Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon was among 2,800 other people who were wounded by the simultaneous blasts in Beirut and several other regions.

Hezbollah, backed by Iran, stated that the pagers belonged to “employees of various Hezbollah units and institutions” and confirmed the deaths of eight fighters.

The group blamed Israel for what it called “this criminal aggression” and vowed to seek “just retribution”. The Israeli military declined to comment.

The question on everyone’s minds is if anyone anywhere worldwide can be targeted by blowing up their handheld devices. 

It’s a known fact that Israel has the best spyware technology that it often sells to security agencies and military. During the ongoing genocide in Occupied Palestine, Israeli Occupation Forces often use mobile phone data supplied by genocide-supporting countries such as the United States and Britain to target so-called “Hamas terrorists” but most often unarmed civilians. 

Israel’s ability to remotely detonate pagers poses a global risk, as many critical facilities, such as hospitals, still rely on pagers for emergency communication. Pagers operate on a separate frequency from mobile phones, ensuring that they can be used to page doctors and emergency responders even when mobile networks. Reliance on pagers is common practice in emergency services work are down. 

In Lebanon, over a thousand pagers were simultaneously hacked, all of which were Motorola devices. This raises concerns about the potential for a country’s emergency services to be compromised, either by a foreign entity like Israel or through the sale of technology to agencies supported by Israel to destabilize a country. This situation poses a threat to anyone who could be targeted.

“How do we know if this issue is limited to Motorola? Mobile phones use lithium-ion batteries that can overheat and explode. Phones have circuits that can stop this from happening. For example, the iPhone shuts down when it overheats. If Israel cannot only disable the safety mechanism but also cause the battery to overheat – this is a global problem.

Why Israel? No one else has the technology or has a grouse with Hezbollah. Or pretty much with anyone else. Zionist supremacy is ingrained into their nature and it’s a known fact that Israel routinely assassinates foreign citizens. Much recently the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Iran by Israeli terrorism.

As for Hezbollah or anyone else, threats of occupation and invasion ensure that this is a mere stumbling block. It will not stop any coordinated resistance to free Palestine or defence against Israeli terrorist aggression. More importantly, it would have the opposite effect to coordinate against Israel. Israeli defence is weak, unlike the wars of decades to boast about the Iron Dome defence system. But the rules of engagement have changed. Recent drones can get through Israeli defences and attack critical military targets. Hezbollah (and Iran) have yet to launch large-scale attacks against Israel which would not only decimate its defences, it will also destroy Israel’s fledging military. Israeli military commanders know about this.

For the rest of us – the world has become much different in the last few days. Airline travel will now be extra problematic. Up till last week, one had to worry if someone had a spoon or a fork in their luggage. Now they need to worry if their mobile phones will explode mid-air. Your children’s screen time could be their last. Israel has turned their terrorism into a global concern. 

Free Palestine. 

The post Should The World Be Worried About Exploding Devices first appeared on NMH.

The Netflix series 3 Body Problem is based on this novel. What is interesting about this story is that is not your regular in-your-face alien attack style of storytelling. At it’s core it comes across as more like a murder mystery thriller that you slowly absorb and savour. And since it’s a Chinese storyteller, there are no Americans blowing stuff up to save the world.

3 Body Problem scores a nice plump 77% on Rotten Tomatoes if you need any form of convincing. But I urge you to get into it and enjoy the ride. There are 8 episodes in Season 1 with Season 2 is more than likely to be greenlit understanding how popular the series has become in a short period of time.

The post 3 Body Problem Is A Must-Watch Streaming first appeared on NMH.

Someone said to me the other day “I keep my standards low. I don’t expect more than Subang Airport because expecting KLIA ends up in disappointment”. With KLIA voted one of the worst airports in Asia, apparently, we don’t deserve better. So say no more – let’s not have better expectations.

The same goes for Air Asia, our budget carrier. The airlines most Malaysians are forced to travel for cheap tickets which we don’t get refunded for because our national carrier cannot do better. After decades of management, remanagement, mismangement and transformation management, we are still no closer to having an airline that can be great. Let’s be mediocre. So say no more – lets not have better expectations.

