How US and EU can Pacify GAZA and make UNRWA and Palestine Hamas-free.
Europeans have the legal key. The identity of Palestine is found! CIRCULATE THIS!
The real identity of Palestine has been found. The legal government is not Hamas. Nor is it Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Fatah. Palestine does not mean an exclusive Arab State.
If the rule of law is followed, the real Palestine Government can ensure peace and prosperity. That’s where the European Union, the USA and other States that believe in the rule of law can help.
The internationally recognized Government of Palestine is certified in international law.
Why peace in Palestine is vital for Europeans
The squabble between Arabs and Jews is small beer compared with the two thousand years of fighting, killing, torture, blood, gore and pillage of European history. In the Thirty Years’ war, parts of Germany lost half their population. In the twentieth century Europe lost 30 million souls in the First World War and even more in the Second World War.
While the Near East has always been a cockpit of war, the Arab-Israeli conflict is relatively recent compared with the wars of the Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Macedonian-Greeks, Romans. Turks and British in Palestine.
Today, Western Europe has peace thanks to the initiative of Robert Schuman. His peace- and prosperity-creating a supranational European Community will celebrate 75 years next year. The 80 year span of W. Europe’s peace after WW2 has never before been surpassed in those millennia of history.
Yet Schuman’s preoccupations were much wider, deeper and global. Ambassador Wladimir d’Ormesson recalled that above Franco-German reconciliation, above even this magnificent peace in Europe, ‘he placed peace in the Holy Land, as this latter governed the former.’ Schuman made critical decisions during his second, short premiership of France in 1948.
Warmongers and Jihadists
Hamas and Islamic Jihad are listed by the European Union as terrorist organisations. Hamas killed and tortured other Arab organisations such as Fatah. It dragged their bodies through the streets. Others just fled.
Hamas and especially its associate Palestinian Islamic Jihad (founded in 1981 with the aid of Iran) are largely responsible for the devastating situation of the Gaza Strip now. Not just the war against Israel that it brought on in October 2023. Billions of dollars of aid have been poured into the Gaza. All wasted on war folly and useless war infrastructure.
Deconstruction not reconstruction. For years Hamas tore out the piping of the water systems and built rockets. Tens of thousands have been fired at Israel since 7 October 2023. One in eight landed inside Gaza.
Hamas says it built five hundred kilometers of War Tunnels. The aim? A metro system? No. To attack Israel powerfully and without warning. The London Underground has a mere 471 kilometers and is the longest in Europe.
Instead of turning Gaza into the Singapore of the Near East, bringing prosperity to all in the region, Hamas blocked economic progress and destroyed its civilian services.
Then having taken complete control of Gaza, it waged a sudden attack on Israelis across the border on the 7 October 2023 Holy Day.
Missed Paradise
It could have built all the economic infrastructure that Singapore has (with its part-Muslim population) or copy similar prosperous, small States.
In 2010 Gaza had its own shopping mall, opened shortly after Hamas arose in a bloody coup. Its war on Arab rivals turned Gaza to economic ruins,
The rich beggar of nations
Instead of becoming a rich commercial territory, Gaza has long demanded international money. I won’t deal with Gaza from 1948 to 1967 because it was occupied, not by Israel, but by Egypt. Gamal Abdel Nasser, military-installed president of Egypt, wanted all of Palestine as part of an Arab Homeland. Egyptians launched war raids from Gaza.
The Arab Oil embargoes and price hikes of 1973 and 1979 forced Europe to pay for Palestinian Arab refugees. If not, oil supplies would be turned off or prices multiplied by sixteen. Europe’s economy plummeted and was partly destroyed for lack of fuel. The EU is still hooked.
Between 1994 and 2020, $40 Billion was donated to Gaza’s 2 million inhabitants, according to the OECD. Qatar, the rival of Saudi Arabia, supplied $1.3 billion. Things got no better when Hamas was voted into power in 2006. Instead of prosperity, Hamas brought devastation.
Why did it happen?
