Yves here. This post documents a part of the toll of Israel’s ethno-supremacist campaign in the Middle East that gets little attention. The paucity of coverage should be no surprise given the limited coverage of deaths and injuries in Gaza and now Lebanon . Witness the regular failure to acknowledge, per the Lancet, that the death count in Gaza is in the hundreds, not tens of thousands, or the media skipping over the fact that the bunker-bombing assault in Beirut to assassinate Hassam Nasrallah killed over 300 civilians. Recall that displacement, as in ethnic cleansing, was Israel’s original aim in Gaza after October 7, but Egypt refused to play ball.
In other words, this piece skips over that for Israel, displacement is a feature, not a bug. Notice the lack of agency in the headline. And I am not sympathetic with the view that Israel gets to play victim for the settlers in north Israel who have left the area as the result of Hezbollah striking military targets there. Hezbollah has made clear that its attacks would end if Israel agreed to a durable ceasefire in Gaza.
By Nicholas R. Micinski, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, University of Maine, and Kelsey Norman, Fellow for the Middle East, Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University. Originally published at The Conversation
A year of conflict has ushered in a new era of mass displacement in the Middle East.
Since Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent sustained Israeli bombardment of Gaza, Israel has expanded its operations on multiple fronts to include the West Bank, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon.
With fighting continuing unabated and the prospects for a direct confrontation between Iran and Israel rising, the region is now in a new period of internal and cross-border displacement that has already uprooted millions.
As scholars of migration, we fear that the results of such displacement will affect the region for years to come – and is likely to further hamper the ability of the region’s people to live safe and secure lives.
Displaced and Trapped in Gaza
Israel’s ongoing attacks have forced nearly 2 million Palestinians to flee their homes in Gaza over the past year, amounting to 9 in 10 inhabitants of the densely populated strip.
What is unique about the scale of the displacement in Gaza is that nearly all internally displaced persons remain trapped, unable to leave the territory amid Israel’s ongoing border closure and bombardment.
This has intensified cascading humanitarian crises, including famine and the spread of disease, along with countless other hardships that make normal life nearly impossible.
For many Palestinians in Gaza, the yearlong bombardment has meant repeated displacement as Israeli attacks shift from area to area, amid shrinking humanitarian spaces.
And although there are complex historical and geopolitical reasons regarding the border closures, international law experts argue that Egypt and Israel have violated international refugee law by refusing to allow Palestinians in Gaza to cross the Rafah border to seek asylum.
The situation in Gaza is structurally different from previous displacement crises in the region – even in civil war-torn Syria, where cross-border aid operations have constantly been on the brink of collapse. That’s because Israel continues to limit and block aid into the territory, and humanitarian workers struggle to provide the bare minimum of food, shelter and medical care during bombing campaigns that have rarely stopped.
To make matters worse, the experience of the past year has shown that refugee camps, civilian apartment buildings, U.N. schools, and hospitals serving civilians and refugees are not safe spaces. Israel frequently justifies its attacks on such locations by saying they are used by Hamas or Hezbollah, despite formal U.N. disputes of many of these accusations. At least 220 U.N. workers have also been killed in these targeted Israeli attacks in the past year – more than any other crisis ever recorded.
This contributes to humanitarian workers struggling to access populations in need, especially displaced individuals. For its part, the United States continues to be the top donor to the the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) and the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), as well as the top supplier of weapons to Israel.
Beyond Gaza, into Lebanon
In Lebanon, massive displacement has also resulted from Israel’s developing war with Hezbollah.
Even before the September escalation of conflict across the Lebanon-Israel border, nearly 100,000 Lebanese had been displaced from their homes in the country’s south due to Israeli shelling. Meanwhile, approximately 63,000 Israelis were internally displaced from the country’s north due to Hezbollah’s rocket attacks.
But starting in late September 2024, Israeli strikes on Hezbollah and Palestinian targets in Beirut and across Lebanon killed hundreds of civilians and exponentially increased internal and cross-border displacement. More than 1 million Lebanese have now fled their homes in a matter of days amid Israel’s invasion and bombardment.
In addition, Syrian refugees and the large migrant worker population in Lebanon were also displaced, with many sleeping on the streets or in makeshift tents, unable to access buildings that were converted into shelters for Lebanese.