With the cost of living skyrocketing and the prices of everything shooting up, one can barely afford economy rice. Yet employer groups fight to ensure that the average Malaysian is properly scarping the bottom of the barrel to get ahead. Yes we have millions of foreign workers shipped in to keep wages low. A proper conspiracy if our politicians didn’t have a hand in it too. Let’s keep our workers cheap while countries around us not only excel but poach our talents. So say no more – let’s not have better expectations.

Our talent flight is increasing exponentially as our young are leaving to greener pastures elsewhere. And green they are with opportunities economically and financially because as a country at this day and age, we cannot seem to get past racial and religious patronages. We bleed talents. So say no more – let’s not have better expectations.

The Malaysian Ringgit is heading towards the gutter while Malaysians lament the high cost of living. Our politicians talk about strong fundamentals that only seem to exist in alternate reality. A country as big as Malaysia cannot compete with Singapore, a country the size of Klang Valley. Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and all our neighbours are moving forward while we are told can but we don’t. Especially when our best and brightest are there and not in our soil. We bleed opportunities. So say no more – let’s not have better expectations.

Even in our politics, we are expected not to have expectations. We are constantly told how amazing it was to topple the formidable Barisan Nasional. Only to have politicians who, pretty much do the same and fiddle while the country burns. People were promised so much but delivered nearly nothing. So say no more – let’s not have better expectations.

We are not even good enough to attract Taylor Swift because anytime there is a concert in Malaysia, it becomes a national shit show of religious supremacy. Never mind that people travel from far and wide to see acts in neighbouring countries. The inflow of tourists coming to see the shows would contribute to local businesses as Singapore not only brought in Taylor but negotiated that she would ONLY do shows in Singapore. We DEFINITELY should not have better expectations.

In short, we Malaysians are told every day to our faces that we need to coast in mediocrity and not have expectations. We are told we are better. For some reason. But we always seem to fall short. Our politicians can’t seem to comprehend what to do because they too are mediocre.

The saving grace is our young are not staying put. They pack up and leave and excel elsewhere. At the very least we can claim they are from Malaysia. Or wonder why they left in the first place!

The post Don’t Malaysians Deserve Better? Say No More! first appeared on NMH.

Imagine your family is brutally murdered in front of you. Their only crime was they were fleeing from harm from people you don’t know. Imagine you being so scared and you’re begging for help. This was what 6 year old Palestinian child Rind Hajab endured before she was brutally murdered by Israeli forces.

“I’m so scared, please come. Please call someone to come and take me,” she was heard crying desperately in the call that PRCS said lasted three hours in an effort to calm frightened Hind.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) and the family of the girl, Hind Rajab, confirmed on Saturday that all seven people inside the car were killed, with the Palestinian relief organisation saying it lost crew members Yusuf Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun in the Israeli attack on civilians in Gaza City.

Family members found Hind’s body along with those of her uncle and aunt and their three children near a roundabout in the city’s Tal al-Hawa suburb, the Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.

Another of Hind’s uncles, Sameeh Hamadeh, said the car was peppered with bullet holes.

“The occupation deliberately targeted the ambulance upon its arrival at the scene, where it was found just metres away from the vehicle containing the trapped child Hind,” said the PRCS statement.

The most dangerous place in the world to be a child.

That devastating description is now being applied to Gaza by UNICEF as the true extent of the catastrophe of this war emerges.

That devastation is leading to one of the worst humanitarian crises of our time – where, for example, a nurse has had to perform emergency caesarean operations on six dead pregnant women to try to save their babies.

The horrors of Gaza are almost unspeakable. As difficult as all this is to read and to watch, the world mustn’t look away.

Rarely, if ever, have so many children been killed, injured, or orphaned as quickly as Israel is doing so in Gaza right now.

“The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child,” says UNICEF’s James Elder. “And day after day, that brutal reality is reinforced.”

Israel’s military has killed nearly 28,000 people – mostly women and children – since October 7

UNICEF’s James Elder said: “In my 20 years with UNICEF, travelling the world from one humanitarian crisis to the next, from famines to floods and war zones to refugee camps, I’ve simply never seen such devastation and despair as is happening in Gaza.” 

The post Hind Rajab Killed By Israeli Occupying Forces first appeared on NMH.

MACC has announced the recovery of property and other assets from 1MDB, the state fund at the centre of a multibillion-dollar corruption scandal across multiple countries and jurisdictions.

