Israel's War Against Hamas - Updates

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[ Only with Israel. Because it is a sovereign Jewish State. No problem with Ukraine taking Russian prisoners. No. ]

 

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The media refuses to report what everyone knows: Egypt really, really hates Palestinians​

Axios reports, "Egypt warned the U.S. and Israel that if Palestinian refugees flee into the Sinai as a result of the Israeli military operation in southern Gaza, it could create 'a rupture' in relations between Egypt and Israel, according to four U.S. and Israeli officials."

The media has been reporting, non-judgmentally, about Egypt's 'refusal to accept any Palestinians attempting to flee from Gaza since the war began. But they refuse to say the simple truth: Egypt hates Palestinians and has treated them harshly since 1948.


From the beginning, Egypt opposed taking in Palestinian refugees. In September 1948 It created the laughable "All Palestine Government" in Gaza as a pretend Palestinian state with no power. It used that as an excuse to forcibly transfer nearly all Palestinians who managed to get into Egypt into Gaza. 5,000 Palestinians who made it to a former British POW camp in Qantara were moved to Gaza.

Egypt was the only Arab country that had a policy to close its borders to Palestinians in 1948. And even then it claimed that the decision was "principled" for the Palestinians' own good. It refused to allow UNRWA to operate in its borders in 1950, relegating it to Gaza.

Gaza was turned into an open-air prison, not by Israel but by Egypt.

Then, as now, Egypt was in the forefront of wanting international aid to the Palestinians in Gaza - but the reason is not because they love Palestinians but because they want to keep them out of Egypt.

Interestingly, one small group of Palestinians remained in Egypt, forgotten by everyone until a few years ago. The village of Gezirat Fadel. has no official status, no infrastructure, and its residents have no refugee or citizenship status in Egypt even after living there for 75 years. They are the exception that proves the rule: Egypt has always been anti-Palestinian.

That hate, usually framed as concern, has been a constant feature of Egyptian attitudes towards Palestinian Arabs for over seven decades. In the 1950s, UNRWA tried to create a way for Palestinians to become self-sufficient in the Sinai, and Egypt (together with self-appointed Palestinian "leaders") scuttled those plans. In the 1970s, Egypt officially classified the Palestinians who were given limited rights by Nasser as "foreigners" and took away basic rights for the few Palestinians who were in Egypt, barring them from universities and other benefits.

The main exception was during the one year that Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi was president of Egypt in 2012-2013, when he often opened the border to Hamas-run Gaza. As soon as he was deposed, Egypt went back to its anti-Gaza policy with a vengeance, clearing out large sections of Egyptian Rafah to get rid of smuggling tunnels and blaming Gaza for the ISIS insurgency in the Sinai. Anti-Palestinian rhetoric was all over Egyptian media.

Even today, Gazans who want to travel abroad from Egypt are not allowed to stay overnight, making their travel plans difficult.

It isn't that Egypt has a policy against all refugees. There are plenty of non-Palestinian refugees in Egypt. UNHCR says:

Egypt hosts around 430,000 registered refugees and asylum-seekers from 59 nationalities. As of October 2023, the Sudanese nationality has become the top nationality, followed by Syrians. Other relevant countries of origin include South Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Yemen, Somalia and Iraq.

Following the outbreak of armed conflict in Sudan in April 2023, large numbers of civilians have been forced to flee to Egypt and other neighboring countries in search of safety. ...UNHCR also supports Syrian refugees who fled their war-torn land and started seeking asylum in Egypt in 2012. The number of Syrians registered with UNHCR Egypt rose dramatically from 12,800 at the end of 2012 to more than 145,000 people at the end of 2022. As a result of the Sudanese and Syrian crises, Egypt now hosts the largest number of registered refugees and asylum-seekers in its history.

At the same time, renewed conflicts and political instability in East Africa, and the Horn of Africa as well as the unrest in Iraq and Yemen, have driven thousands of South Sudanese, Ethiopian, Iraqi, and Yemeni individuals to seek refuge in Egypt. As of 19 November 2023, the refugee population registered with UNHCR comprised 169,000 Sudanese, 152,545 Syrians, 35,917 South Sudanese, 30,713 Eritreans, 17,277 Ethiopians, 8,034 Yemenis, 7,163 Somalis, 5,541 Iraqis, and refugees of more than 50 other nationalities.

