Latest Middle East

[Balanbam00]

59_60:
'' They have lived in the area for generations and that is where their roots are.''.....not quite.
Some 40 years ago I asked an arab why do you not fight in the army? He simply said '' because they are our relatives our families.'' I did not think about it then but how come these arabs of the Galilee have relatives in other arab countries? Because they came into Israel to earn a living,Israel was building a Nation and needed workers.
Common Arabic surnames one can easily find in any phone book in Israel, as well as on the map which reveals their location of origin.
Al-Turki – Turkey, Sultan – Turkey, Uthuman / Ottoman – Turkey, Al Masri – Egypt, Masrawa – Egypt, Al Tartir – Tartir village, Egypt
Bardawil – Lake and village Bardawil, EgyptTarabin – South-east Sinai (Bedouin), EgyptAbu-Suta / Abu-Seeta – Tarabin tribe, Egypt Sha’alan – Bedouin, Egypt, Fayumi – Al-Fayum village, Egypt,Al Bana – Egypt,Al-Baghdadi – Baghdad, IraqAbbas – Baghdad, IraqZoabi – West Iraq,Al-Faruki – Iraq,Al-Tachriti – Iraq,Zabaide / Zubeidy – Iraq,Husseini / Hussein – Saudi Arabia (Hussein was the 4th Imam)Tamimi – Saudi Arabia,
Hejazi – Hejaz region (Red Sea shoreline) in Saudi Arabia,Al-Kurash / Al Kurashi – Saudi Arabia,Ta’amari – Saudi Arabia
Al-Halabi – Haleb region, North Syria,Al-Allawi – West Syria (shoreline),Al-Hurani – Huran District, South Syria,Al-Qudwa – Syria,Nashashibi – Syria,Khamati – Syria,Lubnani – Lebanon,Sidawi – Sidon, Lebanon,Al-Surani – Sour-Tair, South Lebanon,Al-Yamani – Yemen,Al-Azad – Yemen,Hadadin – Yemen,Matar – Matar village. Yemen,Morad – Yemen,Khamadan – Yemen,Mugrabi – Maghreb, Morocco,Al-Araj – Morocco,Bushnak – Bosnia,Al-Shashani – Chechnya,Al-Jazir – Algiers,Al-Abid (Bedouin) – Sudan,Samahadna (Bedouin) – Sudan (still a matter of debate),Al-Hamis – Bahrain,.....and there is more

[Balanbam00]

59_60:
Thus, on the eve of the Zionist settlement, which began with the founding of Petah Tikva in 1878, the country was mostly deserted and abandoned. Its population was sparse and partly nomadic. Famous tourists who visited Israel at the time testified separately to this situation: They found a small rural Bedouin population living in muddy huts and described the place as a marshland, mostly uncultivated terrain, used as a grazing fields for goats and sheep. The local inhabitants were not the owners of the land. The owners were wealthy families from throughout the Ottoman Empire, who had no use for the land beyond the titles and honors it bestowed upon them.

Tawfiq Bey al-Hourani, the Syrian governor of Hauran, said in 1934 that “over 30,000 Syrians invaded Palestine within a few months.”
Winston Churchill, on May 22, 1939, stated that Arab immigration during the Mandate period to Palestine was so great that their numbers grew by such a rate that even the Jews of the entire world could not match.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President of the United States, said on May 17, 1939 that the immigration of Arabs to Palestine since 1921 was far greater than the immigration of Jews in recent times.
According to the British census in 1931, the Muslims in the country were not necessarily Arabs, judging from the languages they spoke: Afghan, Albanian, Arabic, Bosnian, Circassian, Kurdish, Persian, Sudanese and Turkish.
These are the locations of some of the Arab tribes in Israel who are mistakenly referred to as “Palestinians”:
Hebron – Tamimi, Natshi, Ja’abri, Abu Sanina, Qawasma,,,,Jericho – Erekat (Arikat),,Beith Lehem – Touqan , Shak’kaSchem* (Nablus) – Al-Masri
Tulkarem – Al-Carmi, Ramallah – Baraguthi, Tawil, AbbasUm Al-Fahm (Israeli citizens) – Jabrin East Jerusalem – Hejazi (The Hejaz region is the eastern shoreline by the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia) Gaza – Al-Masri, Tarabin, Al-Abid

[Balanbam00]

Gaza rocket destroys home in ''GENTRAL'' Israel, 7 wounded. ( Thats north of Tel _Aviv,so its range of over 100k )

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,...483854,00.html

( You have to see the photo of the damage a rocket can do!!!!

