Why Don't We Hear About the Fate of Palestinians?

As of this May, 2,770 Palestinians had been killed since the start of the civil war in Syria. But when Palestinians there sought refuge in Palestinian controlled Gaza and the West Bank, PA President Mahmoud Abbas turned them down. He said, "It's better that they die in Syria than that they give up their right of return [to Israel]."

In Arab countries, Palestinians are subject to apartheid laws such as the ones in Lebanon that prevent them from working in many professions including medicine, law, engineering, and accounting. This stands in sharp contrast to Israel where all professions are open and Arab-Israelis are also Supreme Court justices and Knesset members.

While the Arab/Palestinian population in Israel is constantly growing, Palestinians have been and are being expelled from Arab countries in which they have lived for years.

In the 1990's, 200,000 Palestinians were forced to leave Kuwait.

In Iraq, only 6,000 out of 25,000 Palestinians are left. According to the head of the Palestinian League in Iraq, Thamer Meshainesh, militias routinely attack Palestinians as part of an organized plan to get them to leave the country.

Khaled Abu Toameh writes:

...when it comes to ethnic cleansing and torture of Palestinians in Arab countries such as Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, the Palestinian leadership chooses to look the other way.

Similarly, the international media seems to have forgotten that there are tens of thousands of Palestinians living in various Arab countries. The only Palestinians that Western journalists know and care about are those living in the West Bank and Gaza strip.

Toameh's report this week, "The Secret Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians" is startling because media tell us so little about Palestinians in the Arab world.

If Israel can't be blamed, there seems to be no interest in what happens to Palestinians.

Wait, Who's Opposed to UN Palestinian State Resolution?

Seems like someone should have checked to see if the Arab states’ resolution, presented by Jordan and Mahmoud Abbas, actually has Palestinian support.

The resolution demands that Israel shrink to the 1949 armistice lines, referred to as “withdrawing to the pre-67 borders and from east Jerusalem.”  This would be followed by the creation of a Palestinian state.

The Palestinian government of Gaza (Hamas) and a number of Palestinian factions including the DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine) are fully against it. This is because the resolution allows for Israel’s existence, something that these organizations oppose.

And recent polls indicate that Gazans themselves support Hamas over Abbas’ Fatah.

But it’s not clear that that the Palestinian Authority wants two states either.  Even when a Hamas-Fatah partnership looked like it was about to happen – as it did several months ago – Hamas was in no way asked to change its foundational agenda of removing Jewish Israel.

Naturally, the Israeli government opposes a resolution imposed on it by the UN – not only, or even primarily, because of the UN’s constant outpouring of resolutions against Israel far out of proportion to that of any other country, but because all the issues involved in creating a state of Palestine – something that the Israeli government supports – impact the entire existing state of Israel and the lives millions of people.

The US is expected to veto the resolution, in any case.

Meanwhile, a majority of the member states of the UN have already symbolically recognized a state of Palestine.

And Europe is rapidly following suit, reiterating after every vote that the support of their parliaments are merely “symbolic gestures.”

Even with a real UN resolution, demands are only symbolic without the work of negotiation between the two countries and the work of building the political structure for the state of Palestine. These resolutions have a way of ignoring the people actually involved, both Jews and Arabs.

Repeated polls have found that in predominately Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, more residents want to be part of Israel than of Palestine.  In a recent survey, 40% of Arabs said they would move into Israel if their neighborhood became Palestinian and 27% said they wanted to be part of a Palestinian state.

Mahmoud Abbas has said that when the state of Palestine is formed, not one Jew should be allowed to live there.

Recognition in the Middle East

                                                                                                                         Tel Aviv -- photo: Reuters

In the UK and Europe, politicians are declaring recognition of a state of Palestine that does not yet recognize the state of Israel.

Yasser Arafat, the first leader of the Palestinian Authority, never did recognize Israel. Even after the handshake with Yitzchak Rabin and the shared Noble Prize for Peace, Arafat continued to wear an image of Palestine that included all of Israel; the Palestinian National Charter that claims Israel has no right to exist and endorses violence to achieve this goal -- never has been changed. The PA operates under this Charter even today.

