PLO closes UNRWA camps in Lebanon over COVID-19 fears, “pro-Palestinian activists” don’t really care

 

The PLO in Lebanon decided to seal off all the Palestinian “refugee” camps in that country after the discovery of four suspected cases of COVID-19 in the Burj al-Barajneh camp.

That camp is only one of a dozen camps in Lebanon that have been virtual prisons for Palestinians for decades.

Even though it is now been over two days since this closure, there is absolute silence from the “pro-Palestinian” crowd on social media about this. In fact, these activists are still politicizing the almost nonexistent problem of COVID-19 in Gaza, even though every single case there was quarantined and no one in the general population of Gaza has caught it.

By any measure, Palestinians in Lebanon are in worse shape than in Gaza. Their population density is far higher, they cannot build, they are not allowed to have many jobs, they are treated as enemies, and the Palestinians fleeing from Syria were forced into the already highly overcrowded camps because their grandparents happened to live in Palestine in 1948.

Yet these people who style themselves as caring about Palestinians largely ignore Lebanon. They claim to speak “truth to power” but will never criticize Lebanese abuse of their Palestinian “guests.”

Just like they won’t criticize Hamas for its role in the misery of Gazans.

The only Arabs they criticize are those that they can claim are aligned with Israel.

Anyone who desires that Palestinians remain stateless and miserable in Lebanon and elsewhere rather than accept Israel’s existence is not pro-Palestinian.

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The entire point of “return” is, and always has been, to destroy Israel (quotes)

I saw this at +972 Magazine today:


While the idea of “return” is presented as a humanitarian issue by Palestinians and NGOs, the Arab world has long recognized that it was a pretext for destroying Israel – and this remains true today.
Here are some historic quotes on the topic from research I did a number of years ago:
As early as October, 1949, Egypt’s foreign minister Muhammad Salah al-Din said, “…in demanding the return of the Palestinian refugees, the Arabs mean their return as masters, not slaves; or to put it quite clearly – the intention is the extermination of Israel.” [i]
Similarly, in 1960 Egypt’s Nasser said, “If the refugees return to Israel, Israel will cease to exist.” [ii]
In 1950, Lebanese weekly As Sayyad suggested that Arab states should recognize Israel in order to ensure the return of the refugees. That way, it added, “we should create a large Arab majority that would serve as the most effective means of reviving the Arab character of Palestine while forming a fifth column for the day of revenge and reckoning.” [iii]
In 1952, Sir Alexander Galloway, former head of UNRWA in Jordan, was quoted by Reverend Karl Baehr, Executive Secretary of the American Christian Palestine Committee, in front of a US Senate committee, as saying, “It is perfectly clear than the Arab nations do not want to solve the Arab refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront against the United Nations, and as a weapon against Israel....Arab leaders don't give a damn whether the refugees live or die."[iv]
Prime Minister of Lebanon Abdullah el-Yafi, stated in 1966, “The day on which the Arabs’ hope for the return of the refugees to Palestine is realized will be the day of Israel’s extermination.”[v]
The people who claim they care about “return” have an agenda which is the opposite of humanitarian. It is an agenda to destroy.
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[i] Egyptian Foreign Minister, Salah-el-Din, The Egyptian daily newspaper Al-Misri, Cairo (11 October 1949), quoted from N. Feinberg, Studies in International Law, with a Special Reference to the Arab-Israel Conflict (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Magnes Press, 1979) 506
[ii] Neue Zuercher Zeitung, September 1, 1960, quoted by Terence Prittie in “Curtis, M. Neyer, C. Waxman and A. Pollack (ed.),"The Palestinians: People, History, Politics," 1975.
[iii] “Israel Gives Plan on Arab Refugees,” New York Times, November 12, 1953, quoting an Israeli white paper.
[iv] Committee on Foreign Relations, Palestine Refugee Program, Hearings before the Subcommittee on the Near East and Africa of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Eighty-Third Congress, First Session on the Palestine Refugee Program, May 20, 21, and 25, 1953 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1953), p. 103. Quoted in "A Tale of Two Galloways: Notes on the Early History of UNRWA and Zionist Historiography," Alexander H. Joffe & Asaf Romirowsky, Middle Eastern Studies, Volume 46, Issue 5, 2010
[v] Abdullah el-Yafi, Prime Minister of Lebanon, the Lebanese daily newspaper El-Hayat, Beirut (29 April 1966), quoted from N. Feinberg, op. cit.

