"How Israel’s Secret Refugee Deals Collapsed in the Light of Day"
"Israel’s plan to send African
asylum seekers to Uganda and Rwanda put years-long secret deals up for
public and legal scrutiny. Yotam Gidron of the International Refugee
Rights Initiative explains how Israel’s African deals over refugee
transfers fell apart."
2023: UK
"Supreme court rejects Rishi Sunak’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda"
Yair Lapid holdt tale i FN 22. september 2022 om forholdene i Israel og mht palestinerne, se Kilde. Innholdet i hans tale har fått den israelske journalisten Amira Hass til et motsvar og utdyping i 11-punkter, HELE hennes artikkel ligger nederst under Kilde.
Den som vil forstå og vurdere situasjonen i Israel/Palestinba må lese alle Amira Hass sine vurderinger.
Palestinians Are Not Israel’s ‘Neighbors’: 11 Corrections for PM Yair Lapid’s UN Speech
The
prime minister is not the first in the history of the UN to give a
speech filled with slogans and lies. In UN reports on Israel’s
domination over the Palestinians, leaders and their aides can find
information to refute them. The following remarks are meant to help them
navigate between the details
Prime
Minister Yair Lapid gives a speech during the 77th session of the
United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at UN headquarters on Thursday.Credit: STEPHANIE KEITH - AFP
Prime Minister Yair Lapid was not the only one on Thursday, and not the
first in the history of the United Nations, to give a speech before the
General Assembly filled with slogans, lies, half-truths, propaganda,
historical distortions, fantasies and beaten-to-death statements. If
there were those expecting an original, honest and inspiring speech from
Lapid – they are the ones with the problem.
Lapid is also not the first Israeli
politician – and he won't be the last – to use the memory of the
Holocaust in vain, as Israel’s most successful propaganda nuclear
weapon. Mentioning the Holocaust is utterly predictable as a tool to
silence, in advance, even the mildest criticism of Israel’s rule over
the Palestinians.
The
problem is that there are too many heads of state in the General
Assembly willing to believe, or pretend they believe, the propaganda
that Israel is a peace-loving democracy, and also an innocent victim of
conspiracies and terrorism. This pretense rescues those countries from
the obligation to honor international conventions and international law,
and take firm measures against Israeli violations of the law.
Take, for example, the new prime minister of the United Kingdom
Elizabeth Truss, who has already stated that she is considering moving
her country’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. The very statement is
another prize awarded to Israel for the disaster it caused to
Palestinian Jerusalem by cutting it off from the rest of the territory
captured in 1967, another prize for its consistent policy of land
takeover in the city, for impoverishing the majority of is residents
while expelling many others out of its borders.
In regular UN reports on Israel’s
domination over the Palestinians, leaders, aides and foreign journalists
can find up to date and historical information refuting Lapid’s
deceptive pretenses. To help them and others find their way through the
abundance of details, and to clarify their significance, the following
comments are written here:
1. Let's start with the greenhouses of the Gaza Strip, which seems to be
the most bizarre piece of propaganda brought out of the attic for this
speech. Other than cheap Palestinian labor, the settlers’ greenhouses on
stolen land flourished before Israel's unilateral disengagement from
Gaza in 2005 for three main reasons: A regular supply of good water from
Israel and from within the Gaza Strip, a continuous supply of
electricity and access to markets and ports – the three conditions that
did not and do not exist for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Israel imposes an autarchic water regime on
the Gaza Strip, as if it were a self-sufficient island geographically
cut off from the rest of the country. After all, it would have been only
appropriate if Israel supplied large quantities of water to Gaza rather
than the tiny quantities it sells the coastal enclave today as
compensation for what it pumps and steals from the Palestinians in the
West Bank. For over 30 years there has been excess pumping from the Gaza
Strip’s section of the aquifer with the result being too high salinity
in the best case – so the water is not suitable for many crops – and
pollution from the trickling down of sewage and toxins.
The
disrupted supply of electricity is due to internal disputes among the
Palestinians themselves, damage to infrastructure caused by Israeli
bombing, limitations on quantities of imported fuel and the general
economic deterioration caused by the blockade.
Palestinian children fill up gallons with water in Gaza City in 2021.Credit: MAHMUD HAMS / AFP
But the main obstacle were the draconian
restrictions on produce exports from Gaza to markets in the West Bank,
Israel and even overseas, from the beginning of the Second Intifada.
