HERO
This is Masad Armilat, a 23-year-old Arab-Israeli man.
Masad works at a gas station near Sderot. On October 7, as gunshots rang out nearby, Masad and left the shop, ran towards the main road,
and found people hiding in bushes after fleeing the Nova music festival, where terrorists were running amok, massacring hundreds.
Some of the people were suffering from gunshot sounds. There was precious little time to think.
Masad selflessly and immediately brought them to the gas station. Once safely inside, he locked the door. He then dragged gas containers next to the entrance, so if terrorists tried to shoot the lock and open the door, the balloons would explode on them.
He led everyone to the shelter, then went outside, risking his life. He waited by the window to see when the terrorists would arrive. And they did.
The terrorists peered inside suspiciously. Suspecting something, they tried to break down the door, kicking at it over and over. But upon seeing the gas balloons, they decided to leave.
Thanks to Masad's heroic and selfless actions, the lives of 14 people were saved that day.
Masad emphasized, "We're all one, whether Arabs or Jewish."
May there be many more people like you, Masad.
7 major differences between the anti-Israel protests and the pro-Israel rally today at the National Mall:
1. Nobody was assaulted.
2. There were many American flags.
3. There was no racism or bigotry.
4. Nobody was hiding behind a face mask.
5. Concern was expressed for innocents on the other side.
6. It was bipartisan.
7. It was much, much larger!
@CptAllenHistory Thank you for this! I really enjoyed and appreciate your post. I know my anti Israel friends will find some way to delegitimize this information. How can I myself back up this information? “Hi, I’m a lawyer” will not be sufficient for them.
Why would a Palestinian like me become an activist against antisemitism?
It's really simple.
Our cause is being used as a weapon to bash Jews.
Keeping us in a permanent state of fear, rage, trauma.
Antisemitism is destroying Palestinian society the way it did to Germany.
https://t.co/lZ6Ism1yFD of the most important means by which UNRWA fulfilled its mission is inflating the number of Palestinians it registers as refugees. It does so by engaging in several unique practices, not applied to any other refugee population in the world: (1) Counting descendants of the original refugees displaced by the War of 1948 in perpetuity (by now into the fifth generation) automatically and with no qualifications; (2) Never removing any “refugees” from the count even if they acquired citizenship of another country, a status that for all other true refugees ends their refugee status; (3) Counting Palestinians who continue to live in the West Bank and Gaza, so in “Palestine” as refugees “from” Palestine. Once UNRWA’s inflationary practices are removed, almost none of the Palestinians who claim to be “refugees”, either as registered by UNRWA (around 5.7 Million) or self-claimed by Palestinians living in the West (a total of 8-9 Million) are actually refugees by any international standard. The vast majority of them are either (1) living in the West Bank and Gaza, and so clearly are not refugees “from” Palestine, still very much living there, and since almost all of them are by now second to fifth generation claimants they have also never been displaced by war - 2.2 Million; (2) Citizens of countries such as Jordan - 2.2 Million or various countries around the world - 2-3 Million. Citizens of countries are not refugees by any international standard. This leaves about 250,000 Palestinians who remain stateless in Syria and Lebanon, despite having been born there and never having been displaced by war. Those countries refuse to give them citizenship. They are certainly no longer refugees, but they are stateless. Of them, perhaps 30,000 are indeed refugees by international standards in that they were displaced by war, crossed the border and have not been given citizenship by any other country. Them, and only them, should be recognized as refugees. That is less than 1% of the total number of Palestinians who claim to be “refugees”.
https://t.co/63JPimBQA3 addition to its inflationary practices, the UNRWA compounds (“Refugee Camps���) and schools are the incubators in which the Palestinian national ethos of “revenge and return” was created and shaped. It is the ground zero Palestinian political organization in that it daily reinforces the Palestinian ethos that the Jews have no right to a state in any of the territory between the Jordan River and the Sea, and that Palestinians will one day undo Israel by means of “return”. Since the days of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, planned and perpetrated by UNRWA graduates, to the October 7th massacre by Hamas, also planned and perpetrated by UNRWA graduates (Muhammad Deif was raised in an UNRWA compound and studied in its school), UNRWA has sustained, nourished, educated and raised generation after generation of Palestinians dedicated to undoing Israel by “all means”, primarily violence and terror. Hamas, like Fatah before it, merely recruits UNRWA graduates ready to commit any atrocity in the name of “revenge and return”. It’s no coincidence that the two places where the perpetual refugee culture is strongest - Gaza and Lebanon - are also the most violent.
