People are wringing their hands in despair at the suffering of the Gazans.The situation of the people is dire, but it's of their own leaders' making.
Everyone in the West has advice: Israel should talk to Hamas; Israel should not do this, etc., etc. What exactly should Israel have done to stop Hamas' provocations over months and momths?
As for "talking" to Hamas? Who can talk to Hamas,or Islamic Jihad, AlQueda, Taliban, Iranians, Hezbollah, etc. etc. Actually, they tried, via the Egyptians,- and a "truce" was organised. It was one-sided,- it didn't stop the daily barrage of rockets and it only escalated on the day the 6-month truce ended.
I don't know what different "tactics" could have been used by Israel. Perhaps there is a different kind of supernatural being that protects the Israelis, North and South from the barrage of daily rockets which they had to endure before and now. The rocket-senders would like to inflict the same deaths and destructions but luckily they somehow can't succeed.
That is their frustration,- so perhaps what Israel could have done is a daily tit-for-tat and spread the same terror on a daily basis to their tormentors. But I bet their aim would have been far more effective and far more lethal, particularly in crowded Gaza. Would that make any difference to the 'Arab streets'? I doubt it,- there is no current hope of overcoming the inherent hatred from the Arab 'street' and the militant Islamic world towards Israel and all Jews. It has been carefully nurtured by their religious leaders for decades. The leaders of the supposed 'religion of peace'.
I look at the poor people of Zimbabwe, for example, who suffer equally from economic sanctions, ill-health and every kind of oppression, deprivation and death due to their own leadership. There is no one to save them from their despotic Mugabe's regime. The Palestinians' problem is the same,- their only hope is another regime that will care more for its people than trying to wipe out Israel. As long as the raison d'etre for the Palestinians remains the defeat of Israel, they will get nowhere!
The demonstrating Arabs and Islamists in other countries will be doing what they always do,- this is what they are good at, massing, shouting, yelling and screaming,- without anything productive coming out of it. Local Arabs or Palestinian sympathisers should have demionstrated against the Hamas rocket launchers before the inevitable retaliation took place. Their and everyone's silence while the Israelis had to live under constant bombardments was OK.
It just shows their hypocrisy at work! Too late to cry now.
MM
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BEWARE OF WELL-MEANING HYPOCRISY
Rabbi Dow Marmur Jerusalem
In view of my general predisposition, I’m on the mailing list of several Jewish organizations on the Left. Some of them have been urging me to sign petitions in response to Israel’s present action in Gaza. I’ve refused. For though I too abhor violence in any form, I don’t know what else Israel should, or could, have done in order to protect its citizen from the shelling of towns and settlements in the south of the country.
The calls for proportionate retaliation by Israel may be sincere, but does that mean that it would have been OK if it had set up rocket launchers on its side of the border with Gaza and match the daily barrage from the other side with an equal number? As the missiles that Hamas and its stooges are firing fall indiscriminately on Israelis, should Israel’s missiles also be imprecise to let casualties be, literally, a matter of hit and miss? Would that be a better protection for the civilians in densely populated Gaza? And would it in any way stop Hamas and its Iranian pay masters from continuing doing damage to life, limb and property?
All war is horrible and war against terrorists even more so, because the enemy usually operates from among civilians and exposes them to additional dangers. There’s much to suggest that Israel knows it and is trying to minimize innocent casualties, but it’s also clear that it cannot prevent them. Thus even in the current war situation it allows some humanitarian aid to get through. Therefore to sign pious petitions, however well-meaning, seems little short of hypocrisy.
The urge to do so is often fuelled by media reports. Journalists, in their legitimate endeavors to tell what they see and hear, describe the carnage and the devastation they witness. Being far away from where the action is we, in turn, are tempted to offer simplistic explanations and apportion blanket blame. A state known for its military prowess like Israel is more likely to incur the wrath of indifferent bystanders than “freedom fighters,” even if they’re nothing more than terrorists.
In their blind zeal and total disregard for human life, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Taliban in Afghanistan have much in common. Each puts blind ideology before the welfare of real persons. When Afghanistan was identified as the main locus of the terrorism that led to 9/11, the international community intervened. The result has been many civilian deaths. Yet nobody recommends proportional retaliation by NATO forces, because that would be quixotic. The situation in Gaza is comparable.
