U specifically replied to, “Ship the rest to Iran. Isreal / Egypt / Jordan shouldnt be forced to harbor terrorists” by asking if all Palestinians were terrorists and completely missing “the rest” in my sentence…
Nope. If you use your country to support / harbor terrorists and behead / kidnap / burn alive your neighbors, dont be suprised when you lose your country…
Luckily the non war criminal one s have places to go… (West Bank) and the war criminal / sympathizers also have places to go (Iran / islamic extremist states).
Seriously, why isnt Iran, the primary supporter / instigator of this muslim extremist terrorism even considered as an option here?
I most certainly did not ask if all Palestinians were terrorists.
Once again you have saved me from making a long rambling post by saying what I think more concisely than I could.
Gazans are desperately poor and uneducated people, half of whom are literally children. Realistically, they are going to be a huge drag on the economy of any country that accepts them, and all the countries in the region are already having enough problems already. The situation really would be analogous to the US deciding to just open the southern border.
The calculus of “wanting them to be a thorn in Israel’s side” may play some part, but it’s not as though letting all of them into, say, Egypt, would be an easy or painless decision on Egypt’s part. Rather than criticizing poor Arab countries for not wanting to take them in, why not criticize rich Western countries, who constantly bloviate about the Occupation but aren’t willing to take in refugees?
Also, as of now the situation at the Gaza/Egypt border is rather mysterious. The border is closed, but AFAIK none of the three relevant parties (Hamas, Israel, and Egypt) have confirmed or denied that they are responsible for keeping it closed.
My guess is that Israel would find itself at war with Egypt, and the Gazans would be caught in the middle.
So, I’ll take that as a no, you can’t unscramble your own word salad into comprehensible English. Maybe we should try baby steps with the proper use of punctuation and capitalization? Spelling out the word “you”?
Israel has bombed the crossing and until the recently worked out agreement to allow humanitarian aid in - which hopefully goes into effect starting Friday, but I wouldn’t lay money on there being no delays on that - this has effectively closed the crossing to any traffic going in, and evacuation of foreign nationals/Palestinians with dual citizenships, since not only does the damage need to be repaired, Israel will bomb anything entering the country through the crossing as part of their complete embargo.
So, it’s really not a mystery; Israel is keeping the crossing closed to traffic going in, Egypt is keeping it closed to refugees trying to flee into Egypt, and foreign nationals/dual citizenship holding Palestinians are a combination of fucked by Israel bombing the crossing and Egypt not wanting to let them cross as leverage for international pressure to get Israel to agree to allow humanitarian aid in.
ISMAILIA, Egypt, Oct 16 (Reuters) - Egypt said on Monday that Israel was not cooperating with delivery of aid into Gaza and evacuations of foreign passport holders via the only entry it does not wholly control, leaving hundreds of tonnes of supplies stuck.
Cairo says the Rafah crossing, a potentially vital opening for desperately-needed supplies into the Israeli-besieged Palestinian enclave, is not officially closed but was made inoperable due to Israeli air strikes on the Gaza side.
Biden said Egypt’s president agreed to open the crossing and to let in an initial group of 20 trucks with humanitarian aid. If Hamas confiscated aid, “it will end”, he said. The aid would start moving Friday at the earliest, White House officials said.
He added that the 20 trucks represented a “first tranche” but “150 or something” trucks were waiting in total. Whether the rest were allowed to cross would depend on “how it goes”.
Egypt says the roads across the border need to be repaired after they were hit by Israeli airstrikes. More than 200 trucks and 3,000 tonnes of aid are positioned at or near the Rafah crossing, according to the head of the Red Crescent for North Sinai, Khalid Zayed.
Supplies would go in under supervision of the UN, the Egyptian foreign minister, Sameh Shoukry, told Al Arabiya TV. Asked if foreigners and dual nationals seeking to leave would be let through, he said: “As long as the crossing is operating normally and the [crossing] facility has been repaired.”
Previous assurances from the US that the border would open have not materialised.
As to why Egypt won’t allow Palestinians lacking dual citizenship to enter Egypt, that’s previously been covered. Egypt fears that Israel won’t allow them to return after the war is over, so they’ll be stuck with the problems of having to have permanent refugee camps for people who have been ethnically cleansed, as well as being held responsible for the inevitable attacks carried out from their territory into Israel by said displaced Palestinians.
Neither of those are unfounded fears. They were also a big part of why Egypt didn’t want to take the Gaza Strip back when the Sinai was returned to them in exchange for a peace treaty and recognition of Israel by them as part of the Camp David Peace Accords.
This is a ridiculous and completely unworkable instance of special pleading. No, it’s not allowable under international law to just kick an entire populace out of its own country because some members of the populace are terrorists, and I don’t think you’d even dream of trying to make such an argument if we were talking about any other populace than the Palestinians.
Did the Irish all get deported because some of them supported IRA terrorism? Did Afghanis have to leave Afghanistan en masse because some of them supported al-Qaeda’s attacks in the US and elsewhere? Have Americans all had to evacuate the USA because the US government has repeatedly sponsored terrorist activities in Latin America and elsewhere? No.
The fantasy of expelling all Palestinians permanently from any part of the occupied territories on the pretext of collectively punishing them for Hamas terror attacks is just a daydream of Israeli-expansionist wishful thinking. (And to be fair, the rest of the world—mostly the US—has coddled that daydream too much by not pushing back against equally unjustifiable encroachments of Israeli settlements into occupied Palestinian lands. We have only ourselves as an international community to blame if some of the Israeli-expansionism supporters have got high on their own supply and started really believing that Palestinians have no claim to fundamental rights and sovereignty.)
