UNRWA in the spotlightIt's not just because of the recent fighting in Gaza that UNRWA has recently been the subject of several articles: the UN agency that was founded to support the Palestinian refugees created during the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948 will mark the 60th anniversary of its establishment at the end of this year. It is arguably a very special anniversary of a very special agency: at a time when millions of destitute refugees all over the world struggled to cope with their fate, UNRWA was set up in December 1949 to just care for one group of refugees - and six decades later, UNRWA is the biggest UN agency with a staff of over 29.000, most of them (99 percent) Palestinians, and it is still devoted to supporting millions of Palestinians that remain classified as "refugees", even though they may live in the same place where they, and indeed their parents, were born, and even though they may have citizenship where they live. The elections and Israel's image
In his recent "Editor's Notes", David Horovitz offers a grim assessment of the challenges facing Israel as the country prepares for elections this week. Horovitz focuses in particular on the "relentless process of delegitimization" that Israel has been exposed to for quite some time now and he suggests that this process will likely intensify if the Likud wins the elections, because Israel's critics would interpret this as a sign that Israel has "turned its back on peacemaking." However, Horovitz also makes clear that what Israel does or doesn't do matters very little to those who are eager to delegitimize the Jewish state. Indeed, recent events have shown once more that there is a chorus of indignation whenever Israel moves to defend its citizens - such unfathomable chutzpah will naturally result in comments like: "Israel's international reputation slumped to its lowest point for two decades yesterday, amid condemnation in Britain and Europe of the Israeli army's behaviour ... There were calls for a United Nations-led inquiry into allegations that the Israeli army carried out a massacre and that its soldiers were guilty of war crimes." This may sound like a very recent condemnation of the fighting in Gaza, but it's actually from April 2002: that's how the Guardian - and indeed many other news media around the world - reported about the Jenin "massacre" that never happened. Pragmatism, Hamas-styleWhile the New York Times has Libya's Muammar Qaddafi laying out the case for "Isratine", the Guardian has taken to offering various Hamas leaders and spokesmen a platform to try themselves as op-ed writers. Apparently, the editors are confident that a majority of the paper's readers won't mind to have this ostensible legitimacy bestowed on the leaders of a group that has been busy in recent weeks with killing, torturing and maiming their political opponents - indeed, the author of one of the recent offerings, Mousa Abu Marzook, confirmed just shortly before his piece was published that Hamas had executed "collaborators", whose crime was according to Marzook that they were Fatah members who "had taken to the streets to blow kisses at IAF planes and handed out candies as they attacked Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip." The boycott tradition
Some 300 British academics, writers and intellectuals have declared their resolve "to stop Israel from winning its war." In order to achieve this lofty goal, the ivory tower powers have called for a campaign against Israel "starting with a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions". While they say that this is what they envision for starters, they are not very specific about what is to come afterwards, though the end goal is crystal-clear: "Israel must lose." Of course, it would be positively offensive and entirely outrageous, unjustified and hypocritical if anybody should be reminded of another call for a boycott, made a few decades ago in the early 1930s. Without a doubt it would be much more polite and infinitely more "politically correct" to overlook the fact that back then, the boycott was also just for starters. And, come to think of it, there is another curious concurrence: back then, the boycott campaigners gave out the call "Deutsche wehrt Euch!" That is: Germans, defend yourselves, defend yourselves against the evil machinations of the Jews. This time around, the boycott campaigners call on their British compatriots, on the British government, and indeed on the wider civilized world to defend the Palestinians against the evil militarism of the Jewish state. "We are Hamas"
Perhaps you remember the demonstrations during the Lebanon War in the summer of 2006, when protesters proudly carried placards announcing "We are all Hizbullah". Over at Z Word, you can admire the updated version: "We are Hamas" - a slogan that, as Ben Cohen rightly observes, was "entirely predictable". What Hamas - and therefore the people who identify so enthusiastically with the Islamist group - really stand for has been gruesomely illustrated in the past few days. Last week, an Israeli air strike targeted and killed Nizar Rayyan (sometimes also spelled Ghayan). He was a Hamas military commander who was regarded as one of the most popular and influential Hamas leaders in Gaza; in addition, he served as a "spiritual" leader for Hamas's armed wing and taught at the Islamic University in Gaza City, where his students reportedly revered him as a prominent Muslim scholar. The cycle of stupidity
It was just a few days ago that Hamas mocked Israel for its failure to respond to the barrage of rockets that rained down on communities near the border with Gaza. A leaflet distributed by the armed wing of Hamas, Izzadin Kassam, boasted that Israel was "hopeless and desperate" in the face of the relentless attacks: "The enemy is in a state of confusion and doesn't know what to do ... Their fragile cabinet has met in a desperate attempt to stop the rockets while thousands of settlers have found refuge in shelters which, by God's will, will become their permanent homes." That was the openly stated goal of Hamas: to force all Israelis in the expanding range of the rockets in Hamas's arsenal to live in permanent fear for their lives. Worried about Gaza's dignity
Is there a precedent for a state being held responsible for the conditions and the standard of living in a territory that is ruled by a group sworn to this state's destruction? Is there a precedent for a state being expected to improve the situation in a hostile territory on its borders that is ruled by a group whose priority it is to stockpile arms and explosives, train militants and terrorists, and use its territory as a launching pad for thousands and thousands of mortar- and rocket attacks against its neighbor? During the year that is about to end, there was supposedly a six months ceasefire between Israel and Gaza - and sure enough, there were "only" about 2,500 rockets and mortars fired from Gaza at Israel in 2008. Hamas has now declared an end to the fake truce, and a spokesman of the group expressed confidence that there would be "huge popular support" for this decision. Indeed, militants in Gaza are reportedly "itching for a fight". Human rights at 60
As many of the commentaries written to mark the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10th have highlighted, the document was drafted at a time when the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II were still a fresh trauma. Back then, it was perhaps hard to imagine that human rights would once be cynically employed to play politics. But six decades on, it's even fashionable in some political circles to downplay the most deadly conflict since World War II and argue that, instead of wasting time and effort to address the humanitarian crisis in Congo - where war and violence have claimed more than 5 million lives since 1988 and as many as 45,000 people still die every month of war-related causes - the international community should rather focus on the suffering that Israel is supposedly imposing on Gaza. Spinning Islamist terror
The terrorist attacks in Mumbai at the end of November were spontaneously compared by many people to 9/11, because even though there were fewer victims and less devastation, the emotional impact and the sense of shock and insecurity was very similar. Sadly, what was also similar was that some commentators were quick to come up with the demand that those who had unleashed the senseless carnage had to be "understood." Writing on Z Word, Eamonn McDonagh offered a scathing critique of one of those attempts to "explain: that the terrorists had plenty of reason for their murderous rampage - indeed, according to the prominent author Eamonn took on, the brutal killers were just "angry and well-educated middle-class kids furious at the gross injustice they perceive being done to Muslims by Israel, the US, the UK and India in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir respectively." |
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