Haaretz complains: Israel didn't allow enemy nationals to return from abroad after 7 years
Haaretz complains in Tuesday's edition how Israel did not allow 'Palestinians' who remained abroad for seven years to return and take up residency in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. In fact, they implicitly lament that were it not for Israel's barring these wealthy 'Palestinians' (Haaretz doesn't call them that, but they clearly must have been - who else can afford to study abroad in this region) the entire demographic picture in the 'territories' might look different. Given that Gaza's population has a natural growth rate of 3.3 percent a year, its population today would be more than 10 percent higher, had Israel not followed a policy of revoking residency rights from anyone who left the area for an extended period of time. The West Bank's population growth rate is 3 percent. Many of those prevented from returning were students or young professionals, working aboard to support their families.Of course, that assumes that wealthy professional 'Palestinians' would have wanted to live in Hamastan and that they would have produced 7-8 children apiece. I only know of two ethnics that continue to have children at that pace - aspire to have children at that pace - even as their income increases: Orthodox Jews and Catholics.
The data on Gaza residency rights was released by the Defense Ministry's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories this week, in response to a freedom-of-information request filed by Hamoked - The Center for the Defense of the Individual. In its letter, COGAT said that 44,730 Gazans lost their residency rights because they were absent from the territory for seven years or more; 54,730 because they did not respond to the 1981 census; and 7,249 because they didn't respond to the 1988 census.If they're alive at all.
It added that 15,000 of those deprived of residency are now aged 90 or older.
I am sure that Judea, Samaria and Gaza are not the only places in the world where at some point you lose your residency rights or cannot pass them on to your progeny. My father's parents left Lithuania (before they were married) just after World War I, and my mother's parents left either Latvia or the Ukraine (from which they respectively came) around the same time. I will guarantee you that if I went to any of those places today and said that I wanted a passport and citizenship rights, they would laugh in my face. Yes, my entire family still has US citizenship, but the very idea of dual citizenship is a relatively recent one. I know Americans who came here in the early 1960's who had to give up their US citizenship. To say that someone who absents themselves voluntarily from the country for seven years during which nothing is heard from them forfeits their citizenship does not seem unreasonable. Particularly when they are hostile to the country's existence.
Today, a similar procedure is applied to East Jerusalem residents: A Palestinian who lives abroad for seven years or more loses his right to return to the city.Unless he is an Israeli citizen, and every 'Palestinian' in 'east' Jerusalem has the right to become an Israeli citizen.
Since many of those who lost their residency rights from 1967 to 1994 in both Gaza and the West Bank were students or young professionals, their descendants today presumably number in the hundreds of thousands. Of the original people affected by the policy - nearly 250,000 - many have since died. But several thousands who were affiliated with the PA were granted the right to return in 1994; still other Palestinians have since been allowed to return for a variety of reasons.You can almost feel the article's author - extreme Leftist Akiva Eldar - crying over the fact that the absence of these 'Palestinians' makes the Jewish majority between the Jordan and the Mediterranean so much clearer. Boo. Hoo.
By the way, the picture at the top of this post is a picture of Jews who were lucky enough to live through their expulsion from Arab countries. Funny - I doubt any of those countries would take those Jews back, although admittedly those Jews don't want to go.
Labels: Gaza, Jewish refugees, Judea and Samaria, Palestinian refugees
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:48 PM
4 Comments:
"... [Gaza's] population today would be more than 10 percent higher"???
But but but why would anyone want such a thing? I distinctly remember the expulsion of Jews from Gaza being supported on the grounds that the population density was unbearable and unsustainable, that the Gaza strip was The Most Densely Populated Place in the World (which of course it wasn't).
Why would Arabs want to live in a state that 100% of their fellow Arabs forbid from entering their own countries if the person is carrying a passport from Israel?
By the way, the picture at the top of this post is a picture of Jews who were lucky enough to live through their expulsion from Arab countries. Funny - I doubt any of those countries would take those Jews back, although admittedly those Jews don't want to go.
This is a lie, revisionist Zionist history. Mizrahi's themselves deny they were forced out.
Many have said they would return if they could.
