The Lebanon Palestinian UNRWA Mix - Refugee Camps or Terrorist Bases?

...Busy with more pressing issues, Abbas was unable to make the trip to Lebanon himself. What is the urgent business that prevented him from showing up in person to try to prevent catastrophe for his people in Lebanon? His grand tour, an end-game bid to win support for an international Middle East peace conference that would choke Israel into submission.

Khaled Abu Toameh..
Gatestone Institute..
21 July '16..

ISIS is on the mind of the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership. Top PA officials have expressed concern that jihadi groups, including ISIS, have managed to infiltrate Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

Lebanese authorities are also worried -- so worried that they have issued a stiff warning to the Palestinians: Stop the terrorists or else we will take security into our own hands.

According to Lebanese security sources, more and more Palestinians in Lebanon have joined ISIS and the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Al-Nusra Front, a Sunni Islamist militia fighting against Syrian government forces. In response, the Lebanese security forces have taken a series of measures in a bid to contain the problem and prevent the two Islamist terror groups from establishing bases of power in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

According to some reports, dozens of Palestinians from Lebanon who joined ISIS and Al-Nusra Front have been killed or wounded in Syria in recent months. Most of those who were killed have been buried in Syria, the reports said.

Alarmed by the success of ISIS and Al-Nusra Front in recruiting dozens of Palestinians to their ranks, the Palestinian Authority leadership this week sent Azzam Al-Ahmed, a senior advisor to President Mahmoud Abbas, to Beirut for urgent talks with Lebanese government officials on ways of containing the escalation. The PA leadership fears that the heightened activities of the two terrorist groups in the refugee camps will force the Lebanese army to launch a massive military operation to get rid of the terrorists, who pose an immediate threat to Lebanese national security.

(Continue to Full Post)

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Lowe - Speak Plainly to Israel? How to Speak Plainly to the Palestinians, Too

Malcolm Lowe
Hudson New York
26 July '11

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2291/speak-plainly-to-the-palestinians


(A number of excellent points, good questions, and worth some thought. Yosef)

Israel's prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, recently complained that the whole world makes demands upon Israel in the name of Middle East peace, but nobody demands anything of the Palestinians. We could add that Netanyahu's predecessors, too, demanded little of them. The Israeli approach to peace negotiations was to offer piecemeal concessions to the Palestinians, hoping for reciprocity.

Yet even Netanyahu has merely asked for Palestinian recognition of Israel as the nation state of the Jews. That is, he asks for a statement of words, which the Palestinians could ignore later on. By contrast, Israel faces demands to establish facts on the ground, such as the removal or at least the freezing of settlements. Thus Netanyahu, too, has not yet overcome the disproportion of demands.

In order to know what to demand of the Palestinians, one must first know what they want to get. Surprisingly, what exactly the Palestinians want is little known even in Israel. This is because the Israeli media pay little attention to Arab affairs in general. The average Israeli hardly hears more about the neighborhood, the Arab world, than does the average European or North American. This applies also to Israeli politicians and peace activists.

In the Palestinian media, by contrast, Palestinian wishes and intentions are made very clear. The fundamental Palestinian stance and negotiating strategy is found in countless speeches and articles. So I shall explain, first, what that Palestinian stance is. Second, why the Palestinians now refuse to negotiate. As we shall see, this is because the Quartet (US, EU, Russia and UN) has already conceded to them as much as they wanted to get from negotiations. Third, what demand has to be made of the Palestinians in order to oblige them to negotiate after all.

Already in the Palestinian parliamentary elections of 2006, all the competing parties, Hamas as well as Fatah, proclaimed their allegiance to what were called the three "national issues." These were: 1) Israel must withdraw to the lines preceding the Six Day Way; 2) the Palestinian state must be created with Jerusalem as its capital; 3) all the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and 1967, together with their millions of descendants, must be allowed to return to where they were living up to 1947.

A cold dose of reality: How PalArabs in camps think (updated)

Elder of Ziyon
12 January '11

This is an amazing article from German magazine Cicero. A helpful email correspondent assisted with the translation.

Refugees from Reality

When Ingo Way visited the Palestinian refugee camp of Aida and met the people who live there. Startled and almost scared, he reports on their grim hope to "return" one day to a country in which many have never set foot.

The Aida refugee camp has been in Bethlehem since 1950. Today just over 3,000 people live there - descendants of those Arabs who fled during the war of 1948 from Israel. the Aida camp is maintained by the UNRWA and it doesn't look like one would imagine a "camp." Aida consists of massive houses and is thus more like a neighborhood than a camp - not even a slum. The entrance to the refugee camp is decorated with a gigantic key, written in English and Arabic, which reads: "Not for Sale". What is not for sale is not difficult to guess: the Arabian soil from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, which must not be abandoned for any peace treaty with Israel. Is this an uncharitable interpretation on my part? Let's see.

I enter the Lajee Center, a kind of community center for residents of Aida, with lounges, a tea kitchen, an Internet cafe and an exhibition space, in which they are presently showing a photo exhibition with pictures from several other refugee camps. Upstairs I meet Khouloud Al Ajarma, who according to her business card is the "Arts & Media Center Coordinator of Lajee Center." Khouloud was born 23 years ago in Aida; her grandmother came from a village in Israel that does not exist anymore. She studied in England, so she speaks with marked British accent. And she talks a lot - eloquent, fluent, confident. Khouloud does not wear a headscarf; instead she wears a pink knitted cap that covered her entire head of hair. On top of the pink sweater she is wearing a black jacket, a checkered skirt that covers her knees, but that allows a look at her black tights and fashionable ankle boots. I like Khouloud - she is educated and pretty with I've always liked British accents.

After her graduation, Khouloud returned back to Aida. She is aiming to "return" to Israel, although she has not been there before. "To remain a refugee is a political decision," she admits. Hence it is for her and for the other inhabitants of Aida out of the question to start a new life elsewhere, or to even become ordinary citizens of Bethlehem - because then they lose their refugee status conferred on them by the UNRWA. "We want no normalization," says Khouloud. "We want to remain refugees to exercise our right of return one day."

(Read full "A cold dose of reality: How PalArabs in camps think")

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The horror of Palestinian Arab refugee camps

Elder of Ziyon Video
November '10

Who is to blame?



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