The latest recoveries, which took place from 2023 until this month, are worth more than 23.9 million ringgits ($5m), the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) said in a statement on Thursday.

They followed the trial and conviction of former Goldman Sachs banker Roger Ng who was jailed by a New York court last year for his role in the scandal.

KEEP READING

The scale of the corruption at the fund, which was established to boost economic development, fuelled a backlash against the government of then-Prime Minister Najib Razak that saw his party lose power for the first time in Malaysian history in elections held in 2018.

The MACC said the latest recoveries came from a former 1MDB employee as well as through voluntary surrender by five individuals, including 4.55 million ringgits ($954,679) from Amhari Effendi, a former special officer to Najib.

The authorities also seized three condominium units worth 7.05 million ringgits ($1.5m) from Mohammad Kamal Yahya, who was a foreign affairs adviser to Najib, as well as assets in Malaysia and Singapore worth 11.75 million ringgits ($2.5m) from associates of Jho Low, the Malaysian financier who is now a fugitive.

Ng was jailed for 10 years in the United States but was allowed to return to Malaysia to assist authorities in their investigations and to recover more of the money that was lost.

Investigators in the US and Malaysia estimate at least $4.5bn was stolen from 1MDB and instead used to finance luxury lifestyles and the production of the Hollywood movie The Wolf of Wall Street.

Najib was jailed in August 2022 in the first of multiple cases related to the scandal, becoming the first Malaysian prime minister ever to be put behind bars. However, it is to be noted, that this is not due to 1MDB but the SRC International case.

Last week, Malaysia’s pardons board announced that his 12-year sentence, for the SRC International case, had been halved and his fine slashed from 210.5 million ringgit ($44.2m) to 50 million ringgit ($10.5m), in a decision that was greeted with dismay by some Malaysians. It also brought hope to Najib’s supporters who believed that he was a victim of political persecution as there were high levels of discrepancies in the court processes including discounting pieces of evidence.

The post Malaysia has recovered $5m of stolen 1MDB assets over the last 13 months first appeared on NMH.

The suspension of funding by a growing number of Western countries for a United Nations agency for Palestinians has raised questions about the fate of the 5.9 million refugees it serves.

The United States and at least 13 of its allies have pulled funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), following allegations by Israel that some of its staff were involved in Hamas’ October 7 attack, which killed 1,200 and saw more than 250 others taken hostage.

The defunding was announced immediately after the result of near unanimous verdict, the court was convinced that South Africa made a plausible case demonstrating that Israel has displayed the intent to execute genocide.

As a result, the court is required, by international law, to proceed with a full hearing and, ultimately, to render a verdict on the seminal question: Is Israel guilty of the crime of genocide in Gaza? It seems that the defunding whats a knee jerk reaction to further punish Palestinians for resisting the brutal occupation.

The UN’s agency for the welfare of Palestinians – UNRWA – is under massive coordinated attack. Israeli claims about a tiny proportion of staff have been used to justify Western countries pulling the plug on funding – catastrophic collective punishment during a humanitarian disaster.

This man knows the truth – he knows UNRWA inside out. He’s Chris Gunness, who was UNRWA spokesman until 2020 for 14 years. Listening to him is so important – it’s a matter of life and death – as he takes apart the false claims and gives us the truth.

Israel calls for disbanding UNRWA, the United Nations agency that aids Palestinians, after Israel presented unverified evidence that at least 12 UNRWA staffers participated in the Oct. 7 massacre. The information was not shared with UNRWA for verification.

The post Israel Lied About UNWRA first appeared on NMH.

After a four-year hiatus, today marked a special day for Malaysia’s favourite bread company as it relaunched its factory tour programme, officiated by the Minister of Women, Family, and Community Development (KPWKM), YB Dato’ Sri Hajah Nancy Shukri.

Factory Visit

Over 40,000 visitors have passed through the doors of the Gardenia KL factory visit facility since 1991. Purposefully built for the comfort of visitors, the facility is designed complete with an observation deck and theatre for guided tours comprising the young and young at heart including families, schools and professional groups. Visitors are greeted with the aroma of freshly baked bread and eventually leave with a sense of amazement at the bakery’s modern and state-of-the-art technology and hygienic production process.

