While the Gaza-Egypt border was open last week, senior Hizballah official Kais Obeid flew from Beirut to Egypt where he met in El Arish in northern Sinai with leaders of Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades from Gaza, a Palestinian news agency reported.
Obeid is considered by the Israeli security services as responsible for the group's operations in the territories; he was directly involved in kidnapping IDF officer Elhanan Tannenbaum.">Israel News - Daily News Alert from Israel: "While the Gaza-Egypt border was open last week, senior Hizballah official Kais Obeid flew from Beirut to Egypt where he met in El Arish in northern Sinai with leaders of Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades from Gaza, a Palestinian news agency reported.
Obeid is considered by the Israeli security services as responsible for the group's operations in the territories; he was directly involved in kidnapping IDF officer Elhanan Tannenbaum.
More evidence of the direction Gaza is going, despite the glowing reviews from wishful thinkers.
One of the favorite Arab games in trying to destroy Israel is starting again.
NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters) - Hamas could one day amend a charter calling for the destruction of Israel and hold negotiations with the Jewish state, a political leader of the Islamic militant group in the West Bank said.
"The charter is not the Koran," Mohammed Ghazal told Reuters in an interview in Nablus on Tuesday.
"Historically, we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now about reality, about political solutions ... The realities are different."
The unprecedented comments by Mohammed Ghazal clashed with recent pronouncements of more senior Hamas officials in Gaza.
But they reflected an apparent shift in Hamas toward the political mainstream and to winning greater world acceptance in the run-up to Palestinian parliamentary elections and after Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip.
Here's the game:
Kill Jews. The more, the better. Loudly advocate terror, proudly.
While killing Jews, have a few "leaders" make statements that don't sound quite as genocidal as their true intent. Put them in jackets and ties. Trim their beards. The best ones are doctors - always a nice touch.
Look at all those microphones! All that media attention just for saying what they want to hear!
Have the world start to recognize and reward the meaningless, slightly less terroristic statements.
Ensure that there are still groups that still explicitly call for the genocide of Jews and worldwide terror, so you can look better by comparison.
Do a few more symbolic gestures with no substance whatsoever to solidify your newfound status as a "realist."
Never, ever criticize the "more radical" groups. They might believe you and then kill you.
Bask in your new political power, achieved with no real concessions whatsoever.
Get money from gullible Europeans and others aimed at encouraging "moderate voices" and dutifully send the money to your terrorist friends.
It worked (and is still working) for the PLO, and for a while it was working well for Hamas (remember it's "political wing" and "military wing" that the world believed was separate?) Now Hamas is playing the same game again, a terrorist implementation of "good cop, bad cop" where the Western world is playing its part to the hilt.
Using these methods, Holocaust deniers can become "president," suicide bombers can be heroes, children can be taught to hate an entire religion, women can be subjugated, lies can become the official language of the "government," agreements never need to be honored, and you can stil rest assured that the world pressure will not be on you, but on the people you want to destroy. Because you are now moderate, and the "dangerous extremists" are the Jewish teenagers who dare to wear the color orange.
This article from Egypt is interesting from a couple of angles.
It shows how Israel's existence is still not accepted, and never will be accepted, by religious leaders of Israel's "peace partner."
It also shows how the famous Al Azhar university, possibly the most influential Muslim institution in the world, will change its religious rulings to be in sync with the Egyptian government. (Read the entire article for more examples of that; this is just the beginning.)
Last week's Israeli withdrawal from Gaza appears to have received the approval of the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, who was quick to rule that normalisation with Israel was religiously acceptable.
"Islam does not prohibit normalisation with other countries, especially Israel, as long as this normalisation is in non- religious domains and serves some worldly interests," Tantawi told a gathering at a festival held to mark the national day of Al-Sharqiya governorate.
Tantawi's statement immediately provoked heated debate inside and outside the Sunni world's most prestigious seat of Islamic learning.
Prominent Palestinian Islamic scholar Sheikh Hamed Al-Beitawi, who is also head of the Palestinian Scholars League (PSL), was quick to denounce the fatwa on the grounds that it "greatly serves the Israeli occupation, which is unacceptable in Islam," and urged the Grand Imam to retract it.
