US threatens to cut annual Egyptian bribe

[#juan]

At one time, Lebanon Syria and Palestine were all part of the same country. Europeans sliced up the Ottoman empire after WW I. You argument is like saying that if Quebec separated from Canada, anyone who owned land in Quebec but did not live in Quebec, looses ownership and anyone living on land owned by non-Quebecers also have no right to continue living in Quebec. So they would be deported to a refugee camps on Quebec's borders to make for Francophones coming from all over the world. Pretty screwed up reasoning.

Besides that, it ignores the fact that most Palestinians owned their own homes, business and farms and were driven off the land anyway.

The absolute injustice of the creation of Israel is something that will breed hatred for centuries. I don't know what the answer is...........or even if there is an answer.

 

[Zzarchov]

Thats a faulty example Earth as One.

1.) Arabs were never part of the Ottoman Empire, they were subjects of it. And unhappy ones at that, THEY carved up the Ottoman Empire from the Inside out to support European powers. Thats WWI history and a big part of Arab Nationalism, their victory over the Ottoman Turks (also Europeans, hint: European does not mean Christian)

2.) They still didn't own the land, and they didn't own the land because they chose not to for reasons of nothing but greed. That backfired, someone else bought the land.

You can blame Israel, but they just bought land for sale. It wouldn't have been for sale if the Palestinians had just said "we own this land, and we are prepared to pay taxes on it".

They didn't, so they got evicted. This is the same laws that apply IN EVERY NATION ON EARTH. Its like claiming your a victim of discrimination if your landlord kicks you out because you refuse to pay rent. Anyone who doesn't pay rent gets evicted.

Quit whining, learn your lesson. This isn't a "Jewish Hypocrisy" , they refused to claim ownership of the land when it was a Muslim Empire.

So they weren't born on the land, their parents didn't own the land, and their grandparents when offered the land for free, refused.

They have no claim on any Israeli land other than wanting it retroactively.

 

[Just the Facts]

The absolute injustice of the creation of Israel is something that will breed hatred for centuries. I don't know what the answer is...........or even if there is an answer.

Oh please with the melodrama. :roll::smile:

The answer is in plain sight. It's the answer that was implemented by the overwhelming majority of displaced persons in the 20th century. There were millions of them.

It's called get over yourself and move on. It's called value your children's lives more than their address.

 

[Just the Facts]

Besides that, it ignores the fact that most Palestinians owned their own homes, business and farms and were driven off the land anyway.

No, some Palestinians owned their own homes, business and farms and were driven off. Most left on their own.

 

[#juan]

Oh please with the melodrama. :roll::smile:

The answer is in plain sight. It's the answer that was implemented by the overwhelming majority of displaced persons in the 20th century. There were millions of them.

It's called get over yourself and move on. It's called value your children's lives more than their address.

Melodrama? Did anyone ask the Palestinians? You know, there might have been a small chance for it to work but the Israelis wanted all of Palestine and the refugees are still in the camps. Generous of them to offer Gaza since it wasn't theirs to give.

 

[Zzarchov]

Sure it was, they took it in a defensive war.

Or do you think Poland needs to give back the land it took from the Nazi's who invaded it? Let back in the people it expelled?

(Who were not asked, not guilty, DID own their land and DID manage to move on with their lives)

Lets face it, Its already been proven with all the past wars that no matter what Israel does it will not be free from violence unless they all commit suicide. So why pander.

 

[Just the Facts]

Melodrama? Did anyone ask the Palestinians? You know, there might have been a small chance for it to work but the Israelis wanted all of Palestine and the refugees are still in the camps. Generous of them to offer Gaza since it wasn't theirs to give.

All of Palestine? They settled for 17% way back in 1947. Still they were attacked by those who had the other 83%. Who wanted all of Palestine?

Why are the refugees still in the camps? Of the millions of refugees mentioned earlier, how many are still in camps? Israel is keeping Palestinians in camps? I don't think so.

 

[Just the Facts]

(Who were not asked, not guilty, DID own their land and DID manage to move on with their lives)

Amen to that, brother! :headbang:

 

[earth_as_one]

Sure it was, they took it in a defensive war.

