They were two different images, each telling a different side of the Palestinian refugee narrative. And they were telling indeed.
Two news stories reported one after the other on Kan 11’s evening broadcast last Thursday caught my attention. The first showed more than 150 Gazans stuck in a plane on the tarmac at South Africa’s O.R. Tambo Airport after that country – the country that led the charges of “genocide” against Israel in the International Court of Justice – refused to admit the “Palestinian refugees.”
What great humanitarians the South African government must be to try to turn away the very people they claim are suffering from “genocide,” “apartheid,” and “starvation.” (The starvation canard is still going strong on social media despite the fact that the ceasefire last month revealed a population that was hungry more for international sympathy rather than for food.)
Clear terrorist messaging
The second eye-catching report showed a large group of Palestinian children from Gaza arriving at an airport in Brussels. They should have presented a cute picture, but they didn’t. All the boys were wearing shirts that sported, front and back, an image of an M-16. This is not just a case of boys will be boys. This became a popular Palestinian symbol during a wave of Hamas terrorism a few years ago. I don’t blame the kids, of course, but the adults accompanying them knew what they were doing, and the Belgians either don’t know what they’re doing or don’t care.
Not so much wearing a heart on their sleeves, this was a brazen message – not one of peace and coexistence. Good luck with that, Belgium. As if the country that is home to the European Union didn’t have enough problems with extremism, antisemitism, and jihadist terror attacks.
The South Africa airport drama ended after some 12 hours when the government relented and granted most of the passengers 90-day visas while a minority flew to other destinations. The Jerusalem Post’s Mathilda Heller this week published interesting, in-depth analyses of the elusive nature of the flight’s possible backers, the al-Majd Organization.
South Africa seems to believe the embarrassing incident was a set-up, especially as the Palestinians left without visas via Israel’s Ramon International Airport. The passengers traveled first to Kenya’s Nairobi Airport and from there flew to the airport near Johannesburg.
South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola is quoted describing the flight as part of “a clear agenda to cleanse Palestinians out of Gaza and the West Bank.” The Palestinian Authority Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, claimed the incident was one of “human trafficking” and warned against “blood traders” and “displacement agents.”
And herein lies the crux of the matter. Even at the height of the two-year war, the PA based in Ramallah and the Hamas regime in Gaza did not want people to leave and Egypt refused to open its border with Gaza to help those who wanted to flee. Not for the first time, the Palestinian population was kept in place, used as human shields by Hamas and pawns by the PA.
It’s one of those curious situations that could only arise with the Palestinians, who have been granted “perpetual refugee” status by the UN – which funds UNRWA, the huge organization devoted solely to the Palestinian refugees.
Middle East analyst Khaled Abu Toameh, writing for the Gatestone Institute, noted an uncomfortable home truth for the Arab world: “Most Arab countries do not want Palestinians.”
He said dozens of Palestinians released by Israel as part of last month’s ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas have complained that no Arab or Muslim country has agreed to receive them.
Most of the ex-prisoners, he noted, “are affiliated with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Mahmoud Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction.” Many had been serving one or multiple lifetime sentences for lethal terror attacks against Israelis.
Arab leaders are understandably concerned that they would pose a threat to their personal security and political stability. The Arab rulers can’t forget the attempt by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to overthrow Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy in 1970. Nor can they ignore the role of the Palestinians in the bloody civil war in Lebanon or how the Palestinians overwhelmingly supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
“Most Arab countries have also denied or restricted citizenship for Palestinians. These countries have cited reasons such as the desire for a Palestinian ‘right of return’ to former homes inside Israel,” Abu Toameh noted. “While Jordan has granted citizenship to many Palestinians, other countries, such as Lebanon and Syria, have imposed restrictions on their employment and movement, barring them from desirable housing and job opportunities.”
Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, banned as a terrorist organization in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere. This should serve as a warning signal regarding Turkish and Qatari involvement in Gaza’s rehabilitation. Regimes that host and support the Hamas leadership and identify with the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology are not neutral actors.
As Abu Toameh warned: “US President Donald J. Trump, who seems to be pinning his hopes on the Arabs to assist in funding and establishing a new government as well as deploying an international force in the Gaza Strip, needs to bear in mind that most of the Arab heads of state and regimes actually do not care about the Palestinians.
“By now, most Arab heads of state see Palestinians as having caused immeasurable harm wherever they have gone and as having rewarded with treachery whoever stretched out a hand to them,” he wrote.
“For the Arab leaders, the Palestinian issue is just another tool to advance their own political objectives, shore up their own popular support at home, or unite various factions against a common enemy.”
It should be noted that it isn’t only the Arab world that does not want to take in the Palestinians en masse. The Spanish government, which supported South Africa in its claims of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, also stopped short of offering Palestinians a home. And Spain wasn’t alone in the hypocrisy.
Compare the response following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The world reacted with deserved sympathy for the Ukrainians and offered sanctuary to those fleeing the war. After the Hamas invasion of Israel of October 7, 2023 – when 1,200 were murdered, 251 taken hostage, thousands wounded, and tens of thousands of Israelis made homeless – Israel was warned against responding and at every stage was hampered from reaching Hamas strongholds, such as Rafah and the strategic Philadelphi Corridor on the Egyptian border, to fight the terrorist forces.
Rather than allowing the departure of those who wanted to leave, Israel was told to keep the Gazan population in place – endangering both the civilians and the IDF soldiers fighting the Hamas scourge. On top of all that, governments around the world demanded that Israel permit ever-increasing amounts of “humanitarian aid” into Gaza – despite the fact that it was openly being hijacked by Hamas and actually prolonging the war and suffering.
Every year on November 29 – the anniversary of the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan vote – the world body celebrates “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.” It is an annual hate fest, demonizing Israel, which accepted partition, and allying with the Palestinians, who rejected a state of their own and, along with the Arab world, declared war on the nascent Jewish state.
Resolution 2803 endorsing US President Donald Trump’s comprehensive plan for Gaza was passed by the UN Security Council this week thanks to the abstention of Russia and China which have veto power (another UN peculiarity).
Among other clauses, the plan calls for the disarming of Hamas – a huge challenge that no country seems keen on tackling. It also contains a clause that is deliberately worded vaguely, saying that once the Palestinian Authority has been reformed and the rebuilding of Gaza is under way, “the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.”
No less important than disarming Hamas in Gaza is completely revamping and deradicalizing the education system, including the UNRWA schools, where jihadist, anti-normalization brainwashing takes place.
Talk about dressed to kill. The M-16s on the shirts of the Palestinian boys in Belgium are a result of their education to worship terrorism and “martyrdom.” It does not bode well for either the Gazan boys or their European hosts.