Thus, in the same way that many women and men on the political Left in the West have accepted joint responsibility for bringing stability to Afghanistan, so it seems reasonable for them to hope that Israel will do the same in Gaza. Even Israel’s Left-wing Meretz party concurs. Abu Mazen, the president of the Palestinian Authority, seems to be in a similar frame of mind, for he has stated truthfully that Hamas is the real culprit when it broke the truce with Israel and provoked it to respond. In their muted reactions neighboring Arab states reflect a similar opinion.
Israelis have responded with relief that, at last, their government is doing something about it and that this time its armed forces are better prepared than they were some two-and-a-half years ago when the country had to respond to a similar situation in the north where the population was exposed to Hezbollah rockets. Though it’s quiet there now, albeit uneasily so, the price was unnecessarily high. We all hope that it’ll be different here, not least for the hapless population in Gaza.
But nobody I’ve heard is over-optimistic or believes that it’ll be easy. The war on terror seems never ending, yet even democratic states engage in it because the alternative is worse. That’s why few of us are in the mood to sign petitions urging “both sides” to sue for peace. Everybody knows that in this case it only requires one side – Hamas – to declare a truce and Israel will respond, as it did during the previous six months, even though the rockets never quite stopped raining over its population.
Jerusalem 29.12.08 Dow Marmur
Monday, December 29, 2008
Friday, December 26, 2008
FROM THE CARMEL TO ICELAND
A story about UNWRA & non-UNWRA refugees.
BENNY ELON (IsraelNN.com)
This fascinating story begins on the slopes of the Carmel mountains. During the War of Independence, Arab villages in the area were abandoned - as in all the areas where the Jews enjoyed strategic superiority - and their inhabitants became refugees. Today, we call those refugees "Palestinians". Farming communities and kibbutzim were established on the ruins of Arab villages that became home to Jewish refugees - refugees who streamed here from Europe after the Holocaust and from the Arab world that expelled the Jews from their midst.
What has happened since to both sets of refugees?
The Jewish refugees have long forgotten their refugee status. The country that absorbed them, the Jewish state, has turned them into its own flesh and blood. The transit camps have become cities, villages and farming communities, and within a decade not one single person remained a refugee in this country.
The Arab refugees, however, have maintained their refugee status. The countries they fled to, Arab countries, have chosen not to grant them citizenship, not to grant them rights and a future, and to leave them as refugees serving as live propaganda and a political weapon against the legitimacy of the Jewish state. The refugee camps have become the biggest hothouse for creating terror, a never-ending well of hatred and incitement towards Israel, towards America and towards anyone who is not an Arab Muslim.
UNRWA is the agency whose sole mandate is to take care of Arab refugees. As opposed to the UN Commission for Refugees, the body that takes care of all the other refugees in the world, UNRWA isn't authorized and doesn't attempt to rehabilitate the refugees, to naturalize them in the countries they are residing in or in a third country, or to give them the opportunity for a life other than that of refugees. Instead of solving the problem, UNRWA reinforces it. This is also the reason why only the Palestinian refugees who are registered with UNRWA preserve their refugee status from generation to generation. If your father was a refugee, then you are also defined as a refugee and so is your son. This is a unique and unacceptable definition. According to the UN Commission for Refugees, a refugee is only one who was expelled himself from his country due to a war. His sons will already be raised in another place after a period of rehabilitation. Tens of millions of refugees from all over the world have been rehabilitated in this way since World War II - with the exception of one national-ethnic group: Israeli Arabs, the Palestinian refugees.
And then, one Tuesday in August, the UN Commission for Refugees announced that it is sending 200 Palestinian refugees to be rehabilitated in Scandinavia. They will be absorbed by the governments of Sweden and Iceland and will construct new lives for themselves. Why were these 200 people awarded this privilege? In what way are they different from the hundreds of thousands crammed into Gaza, one big refugee camp?
