The Human Rights Violations against Palestinians, Not News!

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The death earlier this month in an Israeli prison of Khader Adnan, a senior member of the Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) organization, has received worldwide coverage in major media outlets, including CNN, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, and The New York Times.

Meanwhile, two Palestinian men detained by the Islamist organization Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, died after a supposed unexpected “deterioration” in their health conditions in just the past month.

The deaths of the men in Hamas custody, however, was not given nearly the same attention by the international media and human rights organizations as the death of Adnan. The same newspapers and media organizations that highlighted the case of Adnan — who died after an 86-day hunger strike — chose to ignore the deaths of the two Palestinian detainees in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.

The United Nations, whose “experts” are now demanding “accountability” from the Israeli government following Adnan’s death, also remained silent over the death of the two men held by Hamas.

The attitude of the mainstream media in the West, international agencies and human rights organizations towards these deaths expose their double standards and their ongoing obsession with Israel. The failure to report the deaths of the two prisoners in Gaza underscores their apparent lack of concern for the human rights of Palestinians living under the rule of Hamas, an extremist group designated as a terror organization by the US, Canada, and the European Union, among others.

The media seem more worried about the human rights of Palestinian terrorists than the rights of victims of Palestinian terrorists. Note, for example, how Omar Shakir, the “Israel and Palestine” director of Human Rights Watch, hailed the leader of the Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad, also designated by many countries as a terror group. Has Shakir condemned the deaths of the two Palestinian men in Hamas custody? Not yet.

Adnan was neither tortured nor mistreated in Israeli prison. He chose to go on hunger strike after his arrest in February 2023 on charges of membership in a terror group and incitement to violence. He even refused to undergo medical evaluation or receive medical treatment during the hunger strike. Adnan was fully aware that he was putting his life at risk by refusing food and medical care. He made a conscious decision, knowing full well it could lead to his death.

This also was not Adnan’s first hunger strike in an Israeli prison. In the past, he went on a hunger strike for several weeks, again putting his life at risk. Then, after receiving assurances from Israeli authorities that his detention would not be extended, he had ended his hunger strike.

The stories of the two Palestinian men who died in Hamas custody are vastly different from that of Adnan.

The first man, Mohammed Al-Sufi, 43, was an Islamic preacher from the town of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. On April 20, the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Interior announced the death of Al-Sufi.

Al-Sufi’s 16-year-old son, Abdullah, told the Palestinian Center for Human Rights that his father and he were arrested on April 19 by Hamas security officers shortly after they returned home from a visit to Egypt. Abdullah said that he was punched and beaten by the officers, who accused his father and him of smuggling drugs into the Gaza Strip. He also said that he heard his father being interrogated in a nearby room and denying the charges. After a while, he heard the officers calling his father to wake up. Hours later, at Abu Yusef Annajar Hospital, Al-Sufi was pronounced dead.

Al-Sufi’s family insist he died from torture while in Hamas custody. They say he was arrested because he had criticized Hamas for serving as a proxy for Iran, which he said was responsible for killing Muslims in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Gaza Strip. The family has threatened to avenge his death at the hands of the “Hamas gangs.”

Al-Sufi’s family and friends published a poster on social media with his picture alongside a caption reading:

“I’m Sheikh Mohammed Al-Sufi. I was assassinated by Hamas on orders from Iran because I criticized the killers of Muslims in Syria and Iraq.”

Foreign journalists covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have so far failed to report about the death of the two Palestinians. Foreign journalists did not visit, or even try to contact, the families of the two men who died in Hamas custody in the Gaza Strip. The UN and human rights organizations — who expressed so much concern over the death of the hunger striker in an Israeli prison — have yet to comment on the suspicious deaths of the two Palestinians in Hamas detention in the Gaza Strip, which could constitute crimes against humanity.

No one cares about the two men who died in Hamas custody, apparently because Israel is not associated with their deaths. Had Al-Sufi and Al-Louh died in an Israeli prison, they would have made headlines in The New York Times, the BBC and CNN.

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The Real Origin of the ”Palestinians” Catastrophe

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The real origin of the Palestinians’ catastrophe: They rejected a two-state solution with Israel in 1948 and have paid the price ever since. 

May 15 is the anniversary of Israel’s birth in 1948. It is also the date on which Palestinians in recent years have commemorated their “Nakba,” or “catastrophe.” 

The events of 1948 were indeed catastrophic for the Arab refugees, as many as 700,000, who fled their homes to escape the war that raged after Israel proclaimed its independence. But the Nakba was self-inflicted. Contrary to the mythology promoted in many quarters today, the war that created the refugees was not launched by the infant Jewish state in order to drive the Arabs out. It was launched by the Arabs to smother that infant in its crib.

