Why would the Arab states not let in their brethren who fled from Israel in 1948?

An equal or greater number of Jews fled Arab states, many of them to Israel, where they were resettled.

The answer is as simple as it is appalling: The Arabs wanted them to suffer in order to stir pity in the Western world so that compassionate public opinion would compel the Western powers to press Israel to readmit them. In other words, the Arab refugees were cynically used by fellow Arabs without conscience to stir the consciences of others and emotionally blackmail them for political ends. Wise politicians would have been disgusted and angry over the cruel maneuver, but if such beings exist they are a rare breed, and with most political leaders throughout the world the ploy worked all too well.

That this exploitation of the refugees was Arab policy is beyond dispute. The historical facts demonstrate it: no Arab country will integrate Palestinian refugees. It was confirmed to me personally by a leading Palestinian academic.

I quote from my book The PLO: The Rise and Fall of the Palestine Liberation Organization* (it did fall and nearly die, but was tragically resuscitated by Western governments and Israeli leftists):

Professor Sari Nusseibeh, Oxford-trained teacher of Islamic Philosophy at Bir-Zeit University, and a member of one of the oldest and most respected Arab families of Jerusalem, said to me as we sat and talked in his beautiful house in the old city of Jerusalem: ‘We do not want to solve the Palestinian problem in terms of “human rights”, what we want is a political solution.’

I asked what plan he had in mind to advance such a solution. Had not the PLO let every opportunity for a political settlement slip away by refusing to adapt to political realities?

‘I admire my people more for clinging to their dreams,’ he said, ‘than if they were to compromise with what others call political realities.’

So for the Palestinians in the camps there was no message of hope. They had been sacrificed to the incontinent ambitions of Haj Amin al-Husseini [the Mufti of Jerusalem], Nasser [president of Egypt], Arafat, Assad [president of Syria], and the other Arab leaders, and still they were not to be redeemed. …

The tragedy of the Palestinians is that they were led by people who despised or were devoid of political realism; and Palestinian affairs and concerns were made subordinate to those of the Arab states, which were, of course, pursuing their own self-interest.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, friend of Adolf Hitler and advocate of the Final Solution, is thought to have  personally advised the Arabs to leave when the Arab armies invaded the new state of Israel in 1948,  and to return when the Arabs had won. I always asked people  in the refugee camps in Lebanon in 1983 why they had left their homes, and the invariable reply (through my Arab interpreter) was that they had been advised to go and come back when the Jews had been defeated. When I asked who had advised them to do so, most of them  gave vague answers, amounting to “everyone told everyone else”. But some were sure that the Mufti had “said it on the radio”.

Fast forward to a conversation, reported by the New York Times on December 2, 2010, held between the Israeli novelist Amos Oz and Professor Sari Nusseibeh, in Berlin, where the two men had come to share an award. The conversation was “moderated” by Serge Schmemann, editor of the International Herald Tribune editorial pages.

OZ: … [T]he first issue we need to deal with is the refugee issue, because this one is really urgent. … The refugees are hundreds of thousands of people decomposing in dehumanizing conditions in refugee camps. Israel cannot take these refugees back or it would not be Israel. There would be two Palestinian states, and there would be no Israel. But Israel can do something, along with the Arab world, along with the entire world, to take those people out of the camps, into homes and jobs. Peace or no peace, as long as the refugees are rotting in the camps Israel will have no security.

The description of refugees “rotting” and “decomposing in dehumanizing conditions” may still be true of their lives in the Lebanese camps, but not now on the West Bank or in Gaza. Still, wherever they are, their lives and opportunities are restricted, and they exist as it were in a state of suspension, awaiting emancipation.

This was Nusseibeh’s response:

NUSSEIBEH: I agree. Whether there is or isn’t a solution, the refugee problem is a human problem and it needs to be resolved. It cannot just be shelved day after day after day in the hope that something will happen. The human dimension is far more important in this whole conflict than the territorial.

Let’s not call this a contradiction. Let’s not conjecture that he has forgotten his acquiescence in the long held policy of all the Arab states. Let’s say that he has simply changed his mind. That would be fine if only he understood that while he had been of his previous mind he had contributed to the plight of the refugees which he is now deploring. A regret needs to be expressed, an admission of responsibility needs to be made, a resolution to apply remedies even at this late date needs to be decided upon. It is the lack of those corrections which is so enormously, so frustratingly provoking.

Highly pertinent is this further extract from the same conversation:

SERGE SCHMEMANN: Gentlemen, both of you in your memoirs write about the same historical moment, the founding of the state of Israel, but it is as if you are writing about totally different events.