An early morning rocket (5:24 am) fired from the Gaza Strip struck a house in central Israel on Monday, wounding seven people
The sounds of air raid sirens jolted residents of the Sharon area, northeast of Tel Aviv, from their sleep shortly after 5am, sending them scurrying to bomb shelters.( The resident took his family into the air raid shelter and were saved !!!!)

Military says it struck secret Hamas HQ in central Strip; Netanyahu: We will do everything we must to protect our people; Haniyeh ultimatum to Israel: Don't cross red lines with retaliation

This evening :Airstrike flattens multi-story building in Gaza City IDF calls secret Hamas headquarters. ( 19:23)

03/25/2019 19:42
IDF spokesman: This is just start of broad Gaza operation

[Balanbam00]

There you are Hamas against the palestinians in Gaza

https://www.facebook.com/10001090885...9721639401457/

The 23rd March at 12:47 at Gaza .The "palestinian" people are currently being gunned down , attacked, shot at, beaten and violently deprived of their freedoms.
Where is the outrage? Bcz muslim terrorist killing other muslims ... nothing to see here

[Balanbam00]

The people of the Gaza Strip are protesting again, and soldiers are shooting again, and civilians are being victimized again. Only this time you may have missed the story, because these protests barely rated a buried paragraph in most Western news accounts.

That’s odd: Some media outlets are prepared to devote months of journalistic effort in order to trace the trajectory of a single bullet that accidentally kills a Palestinian — provided the bullet is Israeli.

The difference this time is that the shots are being fired by Hamas, the militant Islamist group that has ruled Gaza since 2007, when it usurped power from its rivals in the Fatah movement in a quick and dirty civil war. Since then, no genuine elections have been held, and no dissent brooked.

The current round of demonstrations, which began last week, comes in reaction to years of Hamas’s economic mismanagement, price hikes and recent tax increases. This is not for lack of funds on Hamas’s part: Since 2012, the group has taken in over a billion dollars from Qatar alone to pay the costs of fuel, humanitarian aid and civil-servant salaries.

Where that money goes is another question. In 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hamas had spent some $90 million building attack tunnels into Israel, at an average cost of nearly $3 million a tunnel. The material devoted to each tunnel, the Journal reported, was “enough to build 86 homes, seven mosques, six schools or 19 medical clinics.” Three wars against Israel, each started by Hamas, have also taken their toll in lives, injuries, infrastructure and isolation.

All this has meant suffering and deprivation for the people of Gaza, irrespective of anything Israel does. In February, Amnesty International reported that the Palestinian journalist Hajar Harb had been tried in absentia by Hamas for publishing a report on al-Araby TV detailing alleged corruption in the Ministry of Health. Hamas officials have also reportedly enriched themselves by controlling the underground trade in goods, from poultry to furniture to cars, between the Strip and Egypt. (cont....)

[Balanbam00]

cont:.....

And so Gazans are making their despair known. Hundreds took to the streets last week, only to be shot at, clubbed and arrested by Hamas security forces.

“The crackdown on freedom of expression and the use of torture in Gaza has reached alarming new levels,” noted Saleh Higazi of Amnesty. Incidents include the arrest of human-rights activists, the beating and jailing of more than 15 local journalists, and violent attacks on peaceful demonstrators “using sound grenades, batons, pepper spray, live ammunition and physical assaults.”

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Hamas bills itself as a “resistance” movement, and such movements, from the Irish Republican Army to the Viet Cong to Zimbabwe’s ZANU-PF, tend to behave in strikingly similar ways: fanatical, thuggish, militaristic, hypocritical and corrupt.

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To these groups, liberation rarely means more than the replacement of some form of foreign occupation with local despotism. They avow democracy but never hold a truly fair election. They create secret police, parallel security services, politburos, inner- and outer-party structures. They make war on their neighbors to distract from their inevitable failure to create prosperity at home. Their leaders preach struggle and martyrdom while living lavishly.

Nor should you be surprised by the scantiness of Western coverage: It would complicate a convenient narrative of the Israel-Palestinian conflict that holds that the former isn’t just the principal oppressor, but the only one. That feeds into the larger progressive fiction that the great crimes of the post-World War II world are the ones the West perpetrated on the rest of the world. In fact, far worse were the crimes of non-Westerners — Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Idi Amin, Nicolás Maduro — perpetrated against their own people.