Or do you think Poland needs to give back the land it took from the Nazi's who invaded it? Let back in the people it expelled?

(Who were not asked, not guilty, DID own their land and DID manage to move on with their lives)

Lets face it, Its already been proven with all the past wars that no matter what Israel does it will not be free from violence unless they all commit suicide. So why pander.

You are mixing up the invaders. Nazis invaded Poland. Jewish immigrants invaded Palestine. The people ethnically cleansed from the land where they lived for centuries still live under occupation. Their resistance to the resulting injustice and oppression is more like what the French experienced under Nazi occupation. I'm sure the Nazis also labelled the French resistance as terrorists too.

 

[MikeyDB]

Why not cut all American "aid" to everyone?

If as the much touted belief by Americans, is that each individual has the right to freedom and self-determination.....take all the aid handed over to Egypt Israel and everyone else and spend it on the issues and needs of Americans!

I wish America would get the hell out or everyone's business.

If these states want peace they will work for peace...

If these staes want perpetual war....they will work at and continue in their pursuit until one or the other is gone....

America should get the hell out and stay out.

America's support for Israel and the money paid in "foreign aid" to everyone else is the merchant mentality of the land of the free and the home of the brave....

A double edged sword....

America doesn't need a "foothold" in the Middle East, America and Americans are held hostage through their electoral process and money-men playing ideologies across the planet...on American dollars.

 

[Zzarchov]

You are mixing up the invaders. Nazis invaded Poland. Jewish immigrants invaded Palestine. The people ethnically cleansed from the land where they lived for centuries still live under occupation. Their resistance to the resulting injustice and oppression is more like what the French experienced under Nazi occupation. I'm sure the Nazis also labelled the French resistance as terrorists too.

Wrong again, read your history. There was already a large German Population in Poland, thats why it was invaded first.

These Ethnically German people (who had lived in the land for eons, it had always been German land, Poland just used to have its borders adjusted in the wars between Russia and Germany, hence the name, the nation on roller skates) were driven out of their homes at gunpoint, because of the actions of Nazi Germany.

So I ask again, these people did nothing, but were forced out of Poland, are you suggesting Poland apologize for crimes against Nazi Germany and give back this land?

That is a far worse crime than anything that happened to the Palestinians, but they moved on with their life. They don't launch wars of aggression against Poland, they don't send bombs over.

Palestine is nothing special.

 

[earth_as_one]

Imagine the consequences? Likely Israel would fall and a bloodbath would ensue. That's in no one's best interests. But weaning Israel off aid with known deadlines might help bring Israel to the bargaining table with every stakeholder.

Everyone including Palestinians benefit from resolving this issue peacefully. But that can't happen while Israel continues to seize Palestinian property.

Peace cannot happen if Israel and the United States dictate terms. Only a just win/win settlement will achieve peace.

Palestinians are entitled to freedom and justice. They should have a right to pursue compensation for damages.

The UN legitamized Israel without recognizing Palestine at the same time. As a result 4.5 million Palestinians are nationless refugees. The countries next to Israel have carried an uninvited and unwelcome burden for 60 years despite voting against Israel's creation.

Canada and many other nations voted in favor of heading down this path. Do these nations have responibility for the consequences of their actions?

 

[MikeyDB]

EasO

What makes you think that the argument of what we should do now is any more important than the thinking that went into dividing nations at the behest and in the interest of particular people?

If you can't get comfortable with the right to determine who can live where.....as determined by the signatories to the United Nations resolutions that created Israel and that divided Hungary and Yugoslavia and built the iron curtain....the once famous Berlin wall....

Why should anyone care about what happens to Palestinians or Isralis for that matter?

If it was OK for the world to stand by as geography was meted-out like reward and punishment at some time fifty or sixty years ago what would lead you to believe that there'd be sufficient rational thought today to acknowledge the hypocrisy of that initial act?

Why isn't it perfectly acceptable to play the world bully based on your military and your economic might and take other peoples lands and dole them out on the basis of "friendship" or "allies" or any other reason the bully thinks is appropriate?