In a separate stark example of reverse migration, about 230,000 people – both Lebanese and Syrians – have fled across the border into Syria.
Bringing the recent regional conflicts full circle with post-2011 Arab uprising displacement and crisis, returning home is an unsafe option for many Syrians who still fear repression under the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Israel’s ongoing invasion of Lebanon is likely to only amplify these trends, as the country ordered numerous villages and towns in the country’s south – miles above the U.N.-recognized buffer zone – to evacuate.
Layers of Regional Displacement
Over several decades, the Middle East has experienced many large-scale, cross-border displacements for myriad reasons. The original forced displacement of Palestinians surrounding the creation of Israel in 1948 and subsequent conflicts created the world’s longest-standing refugee situation, with approximately 6 million Palestinians living across the Levant. The first Gulf War, sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq produced millions of refugees, with long-standing political repercussions for the region.
More recently, the 2011 Arab uprisings and the wars that followed in Syria, Yemen and Libya created millions of refugees, as well as internally displaced peoples, with nearly 6 million Syrians still living in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan and another 6 million displaced inside Syria. Because Syrians have largely not returned home, international organizations have become a semipermanent safety net to provide basic services to refugees and host communities.
New layers of displacement in Lebanon – nationals, refugees and migrant workers – as well as cross-border movement into Syria will put further strain on the underfunded system of humanitarian assistance.
Further, the current Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon is not the first time conflict between the state and its neighbor to the north has preceded large-scale displacement. In an attempt to eliminate the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 and again in 1982. Israel’s 1982 invasion led to the Sabra and Shatila massacres of between 1,500-3000 Palestinian civilians – carried out by Israel’s Lebanese Christian allies – showing that military operations that do not distinguish between militants and civilians can lead to devastating impacts for displaced populations.
Between 600,000 and 900,000 Lebanese fled abroad during the entire course of the country’s civil war from 1975 to 1990.
Two decades later, Israel again invaded Lebanon in 2006 in an attempt to stamp out Hezbollah, leading approximately 900,000 Lebanese to flee the south – both internally and across the border into Syria.
While the speed and volume of Lebanese displacement in 2006 was unprecedented at the time, the number of people forced to flee in late September and early October 2024 has quickly surpassed that record.
So, the region is well versed with the consequences of mass displacement. But what is clear a year into the current conflict is that the Middle East is now in a new era of displacement – in terms of scale and kind.
And the number of families’ lives disrupted by this new era of displacement looks set only to increase. Tensions in the region have escalated further with fresh missile attacks against Israel from Iran and threats of retaliation by Israel.
The experience of decades of conflict in the region is that civilians are most likely to bear the brunt of fighting – whether through forced displacement, an inability to access food or medical care, or death.
Only by way of a cessation of current hostilities and a lasting cease-fire across the region can the conditions be set for at-risk populations to begin to return and rebuild. This is particularly true for those displaced in Gaza who have been repeatedly forced from their homes, but have no borders over which they can cross to safety, and for whom a political solution remains elusive.
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Alas, the ultimate resolution to this problem will be the eradication of the Zionist Movement. Did Herzl anticipate this outcome back then?
Will the Church of the Latter Day Saints make room for their fellow semites in Utah? I had originally supposed that Connecticut would be ceded to the fleeing Israelis, but now that I realize that one of the Lost Tribes already lives in the American West, Utah looks much more logical a place to site the refugees.
No,no, no. Don’t wanna do that. Give them Utah and within fifty years they will have southern Idaho, Arizona down to the Colorado river and eastern Colorado.
Manifest Destiny.