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Hezbollah says suicide bombers “reflect the sublime values of sacrifice and altruism.” Really.

 

Just in case you weren’t already thoroughly convinced that Hezbollah is a completely immoral and contemptible terror group, their English-language Al Manar has an article extolling the acts of 12 suicide bombers who attacked Israeli targets in Lebanon before 2000.

Hezbollah, who has been mistakenly viewed by the Israeli enemy and the West as a mere armed group, is an Islamic Jihadi party that refers to Islam teachings and values in devising its strategies and plans.

Sacrificing one’s soul for the sake of God, nation and oppressed people is praised in Islam as martyrdom. Hezbollah sacrificed 1281 martyrs in its fight to liberate the Lebanese South and Western Bekaa from the Israeli occupation.

The military confrontation with the Zionist enemy imposed on Hezbollah Resistance certain military strategies that prevent the Israelis from frustrating them. In this context, Hezbollah carried out 12 martyrdom bombing operations against the Israeli occupation posts, inflicting game-changing losses upon.

After describing these attacks, the article concludes:

The above-detailed martyrdom bombing operations, which reflect the sublime values of sacrifice and altruism, have dug deeply in the Israeli collective unconsciousness, changing all the Zionist false claims of possessing an invincible military power.

The EU still does not designate Hezbollah as a terror group, only its “military wing.” This would be considered unbelievable if we hadn’t already seen how easily Arab terrorists can bend Europeans to their will. by making various threats of how Europe acting morally would hurt Lebanon or other such nonsense.

A group that glorifies suicide bombers as “altrusitic” does not deserve any respect, and all the respect given to Hezbollah by the EU makes the EU that much more irrelevant.

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05/25 Links Pt2: The Torah Heard Round the World; Dear Europe – the Israelis are not your Jews; Roger Waters – getting a taste of his own medicine

From Ian:

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The Torah Heard Round the World

My synagogue is using the scrolls my grandfather once used as a military chaplain in WWII. Now, once again, his Torah brings comfort during a time of danger and uncertainty.

When our family moved to New York, we brought the Torah with us and loaned it to our new shul, the Park Avenue Synagogue, as our Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove instantly understood the significance of this family treasure.

And now the Torah is back in action during a crisis. When I saw Cantor Azi Schwartz holding my grandfather’s Torah snug to his chest, I was overwhelmed by emotions about how our tradition has the capacity to travel over time and space in a troubled world. He has incorporated this scroll into some of the online services that we watch in our virtual world, part of how he brings relief to all of us who are trying to stay healthy and be patient until this viral storm passes so we can return to normalcy. As he held that Torah, the cantor offered a small taste of what so many observant Jews dearly miss, the spiritual wonder of attending services on Friday night and Saturday morning as we connect with our congregational friends and take time away from the demands of the secular world to pray and learn.

And yet, I couldn’t also help feeling that my grandfather’s Torah needs to be returned to a physical home as soon as possible. While the Jewish community is rightly focused on making sure that public health guidelines are followed, we must be prepared, when this pandemic is over, to do everything possible to repair our social fabric, which includes the synagogue, church, and mosque. Jews and other places of social bonds—educational, cultural, and other nonprofit groups—will struggle to survive when this ends.

COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on the institutions that are so vital to the emotional health of our world—the places where people come together for common interests and experiences, the organizations that offer cultural education and celebration, and the physical religious rooms that help us achieve spiritual vitality. A new normal cannot exist without them. We can’t be virtual forever.

In the years ahead, we must do everything that is necessary to fix the broken spaces where Torahs like my grandfather’s are housed and where we come together as a people to worship. Just as my grandfather did almost 75 years ago, we will need to bring the Torahs back home, as soon as this war is over.

What a Difference a ‘J’ Makes

Not everyone welcomed the visibly distinctive insignia of the Jewish chaplain. Some Protestants, reported the American Israelite in November 1918, bristled at the notion that the Jews had an “emblem peculiar to themselves,” anxious lest they use the war “as a time for their own denominational propaganda work.” A number of American Jews, in turn, bristled at the use of Roman numerals rather than the letters of the Hebrew alphabet to designate the commandments. If, as representatives of the Jewish community claimed, the Ten Commandments was to the Jews (aka the “Hebrews”), what the cross was to Christians, why stop short of heralding it as a Jewish symbol, through and through?

