A Palestinian protester holds wire cutters amid black smoke from burning tires near the fence during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, May 11, 2018. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)
Posted on 05/18/2018 5:09:45 AM PDT by SJackson
Palestinians are being mobilized for a 'right' they do not have and a 'return' that will not happen. Why does the international community insist on helping Hamas delude them?
After Monday’s terrible violence and loss of Palestinian life on the Gaza border, the world owes the Palestinians some painful but simple truths.
Weeks of Hamas-spurred “March of Return” rallies — with their accompanying riots, bids to cut through the border fence in order to carry out attacks inside Israel, dispatch of blazing attack kites, trashing of the Gaza aid infrastructure at the Kerem Shalom crossing, et al — are not going to work. Just like terror tunnels, and rocket fire, and suicide bombings, car rammings and drive-by shootings haven’t worked.
The Hamas strategy won’t work, no matter how successfully it captures the international narrative of what is playing out here. Anguished by the loss of life, Israel will nonetheless defend its borders.
What the terror group calls “Palestine” — i.e. Israel — is not going to be “liberated.” Majority-Jewish Israel isn’t going anywhere. Most specifically, given the current Hamas tactic for bringing Gazans to the border, the “refugees,” in their ostensible millions, are not going to “return.”
After another awful day like Monday — especially after a day like that — the world owes it to the Palestinians to make that clear.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen this latest tactic of mass protests and violence led by Hamas members at the border widely and falsely described internationally as constituting opposition to the Israeli occupation of Gaza. There is immense suffering within the Hamas-run Strip and highly restrictive security without, but there is no Israeli occupation; Ariel Sharon forced the thousands of Jewish settlers there to leave in 2005, and brought the army out with them.
We’ve also seen the protests described as nonviolent — including by a Hamas leader, Khalil al-Hayya, on Monday night. Words fail.
We’ve seen the protests described as aimed at seeking an end to the “blockade” on access to and from the Strip. In fact, the security blockade is a function of Hamas rule, and would end if Gaza’s leaders were ever to stop trying to terrorize Israel. Hamas has exploited every crack in that security envelope to try to import weaponry in its relentless, avowed struggle to destroy Israel. It wants to build up the kind of force in the Strip that Hezbollah has accumulated in Lebanon — 140,000 missiles, all aimed at Israel. Israel is not about to freely open access to Gaza, when the inevitable immediate consequence will be the import of rockets, missiles and other weaponry to be used for our intended elimination.
And since Monday, we’ve seen the protests described as opposition to the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem and as marking “Nakba day,” when the Palestinians mourn what they call the “catastrophe” that befell them with the establishment of modern Israel — the revived Jewish state that the Arab armies tried in vain to kill at birth.
Now we’re getting closer to what this is actually all about.
In truth, as their organizers made plain from day one, the mass border protests are being mounted not against the “occupation” of Gaza, or the blockade on Gaza. For all the misreporting, they were planned and are being held with the undisguised goal of putting an end to the State of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, whose legitimacy in any borders Hamas rejects. Hence the particularly large mobilization in outraged opposition to the legitimizing of Israeli Jerusalem as signified by the new US embassy; hence the particular resonance of Nakba day.
“March of Return.” It’s right there in the name. The people of Gaza are being mobilized by their terrorist rulers for a “return.” They are being assured by their leadership that this “return” is imminent. That their “homeland” will soon be restored. That the Nakba will be reversed. And that those of them who lose their lives in violence at the border in the cause of that “return” will find their place in paradise as martyrs to their divinely blessed struggle.
The world owes it to them to shatter this illusion. And there’s a straightforward means of doing so.
The current unique UN definition of ‘Palestinian refugees’ enables millions of Palestinians to assert, to dream of, to follow cynical leaders who champion, and in some cases to risk their lives for, an unfounded ‘right’ of ‘return’
Unlike every other refugee population on this planet, the UN extends refugee status not only to those Palestinians who lived in what is today’s Israel and fled or were forced from their homes 70 years ago. It also, with ongoing counterproductive consequence, extends refugee status to their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and onward into eternity.
And in so doing, the international community — via the UN’s Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA) — perpetuates the very Israeli-Palestinian conflict it ostensibly seeks to solve. It skews a refugee dispute that should relate to the few tens of thousands of actual refugees who are still alive today, and instead enables millions of Palestinians to assert, to dream of, to follow cynical leaders who champion, and in some cases to risk their lives for, an unfounded “right” of “return.”
The “right” of “return,” demanded by Yasser Arafat and then by Mahmoud Abbas, has helped doom all efforts to date to negotiate a two-state solution. The assertion of a “right” of “return,” right now by Hamas, is bringing ever greater suffering to Gaza. The Palestinians’ unwavering insistence on a “right” of “return” has all but killed off belief inside Israel that a two-state solution can ever be attained.
The world owes it to the Palestinians to correct its definition of Palestinian “refugees” — and it can do so, incidentally, without in any way impacting any aid assistance it provides for Gaza and the West Bank.