The relaunch of visits comes after the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and the devastating 2021 floods in Shah Alam and is a celebration of Gardenia KL’s resilience, and commitment to its treasured consumers to showcase how Malaysia’s favourite bread products are produced transparently.

Gardenia KL CEO, Koh Chin Huat, emphasised the significance of the factory refurbishment and factory visit programme relaunch. “The Gardenia KL factory Tour Programme has been an educative and fun activity providing positive social engagement for all age groups. After almost four years, we gather to witness the relaunch of the programme. I must congratulate the team who have been working tirelessly to bring back the Gardenia Factory Tour Programme opened for the benefit of Malaysians,” said Koh.

#GardeniaCares

As a well-known household brand, Gardenia KL embraces its role in always taking the initiative to help communities. This is at the heart of its #GardeniaCares philosophy which encompasses its Wellness Begins at Home programme, community outreach, training and education, and climate impact mitigation initiatives.

YB Dato’ Sri Hajah Nancy Shukri, commended Gardenia’s dedication to quality and community welfare. “The Ministry takes pride in being at the forefront driving efforts to achieve gender equality, family and community development as a caring and prosperous basis of a fairly developed country. We are deeply moved by the concerted efforts of private industries, such as Gardenia KL, who are making strides in driving initiatives that support community development. As the saying goes, ‘It takes a village’. So it is with strengthening family institutions and national development,” said the Minister.

During the pandemic, Gardenia KL was considered one of Malaysia’s economic frontliners ensuring the steady supply of bread across Peninsular Malaysia. Above and beyond this, Gardenia KL also set up a RM1 million COVID-19 Aid Fund to deliver in-kind aid to vulnerable communities. Malaysia’s favourite bakery has also stepped up to promote mental well-being, a topic that affected almost every Malaysian during the pandemic through its ‘Wellness Begins at Home’ initiative. Witnessing its positive impact, Gardenia KL has grown the initiative into an annual engagement to continue normalising conversations around mental health.

Deeply ingrained in community enrichment, #GardeniaCares initiatives play a role in supporting the KPWKM’s mission of integrating the perspectives of society into the mainstream of national development and strengthening the family institution towards improving social welfare. A summary of #GardeniaCares initiatives was showcased in a mini exhibition during YB Dato’ Sri Hajah Nancy Shukr’s visit to Gardenia KL.

Continuing its tradition of getting children from B40 households excited for the new school term, Gardenia KL presented this year’s Bag-2-School kits to the Trinity Community Children Home Society at the factory relaunch event, witnessed by the KPWKM Minister. Since 2015, Gardenia has positively impacted 33,000 children to date, equipping them with the necessary school supplies.

Gardenia KL’s factory tour is officially reopened to the public. Interested individuals or groups are welcome to register for free to enjoy an educational and fun tour at www.gardenia.com.my

For media inquiries or more information about the event, please contact Encik Yazli Saleh at yazli@gardenia.com.my 

The post Gardenia Shah Alam Factory Resumes Public Tours After Almost Four-Year Hiatus first appeared on NMH.

The Balfour Declaration, which resulted in a significant upheaval in the lives of Palestinians, was issued on November 2, 1917.

The declaration turned the Zionist aim of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine into a reality when Britain publicly pledged to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” there.

The pledge is generally viewed as one of the main catalysts of the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 – and the conflict that ensued with the Zionist state of Israel.

It is regarded as one of the most controversial and contested documents in the modern history of the Arab world and has puzzled historians for decades.

What Is The Balfour Declaration?

The Balfour Declaration (“Balfour’s promise” in Arabic) was a public pledge by Britain in 1917 declaring its aim to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.

The statement came in the form of a letter from Britain’s then-foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, addressed to Lionel Walter Rothschild, a figurehead of the British Jewish community.

It was made during World War I (1914-1918) and was included in the terms of the British Mandate for Palestine after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

The so-called mandate system, set up by the Allied powers, was a thinly veiled form of colonialism and occupation.

The system transferred rule from the territories that were previously controlled by the powers defeated in the war – Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria – to the victors.

The declared aim of the mandate system was to allow the winners of the war to administer the newly emerging states until they could become independent.

