Britain's Dirty Game in Palestine

One of the best assessments of the origins of the nightmare known as the Palestine problem, and of Britain's responsibility for it, was written in 1968 by the great British historian and philosopher of history Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975):

"The story [of Palestine] is a tragedy, and the essence of this tragedy is that about 1,500,000 Palestinian Arabs have now become refugees as a result of the intervention of foreign powers in their country's affairs. The might of these foreign powers has been irresistible, and the evicted Palestinian Arabs have been forcibly deprived of their country, their homes, and their property without having been allowed to have a voice in the determination of their own destiny.

"Though the facts are public, there is widespread ignorance of them in the Western World and, above all, in the United States, the Western country which has had, and is still having, the greatest say in deciding Palestine's fate. The United States has the greatest say, but the United Kingdom bears the heaviest load of responsibility. The Balfour Declaration of 2nd November 1917 was the winning card in a sordid contest between the two sets of belligerents in the First World War for winning the support of the Jews in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and - most important of all - in the United States.

"In promising to give the Jews 'a national home' in Palestine, the British Government was, I believe, using deliberately ambiguous language. As a citizen of the United Kingdom, I declare this belief of mine with feelings of shame and contrition, but I do believe that this is the truth. Throughout the First World War and after it, the Government of the United Kingdom was playing a double game. Perhaps a lawyer might be able to plead plausibly that there was no inconsistency between the respective pledges that Britain gave to the Arabs and the Zionists, or between the inclusion of the Balfour Declaration in the text of the mandate taken by Britain for the administration of Palestine and the classification of this mandate in the 'A' class - a class in which the mandatory power was committed to giving the people of the mandated territory their independence at the earliest date at which they would be capable of standing on their own feet. Whatever the casuists might say, laymen - Arabs or Jews - would, I think, naturally infer, bona fide, from the British Government's various statements and acts that it had made two commitments that were incompatible with each other.

"At the same time when the mandate was drafted, offered, and accepted, the Arab Palestinians amounted to more than 90% of the population of the country. The mandate for Palestine was an 'A' mandate, and, as I interpret the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, Palestine had not been excepted by the British Government from the area in which they had pledged themselves to King Hussein to recognize and support Arab independence. The Palestinian Arabs could therefore reasonably assume that Britain was pledged to prepare Palestine for becoming an independent Arab state. On the other side, the Zionists naturally saw, in the British promise of 'a national home' in Palestine, the entering wedge for the insertion into Palestine of the Jewish state of Israel which was in fact inserted there in 1948.

"To my mind, the most damaging point in the charge-sheet against my country is that Britain was in control of Palestine for 30 years - 1918-1948 - and that during those fateful three decades she never made up her mind, or at any rate never declared, what her policy about the future of Palestine was. All through those 30 years, Britain lived from hand to mouth, admitting into Palestine, year by year, a quota of Jewish immigrants that varied according to the strength of the respective pressures of the Arabs and the Jews at the time. Those immigrants could not have come in if they had not been shielded by a British chevaux-de-frise. If Palestine had remained under Ottoman Turkish rule, or if it had become an independent Arab state in 1918, Jewish immigrants would never have been admitted into Palestine in large enough numbers to enable them to overwhelm the Palestinian Arabs in this Arab people's own country. The reason why the state of Israel exists today and why today 1,500,000 Palestinian Arabs are refugees is that, for thirty years, Jewish immigration was imposed on the Palestinian Arabs by British military power until the immigrants were sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-armed to be able to fend for themselves with tanks and planes of their own. The tragedy in Palestine is not just a local one; it is a tragedy for the World, because it is an injustice that is a menace to the World's peace. Britain's guilt is not diminished by the humiliating fact that she is now impotent to redress the wrong that she has done.

"As an Englishman I hate to have to indict my country, but I believe that Britain deserves to be indicted, and this is the only personal reparation that I can make." (From the Forward to The Palestine Diary by Robert John and Sami Hadawi, 1970)

Some Things Never Change

Yesterday, I quoted the lies of the Zionist fanatic Arthur Koestler back in 1949 to the effect that Israel had a virgin birth in 1948, untainted by any responsibility for the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. You'd think that by now - 2018 - with the wealth of evidence to the contrary uncovered by Israeli historians in Zionist archives, that'd be the end of the matter.

But then what's 'evidence to the contrary' to a Zionist fanatic?

"Then we had Randa Abdel-Fattah... who peddles the falsehood that Israel's establishment created 750,000 Arab refugees." (Sydney Writers Festival needs to right a few wrongs, Vic Alhadeff, The Australian, 12/5/18)

Alhadeff is the chief executive officer of the Jewish Board of Deputies.

Blown Away by Labor's Advance on Palestine/Israel?

Before anyone gets too carried away by the latest glacial advance in the ALP's Palestine policy, please remember that Israel's illegal post-67 West Bank settlement project, which Bob Carr in particular opposes as standing in the way of a two-state solution to the Palestine/Israel project, is, in all its essentials, no different to Israel's pre-67 settlement project.

Every square inch of historic Palestine from the river to the sea is occupied and colonised Arab land.

It matters not whether the occupation and colonisation took place before 1967, or after.

Whether it takes the form of a Balfour Declaration or a United Nations partition plan, no imperial power, or collection thereof, had, or has, the right to dispose of one square centimetre of Arab Palestinian land.

It's Hebron today - but before that it was Haifa. It's Jerusalem today - but before that it was Jaffa.

After 1967, the Zionist land thieves were called settlers - before that kibbutzniks. Same colonial smell, same...

The Zionist settler-colonial, apartheid project called Israel has no right, God-given or otherwise, to one square centimetre of Arab Palestine.

Please keep this in mind before you get too excited about NSW Labor's 'secure and recognised borders,' or anything else to do with Palestine.

And take this ice cold shower:

"Israel fears 'delegitimization' more than anything else. Behind the velvet curtain lies a state built on myths and narratives, protected only by a military behemoth, billions of dollars in US assistance and a lone UN Security Council veto. Nothing else stands between the state and its dismantlement. Without these three things, Israelis would not live in an entity that has come to be known as the 'least safe place for Jews in the world.'

"Strip away the spin and the gloss, and you quickly realize that Israel doesn't even have the basics of a normal state. After 64 years, it doesn't have borders. After six decades, it has never been more isolated. Over half a century later, and it needs a gargantuan military just to stop Palestinians from walking home.

