The chaos in Lebanon has left a large number of South Asians stranded or endangered. Today four Indian Navy ships entered Beirut harbor to begin evacuating nationals to Cyprus:
Over 1,000 Indians assembled at the jetty as Israeli operations against Hezbollah militia intensified in Lebanon.
The warships — INS Mumbai, INS Betwa, INS Brahmaputra and auxiliary tanker INS Shakti — anchored overnight off the Lebanese coast, moved into the port to pull out the anxious Indian nationals and shift them to camps in Larnaca in Cyprus, Navy sources said.
There are about 12,000 Indians in Lebanon, according to press reports. And while India has the capability to mount its own evacuation, other countries with large numbers of nationals in Lebanon are in a more difficult position. The International Organization of Migration (IOM) has a team in Lebanon on behalf of the governments of Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Moldova and Ghana. There are at least 10,000 Bangladeshis in Lebanon, and up to 40,000 Filipinos.
But the case that stands out is Sri Lanka, with an estimated 93,000 nationals in Lebanon of whom 86,000 are women employed as domestic labor. According to a recent article in Middle East Report, Sri Lankan domestic workers have become ubiquitous in Lebanon. You wonÂ’t be surprised to learn that the employment process is shady and the workers often mistreated:
Each year, over 10,000 female Sri Lankans arrive in Lebanon with the intention of working hard to make better lives for themselves and their families. Most of them go to work cleaning, cooking and caring for children—jobs that Lebanese are generally not willing to take though the services are in high demand. Along with Filipinas, Bangladeshis and other Asian and African women, Sri Lankans have become an integral part of the Lebanese home and the Lebanese economy in the post-war era. In most cases, these women earn more than they could in their home country, but it is estimated by the Migrant Services Center, one of the largest NGOs in Sri Lanka serving domestic migrants, that 40 percent of them return to Sri Lanka no better off than they were when they left. Some are struggling to repay large loans taken out for migration expenses and the families of others mismanaged their remittances, but many simply had their wages withheld. It is estimated that 20 percent of the 80,000 Sri Lankan migrant workers living in Lebanon experience some form of maltreatment, ranging from non-payment of wages to verbal, physical and sexual abuse.
Â… According to David Soysa of the Migrant Services Center, hiring agencies direct the least skilled and least educated women to Lebanon, because that destination is perceived to have the highest rates of worker abuse. SFBLE statistics do show slightly higher rates of reported maltreatment in Lebanon than elsewhere.
So far, the Sri Lankan government has been trying to move its nationals from the most endangered areas to other parts of Lebanon:
The embassy was hiring buses to transport those who needed help. The embassy was trying to evacuate about 1500 endangered Sri Lankans from an area called Hyda which was directly on the onslaught of the bombing. There were many problems the embassy was facing to move these people out. Not many drivers were willing to take their vehicles on hire to this area. The other problem was roads and bridges have been destroyed by the Israeli bombing in the area.
A Sinhalese nun called Sister Leela who has been caring for Sri Lankan evacuees interviewed by the BBCÂ’s Sandeshaya said yesterday the Sri Lankan Embassy informed her that another bus load of 100 will be arriving at her center for safety.
In the meantime, it appears that the casualties have begun:
Sri Lankan woman housemaid in Lebanon is feared dead due to the Israeli aerial bombing in Lebanon, Sri Lankan Foreign Ministry said.
Ministry spokeswoman Himali Arunathilake said that “We have received information that a female worker is among the dead in northern Lebanon and we are now trying to verify those reports.”
Given the number of people involved, the conditions on the ground, the fact that many workers don’t have papers, and the expected resistance of employers to allow their domestics to leave, it’s likely that more than a few young Sri Lankan women will become “collateral damage” of the Israel-Hezbollah war.
Thanks for this post. This is a problem that I certainly never pondered and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
Oh my gosh this is really heartbreaking. My bigger concern is that this is a group of people with no disposable income and very little to no savings. What happens once all these people including the Americans who are evacuated land in Cyprus?
The saddest part is that about half the Sri Lankans in Lebanon cannot be moved because they don’t have papers (BBC reported this today) – most likely because of the practice of confiscating passports mentioned in the MERIP article.
