Lebanese Journalist: 100 Years After Balfour Declaration, The Arabs Have Failed Where Israel Has ExcelledFebruary 20, 2018 Special Dispatch No.7344 https://www.memri.org/reports/lebanese-journalist-100-years-after-balfour-declaration-arabs-have-failed-where-israel-has In a November 25, 2017 article marking the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, published in the London-based daily Al-Hayat, Lebanese journalist Karam Al-Hilu compared the meager accomplishments of the Arab world in the past century with those of the rest of the countries of the world, particularly Israel. He noted that Israel’s supremacy in the areas of science, economy, society, and politics is the source of its strength as well as the source of the Arabs’ failure in confronting it.  Karam Al-Hilu. Source: Madardaily, May 15, 2017 Karam Al-Hilu. Source: Madardaily, May 15, 2017 “A century after the Balfour Declaration… the Arabs have not managed to build a [a single] state that possesses knowledge, justice, and the economic, social, and human capability for confronting Zionism. One hundred years have been squandered, in all aspects; during them, the Arabs have been confronting Israel while their cultural infrastructure was in crisis – in the areas of knowledge, politics, economy, society, and thought. According to the 2014 [UN] report on knowledge in the Arab world [the Arab Knowledge Report], despite the 500 Arab universities, with an enrollment of nine million students and faculties of 220,000 lecturers, higher education in the Arab world is very meager in scientific research, in its failure to adapt to digital culture, and in its incompatibility with [universal] scientific and human culture. Outlay on scientific research is extremely negligible. Even in Egypt, the Arab country where the [cultural] awakening is the most deeply rooted, [only] 0.43% of the [gross] national product [is allocated to scientific research], versus 4.04% in South Korea and 3.39% in Japan. Therefore, scientists and research output are a rarity in the Arab world, and the research that is published [there] constitutes only 0.8% of the global average. The number of patents registered to the Arabs in the past 50 years does not exceed [the number of those] registered by Malaysia alone.
“Not a single Arab university ranks among the 500 best in the world, while Israel supersedes the Arabs at an astronomical rate, in inventions and in hi-tech export. Israel has completely wiped out illiteracy [among its citizens], while among the Arabs, 23% remain illiterate.
“The Arabs have not, over the past century of conflict with Zionism, succeeded in building a [single] state of law and justice. The 2017 international transparency report showed that six of the 10 most corrupt countries in the world are Arab. Countries such as Egypt and Tunisia are ranked 108th in corruption, and Lebanon is 136th, while Israel takes 33rd place, which places it with the developed countries.[2]
“[The Arabs] have also not succeeded in building a ‘nation,’ a ‘homeland,’ or a ‘society,’ in the words of Constantin Zureiq,[3] for the tribal division still distances them from [achieving] pan-Arab unity. They also have not managed to establish a country [in which there is] economic justice; the class gaps [among the Arabs] are very great and unemployment, particularly among young people, tops out at 35.7% in Egypt, 32.1% in Iraq, and 45.3% in Mauritania.
“The Arabs’ resistance against Israel must start with their reading of these numbers and these facts. Indeed, they have spared no blood, martyrdom, or [self-]sacrifice, but they have been negligent in the areas of science, economy, society, and politics that are the source of Israel’s strength – just as they are the source of our failure in confronting it.” [1] Al-Hayat (London), November 25, 2017. |
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Whistleblower Exposes Palestinian Authority CorruptionYoni Ben Menachem June 17, 2020 https://jcpa.org/whistleblower-exposes-palestinian-authority-corruption/  Jadallah and Arafat (Jadallah’s Facebook) Whistleblower Exposes Palestinian Authority Corruption-English subtitles
Palestinian Authority corruption currently occupies the attention of Palestinians in the Palestinian Territories. Until a few days ago, the “scandal of the day” was the suspected corruption of the government fund established by the PA to assist victims of the coronavirus. Palestinian residents claimed that only Fatah activists were able to benefit from this fund because of their connections to senior PA officials. The PA denies such claims.
However, today’s topic of conversation revolves around the new corruption case of PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ office.