Meanwhile Hamas, ruling over Gaza, explicitly broadcasts its non-recognition of Israel in its Charter and public statements. The fully Palestinian controlled state of Gaza has not renounced its campaign of firing rockets and missiles at Israeli civilians. And yet, there is a sudden urgency in Europe and the UK to recognize a state of Palestine.

Prime Minster Cameron, who abstained from the British Parliament vote, specified that recognition will not affect diplomacy, and Sweden’s Prime Minister clarified that his parliament’s vote is intended to encourage two states.  Sounds benign but these recognitions seem confused.

The Gaza half of Palestine speaks and acts with unambiguous commitment to violent elimination of Israel. This is not encouraging for a two state solution.

Nor is the West Bank half of Palestine, presided over by Mahmoud Abbas in his ninth year of a four-year term, especially encouraging. President Abbas states both that not a single Jew shall be allowed in the future state of Palestine and that recognizing Israel as a Jewish state should not be required; after all, neither Jordan nor Egypt said the word, Jewish, when they made peace with Israel.

Of course, this word game wasn’t operating when Egypt and Jordan signed peace agreements with Israel since there was no question that they recognized Israel as a Jewish state.

In popular culture in the Middle East, mentioning Israel at all causes conflict.

A recent example:  two Arab-Israeli singers are participating in Arab Idol, the most popular show on Arab television. When the program displayed a map showing all the countries of the participants, viewers were outraged because Israel was included. Quickly an apology was issued and the two singers who live in northern Israel were now shown as living in Palestine.

Those governments outside the Middle East wanting to encourage the two state solution would do well to notice that the state of Israel still needs to be recognized there as well.

UN, Media: No Outrage

Last week in Syria, one percent of the al-Sheitaat tribe was killed, 700 people, some by beheading. Their murderers are members of ISIS, known also as Islamic State.

On a single weekend last month, another 700 people were killed in Syria. Syria’s war death toll is up to nearly 200,000.

This past Friday, in one small village in Iraq, ISIS executed 80 Kurdish men and kidnapped 100 women and children. Elsewhere in Iraq, they hauled off 300 Kurdish women to rape. Young girls returned to their families and committed suicide.

On a single day this month, ISIS slaughtered 1,500 Iraqi Christians. Christians have been fleeing Iraq, where they will be murdered unless they convert to Islam. At least 200,000 have fled to Kurdistan.

Both Israel and the Palestinian Authority apparently believe that ISIS is responsible for some of the rockets fired from Gaza into Israel. 

ISIS objects that Hamas is “not doing enough to destroy Israel” and Hamas considers ISIS to be a threat to their own power.  But they have the same long-term goals—establishing an Islamic caliphate.

A practical difference between ISIS and Hamas at the moment is that Hamas is attacking Israel, a strong country with a strong army. The Jews of Iraq, a community with a 2500-year history, experienced over many years what the Iraqi Christians are experiencing now. There are no longer Jews in Iraq.

Like ISIS, Hamas uses terror, targets civilians, and executes political opponents. They kill their own people as “suspected collaborators.” Using cement intended for building homes to instead build terror tunnels, setting up headquarters in hospitals, launching rockets from neighborhoods, ordering their own citizens not to evacuate dangerous areas and at the same time preventing or intimidating journalists from filming or reporting Hamas’s actions are all in line with their strategies that may seem more complex than those used by ISIS. But their larger agendas are the same.

That there is so little attention to the horrific slaughters by ISIS or to the violence and subterfuge of Hamas threatens all of us who are their intended targets.

--published at Times of Israel

Ceasefire Media Fail

How hard is it to tell when a ceasefire is broken?  Aren’t there thousands of eyewitnesses?

In fact, all of the ceasefires have been broken when rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel. 

So why the misleading language?  