"It is obvious that the fatwa was issued following increased American and Israeli pressure on Arab leaders who already have relations with the Zionist state," El-Beitawi said in a PSL statement. He condemned the fatwa as contradictory to Islamic tenets "because it is the religious duty of all Muslims to help their brothers in driving the enemy out of their lands."
Tantawi's ruling seems to have created rifts within Al-Azhar where many scholars criticised the edict, saying it only reflected the personal opinion of the Grand Imam and not Al-Azhar as an institution.
Sayed Khodeir, former head of the research and translation section at the Islamic Research Academy (IRA), said Tantawi's ruling "was political rather than religious. "It is religiously correct to normalise relations with a country you have peace with but not when this country is usurping Muslim lands and killing Muslim brothers and children," Khodeir explained, saying it would perhaps be in the interest of Egypt to have peace and economic ties with Israel but from a religious viewpoint. "Those who don't care about the affairs of their Muslim brothers do not actually belong to them," Khodeir said.
"As Muslims we consider ourselves in a state of conflict with Israel so long as it insists on occupying Muslim lands, desecrating Al-Aqsa Mosque and Islamic shrines and massacring Muslims," Khodeir said. "Egypt cannot be regarded as separate from what is going on in neighbouring Palestinian lands."
Prominent Al-Azhar scholar Abdel-Azim El-Mataani added that normalising relations with Israel "is not religiously -- or even logically -- acceptable at this particular time when it is using all sorts of aggression and tyranny against Muslims and posing a threat to Arab national security."
El-Mataani said the IRA had formerly issued an edict condemning normalisation with Israel. Former IRA member Sheikh Ali Abul-Hassan had previously issued a fatwa forbidding an Israeli judo team from playing in Egypt or any other Arab and Muslim country. He described such an invitation as an acceptance of what Israel has done and is still doing to Muslims, including usurping land, money and honour.
"This IRA fatwa sounds more logical because we should never accept the Israeli humiliation of Arab and Muslim nations," El-Mataani said.
It doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that Israel's very existence, no matter how much land is given to Arabs, is a major affront to Islam as interpreted by most "scholars."
The US and the EU are falling over themselves to give more money to the PA.
Secretary Rice is a little uneasy over the PA's foot-dragging on disarming Fatah, but not enough to actually stop sending them more money:
"Now, I think it would be a good start for the Palestinians, by the way, if they would disarm the militias of Fatah. That would be a good start. They have a roadmap obligation to disarm terrorist organizations and militias. But as a starting point, because I understand that there are complications with Hamas and there are questions about how capable they would be of actually insisting on disarmament of Hamas."
The Palestinian Authority on Wednesday rejected an appeal from the Quartet to dismantle armed militias and called on the international community to stop meddling in the Palestinians' internal affairs.
Ministers of the Quartet – the United States, the United Nations, Russia and the European Union – said in a joint statement Tuesday that following Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip, Palestinians needed to "dismantle terrorist capabilities and infrastructures."
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the appeal, saying the Palestinians knew how to handle their own affairs.
Hani al-Hassan, a former interior minister in the Palestinian Authority, escaped an assassination attempt on his life Tuesday night when a group of masked men fired several shots at him during a visit to Nablus.
Hassan, who is a member of the Fatah central committee, was not hurt. Sources in the city said the assailants belonged to Fatah's armed wing, Aksa Martyrs Brigades.
The Aksa Martyrs Brigades have issued several threats against Hassan in the past, accusing him of suspending their salaries when he served as interior minister under Yasser Arafat.
Isn't this interesting? Members of the terror group are angry because their salaries were suspended by the PA interior minister?
Maybe I'm crazy, but this seems to imply to me that there is still a relatively consistent funding source directly from the PA to the Fatah terrorists that neither Abbas nor Condi are bothering to address in public. So many "observers" are supposedly watching how the PA is spending its money and no one is uncovering the fact that terrorists are still getting funding straight from the PA?
How many stories have we read that mentioned how terrible the conditions are in Gaza, how overpopulated and destitute it is, how Arabs who live there are in such desperate straits that they have no choice but to turn to terror?