I’ve been wondering all week what the Indian government’s response has been to the situation itself, and Siddhartha’s post has provoked me to search for it. MEA’s statement from July 1 re: Gaza:
MEA press release on Lebanon from July 13:
Remarkably, The Prime Minister’s statement after the G-8 summit makes no mention of Lebanon at all — as if didn’t even bring it up with Bush. This all seems remarkably tepid, but maybe my search skills aren’t quite as good as others’ — has anyone seen other public statements by senior Indian officials?
If not, I’m invariably led to the following ironic (and highly tentative) observation. Once upon a time, the government of India exercised global leadership, and at least arguably influence, on a range of issues through the Non-Aligned Movement and G-77 — whether one agrees or disagrees with what it espoused then substantively, I think it’s fair to say that India was regarded as a leader in the developing world at that time, and its leadership to some extent involved being critical of the then-New World Order that was emerging. Now, has India become so fixated upon its goal of gaining a permanent Security Council seat — and so economically interdependent with the United States and other countries in the global North — that it is sitting on its hands?
I present that as a question because I sincerely mean it as a question — I don’t as yet have a fixed view on the subject. But as we witness the dismemberment and destruction of a country that one might have regard as a model for post-conflict transition for any number of countries in the world, perhaps including Afghanistan and Iraq, I would have hoped for a more assertive and independent response from South Block and the PMO.
On a tangentially related note, Time Out Beirut has suspended publication and provided a poignant message to its readers.
Diplomatic resolutions? That’s so mid to late 90’s.
Seriously though, I’m just surprised the UN has been “obsoleted” to this level, I was under the assumption it was created to prevent these large scale military ops. Reminds me of Chapelle’s black bush. “And I ain’t tryin to dis the UN because they have no army… just go sell some medicine, bitches”
Add this to the growing list of untold, ignored stories. That’s a staggering number of ex-pat workers in a small country not particularly known for having expat workers (like Dubai or Qatar). The Americans and Europeanes flee a war zone by cruise ship (my great grandparents, Americans on a grand European tour after a medical conference in Germany, fled England by cruise ship with blackened windows and radio silence in August, 1914). The Indian Navy will take care of the Indians. Everyone else has to fend for themselves? You’d think that the cruise industry–with multi-billion dollar profits and a hazy sense of nationality–could spare a few more ships.
If not, I’m invariably led to the following ironic (and highly tentative) observation. Once upon a time, the government of India exercised global leadership, and at least arguably influence, on a range of issues through the Non-Aligned Movement and G-77 — whether one agrees or disagrees with what it espoused then substantively, I think it’s fair to say that India was regarded as a leader in the developing world at that time,
Good q, my thoughts
India and Israel have had much closer relations in recent times, which has lead to Israel supplying India with some vital millitary equipment (the deals being blessed by America of course)
There is a perception that support for Arab regimes in the past have not borne any fruit
The coalition of the people of colorThe Non-aligned Movement is dead, and started dying after the 1960 war with China, though it has a few geriatric advocates left in Delhi. The nuclear deal and snubbing of Iran engendered only a little opposition…But who cares what India thinks? The only country that can influence Israel has already made its views quite clear…
According to Hindu newspaper, there is talk of India helping stranded Sri Lankans.
Oh damn, I had no idea. Who knew?
The pictures of blown up children have pretty much numbed my ability to blog about politics.
NEWSFLASH: Indian navy to the rescue, and yes, we’re carrying Sri Lankans and Nepalese too:
We have a hallowed tradition of rescuing our[] citizens from the Middle East, of course; must point out that the largest civilian air-lift ever in history was conducted by India, when we flew Indian nationals from Kuwait during Gulf War I. This is a feat that’s more ironic than it sounds, coz that the largest air-lift ever was also taking place just about that time, that of US military personnel going *into Kuwait.
In comparison, the US was planning to charge its citizens for the priviledge of being rescued by their own Navy.
AK (#4): I don’t know if this answers your question, but we have a contingent in that UN peacekeeping force in south Lebanon.
