May 15 Nakba Day Amman Jordan

Nakba Day 2023 – Radio Pakistan Yesterday was the 75th anniversary of The Nakba “catastrophe,” when Palestinians experienced the “dispossession and loss of their homeland”. Amman has a large Palestinian population, and throughout the day, lamented messages echoed from mosques in the city. They were especially noticeable after dusk. I didn’t understand exactly what was being said, but the words…

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Worldwide Condemnation Of Abbas’s “Disgusting’ Accusation That Israel Committed ’50 Holocausts’

Worldwide Condemnation Of Abbas’s “Disgusting’ Accusation That Israel Committed ’50 Holocausts’

JERUSALEM (VINnews) — Prime Minister Yair Lapid, himself the son of a Holocaust survivor, and others in Israel, Germany and the US expressed shock and outrage Tuesday night, after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of committing “ fifty holocausts” against Palestinians over the years during a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin. Abbas’s accusation, made…

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your post that mentioned Arafat - https://deadpresidents.tumblr.com/post/66966366721/have-you-been-watching-the-pbs-kennedy-documentary - i think plenty of shady people would want him dead but NOT Israel. Arafat would have been more useful to the Israelis alive. Plus, polonium is not the Mossad's technique or style. No, some other country or figures wanted Arafat dead. They likely started by contacting his enemies in the Palestinian Territories and it went from there.

We'll never know for sure who killed Arafat if he was indeed assassinated, but I disagree that he was more useful to the Israelis alive. Maybe in 1993, but not in 2004 when the Second Intifada had been raging for several years and the Israeli Prime Minister was Ariel Sharon. Sharon had absolutely been looking at ways to eliminate Arafat during the Second Intifada and around the time Israel killed Sheikh Yassin, President Bush had to actively reach out to Sharon and urge him not to order a targeted assassination of Arafat. While Sharon didn't explicitly agree to refrain from eliminating Arafat, he seemed to indicate to the Americans that he wouldn't kill him. But shortly before Arafat's death, Sharon reportedly told President Bush that all options were on the table once again.

By the time that Arafat died, he had been a prisoner in his compound in Ramallah as it was completely surrounded by Israeli forces. Israel was no longer interested in trying to work with the Palestinian Authority as long as Arafat was in charge because he had reneged on many of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. And once Arafat died, there was much more positive communication and hope for progress in talks between Israel and the Palestinians -- at least for a while -- so that would seem to suggest that Arafat's death was very useful to Israel. That's supported by the fact that Sharon met with Arafat's replacement, Mahmoud Abbas, at the Sharm El Sheikh summit shortly after Arafat died and that laid the groundwork for ending the Intifada.

Even if polonium wasn't a regular tactic of Mossad, that doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't use that very fact to mask a potential assassination. Again, we'll likely never know for sure, but if Israel did kill Arafat after President Bush directly urged Sharon against a targeted assassination of the Palestinian leader, it would make sense if they tried to disguise a link between the death and Israel.

Have you noticed how almost everything that the anti-Israel crowd accuses people who simply recognize Israel's right to exist of, is (in additional to usually being false) stuff they're guilty of themselves?

"You support ethnic cleansing!"

What do you think it means, when you chant the English translation of "From water to water, Palestine will be Arab"?

"You support an ethno-state!"

Do you call for the destruction of every single nation state, such as Germany, Japan, France, and so on? No? Then so do you. Have you called for the establishment of a Palestinian state? Then, so do you. Between Hamas ruling Gaza and being genocidal when it comes to Jews, and Mahmoud Abbas (president of the Palestinian Authority) stating no Israelis will be allowed in the State of Palestine (and by "Israelis" we all know he doesn't mean the Arab citizens of Israel, he's talking about Jews) that's going to be an ethno-state, too. Oh, you meant a "pure" ethno-state. Those don't exist in today's reality, and Israel, with 27% of its citizens being non-Jews, is no exception.

"Oct 7 didn't happen in a vacuum, you're ignoring the context of the past 75 years!"

You are ignoring big chunks of anti-Jewish violence during these 75 years, you're ignoring the expulsion of almost 900,000 Jews from Arab and Muslim countries, you're ignoring the anti-Jewish violence and persecution that preceded the establishment of the Land of Israel, and you're ignoring all 3,500 years (at least) of Jewish existence in and connection to our ancestral homeland, Israel.

"You support collective punishment!"

The same way you do, when you chant, "When people are occupied, resistance is justified"? Because that's what it means, that for the sin of Israel supposedly being a colonial state (a false claim, since Jews are native to Israel), you're justifying raping 13 year old girls, shooting them in the head, murdering Holocaust survivors, burning babies alive... what's that if not supporting collective punishment? (that's before we get into the fact that Israel not surrendering in a war started by Hamas is NOT collective punishment, or else we would have to define the allies not surrendering to the Nazis in WWII as collective punishment of the Germans)

"You suppor apartheid!"