The world is not a kinder place today Earth than it was sixty or six hundred years ago.....

We have far greater ability to foist suffering and violence on each other in the name of some percieved "balance" that pleases one while disenfranchising another....

Nothing has changed only the excuses....

When France was involved in Algeria, when Holland was involved in South Africa when the U.S. was involved in Nicaragua or Pannama or Haiti.....the rule of the greedy bully hasn't changed one iota.

An empire is still an empire even if you can fool the morons in that nation into believeing that they are the "model" upon which all societies and all humanity should guage their policies and their existence....

Irrespective of the racism the gender discrimination the religious discrimination and everything else that exists in this model society....

Oh but wait...

I've been assured by another contributor here at CC that the way a society establishes its moral codes and standards of justice domestically...internally doesn't matter.....

 

[earth_as_one]

M, do you agree that "might makes right"?

Wrong again, read your history. There was already a large German Population in Poland, thats why it was invaded first.

These Ethnically German people (who had lived in the land for eons, it had always been German land, Poland just used to have its borders adjusted in the wars between Russia and Germany, hence the name, the nation on roller skates) were driven out of their homes at gunpoint, because of the actions of Nazi Germany.

So I ask again, these people did nothing, but were forced out of Poland, are you suggesting Poland apologize for crimes against Nazi Germany and give back this land?

That is a far worse crime than anything that happened to the Palestinians, but they moved on with their life. They don't launch wars of aggression against Poland, they don't send bombs over.

Palestine is nothing special.

You contradict yourself. On the one hand you say its ok for Jewish European refugees to make people homeless because they were in the way of their ethnic cleansing, yet on the other you claim Nazi Germany was justified invading Poland to protect ethnic Germans from similar treatment as Palestinians.

So which is it? Do people have a right to live where they have been living for centuries or don't they?

 

[Zzarchov]

Uhm... Actually Im not claiming that. Im asking you a question, Again and again, you even quoted it

"So I ask again, these people did nothing, but were forced out of Poland, are you suggesting Poland apologize for crimes against Nazi Germany and give back this land?"

Its no wonder you didn't know what I was saying, you apparently didn't read it.

But even by your own history, Palestinians hadn't been there for centuries plural. And they refused to take ownership of the land even then, when it meant they would have to pay taxes on it. And that was long before any Palestinian Identity when the government was fellow muslims (though, their co-palestinians were still Jewish, why does Palestinian Identity preclude being Jewish btw?)

 

[earth_as_one]

People should only be held accountable for their own actions. If the Polish government punished ethnic Germans because of actions of other Germans then that would be wrong. These people could have a claim against the Polish government.

So if I understand your tortured logic and applied it to Canada, I'm sure many First Nations people would agree with you. Canadian citizens who don't own property also aren't really Canadian citizens and don't belong here. In fact they could be relocated to concentration camps. As for the rest of the people living in Canada who do own property, they aren't Canadians either, because in order to claim this, they would have to have been living here for centuries. Most people living in Canada can't trace their ancestors back in Canada as far back as most people living in Palestine in 1947 who ended in refugee camps. By your reasoning these people also can be relocated to refugee camps too. That pretty much leaves First Nations people as the only people who should be living here, by your tortured logic.

But what I can't understand is how you can claim that recent immigrants have more rights to this land than the people living there when they showed up. True some of these immigrants may be able to trace ancestors back to this region thousands of years ago, but what does that have to do with the people living there now? Also many Jews living in Israel today descend from non-Semitic people who converted to Judaism. How is it that these people have more right to this area than the people already living there when they showed up?

That kind of BS is what caused this injustice in the first place and now perpetuates it.

Peace will not come to this area while 4 million people suffer injustice and oppression and people believe myths rather than what actually happened.