[*] – Yeah yeah, I know some of you guys here consider yourself as Amrus and Canucks, but bear with me this one time pleease? Not often that I get to ra-ra India for totally bonafide, non-jingoistic reasons.
I’m glad India is willing to help the Sri Lankans and Nepalese, but it looks like those four Warships onlyhave 1000 seats abord. . .they can ferry people back and forth to Damascus but a) how long before the war spreads there and b) the longer it takes (remember, they have to be let in by the Israeli blockade, in turns) the more opportunities for stranded foreigners to get hit by a bomb like this poor Sri Lankan woman.
Chocolate Brownie:
i am not defending any non-jingoist take here, but to be fair, your statement is not entirely true… during gulf war 1, the people rescued by the initial flights were close friends of the indian ambassador in kuwait and the more ‘elite’/ financially well-off families… there weren’t more than 7 flights out, i am pretty sure (my family and i were there). the maids and the labour workers weren’t the first priority there at all. they only got to leave with their sponsored families if they left and there were many cases of maids that were abandonned by their sponsors. the indian embassy did do a fantastic job however, of organizing trails across iraq and jordan where people were stationed in refugee camps and before they could catch a flight to bombay. people that could pay their way got first picks, the maids & labour workers got to leave later, but everyone was given a chance to get out. anyhow, it wasn’t a free of cost affair. furthermore, the indian embassy in kuwait is quite ‘rich’ because there is a great population of indians there that do very well. so they had the money to put into the arrangements to begin with, if they didn’t, they would have been heavily criticized later for not using it well in a time of need.
AK:
i have been having similar thoughts too… i can’t help but wonder if there are any ‘deals’ are going on between india and US right now… india was taking on a fairly independant role in its global responsibilities… it has been standing well and strong on its own for the last 3-5 years. since the G8 meeting in st petersburg, the attitude and statements re the israel issue seem to be complacent and detached. who knows what’s going on, i can’t help having an uneasy feeling about it…
this is absolutely true, not just in lebanon but many middle-eastern countries! this also goes for indian, bangladeshi and filipino workers. there are HUGE human rights violations going on in several middle-eastern countries. there have also been some cases of ‘mysterious disappearings’. i have often wondered why there has been no action taken by the UN or other agencies. i know that in kuwait the relative incidence has reduced since the gulf war, probably because the cases were being publicized, documented and received a lot more attention, and so people got a little more cautious of their actions. but the attitude that expatriot workers are dispensible and less-than human is VERY prominent and will be hard to break.
this is something that is discussed and criticized a fair bit among ‘expat’ circles in kuwait (which are incidentally the brain and task force that keep the country going): “the media in the west picks up on all the maltreatment of the people in iraq caused by saddam hussein, but conveniently ignores the human rights violations in neighbouring ‘ally’ countries and the passiveness of their governments re such issues”. and trust me, these issues are very well known to locals and the US army there. do you really think a true ‘democracy’ exists in these countries? then why not forcefully enter every such country and ‘fix’ them also as was done in iraq.
It pains me that the government of a country of 1 Billion people where so much of FDI comes directly from or is fueled by Indians abroad, is too f*cking incompetent and weak to even protest against mistreatment of its citizens across the world – especially in the middle east. Do we have no leverage over countries that we imported 20 Billion dollars worth of oil from in 2004-05?
Sumiti:
Thank you for your insight. I stand corrected in that case; I’m a quasi-Gulf-ie myself, but haven’t, as you might imagine, been there in Kuwait, so I had no idea about the ground realities then (or the fact that this wasn’t per-gratis, as I had assumed). I, however, still stand by my earlier assertion of this being the largest civilian airlift ever; it’s all there in the Limca Book of Records, and if I’m not wrong, Air India did get a citation much later.
Exploitation… just to say this; additionally, what pisses me off even more is a few ‘middle-class’ ex-pats’ frigging class consciousness. Out here in Singapore, I’ve seen tech guys who have refused to sit next to workers from Bangladesh and India because Singaporeans would think that they were also workers. What is really interesting is that I doubt they would be so class-concious in India; I mean, surely, if you take a bus or a local train, you’ll have to sit next to just about everyone?