All Israeli citizens have the same civil rights. Apartheid in South Africa was a system where citizens of the country had their rights limited based on skin color/ancestry. The issue in South Africa wasn't that racism existed (IDK a single country where racism doesn't), it's that it was codified into law, and used against the rights of that country's own citizens. Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs have the same rights. Non-Israeli Palestinians not having the same rights as Israelis, including as Israeli Arabs, is the same as French Canadians not having the same rights in the US as French Americans. It is NOT proof the US is applying a system of apartheid unto French people. And if it were, then I have news for you, every country applies different rights to citizens vs not citizens, so every country would be an apartheid state by this criterion. Which would make the word meaningless, and it would diminish the suffering of non-whites under South Africa's apartheid (as some young black South Africans who have actually been to Israel now point out). Meanwhile, I'll point back up to where Mahmoud Abbas said no Israelis (i.e Jews) will be allowed in Palestine, and that under the Palestinian Authority, a Palestinian can be jailed or executed for selling land to Jews, which means the PA demolishes the right to property (of Jews to own it, and of the PA's Palestinian citizens to sell it as they see fit) based solely on the ancestry of the buyer... And you support the PA, right?

"You deny the Nakba!"

I had never encountered any Israeli denying that roughly 850,000 Arabs fled Israel due to the War of Independence. Pointing out that the Arabs are the ones who started that war isn't the same as denying it happened. Meanwhile, the people who make this accusation, largely deny the expulsion of the Jews from Arab and Muslim countries, deny the suffering, discrimination, expulsions and massacres Jews had endured for centuries under Arab and Muslim regimes, and deny the atrocities of Oct 7.

"You support colonialism!"

Say the people who deny the native rights of the Jews, who act as if these rights are limited by time (as if such a limitation benefits anyone other than actual colonizers), who ignore the fact that Palestinians wouldn't exist here without Arab colonialism, or who wish to confer a native status unto them by virtue of... being settler colonialists for a "long time" (to be clear, the way the UN's definition of a Palestinian refugee works, it only requires a person to have been an Arab* settler colonialist in Israel during the 2 years prior to the founding of the Israeli state, to be recognized as a Palestinian. To become a US citizen, in addition to other requirements, you have to live in the US for at least 5 years, 3 if married to an American citizen. That means in June of 1946, it was easier to become a Palestinian "native" in the eyes of the UN, than an American citizen). Don't get me wrong, Palestinians have a right to live in the place where they were born. I can both recognize that they're here due to Arab colonialism, AND be okay with them living here. Just like I can recognize that no Americans today deserve to be displaced, even though the majority of them are there thanks to colonialism. And I don't have to pretend like Americans of European descent have suddenly become native (something that if I did, would probably hurt actual Native Americans), in order to recognize their right to live where they were born. It's just ironic that if we took the logic of the anti-Israel crowd when it comes to native Jews, and applied it to all native peoples, this would harm the natives, erase their rights, recognize their colonizers as natives, and generally help colonialism.

There's probably more, but I think this is demonstrative enough.

* Technically, the UN didn't specify ancestry. As an idea, you could be Arab, Jewish, a Polish Catholic priest living in a convent in the Land of Israel from Jun '46 to May '48, and you'd be recognized as a Palestinian by the UN, but in reality this definition ended up favoring all non-Jewish colonizers of the land. In 1952, Israel said, "It's okay, we'll take care of the Jewish refugees displaced by the War of Independence. No need for the UN to do so. This is what we set up a Jewish state for." This is in addition to Israel taking care of the Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim countries, and Jewish Holocaust survivors. And for Israel's show of responsibility, the now-Israeli Jewish refugees have been punished. They don't get recognized as existing, as having been displaced by, and having suffered due to the war the Arabs started in the Land of Israel against its Jewish communities. "Palestinian" refers to non-Jews only from the second The British Mandate in Palestine's Jews became Israeli Jews, but that doesn't stop the anti-Israel crowd from falsely claiming there are Palestinian Jews today... even though since May of 1948, there aren't, and before that, those Palestinian Jews were British subjects, not the citizens of an Arab independent state called Palestine (something that has never historically existed). Thanks to the exclusion in practice of Jews from the definition of Palestinian refugee, the UN agency for taking care of Palestinian refugees, UNRWA became a tool of spreading anti-Jewish hate.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

9 Dec 23

Just a few months ago, Palestinians took to the streets and openly protested against Hamas and its rule over Gaza:

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Several thousand people briefly took to the streets across the Gaza Strip on Sunday to protest chronic power outages and difficult living conditions, providing a rare public show of discontent with the territory’s Hamas government. Hamas security forces quickly dispersed the gatherings.