Evidently, Egyptians have a much different picture of Gaza.
Many Palestinian men who flocked into Egypt after the IDF evacuated the Philadelphi corridor have seized the opportunity to search for brides. Palestinian sources estimated on Tuesday that at least 100 Egyptian brides were smuggled into the Gaza Strip in the past week.
One of the brides, who identified herself as Samira, said she agreed to marry the man she met only hours earlier "because this was an opportunity that should not be missed." Samira, 28, lived with her family in Al-Arish.
"In Egypt, it's very difficult for a woman my age to get married because I'm considered too old," she said. "Moreover, the economic situation in Egypt is not as good as in the Gaza Strip."
Another bride from Al-Arish said that she always been dreaming of marrying a Palestinian. "Palestinian men are better than Egyptian men," the 27-year-old said. "They know how to look after their wives and provide for them a decent living."
So it appears that the horrible consitions that Israel forced Gazans to live in is preferable to the everyday conditions of the leading "moderate" Arab country
Meanwhile, Reuters publishes a bald faced lie about Gaza to add to the myth of how unbearable it is to live there:
Palestinians would build 3,000 homes for poor families in southern Gaza at Morag, once a stronghold of settler resistance to the Israeli pullout that Washington praised as a potential spur to renewed peacemaking.
The remainder of the housing will be erected elsewhere across the coastal Gaza Strip, the most densely populated place on earth and home to 1.4 million Palestinians.
The destroyed synagogue in the evacuated Gaza settlement of Netzarim is expected to be converted into a temporary Hamas museum in the next few days.
On Saturday members of Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades , Hamas’ military wing, plan to set up an exhibit of the terror group’s “military industry” in what used to be a synagogue.
The exhibit is set to be on display for three days, and will be open to the public from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m.
The group said in a statement that “all of the tools used by Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades to abolish the Gaza occupation will be on display.”
Hamas promises that visitors will be able to see all of the weapons, “from stones to instruments used in suicide attacks and the ‘tunnel war.’” Missiles and rockets will also be on display, the groups said.
One of the many racist "news" sources indexed by Google News is Jihad Unspun, a Canadian website that unapologetically supports terror. It is always nice to check in with this site once in a while to see what many Muslims really think, not filtered by the smokescreens eretced by CAIR or similar groups.
In the middle of an incoherent article that seems to support Al Qaeda's declaration of war against Shiites comes this beauty:
Muslims as a whole have a hard time coming to grips with the fact that Muslims carried out 911 or 7/7 for that matter. In the West, the Muslims blame the CIA and in the East they blame Mossad. This blame mentality is a means in which they can distance themselves from the Mujahideen and continue to live in a make believe world that the Muslims are victims who have something to prove to the Kufr who will ultimately accept them. In addition to the fact that this blame game gives both intelligence agencies way more credit than they are due, it speaks to the very heart of the problem within the Muslim Ummah which is that most do not know that the Muslim faith is based on “justice” not peace and that Muslims have been systematically targeted in the roots of this current conflict for over a century. Saying “La Illaha Illalah” is not a pledge of peace but of obedience. And when the Mujahideen rise to defend the Ummah as required, the weak Muslims apologize for it!....Muslims will never live peacefully with the Kufr unless we abandon our religion or alternately remove them from our lands.
Brussels - The European Union on Monday announced an increase in aid for the Palestinians this year, saying help is crucial to maintain the peace momentum triggered by Israel's withdrawal from Gaza.
The European Commission, executive arm of the EU which has long been the biggest aid contributor to the Palestinians, (not any Arab country! -EoZ) said it will provide some €280m in aid, bigger than the €250m previously announced.
"Only Israel and Palestine can make peace, but Europe is playing its part in the international quartet to create the environment in which peace can take root," said EU external relations commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner.
'We are taking very practical action to regenerate Gaza, and help prepare the Palestinians for statehood,' she said.
"Having led the way in support for reform efforts in the Palestinian Authority, we are now helping to lay the foundations for a viable Palestinian economy."
And look how successful their previous outlays of money have been!