Herzel did not. However, he is a very interesting case. He believed that Jewish high finance could be leveraged in order to pay off those affected by any settlement. A lover of aristocracy (hence, perhaps, the long-running Ashkenazi dominance of the State of Israel), his first overtures were to baron de Hirsch and to the London and Vienna Rothschilds. By the mid-1890s he had settled upon Palestine or Argentina, and he had in mind the foundation of a chartered company along British lines (which were still being set up in the late 19th century, per the Dent’s British North Borneo Company, Goldie’s Royal Niger Company, Mackinnon’s East Africa Company and Rhodes’ South Africa Company – in the last of which much Jewish ‘randlord’ finance played a notable part). If Hirsch proved difficult, not least because he wanted to make the settlers of a Jewish state mere ‘husbandmen’, he was greatly heartened by a visit to London in 1895, where through Israel Zangwill he met members of the Maccabean society, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle (Asher Myers), the chief rabbi (Hermann Adler) and a key to high finance and parliament, Samuel Montagu (NB, Montagu’s two sons: Louis, the 2nd Lord Swaythling ,and Edwin – who was a notable secretary of state for India – rebelled against their father’s enthusiastic Zionism; indeed Louis founded the Anti-Zionist League of British Jews in the wake of the Balfour Declaration). This meeting helped steer Herzl in the direction of British patronage, and he soon formed the view that the scions of Anglo-Jewry (the Montagus, Rothschilds, Mocattas, Montefiores, Lopes’, etc.) would be indispensable.
Thus, the famous tract published the next year, ‘Der Judenstaat’, envisaged a reciprocal arrangement with the hist country: cash for land specifically loans, which would secure prosperity all round. This would be especially useful to an ailing polity like Turkey whose finances were in a state of perennial crisis, and which had long made extraterritorial concessions to European powers in the form of the Capitulations. Thus in chapter 2 of Der Judenstaat: “Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvellous potency. If his Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the finances of Turkey. There we would form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should, as a neutral state, remain in contact with all Europe – which would have to guarantee our existence. The sanctuaries of Christendom would be safeguarded by assigning to them an extra-territorial status such as is well known to the law of nations. We should form a guard of honour about these sanctuaries, answering for the fulfilment of this duty with our existence. This guard of honour would be the great symbol of the solution of the Jewish Question after eighteen centuries of Jewish suffering.” (I have this quote from David Vital, ‘The Origins of Zionism’ (1980), at 266, the first of three stout volumes on the formation of the Zionist movement: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-origins-of-zionism-9780198274391?cc=gb&lang=en&).
Quite why the Ottomans would have been willing to have their finances regulated by a subordinate millet was not answered by Herzel. Nor did he provide any resolution of the contradiction between being a neutral state and a rampart of Europe. However, he evidently considered that European Christians would be the state’s insurers and defenders. Thus, the appeal to evangelical Christian Zionism was present at the creation of Erez Israel, and it was a concept which fell upon fertile ground in Britain and the US: https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/religion/church-history/origins-christian-zionism-lord-shaftesbury-and-evangelical-support-jewish-homeland?format=PB&isbn=9781107631960 and as recently described here: https://oneworld-publications.com/work/lobbying-for-zionism-on-both-sides-of-the-atlantic/. Perhaps if he had reflected on these absurdities and contradictions, and upon the potential decline and fall of empires, he might have been more sanguine; but no, he was a ‘man of action’ and also a man in a hurry, and the Levant has had cause to repent at leisure for his haste.
Wow thanks. This should be a post here.
And in other words it was WEF the early years–a world empire built around money. Of course the problem is that money is just a thing and symbol for power. Like those AI algorithms it has no real intelligence and is a “solution” only as far as power itself is a solution. Imperialistic control needs those 2000 lb bombs.
Napoleon was a power monger but he at least got it. “The moral is to the physical as three to one.” To prevail in the end you need real intelligence, not the robotic kind.
BTW last night I watched Civil War. Great movie. It’s a movie about war, not the United States, and shows what we do to all those other countries with our money.
Edwin was the only member of Balfour’s cabinet to vote against the Declaration.
A link to Edwin Montagu’s complete memorandum is here.
Thanks!!
p.s. Just cause this by Oct 7th genocide is now funny to read – from the homepage´s “ABOUT” (it´s an AICE project):
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/about-aice
““I believe that, working together, we can make history and create a better future for the region and beyond.”
-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
“The U.S. will always be there for Israel. It’s an unshakeable partnership between our two nations..”
– U.S. President Joe Biden
The American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) was established in 1993 as a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization to strengthen the U.S.-Israeli relationship by emphasizing the alliance’s fundamentals—the values our nations share.