Marches took place in Gaza City, the southern town of Khan Younis and other locations, chanting “what a shame” and in one place burning Hamas flags, before police moved in and broke up the protests.

Police destroyed mobile phones of people who were filming in Khan Younis, and witnesses said there were several arrests. Dozens of young supporters and opponents of Hamas briefly faced off, throwing stones at one another.

The demonstrations were organized by a grassroots online movement called “alvirus alsakher,” or “the mocking virus.” It was not immediately known who is behind the movement.

Hamas rules Gaza with an iron fist, barring most demonstrations and quickly stamping out public displays of dissent.

The Islamic militant group seized control of Gaza in 2007 from the forces of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, prompting Israel and Egypt to impose a crippling blockade on the territory. Israel says the closure is needed to prevent Hamas, which does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, from building up its military capabilities.

The closure has devastated Gaza’s economy, sent unemployment skyrocketing and led to frequent power outages. During the current heat wave, people have been receiving four to six hours of power a day due to heavy demand.

“Where is the electricity and where is the gas?” the crowds shouted in Khan Younis. “What a shame. What a shame.”

Protesters also criticized Hamas for deducting a roughly $15 fee from monthly $100 stipends given to Gaza’s poorest families by the wealthy Gulf state of Qatar.

There was no immediate comment from the Hamas authorities.

Source: Times of Israel

For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Most of the time, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015.

According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

While Netanyahu does not make these kind of statements publicly or officially, his words are in line with the policy that he implemented.

Link to the article:

by Jack Elbaum

Terrorists in Gaza using humanitarian aid bags to prop up rockets. Photo: Screenshot

Terrorists in Gaza have been using humanitarian aid bags to prop up rockets they were preparing to shoot at Israelis, new video circulating on social media reveals, underscoring the challenges of delivering aid to Palestinian civilians in the Hamas-ruled enclave without it being stolen.

The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade — which is the armed wing of Fatah, the political party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — used bags from Turkey and UNRWA — the UN agency responsible for the Palestinians — to prop up the rockets, according to the video.

At least three of the bags say they contain “wheat flour,” and the bag from Turkey specifically says it is supposed to go “to the Palestinian people.” It is unclear whether the bags had previously been opened to extract the food and then refilled with sand, for example, or if it still contained the food that was intended to feed Palestinian civilians.

“Any chance the media would cover this, yet another violation of international humanitarian law?” pro-Israel commentator Hen Mazzig wrote on X/Twitter while sharing the video.

Almost every day for the past seven months, Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorist organizations have been shooting rockets into Israel from civilian areas, which is a war crime. Tens of thousands of Israelis are internally displaced and unable to return to their homes as a result.

There is mounting evidence that Hamas has also operated in civilian clothing and in civilian infrastructure such as hospitals. However, these violations of international law are rarely noted by much of the media.

The latest video of terrorists using humanitarian aid for military purposes underscores the issue of making sure such aid gets to Palestinian civilians. 

The US built a pier to deliver 2,000,000 meals daily to Palestinian civilians, but after a few weeks of operation, the Pentagon said none of the aid unloaded from the pier had made it to those who needed it. On one occasion, about 70 percent of the aid has been stolen while en route to a UN warehouse. In other cases, it just never showed up.

Israeli estimates suggest approximately 60 percent of the aid that has gone into Gaza has been stolen — either by Hamas or other groups and individuals. Oftentimes, that aid is then sold to the population at high prices, making it difficult to impossible for most Gazans to gain access to it. 

According to Ehud Yaari, an expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Hamas has made more than $500 million in profit from selling humanitarian aid since Oct. 7.

The terror group began the war last October by massacring 1,200 people in Israel and taking more than 250 people hostage, about half of whom have still not been released.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) -Israel appropriated several tracts of land abutting a major Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, but a source briefed on the decision told Reuters there was currently no plan for construction there.

An announcement by the Civil Administration, part of Israel's Defence Ministry, said the tracts amounted to 2,640 dunams, or 652 acres. The Israeli source said they would now be designated part of Maale Adumim settlement, east of Jerusalem.

A spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority said the move underscored Israel's steady push to cut off Jerusalem from the Palestinian areas which surround it and undermine the possibility of creating an independent Palestinian state.

“The Israeli occupation authorities deliberately defy international legitimacy and its resolutions, which have consistently declared the illegitimacy of settlements in all Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem,” Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for President Mahmoud Abbas, said.

The West Bank is among territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war and where Palestinians, with international support, seek statehood. Most world powers deem the settlements illegal.

