Israel clears voting in east Jerusalem

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, January15 , 2006 (IslamOnlie.net & News Agencies) – Israel finally approved on Sunday, January15 , allowing Palestinians in Al-Quds (occupied East Jerusalem) to vote in the Palestinian legislative elections, scheduled for January25 , but banned Hamas from listing its candidates on ballots in the holy city, drawing immediate rebuke from the Palestinian Authority and the resistance group.

The government approved the decision unanimously, an official said, after US pressure to lift, in the interests of Palestinian democracy, opposition to voting in the occupied holy city, reported Reuters.

"I propose to the cabinet that the election in east Jerusalem be conducted on the same basis as in 1996 and2005 ," acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a Cabinet meeting, in comments carried on Israeli radio.

After talks with both Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Friday, January15 , a US Middle East envoy said Washington wanted Palestinians in Al-Quds to cast their ballot.

"The United States believes that the Palestinians should be able to vote everywhere," said Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch.

Israel had threatened to block voting in the occupied city in protest to Hamas participation in the January 25 polls.

Palestinian officials had threatened to postpone the legislative elections if Israel prevented Al-Quds inhabitants from voting.

Israel had initially been reluctant to allow voting in Al-Quds for the presidential elections in January.

It only allowed Al-Quds residents to vote in post offices after pressures from the United States.

Israel had allowed voting in the holy city in the last Palestinian parliamentary election in1996 .

Israel captured and then annexed Al-Quds after the 1967 war but the international community still regards the holy city, home to nearly 200 , 000Palestinians, as an occupied territory.

Al-Quds is home of Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam third holiest shrine, and represents the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

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http://islamonline.net/English/News/2006-01/15/article02.shtml

Israel yielded to American pressure yesterday and agreed to let East Jerusalem Arabs vote in the Palestinian parliamentary elections on 25 January. But ministers barred Hamas from campaigning in the disputed city.

Within hours, police arrested Sheikh Mohammed Abu Tir, the number two man on the Hamas list, and two other candidates when they tried to hold a press conference near the al-Aqsa mosque compound. Two organisers were also detained.

Earlier, Sheikh Abu Tir, a graduate of Israeli prisons with a vivid spade of a dyed red beard, claimed in an interview with the Israeli daily Ha'aretz that Hamas's participation in the elections represented a major shift to democratic politics.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, had threatened to postpone the elections if Jerusalem Arabs were not allowed to vote.

But Ghassan Hatib, his Planning Minister, protested that the ban on Hamas played into opposition hands. "This is worse than preventing everybody from campaigning," he said. "This will only increase public sympathy for Hamas."

Despite warnings by both the US and the EU that they would cut aid to the Palestinian Authority if Hamas joined the government, a weekend poll showed the Islamic movement closing in on Mr Abbas' Fatah. The Bir-Zeit University survey gave Hamas 30 per cent of the vote to 35 for Fatah. A quarter were undecided.

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article338841.ece

Isn't it true that Palestine was empty and inhabited by nomadic people? (Typical pro-israeli propagandist question)

From the early stages of Zionism to the present, Zionists have propagated the myth that Palestinians did not settle Palestine until it was later developed by the Israelis. To facilitate such disinformation, the Zionists adopted the following slogan to entice European Jewry to emigrate to Palestine:

"A land with no people is for a people with no land".

Had the Zionist leadership admitted the existence of an indigenous people, then they would have been obliged to explain how they intended to displace them. To disprove this baseless myth, let's quote Ben-Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister) who stated as early as 1918 that "Palestine is not an empty country". According to Shabtai Teveth (one of Ben-Gurion's official biographers), Ben-Gurion stated in an article published in 1918 that:

"Palestine is not an empty country . . . on no account must we injure the rights of the inhabitants."

Ben-Gurion often returned to this point, emphasizing that Palestinian Arabs had "the full right" to an independent economic, cultural, and communal life, but not political. (Shabtai Teveth, p. 37-38)

To destroy this baseless myth, click here to view a page that was scanned from a book which was conceived and edited by Ben-Gurion himself, stating that Jews made up 12% of the total Palestinian population as of 1914. It's not only that the majority of the Jews in Palestine were not Zionists (by Ben-Gurion's own admission), but they were also not even citizens of the country since many had recently fled anti-Semitic Tsarist Russia.

As the Ottoman census records show Palestine was widely inhabited in the late 19th and early 20th century, especially in the rural areas where agriculture was the main profession. According to Justine McCarthy (p. 26), an authority on the Ottoman Turks, Palestine's population in the early 19th century was 350,000, and in 1914 Palestine had a population of 657,000 Muslim Arabs, 81,000 Christian Arabs, and 59,000 Jews (including many European Jews from the first and second Aliyah).

