Posted on 10/23/2009 9:04:08 AM PDT by ventanax5
It is a cynical but time-honoured practice in Middle Eastern politics: the statesmen who decry the political and humanitarian crisis of the approximately 3.9 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza ignore the plight of an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians who live in Arab countries. For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel. The refugee problem will be solved, they say, when Israel agrees to let the Palestinians have their own state.
Yet in the two decades since the end of the Cold War, after two Gulf wars, and the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, not a single Palestinian refugee has returned to Israel - and only a handful of ageing political functionaries have returned from neighbouring Arab countries to the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, failed peace plans and shifting political priorities have resulted in a second Palestinian "Nakba", or catastrophe - this one at hands of the Arab governments. "Marginalised, deprived of basic political and economic rights, trapped in the camps, bereft of realistic prospects, heavily armed and standing atop multiple fault lines," a report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) in Lebanon recently observed, "the refugee population constitutes a time bomb."
(Excerpt) Read more at sott.net ...
Palestinians are Arabs, just the same as Arabs in all the other Arab countries.
Where’s the barf-alert?
And what is “Israei-occupied West Bank” about?
I only know of arab-occupied West-Bank and Gaza.
The ole revisionist history thing again.
Hurl.
Palestinian Diaspora? Puh-leez.
Why should I give a rip, when these are the same people who danced in the streets on 9/11? Frankly, why shouldn’t I consider them the enemies they evidenced themselves to be? And, if I consider them enemies, why would I care about their self-piting schmuck?
For decades, Arab governments have justified their decision to maintain millions of stateless Palestinians as refugees in squalid camps as a means of applying pressure to Israel.
Yep. "Palestinian" Gofather Yasser Arafat himself was BORN IN CAIRO, schooled in Egypt and served in the Egyptian Army. He was an ARAB. there is absolutely no distinction. Just tell the above to anyone who argues with you. There is NO rebuttal.
Arabs in Gaza dancing and celebrating 9/11:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrM0dAFsZ8k
Just for ole time’s sake.
That’s not the theme of the article by any means.
Sure, it complains about the treatment of these arabs by other arab nations.
But it assumes lies from the start.
“Palestinian Diaspora” — that’s a lie on so many levels, it’s hard to address any other issue.
It does much more than that, Jewbacca (love ur nick, always have :) - it places the blame squarely on the arab countries.
“Palestinian Diaspora” — that’s a lie on so many levels...
Consider it shorthand for 'arabs who lived in the old British Mandate of Palestine who left because of the 1948 War and are now spread out all over the ME'. Easier to say, what?
Frankly, Arabs living in Israel, who just go about their daily lives are treated better by the Israelis than by their fellow Arabs in other Arab countries.
Correct! There is no such thing as a “Palestinian.” They are just Arabs. They never identified as “Palestinian” before the creation of Israel in 1948. And if they think there is such a place as “Palestine”, then go to Jordan. Jordan is 2/3 of British Mandatory Palestine. Israel belongs to the Jews. They should expel all of their Arabs. So should we!
“Consider it shorthand for ‘arabs who lived in the old British Mandate of Palestine who left because of the 1948 War and are now spread out all over the ME’.”
Even that is wrong.
First, the arabs are NEW immigrants, who came AFTER the Jews began to return in the mid-1800s.
“There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent (valley of Jezreel, Galilea); not for thirty miles in either direction... One may ride ten miles hereabouts and not see ten human beings. For the sort of solitude to make one dreary, come to Galilee... Nazareth is forlorn... Jericho lies a mouldering ruin... Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and humiliation... untenanted by any living creature... A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds... a silent, mournful expanse... a desolation... We never saw a human being on the whole route... Hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil had almost deserted the country... Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes... desolate and unlovely...”.
- Mark Twain, “The Innocents Abroad”, 1867 -
The land in Palestine is lacking in people to till its fertile soil”.
- British archaeologist Thomas Shaw, mid-1700s -
“Palestine is a ruined and desolate land”.