Young Mizrahi Israelis’ open letter to Arab peers
Translated from Hebrew; English edited by Chana Morgenstern | Arabic version here
Sunday, April 24 2011|+972blog
http://972mag.com/young-mizrahi-israelis-open-letter-to-arab-peers/13695/
In a letter titled “Ruh Jedida: A New Spirit for 2011,” young Jewish descendants of the Arab and Islamic world living in Israel write to their peers in the Middle East and North Africa
In our previous letter written following Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009, we called for the rise of the democratic Middle Eastern identity and for our inclusion in such an identity. We now express the hope that our generation – throughout the Arab, Muslim, and Jewish world – will be a generation of renewed bridges that will leap over the walls and hostility created by previous generations and will renew the deep human dialog without which we cannot understand ourselves: between Jews, Sunnis, Shias, and Christians, between Kurds, Berbers, Turks, and Persians, between Mizrahis and Ashkenazis, and between Palestinians and Israelis. We draw on our shared past in order to look forward hopefully towards a shared future.
debunking Carl's fairy story above,
http://www.meforum.org/707/post-zionism-and-the-sephardi-question
by Meyrav Wurmser
Indeed, she argues, the conflict of East versus West, Arab versus Jew, and Palestinian versus Israeli exists not only between Israelis and Arabs but also within Israel between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews.
This view contradicts the mainstream Zionist narrative, which maintains that Zionism saved Mizrahi Jews.[7] According to this view, the Mizrahi Jews were devout Zionists who deeply wished to leave the Diaspora and return to Zion.[8] Zionism saved these Mizrahim when persecution in their Arab and Iranian homelands intensified after Israel's independence. It also rescued them from the backwardness of Arab society and introduced them to the technology and culture of the civilized world. Zionism helped them to overcome the disadvantages of the illiterate, despotic societies from which they came.
In contrast, post-Zionist Mizrahi writers believe that this official Zionist account is false and needs to be de-constructed. They maintain that the Mizrahim did not come from backward or primitive societies. Cities like Alexandria, Baghdad, and Istanbul were great metropolises of wealth and culture. Most Mizrahim had been exposed to Western culture and ideas since they came from countries once subject to British or French rule. The Mizrahim were also largely literate, if not highly educated. Most men and even some women could read the Torah.
The post-Zionist writers also attack the claim that the Mizrahi Jews longed to immigrate to Israel. In reality, they argue, as loyal residents of the Arab world, Zionism played a relatively minor role in the Mizrahi world-view.
Despite the role that the longing for Zion played in their religious lives, they did not share the European-Zionist desire to leave the Diaspora. Even after the Holocaust, post-Zionist writers maintain, Mizrahi Jews remained largely opposed to Zionism and lived peacefully with their Arab neighbors.
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Instead of saving the Mizrahi Jews, Zionism only ruthlessly displaced an entire community, Shenhav maintains, and removed its members' right to determine their own future. Pursuing this logic to its end, he argues that Zionism cannot be considered a liberation movement for all Jews.
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One of the main complaints of this radical intellectual school is the belief that Zionism destroyed the Mizrahi sense of community and culture by forcing the adoption of new "Zionist" and "Israeli" identities so as to eradicate any threat of a Mizrahi-Arab alliance.
This action not only destroyed the natural Arab-Jewish identity of the Mizrahim, these post-Zionists argue, but also sparked the Arab-Israeli conflict. Shiko Behar, a Mizrahi post-Zionist writer, asserts that identity in the Middle East today is shaped around post-colonial nationalism, not the religious division between Muslim and non-Muslim Arabs.[10]
Before the rise of modern Jewish and Arab nationalism, Mizrahim and Arabs could coexist without conflict because they all shared an Arab identity and only differed in their religious beliefs.[11] In Zionist Israel, continues Behar, the Mizrahim could not be considered Arab-Jews even if their historical identity was more closely aligned with the Arab rather than Israeli identity. The Arab-Israeli conflict meant that the Mizrahim were forced to choose: either they were Jews, or they were Arabs.
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Yet for this very reason, argues Behar, the Mizrahim—victimized by both Ashkenazi Zionism and the rise of Arab nationalism—are the key factor in solving the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Zionism and the Mizrahim: What Went Wrong?
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