In your book, Sari, you write: “The year of my conception, 1948, witnessed the collapse of the Palestinian dream…”

And in your book, Amos, that same moment is one of redemption, when your father tells you: “From now on, from the moment we have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew and because Jews are so-and-sos. Not that. Never again.”

Oz and Nusseibeh discussed their different views of what happened in 1948 – that is, of the establishment of the state of Israel – amicably.  But the point had been made by Schmemann. For the Jews, 1948 was one of the most important dates in their very long history; the most important date since 70 C.E.. It is the year of their return to their homeland from which they were exiled by a conquering power.

For the Palestinians, it was the year in which they came into existence as a distinct people, as much the creation of the State of Israel as are the Israelis. Before that date there had been no separate “Palestinian” identity, they had been Arabs among Arabs in the Ottoman Empire. (And Sari Nusseibeh, we learn from the extract, was conceived in that very year, so he was born a Palestinian, into the new nation of Palestinians, and is exactly as old as his people.) What could “the Palestinians’ dream” have been before they even existed as a people?

What we have to remember is that there never was, in all history, a State of Palestine, and that the Palestinian people were brought into existence, which is to say named “Palestinians”, in order to lay claim to the State of Israel. That was their creators’ purpose; their suffering, inflicted and maintained by their fellow Arabs, was the means.

The Arabs were humiliated by their defeat in 1948, and again in 1967. Their fight is as much for revenge as for territory. To strengthen their cause they made it an Islamic issue after 1967, thus multiplying the numbers on their side by many hundreds of millions.

And the United Nations have helped to keep the Palestinians economically dependent and, through their UNRWA schools, full of bitterness and hatred. (UNWRA denies this, but I saw the materials used by the Palestinian teachers in Lebanon, and know for sure that they are rabidly anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, designed to teach bitterness, hatred, revenge, murder and martyrdom by suicide bombing, generation after generation, paid for by Western liberal democracies.)

There is a story in a book by Gita Mehta called Karma Cola ** about a mendicant in India bringing his little daughter, aged six, to a temple outside Katmandu where tourists were gathered. The child was –

.. naked with matted hair that fell in knots on her scarred shoulders. Through each cheek her father had inserted an iron nail. There were scars down the front of her body and her back was crisscrossed with the marks of the lash. Her father carried a whip made of rope to which were attached the blades of small knives … The father led the child by a rope tied to her neck. Outside the temple when a sufficiently large crowd had collected, he took the whip out of his bag and flayed the child. People flung money at them in recognition of their asceticism and in respect for the child, who everybody realized would be reborn a saint for the penances she was undergoing in this life.

That child’s story is the story of the Palestinian people. Her father was no more blamed then are the Arab leaders. The values of the cultures are not questioned. What a gift has been bestowed on the refugees – the opportunity for martyrdom.

Weep and throw money!

Jillian Becker   December 23, 2010

*St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1984 page 227

**Jonathan Cape, London, 1980 page 160

We’re all constantly being lectured by our self-annointed moral superiors to the effect that “the vast majority of Muslims”  want only to live in peace, and do not support Islam’s “Holy War” or the terrorist methods being used to wage it.

In a short and to-the-point opinion column, Paul E. Marek explains why, even if this article of faith were proved to be true, it would be irrelevant:

We are told again and again by “experts” and “talking heads” that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unquantified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam. The fact is, that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars world wide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. The hard quantifiable fact is, that the “peaceful majority” is the “silent majority” and it is cowed and extraneous.

Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people [about 4 times as many as that according to Solzhenitsyn – JB]. The peaceful majority were irrelevant.

China’s huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.

The average Japanese individual prior to World War 2 was not a war mongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing …

History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by the fanatics. Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up …

We must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.

He includes Nazi Germany in his article. He quotes a German friend who claims that very few Germans were “true Nazis”. Whatever he might mean by “true Nazis”, the number of Germans who actively or vocally opposed Nazism was very small. It’s amazing how the German “Opposition” to Nazism has grown bigger every year since the Second World War ended.

So we wouldn’t take Nazi Germany as an example of a majority silently opposed to the evil actions of vicious leaders.

But we do agree that the supposed opinions of “most Muslims” are of no account in the war with Islam.

Walter Williams writes a short, perfect essay titled “Who owns us?” Here’s a substantial part of it:

I am my private property and you are yours. If we accept the notion that people own themselves, then it’s easy to discover what forms of conduct are moral and immoral.