- Count Constantine François Volney, XVIII century French author and historian -
“The Arabs themselves cannot be considered but temporary residents. They pitched their tents in its grazing fields or built their places of refuge in its ruined cities. They created nothing in it. Since they were strangers to the land, they never became its masters. The desert wind that brought them hither could one day carry them away without their leaving behind them any sign of their passage through it”.
- Comments by Christians concerning the Arabs in Palestine in the 1800s -
“Then we entered the hill district, and our path lay through the clattering bed of an ancient stream, whose brawling waters have rolled away into the past, along with the fierce and turbulent race who once inhabited these savage hills. There may have been cultivation here two thousand years ago. The mountains, or huge stony mounds environing this rough path, have level ridges all the way up to their summits; on these parallel ledges there is still some verdure and soil: when water flowed here, and the country was thronged with that extraordinary population, which, according to the Sacred Histories, was crowded into the region, these mountain steps may have been gardens and vineyards, such as we see now thriving along the hills of the Rhine. Now the district is quite deserted, and you ride among what seem to be so many petrified waterfalls. We saw no animals moving among the stony brakes; scarcely even a dozen little birds in the whole course of the ride”.
- William Thackeray in “From Jaffa To Jerusalem”, 1844 -
“The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is of a body of population”.
- James Finn, British Consul in 1857 -
“There are many proofs, such as ancient ruins, broken aqueducts, and remains of old roads, which show that it has not always been so desolate as it seems now. In the portion of the plain between Mount Carmel and Jaffa one sees but rarely a village or other sights of human life. There are some rude mills here which are turned by the stream. A ride of half an hour more brought us to the ruins of the ancient city of Cæsarea, once a city of two hundred thousand inhabitants, and the Roman capital of Palestine, but now entirely deserted. As the sun was setting we gazed upon the desolate harbor, once filled with ships, and looked over the sea in vain for a single sail. In this once crowded mart, filled with the din of traffic, there was the silence of the desert. After our dinner we gathered in our tent as usual to talk over the incidents of the day, or the history of the locality. Yet it was sad, as I laid upon my couch at night, to listen to the moaning of the waves and to think of the desolation around us”.
- B. W. Johnson, in “Young Folks in Bible Lands”: Chapter IV, 1892 -
“The area was underpopulated and remained economically stagnant until the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers in the 1880’s, who came to rebuild the Jewish land. The country had remained “The Holy Land” in the religious and historic consciousness of mankind, which associated it with the Bible and the history of the Jewish people. Jewish development of the country also attracted large numbers of other immigrants - both Jewish and Arab. The road leading from Gaza to the north was only a summer track suitable for transport by camels and carts... Houses were all of mud. No windows were anywhere to be seen... The plows used were of wood... The yields were very poor... The sanitary conditions in the village [Yabna] were horrible... Schools did not exist... The rate of infant mortality was very high... The western part, toward the sea, was almost a desert... The villages in this area were few and thinly populated. Many ruins of villages were scattered over the area, as owing to the prevalence of malaria, many villages were deserted by their inhabitants”.
- The report of the British Royal Commission, 1913 -
2. The arabs fled anything:
In 1948, approximately 630,000 Arab so-called refugees were encouraged to leave Israel by Arab leaders, who promised to purge the Land of Jews. They were begged to stay be Jews.
Between 1948 and 1967, the Arab flow into the Israeli territories occupied by them (Judea, Samaria and Gaza) was intensified. The UNRWA reported in 1951-52 that 200,000 Arab “refugees” were languishing in Gaza, along with 80,000 original residents who barely made a living before the refugees arrived», notwithstanding, a project to accommodate 10,000 families in the Sinai area (then under Egyptian control) was suspended. How is that the Gaza Strip, having around 80,000 allegedly native residents and twice and half that number of immigrants is only fifty years later overpopulated, with about one and half million of “native people dwelling there since ancestral times”?
It's like saying that their is a difference between eastern Oklahomans and western Oklahamans, except that Oklahomans don't have a superabundance of congenital birth defects due to constant 1st-cousin marriage.
If anything defines them, it's their insistance on acting like preadolescents.
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