On June 11, 2020, “The Palestinian Center for Communications” news agency and the Hamas-affiliated Shehab News Agency released a video of Yasser Jadallah, former director of President Mahmoud Abbas’ Political Department of the PA, in which he revealed major corruption related to the theft of funds given to the PA from international organizations. He described how these funds were transferred to personal accounts.1
He claimed in the video that the funds in the Palestinian Ministry of Finance listed under the heading “EU assistance and Arab states” were mostly transferred to the Palestinian presidency and from there to secret accounts known to only three people: Chairman of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas; his Private Secretary Mrs. Intesar Abu Amara; and Mahmoud Salameh, Deputy Chief of Staff in the PA Chairman’s Office.
He claimed that as soon as these funds enter the accounts of the PA chairman’s office, they suddenly disappear and are then transferred to accounts with fictitious names, including accounts with the names of Mahmoud Abbas’s grandchildren.
“We have passed this information onto European MPs,” Jadallah claimed.
He added that Mahmoud Abbas listens to the opinions of his Private Secretary Mrs. Intesar Abu Amara and Deputy Chief of Staff Mahmoud Salameh so that when security chiefs Majid Faraj and Ziyad Hab al-Rih want funds, they must first flatter them.
Jadallah said the PA chairman ordered his office accounts to be destroyed every six months, but in reality, they are destroyed every day for “security reasons.” He accused Mahmoud Abbas of stealing money because he knows “the Palestinian people are exhausted and weak.”
Yasser Jadallah left Ramallah for Brussels and sought political asylum in Belgium. He forwarded to the European Union and the Belgian authorities all the material he had on PA corruption.
He accused two Palestinian security agents, Nizar Al-Haj and Tareq Al-Abidi, of pursuing him and trying to assassinate him, per the instructions of Intesar Abu Amara and Mahmoud Salameh, to stop him from revealing the corruption. He claims he was abducted twice to exert pressure on him not to reveal what he knew.
The PA has refrained from commenting on the posted video and has not, at this time, taken any legal action against Yasser Jadallah.
PA sources vehemently deny Yasser Jadallah’s claims. Fatah officials say he is a disgruntled person trying to settle accounts through lies.
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas denies all claims that he and his two sons are involved in corruption, and his associates say it is fake news that his political rivals and Israel are disseminating to discredit him.
Meanwhile, at a conference in Ramallah on December 19, 2019, entitled “The War Against Corruption,” the PA chairman said that the Palestinian office assigned to fight corruption was dealing with 460 corruption complaints and that this information pleased him.
“There is no one who stands above the law or interferes with the work of the headquarters,” Mahmoud Abbas argued.
He also urged Palestinian residents of the PA not to hesitate and to file complaints of suspected corruption.
The PA chairman also claimed that the Palestinians are on their way to establishing a state and it is therefore imperative to fight corruption and maintain transparency, “We want a state of law,” Abbas said. Long Lost CredibilityThe PA and its head have long lost credibility in the eyes of the residents of the Palestinian territories; many of them do not believe senior PA officials, and corruption stories in the PA organization are commonplace on the Palestinian street.
Yasser Jadallah’s video was circulated via WhatsApp across the territories and sparked considerable interest. The PA’s silence on the issue only heightens suspicions that there is substance to the news.
The issue of corruption is one of the main reasons why most of the residents of the West Bank do not want to enter a new intifada against Israel, especially now when the issue of “annexation” is at stake.
They feel exploited and disadvantaged while the Palestinian leadership enjoys the good life. “If Mahmoud Abbas wants an intifada against Israel, he should send his own two sons to confront IDF soldiers at checkpoints,” a senior Palestinian education official told me.
* * * Note 1 https://www.palinfo.com/news/2020/6/11/مدير-سابق-بديوان-عباس-يكشف-ملفات-فساد-كبيرة |
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No Arab Demographic Time BombAmb. Yoram Ettinger, 4September2018 http://jcpa.org/article/no-arab-demographic-time-bomb/ Demographic Reality Defies Conventional WisdomContrary to conventional wisdom, the Jewish state is not facing an Arab demographic time bomb. It benefits, however, from a robust Jewish demographic tailwind of births and net immigration.