Fear of desecration, of exposing the sacred Hebrew letters to the most frightful of wartime conditions, was one response; the difficulty of procuring Hebrew letters another. Left unsaid but implicit all the same: By WWI, American visual culture, which prized the Ten Commandments, commonly depicted them with Roman numerals, not Hebrew letters. (By then, the “Tablets of the Law” had become as much an American phenomenon as a Jewish one, but that’s another story.)

Though quelled at the time and for several decades thereafter, concern over the nomenclature by which the Ten Commandments was identified repeatedly surfaced. Writing more than 50 years later, in 1972, Rabbi Judah Nadich, General Eisenhower’s adviser on Jewish affairs, called the concern a “perennial” one, while Rabbi Aryeh Lev, director of the National Jewish Welfare Board’s Commission on Jewish Chaplaincy, across whose desk passed any number of suggestions—among them, replacing both the Hebrew letters and the Roman numerals with “short straight horizontal lines”—described it as “really an interesting matter.”

It would take another decade—a total of 65 years—before Hebrew lettering finally made its way onto the Jewish chaplain’s Ten Commandments insignia. In 1983, it became official.

The substitution of a “J” for an “H” and of the Hebrew alphabet for Roman numerals may not appear on anyone’s list of triumphant historical moments or victories. Perhaps they should. Gestures of inclusion and public recognition, these two visual declarations not only stabilized American Jewry’s footing, but also bolstered its confidence, its self-assertion, as a minority culture. By my reckoning, that qualifies as a victory.

📽 VIDEO: President Truman meets with Chaim Weizmann, President of the newly proclaimed State of Israel, at the White House #OnThisDay in 1948. https://t.co/PpC76dXDDL

— AIPAC (@AIPAC) May 25, 2020

Dear Europe – the Israelis are not your Jews

At some point, the people who run the European Union will have to get used to the idea that Israel is here to stay.

So far, it’s been a tough sell, mostly because old habits die hard.

Amid the flurry of denunciations against Israel, for even thinking about going ahead with sovereignty for parts of Judea and Samaria, most telling is this remark from Josep Borrell, EU’s High Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, as follows: “We strongly urge Israel to refrain from any unilateral decision that would lead to the annexation of any occupied Palestinian territory, and would be, as such, contrary to international law.”

Regarding international law, the high commissioner is highly mistaken, as we read here from the Gatestone Institute.

From time immemorial, or precisely the Revelation at Sinai, which the Sage Judah Halevi referred to as the defining moment of all world history, the land, all of it, belongs to the Jews, verified over and over again from Balfour, to the League of Nations, to the San Remo Conference, back to The Kuzari and ultimately to the Hebrew Bible.

It is written in parchment. It is written in stone. It is written in the DNA of every Jewish person, man, woman, and child.

So what’s troubling those European commissioners, high and low, particularly from France, and now even the Vatican?

Yes, France, still famous for the Roundup of Paris, which even amazed the Gestapo at how smartly the gendarmes rushed to the task.

Suddenly, the French were more efficient even than the Germans…and today, incidentally, Germany has also voiced “concern” about Israel’s possible move toward partial annexation.

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Antisemitism in Yemen 1910-1915

The American Jewish Yearbook has interesting information about Jews throughout the world since its inception.

In the yearbook covering 1909-1910, here are a few entries:

September 22. Jews forced to leave Yemen (Arabia) to avoid conversion to Mohammedanism.

DECEMBER 3. One hundred and fifty Jewish emigrants from Yemen arrive in Palestine; they are distributed among colonies of Rehoboth and Rishon le-Zion.

September (1910): Jews of Yemen protest against refusal to accept their testimony in courts.