(continue reading)

EDITH M. LEDERER at AP, via NewsNation:

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United States vetoed a widely backed U.N. resolution on Thursday that would have paved the way for full United Nations membership for the state of Palestine. The vote in the 15-member Security Council was 12 in favor, the United States opposed and two abstentions. The resolution would have recommended that the 193-member General Assembly, where there are no vetoes, approve Palestine becoming the 194th member of the United Nations. Some 140 countries have already recognized the state of Palestine, so its admission would have been approved. This is the second Palestinian attempt to become a full member of the United Nations, and it comes as the war in Gaza, now in its seventh month, has put the more than 75-year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict at center stage. Before the vote, U.S. deputy State Department spokesman Vedant Patel said the United States has “been very clear consistently that premature actions in New York — even with the best intentions — will not achieve statehood for the Palestinian people.” Palestinian membership “needs to be the outcome of the negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians,” U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood said. It “is something that would flow from the result of those negotiations.” Anything that gets in the way “makes it more difficult to have those negotiations” and doesn’t help move toward a two-state solution where Israel and Palestine live side by side in peace, which “we all want,” Wood told reporters. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas first delivered the Palestinian Authority’s application for U.N. membership to then-Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2011. That initial bid failed because the Palestinians didn’t get the required minimum support of nine of the Security Council’s 15 members. The Palestinians then went to the General Assembly and by more than a two-thirds majority succeeded in having their status raised from a U.N. observer to a non-member observer state in November 2012. That opened the door for the Palestinian territories to join U.N. and other international organizations, including the International Criminal Court. The Palestinians revived their bid for U.N. membership in early April, backed by the 140 countries that have recognized Palestine as an independent state.

This is such a disgraceful decision by the Biden Administration vetoing making the State of Palestine a full UN member.

"The essay is an embodiment of a more expansive intellectual labyrinth that haunts Western intellectuals. It characterizes the Palestinians as “necessary and inevitable victims,” rendering them visible only as archival footnotes in yet another efficacious settler colonial enterprise. Is it not curious, one might ask, that the very sympathy shown to Palestinians appears directly proportional to their perceived inability to confront the uniform machinery of settler colonialism? There is a hidden gratification in witnessing this tragic narrative from afar. Israel’s persistent upper hand serves as a powerful catalyst for Western intellectuals’ feel-good sympathy, a kind of pseudo-solidarity that whispers to Palestinians: “We are with you, but only so long as you remain tragic victims sinking graciously into your own abyss.” One might even argue that this sympathy is contingent upon the Palestinians’ maintenance of their tragic status quo.

There’s a safety in this for those intellectuals: the Palestinian experience, as heart-wrenching as it is, remains comfortably distant, a spectacle to be consumed. This pre-inscribed script becomes an eerie marker of the limitations of critical intellectual engagement with Palestine and the Palestinians.

As a result, when Palestinians dare to rebel and challenge their imposed fate after years of oppression, the responses are predictably schizophrenic. The same intellectuals who once sobbed at our plight are now torn. Many become moral policemen, quickly brandishing the baton of condemnation, but even more importantly, readily “adopting” with full intensity Israel’s curated and sensationalized version of the events of October 7 in the so-called Gaza envelope (the Israeli settlements bordering Gaza).

The collective voice, which once resonated with sympathy, now echoes with cautionary tales that warn against the wrath of the oppressed, which is barbaric, primordial, and awakens right-wing fascism.

The real paradox is in the mistaken understanding of how Zionist vengeance works — it doesn’t simply react to Palestinian actions, provocations, or even their capacity to invoke terror, but goes beyond the conventional realm of cause and effect and seeks to punish the audacity of mere Palestinian existence. Even a Palestinian like President Mahmoud Abbas, who allows Israel to continue expanding its settler colonies in the West Bank and serve its security and financial interests, is an affront to the settlers. All that the Palestinian Authority (PA) has received in return for its security and civil cooperation with Israel is financial sanctions and a hidden desire to get rid of Israel’s dependency on the PA’s security cooperation.

The Dahiya doctrine is evident in Gaza today. Israel has declared that any attack on it that it deems significant will result in the comprehensive destruction of both civil and governmental infrastructure, including bombing villages, cities, and towns back into the “stone age” through wholesale destruction. In other words, any form of resistance, regardless of the target, will be met with no less than a scorched earth policy from the air.

The world has sent a clear message to the Palestinians: there will be no legal respite, no political relief, only limited support for nonviolence, and occasional condemnations when and if Israel is perceived to commit crimes. In fact, there is violence in this insistence on nonviolence by the international community because it is effectively an invitation for Palestinians to lie down and die.

The various layers of Israel’s defensive structure include the geographic proximity of its military installations and its civilian settlements, including the wide presence of military-trained police forces in civilian areas. The wide ownership of guns, specifically in frontier areas like the Gaza envelope, would also be an important consideration for any military planning or offensive operation.

With the available information, we can surmise that the operation had three main tactical goals: capturing Israeli soldiers in exchange for prisoners, getting information or weapons from Israel’s many military bases, and making it hard for any police or military force to easily clear and retake the Gaza envelope (which they would probably do by negotiating over hostages they held in the settlements inside the Gaza envelope).