"Israel is a failed experiment. It is on life-support - pull those three plugs and it is a cadaver, living only in the minds of some seriously deluded foreigners who thought they could pull off the heist of the century.

"The most important thing we can do as we hover over the horizon of One State is to shed the old language rapidly. None of it was real anyway - it was just the parlance of that particular 'game'. Grow a new vocabulary of possibilities - the new state will be the dawn of humanity's great reconciliation. Muslims, Christians and Jews living together in Palestine as they once did.

"Naysayers can take a hike. Our patience is wearing thinner than the walls of the hovels that Palestinian refugees have called 'home' for three generations in their purgatory camps.

"These universally exploited refugees are entitled to nice apartments - the ones that have pools and a grove of palm trees outside the lobby. Because the kind of compensation owed for this failed Western experiment will never be enough.

"And no, nobody hates Jews. That is the fallback argument screeched in our ears - the one 'firewall' remaining to protect this Israeli Frankenstein. I don't even care enough to insert the caveats that are supposed to prove I don't hate Jews. It is not a provable point, and frankly, it is a straw man of an argument. If Jews who didn't live through the Holocaust still feel the pain of it, then take that up with the Germans. Demand a sizeable plot of land in Germany - and good luck to you.

"For anti-Semites salivating over an article that slams Israel, ply your trade elsewhere - you are part of the reason this problem exists.

"Israelis who don't want to share Palestine as equal citizens with the indigenous Palestinian population - the ones who don't want to relinquish that which they demanded Palestinians relinquish 64 years ago - can take their second passports and go back home. Those remaining had better find a positive attitude - Palestinians have shown themselves to be a forgiving lot. The amount of carnage they have experienced at the hands of their oppressors - without proportional response - shows remarkable restraint and faith.

"This is less the death of a Jewish state than it is the demise of the last remnants of modern-day colonialism. It is a rite of passage - we will get through it just fine. At this particular precipice in the 21st century, we are all, universally Palestinian - undoing this wrong is a test of our collective humanity, and nobody has the right to sit this one out.

"Israel has no right to exist. Break that mental barrier and just say it: 'Israel has no right to exist.' Roll it around your tongue, tweet it, post it as your Facebook status update - do it before you think twice. Delegitimization is here - have no fear. Palestine will be less painful than Israel ever was." (Excuse me, but Israel has no right to exist, Sharmine Narwani, english.al-akhbar.com, 17/5/12)

Refugees? What Refugees?

Today is the 50th anniversary of the fifth day of the June/Six-Day War of 1967.

So Israel's grabbed the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but what to do with all those Palestinian refugees the apartheid state invariably generates whenever it goes to war?

Simple: Deny they're refugees. Say they just decided to go walkabout. Admittedly in large numbers, and all at the same time, but hey, Bedouin genes, what can I say? Oh, and play the Holocaust card. Always works a treat:

"The plight of the refugees was a photogenic subject. Israeli ambassadors overseas wrote to Jerusalem that television broadcasts from the bridges [over the Jordan] and the tent camps set up by the UN on the eastern side of the river were damning. They reported on pictures of Israeli soldiers firing shots in the air to hurry the refugees over the bridges. Correspondents estimated that the new tent camps housed some 80,000 refugees from Gaza and the West Bank. Winter was coming, threatening to make their conditions intolerable 'The most terrible impression is made by scenes of fathers with children in their arms, begging our guards to let them go back to their wives and children still on our side,' wrote Israel's ambassador to Germany. He added, 'We cannot stand up, here or in other countries, to the wave of protest, which we believe will also have political implications.' He asked that Israel at least permit family reunifications. The ambassadors were right: the ugly images in the media led too many governments, including the United States, to demand that Israel allow the refugees to return...  [PM] Eshkol gave orders to explain to British prime minister Harold Wilson that the reporters were misconstruing the scenes: the people they were photographing had left their homes willingly. As was the usual custom, he also cited the Holocaust. 'No people,' he told the vice president of the International Red Cross, 'that, like ours, six million of its old and young butchered and burnt by the Nazis less than a generation ago, could be unresponsive to any humanitarian interest'." (Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, the War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East, 2007, pp 540-41)

You Can Run, But You Can't Hide 2

Israelis say NO...

Uri replies to Salman in his weekly column, 17/5/14:

Dear Salman,

I was profoundly moved by this letter. It took me days to find the courage to answer. I try to do so as sincerely as possible.

I also vividly remember our conversation in Paris, and wrote about it in the second part of my memoirs, which will appear in the course of this year. It may be interesting for the readers to compare our two descriptions of the same conversation. About the scene near Hulayqat I have written in the first part, which has already appeared in Hebrew.

When I was wounded in the 1948 war, I decided that it would be my life's mission to work for peace between our two peoples. I hope that I have been true to that promise.

Making peace after such a long and bitter conflict is both a moral and a political endeavor. There is often a contradiction between the two aspects.

I respect the few people in Israel who, like Tikva, completely devote themselves to the moral side of the refugees' tragedy, whatever the consequence for the chances of peace. My own moral outlook tells me that peace must be the first aim, before and above everything else.

The war of 1948 was a terrible human tragedy. Both sides believed that it was an existential battle. that their very life was hanging in the balance. It is often forgotten that ethnic cleansing (not a familiar expression in those days) was practiced by both sides. Our side occupied large territories, creating a huge refugee problem, while the Palestinian side succeeded in occupying only small Jewish areas, like the Old City of Jerusalem and the Etzion settlement bloc south of Bethlehem. But not a single Jew remained there.

The war, like the later Bosnian war, was an ethnic war, in which both sides tried to conquer as large a part of the country as possible - EMPTY of the other population.

As an eyewitness and participant, I can testify to the fact that the origins of the refugee problem are extremely complex. During the first seven months of the war, the attacks on the Arab villages were an absolute military necessity. At that time, we were the weaker side. After a number of very cruel battles, the wheel turned and I believe that a deliberate policy of expulsion was adopted by the Zionist leadership.

But the real question is: Why were the 750,000 refugees not allowed home after the end of the hostilities?

One has to remember the situation. It was three years after the smokestacks of Auschwitz and the other camps had gone cold. Hundreds of thousands of wretched survivors crowded the refugee camps in Europe and had nowhere to go but to the new Israel. They were brought here and hastily put into the homes of the Palestinian refugees.