Israel's founding myth: A barrier to peace
Barry Lando, Truthdig, Jul 24, 2007

The ruins of the Palestinian village of Kfar Bir'im, destroyed in 1949. It is now an Israeli national park. (Charlotte de Bellabre, Maan Images)
Forget about Hamas, the wall, Gaza and the occupied territories. There can be no peace in the Middle East until Israel and the Palestinians deal with one key issue: the Palestinian demand that Israel recognize their right of return. That demand is based on the Arab charge that the Zionist state created the refugee problem in the war of 1948-49 by a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. It's an accusation that Israel's leaders have consistently rejected. Jewish soldiers could never commit such crimes. It was the Arabs themselves, they say, who created the refugees.

It has become increasingly evident, however, that the Israeli position is, in fact, a self-serving myth created when the Jewish state was born, perpetuated ever since by the country's leaders and still blandly accepted by Washington.

The myth goes like this: In 1948, when the Arabs attacked the newly declared state of Israel, the Arab population fled by the hundreds of thousands. They left not because of attacks by Israeli soldiers but because of the calls of their own Arab leaders, who guaranteed them a speedy return once the Arab armies had triumphed over the upstart Jewish state. Indeed, they fled despite the attempts of many Israelis-as was movingly portrayed in the film Exodus -to convince their Palestinian neighbors to remain. Why should such treacherous people have the right to return? Not to mention the fact that their return by the millions would spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

This is the story that Israel's leaders and Jews throughout the Diaspora have clung to for more than half a century. But since the early 1990s a new generation of Israeli historians and investigative journalists-drawing on formerly classified documents as well as recollections of Israeli leaders of the War of Independence-has demolished the traditional Israeli position.

According to their research, the Palestinians fled their villages not in response to a call from Arab leaders but because of a concerted campaign of terror-including massacres and rape-perpetrated by military units of the newly declared Israeli state.

As Gideon Levy, a leading columnist from Haaretz, put it, "1948 was Israel's finest hour, the culmination of a mad dream: the formation of an independent Jewish state." At the same time he declared, "it was our darkest hour, in which we committed war crimes on a large scale. And did so in all good conscience."

The key point, often overlooked, is that in 1948, Resolution 181 of the U.N. General Assembly didn't just call for the creation of the single state of Israel from the British mandate of Palestine. In fact, it recommended dividing Palestine into two separate countries-one predominately Arab, the other Jewish-to be joined by an economic union.

According to Sylvain Cypel, a leading correspondent for Le Monde, the full version of that U.N. resolution was never published in its entirety in Hebrew. The reason for that may be simple. From the beginning Israel's future leaders were determined that the Jewish state, carved out of the British mandate, would be just a first step toward the eventual takeover of all the land of Palestine. As David Ben Gurion, who would become Israel's first prime minister, confided to Labor Party members in 1941, "As soon as we gain power, once our state is established we'll annul [the partition] and will spread out over all the territory of Israel."

There was, however, an obvious demographic hitch to such ambitions. If the Palestinians were allowed to remain on their lands, their numbers would overwhelm the Jews - the Jewish state would be stillborn. In fact, according to Benny Morris, one of the first of the new Israeli historians, European Zionist leaders had secretly discussed plans for transferring the Arab population out of Palestine as far back as 1937 in Zurich. They had few illusions that the relocation of up to 500,000 Arabs could be peacefully achieved. "It is hard to imagine a transfer without recourse to force," Ben Gurion later wrote in 1941.

Such blunt talk was for internal use only. Outwardly, a different myth was already being prepared. "They lied, oh, how they lied," thundered Gideon Levy. "The Arabs were always the bad guys, and we were the just, absolute, and sole victims. That's what we've been told."

Indeed, after thoroughly researching Israeli archives, Morris found that not only was there no evidence that Arab leaders had called upon their people to flee in 1948-49, but that records revealed exactly the opposite: "In no case did a Palestinian population abandon its homes before an attack." To the contrary, Israeli intelligence services had actually intercepted calls from Arab leaders asking Palestinians either to remain in their homes or to return if they had already fled.

Morris and other Israeli historians concluded that the Palestinians' flight was-as the Arabs had long claimed-the result of a purposeful policy of Israeli forces, whose communiques at the time spoke openly of "cleansing" or "purifying" the conquered Arab villages.