This meant that fighters set up camp inside Israeli settlements to try to delay the recapture of the envelope. They did this by fighting or negotiating for a long time to free the hostages while stopping civilians from resisting the deep maneuver within Israeli territory. The problem is that growing evidence shows that Israel wasn’t interested in negotiating over hostages and instead prioritized retaking the Gaza envelope by shelling its own settlements, killing the fighters, and perhaps leading to the death of its own civilians.

The Palestinian military strategy aimed to delay and postpone, while Israel’s strategy focused on the rapid recovery and reclamation of its territory. And it is highly unlikely that this policy did not at least exacerbate the extent of the civilian casualties. Numerous testimonies from Israeli survivors indicate that Israeli military and police units may not have exercised caution in the battles around the Gaza envelope. This evidence has encouraged a group of Israelis to write an open letter encouraging their fellow citizens to demand the truth of the events of October 7.

The primary difference, then, between when Israel commits its crimes against Palestinian civilians and when Palestinians do it stems from an international network that legitimizes, clarifies, and codifies the logic behind Israeli military actions. This gives it an appearance of respectability, even when the underlying rationale appears deeply flawed or seemingly justifies the large-scale killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Hamas can remain barbaric, and Israel can remain a strong “democratic and liberal” ally of the United States. The first engages in a mindless act of profane violence, while the second engages in calculated and methodical strikes, a sacred form of violence.

Not delving into the military logic of the attack exemplifies an aversion to confronting the reality of violence and the logics that animate it, an avoidance that is endemic among certain intellectuals. It’s not just about the refusal to bring these topics to light, but about what this refusal signifies about the problematics of dealing with the logic of Palestinian violence, especially in an environment that simply casts it as profane, detestable, and morally degraded.

Perhaps what is central to any moral judgment is that these judgments need to be rigorously subjected to evidence, especially when Israel refuses to share much of the evidence it has. Did Hamas issue orders for the killing of civilians, or was the killing of civilians an excess on the part of the fighters? How many of the Israelis were killed in the exchange of fire with fighters? Did the Israeli military effort to retake the Gaza envelope take into consideration the presence of Israeli civilians? These questions are important, not only because they will provide us with a clearer picture, but because the official Israeli version of events was employed to justify the Dresden-like air campaign against Gaza and the mass murder of Palestinians.

Why wouldn’t an assault on Israel’s primary nerve — its deterrence and military power — not lead to a humbling experience that might open new avenues for a new political solution? While such prospects seem distant in the heat of battle and in light of Israel’s genocidal intent, the actual battle on the ground is what will decide the future.

Skirting their political utility and military logic and confining them to mere “vengeance” ignores the fact that all wars and battles, no matter how horrific, bloody, and tragic, might ultimately create the space for new possibilities — even hopeful ones. This line of thinking also ignores the world as Palestinians experience and perceive it — that is, as long as Israelis live in this assured certainty of their all-encompassing power, the will to change the reality of the Palestinians will remain absent.

And even if the Palestinian resistance fails to snatch a relative victory in this battle, the alternative would have been a slow death.

This is the kind of genuine critical engagement with the Palestinian resistance that we require. It isn’t solely about Palestine’s stance against ethnic cleansing, or its own fight to reclaim Palestine — rather, it is a liberation movement with global resonance that represents a universal struggle.

Perhaps the perception that the events of October 7 were nothing more than an expression of intra-Palestinian necrosis is more an indication of what intellectuals secretly wish for us. But we in Palestine desire and fight for a world that includes us, and a world that includes everyone else. Mourn us if you want, or don’t. Condemn us, or don’t. It’s not like we have not heard the cries of condemnation before."

I want to share this (from August '23), so you can get an idea of the collusion between the PA (and PLO) and the zionist entity. (The PLO is still the internationally recognized "representative" of the Palestinian people, since the occupation has continually fought efforts for Palestinians to have their own rightful state.) From RNN:

The Jenin Phenomenon: New Details Reveal the PA's Plan to "End Resistance"

PIJ leader Maher Al-Akhras revealed aspects of a special security plan led by the Palestinian Authority's Security Services to end what it calls the "Jenin Phenomenon." The plan includes deploying hundreds of PA Presidential Guard soldiers at the entrances and gates of the city and the camp as part of the PA's "sacred security coordination" with the zionist enemy. This is an extension of previous US-backed plans that have been brewing for months.

According to Al-Akhras, the PA set up a security operations room in Jenin that includes senior security figures in the PA, including those who led the PA plan to attempt to dismantle the Lions' Den. These figures represent all aspects of the PA Security Forces, and Presidential Guard members were added.