For example, from 1995 to 2017 the number of Israeli Jewish births surged by 74 percent, from 80,400 to 140,000, while the number of Israeli Arab births grew by 19 percent, from 36,000 to 43,000. Moreover, contrary to conventional wisdom, the trend of Israeli emigration has slowed down. The number of Israelis staying abroad for over a year increased by 6,300 in 2016 (the lowest increase in 10 years – a derivative of the growth of Israel’s economy), compared to 8,200 in 2015 and 14,200 additional emigrants in 1990. At the same time, Israel’s population surged from 4.8 million in 1990 to 8.8 million in 2018.
Since the end of the 19th century, the Jewish-Arab demographic balance has systematically defied the demographic establishment’s assessments and projections.
For instance, in March 1898 Simon Dubnov, a leading Jewish historian and demographer, projected 500,000 Jews in the Land of Israel by 1998, defining Theodore Herzl’s Zionist vision as “messianic wishful thinking.” However, Herzl was the ultimate realist and Dubnov was off by 5.5 million Jews!
In October 1944 the founder of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS) and the luminary of Israel’s demographic and statistical establishments, Prof. Roberto Bachi, projected 2.3 million Jews in Israel in 2001, a 34 percent minority. Bachi’s projection reflected the demographic establishment’s underwhelming assessment of Jewish fertility and immigration (aliyah) and overwhelming assessment of Arab fertility. In 2018 there are seven million Jews in Israel, a 65.5 percent majority in the combined area of pre-1967 Israel, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), enjoying an effective demographic tailwind.
During the 1980s the ICBS sustained its traditional, minimalist assessment of aliyah, dismissing the potential of an aliyah wave from the Soviet Union. Yet, in defiance of the demographic and statistical establishments – and thanks to a most assertive, proactive aliyah policy by Prime Ministers Ben-Gurion, Eshkol, Meir, Begin, and Shamir – 1 million Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel.
In 2000, consistent with demographic political correctness, the ICBS projected a gradual decline of the Jewish fertility rate from 2.6 births per woman to 2.4 in 2025. However, by 2017 the Jewish fertility rate had risen to 3.16 births per woman and 76.5 percent of all Israeli births were Jewish, compared to 69 percent in 1995.
The Westernization of Arab DemographyIn 1969 Israel’s Arab fertility rate (nine births per woman) was six births higher than Israel’s Jewish fertility rate. However, that gap was erased by 2015 (3.11 births each), and in 2016-17 the Jewish fertility rate was higher than the Arab rate (3.16 births per woman and 3.3 when both Jewish spouses were Israeli-born). Moreover, the Arab fertility rate in Judea and Samaria is 3 births per woman, compared to 5 in 2000. In fact, in 2018 Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is equal to Jordan’s while exceeding the fertility rates in all Arab countries other than Yemen, Iraq, and Egypt.
The rise of Jewish fertility reflects enhanced optimism, patriotism, attachment to roots, communal responsibility, and a substantial decline in the number of abortions. Furthermore, while conventional wisdom assumes that the surge of Israel’s Jewish fertility rate was triggered by the ultra-Orthodox community, reality documents a moderate decline of the ultra-Orthodox fertility rate (due to the growing integration into the job market and academia) while a substantial increase of the fertility rate has occurred in Israel’s secular sector, which is the largest sector of the population.
At the same time, the Westernization of Arab fertility (in Israel, Judea and Samaria, and throughout the Middle East) is a derivative of the following phenomena:
According to a June 2012 study by the Washington-based Population Reference Bureau (PRB), 72 percent of 15- to 49-year-old Palestinian married women prefer to avoid pregnancy, trailing Morocco (78 percent) while ahead of Jordan (71 percent) and Egypt (69 percent).
Auditing, rather than Echoing, the Official Palestinian DataIn contrast to the Israeli and global demographic establishment, this article audits – rather than echoing and amplifying – the official data of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS). The article examines the records of the PCBS against the data published by the Palestinian Departments of Health, Education, and Interior, the Palestinian Election Commission, the World Bank, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, Israel’s Authority of International Passages, and so on.