The contemporary Nakba narrative is a masterpiece of ahistorical distortion and antisemitic propaganda. It casts the events of 75 years ago as a monstrous crime successfully committed by Jews against Palestinians. The opposite is closer to the truth.

In November 1947, the United Nations concluded that the only way to bring peace to Palestine was to divide it between the two populations that had “irreconcilable” claims to the land. By a lopsided majority, the General Assembly voted to partition the land — which had been under British rule since 1917 — into “independent Arab and Jewish states.” The Jews agreed to this two-state solution. The Arabs, as they had in the past and would in the future, refused. They immediately commenced a campaign of murderous aggression to prevent a Jewish state from becoming a reality. On May 15, 1948, the Zionist leaders, in accordance with the UN resolution, proclaimed Israel’s independence. Within hours, bombs were falling on Tel Aviv. Arab armies from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, and Egypt crossed Israel’s borders. “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre,” promised Azzam Pasha, the secretary-general of the Arab League, “which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”

They had every expectation of a quick victory. How could Israel, with a minuscule population of 600,000, hope to withstand the combined might of Arab nations that numbered in the tens of millions? “It does not matter how many [Jews] there are,” Azzam said. “We will sweep them into the sea.”

But Israel survived the Arab onslaught, albeit at a steep price — fully 1 percent of its population was killed in the fighting. Across the Middle East, meanwhile, antisemitic fury erupted against Jews living in Arab countries. “Jews In Grave Danger In All Moslem Lands” reported The New York Times. Within months, pogroms, expropriations, and expulsions had driven as many as 850,000 Jews to flee. Most made their way to Israel, which accepted them as new citizens. Over time, the traumatized and impoverished refugees rebuilt their lives, dealing with their shock and loss as best they could, starting over in a new country and moving on.

No one today speaks of the Jewish “Nakba” of 1948. That is because Israel strove to absorb the Jewish refugees into mainstream society. By contrast, many of the Palestinians who fled Israel were housed by the surrounding Arab states in permanent refugee camps, barred from citizenship, deliberately not integrated into the societies where they had ended up. With cruel cynicism, three generations of Palestinians have been encouraged to see themselves as victims of an unspeakably terrible calamity — and to believe that it is only a matter of time until the Jewish state is eliminated and replaced by an unpartitioned Palestine, the world’s 22nd Arab nation.

It is hard to overstate just how abnormal and unhealthy this is. In the years following World War II, scores of millions of human beings became refugees. At least 12 million ethnic German civilians, to take one example, were expelled from their homes in Central and Eastern Europe. The 1947 partition of India and Pakistan turned 14 million Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims into refugees, unleashing a wave of ghastly violence that left as many as 2 million dead. Nearly all wars produce refugees, and refugees’ best hope nearly always lies in resettlement — not in clinging to fantasies of return, fueled by hatred and channeled into terrorism.

“Palestinian nationalism,” Edward Said told an interviewer in 1999, “was based on driving all Israelis out.” That attitude is the true Palestinian catastrophe.  For 75 years, Palestinians have paid a painful price for their refusal to grasp the hand of friendship that was offered to them. Will it be another 75 before they are ready to live in peace with their neighbors? The catastrophe of 1948 was self-inflicted. It doesn’t have to be self-perpetuating.

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Israel At 75

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Article  by Joseph Puder, from The Detroit Jewish News

Most remarkable has been the nation’s many decades of successful integration of people of widely diverse backgrounds.

Today’s Israel is much different from the Israel of my youth. It is richer, stronger and much more diverse. I grew up in a seemingly egalitarian Israel, where our economy rested on socialist principles. The kibbutz (collective farm community) was the symbol of our society’s success well into 1970s and beyond, and it produced most of our military and political leadership. Capitalism was almost a dirty word, yet Western culture permeated much of our urban life in the state’s early decades.

Growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust made Israel determined to overcome the odds against it. In its first war for survival, the 1948 War of Independence, Israel prevailed over the combined Arab armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, who openly declared to the world their world intention to destroy us. George Marshall, President Harry Truman’s secretary of state, didn’t think the nascent Jewish state could survive. He cautioned Truman against recognizing the Jewish state.

The early years were bleak. Between 1949 (immediately after the War of Independence) and 1951, the country absorbed more people than it previously had on May 14, 1948, when David Ben-Gurion (Israel’s founding father and first prime minister) declared the independence of the Jewish state.

The absorption of over a million Jews, Holocaust survivors and Middle Eastern Jews expelled from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, etc., necessitated an austerity program. This era in the early 1950s was called Tzena. Families received coupons for basic foods such as milk, eggs, potatoes, etc. Meat was scarce and expensive. Private cars were rare, and such essentials taken for granted today, including refrigerators (we used ice boxes), telephones and television sets were the property of few. Those individuals who owned a TV could only receive broadcasts from the Arab states and Europe. Israel launched its TV broadcasting in May 1968.