All this did not obliterate our moral obligation to put an end to the terrible tragedy of the Palestinian refugees. In 1953 I published in my magazine, Haolem Hazeh, a detailed plan for for the solution of the refugee problem. It included (a) an apology to the refugees and the acknowledgment in principle of the right to return, (b) the return and resettlement of a substantial number, (c) generous compensation to all the rest. Since the Israeli government refused to consider the possibility of the return of a single individual, the plan was not even discussed.

Why do I not stand on a hilltop and cry out for the return of all refugees?

Peace is made between consenting parties. There is absolutely no chance that the vast majority of Israelis would freely agree to the return of all the refugees and their descendants, who amount to six or seven million people - the same number as Israel's Jewish citizens. This would be the end of the 'Jewish state' and the beginning of a 'bi-national state', to which 99% of Israelis strenuously object. It can be imposed only by a crushing military defeat, which is currently impossible because of Israel's infinite military superiority, including nuclear arms.

I can stand on the hilltops and shout - but it would not bring peace (and a solution) one step closer.

To my mind, waiting for a solution in a hundred years, while the conflict and the misery continue, is not really moral.

Dear Salman, I have listened attentively to your presentation.

You say that Israel could easily absorb all the refugees by putting them into the Negev, which is almost empty. That is quite true.

The vast majority of Israelis would reject that, because they are fiercely resolved to have a large Jewish majority in Israel. But I also ask myself: What is the logic of that?

When I met with Yassar Arafat in Beirut during the war of 1982, I also visited several Palestinian refugee camps. I asked many refugees whether they wanted to return to Israel. Most said that they wanted to return to their villages (which were eradicated long ago) but not anywhere else in Israel.

What is the sense of putting them into the harsh conditions of the desert in a Zionist-dominated and Hebrew-speaking country, far from their original homes? Would they want that?

Arafat and his successors limit their aim to a 'just and AGREED solution', giving the Israeli government a veto right. That means, in practice, at most the return of a symbolic number.

My latest proposal is for the Israeli president to apolpgize and express the profound regret of the Israeli people for its part in the creation and prolongation of the tragedy.

The Israeli government must recognize the moral right of the refugees to return.

Israel should organize the return of 50,000 refugees every year for 10 years. (I am almost alone in Israel in demanding this number. Most peace groups would reduce that to 100,000 altogether.)

All the other refugees should receive compensation on the lines of the compensation paid by Germany to the Jewish victims. (no comparison, of course.)

With the foundation of the State of Palestine, they would receive Palestinian passports and be able to settle there, in their country.

In the not too distant future, when the two states, Israel and Palestine, shall be finally living side by side, with open borders and with their capitals in Jerusalem, perhaps within a region-wide framework, the problem will lose it sting.

It hurts me to write this letter. For me, the refugees are no abstract 'problem', but human beings with human faces. But I will not lie to you.

I would be honored to live next door to you (even in the Negev Desert).

Salamat,

Uri

TBC...

You Can Run, But You Can't Hide 1

Tomorrow is Nakba Day, marking 69 years since Israeli terror gangs ethnically cleansed 78% of Palestine in 1948, creating, in the process, the Palestinian refugee problem.

Uri Avnery, is a leader of Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc), a former member of the Knesset, a journalist, and, as a member of Menachem Begin's terrorist Irgun in 1948, a creator of the Palestinian refugee problem.

Salman Abu Sitta is a founder of the Palestine Land Society (an organisation concerned with the implementation of the Palestinian Right of Return), and the seminal website palestineremembered.com. He is a Palestinian refugee.

What follows is a 2014-17 correspondence between the two. It was given by Abu Sitta to the Mondoweiss website and posted there on 22/4/17 under the heading 'Why do I not cry out for the right of return?' - an exchange between Uri Avnery and Salman Abu Sitta.

ESSENTIAL READING, I re-post it here in four parts over the next four days:

Salman to Uri 7/5/14:

Dear Uri,

I read with great interest your interview in Haaretz about your rich and eventful life. You have stuck to your principles since the early 50s when you found that the old doctrine was neither workable nor moral.

I remember vividly our chat over dinner in Paris with your kind wife Rachel, bless her soul [at a UN conference on the Palestinian refugees]. You described your early days as a young German by the name of Helmut, when you joined the terrorist organization, the Irgun, and when you, carrying a machine gun on a hilltop at Huleigat (where there is now a war memorial to 'honour' those soldiers) watched the sea of humanity of expelled refugees march towards Gaza by the seashore.

I also told you my story; how I became a refugee without ever seeing a Jew in my life and how I spent years trying to find out who was responsible for my becoming a refugee, by name, face and battalion.

I remember asking you, 'Would you agree to my return to my house if it were up to you?'

You said, emphatically, NO.

I wrote all about this in my memoirs to be published this year in Europe and USA.

I am reminded of a similar story but with a different ending. I refer to Reflections of a Daughter of the '48 Generation' by Dr Tikva Honig-Parnass. It is a moving account of how truth and reality faced her, as a Palmach soldier, with the grave injustice done to Palestinians. Since then she has spent her energy defending their rights, including the Right of Return.

I saw no trace or hint of retraction in your interview of the kind I had hoped for, namely your recognition of the Right of Return, or any atonement for the great sin: the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Would it not be a fitting last station of a long life (and I wish you more of it) for you to stand on hilltops (again) and shout for all to hear, summing up all your life experiences: the refugees must return, we must repent the sin of ethnic cleansing?

Is this too much to ask of a principled man like you to do this? I am not asking on behalf of the Palestinians, because no doubt they WILL return. I am hoping that it will be a crown to your life's achievements in the Israeli milieu.

As I have written repeatedly: The history of the Jews will not be marked any more by the killing of Christ or the Nazi atrocities of WWII, but indelibly by what they have done to the Palestinians, deliberately and constantly, without remorse, regret or remedy, thus reflecting that side of the human spirit which does not learn from history and voids itself of any moral posture.

Best regards,

Salman Abu Sitta

TBC...

Phillip Adams: And the Answer Is?