Even if farmers could overcome the problems of water and electricity,
they would be left with surplus produce and incur huge financial losses.
2.
“Lay down your weapons.” This was uttered by the head of a country
whose economic and diplomatic strength depends on its arms and espionage
industries, which have been developed in the world’s most available and
effective lab: The occupied Palestinian territory, whose population
resists and therefore is repressed by interrogations, weapons and
arrests.
3. The closure policy, or in other words the severe restrictions on
movement was imposed on the Strip back in January 1991, before the
suicide attacks, Hamas rockets and the establishment of the Palestinian
Authority. The closure policy has undergone a number of changes since
then, but the reason behind it was and remains a political rather than
military or security decision: To disconnect the population of the Gaza
Strip from that of the West Bank in order to foil the chance for a
Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders.
4. “We dismantled the military bases in
Gaza.” But not in the West Bank. Just as Israel believes it is entitled
to bomb in response to a shelling of Nahariya or Ashkelon, even if its
leaders live between Caesarea and Jerusalem – so does Hamas see itself
as entitled and even obligated to respond to the harm caused by Israel
to the West Bank's Palestinians. Luckily for us, Hamas does not have
that many rockets to respond to all Israeli attacks against
Palestinians' bodies, health, land, water, freedom and property.
5.
And what will happen if they lay down their weapons? The pretense that
Hamas is an equal military opponent to Israel serves its political
purposes and image, but it does not free Palestine. In contrast, it
helps Israeli propaganda.
6. Fake news and images of the deceased girl on Instagram. One needs a
great lack of self-awareness, disinterest and ignorance to enter this
arena of fake news about military operations and “uninvolved”
Palestinian civilians who were killed in Israeli bombing, shelling and
shooting. The army, its soldiers and commanders, and not social media,
have many times falsified facts concerning Palestinian casualties. They
correct themselves only when the person killed is famous and American
like Shireen Abu Akleh
or when there are videos refuting its first claims. Precise data on the
numerous civilian dead among the Palestinians can be found on the B’Tselem website.
7. The Palestinians are not Israel’s “neighbors.” They are the
indigenous people who emerged, lived in and developed the land between
the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea long before Zionist
immigration. Leaving aside the historical circumstances that led to its
founding, Israel was established at their expense through the expulsion
of over half of them and the creation of a political system that from
the beginning intended to exclude them.
Members
of the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian
Hamas movement, stand guard around a model of the 'Shehab' drone erected
on a roundabout in Gaza City, this week.Credit: MAHMUD HAMS - AFP
8. Israel is a democracy for Jews. In other
words, it's not a democracy. Almost two million Palestinians are today
citizens of Israel who are discriminated against according to the law,
in the allocation of budgets and in work and study opportunities. They
are dispossessed of their lands and their history and are the target of
racist attitudes and actions, both individually and politically. The
Israel Police and Shin Bet security service are able to determine the
identity of a Palestinian who murdered an elderly Jewish woman
within an hour, but do not find and apprehend Palestinian citizens of
Israel who have murdered hundreds of other Palestinian citizens. This
alone summarizes the institutionalized discrimination and disrespect
against Palestinians.
9.
All the achievements of Israel’s Palestinian citizens in various areas
are the fruit of a long and determined civil struggle, and not a favor
Israel is doing for them.
10. Almost 5 million Palestinians live under the 55-year-old Israeli
military and Shin Bet rule – whether directly like in annexed East
Jerusalem and Area C, hybrid (direct and indirect) such as in the
Palestinian Authority enclaves or effectively as in the Gaza Strip. The
government of Israel determines nearly every significant parameter of
their lives. It controls the borders, it controls the water resources
and land that it appropriates according to its own desires, the freedom
of movement and thus the economy too, family and social connections. All
this while the Palestinians are deprived of any civil rights and are
barred from participating in the process of electing the government that
determines their lives.
11. "Two states for two peoples." Parroting
the hollow slogan is the required lip service in international forums.
But we can't accuse Lapid and his advisers of providing this service.
Here the blame lies with European and Arab nations, which have enabled
Israel for the last 30 years to carve up the territory designated for a
Palestinian state and turn it into small, disjointed enclaves surrounded
by constantly expanding settlement blocs.
Like
his predecessors, when Lapid blathers about “the two-state solution,”
he really means the seven state solution: Greater Israel and the six –
or maybe even more – Palestinian Bantustans.