Indeed. Of course Edwin Montagu’s misgivings should also be seen through the prism of the India Office. India contained at least 80m Muslims. He was acutely concerned about the mounting risk of unrest and a recrudesence of the pre-war Tilakite movement; the Balfour Declaration posed a real threat to the loyalty of British Indian Muslims, some of the princely states and in sensitive frontier regions like the NWFP. These concerns proved prescient: the khilafat movement broke out in 1918 when it became evident to Indian Muslims that Britain and the other victorious powers were set upon the dismemberment of the Ottoman empire, including in Palestine. The khilafat movement was especially disconcerting to the British authorities when it joined forces with Gandhi in a united front, and the brutal response of O’Dwyer in the Punjab was indicative of just how frightened the British had become (the ‘Montford’ reforms of 1919 which Montagu generated with Chelmsford – Montagu was the accelerator and Chelmsford the brake – were at least partly intended to take the heat out of the situation). It was also a subsidiary factor in the Third Afghan War of 1919, which further deranged Indian finances.
Unfortunately, the alliance with Gandhi broke down in 1921 when there was a surge of Hindu/Muslim communal violence in the southern Deccan (the Moplah or Mapplia rebellion – the Moplahs had a long history of violent and intractable antipathy to British rule), and with the Chauri Chaura massacre in 1922 Gandhi ended the non-co-operation movement entirely. The khilafat movement continued until Ataturk’s abolition of the caliphate in 1924.
These are much the best works on the khilafat movement: https://brill.com/display/title/6682?language=en (absurdly expensive, as usual for Brill hardbacks) but this (also by Brill) is pleasingly open access: https://brill.com/display/title/23613?language=en. This is the fullest work on the Mappilas: https://archive.org/details/islamicsocietyon0000dale. Unfortunately, there has been no book length treatment of Montagu since 1964 (by the very important Treasury official David Waley, son-in-law of Samuel Montagu and brother of the famous Sinologist, Arthur), although there have been two articles on him, in 1965 (by Conrad Corfield, the distinguished head of the Indian political service) and in 1987.
Ha! I knew it.
I was watching “Operation Mincemeat” again (and again a major let-down, don´t watch it) about the WWII secret operation where the British – as always – outwitted the “mustachioed man” (Gosh Hitler really had an IQ of 10) – the book adapted is much better – and of course Ewen Montagu, who came up with Operation Mincemeat – was Louis Montagu´s son!
Looking into Sam Montagu´s Wiki it appears as though when fucking Mr. Montagu was inspired by early English history creating old-school dynasties – six kids (they never talk about the wifes in this context, it´s amazing…) all in influential positions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Montagu,_1st_Baron_Swaythling
That goes back to Genesis. A begat B begat C etc. with only the occasional hint that a woman was involved.
Indeed thanks for the concise summary!
* * *
Inspired from it a few bits of my own reading memory on Herzl and Palestine:
Herzl had a problem which would mirror today´s elites:
He never visited the Holy Land and spoke about another people and another land as of subjects he did not know anything about, least of from first-hand experience.
He made it to Rome. Not farther. Meeting the Holy Chair there and some dignitaries.
Today still to be found his “country without people for people without a country” propaganda concept. Even though mightyly debunked by Finkelstein´s doctoral thesis 40 years ago.
German writer Dana von Suffrin – who just received another local literary prize for mediocre literary work – being Oct. 7th next week and Suffrin having Jewish relatives not a coincidence – a couple of years ago wrote a study about Jewish botanists and their role as settlers:
“´The Possibility of a Productive Palestine: Otto Warburg and Botanical Zionism.” (published by the Leo Baeck Institute London).
I think this is a 2021 paper (I only read a longer study from 2019.)
“The Possibility of a Productive Palestine: Otto Warburg and Botanical Zionism. In: Israel Studies”
https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/102430/
(no open access unfortunately only abstract)
On Dana von Suffrin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_von_Suffrin
I wonder how I would feel about reading the study again now. But I remember it was stunning already then how little she did about the native Arab culture on that subject.
The problem of course being the framing of the scholary subject itself – a practice inherent to the idea of academic excellence – which does exclude a holistic approach which would be regarded as “bad scholarship” because asking about Arabs and the political implications of the racism preceding it all was not part of the work´s posed problem.
Which brings us back to Herzl´s core flaw – the lack of representation and awareness that there WAS a problem as big as a whale.
And this has been perpetuated until today.