May 3, 1912: Anti-Jewish disturbances in Yemen. Several Jews murdered

1913-14: JEWS OF THE YEMEN:—AUGUST. Government permits organization of judicial tribunals exclusively of Arabs; this action victimizes Jews who may be falsely accused, as testimony of two Arab witnesses suffices to secure condemnation.—Jew ill-treated and left half dead in roadway because he submitted successful bid when invited to exchange large sum of money for Government. Complaint of Jew unavailing.—Heads of community imprisoned for disobeying edict ordering them to clean streets, no matter what their social status. Representations to Governor of Sanaa, the representative of central Government, unavailing.— Minister of Interior declares that peremptory orders will be given to Military Governor of Sanaa to protect Jews of Yemen.— OCTOBER. Further cruelties of the Imam, spiritual head of Yemen, toward Jews reported. Jews denounced for alleged trading in intoxicating drinks promptly punished without investigation of the charges.—MARCH. The Imam accedes to request of Haham Bashi, that Alliance Israelite Universelle be permitted to establish a school at Sanaa in which Arabic, Hebrew, and a foreign language may be taught.—MAY 28. Haham Bashi receives reports from Sanaa that the Arabs have again attacked Jewish inhabitants.

  

 

 

This is how Arabs have treated Jews throughout the centuries. Nothing to do with Zionism.

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“Unilateral West Bank land grab”

 

 

 

Alan Solow, a member of the Executive Committee of Israel Policy Forum and former Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, wrote a blog in Times of Israel arguing that Israel should not extend sovereignty on parts of Judea and Samaria for this reason:

No solution should be imposed on anyone or by anyone in the Israeli-Palestinian arena.

While American Jewish consensus around Israel policy has not always been easy to attain, this sentiment has stood for decades as the one universally accepted principle undergirding the quest for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – that it must be reached through bilateral negotiations between the parties. This precept allowed Jewish leadership to strongly urge American administrations of both parties not to attempt to implement their own vision of how to resolve longstanding differences between the two sides. Despite expressions of expected or preferred outcomes over the years, every President has endorsed this concept. This principle also allowed American Jewish leadership to credibly oppose unilateral attempts by the Palestinian Authority to declare a state or to otherwise take action without consent to change the status of disputed territories.

There is a fatal flaw in this logic: Palestinians have been acting unilaterally for decades.

They have called themselves the State of Palestine. They have joined numerous international conventions without any desire to actually enforce their words.

They have built illegally in Area C, with support from the European Union, creating facts on the ground and literally engaging in a “land grab.”

And, perhaps most importantly, they have taken the de facto veto power that the international community has given them, using exactly this logic, to make peace far more distant than it appeared to be in 2000.  They’ve said “no” to every offer, not to negotiate but to wait for others to pressure Israel to give up more concessions without compromising their own intransigent, extremist positions.

Solow makes it sound like this status quo can go on forever:

The fact is that nobody is credibly threatening Israel’s control over major settlement blocs in the West Bank which are generally recognized as likely becoming Israeli territory as part of a final status agreement. Israel’s continued control of these Jewish population centers is, as a practical matter, uncontested. The only reason to acquiesce to Israel taking them unilaterally now is to abandon the position that solutions are to be negotiated, not imposed.

It can go on for a few years, but the situation is not frozen in amber. Palestinians will continue to build; they will continue to attempt to gain political legitimacy at Israel’s expense, they will continue to grow in population, they will continue to occasionally explode in violence.

Israel cannot play forever by these rules where Palestinians can do what they want and Israel has its hands tied by adhering to an artificial moral standard.  Continuing to wait for Palestinians to come to the table means that Palestinians can continue to act with impunity.

Extending sovereignty is not a land grab. It is the beginning of a disengagement. It is finally choosing borders. It is solving the demographic problem. It is staking a legal claim. It is sending a message that Palestinian intransigence will not be rewarded anymore. It is recognition that the world has changed since Oslo and Israel cannot be tied to an agreement that the Palestinians have abrogated since at least 2001.

Solow shouldn’t be warning Israel against doing what it must. He should be explaining to American Jewry why Israel must do it. And it is a serious failure in American Jewish leadership that he, and other leaders, cannot even figure this out for themselves.

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05/25 Links Pt1: Muslims themselves gave us the tools to disprove Palestinian lies ?; Israeli minister to Twitter: Remove Khamenei from your platform

From Ian:

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Muslims themselves gave us the tools to disprove Palestinian lies ?