Overcrowded? Gaza is not as overcrowded as other small territories. They have higher population densities.
Macau,
Monaco,
Singapore,
Hong Kong.
Gaza comes fifth. It is followed by European States Gibraltar, Vatican and Malta,
All are far richer. All have much higher GDP per head. Few have any great natural resources. Yet they became rich.
Gaza has some of the finest Mediterranean beaches and it is surrounded by countries of the same religion and culture. Gaza has a 97 percent literacy rate — higher than Egypt. Hamas made the youth unemployed and thus compliant. Until it earns its own living and to live in peace, Jihadi Gaza will never assert independence as a territory like the others.
Two Core Problems
So what went wrong? Two causes can be identified. Both need to be treated if Gazan Arabs are to have a decent life and expectance.
The first is obviously Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. A territory with a terrorist government is on a self-destruction mission. If Hamas is eliminated, can Gaza live in peace?
That leads to the second problem, a big problem, that world leaders ignore at the peril of Gazans and many others.
That is UNRWA.
The Israeli government documented HUNDREDS of UNRWA employees who are Hamas activists. It uncovered Hamas data and counterchecked with names of UNRWA employees.
The UN refused to check all the data that the Israelis had found, Israel officials said. Why would they do that? And the EU went along with the UN’s lethal lethargy. That is using each other’s blinders to hide facts. It reinforces bad policy. It exposes the European public to untold dangers, not to mention all those in the Near East. It is a multilayer cover-up of the crooked.
The Hamas Command Center was built directly under and connected to the UNRWA Headquarters in Gaza. It uses UNRWA for its utility supplies. That is dangerous collusion. Who can trust the UN any more? Who can trust the EU when it relies on the UN?
Whatever the numbers it is a major problem that a supposedly neutral UN organisation is involved in attacking, killing, raping and capturing peaceful civilians and holding them hostage.
The main question is:
How can people be protected against terrorists?
Whether the terrorists are members of Hamas or UNRWA or both, law-abiding democrats should not allow terrorists to be ruining the lives of peaceful citizens.
How did UNRWA get in this twist? Simple answer the UNRWA organisation was built all twisted up. The antisemitic States in the Cold War made UNRWA different from all UN refugee agencies to cause lasting ill-will. The USSR was mortified that Israel did not follow the Communist line. Refugees were isolated in camps in Arab countries, never to be integrated. The result was inevitable: UNRWA became entwined with the death cult of Jihadi terrorism.
To understand how it happened we need to go back to the years after WW2 and the outbreak of the war between Jews and Arabs in Palestine when the British Mandate for Palestine was expiring in 1948.
Geopolitical Dupery
But first we need to free out minds of a delusion. Disinformation is used by governments and their agencies like the KGB to change political reality. Changing people’s ideas for lies is expensive in terms of propaganda costs but much cheaper than war.
Once the Turkish Ottoman Empire collapsed after WW1, the League of Nations gave the British a Mandate to govern Palestine. It was not to create an Arab State. It was to restore the Jewish State. No conquering army in the past annulled their hereditary rights. In the Mandate documents Palestinian meant Jewish settler or resident. Most Arabs in the territory refused to call themselves Palestinians. They called themselves Syrians (Halab = from Aleppo) or Egyptians (al-Masri) or after a town abroad like Baghdadi boasting their family Arab roots. Other Arabs have names like Cohen (=Hebrew priest) or Levin, indicating Israelite pedigree.
The UK’s Government of Palestine circulated Palestine banknotes and coins with the Hebrew Palestine followed by letters Alef Yod אי signifying Land of Israel in Hebrew. It issued ‘Government of Palestine’ identity cards. Here, for example, is the Government ID card from the 1930s of Jehoshua Sherell resident of Haifa. It is stamped ‘Haifa and Samaria District.’
In May 1948 the Palestinians — the Jews in the Holy Land — created a State. Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and his new government called it Israel, a land open to Jews, Arabs, Druze and all irrespective of religion.