They equipped the PA headquarters with dozens of individuals responsible for preventing any celebrations of resistance in Jenin. Akhras noted that these individuals were armed and provided with armored vehicles, spread across various PA headquarters in the city and the camp. Their exclusive role is to pursue any demonstration celebrating any resistance operation or to besiege and surround any march of resistance fighters in the camp.

Al-Akhras indicated that this room is the result of a plan approved after the traitorous Aqaba and Sharm El-Sheikh meetings between the PA and zionist enemy with US oversight, mainly activated after the recent Jenin invasion and in light of the heroic acts of resistance to repel the occupation forces from the camp.

The PA presented a plan that includes a set of points to "empty" the Jenin Brigade, the first of which is to bargain with the resistance fighters to surrender their weapons in exchange for receiving a pardon from the occupation and ensuring they are not pursued. The plan also offers jobs and money similar to what the PA attempted to do with the Lions' Den last fall; this plan depends on the same figures who tried to make these deals with Lions' Den fighters to "apply their vision and plan."

Further, the plan includes methods of threats and intimidation in terms of arrest and refusal to release even if court orders were issued—as is the case for fighters Musab Shtayyeh, Murad Malaysha, and Mohammed Brahma—linking the arrest of resistance fighters to the responsibility of the higher PA security agencies, and threatening the families of the wanted with the possibility of their assassination at any moment in order to continuously intimidate them.

He pointed out that this plan as a whole reflects the desire to implement the statements of PA President Mahmoud Abbas who stated, "We will not allow Balata to become like Jenin," indicating his desire to "resolve" the existence of resistance.

Al-Akhras considered these measures a clear participation by the PA in the liquidation of the resistance and ending its presence, while the PA stands by and watches the crimes of the settlers and their open war against the Palestinian people.

Al-Akhras called on "the leadership of the Fatah movement and the honorable members of the movement to take a stand against these measures that target all resistance fighters equally, aiming to secure the occupation at the expense of the blood of our people and the lives of its sons," and "The Authority must release the resistance fighters it recently arrested."

He added, "The Authority must know its duty. Where is it regarding the Palestinian concern?"

Al-Akhras reaffirmed, "The Islamic Jihad movement is continuing on the path of resistance, and it will not be concerned with those who have let it down."

Further, this evening, a meeting was held between the head of the "Shin Bet," Ronen Bar, and the Secretary of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hussein Al-Sheikh, with the aim of increasing security coordination between the Palestinian Authority and zionist entity and strengthening the PA, a day after the entity rewarded the PA with a one year debt freeze.

By: Tim Black

Published: Oct 19, 2023

Over the past two weeks, the same phrase has been uttered by countless politicians: ‘Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.’ US president Joe Biden has said it. British PM Rishi Sunak has said it. Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, which rules over the West Bank, has said it (before his speech was redacted).

But something far stronger needs to be said. It’s not that Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people. It’s that Hamas is against the Palestinian people. It’s the enemy of the Palestinian people. Its interests as an Islamist terrorist movement, dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the creation of an Islamic state in its place, stand in direct opposition to the interests and lives of the Palestinian people.

Make no mistake: Hamas has always treated the Palestinians like dirt. Since it seized power in Gaza in 2007, it has ruled as one would expect it to – as a brutal, oppressive, theocratic regime. It has tortured and killed those who deviate from its strict ‘laws’, and who dissent from its quasi-fascist ideology. Homosexuals have been regularly persecuted, tortured and killed. And political opponents have frequently been murdered, sometimes under the cover of its intermittent battles with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

Perhaps most despicable of all, Hamas has constantly sacrificed Gazans in its multiple conflicts with Israel, deliberately placing them in harm’s way. It has stored rockets in schools, mortar shells in hospitals and munitions in mosques. And, with incredible callousness, people have been ordered to remain in their homes during Israeli attacks, even when being told by the IDF to evacuate. This is still happening now. The IDF is telling those living in the north of Gaza to evacuate, while Hamas is ordering them to stay put.

Despite Western sympathisers’ attempts to downplay this horrific ‘tactic’, or to dismiss it as Israeli propaganda, Hamas has always been open about it. As one of its leaders boasted in 2008: ‘For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry… The elderly excel at this, and so do… the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women and children.’ During the 2014 conflict with Israel, another senior spokesman told Palestinian station al-Aqsa TV that wilfully sacrificing Gazans ‘attests to the character of our noble, jihad-loving people, who defend their rights and their homes with their bare chests and their blood’.

Hamas uses the phrase ‘human shields’, but this unjustly dignifies this tactic’s depravity. For Hamas, Gazans’ bodies are not shields – they are media fodder. Their lives are worth less to Hamas than their deaths – the images and videos of which offer valuable propaganda material to be circulated around the world as proof of Hamas’s victimisation at the hands of evil Israel. Again, this is what Hamas is doing right now. As the Israeli military readies itself for a ground invasion, Hamas is happy to turn hundreds of thousands of Gazans into bloody war propaganda.