ABC Radio National personality, Phillip Adams, never ceases to amaze. Here he is introducing a segment on his Late Night Live program called World's largest refugee camp (27/2/17):

"My excuse for retelling the story that I was radicalised at the age of 12 by reading The Grapes of Wrath is simply this - the book we're about to discuss [City of Thorns] begins with 3 sentences from that book. Let me read them. 'There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolise. There is a failure here that topples all our success.' John Steinbeck. And I hope the book we're about to discuss will radicalise another generation. If you look at the collection of Palestinian refugee camps in the world, in Jordan, Lebanon, in the West Bank, Gaza, and formerly in Syria, the numbers are shocking, they're beyond shocking, they're numbing, and the world's sensibility seems to be appropriately numbed. An estimated 5 million Palestinians are living throughout the region, but the world's largest refugee camp, called Dadaab is situated in the desert of Kenya, and has over half a million inhabitants, just like the camps housing generations of Palestinians... "

Let me sum that up for you. Adams is professedly NUMBED by the existence of permanent Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East, that is, camps that date back to the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 when the ancestors of these refugees were driven out of their Palestinian homeland by Zionist terror gangs.

My reaction: WOW!

To my knowledge this is an Adams first. Here he is, 77 years old; a veteran commentator on, and explorer of, the issues of today, yesterday and tomorrow; a public intellectual; almost, if not already, an Australian icon; and, importantly, an avowed man of the Left; and he's only now discovered something of the significance of the daddy-of-all contemporary refugee problems, the Palestinian refugee problem.

The standout instance of his failure on this issue for me was a 2009 LNL interview with the American-Palestinian writer Saree Makdisi. When Makdisi called for an end to Israel as a Jewish state and the creation of one state for Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, including, by implication, those in refugee exile, Adams worriedly asked how long it would take before Jewish Israelis were a minority in Israel. Makdisi, puzzled, replied, "I don't know. I don't even know that that question matters." At which Adams snapped: "It sure as hell matters to them." (For the all important context, see my 19/9/09 post He Just Doesn't Get It.)

If anyone out there is in a position to raise the issue with Adams, the obvious question to put to him now would be this: you recently indicated that you were numbed by the scale and time of Palestinian refugeedom. But are you sufficiently numbed to support the return of today's Palestinian refugees - from Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza and elsewhere in the Palestinian diaspora - to their former homes and lands in Israel, along with all that that entails by way of equal rights for all, regardless of sectarian affiliation, between the the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea?

John Kerry's Israeli-Occupied Mind

In my last post, I listed US Secretary of State John Kerry's terms of endearment for the genocidal colonial-settler state of Israel (Remarks on Middle East Peace, 28/12/16). I turn now to what he had to say about the brutalised indigenous, occupied/exiled inhabitants of Palestine.

There's barely a word, phrase, sentiment, misrepresentation or outright lie in it that hasn't been borrowed from some Zionist propaganda tract or talking point.

In a very long speech, there are only two points where Kerry actually touches on the devastating impact of Israel's military occupation on the Palestinian people - but in neither does he come anywhere close to doing it justice:

"I have also often visited West Bank communities, where I met Palestinians struggling for basic freedom and dignity amidst the occupation, passed by military checkpoints that can make even the most routine daily trips to work or school an ordeal, and heard from business leaders who could not get the permits that they needed to get their products to the market and families who have struggled to secure permission just to travel for needed medical care."

"I've also seen the devastation of war in the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian girls in Izbet Abed Rabo played in the rubble of a bombed-out building."

The idea that desperate acts of resistance are an inevitable consequence of a grinding, never-ending military occupation/colonisation process is nowhere to be found. Instead, we get this:

"There is absolutely no justification for terrorism, and there never will be. The most recent wave of Palestinian violence has included hundreds of terrorist attacks in the past year, including stabbings, shootings, vehicular attacks and bombings, many by individuals who have been radicalized by social media. Yet the murderers of innocents are still glorified on Fatah websites, including showing attackers next to Palestinian leaders following attacks. And despite statements by President Abbas and his party's leaders making clear their opposition to violence, too often they send a different message by failing to condemn specific terrorist attacks and naming public squares, streets and schools after terrorists. President Obama and I have made it clear to the Palestinian leadership countless times, publicly and privately, that all incitement to violence must stop. We have consequently condemned violence and terrorism, and even condemned the Palestinian leadership for not condemning it."

Incredibly, even seeking redress in international fora is verboten:

"Far too often, the Palestinians have pursued efforts to delegitimize Israel in international fora. We have strongly opposed these initiatives..."

Apparently, occupied/colonised Palestinians are supposed to just sit on their hands as the Israelis, with the connivance of the Americans, pull the rug out from under them. And God forbid that any Palestinians should want all of their homeland back:

"Most troubling of all, Hamas continues to pursue an extreme agenda: they refuse to accept Israel's very right to exist. They have a one-state vision of their own: all of the land of Palestine."

Then, FFS, we have the naked Israeli virgin encircled by swarthy, hirsute bikies, drooling at the prospect of violating her sweet innocence as they close in:

"And we all understand that Israel faces very serious threats in a very tough neighborhood. Israelis are rightfully concerned about making sure that there is not a new terrorist haven right next door to them."

Here it is, 2016/2017, and Kerry's still trotting out the Leon Uris version of 1948:

"The United States recognized Israel seven minutes after its creation. But the Palestinians and the Arab world did not, and from its birth, Israel had to fight for its life. Palestinians also suffered terribly in the 1948 war, including many who had lived for generations in a land that had long been their home too."

The Palestinian presence in Palestine goes back to the Canaanites but for Kerry it has long been their home too!

As for 1967, he peddles the same, tired myth we've been hearing now for almost 50 years:

"Next year will also mark 50 years since the end of the Six-Day War, when Israel fought for its survival."

Finally, here's Kerry's 'solution' to the Palestinian refugee problem:

"Provide for a just, agreed, fair, and realistic solution to the Palestinian refugee issue, with international assistance, that includes compensation, options and assistance in finding permanent homes, acknowledgment of suffering, and other measures necessary for a comprehensive resolution consistent with two states for two peoples."

This of course has nothing whatever to do with justice, fairness or realism. It is nothing more than a transparent attempt to skirt the requirements of UNGA resolution 194 (1948): "... refugees willing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so..."

Kerry's speech is nothing but the delusional product of an Israeli-occupied mind.

Time to Review Israel's UN Membership

Have you ever wondered how the Zionist entity, which ethnically cleansed 78% of Palestine in 1948, managed to gain admission as a member in the United Nations?