See von Suffrin who has just been awarded for writing another book about her Jewish family, the story spans from Romania to the 1967 War and the Holocaust, while in the real world between 40.000 and 200.000 Palestinians have been killed by the descendants of those benign settlers.
Another point not of scientific significance but of anecdotal and biografic:
Herzl was brought up by his mother stuffing his head with notions of grandeur, telling him he was some awesome genius bound to change history. Herzl took this as vocation for becoming a great artist in his case a writer, which however did not work out.
He did work successfully for some Viennese legacy papers and felt not fulfilled.
Considered himself a failure. Because novels, fiction, was the big artform. Not journalism.
Besides he married a woman who most likely did not love him and it was an unhappy relationship.
Herzl at some point lost his ways and after some serious nervous breakdowns reemerged with this insane idea of the Judenstaat. Which was HIS novel. He finally found his calling…
So the fascist idea which comes with any form of putting fiction into politics and which was thus to be found in Herzl´s concept too was result of a medical case, of a psychosis.
Sure I am doing here something I usual hate to do – mixing up psychology with politics and history – but I wouldn´t be the first one. And the parallels with the present are just too obvious to neglect them.
WHy it reminds me a bit of the artistic career and life of the mustachioed man?
ah, you mean Chaplin!
(just kidding. What´s about that rumour that “mustachioed man” got the idea from CC in the first place?)
They were quite fashionable back in the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FredTrump1950-02.png
> “country without people for people without a country”
That phrase was actually coined by Christian Zionists, before Herzl’s time. I don’t think the Zionists ever used it (though they certainly behaved as if they believed it)
> He never visited the Holy Land a
That should be “had not yet visited”. Herzl did visit once, meeting the German Kaiser there.
> He made it to Rome. Not farther. Meeting the Holy Chair there and some dignitaries.
He had got further than Rome: He visited Constantinople several times, meeting the Sultan and convincing himself that the Sultan was favouring his plans. Bernard Lazare cynically pointed out that anyone could meet the Sultan for enough bakshish and that, even if he wanted to, the Sultan could not do what Herzl wanted. (Quoting from memory from his article in Pro Armenia. I’ve never managed to find the article online; I once downloaded it from the BNF.).
He was actually a pretty good writer of fiction. See his account of the Dreyfus trial with the mob shouting “death to the Jews”. When he was writing as a journalist, they shouted “death to the traitor”. Herzl’s original report is here (top of middle column).
Herzl was a journalist so I have no doubt he gave no thought whatsoever to matters not directly connected with the ‚rightness“ of his own viewpoint
Even with their dubious claim to being the lost tribe, the Mormons and their lawyers are smart enough and hypocritical enough to turn most of the Zionists claims on their ear starting with the fact most aren’t really Semitic. I’m thinking they may be stuck with New Mexico, as I don’t think there are enough rich people in Santa Fe to make the difference.
Yet the Mormons aren’t smart enough to realize the Book of Abraham is an obvious fraud
I’m offering three or four Virginia and Maryland counties around Washington which will be the shared capital. Israelis will have their special right to claim any house as their own . I don’t think they would pick worn so lower income earners will not lose theirs .
Until another really bad pandemic starts to spread…
I have contributed to countless Gofund campaigns for friends of friends to leave Gaza. Egypt used to charge people $5k per individual to escape across the border. Then the border was closed and anticipation is that it will open back up very very soon, charges are now down to $1k per person. Why is Egypt allowed to do this. No one has the money anymore because the entire banking system restricts Gazans from getting money. I know Gazans who has had Paypal freeze their account and have no access to their own money now. Western Union is the only option now. Why is the world allowing this.
The World was always like this, but you were not paying attention.
I’ll tell my friend in Gaza that as she receives taunting emails from PayPal Israel that she can’t access her own money.
Your friend in Gaza already knows that you were not paying attention.
What a good example of the callousness of Americans.
My, aren’t we presumptuous?
Why GoFundMe rather than a Hawala bank ?
Thanks, I’ll look this up and see if it can help.
So most people who contribute belong to Christian church groups in the US and Ireland and are older and more traditional. So I don’t think a Hawala service helps. But looks like an interesting concept.
