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The war against the Jews

Wednesday, 7th November 2007

To many in Britain, Israel is axiomatically the oppressor of the Palestinians. As the prospect of a Palestinian state is talked up in advance of Annapolis, here’s how the Palestinians themselves view the exciting prospect of shaking off this ‘oppression’:

In the months leading up to the upcoming Annapolis peace conference, talk of a future division of the city has prompted a staggering increase in nationalization requests by Palestinians seeking to escape life under the Palestinian Authority. Some 250,000 Palestinians currently reside in Jerusalem. Only 12,000 of them have sought to obtain an Israeli citizenship since 1967, an average of about 300 new citizens a year. But over the past four months the Interior Ministry has registered an unprecedented 3,000 applications, primarily residents of the Arab neighborhoods unlikely to remain under Israeli sovereignty according to the political initiative currently on the agenda.
The 240,000 non-naturalized Palestinians in the city currently hold the status of permanent residents. As Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem they were also eligible to participate in the elections held by the Palestinian Authority. As accepting Israeli citizenship was viewed by many within the community as tantamount to treason, most Palestinians opted to remain permanent residents and enjoy the benefits of living under Israeli sovereignty – full welfare rights, municipal voting rights and unrestricted movement - without putting their loyalty to the Palestinian Authority into question. The average Palestinian family in East Jerusalem currently receives a $770 monthly stipend from Israel. ‘They've weighed the pros and cons of life under the Palestinian Authority and those under Israel and they've chosen,’ said residents in East Jerusalem of their naturalization-seeking neighbors.

Note the fact that Israel has bestowed upon these Arab Jerusalemites the benefits of Israeli citizenship, even though they are not Israeli citizens and are loyal instead to a PA which teaches its children to hate Jews and destroy Israel and whose affiliates regularly mount terrorist attacks upon it. Some oppression, eh.

Meanwhile, as Mahmoud Abbas continues to insist on the ‘right’ of Palestinian ‘refugees’ to live in Israel (thus destroying its identity and purpose as a Jewish state) despite the creation that he is demanding of a Palestinian state (the anomaly that in itself exposes the real agenda here as not two states at all but the destruction of the Jewish nation state of Israel) a group in the US has launched a campaign to draw attention to the Jewish refugees from Arab lands — the 800,000 Jews who were ethnically cleansed from their often ancient homes in Arab countries in the years after 1948. For if the families and descendants of those Arabs who fled the newly formed state of Israel are considered to have the ‘right’ to their ancestral homes, then how much more true is this of those Jews who were forced out of Arab countries? By the same reckoning, they should have their 'homes' back too. So where is the international outcry on their behalf? Surely this can't be evidence of -- gasp -- double standards where Israel is concerned?

The group’s director, Stanley Urman, said on Monday that it had unearthed evidence of collusion among the Arab nations to persecute and exploit their Jewish populations:

To back the claim, the group had reproduced copies of a draft law composed by the Arab League in 1947 that called for measures to be taken against Jews living in Arab countries. The proposals ranged from imprisonment, confiscation of assets and forced induction into Arab armies to beatings, officially incited acts of violence and pogroms. Subsequent legislation and discriminatory decrees enacted by Arab governments against Jews were ‘strikingly similar’ to the actions laid out in the draft law, Urman said.

In January, 1948, the World Jewish Congress submitted a memo with the text of the draft to the UN's Economic and Social Council. It accompanied the submission with a warning that ‘all Jews residing in the Near and Middle East face extreme and imminent danger.’ At a meeting two months later, however, Charles Malik, the Lebanese ambassador and president of the council, succeeded in a parliamentary maneuver that ended consideration of the memo. Though the event drew news coverage at the time, it had gone unnoticed since.

Indeed, who in the west now knows about these forgotten Jewish refugees? Who cares? They were driven out of their Arab homes by state persecution. Yet virtually no-one in the west has heard about this because these refugees were absorbed, mostly into Israel, without any fuss. Most of the Arabs who fled Palestine, by contrast, did so not because they were pushed out but because they were told to flee by those Arab states which were confident that within a short space of time they would have destroyed the newly reconstituted Israel (many Arab sources have attested to the truth of this, as you can read here).

They were then deliberately kept in squalid ‘refugee’ conditions by those same Arab states which refused to absorb them in order to present them as victims of Israel — a ploy whose success in poisoning the western mind has exceeded their wildest expectations, and which has ensured that anti-Jewish terror has been swelled by a ‘peace process’ founded upon a monstrous lie — of which the Annapolis farce is but the latest example.

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Sergey

November 10th, 2007 10:28am

This conflict can't be resolved without sound military defeat of Palestinians, just as conflict between Israel and Egypt and Jordan was settled only after these countries were completely defeated. Until Palis give up any hope to destroy Israel by terror, they would have no genuine interest in peaceful settelment.

Ahad Ha'amoratzim

November 11th, 2007 8:09pm

Field says "I don't think Israel has a good moral claim to the whole of the city" given Jerusalem's importance to three different faiths. I think Israel has a better claim, for several reasons. You may not care that Jerusalem's connection to Judaism goes back centuries before the other faiths even existed, or that the other faiths deem Jerusalem important ONLY because it was the holy city to the Jews. More recently, when Jerusalem supposedly was internationalized, the Arabs put the Jewish Quarter of the Old City under siege, eventually starving out a Jewish community that dated back to the 1200's. The world that declared the city "Internationalized" did nothing to aid the Jews who were trapped there. The British, whose job it was to prevent the siege, arrested Jews who tried to run the blockade. The Jordanians then took over the Old City, desecrated Jewish cemeteries and synagogues (again, many dating back a millenium) and turned them into public latrines,horse stables, and paving stones. Your "international community" did nothing about that either. Jordan then barred ALL Jews (not just Israelis) from visiting the parts of Jerusalem that Jordan invaded, including Old City with the Western Wall and the Temple Mount. Again the "international community" did nothing. By contrast, Israel safeguards the holy sites of all three religions. (In fact, they safeguard Dome of the Rock and Al Akhsah Mosque to a much greater degree than they do Jewish holy sites), protect Christians and Christian holy sites from desecration and persecution by Muslims, and safeguard access to all people (again, if anything, Israel allows less access to Jews than to Muslims). In sum, Israel has been the most impartial and faithful guardian of the City for all three faiths. If we followed your suggestion, we all know what would happen -- the Muslims would take over the entire "internationalized area" by violence, exclude Jews, destroy Jewish holy sites, and begin purging the area of Christians and Christian holy sites, as they have been doing in Gaza, Bethelehem and Nazareth. And your reliable international community would do nothing about it, except perhaps to look for ways to blame it on those perfidious Jews. Sorry, Field, we trusted your international community time and again, and each time they sold us out. Ehud Olmert may have learned nothing from all of this (nor does he much seem to care that the Waqf is systematically destroying priceless Jewish archeologic sites and purging every trace f Jewish history from the Temple Mount), but not every Jew is as willfully blind as he.