John Quigley's new book, The International Diplomacy of Israel's Founders: Deception at the United Nations in the Quest for Palestine (2016) reminds us, yet again, that in their drive for exclusive control over Palestine, no lie is too big for Israel's rulers, and that, where Israel is concerned, US myopia and delusion know no bounds.

On the subject of UN General Assembly Resolution 273 (Admission of Israel to membership in the UN) of May 11, 1949, Quigley writes as follows:

 "Warren Austin, the US delegate [to the UN], announced as he had in the Ad Hoc Political Committee (AHPC), that the US would vote for Israel's admission. Austen referred to the discussions of Israel's application in the AHPC... 'The long discussion of Israel's application,' Austen said, 'was evidence of the general deep-rooted desire for a just solution of questions relating to Palestine, and especially those of Jerusalem and the Arab refugees'.

"So the US was solid for Israel, even though what Austen was saying about Israel's desire for solutions was directly contrary to what Mark Ethridge [US representative on the Conciliation Commission for Palestine] was reporting to President Truman. The discussion in the General Assembly went well for Israel... While the resolution did what [Abba] Eban [representing Israel's Jewish Agency] asked, by finding Israel to be peace-loving and on that basis admitting it to membership, it also recited Israel's commitments that formed the basis for the General Assembly's decision to admit Israel, as well as the General Assembly's prior resolutions that imposed obligations on Israel. Resolution 273 read:

'Having received the report of the Security Council on the application of Israel for membership in the United Nations,

'Noting that, in the judgment of the Security Council, Israel is a peace-loving State and is able and willing to carry out the obligations contained in the Charter, [...]

'Noting furthermore the declaration by the State of Israel that it 'unreservedly accepts the obligations of the United Nations Charter and undertakes to honour them... ,

'Recalling its resolutions of 29 November 1947 and 11 December 1948 and taking note of the declarations and explanations made by the representative of the Government of Israel before the Ad Hoc Political Committee in respect of the implementation of the said resolutions,

'The General Assembly... 1. Decides that Israel is a peace loving State which accepts the obligations contained in the Charter and is able and willing to carry out those obligations; 2. Decides to admit Israel to membership in the United Nations.'

"The General Assembly thus was explaining that its decision to admit Israel was premised on the commitments Eban had made to the AHPC in regard to repatriation and to Jerusalem. The reference to the resolution of '29 November 1947', the partition resolution, was pointed, because that resolution specified that a Jewish state, were it to be formed, must accord equality without reference to ethnicity. The reference to the resolution of '11 December 1948' similarly meant obligations for Israel, in particular the obligation to repatriate the displaced Arabs.

"Resolution 273 was unusual in UN practice. General Assembly resolutions admitting a new member typically recite only that the Security Council has has received membership. They make no mention of dialogue with the applicant state preceding admission, and no mention of commitments the state may have made in order to secure admission. By its reference to commitments made by Israel, the General Assembly was indicating that it would not have decided to admit absent those commitments." (pp 133-35)

Of course, as we've known for decades, Israel was never serious about honouring either commitment. With this in mind, and given its record in violating countless UN resolutions, and general contempt for international law, Israel's continued membership in the UN should be up for review. As it stands, it not only serves to discredit that body in the eyes of the world, but also does irreparable damage to the reputation of the United States, given its self-imposed role as Israel's principal UN fig leaf.

Pauline Hanson MK

Hating Hansonism in Australia:

"We know that in the Holocaust's aftermath, 58% of Australians opposed Jews being granted asylum down under... Today it is hard to imagine Australia without its significant Jewish contribution. Twenty years ago, Hanson spread her anti-Asian agenda, suggesting some 'invasion' was to blame for job and economic insecurity facing Australians. She was wrong. Australians of Asian extraction are well integrated and good citizens. In 2016, with similar job and economic insecurity abounding, Hanson has now raised the bogey of Islam." (Not in our name: Melbourne's Jewish community does not support One Nation, Nick Dyrenfurth & Dean Sherr, theguardian.com, 16/12/16)

Hearting it in Israel:

"The Palestinians will have to make concessions... This means finally accepting that the 1948 Palestinian refugees will only return to the Palestinian state and not to Israel." (The enemy within: the far-Left hijacked the Palestinian cause, Nick Dyrenfurth, The Australian, 11/11/09)

What a Croc(k)!

That old Zionist crocodile, Shimon Peres, could sure cry a river over the Palestinians when it suited him:

"It is hard to separate the miserable plight of the Palestinian refugees from the claim to the 'right of return.' For the first generation of refugees, the experience of being a refugee and the culture that grew up around it served as a basis for the consciousness of exile from the land of their birth - the loss of the country, house, lands, landscapes familiar from childhood, and family graves - alongside the hope of returning to their homes. The second and third generations have inherited this experience, a powerful emotive load that grows ever stronger amid crushing poverty and degrading conditions in the refugee camps. The claim to the 'right of return' has to be seen against this complex historical background." (The New Middle East, Shimon Peres, 1993, p 189)

Then, just as all and sundry (ie, politicians, journalists and the like) are sucked in by these tears, those cruel jaws snap shut:

"However, it is a maximal claim; if accepted, it would wipe out the national character of the State of Israel, making the Jewish majority into a minority. Consequently, there is no chance it will be accepted, either now or in the future."

Don't be fooled by Zionists' crocodile tears. Its the snap of their jaws you've got to concentrate on.

The Guardian: What Palestinian Refugees?

In the face of an ailing Fairfax press, a tepid, harassed and self-censoring ABC, and a ferociously zioconservative Murdoch press, I assume that some (how many?) Australians are turning to the online Guardian website as a news source. Few, I imagine, are aware that, with Jonathan Freedland at the helm, the Guardian is virtually a no-go zone for critical commentary on the subject of Palestine/Israel.

It should come as no surprise then to find there Guardian columnist Giles Fraser's warm and fuzzy, Israel-you're-better-than-this rubbish: You'd think that Israel, of all places, would respect its refugees: Africans facing genocide are making a modern-day Exodus, fleeing through the Sinai. But the Israeli government has no time for non-Jewish asylum seekers (17/6/16).