So the Jewish population in Palestine as of 1914 were under 8% of the total population, which was much smaller than the Palestinian Christian Arab population. It should be noted that our source, Justine McCarthy was quoted by many Israeli Jewish scholars like Benny Morris and Tom Segev. In that regard, it's worth quoting one of the most ardent Zionists, Israel Zangwill, who stated as early as 1905, that Palestine was twice as thickly populated as the United States. He stated:

"Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. The pashalik of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United States, having fifty-two souls to the square mile, and not 25% of them Jews ..... [We] must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the [Arab] tribes in possession as our forefathers did or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to despise us." (Righteous Victims, p. 140 & Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 7-10)

In other words, Palestinians were recognized by the Zionist leadership as "humans" who populated Palestine, however, that was not good enough of a reason to "grant" them the same political rights as Jews, who mostly lived outside of Palestine. Consequently, this ideology was the prelude to the wholesale DISPOSSESSION and ETHNIC CLEANSING of the Palestinian people during the 1948 war.

Soon after the first Zionist Congress in Basel (Switzerland) in 1897, a Zionist delegation was sent to Palestine for a fact finding mission, and to explore the viability of settling Palestine with persecuted European Jews. The delegation replied back from Palestine with a cable that stated:

"The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man." (Iron Wall, p. 3)

Despite that many Zionists were aware of this happy marriage as early as 1897, they have deliberately chosen to terminate this relationship since they think that Jewish rights are more important than Palestinian rights. The forcible divorce of Palestine from its indigenous people was eloquently articulated by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Israeli political Right, in 1926 who explained that:

" ... the tragedy lies in the fact the there is a collision here between two truths .... but our justice is greater. The Arab is culturally backward, but his instinctive patriotism is just as pure and noble as our own; it cannot be bought, it can only be curbed ... force majeure." (Righteous Victims, p. 108)

The questions which beg to be asked are these:

* Do two wrongs make a right?
* Is it just to solve an injustice by perpetrating another injustice?
* If at one point, Palestinian injustice becomes greater than Jewish injustice, does that justify perpetrating war crimes to solve their injustice?

What makes many Zionists dangerous over time is that they start believing their own propaganda. For example, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Prime Minister between 1996-1998, proposed lately that Israel should never relinquish control over the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip since he claims that the local population are the descendents of non-indigenous Palestinians. He also alleged that these people came to look for employment that was generated by the influx of new European Jewish capital. Yehoshua Porat, a Hebrew University professor, refuted the late Prime Minister in an article published in Ha'aretz Daily, click here to read his rebuttal. It's worth noting that Professor Porat worked for the campaign to elect Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, so it might not be a good idea to call him Netanyahu hater.

It's really amusing that while nearly all Israelis and Zionists believe that Hawaii, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Tahiti, and Iraq were all populated by indigenous people prior to WW I, however, they find it extremely difficult to imagine that the "Promised Land" (one of the most strategic areas in the world) had any indigenous people whatsoever. It's as if the "Promised Land" had been waiting for over 2,000 years for Israelis and Zionists to settle it and make it bloom, click here to read our response to this argument.

Finally, it's not only that Palestine enjoyed a strategic commercial location (being the land bridge between Asia and Africa), its lands were also fertile and planted with all sorts of trees a long time before the Zionists came to its shorelines. So to claim that Palestine had no people until the Zionists came to settle it, is an absurd claim. Sadly, many Israelis and Zionists hate the idea of an indigenous Palestinian people to the point that they've created a fictitious world based on illusion. In that respect, the Palestinian people have a simple message: Over 8.5 million Palestinians are not going away. The sooner the Israelis and Zionists understand this simple message, the faster they will wake up from their delusional coma.

Palestinians are not the only people to have been subjected to population transfer, it is normal in human history

(Typical zionist assertion)

Increasingly, this argument has become the response of many Israelis and Zionists to the Palestinian Right of Return. Slowly, but surely, the argument that Palestinians left their homes based on their free will (click here to read our response) has been losing ground to newly discovered historical facts, thanks to Israeli revisionist historians, who based their research on declassified Israeli and Zionist archives.

It's misleading to compare the population transfer that occurred in the aftermath of WW II to the one that came upon the Palestinian people for the following reasons:

* It's true that population transfer occurred in Europe in the aftermath of WW II, however, it was neither politically motivated nor enforced by armed might. It should be noted that many Displaced Persons (D.P.) refugee camps sprang up all over Europe soon after the war. However, that was mostly done for economic and not for political reasons. Soon after the war, Europe's economy and infrastructure were devastated, and to stabilize it the U.S. sponsored the Marshal Plan to help Europe help itself.

Non-politically motivated population transfer was and still is happening around the world, and it is not restricted to Europe only. On the other hand, "transferring" a whole minority (actually, in the case of Palestinians it was the 2/3 majority that was "transferred" by the "Jewish minority") to achieve political objectives is nothing but sheer TERROR. If this is not accepted, then,

What were the war crimes perpetrated in Bosnia and Kosovo?
Why, when Slobodan Milosevic used such excuses, was he condemned and tried as a war criminal?
Since "population transfer" allegedly occurred in Europe during WWII, and it's excusable for the "Jewish minority" in Palestine to use such forced "transfer" of a people in order to become the majority, then:
Why the same excuse can't be used by the Slavic majority to "transfer" the "unwanted" Albanian Muslim minority?