Of all the Palestinian lies about the Temple Mount, the most dangerous is the false thinking being ‎created. In recent years, the Palestinians have been kneading the timeline of history as if it were ‎dough. They are writing a new historical story for Jerusalem: the Muslims were here first, while the ‎Jews – who have no ties whatsoever to the city and its holy sites – arrived after them, then ‎proceeded to steal, block off, and invent a story about the Mount and the Temple that sits there. ‎

For the past few years, Israel has opted to stay in its PR comfort zone. In the face of these mega-lies, it ‎chose to focus on the Palestinian ritual that goes along with the invented history and assigns Israel an ‎intention of destroying "Al-Aqsa" by means of an artificial earthquake and "throwing chemicals on the ‎foundations of the mosque," as well as horrific cartoons that show Jews as "Dr. Streimer" or as snakes ‎and octopuses wrapping themselves around the Dome of the Rock, stealing ice cream bars shaped like ‎Al-Aqsa with evil looks, or cutting off the top of the Dome of the Rock with a guillotine and rushing Al-‎Aqsa on D9 bulldozers to raze it. ‎

But none of these imaginings or works of art comes close to the seriousness of what Palestinian ‎leaders have been doing to their people's thinking for several years now: the "historical" statement ‎that Jewish ties to Jerusalem are based on falsehoods; that Jews have no true ties to Jerusalem; that ‎the Temple never stood on the Temple Mount; or that the Temple itself was only imaginary – "Al-‎Mazoom," as they call it. ‎

The immediate reaction to this false version of history is to turn to archaeology and well-established ‎history – hundreds of Jewish and Christian historical sources – to disprove the plié. But it seems that ‎isn't enough. Even the long list of prominent Muslim religious figures who for 1,300 years wrote ‎unhesitatingly about the Temple Mount as the location of the Jewish Temple makes no impression of ‎missions of Muslims. ‎

So we need something else – to delve into the history of the Mount. In the past few years the ‎research "tool belt" at our disposal has expanded, and we should use it. More and more academic ‎studies are showing that the Muslims, from the first time they visited the Mount, used Jews to find ‎their way around and that the Jews were the ones who taught Muslims about the Mount and where ‎its borders lie, as well as the boundaries of the Foundation Stone, and that the first Muslim ‎ceremonies at the Dome of the Rock bore a striking resemblance to Jewish ceremonies at the very ‎Temple whose existence the Muslims now deny. ‎‎

David Singer: PLO Opens Door to Jordan Returning to Judea and Samaria

Netanyahu had no compunction in calling out and exposing the continuing travesty of justice that these current protestations represented.

However the roadblock jamming any progress in resolving the conflictwas suddenly cleared when days later PLO President Mahmoud Abbas announced:
"The Israeli occupation authority, as of today, has to shoulder all responsibilities and obligations in front of the international community as an occupying power over the territory of the occupied state of Palestine, with all its consequences and repercussions based on international law and international humanitarian law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which holds the occupying power responsible for the protection of the civilian population under occupation and their property, criminalizes collective punishment, bans theft of resources, appropriation and annexation of land, bans forced transfer of the population of the occupied territory and bans transfer of the population of the occupying state (the colonialists) to the land it occupies, which all are grave violations and war crimes"

Stripped of the lies and false and deceptive claims contained in this statement that have formed part and parcel of the PLO’s propaganda arsenal since its formation in 1964 – Abbas’s message was clear: Abbas was now turning over responsibility for Judea and Samaria to Israel.

The PLO had never claimed “regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan” or “on the Gaza Strip” as article 24 of its founding 1964 Charter declared. Its activities were to be “on the national popular level in the liberational, organizational, political and financial fields”.

This PLO position only changed in 1968 after Jordan – having occupied Judea and Samaria between 1950 and 1967 driving out every Jew living there – lost that territory to Israel in the Six Day War. Gaining sovereignty in 100% of Judea and Samaria by the creation of another Arab State became the focus of the PLO from 1968.

President Trump’s peace plan offeringthe PLO possibly 70% of Judea and Samaria plus Gaza (see map below) has been rejected by the PLO.

Abbas – in turning over responsibility for Judea and Samaria to Israel – has opened the door to Jordan replacing the PLO as Israel’s negotiating partner.Successful negotiations between Jordan and Israel could see Jordan annexing part of Judea and Samaria, Jordanian citizenship being restored for the Arab residents as existed between 1950 and 1988 and a possible end to the Jewish-Arab conflict.