An extract:

"At the [Tel Aviv] bus station, I meet up with Mutasim Ali. who runs an advice centre for African refugees. He tells me that as legitimate refugees the state cannot deport them. Instead, the government is 'making conditions so hopeless that asylum seekers feel they have no choice but to leave'. Officially classed as 'infiltrators', they are subject to daily racism and harassment, being taken to the miserable Holot detention centre in the Negev, for no other reason, he says, than to 'break your spirit' and 'stop you integrating into Israeli society'. Some are offered cash sums of up to $3,500 to get on a flight to Rwanda or Uganda and basically bugger off. All of which is massively disappointing from the government of a country that inspired the first international agreement protecting the rights of refugees."

The problem here, of course, is a complete absence of context. The entire piece makes no reference whatever to Israel as a nation founded on the forced deportation of up to a million Palestinian Arabs in 1948.

Any who tried to return were shot out of hand as infiltrators.

Those Palestinians now under occupation, many of them the descendants of 1948 refugees, are subject to daily racism, harassment and worse designed to break both their spirit and their bodies.

The blockaded inhabitants of the Gaza ghetto, most of whom are also the descendants of 1948 refugees, are serially bombed and shelled, with the same aim of breaking both their spirit and their bodies.

And yes, the idea of throwing money at Palestinian refugees to basically bugger off has, from time to time, been mooted by Israeli officials.

The assertion that Israel has inspired anything even remotely humane with respect to the treatment of refugees is an obscene distortion of the truth. What dishonest, shoddy journalism this is.

The Appalling David Feeney MP

Well, well, well:

"Labor frontbencher David Feeney owns an undeclared $2.31 million property, potentially placing him in 'serious contempt' of the Parliament. And the ALP power broker said he didn't know if the house was negatively geared* - despite Labor's proposed changes to property tax rules being a key election issue... [Feeney, BTW, lives in a $2.875 million pad East Melbourne and also owns an investment property in Seddon purchased for $380,000 in 2004.] Mr Feeney has not declared the $2.31 million Northcote property, purchased on December 24, 2013, more than two years after the parliamentary deadline [for disclosure]. The rules around what MPs must declare are quite strict and require that all property, shares and gifts worth more than $300 be reported within 28 days. Although Mr Feeney updated his register twice in 2015, on neither occasion did he declare the Northcote house." (Election 2016: David Feeney didn't declare $2.3m house and 'doesn't know' if it's negatively geared, Massola/Willingham/Hunter, The Age, 17/5/16)

OK, I can understand why Mr Feeney twice overlooked updating his register of interests last year. He was busy... scribbling pro-Israel propaganda pieces for Melbourne's Age.

In a piece he wrote back then called Empty symbolic gestures of recognition will not help the Palestinian people, he declared, among other things, that:

"The Palestinians should abandon their campaign to destroy Israel [by] abandoning the so-called 'right of return' for the descendants of the 1948 refugees." (22/7/15)

Now just so we're clear here, our 3-property portfolio politician's "so-called 'right of return'" just happens to be enshrined in Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) - the right of people to leave and return to their country (not to mention UN Resolution 194 which calls on Israel to permit the return of Palestinian refugees driven out of their homes by Zionist forces in 1948).

So, this padded, 3-property (and counting?) right-wing ALP power broker, who blithely prattled on in his 2008 maiden speech about believing in "the fundamental human rights of us all and the need to eliminate discrimination wherever it is found," is calling on Palestinians to give up their fundamental, inalienable, international law-guarenteed right to return to the homes from which they were driven by his Israeli heroes in 1948.

What an appalling hypocrite! No wonder Labor's losing ground to the Greens.

[*"#Election2016 - #negative gearing costs every taxpayer $310 per year smh.com.au..." Feeney tweet, 12/5/16]

Introducing Rabbi Joachim Prinz

An interesting comment on the relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism by Stephen Shenfield from the comment thread following Roland Nikles' An apologia for Ken Livingstone (What would Buber say?) at mondoweiss.net:

"Zionism... was steeped in anti-Semitism from the start. Zionists agreed with anti-Semites that the Jews were a foreign and unassimilable element in their host societies and that it was therefore natural, inevitable, and humanly understandable that they should be rejected and persecuted. They shared the anti-Semites' negative perceptions of Jews as they actually existed. That also meant that they hated themselves. Where they differed from the more thoroughgoing anti-Semites was their believe that at least some Jews could be rehabilitated and normalized through Zionist efforts. Hitler in particular did not believe this was possible; for him the only final solution of the Jewish question was extermination.

"However, Hitler cannot be equated with Nazism as such. In the 1930s there were Nazis, including SS officers, who thought Zionism could solve the Jewish question. A key figure in the attempt at a Zionist-Nazi rapprochement was Rabbi Joachim Prinz. I got hold of his book Wir Juden (We Jews), published in Berlin in 1934, i.e. under Nazi rule. The author himself apparently blocked publication of an English translation after his emigration to the US in 1937 - and no wonder. The book is a skillful synthesis of Nazi and Zionist ideas, with the 'German Revolution' presented as a model for Jews to emulate. It shows that the German Zionists did not collaborate with the Nazis for purely practical purposes - they also saw the two movements as ideologically complementary. Of all the tendencies of Jewish thought Zionism is and always was the closest to anti-Semitism. The hypocrisy of Zionists accusing other people of anti-Semitism on the flimsiest grounds is astounding."

Here's more on Rabbi Prinz by Israel Shahak:

"Dr Joachim Prinz, a Zionist rabbi who subsequently emigrated to the USA, where he rose to be vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and a leading light in the World Zionist Organization (as well as a great friend of Golda Meir), published in 1934 a special book, Wir Juden (We Jews), to celebrate Hitler's so-called German Revolution and the defeat of liberalism: 'The meaning of the German Revolution for the German nation will eventually be clear to those who have created it and formed its image. Its meaning for us must be set forth here: the fortunes of liberalism are lost. The only form of political life which has helped Jewish assimilation is sunk.'

"The victory of Nazism rules out assimilation and mixed marriages as an option for Jews. 'We are not unhappy about this,' said Dr Prinz. In the fact that Jews are being forced to identify themselves as Jews, he sees 'the fulfilment of our desires'. And further: 'We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honoured and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind. Having so declared himself, he will never be capable of faulty loyalty towards a state. The state cannot want other Jews but such as declare themselves as belonging to their nation. It will not want Jewish flatterers and crawlers. It must demand of us faith and loyalty to our own interest. For only he who honours his own breed and his own blood can have an attitude of honour towards the national will of other nations.'