The answer is simple. These refugees were never under UNRWA's umbrella. Because they were enlisted - while still on the Carmel mountains - into the Iraqi army that participated in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. Together with their families, they withdrew with the army to Iraq. They weren't granted civilian status there, but they also didn't encounter UNRWA. Today, when they became refugees for the second time following the American-led war in Iraq, they were put on the UNHCR's refugee list, which is, after all, the UN commission for "normal" refugees - those who are to be rehabilitated, as opposed to the refugees under the auspices of UNRWA, whose refugee status is destined to be perpetuated.
The residents of Kerem Maharal and Geva in the Carmel can relax. The Arabs who lived there several years before them won't return, and they are not even waiting for them in Jabalya or in Nahar El-Barid. They boarded the plane to Scandinavia and, instead of the energies their brothers invest in cultivating suicide bombers, they will likely invest in establishing themselves financially and in building new lives, sixty years late.
__._,_.___
MM
BENNY ELON (IsraelNN.com)
This fascinating story begins on the slopes of the Carmel mountains. During the War of Independence, Arab villages in the area were abandoned - as in all the areas where the Jews enjoyed strategic superiority - and their inhabitants became refugees. Today, we call those refugees "Palestinians". Farming communities and kibbutzim were established on the ruins of Arab villages that became home to Jewish refugees - refugees who streamed here from Europe after the Holocaust and from the Arab world that expelled the Jews from their midst.
What has happened since to both sets of refugees?
The Jewish refugees have long forgotten their refugee status. The country that absorbed them, the Jewish state, has turned them into its own flesh and blood. The transit camps have become cities, villages and farming communities, and within a decade not one single person remained a refugee in this country.
The Arab refugees, however, have maintained their refugee status. The countries they fled to, Arab countries, have chosen not to grant them citizenship, not to grant them rights and a future, and to leave them as refugees serving as live propaganda and a political weapon against the legitimacy of the Jewish state. The refugee camps have become the biggest hothouse for creating terror, a never-ending well of hatred and incitement towards Israel, towards America and towards anyone who is not an Arab Muslim.
UNRWA is the agency whose sole mandate is to take care of Arab refugees. As opposed to the UN Commission for Refugees, the body that takes care of all the other refugees in the world, UNRWA isn't authorized and doesn't attempt to rehabilitate the refugees, to naturalize them in the countries they are residing in or in a third country, or to give them the opportunity for a life other than that of refugees. Instead of solving the problem, UNRWA reinforces it. This is also the reason why only the Palestinian refugees who are registered with UNRWA preserve their refugee status from generation to generation. If your father was a refugee, then you are also defined as a refugee and so is your son. This is a unique and unacceptable definition. According to the UN Commission for Refugees, a refugee is only one who was expelled himself from his country due to a war. His sons will already be raised in another place after a period of rehabilitation. Tens of millions of refugees from all over the world have been rehabilitated in this way since World War II - with the exception of one national-ethnic group: Israeli Arabs, the Palestinian refugees.
And then, one Tuesday in August, the UN Commission for Refugees announced that it is sending 200 Palestinian refugees to be rehabilitated in Scandinavia. They will be absorbed by the governments of Sweden and Iceland and will construct new lives for themselves. Why were these 200 people awarded this privilege? In what way are they different from the hundreds of thousands crammed into Gaza, one big refugee camp?
The answer is simple. These refugees were never under UNRWA's umbrella. Because they were enlisted - while still on the Carmel mountains - into the Iraqi army that participated in the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. Together with their families, they withdrew with the army to Iraq. They weren't granted civilian status there, but they also didn't encounter UNRWA. Today, when they became refugees for the second time following the American-led war in Iraq, they were put on the UNHCR's refugee list, which is, after all, the UN commission for "normal" refugees - those who are to be rehabilitated, as opposed to the refugees under the auspices of UNRWA, whose refugee status is destined to be perpetuated.
The residents of Kerem Maharal and Geva in the Carmel can relax. The Arabs who lived there several years before them won't return, and they are not even waiting for them in Jabalya or in Nahar El-Barid. They boarded the plane to Scandinavia and, instead of the energies their brothers invest in cultivating suicide bombers, they will likely invest in establishing themselves financially and in building new lives, sixty years late.
__._,_.___
MM
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