The same goes for the Palestinians. More have died in Syria in the last decade, mainly on account of the depredations of the ostensibly pro-Palestinian regime of Bashar al-Assad, than have been killed by Israel. And Palestinians continue to be the victims of leaders who see no reason to subject themselves to regular elections, or financial audits, or criminal investigations, or any other mechanism of political or moral accountability.

That lack of accountability is chiefly a Palestinian failure. But it’s abetted by Western journalism that, with some honorable exceptions, for too long has been depressingly incurious about any form of Palestinian suffering for which Israel cannot be held responsible. That is sometimes a function of ideological bias, but it is also a failure of basic reporting.

Israelis and their friends abroad often complain about slanted coverage that seems to find fault in everything they do, while finding excuses in everything their adversaries do. If the protests in Gaza demonstrate anything, it’s that Palestinians hardly benefit from the coverage, either.

Palestinian lives and livelihoods should matter despite who harms them. A world that shrugs at Hamas’s abuse of its own people merely licenses the abuse to continue, unchecked.

[The Bedlington Terrier]

It seems that conflicting accounts, fake news, Israeli and Hamas propaganda and a news blackout from inside Gaza is muddying the waters.

We know for certain Israeli jets have been bombing Hamas targets inside Gaza and I conclude that Hamas are deliberately targeting Israel with rocket attacks in the sure knowledge that hell will be unleashed on the Palestinian population imprisoned on the strip.

The Nazis soon realised that if they wanted to wipe out a population, simply ghettoize them and just bomb the living daylights out of them. It's pitiful that the western democracies and the UN will not call time on this insidious genocide.

[Balanbam00]

A year has passed since the start of March of Return campaign and Gaza's rulers have nothing to show for it, leading them to make desperate decisions because now it's a matter of political survival.
Monday’s pre-dawn rocket fire on central Israel occurred just hours before Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was to deliver a speech, marking a year since the start of the March of Return demonstrations. Although the campaign’s goals were always a little less grandiose than actually returning to pre-Israel Palestine, they were no less ambitious - trying to lift the blockade on Gaza.
A year has passed and Sinwar doesn’t really have anything to say, neither to the ordinary residents of the Strip nor to the loyal Hamas supporters who have demonstrated tirelessly week after week over the past year along the security fence. The economic situation has not improved and the millions in Qatari aid are just a drop in the ocean compared to the needs of Gaza’s residents, some of whom have stopped being afraid and taken to the streets.
The Egyptians - who have been indirectly mediating talks between Gaza and Jerusalem - presented Israel with a list of far-reaching demands from Sinwar, who thought that Netanyahu would try, at any cost, to avoid a military confrontation in Gaza two weeks before the Knesset elections. There is a sense of real distress within Hamas: neither Sinwar nor Ismail Haniyeh can afford to be left empty-handed and drag the masses into another year of useless demonstrations. At this point, it’s a matter of political survival for Hamas.
The Israeli response to these demands didn’t seem to satisfy Hamas, so Sinwar did what he always does and rolled the dice. Unlike previous rounds of cross-border fighting between Israel and Hamas, this time everything was somewhat low-key. The news of a direct hit by a rocket, which normally triggers outbursts of joy in Gaza, was met with a restrained response, accompanied by apprehension.

A year of security tensions didn’t go unnoticed on the other side as well. In the hours following the rocket fire, with reports of preparations for a wide-scale Israeli operation, the panic in Gaza reached its climax. Gazans stayed inside their homes, since bomb shelters are only available to Hamas officials, and left the doors a little open in order not get hurt from them flying off their hinges during the Israeli Air Force attacks.
The way things look at the moment, it seems as though this formula of limited understandings, restrain and transfer of Qatari cash to Hamas, has exhausted itself. Hamas wants an arrangement that would significantly improve the economic situation in Gaza and lift the blockade, while maintaining its military capability. And due to the growing public criticism about Hamas’s mismanagement of the Strip, the need for an arrangement has become more pressing.
Netanyahu, however, would not be able to give them that deal, even if he wanted to, and not only because of the elections. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is determined to thwart any Israeli deal with Hamas. He has the ability to cut even more of the funds that he transfers to Gaza, which would result in even more instability.