“Gaza Attacks Resume as Ceasefire Expires; Truce Talks Up in the Air.” That’s the LA Times on the latest ceasefire. If you read carefully, almost between the lines, you can figure out that Israel did not break the ceasefire.  But it is as if the paper is trying for lack of clarity, casting doubt on the story even as it tells it, and using quote marks around “terror sites,” as if these might be something other than terror sites:

The Israeli army spokesman’s office said in a statement that “terror sites” across Gaza had been targeted following the resumption of Palestinian rocket fire. Hamas disavowed responsibility for the initial volleys of rockets after the cease-fire’s end, with smaller Palestinian factions claiming to have carried out the attacks.

At least two projectiles were intercepted by Israel’s antimissile system, with others falling in open areas in southern Israel.

Since the Iron Dome intercepted two “projectiles,” that is, rockets, there really isn’t a question about who broke the ceasefire. A “smaller faction” of Gaza terrorists rather than the larger faction, Hamas, still clearly means the attacks are coming from Gaza though the headline suggests attacks on Gaza or that the ceasefire expired due to actions from both sides.

Similarly—but more so—The Guardian’s headline, “Israel and Hamas Resume Attacks as ceasefire talks remain deadlocked” suggests that the failure of the talks caused the fighting to “resume” rather than the refusal of Hamas to continue the ceasefire. The Guardian also uses quotes around “terrorist targets” to even greater obfuscation than the LA Times, by not indicating that Hamas places their launchers and rockets in these locations:

Israel's military said it had hit 33 "terrorist targets" since midnight. These included several mosques and houses across the length of Gaza.

And CNN equalizes the ending of the ceasefire with this headline, “Israel Carries Out Strikes on Gaza After Rocket Fire Resumes.” After twenty-four paragraphs detailing the ongoing fighting and Hamas demands, the article does include a quote from Israeli UN Ambassador, Ron Proser responding to UN President, Ban Ki Moon:

"Your statement said that you were disappointed that the parties were unable to agree to an extension of the ceasefire. I couldn't help but notice that you didn't mention one of the parties, which happens to be the party that violated the ceasefire. This party has a name -- they are called Hamas."

Where is the Hamas Offensive?

We get constant news of the “Israeli offensive” and the “Gaza offensive” but both refer to action by Israel. What about the Hamas offensive?

This phrase does not exist in mainstream media.  It doesn’t come up in a Google search.

And without the concept of  “Hamas offensive,” the fact that Israel is fighting a defensive war stays out of focus.

American and UK media report on IDF soldiers and Palestinian civilians.  Hamas fighters are invisible.

We hear about Hamas rockets, though not often about the ones landing inside Gaza. Mostly the rockets are mentioned in terms of their uselessness against the rather mysterious Iron Dome.

Israelis who are not currently serving in the IDF are nearly as invisible as Hamas fighters.  As the war reporting continues, Israelis seem to be receding into the background, as if each story is titled, “what did the IDF do to Gaza today?”

The gruesome casualty count continuously reported from Gaza -- but not from other conflicts -- does not distinguish Palestinian combatants from civilians.

The source for this count, so far, is Hamas itself or the Gaza Health Service that is run by Hamas. And the familiar words: “most of them civilian,” cannot be accurate given that a majority are men of fighting age.

Simultaneous strikes at a Gaza hospital and the Shati refugee camp provoked outrage. Israel showed photos to demonstrate that they were not targeting these areas and reiterated that they never target civilians.  But media went with identifying Israeli strikes or equalizing Hamas and Israeli “claims.”

Yet, whenever a reporter is brave enough to say what’s really happening we hear the truth, as occurred last week in tweets from Italian reporter, Gabriele Barbati:

Out of ‪#Gaza far from ‪#Hamas retaliation: misfired rocket killed children yday in Shati. Witness: militants rushed and cleared debris

7:46 AM - 29 Jul 2014

@IDFSpokesperson said truth in communique released yesterday about Shati camp massacre. It was not ‪#Israel behind it

7:47 AM - 29 Jul 2014

Journalists could help by acknowledging the limitations of their sources and the intimidation reporters and photographers face from Hamas.  There could be blazing headlines with information of the kind Gabriele Barbati shared.

Luckily, there are some in the media who do get it.  But right now, they’re the exceptions.

 published at Honest Reporting