In the wake of Israel's seeming diplomatic victories that accompanied the Gaza withdrawal, notably the overtures from Pakistan, it is interesting to see how isolated some Arabs are feeling from their Muslim counterparts.
In this funny screed published in the "Arab American News", Ramzy Baroud writes an article titled "The risks of normalizing relations with Israel." As part of his "historical overview" showing the supposed centrality of Palestine to Arab thinking, he offers this whopper:
Israel exploited the mostly sentimental relationship Arabs and Muslims held toward Palestine. While the tangible and perpetual conflict was in fact taking place between Israel, a newly forged entity with further colonial ambitions, and a fragmented and displaced Palestinian refugee population, Israel labored to elate a different interpretation, that of a tiny little country struggling for survival amongst hordes of hostile Arabs and Muslims, who were up in arms to erase this little stretch of land from the face of the earth. Considering the political and military positioning of most Arab and Muslim countries, the Israeli claim is almost comical.
One would almost think that the wars in 1948, 1967, and 1973 initiated by Arab countries against Israel never happened!
But the fact that articles like this are even being written betrays the nervousness that is rippling through the Arab world since Musharraf made his overtures to Israel, and especially since he shook hands with Sharon last week.
How much of these efforts are honest reappraisals from the Muslim world of Israel, and how much is the result of diplomatic arm-twisting by the US, is unclear. Equally unclear is whether the apparent diplomatic gains offset the problems with the Gaza withdrawal. But it is fun to watch the Arabs squirm as it becomes more apparent that their unified front of Muslim anti-Israelism is crumbling, and that their pretense of solidarity with Palestinian Arabs has shown no solid results over the decades.
by Alastair Gordon, President, Canadian Coalition for Democracies Monday, September 19, 2005
Toronto, Canada - Saturday, 17 September 2005 - On September 15, Prime Minister Paul Martin announced from New York that Canada will give another $24.5 million to the Palestinian Authority (PA). This past May, Mr. Martin announced $12.2 million in aid during the visit to Canada of PA President Mahmoud Abbas, bringing the total Canadian aid to the Palestinians to $310 million since 1993.
“President Abbas came to office promising (1) to disarm Palestinian militants, (2) to end incitement in schools and media, and (3) to end glorification of suicide bombing,” said Alastair Gordon, President of the Canadian Coalition for Democracies (CCD). “On that understanding, Prime Minister Martin promised another $12.2 million in May of this year.'
Since receiving Canadian tax dollars, President Abbas has reneged on all his commitments. Specifically, (1) PA Foreign Minister Nasser al-Kidwa publicly declared in June that the PA will not disarm Hamas and other terrorist groups under its jurisdiction; (2) Not a single textbook denying the existence of Israel and preaching the destruction of “the Zionist entity” has been removed or revised; and (3) Abbas himself, speaking to a group of high school students and educators in Gaza, glorified suicide bombing when he declared, “What has been achieved here [in Gaza] is due to the martyrs.”
“When money is given on the understanding that certain commitments to peace will be undertaken, the open declaration by the recipient that those commitments will not he honoured should mean, at a minimum, that funding would stop,” said Gordon. “Instead, our Prime Minister rewards bad faith with another $24.5 million from Canadian taxpayers.”
“It is not enough to pretend that the money is allocated to specific projects, because money is fungible,” added Gordon. “If Canadians are paying to build a highway, those funds are now freed up for war against Israel, in keeping with the PA’s constitutional governing charter and repeated declarations by PA spokespeople.”
On behalf of Canadians, CCD is urging Paul Martin to inform President Abbas that he will receive no more Canadian funding until he meets his commitments. Canadians expect that the Palestinian Charter will finally be amended to remove Article 9 that declares “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine”, Article 20 that states “Jews [do not] constitute a single nation with an identity of its own”, and other articles that call for the destruction of Israel through violence (See PLO Charter below).
“The constitutional Charter of the PA is available on the web for Paul Martin to read,” concluded Gordon. “Instead, our Prime Minister has chosen to purchase international approval with the blood of Israelis, while refusing to tell Canadians what benefit has been derived from nearly one third of a billion tax dollars paid to Arafat and Abbas.”