According to Gen. Yigal Allon, in May 12, 1948, as his men approached each Arab town, they tossed in tracts with the message in Arabic, "if you don't flee immediately, you will all be slaughtered, your daughters will be raped." Those were not empty threats.

"The reality," writes Cypel in his newly published book,
Walled, "is that the expulsion was desired, coordinated, and accomplished by systematic atrocities against, and killing of, civilians, with town properties razed on order (at first on a very unequal fashion from one area to another), and that nearly half of this expulsion was carried out even before the Arab states attacked Israel."

http://imeu.net/news/article005986.shtml

Even Israeli and Jewish historians have admitted what happened to these people. People like Ilan Pappe have done more for peace in this region than any deal between corrupt politicians. Admitting the truth is the first step to coming to terms with it.

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]The ethnic cleansing of Palestine[/FONT]



[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]by Ilan Pappe; October 03, 2006 [/FONT]

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif](1) Can you tell ZNet, please, what your new book, "The ethnic cleansing of Palestine" is about? What is it trying to communicate?[/FONT]​

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]The book tries to show that in 1948, the Zionist movement waged a war against the Palestinain people in order to implement its long term plans of ethnic cleansing (whereas Israeli historians, including 'new historians', claimed that the war was waged by the Arab world against the state of Israel in order to eliminate it and it resulted in expulsions of Palestinians). The Arab world tried to prevent this cleansing, but was too fragmented, self-centered and ineffective to stop the uprooting of half of Palestine's native population, the destruction of half of its villages and towns and the killing of thousands of its people.[/FONT]​

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]And since that ethnic cleansing was successfully implemented in almost 80% of Palestine without any global or regional repercussions - the ethnic cleansing policy continues ever since 1967 in the remaining 20% of the country. Creating a Jewish state in historical Palestine cleansed of Palestinians is still the ideolgoical infrastructure on which the state of Israel is based. How to achieve this goal is a divisive issue between Left Zionists - hoping to negotiate a settlement that would leave a small number of Palestinains in a greater Israel and the Right Zionsts willing to implement a more direct cleasning policy from the same area even today.[/FONT]​

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]The book uses the accepted scholarly definition of Ethnic Cleansing to show its academic as well legal applicability to the case of Palestine and argues that since in the eyes of the world - including the State Department and the UN - ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity, this how we should view the Israeli actions in the past and ISrael's policies in the present.[/FONT]​

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif](2) Can you tell ZNet something about writing the book? Where does the content come from? What went into making the book what it is?[/FONT]​

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]The book is based on three major sources. First it uses new material from the Israeli military archives that was released in the late 1990s. Secondly, it is based on a re-reading of the older archival material through the prism of the ethnic cleansing paradigm. Thirdly, it uses extensively the Palestinian oral history archives.[/FONT]​

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif](3) What are your hopes for "The ethnic cleansing of Palestine"? What do you hope it will contribute or achieve, politically? Given the effort and aspirations you have for the book, what will you deem to be a success? What would leave you happy about the whole undertaking? What would leave you wondering if it was worth all the time and effort?[/FONT]​

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]The book first and foremost is my modest message to the Palestinians wherever they are, and especially to the refugees, that their narrative, which was denied for so many years, is fully vindicated and validated in this book.[/FONT]​

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Secondly, I think that through the paradigm offered in this book for the 1948 events, one can have a far better understanding of the Israeli policies in 2006. It offers a better conceptualization of the nature of the Israeli actions agaisnt the Palestinian minority inside Israel, in the occupied territories, and the disengaged Gaza Strip and lately in Lebanon. In this respect occupation and pullout and ingathering are all different ways for implementing the coveted goal of a complete ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.[/FONT]​

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]Thirdly, but this is really in the realm of wishful thinking, it hopes to stir public opinion in the West and in Israel. If the premises of this book are accepted, the West has to change its attitude towards the Jewish State. It can not be absovled any more for its past and present crimes. And more importantly, the Israeli society has to look at the mirror and refuse the policies that were and are made in its name. If this is not done then eventually all of us - Palestinians and Israelis alike - will perish in a mutually assured destructive process. [/FONT]​

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif]http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11102[/FONT]​

Only when the root causes of the injustice and oppression suffered by 4 million Palestinian refugees are exposed can we finally begin to solve these problems.