Immoral acts are those that violate self-ownership. Murder, rape, assault and slavery are immoral because those acts violate private property. So is theft, broadly defined as taking the rightful property of one person and giving it to another.

If it is your belief that people do not belong to themselves, they are in whole or in part the property of the U.S. Congress, or people are owned by God, who has placed the U.S. Congress in charge of managing them, then all of my observations are simply nonsense.

Let’s look at some congressional actions in light of self-ownership. Do farmers and businessmen have a right to congressional handouts? Does a person have a right to congressional handouts for housing, food and medical care?

First, let’s ask: Where does Congress get handout money? …

The only way for Congress to give one American one dollar is to first, through the tax code, take that dollar from some other American. It must forcibly use one American to serve another American.

Forcibly using one person to serve another is one way to describe slavery. As such, it violates self-ownership.

Government immorality isn’t restricted only to forcing one person to serve another. Some regulations such as forcing motorists to wear seat belts violate self-ownership. If one owns himself, he has the right to take chances with his own life.

Some people argue that if you’re not wearing a seat belt, have an accident and become a vegetable, you’ll become a burden on society. That’s not a problem of liberty and self-ownership. It’s a problem of socialism, where through the tax code one person is forcibly used to care for another.

These examples are among thousands of government actions that violate the principles of self-ownership. Some might argue that Congress forcing us to help one another and forcing us to take care of ourselves are good ideas.

But my question to you is: When congressmen and presidents take their oaths of office, is that oath to uphold and defend good ideas or the U.S. Constitution?

When the principles of self-ownership are taken into account, two-thirds to three-quarters of what Congress does violate those principles to one degree or another as well as the Constitution to which they’ve sworn to uphold and defend. …

If we accept the value of self-ownership, it is clear that most of what Congress does is clearly immoral.

Read all of it here,

It’s simply true.

It’s a libertarian conservative’s delight.

A scene from the jihad in “pacified and democratized” Iraq:

On Sunday, October 31, 2010, nine al-Qaeda terrorists stormed the Syriac Catholic cathedral of Baghdad and murdered dozens of the congregation, including very small children. For a full account of what happened go here. Fifty-eight people were killed in addition to the suicide-bombers. Among the dead were some of the men belonging to the “unprepared and ill-led” security forces, who bungled a rescue attempt after some five hours.

Photos of the atrocity have not been widely published in the US, perhaps because they are too shocking, or perhaps for fear of provoking Muslim protest, so we are publishing them.

Some of the victims were beheaded, as can be seen in the bottom picture. It looks as if in this case the severing was done after the body was blown apart.

Having failed to make a case for “world governance” on the pretext of saving the planet from manmade global warming, fanatical advocates of that ultimate horror now hope to exploit the WikiLeaks scandal to achieve their end.

Softly, softly. One  small step at a time. Starting with UN control of the Internet.

The United Nations is considering whether to set up an inter-governmental working group to harmonise global efforts by policy makers to regulate the internet.

“Policy makers”. Note the currently correct term for aspiring, upwardly mobile, whole-world dictators.

They’re only wanting to “harmonize global efforts”. Sounds cozily co-operative, unthreatening, even soothing, does “harmonize”!  And the implication is that these efforts are underway already, all over the globe, nothing to make a fuss about, but unevenly, perhaps more expensively than necessary because of  – Oh, say, duplication of effort. Let’s get all the conscientious toilers in this field into one team pulling together.

To what end, these sneaky tactics? To regulate the internet.

An “international body would attempt to create global standards for policing the internet – specifically in reaction to challenges such as WikiLeaks.”

What does “create global standards for policing” mean if not the making of laws by a central body to be globally enforced?

And what does that mean if not the start of “world governance”?

They must not be allowed to do this.

And the internet must remain free.

In Britain now there is no law but Human Rights law, and Justice is its victim.

Here’s an illustration of the fact from the MailOnline:

Aso Mohammed Ibrahim knocked down [12-year- old] Amy Houston and left her to ‘die like a dog’ under the wheels of his car. He was driving while disqualified and after the little girl’s death he committed a string of further offences. …

The child lay screaming in pain and terror while her Muslim murderer ran away from the scene.

But yesterday Ibrahim … won his lengthy fight to stay in Britain.

His lawyers argued that “sending him back to Iraq would breach Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, which guarantees his right to a private and family life with his children.

Immigration judges ruled that sending him home would breach his right to a ‘private and family life’ as he has now fathered two children in the UK.

So why not pack the whole family off to what is referred to as his “home” – namely Iraq, for the liberation of which much British blood has been shed?