Palestinian Authority policemen went on a rampage in Nablus on Saturday night, setting a car and a house on fire and shooting indiscriminately in one of the city's main squares.
The policemen were protesting against the killing of one of their colleagues, Khalil Kharmah, by a security officer from the PA's National Security Forces. Kharmah, 35, was shot to death while he was sitting inside a police station. The motive for the killing was unknown.
Following the incident, scores of policemen torched the house and car of the assailant. Later, they drove through the center of the city, shooting into the air and burning tires, forcing shopkeepers to close their businesses.
NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip (AFP) - Once the epitome of high-tech and worth millions in desperately needed trade, the greenhouses of Gaza have been stripped bare by their former Jewish owners and pillaged by the Palestinians.
Fitted out with sophisticated, computer-programmed irrigation systems, rich New York Jews forked out 14 million dollars to buy the hothouses from former Israeli settlers and donate them to the Palestinians.
Under the deal negotiated by James Wolfensohn, the international special envoy for the pullout, the glass houses and their annual crops of 75 million dollars, were to be handed over in good state to the Palestinian Authority
But pillagers, taking advantage of the chaos reigning over some evacuated settlements in the days since Israel left and ceded control of Gaza to the Palestinians, made a bee-line for greenhouses seen as gold dust.
According to Palestinian authorities, who have since ordered police and civilians to stop the ransacking of money-making structures so crucial to the future of impoverished Gaza, around 800 of the 4,000 greenhouses are unusable.
"Repairs cost 10,000 dollars per greenhouse," said Osama al-Farra, mayor of the closest Palestinian town, Khan Yunis.
"Part of the electrical circuits, irrigators and computers were taken by settlers, the rest by looters," he said.
Taking a quick tour of the ruins of the largest Jewish settlement bloc, Gush Katif, is enough to ascertain that if most of the greenhouses' metal frames are still in place, they are cavernous shells.
Electricity sub-stations have been gouged open and their wires yanked out, impossible to know whether it's the handiwork of settlers or looters.
Few greenhouses have even a pipe left as ripped tarpaulin flaps in the wind.
Next to one, a peasant from near Gaza City and three of his cousins bundle water pipes and tarpaulin into a pick-up van.
"An Israeli tank destroyed our farm," Hani offers by way of excuse.
"The Palestinian Authority talks but does nothing. The intifada ruined us: with this we can build again," he adds.
Outside Neve Dekalim, once the largest Jewish settlement in Gaza, Abdelaziz Ali Otman, 53, and colleagues drink tea. For 20 years they were employed in the enclave by a wealthy Jewish settler.
"It was us who did everything here so we know how to take care of it!" According to him, some owners stopped watering flowers, fruits and vegetables two months before the withdrawal, others carried on until the last day.
Otman and five colleagues were sitting down, unarmed, to protect the hundreds of hectares and put off looters. One civilian car skidded in front of them: "Guys, guys, come quickly, some lads are cutting the fence!"
Palestinian forces are now installed outside most of the greenhouses, but that doesn't stop the looters from continuing to carve out treasures.
Three pillagers were slicing through the fence when a police patrol orders them off the premises.
Suddenly a guard comes out from behind the bushes. Carrying pliers, he was helping the looters.
Where to begin?
AFP explicitly blames Jews for some of the equipment missing from Gaza without the slightest fact to back it up.
AFP twice refers to Jews as "rich" or "wealthy". While in the case of the stupid American Jews who decided to throw away millions on Palestinians, they were in fact rich, the story could have easily said "by members of the American Jewish community" rather than bring up the stereotype of influential New York Jews. And what purpose is served by calling the Gaza greenhouse owner "wealthy" if not to again promote a stereotype?
If it costs $10,000 to fix each of 800 greenhouses, that means that out of the $14 million gift, $8 million is already wasted. It also means that the true value of the greenhouses far exceeded $14 million (especially if the annual crop is $75 million) - a fact never mentioned in the media.
Palestinian "police" joining in the looting is always a nice touch to any story from the territories!
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".
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!
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.
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.
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."
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.
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