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.

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

Israelis Saving Syrian Lives

                                              Israeli Field Hospital, Golan Heights  (Reuters )

Syria’s civil war has claimed the lives of around 130,000 people; it’s estimated that about one and a half million people have been displaced.  For the many needing medical attention, the best care comes from an “unlikely source”: Israel.  

The two countries have no diplomatic relations and Israel is considered an “enemy” by the Syrian government.  Meanwhile, Israel has set up three field hospitals in the Golan Heights and has been treating Syrians -- fighters as well as civilians -- in Israeli hospitals.  Upon returning to Syria, the patients could be harassed or killed as “collaborators with Israel,” so care is taken to keep their identity completely secret.

For Israeli medical staff, national or political identity is irrelevant. “We treat who ever comes in the door,” says the clinical director of Israel’s Western Galilee Medical Center, Masad Barhoum. Most of the patients are very badly hurt and receive “lifesaving medical treatment” in Israel.

Since Israel has kept their whole program of assistance as quiet as possible it’s not entirely easy to find out details, how many people have been treated, how many are fighters and how many civilians, and so on. It was only a month ago that any cameras were allowed into a field hospital and then only with the patients’ faces fully obscured so that they could not be identified.  

One of the most informative articles I’ve read, itself comes from an unlikely source, the United Arab Emirates' National Post. Neither the UAE or Syria allow Israelis into their countries. Yet, real life (and death) seem to intrude on these fixed positions. The National article begins:

When a rebel was shot and severely wounded during a new offensive on Syria’s southern front, his colleagues knew the only hope of saving his life was to get him to Israel. (continue here)