threatened by the growth of population and the exhaustion of water resources. The Institute explains: "Since one ton of grain represents 1,000 tons of water, [importing grain] becomes the most efficient way to import water. Last year, Iran imported 7 million tons of wheat, eclipsing Japan to become the world's leading wheat importer. This year, Egypt is also projected to move ahead of Japan. The water required to produce the grain and other foodstuffs imported into [the region] last year was roughly equal to the annual flow of the Nile River."

Although these two concerns might seem unrelated, they converge in the history of Israel, created by several generations of settlers and constrained at every point by the dearth of water in a mostly desert land. In the mid-19th century, before the arrival of the first groups of Jewish settlers fleeing pogroms in Russia, Arabs living in what became the mandate territory of Palestine -- now Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza -- numbered between 200,000 and 300,000. Their population density and longevity resembled today's conditions in parched and depopulated Saharan Chad. Although Worldwatch might prefer to see the Middle East returned to these more earth-friendly, organic, and sustainable demographics, the fact that some 5.5 million Arabs now live in the former British Mandate, with a life expectancy of more than 70 years, is mainly attributable, for better or worse, to the work of those Jewish settlers.

...Many people imagine that the new and larger influx of Jewish settlers after World War II perpetrated an injustice on the Arabs. What they did, in fact, was to continue the heroic and ingenious pattern of development depicted by Lowdermilk in 1939. With the Arab population growing apace with the Jewish population in most neighborhoods, and indeed faster in some, there could not possibly have been any significant displacement. The demographic numbers discredit as simply mythological or mendacious all the literature of Palestinian grievance and eviction from the likes of Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim Rashid Khalidi, and the other divas of the naqba narrative.

By 1948, the Arab population in the Mandate area had grown to some 1.35 million, an increase of 60 percent since the 1930s, and up by a factor of seven since the arrival of the creative, far-seeing cohort of pioneering Jews from Russia in the 1880s. Mostly concentrated in neighborhoods abutting the Zionist settlements, this Arab population was the largest in the entire history of Palestine. Only the 1948 invasion by five Arab armies -- and a desperate and courageous Israeli self-defense -- drove out many of the Arabs, some 700,000. These Palestinian Arabs were evicted or urged to flee by Arab leaders in 1948 in a war that the Jews neither sought nor invited. But the creation of the State of Israel and its growing economy accelerated a renewed immigration into the area to today's level of some 5.5 million Arabs.

The only real Palestinian naqba came not in 1948 at the hands of Zionists, but rather in 1949, at the hands of foreign aid bureaucrats in the form of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). In a desire to compensate the Palestinians for their alleged victimization by the creation of the State of Israel, the international bureaucracies perpetrated and created a genuine and permanent victimization among the 1.4 million refugees who live in UNRWA's 59 camps and the millions more who reside in the surrounding ghettoes.

...The spurious ideology of Palestinian victimization by Israel blinds nearly all observers to the actual facts of economic life in the region. No one reading the current literature could have any idea that throughout most of the three roughly 20-year economic eras following 1948, the Palestinians continued to benefit heavily from Israeli enterprise and prospered mightily compared to Arabs in other countries in the region.

During the era of Israeli "occupation" that ran from after the war of 1967 to 1993, for example, the number of Arabs in the territories tripled to some 3 million, with the creation of some 261 new towns, a tripling of Arab per capita incomes, and a rise in life expectancy from 52 to 73 years. Meanwhile, the number of Israeli settlers in this area stripped of Jews by Jordan rose only to 250,000. Again, far from effecting any displacement of Arabs, the Jewish settlements enabled a huge increase in both the number and wealth of the Palestinian Arabs.

IHH is out of the flotilla (updated)

From YNet:

The Turkey-based IHH group, considered the driving force behind the Gaza flotilla announced Friday its ship the Mavi Marmara will not be taking part in the Strip-bound sail.

IHH Chairman Bolant Yilderim called a press conference and told reporters that "due to technical problems, the Mavi Marmara will not sail this time and we are deeply sorry for that."

The international vessel convoy, which currently consists of 10 ships, will sail to Gaza nonetheless, he added, saying that the fact that the sail will be devoid of the Marmara would negate the notion that the flotilla was an "Islamist idea by Turkey."

The planned flotilla has been hit by setbacks as organizers have been finding it hard to meet their goal in regards to the number of ships participating in the sail; as well as calls from the UN and the Turkish government to cancel or postpone the planned sail.

The IHH, which organized the first Gaza flotilla, is heavily involved in the second sail, alongside the "Free Gaza" Movement" and the "European Campaign." These three are joined by several smaller groups, which are trying to stage a united international front.

No doubt, the flotilla organizers can make up for it because they claim to have 500,000 volunteers who applied to be on the ships.

UPDATE: The flotilla organizers insist that IHH is still in the flotilla, even if the Mavi Marmara is not. (h/t israelinfo)