The case of Palestine, however, was unique. Unlike the rest of the post-war mandates, the main goal of the British Mandate there was to create the conditions for the establishment of a Jewish “national home” – where Jews constituted less than 10 percent of the population at the time.

Upon the start of the mandate, the British began to facilitate the immigration of European Jews to Palestine. Between 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population rose from nine percent to nearly 27 percent of the total population.

Though the Balfour Declaration included the caveat that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”, the British mandate was set up in a way to equip Jews with the tools to establish self-rule, at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs. 

Why Was It Controversial?

The document was controversial for several reasons.

Firstly, it was, in the words of the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said, “made by a European power … about a non-European territory … in a flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority resident in that territory”.

In essence, the Balfour Declaration promised Jews a land where the natives made up more than 90 percent of the population.

Secondly, the declaration was one of three conflicting wartime promises made by the British.

When it was released, Britain had already promised the Arabs independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1915 Hussein-McMahon correspondence.

The British also promised the French, in a separate treaty known as 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, that the majority of Palestine would be under international administration, while the rest of the region would be split between the two colonial powers after the war.

The declaration, however, meant that Palestine would come under British occupation and that the Palestinian Arabs who lived there would not gain independence.

Finally, the declaration introduced a notion that was reportedly unprecedented in international law – that of a “national home”.

The use of the vague term “national home” for the Jewish people, as opposed to “state”, left the meaning open to interpretation.

Earlier drafts of the document used the phrase “the reconstitution of Palestine as a Jewish State”, but that was later changed. 

In a meeting with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in 1922, however, Arthur Balfour and then-Prime Minister David Lloyd George reportedly said the Balfour Declaration “always meant an eventual Jewish state”.

Why Was It Issued?

The question of why the Balfour Declaration was issued has been a subject of debate for decades, with historians using different sources to suggest various explanations.

While some argue that many in the British government at the time were Zionists themselves, others say the declaration was issued out of anti-Semitic reasoning, that giving Palestine to the Jews would be a solution to the “Jewish problem”.

In mainstream academia, however, there are a set of reasons over which there is a general consensus:

• Control over Palestine was a strategic imperial interest to keep Egypt and the Suez Canal within Britain’s sphere of influence 
• Britain had to side with the Zionists to rally support among Jews in the United States and Russia, hoping they could encourage their governments to stay in the war until victory
• Intense Zionist lobbying and strong connections between the Zionist community in Britain and the British government; some of the officials in the government were Zionists themselves
• Jews were being persecuted in Europe and the British government was sympathetic to their suffering

How Was It Received By Palestinians And Arabs?

In 1919, then-US President Woodrow Wilson appointed a commission to look into public opinion on the mandatory system in Syria and Palestine.

The investigation was known as the King-Crane Commission. It found that the majority of Palestinians expressed strong opposition to Zionism, leading the conductors of the commission to advise a modification of the mandate’s goal.

The late Awni Abd al-Hadi, a Palestinian political figure, and nationalist, condemned the Balfour Declaration in his memoirs, saying it was made by an English foreigner who had no claim to Palestine, to a foreign Jew who had no right to it. 

In 1920, the Third Palestinian Congress in Haifa decried the British government’s plans to support the Zionist project and rejected the declaration as a violation of international law and of the rights of the indigenous population. 

However, the other important source for insight into Palestinian opinion on the declaration – the press – was closed down by the Ottomans at the start of the war in 1914 and only began to reappear in 1919, but under British military censorship.

In November 1919, when the al-Istiqlal al-Arabi (Arab independence) newspaper, based in Damascus, was reopened, one article said in response to a public speech by Herbert Samuel, a Jewish cabinet minister, in London on the second anniversary of the Balfour Declaration: “Our country is Arab, Palestine is Arab, and Palestine must remain Arab.” 

Even prior to the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate, pan-Arab newspapers warned against the motives of the Zionist movement and its potential outcomes in displacing Palestinians from their land.

Khalil Sakakini, a Jerusalemite writer and teacher, described Palestine in the immediate aftermath of the war as follows: “A nation which has long been in the depths of sleep only awakes if it is rudely shaken by events, and only arises little by little … This was the situation of Palestine, which for many centuries has been in the deepest sleep, until it was shaken by the great war, shocked by the Zionist movement, and violated by the illegal policy [of the British], and it awoke, little by little.” 