In short, why are there still millions of people claiming to be refugees from a war that ended more than seven decades ago? Because to the Palestinians, that war has never ended, and they continue to believe that one day, with enough patience and violence, they could still win it to achieve their original goal: no state for the Jewish people anywhere from “The River to the Sea”.
(The full history is of-course available in “The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream has Obstructed the Path to Peace”).
Why are there even places called “refugee camps” in Gaza? And why are two thirds of the people living in Gaza, who were born there and lived there their entire lives, called “refugees” from a war that ended more than seven decades ago? The answers to these question unlock the core of the conflict. Here they are (Part 1; Part 2 in the first comment):
1.The 20th century has been marked by a transition from empires to states. We begin the 20th century when much of the world is divided between empires. We end it when much of the world is divided between states. When lucky, those states were based on the self determination of a people who share a common history, language, ethnicity, background religion and connection to a territory. (Zionism emerged in this context based on the idea of self determination for the Jewish people in the only territory to which they were ever connected as a people). When unlucky those new states were artificially created by receding empires drawing boundaries, forcing different peoples to share one state, leading almost always to civil war, dictatorship, or both. This transition has been bloody. It involved two world wars and numerous regional and civil wars. In the bloody process of empires receding and new states emerging to replace them, tens of millions of people were displaced, fleeing across newly created borders, typically to new countries with an ethnic makeup similar to their own. This was true of Hindus and Muslim, Ukrainians, Poles and Germans, Bulgarians, Greeks and Turks and Arabs and Jews. This was not unique.
2.What was unique is that one group only of refugees from that time and those wars were allowed to maintain themselves as endless refugees in anticipation of one day winning a war they had lost. Those were the Arab refugees from the war of 1948, later to be known as Palestinians. All other refugee groups, except the Palestinians, were presented with a clear message: “it’s tough, it’s tragic, move on”. There was a clear understanding that in the most fundamental sense there is no going back - not in place and not in time (thus, there was no such thing as “a right of return”). To seek to go back would mean endless war. And so the message was forward looking and future facing. Tens of millions of refugees and displaced persons, among them millions of Jews, would build new lives in the new countries to which they fled.
3.Except Palestinians. The war that the Arabs of the land and the surrounding countries waged to prevent a Jewish state from emerging and gaining independence failed to achieve its goals. Despite the violent onslaught of 1947-49, Israel emerged as a sovereign state. But the Arabs of the land, sustained by broader Arab support, refused to accept this outcome. They proceeded to undo it through a variety of means, including repeated wars, economic boycotts, international condemnations and a complete refusal of the refugees themselves to be settled, as it would effectively mean accepting that the war was over.
https://t.co/NY8E4ecoBH that end of keeping the war of 1948 alive until its goal of undoing the Jewish state could be achieved, a temporary agency established to resettle the refugees - UNRWA (initially called REWA, but the Arabs insisted on the letters UN so that it would appear to enjoy international legitimacy) - was hijacked by the Arab refugees. As a result of this hijacking UNRWA effectively became a Palestinian entity devoted singularly to sustaining and stoking the idea that uniquely among the world’s refugees, Palestinians don’t need to move on and can keep insisting on “return”, both in space and in time, to a time when there was no Israel. UNRWA thus became the mechanism by which the Jewish people alone were denied the right to to consider their hard won self-determination and sovereign statehood as a done deal.
(Part 2 continues in the first comment:)
Over 1,800 Stanford alumni signed a letter condemning Stanford’s response to the Hamas terrorist attack that the school failed to condemn.
"Your failure to clearly condemn Hamas’ barbarism and those who celebrate it, without conflating unrelated issues, is a shocking abrogation of your responsibility as leaders to draw a bright line between right and wrong…"
The full letter is 🔥 — Read it here: https://t.co/QzRDUpp7TZ
$12.5M raised ✅
NCAA Champ, OW ✅
One of the most diverse teams on campus ✅
@KeepStanfordWRE attracts students from all backgrounds and helps shape them into leaders who impact their communities in meaningful ways.
We deserve transparency, @Stanford.
https://t.co/zvJJOBojgW
Congrats to @shanegriffith7 & the entire @KeepStanfordWRE family.
Last night was incredible & the outpouring of support has been astounding.
Thank you to our alumni, parents, current student-athletes, staff & other program supporters for your unwavering commitment. ❤️🙏👊⚫️
Shane Griffith is the 2021 NCAA wrestling champ. He wrestles for @CardWrestling. His singlet is inside out because @Stanford is dropping the wrestling program. They were told raise money, they’ve raised over 10mill. What more do they need? @KeepStanfordWRE retweet please