This is a great post. Just wanted to point out that it might make more sense if your title said “Lankan Maids” instead of Lanka Maids (Lanka Maids = America Maids, Lankan Maids = American Maids). Minor thing, but it makes a diff to Lankan diaspora chicks like me. thanks. keep up the great writing. 🙂
SP, could you point me towards the ‘MERIP article’ you referenced? thanks!
sorry, nm. got it. (its late.)
I spent significant time in Beirut last year and the year before. The Ski Lanka and Filipino maids are ubiquitous in the Christian areas of Beirut and in the mountain villages that surround the capital.
Thank you for bringing their situation to our attention.
Now I wonder who will tell the story of the tens of thousands of Russian, Romanian and Ethiopian prostitutes that can also be found in some of those same Christian neighbourhoods.
BBC did a bit about this a few years ago (2003) in which they interviewed the Sri Lankan Minister of Labour, Mahinda Samarasinghe about the abuse of these migrant workers:
That’s weak. Damn weak.
Does anyone know how the demographics of these Sri Lankan women breaks down? Tamil? Muslim? Sinhala? I can’t find anything that doesn’t refer to them all as Sri Lankan.
From what I know its all a mix. What they do have in common though is that they are almost all from rural/village backgrounds.
Female domestic labourers is a big weird industry. Most women must go through an agency, so they have to cough up money just to get into the whole process.
The ‘In Focus’ section ofCenwor‘s webpage has some good info/articles.
Partially answering my own question, a couple more statements by MEA and the Congress Party. Still seems somewhat weak — a stronger move would be to recall the Indian ambassador to Israel and/or some sort of economic shot across the bow.
So even the Lebanese use South Asian maids! Lebanon is a country which Blackwater staff could take over in less than a week.
Lebanon seems to have a pretty high Asian population. The CIA factbook estimates 3,874,050 people in to be currently living in Lebanon. Using data from this post and from Yahoo, if there are approximately 10,000 Bangladeshis, 40,000 Filipinos, 12,000 Indians, and 93,000 Sri Lankans in Lebanon, then approximately 155,000 people living in Lebanon are from Asian countries. Not bad for a country of only 3.8 million. (I couldn’t find a figure on other Asian diasporas so I’ll conveniently ignore those countries.)
93,000 is a staggering number of expatriots Preston, but that number pales in comparison to the 402,582 registered Palestinian refugees in the country. I’d like to to see their government try to evacuate them from Lebanon.
I’d like to to see their government try to evacuate them from Lebanon.
Who would that be? Israel?
fixed. 🙂
And dropping by the minute. We’re already fairly close, if not even with, the number of displaced persons in Kosovo in 1999.
I heard the figure of 500,000 displaced but that refers to IDPs. I don’t have a good fix on how many are leaving the country beyond the western evacuations.
Yes, it’s unclear. But in terms of the scale of the humanitarian crisis, it probably doesn’t matter whether they are IDPs or formally refugees (and in this case, most probably wouldn’t be formally refugees even if they made it to another country). In fact, depending on where in Lebanon people are fleeing to, it could be harder to ensure protection for IDPs than for people who make it to some other country.
I’ve heard that India has officially condemned Israel’s actions. For a country renowed for its intellectuals, its foreign policy just does not make sense to me. India has repeatedly let its allies down so as to go with common world opinion. During the Kargil crisis it was Israel that came to India’s aid or has India’s technocrats already forgotten that small detail ? India’s actions are motivated by its need to join the OIC, an organisation that has done nothing of value for four decades and one that wastes no breath bemoaning India’s actions in Kashmir; while Israel has always supported India’s counter-terror measures. Hell the Palestinians have hailed Pakistan’s nuclear weapon as the ‘Islamic bomb’.