Every dead Palestinian is useful for Hamas. Just consider the explosion at the al-Alhi Arab hospital earlier this week. This was immediately held up by Hamas spokespeople as proof of Israeli war crimes. They claimed that 500 innocent people had died in the blast. Yet it now seems likely that Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another Islamist terror group, was responsible. All too often, rockets fired at Israel fall short of their targets and end up killing Gazans instead. But this is of no concern to Hamas, which can exploit and weaponise these deaths to its own abhorrent ends.

There is no question that Gazans have suffered greatly over the past two decades. But their oppression and exploitation has only benefitted Hamas’s leaders. They have happily reaped the rewards of their reign of terror, growing rich on their control of the Gazan black market, the largesse of their regional backers and no doubt some of the billions of dollars Gaza receives in international aid. Long-time Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh pledged to live on ‘olive oil and dried herbs’ after he led Hamas to victory at the 2006 Palestinian elections. In 2019, he shook off his asceticism and left Gaza to go on what Hamas announced was a ‘foreign tour’. He has never returned. The multibillionaire now lives in luxury in Qatar. As does some-time chairman of Hamas, Khaled Meshal. Meshal and his family, estimated to be worth something in the region of $2.5 billion, own a Doha real-estate firm, four residential towers and a 20-story mall. And all the while, the vast majority of Gazans live in extreme poverty.

Hamas is clearly corrupt, brutal and nasty. Yet we rarely hear much about just how vicious a regime Hamas runs, because Hamas also arrests, tortures and detains journalists. It is eager for the local and international press to carry stories and images of Gazans’ deaths at the hands of an Israeli missile. But less keen for the media to carry stories and images of its own treatment of Gazans.

That Hamas can treat Gazans so callously and brutally should not surprise us. Formed by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1987, Hamas does not share the interests of the Palestinian people. It is not concerned with establishing some form of Palestinian statehood, or securing rights and freedoms. No, its goals are near-enough apocalyptic – and genocidal.

Like the larger Islamist movement of which it is part, Hamas wants to wage war – perhaps the final war – against the Jews. It wants to destroy Israel, to cleanse the land of Jews ‘From the river to the sea’, as the slogan goes. ‘Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious’, reads one of the opening lines of Hamas’s 1988 founding charter. Hamas, it says, ‘is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy [Israel] is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realised’.

This genocidal anti-Semitism doesn’t just pose a danger to Jews in Israel – it also makes any sort of political resolution of the Palestinian question near impossible. After all, how can Israelis be expected to make accommodations with a group that openly calls for their extinction? Meanwhile, the lives of the Palestinians are treated as mere fodder in this obscene, racist campaign.

And yet there are still many Western leftists proudly celebrating Hamas right now. There are many ‘radical’ academics cheering on Hamas’s pogrom of Jewish civilians as an act of resistance. And there are many poseurs flooding social media with Hamas-style anti-Zionism. These are not friends of the Gazans. They are friends of Hamas. And that makes them the enemies of the Palestinian people.

==

Free Palestine... from Hamas. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the biggest victims of Islam are Muslims. Hamas needs to be hunted down and exterminated so that Palestinians can find peace with Israel. It's impossible with fundamentalist terrorists in charge, because they're conducting a divine holy war.

The same way Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, ISIS and the Taliban need to be wiped out, and the Iranian regime torn down.

Also, defund Gender Studies.

A new poll released by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research finds declining levels of support for Hamas in both the Gaza Strip and West Bank, though the percentage who believe the terror group’s October 7 onslaught was “correct” is virtually unchanged.

According to the survey, 71% of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank back the October 7 massacres in which in terrorists killed some 1,200 people and kidnapped 253 others, versus 72% who said so when the organization’s previous poll was published in December.

While the overall figure remained steady, support for atrocities increased from 57% to 71% in Gaza the past three months and dipped from 82% to 71% in the West Bank.UNRWA RallyKeep Watching

Along with Islamist group itself, respondents gave high marks to the Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar over his conduct in the war, with 61% approving, though this was down some from 69% in December.

Among the other questions in the survey are who Palestinians would vote for if new parliament elections were held today. A plurality — 30% — say Hamas, followed by 14% for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement, which was just below the 15% for none of the above. Six percent of respondents say they’ll back third parties while 36% won’t vote.

Update post:

Today marks 123 days since Hamas launched the war in Gaza with its massacre of Israeli civilians.