See my previous post regarding the pernicious and pervasive ignorance in mainstream western media about different MENA peoples being distinct national populations inhabiting distinct nation-states.
We in the US may (not unreasonably) oppose some of the things Iran does, but that doesn’t change the fact that Iran is a sovereign nation-state with the right to control its own borders and set its own immigration policies. It isn’t some kind of refugee dumping-ground that the US, or Israel, or any other state has the right to forcibly transfer a foreign population into.
(Even if the Palestinians were ours to forcibly transfer, which they’re not. They’re a non-Iranian Arab population living in their own ancestral homeland, and neither the US nor Israel nor anybody else has the right to kick them out of it, or deprive them of rights and self-determination within it. That remains true whether or not some Palestinians, like some members of many other nation-states, are terrorists and/or supporters of terrorism.)
I just want to say that even if other countries, like Egypt, the US, whatever, let Gazans flee as refugees, there would still be lots of Gazans in Gaza. There’s no way the entire population would voluntarily move, even under conditions like they are suffering today.
Saying “oh, we don’t want to help remove the population” is a fig leaf for the real answer, which is “we don’t want those people here”. I think it’s a humanitarian disaster that no one will accept Palestinian refugees. I don’t think it’s a “principled” position. I think it’s an inhumane one.
Well, the alternative seems to be either a) expecting Israel to do that, noting that the relative population numbers are considerably worse (even leaving out the fact that few if any of the population of Gaza appears to want to destroy Egypt or Egyptians and a significant number of that population – no of course not all of them – does want to destroy Israel and Israelis) or b) keeping them shut up in Gaza, which is obviously not working well for anybody; though I grant that it’s working out a whole lot better for Egypt than for either the Gazans or the Israelis.
As I think I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t see a good way out of this situation. One thing I do see is that a whole lot of people (maybe not including you) are blaming the people who have been holding one side of this border closed, but not the ones who’ve been holding the other side closed. Which they’ve been doing since there were a lot fewer people there.
Maybe write your Congressperson?
Well, Israel is the nation-state that claims jurisdiction and control over the occupied territories, including Gaza, and makes the rules about who can and can’t go there. It’s not reasonable to say that Israel is entitled to assert authority over Palestinian territory and deny Palestinians rights and sovereignty there, and then to turn around and say that Israel’s not responsible for what happens to Palestinians in the territories that Israel insists on controlling.
I don’t think it’s as easy or simple as that to apportion “blame” in this situation: there’s a lot of blame to go around, in any number of respects. Both Israel and Egypt are responsible for the Gaza blockade, for example, and all the Gazan militant groups including Hamas are constantly generating further chaos.
But AFAICT it’s Israel, not Egypt, that makes and enforces the rules about who may and may not enter Gaza. Israel is the nation-state regarded by the UN as the occupying power in Gaza, as in the West Bank.
If Israel isn’t willing to guarantee that refugees fleeing the current conflict in Gaza will later be allowed back in, then I don’t see much difference between “refugee crisis” and “policy of ethnic cleansing” in this case.
Moderating:
Replies like this are not encouraged here. Also it makes no sense in this use.
Please avoid such posts in the future.
That’s @thorny_locust’s point I think. If these countries care about the plight of the Palestinian people, why are all the Palestinians in those countries forced to live in refugee camps for decades?
The answer is that these countries don’t care about the plight of the Palestinians, or if anything they directly benefit from Palestinian suffering because it keeps a thorn in the side of Israel.
You do know that the US did do exactly that? You also do know that Gaza and the West Bank were a part of Egypt and Jordan until those countries attacked Israel and lost?
Imagine if Mexico started the Mexican-American war, not the other way around; and when Americans came into Texas and California the Mexican government told Hispanics leaving in those regions “come into Mexico so we can destroy the Americans and then go home”. And then when America did not lose the Mexican government put all the Hispanics who fled California and Texas etc in a refugee camp in the Sonoran desert, and they were still there today.
Gaza was never part of Egypt. It was part the British protectorate Mandatory Palestine when it was occupied by Egypt in 1948 to keep it from becoming part of Israel. It was administered by Egypt as an occupied territory, until Israel occupied it in 1967.
This would be a valid analysis if, say, Israel had conquered Gaza in a war of expansion against the Palestinian people while Egypt stood by.
But that’s not what happened. Gaza was already Egyptian territory. Israel won Gaza in a war with Egypt, not conflict with the Palestinians. And then Israel offered Egypt Gaza back, but the Egyptians refused.
I think that’s conflating the “Why don’t Palestinians go to other Arab countries” with “why do the countries that owned Gaza and the West Bank to begin with and already have Palestinian populations keep the Palestinians in their territory in refugee camps”.
Relocating Palestinians halfway across the Middle East is a stupid idea motivated by racism. It is also different from pointing out that the countries that originally had the responsibility of ruling the Palestinian territories and their people - Egypt and Jordan - have never acted in the interests of these people (who once upon a time were theoretically their subjects) and in fact are a major part of the reason why the Palestinians are wgere they are.
Fair enough, that’s a distinction.
It’s a difference, too. Using your original definition, Gaza was “part” of Britain or Israel longer than it was “part” of Egypt. From a purely legal (not practical) point of view, Gazans should all be Israeli citizens.
Sorry, I meant to say “that’s a valid distinction”. I agree, Gazans are not and were not Egyptian citizens and that’s a major difference.