King Abdullah – expect a call from President Trump.

Are deep security ties between Israel and Jordan at risk? – analysis

Israel’s defense establishment understands the need to prevent a collapse of such ties, as the two countries not only have robust security coordination and intelligence sharing mechanism regarding the common threats. According to foreign reports, Jordan has allowed Israeli jets to use its airspace for its war-between-wars campaign in Syria.

The strategic depth provided by Jordan, which has not entered into any alliance with neighboring countries hostile to Israel, has kept Israel’s eastern and longest border the quietest and safest for 25 years.

Both Jordan and Israel understand that should security ties fail, not only will King Abdullah face instability at home, but the violence could spill over the border to Israel.

With a majority of Jordan’s citizens of Palestinian descent, Palestinian self-determination and maintaining the status quo of the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem are key aspects of public discourse in Amman and contribute to the cooling relationship between the neighboring countries.
In March, Jordanian Prime Minister Omar Razzaz told CNN that “today, we are at the lowest level in the relationship that has been since signing the peace treaty” and warned that the peace treaty itself was at risk.

Razzaz also denounced Israel’s alleged “violations of the sanctity of Muslim and Christian endowments in Jerusalem.”

While Netanyahu and Abdullah both recognize the need to keep the peace, domestic pressures in Jordan might make it difficult for the king to continue it at the low-profile level it currently stands.

That would not be good, for either side.

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Lebanese minister calls for extending COVID-19 lockdown–because otherwise the Zionists win

 

Lebanese interior minister Mohammad Fahmi, noting an increase in coronavirus cases in Lebanon, called for a “total lockdown” on the country.

But to make his point, he didn’t say this this was for the safety of the Lebanese people. He didn’t say that he wanted to flatten any curves. 

No, this minister said that by not adhering to a lockdown, Lebanese society would be hurt – which is just what the Israelis want to see.

He explained that "For me , there is no such thing as Israel; there is something called the Zionist entity. It intends  that our society crumbles from within. This is a particular interest of the enemy of our society, and our enemy is clear. If our society does not to abide by public safety, this is in the interest of the Israeli enemy.”

I fully expect an opposition politician, who wants lockdown restrictions lifted, to say that failing to do so would wreck the Lebanese economy, which is exactly what the Zionists want.

It is a strange obsession that Arabs still have with Israel: blaming Israel for everything that is wrong in their own society, labeling their political enemies as “Zionist” and using the word Israel the way some parents use the boogeyman to scare kids into doing what they want.

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Pressure builds to stop EU funds to Palestinian NGOs with terror ties

Here is a translation from a German article by Bild about how the EU is starting to wake up to the consequences of funding NGOs with terror ties.

 

Terror with EU tax money?

The EU appears to continue to fund non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the Palestinian Territories where terrorists are employed. An EU representative also assured the Palestinian NGOs that a new EU counter-terrorism clause would not change this. There is massive criticism from Israel about this practice.

Background

On August 23, a cell of the PFLP terrorist group carried out an explosive attack and murdered the teenage girl Rina Shnerb (17), her father and brother were seriously injured.

After Israeli security forces smashed the terror network, the investigators found that several of the arrested worked for Palestinian NGOs, some of them in senior positions. The organizations are funded by the EU.

Samer Arbid, the leader of the PFLP terror cell, worked for several Palestinian NGOs that received EU funds - as accountants and finance directors.

New EU anti-terrorism guidelines

At the beginning of December 2019, the EU tied the funding of NGOs worldwide to a new clause: Funded NGOs would have to ensure that their employees or organizers of workshops are not on the EU terror list.

Palestinian NGOs then protested sharply against the clause: Hamas, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the PFLP are on the EU terror list. It is unclear how many of their members, sympathizers and supporters are employed by Palestinian NGOs and thereby receive EU funds.

The PNGO, the umbrella organization for Palestinian NGOs, appeared to be seriously concerned that millions of euros could not be paid from the EU and called on the EU to remove the anti-terror clause for the Palestinian organizations.

In any case, the PNGO said, the Palestinian groups on the EU terror list are not terror groups, but political organizations and "resistance groups" whose legal status cannot be determined by an EU document.