There were two terrorist attacks today in Israel, both stopped before anyone was injured. The first entails Palestinians from the West Bank shooting at a home in kibbutz Meirav in the Gilboa mountains (where the Israelite king Shaul and his sons died 3,000 years ago), the house was damaged, but no person was hurt. This kibbutz was attacked several times along 2023. The second was in the city of Shchem (you might know it as Nablus, the Arab mispronunciation of the Greek word 'Neapolis,' because Arabic doesn't have the sound 'p'), I'm attaching the pic of the gun and knife which were found on the terrorist after he was neutralized. I found reports about them on two Israeli websites (Ha'aretz and Now14), but both are in Hebrew. The latter also mentions a rock throwing terror attack earlier today, against the car of a woman named Rachel Yaniv. Her brothers, Halel and Yagel Yaniv, were murdered by Palestinian terrorists almost a year ago.

We got the info today on an Iranian attempt on the lives of Jewish leaders in Stockholm, that was stopped in 2021. These terrorists, believed to be linked to the IRGC, infiltrated Sweden under the guise of Afghan refugees, and were deported (rather than put on trial) in 2022. This is a small reminder that the Islamist axis led by Iran, and which includes the terrorist organizations it funds (including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis), as well as countries that chose to align themselves with Iran against the west, such as Qatar, is not anti-Zionist, it IS antisemitic.

In an Israeli TV interview conducted in Arabic, an Israeli journalist asked the right hand man of Palestinian Authority's president Mahmoud Abbas, whether he's willing to denounce the Oct 7 massacre. He didn't. Instead, he insisted that the occupation is the source of all this violence (even though terrorist attacks against Jews in Israel by Arabs predate both the war in 1967, which used to be defined as the start of "the occupation," and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948), and that as long as the occupation continues, so will such acts [as the Oct 7 massacre].

As part of the campaign against the antisemitism and bias at the BBC, an employee who called the Jews Nazis, and denied the Holocaust, has finally been fired.

Israel's most popular sketch comedy show decided to tackle UNRWA with this funny short vid:

In the segment where the UNRWA teacher shows how he teaches biology, history and English using Hitler's Mein Kampf, on the left side of the wall behind the "teacher" you can see the lyrics of a song titled Fedayeen (a term used for Egypt-funded Palestinian terrorists who attacked Israelis in the 1950's), and the pics of two Hamas leaders who are heading the war in Gaza now, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif ('deif' is a nickname, his real name is Mohammed al-Masri, a last name that literally means "the Egyptian," so guess where his family is originally from).

Jewish singer Montana Tucker proved she's the bravest artist from among countless performers who attended the biggest American entertainment award shows recently, as she wore an enlarged version of the yellow ribbon to bring the Israeli hostages back home to the Grammys. She didn't just speak up for her people, she made sure everyone would hear her. She's been regularly speaking up for Israelis and Jews since Oct 7.

The ceremony also included a nice gesture to the over 400 people in Israel who were either murdered at or kidnapped from the Nova music festival on Oct 7. Taylor Swift broke yet another music industry record, so this is a good time to remind everyone that there are several Hamas leaders who are each individually richer than her. It pays more to kill Jews, than to be one of the most successful musicians ever (her net worth is estimated at about 1 billion dollars).

This is 19 years old Idan Alexander.

His mom Yael recounted how cool he was in every given situation, and how proud his family was of him, when he told them that he intends to leave New Jersey and make Alyiah. Moving to Israel of course meant he'd have to serve in the army, too. On Oct 7, Yael got to talk to him, and hear that he has seen some horrible things already. She knew something was off, because unlike his usual behavior, he sounded stressed. Idan was kidnapped by Hamas, and it took 6 days before the family even learned whether he's alive or dead. He's been in captivity for 4 months now.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

“Horrified by the Israeli airstrike on Al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital. Hundreds are dead in the single most brutal attack on Gaza. This massacre is a war crime, an affront to humanity, and a stain on the world's conscience. There is NO justification for this. Our prayers are with the victims and their families. May God grant them the peace they so deserve.” — Queen Rania of Jordan on 17 October 2023

“Where is the self-defense in targeting children, civilians, and medical staff? This is a war crime! Unspeakable horror..Silence is unacceptable.. and the entire world has to speak up. The western world can no longer claim morality if they continue with these double standards. Israel is responsible for this massacre and must be held accountable.” — Crown Prince Hussein of Jordan

Gaza authorities said an Israeli air strike on Tuesday killed about 500 people at a hospital in the Palestinian enclave, but Israel said a Palestinian rocket had caused the blast. The death toll was by far the highest of any single incident in Gaza during the current violence, triggering protests in the occupied West Bank, Istanbul and Amman.

Reacting to this, Jordan called off the U.S. president’s planned summit with Arab leaders. The postponement of the Amman summit comes after Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas withdrew from the scheduled meetings in protest of the attacks, which the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza blamed on an Israeli airstrike. “This war and this aggression are pushing the region to the brink,” Ayman Safadi, Jordan’s foreign minister, told al-Mamlaka TV, a state-run network. He said Jordan would only host the summit when all participants agreed on its purpose, which would be to “stop the war, respect the humanity of the Palestinians, and deliver the aid they deserve.”