Those are just the registered refugees.It is clear that Egypt does not have an anti-refugee policy - it only has an anti-Palestinian policy.

In fact, while Egypt was welcoming Syrian refugees, there was an exception: Syrian Palestinians. Hundreds of them were placed not in refugee camps but in jail.

Given this context, Egypt's treatment of Gazans may be principled - but the principle is that Egypt hates Palestinians, and always has.

The media refuses to report what everyone knows: Egypt really, really hates Palestinians

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

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The Oslo process for dividing the land with Israel to create a zone of Palestinian autonomy — and possibly statehood — had been embraced, at least tepidly, by the late Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). But Hamas, the PLO’s most significant Palestinian rival, was fundamentally opposed to peace with Israel, insisting the only path forward was “armed resistance” aimed at eradicating Israel. Throughout the 1990s, when the peace process was moving forward, Hamas sought to derail it by blowing up Israeli buses and cafes. By the early 2000s, when peacemaking ground to a halt, they had killed hundreds of Israeli civilians in this manner, leading to further separation of Israeli and Palestinian societies.

The Hamas leaders and spokesmen who agreed to our interviews were rarely what you would expect of representatives of a terrorist organization. They were men who were fluent in English, logical-sounding about their grievances and highly educated to boot, usually in engineering or medicine. They portrayed themselves as part of a “political wing” of Hamas, one that was unaware of what was being planned by the more secretive military wing. Often, these spokesman insisted, they had no idea that an attack was imminent.

By and large, we reporters ate it up. Our editors wanted us to have access to this shadowy group and to explain its lure for average Palestinians — and in particular, the strategic challenge it presented to Arafat. By claiming that the organization’s left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing, Hamas made it easy for themselves to evade tough questions — like, why target civilians rather than military targets? — and convenient for so many of us to feel like we were putting our fingers on the Palestinian pulse rather than sitting down for tea with terrorists.

So we sipped their bitter brews, and they talked a good game. “Look, we take no joy in seeing Israeli civilians get blown up,” one spokesman told me — back in the day when Hamas’ worst weapon was a suicide bomber in an urban area — before going on to insist that these attacks were the only rational answer to what they saw as the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. When I asked why Hamas wouldn’t take a crack at negotiations instead, they responded that there was no point in talking to Israel — and Israel wasn’t exactly jumping to talk to Hamas either. The spokesman insisted I not use his name with that almost-empathetic quote about not taking joy in killing Israelis. In retrospect, I wonder if he said it because he knew it sounded good to the Western ear.

Hamas played other games with language, presenting themselves as reasonable by saying that its leaders would in theory agree to a long-term hudna, or truce, with Israel. Their words sound nice — who wouldn’t chose a lasting truce over the horrific killing and destruction we are now witnessing? — but the reality was that Hamas would never ink a permanent deal with Israel because, their leaders told me, Islam forbade it.

And then there were the outright distortions. Ahead of October 7, Hamas duped Israel into thinking that the organization was uninterested in inflaming the situation and wanted Gazans’ lives to improve. With that in mind, Israel actually relaxed the Gaza border crossings in late September — a week before the attack — to let more Palestinian laborers into Israel. Sadly, the opening to thousands of additional workers from Gaza turned Israel into an information sieve from which Hamas reportedly gathered intelligence for its attack in October.

Hamas also played fast and loose with facts they gave us reporters. During the first major Israel-Hamas war in 2008 to 2009, known as Operation Cast Lead, Hamas said that fewer than 50 of the 1,400 dead in Gaza had been combatants. But more than a year later, Hamas’ interior minister acknowledged in an interview with the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper that between 600 and 700 of its militants were killed in that war. In that and in almost every war since, Hamas or other militant groups in Gaza launched rockets that fell unintentionally on their own citizens, but rarely if ever, owned up to the error, instead blaming Israel for the deaths.


(full article online)

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/07/opinions/israel-hamas-gaza-media-press-prusher

 

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[ The main thing about being anti Israel is being IGNORANT of the history of the Jews. The Greeks conquered the Jewish homeland and the Jews fought back. That is what Hannukah is about. But being ignorant is more important, because it is about Israel, it is about the Jews ]

 

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