According to the umbrella organization PNGO, the EU must withdraw its "unjust conditions" for the support of the Palestinian NGOs. Under these conditions, the Palestinian NGOs should not accept funding agreements with the EU. Further steps will be taken at local and international level against the "criminalization" of the Palestinian struggle.

EU buckled against the Palestinians

The story could actually end here: After all, the EU, as a generous donor, can determine the conditions under which it distributes the millions of taxpayers' money - compliance with the anti-terrorism guidelines should be a basic requirement.

But instead of pointing out that the Palestinian NGOs should either stay away from terrorist groups or look for new sponsors, the EU apparently met the Palestinian demands. Several EU representatives assured the PNGO that nothing would change in the current funding practice, as the organization NGO Monitor documented.

 

On March 30, Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff, EU representative in the Palestinian Territories, said in an official letter to the umbrella organization PNGO: The EU would continue to support Palestinian NGOs as before. Because on the EU sanctions list, according to the EU representative, there are no Palestinian individuals, only terrorist groups. However, as long as these individuals were not on the EU sanctions list with their “exact first and last name and confirmed identity”, they would not be excluded from EU funding, even if they belong to or support terrorist groups.

That letter from the EU representative to PNGO is likely to have made a board member of the umbrella organization particularly happy. Walid Hanatsheh is also the finance director of the NGO "Health Work Committees", so it manages the donations from the EU. In addition, Hanatsheh is a senior member of the PFLP. In October 2019, he was arrested by Israeli security forces - he was charged with commanding the Samer Arbid terror cell that murdered teenage girl Rina Shnerb in August.
However, since Hanatsheh is not on the EU sanctions list as an individual, there would still be nothing standing in the way of funding with EU funds. On April 30, NGO Monitor addressed an open letter to EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen (61, CDU) and asked that the EU actually implement its own counterterrorism clause.

In the meantime, several EU parliamentarians have made inquiries to check the practice of the award. Olivér Várhelyi, European Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighborhood Policy, said he had asked the heads of the EU delegations in Tel Aviv and the West Bank, as well as the Gaza Strip, to look closely at whom EU funds were paid out to.

Daniel Schwammenthal, director of the American Jewish Committee's AJC Transatlantic Institute in Brussels, demands consequences from BILD: "These NGOs have to repay European taxpayers' money immediately and are on a black list." who received EU funds. "The current EU security measures have not worked here, we need improvements to rule out such networks with terrorists in the future."

(h/t EBoZ)

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80% of Palestinians have home internet, nearly everyone has a smartphone

 

 

The Palestinian Ministry of Communication released some statistics that show that Palestinians are among the better connected people of the world.

Some 4.2 million have mobile phones–that’s equivalent to 85% of the total population. The survey, though, said that some 75% of all above the age of 10 have their own mobile phone, while some 87% of all above 10 use a mobile phone, presumably the family phone.

About 80% of Palestinian families have internet access at home.86% of those aged 10 and above use social networks, the number reaching 90% in the West Bank.

These are not exactly third-world numbers, here.

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EoZTV: Interview with Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz on their book “The War of Return”

 

This was a good, informative interview about the real goals of the mythical Palestinian “right of return” and what can be done about it now.

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05/24 Links: Undermining the International Criminal Court; Suddenly, HRW Discovers Antisemitism; UAE activists rail against Palestinians for rejecting medical supplies

From Ian:

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Amb. Alan Baker: Undermining the International Criminal Court

As early as the late 1950s, following the Holocaust of the Jewish People by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, Israel was one of the founding fathers of the post-Second World War vision of a permanent international criminal tribunal.

The vision was to establish a juridical body to adjudge the “most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole.” As such, from the early 1950s and up to the adoption of the International Criminal Court’s Statute at the Rome Conference in 1998, Israel took an active and central part in the process of negotiating and drafting the court’s founding documents.

The preambular provisions of the Statute indeed stressed the noble and solemn determination of the States parties “for the sake of present and future generations, to establish an independent, permanent international Criminal Court.”

The very nature and purpose of such a central, independent and vital juridical body to adjudge the most serious crimes of international concern would imply that such a body would be completely independent of pressures and influence, and immune from politicization. One might have assumed that the international community would not permit any attempt to prejudice the Court’s integrity, credibility and authority through political abuse and manipulation.