Joker, that is false, most of the world is against the genocide and atrocities. It is the US/UK/Israel and vassals who are doing this. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2024/09/19/end-israel-occupation-palestine-un-vote/
Why is the world allowing this? Seriously? This is Washington’s doing. I don’t say that in a mechanical way–I know that Zionists have bribed Congress into sillyness, I know that many neocons are Israel first and the others very close to that. Part of the neocon mentality is to be brutal, murderous, violent, scary, and so on (I heard this rhetoric in Washington decades ago) in order to back the “New World Order” with an iron-fist. Some of these guys literally said that we need to scare the world to death in order to rule it (remember their objective is to rule the world).
Israel is the example to be followed. Israel feels free to murder, torture, and be indifferent to the suffering of the “other”– there is not even an ounce of compassion in mainstream Israeli culture for non-Jews, and American neocons are aping that attitude hence their support for slaughtering Russians not for any tangible reason (they knew they would lose in Ukraine) but just because they could, hence their support for striking population centers in Russia, fortunately rejected by Biden. The neocons sought to turn the West into the caricature of the Empire in Star Wars and themselves collectively as Darth Vader–hence Dick Cheney–note who he favors in the POTUS election.
While I am too young to remember, the US illegally carpet-bombed SE Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, and left a toxic legacy and unexploded ordnance that exists to this day. The torture programs, Gitmo, etc. etc. This is nothing new and is as American as Apple pie. If Israel did not exist, the US would still be guilty of massive historical atrocities. So much for the good guys with white hats eh
It looks like a lot of this has gone down the Memory Hole and there is no historical context anymore.
That’s why those of us who remember back to the coup of ’63 need to continually warn younger people about the true nature of the Deep State.
My family happens to be from there. I’m not naive. People really like to lecture to those they think are less than them don’t they. Sorry I was looking for advice on how to get my friend and her children out of Gaza. Instead, let’s do an intellectual anti US Empire circle jerk and run a science fiction exercise on Mormonism statehood.
This is a place where people like to intellectualize. If you want action try Facebook. I used to know some Italian mafia guys–I’m guessing that you need money and muscle to get people out of that area. It’s a cruel and impossible situation.
Thanks for the advice. I was originally hoping that this being finance oriented, someone may know how they can get their money that has been frozen by PayPal for half a year. If they could get that, they could pay off Egypt in a couple days. Egyptian guards are the mafia there. And Paypal seems to be Israeli affiliated. They very much want to be displaced from Gaza. Intellectualizing about people dying is so first world. Mocking people concerned is such an Israeli move. Or perhaps it’s just online discourse.
This is not a matter of “knowing finance”. PayPal is not a bank so no regulator has any leverage (there is some licensing of payment processors in some states here but it’s just pro-forma, no oversight or recourse). They have what amounts to terms of service that they can interpret any way they see fit.
Banks don’t even cooperate with the courts in collecting judgements in lawsuits. PayPal is even more bunkered. From a lawyer in Oregon:
Thank you for this information, it is much appreciated. She is extremely frustrated that the money she begged for months for from many people is now being kept from her for 180 days. It is difficult to not come to the conclusion in our frustration that PayPal is purposely trying to keep her from buying food etc as all the Paypal correspondence was signed off by Israeli names and extremely dismissive. The responses here added to that. I am just very frustrated. I know PayPal does not allow accounts in many areas which is what they told her (no one in Palestine can have a PayPal account but then you don’t have much access to banking already there). This person is very smart and we know each other through news media channels so I’m hoping she finds the resources to get out. She knows all about the banking issue as everyone there does. They are far more savvy than all of us. I am just praying for now and hope Egypt relents.
Bribed? They are like British journalists
(Humbert Wolfe)
I am a complete naïf with regard to international banking and dealing with the Israelis and so not acquainted with the technicalities, therefore my thoughts may be utterly unworkable and you may already have considered them and determined them unfeasible. I am troubled reading about this and in no way intend to be flippant about your friend’s plight which grieves me greatly.
In no particular order : Would bitcoin help in any way. Would it be possible to open a joint bank account in Egypt in your & your friend’s name ? As joint account owner, could you act with a sort of power of attorney to complete the application on her behalf and allocate funds in the joint account to cover the cost ?