As long as these people continue to suffer injustice and oppression they will fight for justice and freedom.

Also the people living in this area before it became Israel (Palestinians) were Muslim, Christian and Jewish. The Jewish ones weren't ethically cleansed because they were Jewish. That's why there aren't any Jewish Palestinian refugees.

Non-Jewish Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from Palestine because they weren't Jewish. It had nothing to do with the war and everything to do with creating a Jewish majority state for Jews. Few Palestinains who became refugees were even involved in the fighting. Most were unarmed civilians. How brave are soldiers who force unarmed civilians from their homes and loot their property?

http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story680.html

So much for a rag tag Israeli army outnumbered by masses of blood thirsty Arabs. The truth is far less complimentary than that.

 

[Zzarchov]

People should only be held accountable for their own actions. If the Polish government punished ethnic Germans because of actions of other Germans then that would be wrong. These people could have a claim against the Polish government.

So if I understand your tortured logic and applied it to Canada, I'm sure many First Nations people would agree with you. Canadian citizens who don't own property also aren't really Canadian citizens and don't belong here. In fact they could be relocated to concentration camps. As for the rest of the people living in Canada who do own property, they aren't Canadians either, because in order to claim this, they would have to have been living here for centuries. Most people living in Canada can't trace their ancestors back in Canada as far back as most people living in Palestine in 1947 who ended in refugee camps. By your reasoning these people also can be relocated to refugee camps too. That pretty much leaves First Nations people as the only people who should be living here, by your tortured logic.

Then you don't read. Most of that is stuff you made up, mixing your own beliefs with mine in some wierd Chimera. Those who neither own property nor are contractually renting it are not entitled to stay on the property of others. Just like the law says current.

How long your relatives have lived here is unimportant. The important thing is do you live here and where you born here. Where your parents were born is irrelevant.

The other stuff is just you making stuff up because your tortured logic is that people who refused to claim ownership of free land when they would have had to pay taxes on it, should be able to give this land they never claimed nor wanted in their life to their grand children, who were born in a foriegn country and have never set foot on that land or the same country as that land.

Tough nuggies. Its a sign of a faulty arguement when you have make bold faced lies and purposeful misinformation to defend it.

 

[earth_as_one]

Z: "The important thing is do you live here and where you born here."

If that was important as you say, than you should agree that this was important back in 1947-8 and again in 1967 when Jewish immigrants ethnically cleansed Palestine of non-Jewish Palestinians. It should also be important as Israel contiues to seize property from native born non-Jewish Palestinians and hands it over to recent Jewish immigrants.

Z, No matter how much you try to whitewash what has gone on and is going on in Palestine, its still ethnic cleansing by any definition and the victims of Israel's ethnic cleansing have been suffering for over 60 years now. There won't be peace until the world recognizes the injustice and oppression suffered by these people and solves this problem. Right now, people like you continue to obfuscate the process of recognition and therefore hinder a longterm peaceful and just solution to this problem.

 

[Zzarchov]

ITs not ethnic cleansing. They didn't own the land, they got evicted. Deal. Same thing happens here, is it ethnic cleansing if I kick someone who doesn't pay rent out of an apartment building?

No matter how much you try and glitz it up with glitter paint and rose coloured glass, most of the 1947 land was in fact Israeli, those evicted were by and large done so legally?

Was it harsh? Oh hells ya. Was it the worst parition of a country to go on?

No.

Was it the worst religious partion to go on THAT YEAR.

No.

What happened to that other partition between muslims and non muslims? They went on to be normal countries (by and large) and got on with it.

I notice you "whitewash" how there were magically no more Jewish communities on the other side of the line, how they were "ethnically cleansed" ?

 

[earth_as_one]

Records from British and Israeli archives from this time period have been thoroughly examined by Jewish Israeli historians. These people have no trouble describing the events as "Ethnic Cleansing".