It owes it to the Palestinians to make clear that Israel will not be required or pressured to commit national suicide as a Jewish state by absorbing millions of descendants of Palestinians who used to live in what is today’s Israel. Just as Israel, following the division of Mandatory Palestine by the UN in 1947 and independence in 1948, built a thriving state in its revived historic home, including by absorbing hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Middle Eastern and North African countries, so the Palestinians should be encouraged to build a thriving Palestinian state alongside and in true peace with Israel as the home to their millions — a first ever Palestinian state, in a framework that was spurned by the Arab world 70 years ago and that they tragically continue to reject.
The world owes it to the Palestinians to push for a genuine two-state solution — for a Palestine at peace with today’s majority Jewish Israel, not for a Palestine that simultaneously insists on destroying Jewish Israel. To help both sides move toward a genuine two-state solution that would give the Palestinians independence and enable Israel to maintain its democracy and Jewish character — a negotiated separation.
Want to alleviate the ongoing tragedies of Gaza? Want to prevent the endless repetition of horror days like Monday? Make plain to the Palestinians that they have no “right” of “return.” Tell them that they deserve leadership that doesn’t lie to them and abuse them. And make it clear that their independence can only be achieved through a genuine readiness for coexistence, alongside majority-Jewish Israel.
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Israeli UN ambassador should tell every country that went against Israel on Monday that Israel will be clearing out Gaza and sending all refugees to their countries.
See how that flies.
The world does not owe crap to the Palestinians, as long as they act the way they act. The leadership that they have chosen for themselves inflicts upon them the Fate that is so clear, borne out by the results of their actions. They are in essence a bacterial infection, and any civilized organization, being a country, a nation, or a people, or a culture, owes that infection the favor of being eliminated. That is why all of their so-called Arab brethren reject any sort of assimilation of Palestinians and always have; instead being willing only to give them money to purchase weapons that they can Slaughter either themselves or Jews with, it matters little. The answer, is for them to stop acting like a bacterial infection.
Liberals and Palestinians are big on pretending. They pretend that there was a place called Palestine. They pretend Jerusalem is their capital, but not the capital of Israel. They have maps that pretend Israel doesn’t exist. For the longest time they wouldn’t even say the word Israel, as if saying it gave it legitimacy. We finally have a President that doesn’t pretend. We need more of that in the world.
Wimpy-ass bolt cutter in that first picture. Nothing to be proud of there. Even Harbor Freight has better.
Gazans are Egyptians.
West Bankers are Jordanian.
Send them back to their respective countries and let them do the dirty work (they hate Pali Arabs even more than the Israelis do...).
A while ago there was a cartoon which showed three people at a negotiating table, one represented Israel (Bibi), another the Palestinians (looking like Arafat), and the third was US (maybe Obama).
The Palestinian had a sign that read something like “Death to all Jews”
The US guy, Obama, looks at Bibi and asks: “Can you meet them halfway?”
Pretty much where things stand there, but, of course, Trump is not Obama!
A good place to start would be the media should stop referring to Israel as “occupied territory”. The American Left is as much at fault as Hammas.
Irrelevant, the bolt cutter is just a prop anyway. His job is to look pretty to rich liberal skulls full of mush.
Female college students / SJW's will swoon over him - clean-shaven, exotic-looking, rippling six-pack abs.
He's not a warrior, he's a model, obviously.
Fair point! Especially when one considers the kind of video-game, basement-dwellers, that Millennial women are stuck with, if they even want a guy.
The only way there will be peace is when Israel retakes Gaza and kills every last man woman and child within it’s borders. The moslem plague cannot be compromised with or civilized, it can only be eradicated.
(Now we know that in the end there will be a false peace for a few years, but The LORD is coming back and will make a true peace for Israel and for all the world. We’ve just got to get through the hell on earth between now and then)
Why isn’t Israel killing all these terrorist leaders? Just keep doing it over ad over, until no one wants the job any more.
A writer named P.J. O’Rourke visited there once and was tear-gassed in the middle of a ‘protest’, and he made the realization that these are people acting like kids playing cops and robbers- with real guns. The way you and I go home to watch TV and play with the kids and mow the lawn, these people go to protests.
“Why does the international community insist on helping Hamas delude them?”
Because the Gaza Arabs are cannon fodder in the proxy war being waged against Israel by that “international community”.
American and western media is complicit in the tragedy that is Gaza and the West Bank. The UN continues to feed, house, cloth and supply all other essentials to a mob of uneducated tribal people, nearly half of the able bodied men are unemployed, when they should never have gotten involved with their support.
70 years of refugee status for them and all their kin? Ridiculous. Tell them the free ride is over and tell the media to quit fomenting terrorist activity.
“in the proxy war being waged against Israel by that international community”
“...tell the media to quit fomenting terrorist activity.”
Fat chance of that. Getting eyeballs on the screen is all that matters. Blood, hate, and violence get eyeballs on the screen. If anything, the media will encourage it.
The truth that dare not speak its name.
Israel needs to make the announcement and to fashion it with the craftiness of a New York lawyer. With US support, Israel should hold a national referendum with a supermajority requirement that sets a deadline for the Palestinians to begin direct, final status negotiations with Israel, after which date Israel will not consider proposals or entertain negotiations with anyone for a “right to return” for Palestinians or for a right to immigrate to Israel for anyone who is not a Jew — unless those Muslim nations who expelled Jews provide an equivalent right to return or to immigrate for Jews and other non-Muslims.
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