Because they’re protected by the Human Rights Act, a sentimental abomination proceeding from the undemocratic EU, whose laws take precedence over the laws of its constituent nation-states. The Act “guarantees his right to a private and family life with his children”.

Okay, but why in Britain?

Last night Amy’s father said …  ‘This decision shows the Human Rights Act to be nothing more than a charter for thieves, killers, terrorists and illegal immigrants.” …

Mr Houston … said he was ‘absolutely devastated’ by the decision to allow Ibrahim to stay in the country indefinitely.

‘How can he say he’s deprived of his right to a family life? The only person deprived of a family life is me. Amy was my family.’

Amy was Mr Houston’s only child and for medical reasons he is unable to have any more children. …

Ibrahim, now 33, arrived in Britain hidden in the back of a lorry in January 2001. His application for asylum was refused and a subsequent appeal in November 2002 failed, but he was never sent home.

In 2003, while serving a nine-month driving ban for not having insurance or a licence, he ploughed into Amy near her mother’s home in Blackburn.

He ran away, leaving her conscious and trapped beneath the wheels of his black Rover. Six hours later her father had to take the heartbreaking decision to turn off her life-support system.

But despite leaving Amy to die, Ibrahim was jailed for just four months after admitting driving while disqualified and failing to stop after an accident.

Since his release from prison he has accrued a string of further convictions, including more driving offences, harassment and cautions for burglary and theft.

His lawyers did their best to paint him as a good guy, a desirable citizen, by pleading that “he had became a father figure to [his putative wife’s] two children from a previous relationship and was even helping them with their homework.

This account was dismissed as ‘clearly not credible’ after Ibrahim admitted he could barely speak English.

The judge accepted that Ibrahim’s behaviour was ‘abhorrent’ and branded his evidence ‘contradictory and unsatisfactory’. However –

having a big heart, and because he could use the Human Rights Act to justify his using that organ to think with rather than his head –

–  he ruled that [Ibrahim] had developed a ‘significant and substantial’ relationship with the children and was acting as their father.

Yet, according to the UK Border Agency, “there was little evidence that he was living at the same address as his own [and presumably the other two] children.”

Still, the judges remained staunchly deaf to all arguments and blind to justice, because there is no law but human rights law.

So an illegal immigrant with a long criminal record, who has murdered a child by running over her while driving without a licence, must be allowed to stay in the country because he has fathered a couple of children, and because he’s a father figure to other children, none of whom he lives with. It is his human right.

Why are decent Britons not rising in rebellion against the judges, the law-makers, the entire political establishment that is wrecking their civilization? Tens of thousands are demonstrating in the streets against a rise in University fees, but not against the ruination of their country by the policy of multiculturalism – more specifically, Muslim immigration – and the imposition of despotic EU law.

Is it because multicultural Britain no longer gives a damn about justice?

Almost everyone is superstitious to some degree, even the most rational among us.

John Stossel, that consistently rational, commonsensical, free-marketeer and libertarian, who also has the virtue of expressing his ideas clearly, writes:

We human beings sure are gullible. Polls report that 27 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, and 25 percent in astrology. Others believe mediums, fortunetellers, faith healers and assorted magical phenomena. …

Whether you believe in God — or psychics, or global warming — that’s your business. …

Well, a belief in psychics will probably only harm the believer; but believers in God or global warming are dangerous to us all.

And so is belief in government, as Stossel points out:

Being gullible about government hurts everyone. Government is force. When it sells us bunk, we have to pay even if we don’t believe in or want it. If we don’t pay up, men with guns will make sure we do.

It’s good to be skeptical. It’s really good to be skeptical about government.

It seems that the chance of Israel’s survival is about to be considerably diminished.

For some time it has been all too predictable that a small beleaguered democratic Jewish state in the midst of hostile Arab tyrannies would be existentially threatened when Europe became dominated by its Muslim populations in the middle of this century. It will be a tiny strip of dry land in a rising Islamic ocean covering a large part of Asia, north Africa, and all Europe.

Now it seems that its doom is much nearer, as European foreign ministers have declared that their countries are willing to recognize a self-declared State of Palestine. The information comes hot on the heels of announcements by Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay that that’s what they intend to do.

What this means in effect is that Europe will be joining in the war of annihilation the Arabs have been waging against Israel ever since it was legally established in 1948.

Israel can win a war against the Arabs, and probably against a nuclear armed Iran, but not against Europe, and especially not when America is under the leadership of an anti-Israel, pro-Islam president.