"The whole book is full of similar crude flatteries of Nazi ideology, glee at the defeat of liberalism and particularly of the ideas of the French Revolution, and great expectations that, in the congenial myth of the Aryan race, Zionism and the myth of the Jewish race will also thrive." (Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, 1994, pp 71-72)

Compare the above with the following account of Prinz from the promotional website of the 2013 documentary, Joachim Prinz: I Shall Not Be Silent:

"In Berlin in the 1930s, the civil rights of Jews were systematically stripped away. A young rabbi refused to be silent. His name was Joachim Prinz and he set out to restore the self-esteem of the German Jews. Knowing the Nazis were monitoring his every word, and despite repeated arrests, Prinz continued to preach about the value of Judaism. He saved many lives by encouraging Jews to emigrate from Germany. Expelled from Germany in 1937, Prinz arrived in the United States, the land where democracy had supposedly triumphed over bigotry and hatred. Here, he witnessed racism against African Americans and realized the American ideal was not a reality. As rabbi of Temple B'nai Abraham in Newark, NJ and later as President of the American Jewish Congress, Prinz became a leader of the civil rights movement. Prinz worked to organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, declaring, 'bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.' Moments later, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his 'I Have a Dream' speech. Throughout his career, Prinz spoke out for justice, unconcerned with the popularity of his positions. He identified with the prophets, writing in a 1975 letter, 'Remember the Biblical adage, 'For the sake of Zion, I shall not be silent'." (Prinz's Story, prinzdocumentary.org)

Returning to earth:

"Said Rabbi Joachim Prinz, President of the American Jewish Congress in a resolution he introduced at the closing session of the group's biennial national convention in Miami Beach on May 18, 1958: 'We call upon the United States to take the lead in solving the Arab Refugee problem by pressing for the resettlement of the bulk of the refugees in the sparsely populated land of their Arab kinsmen'." (The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time, Moshe Menuhin, 1969, p 142)

Born More Equal

Jennifer Oriel, writing in today's Australian:

"The greatest erosion of human potential arises from the belief that some of us are born more equal than others." (White, male & increasingly discriminated against, 21/3/16)

But what about the bizarre belief that a certain strip of land in the Middle East lying between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan really belongs to Jennifer Oriel and friendz, who not only have Australian citizenship, homes and jobs, but can migrate to said strip of land any time they choose and call it home, while those who were ethnically cleansed from it in 1948 and 1967- to make way for the Jennifer Orielz of this world - are not allowed to return there?

Looks like Jennifer Oriel and friendz were born more equal than they.

How to Solve the Syrian Refugee Problem

Too many Syrian refugees? In the Middle East? In Europe?

I have the answer.

It's simplicity itself. Just a matter of logistics and funding, really.

Here's what we do:

1) All Palestinian refugees driven out of Palestine in 1948 and 1967 by Zionist terrorists return to their homes and lands in Israel. We even have a perfectly serviceable UN General Assembly resolution, from 11 December, 1948, that's never been implemented, by way of sanction. It's called Resolution 194, and here are the key words:

"[UNGA] Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return..."

All it needs is to be implemented! End of Palestinian refugee problem!

2) Syrian refugees, currently in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Europe, move into the dwellings of Palestinian refugees departing Lebanon and Jordan for Israel, pending a political settlement in Syria.

I rest my case...

Oh... wait!

Israel won't let the Palestinian refugees return because, well, they're not Jews.

And the rest of the world has to pander to Israel's every vile, apartheid whim and wish - whatever the human cost - right?

The Piano Man, Redacted

What the Sydney Morning Herald's Middle East correspondent Ruth Pollard can write about Palestinian refugee, Ayham al-Ahmad:

"Even as he walks along the border from Croatia into Austria, pianist Ayham al-Ahmad is singing the songs of Yarmouk.

"He is a long way from the neighbourhood he called home for 27 years, a home he was forced to flee in April when Islamic State militants took control of much of Yarmouk, the besieged Palestinian refugee camp just 6 kilometres from the centre of Damascus.

"Since then he has made the trek from Syria into Turkey and down to the Mediterranean coastal city of Izmir where tens of thousands of Syrians have made the short but dangerous passage to Greece.

"Documenting every step of his journey on Facebook, the famous piano player of Yarmouk made a quiet, heartfelt plea for safety as he prepared for the sea crossing.

"'Dearest Mediterranean, I am Ayham and I would like to safely ride your waves,' he wrote on September 14. 'People here just want to go to Europe, [they are] paying through their noses for it. They ride in dinghies prone to overturning in seconds, taking all their lives to your deepest canyons. So what's the solution? We would like Turkey to open its borders with Greece and let us board overland in safety, away from the boats of death,' he wrote, signing off: 'This is Yarmouk, from the heart of Turkey, Ayham.'

"The days when I felt the most helpless were when I had money, but I could not get milk for my year-old baby Kinan, or when my older son Ahmad would ask me for a biscuit,' he told Agence France-Presse of leaving his wife and two young children behind - for now - to find a secure place in Europe where he can bring them.

"Ahmad held out for two years as the situation in Yarmouk deteriorated, moving his piano onto an old wooden trolley that he could wheel out of danger whenever the militants got too close or the regime shelling proved too dangerous.

"When he finally decided to move his family out of Yarmouk to the neighbouring suburb of Yalda in April, militants from IS stopped him at a checkpoint.

"They burnt his beloved piano to the ground in front of him, declaring: 'don't you know that music is haram [forbidden by Islam],' AFP reported.

"By the time he made it to Turkey's coast, Ahmad was exhausted and suspicious of the people smugglers who were making their fortune off the desperation of those fleeing the conflict in Syria.

"'We got into the inflatable boat and we made a deal with the smuggler that he wouldn't let more than 40 persons to get in it with us,' Ahmad wrote on Facebook on September 16. 'I was surprised to find more than 67 persons and a lot of baggage.'

"To everyone's great relief, he posted again the next day: 'After a dangerous trip through the Mediterranean Sea I arrived to Greece, thanks for all the prayers and wishes, I love you all very much.'

