As punishment for voting Hamas, a Palestinian political party which does not wish to have diplomatic relationship with an Israel it considers illegal and an incessant invasive intruder into Palestinian land, the Europeans are cutting off its annual aid of some 600 million Euros to the Palestinian Authority.
The US-led movement to subjugate Palestinian democratic choice will now take a greater deeper bite with the Europeans implementing its threat to deny its annual aid to the Hamas staffed Palestinian Authority, the government of Palestine.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza, much hated by Israel when UNRWA was headed by Dane Peter Hanson, warned: "The Gazan population is extremely dependent on donor aid so, when it [European aid] is reduced, it has an immediate consequence on the ground. We are concerned about the consequences on the security side. If the security forces are not paid, how will they express that frustration, what will that mean for the general security in Gaza?"
The Red Cross also chipped in to say that Palestinians already face extreme hardship because of the Israeli-caused economic crisis through the latter’s deliberate restrictions on movement of people and goods.
Cutting off funding to the Palestinian Authority would provoke a broader humanitarian emergency because of reduced or even eliminated services such as water supplies and medical care.
But Ben Bot, the Dutch foreign minister, encapsulated the European loss of higher principles by saying bluntly what we all know already: "The Palestinian people have opted for this government, so they will have to bear the consequences."
He’s reminding the Palestinians: “You exercise democracy to pick someone the Israelis and Americans didn’t approve; we have to punish you for your nerve in exercising your democratic choice when you ought to have complied with Israeli dictates.”
However, the Arab world should not be allowed to escape unscathed. Their shameful sloth in coming to the financial support of their Palestinian kinfolks is also not vocally supportive enough. Sneaking a few dollars to the Palestinians quietly behind the American back is in reality genuflecting to US imperialism, though hardly surprising when most of the wealthy ones like Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf nations are already in American pockets.
It may eventually fall upon the Persians to openly support a nascent Arab nation that has long been denied by the Israeli-American bloc its righful place among the community of nations.
Agreed, once the Palestinians have their rightful land usurp by the Israeli to earn a living off. Note that Israel has unlawfully withheld US$50+ million per month of tax revenue that belongs to the Palestinain Authority.
ReplyDeleteNote that Egypt receives US$2 billion a year for not confronting Israel.
Note most of all that Israel is the region's biggest parasite (after the war cost in Iraq), receiving around US$4 to 5 billion per year; if you include the US$2 billion of bribes to Egypt for not confronting Israel, the Jewish State is one humongous sponge of US taxpayers' money, and we haven't even look at the hugh US subsidy for Israeli defence developments such as the Phalcon airborne radar, the air defence anti-ballistic missile systems, etc.
Quit asking for bloody handouts! Aye to that
The Jews are living in an area which used to belong to their ancestors. The real invaders of Palestine are the bloody Muslim Arab aders who conquered Palestine. If the bloody Palestinians cannot accept this historical fact then they must "quit asking for bloody handouts! Imagine the Chinese and Indians who arrived in the Malay
ReplyDeletePeninsula later than the so-called Bumiputras (Malays) refusing to recognise the existence of Malaysia as a country.
Will the Malays accept this nonsense?
what land of their ancestors? ever heard of a bloke by the name of Joshua, a former slave of the Egyptians? your biblical knowledge is appalling! get back to Sunday school bible studies ;-)
ReplyDeleteand the Israelis should be the first to stop asking for handouts!
I am unclear on a couple of things. Are you trying to tell me that a former slave has no legitimate right to establish a state/nation or that Joshua was not a Hebrew (Jew)? If Joshua has no right to establish a nation then neither can the Malays claim any legitimacy for the nation of Malaysia.
ReplyDeleteThe Malays are not the indigenous people of the Malay Peninsula and yet the Malays claim Malaysia as their ancestral home and the international community recognises the Malays as the rightful rulers of Malaysia. Why can't the Muslims/Malays recognise the existence of Israel. By the way, the people getting and asking for handouts in Malaysia are mostly Muslim/Malays
I did not say that Joshua was not a Hebrew - I said he was an Egyptian slave - if you know your Sunday school bible studies, you would have agreed.
ReplyDeleteCould a slave establish a nation, after seizing the land from others?
Yes, but then after the Hebrews or rather the Judeans were kicked out to the 4 corners of the world by the Romans (2nd Diaspora), others (including the Arabs about 1200 years ago) moved in just in the same manner as the Hebrews had.
So, what's the difference? Whose ancestral land was it? Those before the Hebrews, the Hebrews or those after the Hebrews, the last having lived there continuously for 1200 years, before the Balfour Declaration created a new Israeli State in 1947 against the wishes of the Arabs, who, as I mentioned, had lived there continuously for 1200 years?
For legitimacy of ownership, how far do we go back in time? If only to the time of Joshua, we need to ask why stop thence; why not to an even earlier period? What's good for the goose ought to be good for the gander.
And why not measure ownership in terms of duration of residence (1200 years) plus recency (since 1200 years ago until now), and not based on biblical stories?
I referred to Joshua as a "former slave" in my previous posting. Please read carefully. I hope you understand the meaning of the word "former" which is used to describe something in the past.
ReplyDeleteNow, back to my question which you have either ignored or failed to understand. It is an indisputable fact that the orang aslis were here for thousands years before the Malays came to the Malay ( for want of a better word ) Peninsula. However, the nation of Malaysia is still recognised as legitimate by the international community. So, why can't the Arabs/Muslims accept the state of Israel?. In other words "What's good for the goose ought to be good for the gander".
The Palestinians cannot deny responsibility for putting into power an organisation bent on the destruction of Israel as much as the Malays who do not support UMNO today cannot deny that for better or for worse the Malaysian UMNO-led government is a creation of the Malays. In other words, you reap what you sow.
By the way I am sure you know that there many non-Muslims and some Muslim scholars who see the "flogging" of Israel as attempts By Muslim rulers to cover-up their own shortcomings. It is a good thing the present administration of Malaysia has largely put all that posturing behind.
No, I was the one who termed him a former slave in the first place. If I referred to him subsequently without the qualification 'former' that's just for economy of writing.
ReplyDeleteWe are talking about statehood. Whilst the orang asli were there earlier, there was no "state" as understood by the community of nations. There were just dispersed small groups of different tribes. But Palestine has already existed as a state, although under European colonisation, just as various Asian and Middle-Easten states had been.
But Israel? There was no Israel since the 2nd Diaspora - and that's 2000 years ago - more nations have disappeared in less time - until the Europeans, guilty of their inaction over the Holocaust, sought to relieve their guilt by using Palestinian land as a consoling gift to mainly European Jews, whose homeland were actually Poland in the main, and Russia/Belorussia. That's where they belong, having being residents for nearly 2 thousand years as Europeans.
The issue of Israel/Palestinian is not about democracy (like a democratically elected Hamas) or dictatorship (like US client states of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia) - it's the rights of the Palestinians to their own land.
Ironically, the Israelis, descendants of persecuted European Jews, victims of Nazi brutalities, are today themselves the inheritors of their Nazi persecutors' brutalities in the way they oppressed the Palestinains. The GAZA is the world's biggest prison; the West Bank is the Israeli created Bantustan. Today the Israeli state is like the Nazi organization or the former White supremacist state of South Africa (which incidentally, Israel had close military and secret alliance - can you beat that, of all the nations in the world, an Israel peopled by the children of the Holocaust collaborating with a white supremacist State?)