Reference Jewish Israeli Historians:

Benny Morris: Rape Murder and Transfer
http://www.logosjournal.com/morris.htm

Ran HaCohen: Ethnic Cleansing, Past, Present and Future:
http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/h123002.html

see also Ilan Pappe above.

As far as the "Jewish refugees from Arab countries" is concerned, that spin on historical events is a relatively recent development. Most of the supposed Jewish "victims" find the new version of how and why they came to Israel morally repugnant and insulting:

Written by a professor at Tel Aviv University and published in an Israeli Newspaper:

15/08/2003

Hitching a ride on the magic carpet

By Yehouda Shenhav

Any analogy between Palestinian refugees and Jewish immigrants from Arab lands is folly in historical and political terms.

An intensive campaign to secure official political and legal recognition of Jews from Arab lands as refugees has been going on for the past three years. This campaign has tried to create an analogy between Palestinian refugees and Mizrahi Jews, whose origins are in Middle Eastern countries - depicting both groups as victims of the 1948 War of Independence. The campaign's proponents hope their efforts will prevent conferral of what is called a "right of return" on Palestinians, and reduce the size of the compensation Israel is liable to be asked to pay in exchange for Palestinian property appropriated by the state guardian of "lost" assets...

...Any reasonable person, Zionist or non-Zionist, must acknowledge that the analogy drawn between Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews is unfounded. Palestinian refugees did not want to leave Palestine. Many Palestinian communities were destroyed in 1948, and some 700,000 Palestinians were expelled, or fled, from the borders of historic Palestine. Those who left did not do so of their own volition.

In contrast, Jews from Arab lands came to this country under the initiative of the State of Israel and Jewish organizations. Some came of their own free will; others arrived against their will. Some lived comfortably and securely in Arab lands; others suffered from fear and oppression.

The history of the "Mizrahi aliyah" (immigration to Israel) is complex, and cannot be subsumed within a facile explanation. Many of the newcomers lost considerable property, and there can be no question that they should be allowed to submit individual property claims against Arab states (up to the present day, the State of Israel and WOJAC have blocked the submission of claims on this basis).
The unfounded, immoral analogy between Palestinian refugees and Mizrahi immigrants needlessly embroils members of these two groups in a dispute, degrades the dignity of many Mizrahi Jews, and harms prospects for genuine Jewish-Arab reconciliation.

Jewish anxieties about discussing the question of 1948 are understandable. But this question will be addressed in the future, and it is clear that any peace agreement will
have to contain a solution to the refugee problem. It's reasonable to assume that as final status agreements between Israelis and Palestinians are reached, an international fund will be formed with the aim of compensating Palestinian refugees for the hardships
caused them by the establishment of the State of Israel. Israel will surely be asked to contribute generously to such a fund.

In this connection, the idea of reducing compensation obligations by designating Mizrahi immigrants as refugees might become very tempting. But it is wrong to use scarecrows to chase away politically and morally valid claims advanced by Palestinians. The "creative accounting" manipulation concocted by the refugee analogy only adds insult to injury, and widens the psychological gap between Jews and Palestinians. Palestinians might abandon hopes of redeeming a right of return (as, for example, Palestinian pollster Dr. Khalil Shikai claims); but this is not a result to be adduced via creative accounting.

Any peace agreement must be validated by Israeli recognition of past wrongs and suffering, and the forging of a just solution. The creative accounts proposed by the refugee analogy turns Israel into a morally and politically spineless bookkeeper.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=329736

Regardless, four million + people remain nationless refugees living in poverty, oppression and injustice as a direct result of Israel's creation.

I am not saying Israel does not have a right to exist. What I'm saying is that until these people get freedom and justice they will fight for it. The only way these people will get freedom and justice peacefully is if the rest of the world acknowledges the truth and then deals with it in a fair manner.

Hiding behind myths as you seem intent on doing is about as useful as pretending these four million men, women and children don't exist. These people aren't only growing in number, they are also growing impatient and angry. The number of militants among them is growing and they are becoming meaner and better armed.