"By Monday, Ahmad had become one of the 12,000 to 13,000 refugees who had entered Austria in just 24 hours between Sunday and Monday. He is counting down the days before he can send for his family." (Famous pianist escapes to Austria, 23/9/15)

Presumably, this is what Pollard can't write about Ayhan: To find a place of refuge, a Palestinian refugee such as Ayhan has to travel all the way from Damascus to Vienna, a journey of around 2,330 kms. His ancestral homeland, Palestine, known since 1948 to its usurpers as 'Israel', is less than 100 kms from Damascus, but if Ayhan tried to return there, he'd be shot dead at the border... simply because he's not Jewish.

When Zionists Advocate for Refugees...

It takes a special kind of chutzpah for a Zionist to bang on about refugees. Take Jonathan Freedland, for example. Prompted by the photograph of the drowned Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi, the Guardian's new editor-in-chief writes:

"Until the prime minister's announcement [that it would take in more Syrian refugees], it had set an upper limit of 750 refugees a year. Indeed, in the 18 months since it established the vulnerable person's scheme, it has admitted just 216 such people from Syria. It has always had an alibi: there's no room, no one wants them, councils cannot cope with the extra strain. But if councils themselves step forward, that alibi is gone. There are 433 local and county authorities in the UK. If each one committed to take 50 people, that would be more than 21,000... Of course, this could never be a whole solution. Action for refugees means not only a welcome when they arrive, but also a remedy for the problem that made them leave." (Aylan Kurdi: this one small life has shown us the way to tackle the refugee crisis, theguardian.com, 5/9/15)

Reading the above, we need to keep in mind that there are 12 Palestine refugee camps in Syria and 560,000 registered Palestine refugees. All have been affected by the conflict in Syria. Almost 300,000 are internally displaced. There are over 40,000 in Lebanon and over 15,000 in Jordan. How many are part of the Syrian refugee exodus currently streaming into Europe is anyone's guess.

We need also to remind ourselves that all of these Palestine refugees in Syria (as elsewhere) are the product of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and 1967, and that none of them have ever been allowed to return to their homes and lands in Palestine/Israel - just in case Jewish Zionists - like Jonathan Freedland - should one day decide to  avail themselves of the Jews-only option, courtesy of Israel's apartheid Law of Return, of automatic Israeli citizenship.

If Freedland is ever to be taken seriously on the subject of refugees, he should publicly:

1) renounce his right as a Jew under Israel's Law of Return to take up citizenship in Israel;

2) call for the immediate repatriation to Israel of all Palestine refugees in Syria;

3) call for the phased repatriation of all Palestinian refugees to Israel;

4) support a transition from Israel as a Jewish state to a state for all of its citizens regardless of their religious or ethnic affiliation.

Unless and until he does so, anything he has to say on the subject of refugees should be taken with one hell of a grain of salt.

For the full story on Freedland, I recommend: Why Jonathan Freedland isn't fit to be the new editor-in-chief of the Guardian, Blake Alcott, counterpunch.org, 13/2/15.

Betts on Buzi's 'Refugee Nation'

Welcome to OMFG territory:

 "Two weeks ago real estate millionaire Jason Buzi launched his idea for a 'Refugee Nation' in the global media. The basic premise was not new: to buy an underpopulated area of land somewhere in the world and turn it into a territory for the world's refugees to begin a new life. It combines the historic precedent of the origins of Buzi's native Israel with..." (Is creating a new nation for the world's refugees a good idea? Alexander Betts, guardian.com, 4/8/15)

Stop right there. As soon as the 'I' word pops up you know you don't really need to read further.

After all, this rich bozo comes from a nation which was born of a process of turning an indigenous population into refugees (in 1948), and which to this day refuses their return simply because it wants to be exclusively Jewish. The result: they are forced to remain warehoused in perpetuity in their various countries of refuge.

And now here we have a representative of that same refugee-producing and refugee-perpetuating nation proposing that today's refugees, from wherever they come, forget about returning to their homelands and be warehoused somewhere, anywhere, so long as it's out of sight and out of mind.

The mind fairly boggles at the chutzpah of it all. But, hey, there's worse:

The author of the piece, Alexander Betts, a professor of refugee and forced migration studies and director of Oxford's Refugee Studies Centre, makes absolutely no reference in his piece to the now 7m plus warehoused Palestinian refugees.

Gobsmacking!

Go Back To Where You Came From

"'I just want to live a respectable life here as a human; I just say, welcome us,' Ammar Mershed says in one of the most moving scenes in the new series of the award-winning Go Back to Where You Came From... Mershed is a Palestinian refugee from Iraq, encountered by some of the opinionated group early in the first episode. He's a deeply sincere but jolly and hospitable man now working as a teacher's aide. His family has settled in western Sydney's Bankstown, part of the world's 5 million stateless Palestinians." (The turnaround, First Watch, Graeme Blundell, Weekend Australian Review, 25/7/15)

Graeme Blundell's sympathetic sketch of Palestinian refugee Ammar Mershed is most unusual for a Murdoch rag. What a pity it isn't longer.

If I may take the liberty of adding the missing details:

Back in 1948, the Mershed family was driven out of their Palestinian homeland by the fanatical forces of Jewish State in the Levant (JSIL) and never allowed back. In those grim days, if any Palestinian refugees were caught by JSIL gunmen trying to return to their homes and lands, they were labelled 'infiltrators' and simply shot out of hand. (Ditto today, 67 years later.) The family found their way, somehow, to Iraq, where Ammar was born.

Then in 2003, Ammar, now with a family of his own, was displaced yet again after a cabal of JSIL-linked US neocons, having risen to giddy prominence in the administration of George W. Bush, persuaded that dumbarse and his cronies that Iraq should be next on his to-do list after Afghanistan. And so Ammar and his family found themselves once more on the run.

Somehow they ended up in Australia, where occasionally he'd encounter racist bogans who'd tell him to go back where he came from. But what could he do? He couldn't tell them that he came from Palestine and would give his right arm to go back there if he could, because he knew that the idea of a refugee actually wanting to go back to where he came from was simply too hard for these mental defectives to understand. They'd just think he was nuts, or trying to be funny, and get even more aggro. And anyway, some of them had actually taken to waving JSIL flags at Reclaim Australia rallies.

So whenever these grubs crossed his path and shot their mouths off, Ammar had little choice but to grin and bear it, retreat to the safety of his public housing digs in Bankstown, focus on the little map of Palestine, lovingly carved from the wood of an olive tree, which hung on his living room wall, and say to himself: Next year in Jerusalem.