Quote:
Originally Posted by Hadis
They get the right to became citizens of Palestine,according to most Israeli negotiating positions that I know of.
That's nice that this is
our position. Too bad not a single Arab public opinion agrees with it.
In fact,
Abbas has specifically demanded that no refugees should ever become citizens of the countries in which they live (including Palestinian-held territory), thereby dooming the people he supposedly cares for to more decades of misery:
Quote:
According to Beirut-based Now Lebanon news agency, Abbas told the An-Nahar newspaper of “permanent” cooperation with the Lebanese government to maintain security in Palestinian refugee camps.
The president also voiced hope that the lives of Palestinians in Lebanon would be “easier”, adding that they did not “want to be naturalized.”
And a while back:
Abbas was even more emphatic:
Quote:
We would never accept any settlement that leads to naturalizing Palestinians in Lebanon," Abbas told pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat.
"We would not accept any settlements that would lead to a demographic change in Lebanon. This is totally unacceptable ... We won't accept a settlement that obliges Lebanon to naturalize even one Palestinian. We will find a settlement that satisfies Palestinians in Lebanon and satisfies Lebanon ... I'm sure of this and time will prove it," Abbas added.
Falasteen (autotranslated by google) says the same thing: that
it is better for Palestinian Arabs to be languishing in "refugee" camps with sewage running through the streets than to live in the West where they may lose their interest in destroying Israel. And this article is written by an International Solidarity Movement officer, supposedly devoted to human rights, but it openly advocates the absence of any human rights for Palestinian Arabs!
Unfortunately, they are all
lying.
Every time Lebanon has (quietly) offered Palestinian Arabs the chance to be citizens, they have
jumped at the opportunity (50,000 in the 50s and 60s, and another 20,000 in 1994).
Gazans have also lept at the opportunity to become Egyptian citizens in recent months; over 2000 have done that including Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar.
And when those rights
are offered, even reasonable human rights like freedom of occupation, so-called human rights activists are
angry!.
Human Rights Watch responded to this policy with
the following:
Quote:
The right [to return] is held not only by those who fled a territory initially but also by their descendants, so long as they have maintained appropriate links with the relevant territory. The right persists even when sovereignty over the territory is contested or has changed hands. If a former home no longer exists or is occupied by an innocent third party, return should be permitted to the vicinity of the former home...
I didn't quote the whole thing here but go to the link if you care.
No UN resolution or any Article refers to "descendants". Further, in their zeal to "protect" a non-existent "right of return" for Lebanese Palestinians
who were born in Lebanon, Human Rights Watch is denying Palestinians in Lebanon their human rights to citizenship in the country of one's birth! Human rights are individual, not collective.
This is the crux of the matter: on an individual basis, Arabs have proven time and time again that they just want to be treated like human beings and to be able to raise their families in dignity, and they never cared whether this was in Palestine or Jordan or Syria, or Canada for that matter. Their "leaders," symbolized here by this writer, do not want to see individual Palestinian Arabs happy, because their main card in pressuring Israel is a huge amount of miserable "refugees."
The entire issue is one of individual choice. If Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon are afraid that by becoming citizens, they would compromise on the miniscule chance that they would eventually be allowed to move to Israel and rebuild a village destroyed in 1948, they can choose not to become naturalized. But history shows that most Lebanese (and Egyptian, and Syrian, and Iraqi) Palestinians would become citizens in a minute if they could.
Last edited by Gamblor; 08-10-2012 at 05:21 PM.