Increased Jewish immigration under the mandate created tensions and violence between the Palestinian Arabs and the European Jews. One of the first popular responses to British actions was the Nebi Musa revolt in 1920 which led to the killing of four Palestinian Arabs and five immigrant Jews. 

Who Else Was Behind It?

While Britain is generally held responsible for the Balfour Declaration, it is important to note that the statement would not have been made without prior approval from the other Allied powers during World War I. 

In a War Cabinet meeting in September 1917, British ministers decided that “the views of President Wilson should be obtained before any declaration was made”. Indeed, according to the cabinet’s minutes on 4 October, the ministers recalled Arthur Balfour confirming that Wilson was “extremely favourable to the movement”. 

France was also involved and announced its support prior to the issuing of the Balfour Declaration. 

A May 1917 letter from Jules Cambon, a French diplomat, to Nahum Sokolow, a Polish Zionist, expressed the sympathetic views of the French government towards “Jewish colonisation in Palestine”. 

“[I]t would be a deed of justice and of reparation to assist, by the protection of the Allied Powers, in the renaissance of the Jewish nationality in that Land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago,” stated the letter, which was seen as a precursor to the Balfour Declaration. 

Also Read:

Israel Faces Trial For Genocide In Gaza

UK Accused Of Hypocrisy In Not Backing Claim Of Genocide In Gaza Before ICJ

What Impact Did It Have On Palestinians?

The Balfour Declaration is widely seen as the precursor to the 1948 Palestinian Nakba when Zionist armed groups, who were trained by the British, forcibly expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. 

Despite some opposition within the War Cabinet predicting that such an outcome was probable, the British government still chose to issue the declaration. 

While it is difficult to imply that the developments in Palestine today can be traced back to the Balfour Declaration, there is no doubt that the British Mandate created the conditions for the Jewish minority to gain superiority in Palestine and build a state for themselves at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs. 

When the British decided to terminate their mandate in 1947 and transfer the question of Palestine to the United Nations, the Jews already had an army that was formed out of the armed paramilitary groups trained and created to fight side by side with the British in World War II. 

More importantly, the British allowed the Jews to establish self-governing institutions, such as the Jewish Agency, to prepare themselves for a state when it came to it, while the Palestinians were forbidden from doing so – paving the way for the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine. – Al-Jazeera

The post The Balfour Declaration: How Palestinian Land Was Stolen From Its People first appeared on NMH.

South Africa has invoked the Genocide Convention, officially backed by Turkey & Malaysia to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza [ICJ Press Release].

The Israeli Occupation has killed 30,034 Palestinians, 27,681 of whom are civilians, amongst them are 11,833 CHILDREN & 104 Journalists. [Euro Med].

Israel has also bombed 300+ schools, 23 hospitals, and 102 ambulances and has displaced 1.9 million Palestinians [Gaza Government Media Office]. Israel also imposed an illegal siege cutting off fuel, electricity & medical supplies to Gaza [Ministry of Health in Gaza].

The International Court of Justice has announced public hearings on January 11th-12th for South Africa’s case against Israel for committing Genocide in Gaza [ICJ Press Release].

Beth Miller of Jewish Voice for Peace points out that “Pages 59-67 of South Africa’s suit is just a list of quotes from Israeli government officials and prominent members of the public with genocidal rhetoric.”

Israel is likely to attend the hearing and discount all the evidences presented against it. Israel has never cared because it has the US and UK protecting its interests so regardless of the decision and it’s a win for Israel. The United Nations is powerless to do anything because the US will veto any decisions or resolutions. And if any of the Arab countries organise any military, the US will leverage the action to get into war because it means expansion of Israel’s territories. That – is why Israel is so arrogant about. It has nothing to do with religion or Jews believing they are chosen people. It just allows the US and the UK to ensure they have a presence in the Middle East and not allow that region to prosper. They were so careful about the Middle East but they couldn’t do anything about China. The US especially is unable to get a foothold in Asia. No one will allow it. It’s all about control. And the Palestine people are just in the way of an expansion of Israeli territory.

The post Israel Faces Trial For Genocide In Gaza first appeared on NMH.