No Arabs declared a State of Palestine. The Ben Gurion declaration meant that the name Palestine was defunct. It was as dead and extinct as a Norwegian parrot.
Arab States proclaimed their goal: the total destruction of the unarmed Jews. (The British had refused them arms.) They said Arabs only would occupy land of Sham from Egypt to Syria. No Arab Palestine was planned. The land was to be divided amongst the neighboring Arab countries, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria.
It was only in 1964 that the Soviet Union allied with Nasser’s Egypt invented the idea of a Palestinian Liberation Army. A sham. They wanted to take over the entire land, kill all Jews they could and chase the others ‘into the Mediterranean’.
What was the area of the British Mandate for Palestine as recognised by the League of Nations as hereditary Jewish territory? It covered both present day Israel and Jordan.
What does UNRWA say about itself?
UNRWA is mandated by the UN General Assembly to serve ‘Palestine refugees’. This term was defined in 1952 as any person whose "normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict." Palestine refugees are persons who fulfil the above definition and descendants of fathers fulfilling the definition.
*** Notice: nothing about it being exclusively Arab.***
Or not say?
UNRWA took over from UN Relief for Palestine Refugees (UNPRP), founded in 1948.
For centuries before 1948 Palestine meant the Holy Land. Palestinian in the UN and in the Mandate documents generally meant Jewish resident.
Then four years after the term ‘Palestine’ was defunct UNRWA was set up in 1952 by General Assembly Resolution 302.
UNRWA chief Filippo Grandi told me UNRWA’s mission was to serve both Jews and Arabs.
Why 15 May? On 15 May Arab armies attacked Israel from North, East and South. Jordan seized what the later called the West Bank. That’s not what the UN called it. It was designated in United Nations documents of the time as Judea and Samaria. Islamic countries continued to expel Jews after this date, including 140,000 from the 2600-year old community of Iraq.
Who are ‘Palestinian refugees’? In 1946 there were hardly any Arabs who claimed to be Palestinians. Most said they were Syrians. The Jews in 1946 considered themselves Palestinians because
that was how people identified Jews,
it was the official name of the country,
it was recognized as such by the British,
it was the name given by the United Nations for Jewish inhabitants and earlier by the League of Nations who created the Mandate,
it was the name for the Holy Land in the maps of all people from after the Roman wars of the first and second century and until this day. It designates the land of Israel of the Jews and Israelites.
ACT NOW! USA, EU need honest RULE OF LAW POLICY.
If the EU wants the rule of law in the region and peace, it should
insist that UNRWA applies its own mandate fairly without racial discrimination.
run UNRWA as both a Jewish and Arab organisation equally and fairly. From the late 1940s and in the 1950s UNRWA was active helping both Jewish and Arab refugees. Why is it now racialist?
it is corrupt practice to call second, third generations of a refugee, a refugee and give them the same status. This is not how other United Nations Refugees agencies work. Neither should the UNRWA. It was not in the UNRWA mandate but created by internal bureaucratic decisions. It has no legal force. It should be reversed.
Refugee status should stop. After WW2, Europe alone an estimated 65 million citizens were forced from their homes. Refugees were handled at first by the Allies, then the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, UNRRA, until 1947 and the International Refugee Organisation, IRO, until 1952. Schuman and his Chef-de Cabinet Robert Rochefort were very active in these refugee challenges.
The international definition of ‘refugee’ used by international organisation applies to one person not for generations.
Nearly a million Jews were expelled from Arab countries in 1948 and just after the 18 May deadline that UNRWA uses. That’s more than Arab refugees.
Why wasn’t UNRWA applied to help Jews and their families forever?
Well David, this is all right. And clever! You talk, you write. But, who reads? I think and believe you have no audience. How can you reach out! You are calling out in the desert! We are entering a new period, a new year, the world scene will change, new difficulties will appear. However I wish you strength to continue.
You are completely right, Eva. Even those who could benefit most in Israel -- including the official I discussed it with -- haven't opened the email.