I hope that next time India is in dire need of Arms and ammunition, Israel plays hard to get so that India, for once, will have the cajones to stand up for its allies and not revert to its traditional ‘non-aligned’ approach
“Now I wonder who will tell the story of the tens of thousands of Russian, Romanian and Ethiopian prostitutes that can also be found in some of those same Christian neighbourhoods.”
yesterday cnn showed an ethiopian woman, i assumed she was a maid or nanny or something like that. she was cowering in a garage and crying. as the reporter said, while other countries are sending ships or planes, it’s unlikely there will be any ethiopian ship being sent for her or other ethiopians. it was very sad. what’s going to happen to them?
i’m sure the indians formed an orderly single file line to get on the boat.
Kesh — Are these the values that should form the basis for Indian foreign policy? Even from a purely self-interested perspective, radicalizing thousands of people throughout West Asia and elsewhere cannot be in India’s long-term strategic interest.
India used to take a stand on issues in Palestine because of its former understanding of the Israel situation as one of Western colonialism in the Third World. This recent condemnation of Israel’s outrageous actions falls more in line with principle than it does with India’s conflicted attempt to suck up to America vis-a-vis Israel. India is clearly confused on what it wants.
I’ve heard that India has officially condemned Israel’s actions. For a country renowed for its intellectuals, its foreign policy just does not make sense to me. India has repeatedly let its allies down so as to go with common world opinion. During the Kargil crisis it was Israel that came to India’s aid or has India’s technocrats already forgotten that small detail ? India’s actions are motivated by its need to join the OIC, an organisation that has done nothing of value for four decades and one that wastes no breath bemoaning India’s actions in Kashmir; while Israel has always supported India’s counter-terror measures. Hell the Palestinians have hailed Pakistan’s nuclear weapon as the ‘Islamic bomb’.
I hope that next time India is in dire need of Arms and ammunition, Israel plays hard to get so that India, for once, will have the cajones to stand up for its allies and not revert to its traditional ‘non-aligned’ approach
I agree with you totally. However India’s official pronouncements on Israel-Palestine are held hostage by its Muslim minority which rails against Isarel as a monolith. India condemning the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers in itself shows it has come a long way from invariably blaming the Israelis for every conflict. India should grow some balls and finally recognize the real victim. But that might lead to many more train bombs. It’s complex.
AK, of course not …… but i can also show pictures of young Syrian,Lebanese and Egyptian children vowing to fight to wipe Israel off the map.
Israel is just a small strip of land that resembles Kerala, Almost every country has persecuted its Jewish diaspora……….. why can’t the Israeli’s have a home to themselves ?
And what was the reason for this conflict ?? Olmert had pledged to withdraw from Gaza, he has been criticised by his own people because he planned to move settlers further back to make more space for the Palestinians, peace was at hand. WHY did Hamas and Hezbollah act the way they did if what they truly wanted was peace for the Palestinians.
Israel is surrounded by enemies, each nation has attacked the country or has plotted to, you know that saying about being backed into a corner, Which one of Israeli’s actions are not a result of it being attacked in some form. However, Israel is powerful and any attack invites a crushing response. Its probably the only way the state can exist, which nation does not have the right to defend itself ?
India can learn a lot from Israel as far as protecting its people go and standing up for a set of beliefs, which is why India gets played around by countries in the middle east and its citizens treated as sub-human.
well, i guess that israelis have now succeeded in map wiping where these others have failed.
collective punishment is a violation of international humanitarian and human rights law. that’s exactly what’s going on here now, on a massive and blatant scale — i don’t think many israelis would actually deny that. and as yeti notes, even if one recognizes israel, there remain anticolonial principles at stake here that one would hope that India would still champion.
However India’s official pronouncements on Israel-Palestine are held hostage by its Muslim minority which rails against Isarel as a monolith
But that might lead to many more train bombs
Maybe I should have elaborated a chain of events between the two statements. Didn’t mean to cast aspersions on India’s Muslims. But I do believe that most Indian Muslims will not take nicely to an out and out pro Israel policy, even if it’s morally correct.
So is aiding terrorists and admitting them into governments.
I don’t see Hezbollah dropping leaflets warning Israeli’s civilians about an attack. Hezbollah is not just a terrorist cell, it is intergrated into the very fabric of society in Lebanon. Why is America backing Israel ? Because America remembers how Hezbollah murdered 63 people during the 1983 embassy bombings and the torture/death of William Buckley at the behest of the Iranian Padsaran. Israel is doing what America wishes they had done.