Unlike the demographic establishment, this article does not indulge in projections, which are subjective by definition, affected by a litany of unpredictable domestic and international social, economic, and geopolitical factors. Instead this article focuses only on well-documented and verifiable birth, death, and migration data.
Since 2004 the America-Israel Demographic Research Group – consisting of three Americans and six Israelis, including this writer – has documented significant inaccuracies and misrepresentations by the PCBS totaling over one million Arabs in Judea and Samaria and about half a million in Gaza. For instance:
According to a 1946 document compiled by Israel Trivus and submitted by David Ben-Gurion to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (titled “No Arab Majority in the Land of Israel”), if one accepted the official British Mandate statistics – which echoed the Arab numbers with no scrutiny (as is the current practice) – then Arab natural increase in the Land of Israel was the highest in human history, dramatically higher than customary in the Arab world.
The 2018 demographic realityContrary to political correctness, which has embraced demographic fatalism – repeatedly frustrated by reality – this article has embraced due diligence, documenting the reality of Jewish demographic momentum.
In 2018 – irrespective of the international norm to regurgitate official demographic numbers without due diligence – there are 1.85 million Arabs in Judea and Samaria (not 3 million as claimed by the PCBS), 1.6 million Israeli Muslim Arabs, 130,000 Israeli Druze, 130,000 Israeli Christian Arabs, and seven million Jews – a 65.5 percent Jewish majority in the combined area of pre-1967 Israel, Judea, and Samaria, compared with a 9 percent Jewish minority in 1900 and a 39 percent minority in 1947. While Arab demography has undergone powerful Westernization, Jewish demography has benefited from a robust demographic tailwind of fertility and an annual net immigration of 25,000-30,000 in recent years.
The latter has been the most critical growth engine for the Jewish state, representing a core value of the Zionist idea: the ingathering (aliyah) to the homeland. In 2018 there is a unique window of opportunity for another wave of aliyah from France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Britain, additional European countries, Argentina, the United States, and so on. Such a wave would follow the waves that have enriched the Jewish state every 20 years since 1882, provided that Jerusalem revives the proactive aliyah policy that was implemented by all prime ministers until 1992 but replaced since that time by a proactive absorption policy.
In 2018 Israel is the only Western democracy and advanced economy endowed with a relatively high rate of fertility, which facilitates the sustained growth of the economy as well as a potential expansion of the military ranks – if necessary – while boosting the level of national optimism.
Against the backdrop of the aforementioned demographic documentation, the suggestion that the Jewish state is facing an Arab demographic time bomb is either dramatically mistaken or outrageously misleading. Or both.
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Why International Farhud Day Stymies Invented Palestinian Historyby Edwin Black https://www.algemeiner.com/2018/05/30/why-international-farhud-day-stymies-invented-palestinian-history/  Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini and Adolf Hitler December 1941
When International Farhud Day was proclaimed at a conference convened at the United Nations headquarters on June 1, 2015, its proponents wanted to achieve more than merely establish a commemoration of the ghastly 1941 Arab-Nazi pogrom in Baghdad that killed and injured hundreds of Iraqi Jews. Farhud means violent dispossession. The Farhud was but the first bloody step along the tormented path to the ultimate expulsion of some 850,000 Jews from across the Arab world. That systematic expulsion ended centuries of Jewish existence and stature in those lands.
Jews had thrived in Iraq for 2,700 years, a thousand years before Muhammad. But all that came to end when the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, led the broad Arab-Nazi alliance in the Holocaust that produced a military, economic, political, and ideological common cause with Hitler. Although Husseini spearheaded an international pro-Nazi, anti-Jewish Islamic movement from India to Central Europe to the Middle East, it was in Baghdad — a 1,000-kilometer drive from Jerusalem — that he launched his robust coordination with the Third Reich.