I wish you and your friend as prompt & satisfactory a resolution of this awful predicament as possible in the circumstances. -sincerely, alfred venison.
Thanks for the advice! They can’t use bitcoin as they also need the money to buy food. We’ve explored all the options. They have family who has already left and can help via Cyprus. The only way to transfer money is via Western Union. I also don’t bave the kind of money to help them and pay Egypt for the entire family to evacuate.
Why is Egypt allowed ??? Did you really write this about a sovereign state guarding its borders ?
Maybe Lebanon should have done do and spared itself in 1970 !
Clearly you feel the U.S.-Mexico border should be wide open too
Because of law relating to refugees. It applied to us when we were younger in Laos via Thailand.
U.S.-Mexico border being wide open would help bring down US Empire faster, and Israel with it. That sounds like a solution to many problems.
No, it’s not Assad that Syrians fear, but life without food and medicine due to illegal U.S. sanctions.
True, “sanctions” is a classic NewSpeak word that translates as Siege Warfare in standard English.
Assad like Saddam is Ba‘ath Party which was Secular and founded by a Christian. It had such disadvantages as women working and educated and Christians and Muslims living together and even Saddam‘s Foreign Minister was a Christian
Every Secular Arab regime whether Syrian Arab Republic or Lebanon or Libya or Iraq has been destabilised by U.S.-Israel in favour of Sunni Fanatics
ISIS was created in Camp Bucca in Iraq by USA to reverse Shia gains from toppling Saddam
Assad is Alawite and they are regarded as apostate under Islam for celebrating Christmas. US prefers Theocratic Absolutism as in Israel or Saudi or Pakistan
“…Over several decades, the Middle East has experienced many large-scale, cross-border displacements for myriad reasons…”
A myriad of reasons, most of which can be traced to US/UK and Israel. Blaming this on Bashar al Assad is typical victim-blaming and rank hypocrisy.
Similarly, what is happening in the western hemisphere is also mostly due to US foreign policy, US “intelligence” covert actions, the austerity ghouls of the Washington Consensus, IMF etc. Haiti is a failed state, they are trying to starve Cuba and Venezuela etc.
But this is also a feature not a bug: blame the victims for political gain, use desperate migrants as political scapegoats and distractions away from looking at domestic institutional corruption and lack of democratic choice, and migrants can be used as a giant pool of cheap, exploitable labor. And the public pay for it, while the oligarchy profits more. What a great side-benefit.
Today’s Reuters headline brays that IRAN is the bad guy of the world – cheats, tricks, kidnaps, murders – all in the face of the last few days’ news of Israel/US bunker buster bombs killing indiscriminately – astounding disinformation by Reuters. Decapitation hits by Israel/US? Israeli aggression unchecked by the world as more and more death and destruction unleashed on its neighbors? No – Reuters wants you to believe the world’s villain is Iran. Reuters is a tool – important to understand. What reach the Israel Lobby has.
But on the other hand, we don’t need no Israel Lobby to be anti-Iran. Recall the UK/US overthrow of the democratically-elected, secular, Mohammed Mossadegh govt. in Iran. in 1953. The Brits have been meddling in Iranian affairs even longer than the Yanks. Recall the hostage crisis in 1979. and the cringe-inducing Sen. John McCain singling “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran”
Yes, very true. I remember, though not much if any mention of that anymore. One thing that also has been mostly forgotten (my guess) is the Proud Prophet war game devised by Thomas Schelling in 1983 at the request if R.Reagan to “explore the outcome and effects of a nuclear war” (Per Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War, a Scenario). This is a description of escalation in my opinion, in today’s war environment. So worth looking up. Our “best and brightest” most certainly are ‘belief’ driven and very ignorant. A dangerous state of affairs.
Thomson-Reuters of Toronto you mean.
India & Global Left from three days ago:
Norman Finkelstein & Mouin Rabbani react to Lebanon Attack, Iran retaliation & Nasrallah’s death
Thanks again!!!
Would have missed out without this link.
And one shall not miss out on Rabbani.
Readers here might be interested in this excellent new Al Jazeera video documenting Israeli war crimes, many of which were proudly posted on TikTok by IDF forces.
https://youtu.be/kPE6vbKix6A?si=1o43nH9yiQZzkUoh