* Soon after the 1948 war, the Palestinian people lost almost everything they owned, such as farms, businesses, buses, factories, railroads, boats, banks, ... etc., and above all, they lost their political and civil rights. Note that none of the European nations (such as the German, French, Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, etc. nations) had their political, economical, and civil rights removed. What's fundamentally unique about what happened to the Palestinian nation is that their political, civil, and economic rights as a people have been all removed in favor of the "Jewish minority".

* Assuming that forcible population transfer really occurred in Europe, the questions which beg to be asked are:

Should such policies be the norm, or the exception?
If the alleged forcible population transfer really happened in Europe, is it excusable to practice such polices?
Is "forcible population transfer" a war crime?

* Assuming for the moment that the act of forcible population transfer is not a war crime, then
Would you condone such practices against other people?
If the conundrum has not been yet comprehended, then would you accept such policies against the Jewish citizens of Russian, Poland, Germany, ... etc.?
It's worth noting that when Israel tried Adolf Eichmann for atrocities committed as a Nazi leader, it included charges of forcible expulsion (ethnic cleansing) which was classified as a war crime and a crime against humanity.


It should be emphasized that, even prior to the population transfer which resulted from WW II, the Zionist leaders were keen on creating a "Jewish State" based on a "Jewish majority" by mass immigration of Jews to Palestine, primarily European Jews fleeing from anti-Semitic Tsarist Russia and Nazi Germany. When a "Jewish majority" was impossible to achieve, based on Jewish immigration and natural growth, Zionist leaders (such as Ben Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and Chaim Weizmann) concluded that "population transfer" was the only solution to what they referred to as the "Arab Problem."

Year after year, the plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its indigenous people became known as the "transfer solution". David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, eloquently articulated the "transfer solution" as follows:

* In a joint meeting between the Jewish Agency Executive and Zionist Action Committee on June 12th, 1938:

"With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement] .... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it." (Righteous Victims p. 144).

* In a speech addressing the Central Committee of the Histadrut on December 30, 1947:

"In the area allocated to the Jewish State there are not more than 520,000 Jews and about 350,000 non-Jews, mostly Arabs. Together with the Jews of Jerusalem, the total population of the Jewish State at the time of its establishment, will be about one million, including almost 40% non-Jews. such a [population] composition does not provide a stable basis for a Jewish State. This [demographic] fact must be viewed in all its clarity and acuteness. With such a [population] composition, there cannot even be absolute certainty that control will remain in the hands of the Jewish majority .... There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of only 60%." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 176 & Benny Morris p. 28)

* And on February 8th, 1948 Ben-Gurion also stated to the Mapai Council:

"From your entry into Jerusalem, through Lifta, Romema [East Jerusalem Palestinian neighborhood]. . . there are no [Palestinian] Arabs. One hundred percent Jews. Since Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, it has not been Jewish as it is now. In many [Palestinian] Arab neighborhoods in the west one sees not a single [Palestinian] Arab. I do not assume that this will change. . . . What had happened in Jerusalem. . . . is likely to happen in many parts of the country. . . in the six, eight, or ten months of the campaign there will certainly be great changes in the composition of the population in the country." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 180-181)

* In a speech addressing the Zionist Action Committee on April 6th, 1948:

"We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate upper and lower, eastern and western Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem area ..... I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of Arab population." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 181)

* Click here for more "Transfer" (Ethnic Cleansing) quotes from Zionist leaders.

Often Israelis and Zionists view WW II population transfer as a legal precedent, however, when asked to put up the details, they fail to come up even with one example which is not already a war crime. On the contrary, after considering the compulsory population transfer that Josef Stalin perpetrated against the people of the Caucasus during WW II, the truth cannot be more of a paradox. In 1943-44, Stalin ordered the whole population of the Caucasus to be expelled to Siberia as a collective punishment for their collaboration with the Nazis. However, the same people were allowed to return home in 1958 when the scale of the war crime became known to the Soviet premier at the time. So if the people of the Caucasus were allowed to return to their homes under Communist rule, how come Palestinian refugees cannot use this return as a legal precedent to return to their homes, farms, plantations, businesses, boats, banks, ports, ...etc. under Israeli rule?

Finally, it must be emphasized that the "Jewish people", of all peoples, should deplore such lame arguments. Ironically, European Jews were the first victims of politically motivated population transfer (Ethnic Cleansing), and it's the ultimate hypocrisy when Israelis and Zionists use such an excuse to practice and promote Ethnic Cleansing. If such war crimes were practiced against Jews in the past, that's no excuse to practice or attempt to justify similar war crimes against the Palestinian people.