Another dramatic rise in Israel’s Jewish population came in the early 1990s with the influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. Almost 1.5 million arrived and impacted the demographic balance between Israelis and the Palestinians. Yasser Arafat’s threat that “Palestinian-Arab wombs would bury Israel” didn’t materialize.

Israel’s population grew from around 806,000 in 1948 to about 9.7 million in 2023, with the Jewish population numbering 7.1 million (figures given by Times of Israel). Today, Jewish birthrates in Israel are in parity with the Palestinians. Most remarkable has been the nation’s many decades of successful integration of people of widely diverse backgrounds.

Technological Advances

Not long ago, Israel was energy-dependent and water-starved. But with freedom of thought and creativity encouraged, the discovery of significant gas deposits off Israel’s shores are making the country a potential energy exporter. Its desalination plants, a model for the world, makes Israel water self-sufficient.

Still, lacking natural resources, Israel’s brain power and ingenuity have made it a world leader in the crucial areas of medicine, water technology, desert agriculture and environmental protection, recycling as much as 90% of its wastewater. Israel has been sharing its important advances and conservation practices with nations rich and poor throughout the world, enhancing our parched planet.

The country has become known globally as the Startup Nation, being the next country after the U.S. in companies represented on the USA Stock Exchange.

For decades, the Arab League economic boycott of Israel aimed at stifling its growth and causing its people to abandon the country didn’t succeed. The privatization policies of Benjamin Netanyahu in the 21st century propelled Israel into becoming a major economic success story. It resulted in the Arab boycott disappearing and Israel’s growing acceptance among its hitherto enemies in the Arab world.

This ultimately translated into the Abraham Accords of September 2020, when Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates signed a peace treaty with Israel, to which Morocco and Sudan (still pending) also joined. Egypt and Jordan, acknowledging Israel as a formidable neighbor, signed peace treaties with Israel in 1979 and 1994, respectively.

Today’s Challenges

Domestically, Israel has some challenges, as do all nations. Constitutional issues that in Israel are referred to as Judicial Reform have sharpened some divisions in the country between left and right, secular and religious Israelis. Yet, democracy and free speech have been on full display.

In the foreseeable future, Israel is facing a gathering storm. The Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies are threatening to attack Israeli population centers from multiple fronts. Saudi Arabia, until recently a major prospect to join the USA-backed Abraham Accords, has instead turned and reached a rapprochement with Iran via Chinese mediation. This stunning event follows repeated public criticism of the Saudis by President Biden over the Khashoggi killing. Riyadh reacted to Biden’s hostility and softening of American support.

The growing influence of China and Russia in the Middle East does not bode well for Israel or the USA. Furthermore, Israel, unlike any other country, faces the existential threat of annihilation. A soon-to-be nuclear Iran, which openly proclaims to the world its intention to destroy Israel, remains a challenge. The sophisticated Israeli military is, however, addressing these challenges. Israel has repeatedly agreed to the existence of a Palestinian state but only if Palestinians agree to live permanently at peace next to Israel and not replace it.

Israelis, despite the arguments and division, recognize the incredible achievements of the Jewish state. Israel is among the freest countries in the world, where religious freedom, free speech (as witnessed by the massive recent protests) human and civil rights are protected. Israel is the only place in the Middle East with a growing Christian population, expanding by roughly 2% annually. Israel is the only place in the Middle East where the LGBTQ community can live without fear of oppression.

Israel is a world leader in high-tech and research and development, spending nearly 5% of GDP on innovation. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has been called the most moral army in the Middle East, if not worldwide. While Palestinian propaganda seeks to portray Israel as being colonialist, Israel represents, more than anything, the return of an indigenous people to their own land.

Israel has come a long way from the early days. Its GDP per capita income rose from around $7,000 in 1948 to $52,170 (2021).

Seventy-five years into Israel’s existence, the Jewish state is not merely surviving, it is thriving.

Although I miss the intimacy that typified the Israeli society of my youth, Israel today is a more mature, highly developed nation. There are still unsolved domestic and external problems, including the cost of living and achieving the yearned for peace with all its neighbors. However, success came at a price in blood: 24,213 Israelis who died in defense of the Jewish state and 4,255 victims of terror.

It is fitting to recall Israel’s beloved poet Nathan Alterman’s famous poem: “Full of endless fatigue and unrested, yet the dew of their youth is still seen on their head, thus they stand at attention, giving no sign of life or death, then a nation in tears and amazement will ask: Who are you? And they will answer quietly, “We are the silver platter on which the Jewish state was given.”

So, Happy 75th birthday, Israel!

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