Hezbollah has never answered for many of its crimes, Israel targets Hezbollah infrastructure and Hezbollah makes sure that it thrives in civilian area.
This is Israel’s afghanistan, Hezbollah doesn’t give a hoot about Lebanon, if they did they would never have used Lebanon to fight their battles.
How else would you battle Hezbollah, any other nation that would have to fight them would have to go through the same motions that Israel has. What does Israel have to gain by killing innocent Lebanese ? You cannot do dialogue with terrorists, the only way you can defeat them is exterminate them.
Why is America backing Israel ? Because America remembers how Hezbollah murdered 63 people during the 1983 embassy bombings and the torture/death of William Buckley at the behest of the Iranian Padsaran.
You forgot the big one ; the suicide bombing of 240 US marines in the 80s.
Too bad for them then, What has Israel done to Indian Muslims ? Israel has muslims who are Israeli citizens, a fact that arab countries chose to ignore sometimes. Muslims in India that are anti-Israeli are radicalised by our own “Sharia law in India is a must” clerics. India’s hesitation about Israel also comes from the fear that the Arab world would also draw parallels between India and Israel, parallels which no doubt exist. Hence India’s condemnation of Israel. The BJP had it right when it forged closed ties with Israel and Congress is throwing all that down the drain. Israel has never harmed India in anyway (except for its penetration of RAW). India should stand by for what it deems right and cultivate its true allies. Consider that America is destroyed and Israel is destroyed, guess who’s in the crosshairs ?
I know, i wanted to emphasise the civlian murders.
The right to land is a basic one that any people should be able to ask for. Unfortunately Palestine was already occupied by people who’d been living there for centuries before European Jews settled it, purchasing the land from absentee Arab and Turk landlords and displacing the people who actually lived there. This is the root cause of the conflict. The Palestinians have been systematically displaced, by physically and economically violent means, from land that was theirs. Their response has not always been picture-pretty for Western eyes but it was been just that – a self-defensive response.
Hamas acted the way it did for two reasons. First, Israel and the US and Europe had cut off a vast proportion of the aid to Palestine once Hamas was elected to office (under the auspices of denouncing Hamas as a terrorist organization, a problematic idea in itself). Palestinians were literally starving in droves, children were dying, etc etc. Then, Israeli artillery fire killed a group of Palestinians on a beach. The only party that has claimed that this was anything other than an Israeli move has been the Israeli government itself. Second, Israel’s prisons are clogged with Palestinian men, women, and children, and are notorious for torture (unless you think that 8000 palestinians are all terrorists and also not deserving of humane treatment). So under those circumstances, a desperate attempt to gain some leverage by capturing ONE Israeli soldier doesn’t seem like a very morally problematic issue, particularly given the fact that Palestinians have been under siege for a long time. Hizbullah’s action strikes me as one of aid to the Palestinian cause as well, by leveraging against the Israeli government and armed forces.
Why was Israel “attacked” in the first place? Who initiated the 1967 war? Menachem Begin himself stated that there was no proof that Egypt was about to attack Israel. It was a blatantly expansionist move by an explicitly colonizing agent.
Explain. Yes, desi workers are exploited in the Middle East, but is that a good reason to justify the occupation of Palestine? I don’t see Palestinians abusing South Asians. Stop equating all Middle Easterners with one another, these are all different nations with different political and social circumstances at play.
Since when is an attack by a military group by another military group some kind of horrific incident? It is horrific in that war and death are horrific, but this is also a consequence of larger things. I think there’s too much willingness here to cite the sensational nature of “terrorism” without actually exploring why it happens, and also how often states (such as both Israel and India, for different reasons) are heavily guilty of abusing, killing, and terrorizing innocent civilians.
If slaughter and pogorms of jews can be classified as self defense then yes i agree with you.
And you don’t think all that aid would go into buying arms for its military wing ? or funding more suicide bombings in tel-aviv. Hamas has an agenda and that is exactly what its charter demands. Israel’s Destruction and all that aid money would go into that objective.