Melanie Phillips writes about this in the Spectator. Even she, to our mind, does not seem fully to comprehend the significance of what this EU policy – if it becomes policy, which it probably will – would be. Her analysis, however, is spot on:

Europe’s foreign ministers have threatened to recognise an independent Palestinian state to punish Israeli refusal to halt ‘illegal’ Jewish settlements. …

So let’s get our heads round this.

Israel, the victim of six decades of Arab aggression, is to be punished for frustrating ‘peace’ talks with its aggressors in which it is prepared to take part, on the grounds that it refuses to halt building homes which are said to be illegal but are not; while no punishment is to be meted out to the Arab aggressors who refused to take part in negotiations during the ten months that Israel did halt building these homes — within territories which during these past nine decades it has been entitled to settle under international law – even though these Arabs are the belligerents in the Middle East conflict and continue repeatedly to assert that they will never accept Israel as a Jewish state and who accordingly teach their children to grow up to hate and kill Israelis in order to achieve their never-renounced aim of destroying Israel; nevertheless these genocidal belligerents who have repeatedly turned down a state of their own ever since this was first offered to them more than seven decades ago because they wanted to wipe out Israel instead are to be rewarded by the EU while their victim is to be punished; and all to realise the creation of a state of Palestine which will surely turn in short measure into part of greater Iran, to the terrible cost of the Arabs living in such a state of Palestine and placing the free world in even more danger.

Question: are these morally bankrupt European politicians evil, or just very, very stupid?

Our answer is that they are evil, of course, since their intention is so intensely unjust as to be nothing less than evil – though we don’t rule out the high probability that they’re stupid too.

We see no suggestion that Europe will demand any concessions from Palestine on Israel’s security – or even that Palestine recognize Israel – in exchange for European recognition of Palestinian statehood. We can see no suggestion that in exchange for recognition of another Arab state within designated borders, the Europeans will demand that Arabs forfeit the “inalienable” right of over 1million of their number to reside in Israel (whatever its borders). Understandably. In making those demands, Europe would be putting itself in Israel’s place negotiating “peace” on the same terms. And will get nowhere, just as every Israeli government has got nowhere.

So, Europe, by recognizing Palestine, will also be tacitly supporting the ongoing war of Palestine against Israel. There is nothing to suggest that Palestine – led by the PA or by Hamas – will stay happily behind any borders. The “right of return” will still fuel resistance, as will Islamic fundamentalism. Israel will not cede Jerusalem, even if chunks of Judea and Samaria are handed over to a Palestine. The fighting will continue.

Will Europe put its money where its mouth is? Will it boycott and sanction Israel economically? Will it, in fact, implement the Arab boycott – which is part of the 60-year-old Arab war against Israel?

In other words, will Europe’s tacit support of Palestine by recognizing it as a de jure state become an active war alliance against Israel – economically and militarily? Does Europe propose to field an army at the Palestine borders – through the UN or under its own colors? Will the Europeans fight a border contest on behalf of Arabs? Will they fight the Israelis’ self-defense on behalf of Arabs? Will they, in effect, continue their unfinished business against Jews, in alliance (again) with Arabs?

Unless Europe is prepared to impose sanctions and fight Israel when Israel takes action against Palestinian rocket-launchers and terrorist acts, we cannot see how the European recognition of Palestine along stated borders (1948 armistice lines?!) will change the situation at all, except in one very important respect: peace will have been decoupled from statehood. The dangerous delusion that peace and Palestinian statehood can simultaneously be reached after negotiations – direct, indirect, Likud or Labor, mediated by quartets, or soloists – will be shattered, finally and forever. The Europeans will awaken to the fact that national self-determination for Palestine is defined as war with Israel (whether the nation has real or imaginary borders), for as long as Israel exists within any borders at all.

With the land-for-peace delusion gone, and Europe actively siding with the Arabs against Israel, it may be harder for Europe to pretend – even to itself – that it is motivated by compassion for a select group of Arabs, or justice, or the wish for peace, or even, as we hear so often, the best interests of Israel and Jews. The only mighty international law principles Europe will vindicate is that mighty principals make international law. Sadly, it will be the Jews who will (again) pay the price for the revelation of this banal truth.

What Israel should urgently do – in anticipation of any declaration of Palestinian statehood – is declare and secure the borders it is prepared to defend. That would at least put an end to the negotiability of that territory under the futile “land for peace” formula and place it firmly under the protection of the “war for war ” formula. If Israel defends its borders in war, she keeps them. Peace, should it ever come, will be for peace, and only for peace.

Which Israel might at last enjoy for a few remaining decades.

C. Gee   December 15, 2010