However, for several years, the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has been deluged with complaints by the Palestinian leadership, purporting to represent a non-existent “State of Palestine.” Such a huge volume of complaints are part of the ongoing Palestinian attempts to delegitimize the State of Israel in the institutions of the international community, including the ICC, through the cynical abuse and manipulation of those institutions. Download pdf

StandWithUs: The Jew Always Fits The Crime

WATCH: Antisemites will always find a rationale for their particular brand of Jew-hatred, but none of their explanations hold up. Yet throughout history, people who want to marginalize and demonize Jews continue to find ways to make sure that the Jew always “fits the crime.”

Suddenly, Human Rights Watch Discovers Antisemitism

In essence, while HRW understands that antisemitism is a core element of the extreme right’s worldview, it sees its appearance in other contexts as a marginal aberration. In a May 2019 briefing that purported to explain the “wrong way to combat antisemitism,” HRW analyst Wenzel Michalski took to task a vast swathe of the German parliament — from the left-wing Greens to the conservative Christian Social Union — for agreeing on a resolution that deemed the movement to boycott Israel as antisemitic.

“In Germany, the term ‘boycott’ evokes memories of the boycott of Jewish-owned shops in the 1930s,” wrote Michalski. “To equate that dark chapter with boycotts of Israel over its rights abuses is to trivialize our history. Activists worldwide use boycotts to challenge rights abuses and seek political change. Boycotts played key roles in the US struggle for African-American rights and in international campaigns against apartheid in South Africa and atrocities in Darfur.”

Michalski’s overarching argument — that a small number of antisemites muttering darkly about “Zionists” should not sully the boycott movement’s honorable goal of securing independence for the Palestinians — exemplifies the denial among progressives in Europe and the United States that the Palestine solidarity movement is itself an incubator of antisemitism. Nowhere does Michalski recognize what the movement to boycott Israel has no problem recognizing: that subjecting Israel and its people to isolation is a necessary condition of bringing about the Jewish state’s replacement with a unitary State of Palestine, in which Jews would, at best, revert to being a religious minority ruled by others.

In the minds of most Jews (and quite a few non-Jews as well), promoting the elimination of the world’s only Jewish state as a just solution to the Palestinian issue is unquestionably antisemitic. Now in its second decade of existence, the BDS movement has been a key contributor to the antisemitic atmosphere in Europe — specifically, by portraying Jews as oppressors and violators of human rights, it helped remove the taboo on blatant antisemitic rhetoric in society more generally.

I don’t believe that HRW’s inability, or refusal, to grasp the diverse nature of modern antisemitism is a reason to shun its solidarity in combating the far-right. But as long as HRW remains blind towards these other forms of Jew-hatred, its solidarity will only run skin-deep — and no more.

How the EU skirted the ban on funding terrorist groups

A letter sent by a representative of the European Union to the Palestinian Authority, which includes a promise to find a way around new EU instructions that prohibit the transfer of any financial aid to civil groups that are directly or indirectly linked to terrorism has aroused strong criticism in Israel as well as the EU.

On March 30, German diplomat Sven Kuhn von Burgsdorff sent the letter to the umbrella organization that represents Palestinian civil groups, announcing continued funding for their activities, even if their members include individuals who are linked to terrorist groups.

The main paragraph in contention states: "It is understood that a natural person affiliated to, sympathizing with, or supporting any of the groups or entities mentioned in the EU restrictive list is not excluded from benefiting from EU-funded activities unless his/her exact name and surname (confirming his/her identity) corresponds to any of the natural persons on the EU restrictive lists."

After the letter was made public, members of the EU Parliament have demanded an investigation into the EU representatives in the PA for allegedly violating EU policy. The parliament wants to determine whether the EU Commission knew about the step he was taking.

Now the American Jewish Committee's Transatlantic Institute in Brussels has revealed that Von Burgsdorff 's letter was preceded by two other similar commitments from senior EU functionaries to the Palestinians, which would appear to indicate a consistent policy of skirting the ban on funding organizations with ties to terrorism, rather than a rogue move by one official.

According to the American Jewish Committee, a few days after the EU adopted the ban on funding groups whose members and/or activity is linked to terrorism, Von Burgsdorff 's predecessor, Thomas Nicholson, promised Palestinian groups that the new regulation did not apply to them.

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