The current Gaza war creates a historic opportunity to change the region and the fate of the refugees
By Dror Eydar, ASIA TIMES 20 January 2024
Palestinians attend a rally marking the 32nd anniversary of the founding of the Islamist movement Hamas, in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on December 13, 2019. Photo: Majdi Fathi / NurPhoto via AFP
On September 9, 2023, less than a month before the October 7 massacre and the war that followed, violent clashes broke out between hundreds of young Gazans and security guards from a Gaza travel agency that had been granted a license to issue visas to Turkey. Several people were injured, and the company’s offices were damaged.
The Gaza branch of the Palestine Society of Tourism and Travel Agents (yes, Gaza did have a tourism and travel association) accused the travel agency of exploiting its monopoly on issuing permits to raise prices. So why did the fracas break out in the first place?
A study published by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Center on migration from Gaza since the Hamas takeover in 2007 shows that some 300,000 young people have left the Strip in that time.
A report about a month before the war claimed that around 19,000 Gazans applied for a travel visa to Turkey within the space of just one week, and some 83,000 Gazans who had already applied for a visa were waiting to receive it.
Similar figures provided by human-rights organizations in Gaza were cited in the Arab press. The visa applicants seek to make it to Turkey and from there to Greece, elsewhere in Europe, and Canada.
According to reports, young people are driven to leave Gaza by a general sense of hopelessness: Hundreds of thousands of university graduates don’t have jobs; unemployment and poverty rates are increasing; the private sector is collapsing because of the destruction of enterprises and companies; the cost of living is soaring; there is insufficient social care and levels of service are low, especially in mental health and other fields.
Murderous theocracy
Life in the Gaza Strip was difficult before the war, and is even more so now, given the extent of the destruction. Hamas has established a theocracy in the Gaza Strip similar to Iran, which it serves.
This means a life without civil and human rights, without freedom of expression, without education; Gaza is ruled by a culture of death, and its subjects are destined from birth to serve as cannon fodder for the realization of its leaders’ sick lust for destruction.
The massive donations given to Gaza by European and American taxpayers were mostly stolen by senior Hamas figures, and the rest was used to build an underground city – a shelter for murderers – and to turn Gaza into a huge terrorist base whose residents were destined to serve as living shields.
There is no hope in Gaza. There probably never was. Even if we believe the delusions about Gaza’s reconstruction, it will take many years, and in the interim Gazans will live in tents as refugees. They will live in pitiful conditions and cultivate one aspiration – the destruction of the State of Israel (an aspiration that will inevitably lead to wars, which in turn will lead to further suffering and destruction, and more refugees).
Genocidal ideology
Hamas’ ideology is a direct offshoot of its parent movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. This ideology is clearly stated in the Hamas Charter that inspired the Hamas terrorists and their collaborators from among the “non-involved” Gazan population, to massacre us Israeli residents.
Two principles in the Charter constitute the raison d’être of its adherents: total commitment to the destruction of Israel and killing Jews wherever they may be.
It is no coincidence that Israeli soldiers found a translated Arabic copy of Mein Kampf in Gaza. For Hamas, Adolf Hitler is a role model. October 7 was a shocking demonstration of the genocide Hamas would inflict on us Israelis if it only could. The same spirit exists in the Palestinian Authority; the difference is in ability and opportunities.
Israel will fight to eliminate Hamas, but its totalitarian ideology will remain. It will ensure that Gazans will continue to be inculcated with a culture of death and destruction, lust for murder, and above all, a willingness to sacrifice themselves so long as they kill a small number of Jews.
Double standards
Given this state of affairs, is it not right for us to think seriously about helping Gazans emigrate so they will be able to start a new life, somewhere where children can go out in the morning to learn wisdom and science rather than death and the love of evil?
Tens of millions of refugees have moved to new places over the past hundred years and have rebuilt their lives. Why has Germany accepted a million refugees from Syria over the past decade without a veto from the West?
We have not heard anyone insist they return to Syria; indeed, we have not heard similar cries for the 11 million refugees displaced in that country. And what about the millions of Ukrainian refugees? These are just a couple of examples that illustrate the rule.
The United Nations has two refugee organizations, one for refugees from around the world, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the other for the Palestinians, the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
There are also different definitions of “who is a refugee.” The 1951 Refugee Convention, which defined the mandate of the UNHCR, stated that refugees are those who have been forced to flee their country because of political persecution or violation of their civil or political rights.
Later, the concept of a refugee was extended to those fleeing war and violence, and even economic persecution that makes it impossible to provide children with an education.
In contrast, UNRWA’s definition of a Palestinian refugee is someone whose “normal place of residence was Palestine during the period June 1, 1946, to May 15, 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.”
Why is a stay of only two years sufficient to be considered a refugee? After all, the Palestinians claim to have lived here since time immemorial. This definition enabled, for example, a resident of Sudan who came here in 1943 to look for work and fled after the war, to receive the status of a Palestinian refugee.
In the rest of the world, refugee status ends once a refugee has been resettled; it certainly doesn’t pass on to future generations. But with Palestinian refugees under the care of UNRWA, things are different. They pass on refugee status to future generations, even those who settled in other countries and received citizenship. This is how we reached the absurd number of more than 5 million Palestinian refugees.
This has nothing to do with care and concern for Palestinian refugees; it stems from the desire to fuel the fires of hatred toward Israel and to keep alive the Palestinian dream of destroying Israel through what they call the “right of return” – in other words, flooding Israel with refugees so that it is no longer a majority Jewish state.
It is the United Nations that is responsible for this disgrace. UNRWA has not helped solve the refugee problem; it has perpetuated it, perpetuating hatred of Israel in the process. Why is the fate of the Palestinians better than that of the rest of the world’s refugees?
In 2014, when Islamic State (ISIS) tortured, murdered, and ethnically cleansed Yazidis in Iraq, and the world stood by, I saw a picture of a Yazidi woman holding a sign that read in English: “The problem of the Yazidi people is that our enemy is not Jewish.”
Two choices
The current Gaza war creates a historic opportunity to change the region and the fate of the refugees. Changing old concepts is not only about Israel’s security doctrine but also about the future of the region.
In the second half of the 19th century, the Jews of Eastern Europe lived in economic and social conditions similar to those the residents of Gaza live in today (the big difference was that they did not massacre their neighbors or dispatch terror and murder squads). As soon as the opportunity was afforded them, the Jews moved on to better places.
The prohibition on discussing voluntary migration of Gazans stems from the mistaken belief that this might sound like “ethnic cleansing.” It is not.
There are two alternatives for Gazans: a decent and dignified life, somewhere new, far from Hamas’ malign influence, or remaining in the Gaza Strip in pitiful conditions and with no hope.
We should not delude ourselves: Even if we build luxury neighborhoods for Gazans, life there will soon return to Third World conditions, because the Strip will continue to live under the ideology of death and destruction.
For now, hope for Gazans lies outside of Gaza.
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