And I suppose Naser’s blocking of the Straits Of Tiran to Israeli ships and militarising of the UN occupied buffer zone were training exercises ? Of course those defense pacts with Jordon and Syria a couple of days before Egypt’s military movements were just coincidences. An attack by Egypt was imminent. The whole world knew it, Israel just launched a pre-emptive strike so that they could gain the upper hand and it was a move that saved Israel’s bacon. This is precisely why Golda Meir waited for Israel to be attacked during the Yom Kippur war before stricking back even though Israel knew about the attack.
Read carefully,When did i say Palestinians were abusing South Asians, My point was India should not forgo its ties with Israel so as to curry favor with the Gulf countries.
Israel has muslims who are Israeli citizens, a fact that arab countries chose to ignore sometimes.
You mean, second–class citizens, perhaps at best. And therein lies a fundamental and perhaps intractable problem.
You mean, second–class citizens, perhaps at best. And therein lies a fundamental and perhaps intractable problem.
“Pogroms“? What justifies your suggestion of equivalence with the what took place in Central and Eastern Europe? Both the context and power dynamics are fundamentally different.
That is how i chose to describe the Hebron riots in the 1920’s.
Kesh you’d fare better by saving your debating skills for better informed adversaries. Besides this issue is out of this blog’s scope.
But before I quit: Israel is but a dot in the Muslim Middle East. The only Jewish state in the entire world. And yes Jews have historical claim to this land. Read the Bible, Koran whatever the hell you may. Let’s say that the Palestinians have been uprooted from their ancestral land. Can’t they settle down in peace just a few miles away? Remember Arafat wallking away after being offered 95% of what he wanted? Remember Sharon forcefully evicting Jewish settlers to make way for jew hating Palestinians? Throughout history many people have been wrongfully driven away from their lands, have moved on, worked hard, prospered and then peacefully brought the world’s attention to their plight. Not the Palestinians. They have to butcher jews and then have a celebratorymela in their streets. Not too long ago some of these oppressed Palestinians lured an Israeli teenager to their side of the border. He was just a friendly kid. They then bludgeoned him to death. They always start it , then Israel retaliates by pin pointed strikes, sometimes civilians get killed, Isarel apologizes and then most of the world rushes to condemn Israel. It’s the Arab propaganda that makes beasts out of otherwise nice and sane human beings.Read their books, editorials, watch their TV.
As for Muslims’ being second class citizens in Israel. They are, for a fact financially better off than their Arab brethren in countries like Egypt and Jordan ( the ones without the oil ). Arabs in Israel are as much second class as are Blacks in America or Muslims in India. For God’s sake Isarel is a Jewsish state. Let’s not even talk about what happened to the Jews in Arab/Muslim lands. Oh yes there are exceptions like parts of Ottoman rule or that of earlier Islamic Spain. They are however few and far between.
Here’s an excerpt from the link you cited: In early October, Palestinians inside Israel protested very vocally in solidarity with the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Arabs in Israel went out to the streets to protest because of the Palestinian issue, and not their own daily issues.
The victory of Hizballah in Lebanon changed the balance for a lot of Arabs, especially for young people
The second class citizens of Israel are allowed all of the above. Some would call that treacherous. But Isareli society belives in freedom of speech and expression. In oppressed Palstine however, they murder and then drag the bodies of fellow Palestinians convicted ( not in a court of law ) of collusion with the enemy. National Democratic Assembly (NDA), a party advocating cultural autonomy and civil rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel, in the Knesset.
The second class citizens even have a party in the Knesset!
Crossing the border to kidnap and kill Israel’s soldiers? That’s war. They want an exchange of prisoners. Prisoners who will then be sent back as suicide bombers to kill women children and the elderly on Isarel’s buses. At least Israel is humane enough to feed and clothe these murderers. You’ll throw up when you read what the Arabs did to Jewish prisoners caught in the various wars.
But we shouldn’t be judging Israel by the standards of Arab countries. Right? That’s the point. Israel is being held to a much higher standard and deservedly so. Meantime its critics have such low expectations of Palestinians and Arabs. Makes me wonder who is the racist here.
Congratulations, you just defeated your own argument.