In 1941, Iraq still hosted Britain’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which controlled the region’s oil. Hitler wanted that oil to propel his invasion of Russia. The Arabs, led by Husseini, wanted the Jews out of Palestine and Europe’s persecuted Jews kept away from the Middle East. Indeed, Husseini persuasively argued to Hitler that Jews should not be expelled to Palestine but rather to “Poland,” where “they will be under active control.” Translation: send Jews to the concentration camps. Husseini had visited concentration camps. He had been hosted by architect of the genocide Heinrich Himmler, and the mufti considered Shoah engineer Adolf Eichmann not only a great friend, but a “diamond” among men.
Nazi lust for oil and Arab hatred of Jews combined synergistically June 1–2, 1941, burning the Farhud into history. Arab soldiers, police, and hooligans, swearing allegiance to the mufti and Hitler, bolstered by fascist coup plotters known as the Golden Square, ran wild in the streets, raping, shooting, burning, dismembering, and decapitating. Jewish blood flowed through those streets and their screams created echoes that have never faded.
The 1941 Farhud massacre, which was launched in tandem with an attempted takeover of the British oil fields and London’s airbase at Habbaniya, set the stage for the Mufti-Hitler summit and the establishment of three Islamic and Arab Waffen SS divisions in central Europe under Himmler’s direct sponsorship. After the State of Israel was established in 1948, mufti adherents and devotees throughout the Arab world, working through the Arab League, openly and systematically expelled 850,000 Jews from Morocco to Lebanon. Penniless and stateless, many of those refugees were airlifted to Israel where they were absorbed and became almost half the families of Israel.
Remembering the tragic facts of the Farhud process will make it harder for the newly-invented history to take root. After the Arabs rebranded themselves as “Palestinians” in May 1964 with the backing of the Soviet KGB, a new narrative began to come together. In part, it pretends that the Arabs of Ottoman and then British Palestine did not arrive in the seventh century during the Arab-Islamic Conquest, as history records. Their narrative now asserts that are actually descendants of the Canaanites and the Philistines. Palestine is named for the Philistines. After the Jews were expelled by the Romans in about 135-136 CE, the name of their nation was changed from Judea to Syria Palaestina. But in truth, the Israelites gave rise to the only true surviving Canaanites. The Philistines were Greek Island sea invaders defeated by Ramses III in about 1150 BCE and sequestered into the Gaza Pentapolis, not Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula who conquered in the seventh century CE.
Invented Palestinian history also asserts that present-day Israelis are almost entirely transplants from such alien regions as the Ukraine, Poland, Brooklyn, and Germany — or descendants thereof. Remembering the Farhud helps us understand that almost half the early Jewish families in newly-declared Israel were not from across the sea, but rather from across the river, across the bridge, down the road, and plucked from the same culture.
What’s more, the fabricated Palestinian history laments that Palestine became just a consolation prize for the Holocaust — a tragedy that either never occurred or was a purely European misdeed for which Arabs are not responsible and in which they were not involved. Remembering the 1941 Farhud and the Arab-Nazi alliance that sparked it, locks in Arab involvement in the Holocaust as one of full partnership with the Third Reich. This Nazi-Arab alliance thrived, complete with tens of thousands of Islamic and Arab volunteers arduously fighting in the trenches, coordinating diplomatic and strategic affairs through the Arab Higher Committee, broadcasting nightly incendiary hate messages beginning with words “Oh Muslims,” and undertaking all things calculated to advance a German victory which promised an Arab state in Palestine and a disappeared Jewish population. No wonder the Arab marketplaces were filled with placards that exhorted, “In Heaven, Allah is your ruler. On Earth, it is Adolf Hitler.”
The established and incontrovertible facts chronicling the Arab world’s deep and enthusiastic anti-Jewish alliance with the Third Reich during the Holocaust, which exploded into the Farhud, plus the subsequent population shift that Arab governments engineered to expel 850,000 of their own Jewish citizens, make it impossible to weave a fabric of invented history. Recognizing, remembering, and reminding the world of those facts on International Farhud Day, June 1, will help all participants and observers of the Arab-Israeli conflict confront the true legacy that has helped create today’s stalemate. Recognition is the first step along the painful path toward reconciliation.
Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling author of IBM and the Holocaust, and the prize-winning book The Farhud — Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust. In 2015, Black organized and founded International Farhud Day. |