Israel was founded on lies. The lie that Palestinian land was largely unoccupied. The lie that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and villages during their ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 because they were told to do so by Arab leaders.

The lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war that saw Israel seize 78 percent of historic Palestine. The lie that Israel faced annihilation in 1967, forcing it to invade and occupy the remaining 22 percent of Palestine, as well as land belonging to Egypt and Syria.

Israel is sustained by lies. The lie that Israel wants a just and equitable peace and will support a Palestinian state. The lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The lie that Israel is an “outpost of Western civilization in a sea of barbarism.” The lie that Israel respects the rule of law and human rights.

Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians are always greeted with lies. I heard them. I recorded them. I published them in my stories for The New York Times when I was the paper’s Middle East Bureau Chief. – Chris Hedges

The Israel-Palestine conflict has been going on for so long many people forget how it started and what caused it. What was the Balfour Accord and Resolution 181? While we will look at the Balfour Accord in a separate article, you can read about Resolution 181, the outcome of the Balfour Accord.

More Lies by Israel

The following article was written by Lorenzo Kamel and published in the Cairo Review in 2022. Lorenzo Kamel is a historian and award-winning author. Among his books are The Middle East from Empire to Sealed Identities and Imperial Perceptions of Palestine: British Influence and Power in Late Ottoman Times, which was the recipient of the 2016 Palestine Academic Book Award.

Resolution 181, passed by the UN General Assembly (UNGA) on November 29, 1947, suggested the creation of two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The plan to partition Palestine would have established the Jewish state on an area of approximately 14,100 square kilometers, or 56.47 percent of the total land, to be inhabited by five hundred thousand Jews, four hundred thousand Arab-Palestinians, and ninety-two thousand Bedouins (in the Negev desert). This means that the Jewish state was expected to host an almost equal number of Jews and Arab-Palestinians. At the time, in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, Jews accounted for about 30 percent of the total population, and owned approximately 6.7 percent of the land (“land ownership” was not common in the region: in 1951 Iraq, for instance, only 0.3 percent of the registered land was owned as “private property”).

As for the Arab state envisioned by the UNGA, it would have covered approximately 11,500 square kilometers (42.88 percent of the total), with ten thousand Jews and eight hundred thousand Arab-Palestinians. Jerusalem, on the other hand, was expected to be subject to a Special International Regime under UN control.

The Partition Plan provoked territorial, demographic, and existential claims. For instance, the Arab-Palestinians complained that, despite Britain’s immigration policy to Palestine in the late 1930s and 1940s, a large percentage of the Jewish population was made up of recent immigrants, and that just four decades earlier, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Arab-Palestinians represented about nine-tenth of the total population. This local majority included only a small percentage of recent immigrants from neighboring areas (not from other continents), which to a large extent compensated for a wave of outward migration. In the second half of the 1930s, due to a state of public disorder, Palestine saw a substantial outward movement of Arab Palestinians, mainly towards South America, which hosts the largest Palestinian presence outside of the Arab World.

The Zionist leadership, on the other hand, claimed that the future Jewish state included the Negev Desert (known as Naqab in the ancient Egyptian texts), an inhospitable environment that could only be used after major capital investments, and where Jews constituted about 1 percent of the total population of the time. On top of this, the exclusion of the area east of the Jordan River (Transjordan) was heavily opposed by Zionist Jews, with some of them claiming that “Great Britain robbed the Jewish people of three-quarters of its country”.

Most Zionist leaders were convinced that the Mandate for Palestine, entrusted to Great Britain by the League of Nations to administer Palestine, encompassed both the area west of the Jordan River and Transjordan. In their view, Transjordan was therefore included in the “Jewish national home”, although it contained no Jewish community at the time.

However, this narrative, which is still popular among a minority of scholars, overlooks the fact that the June 1922 British White Paper—which excluded Transjordan from Palestine—was requested and received by the League of Nations before the Mandate was confirmed in July 1922. In the words of the future first president of the State of Israel, Chaim Weizmann: “It was made clear to us that confirmation of the Mandate would be conditional on our acceptance of the policy as interpreted in the White Paper [of 1922], and my colleagues and I therefore had to accept it, which we did, though not without some qualms.”

The role of the UN and its Resolution 181 triggered several other claims and counterclaims. It was argued, for instance, that the UN assigned to the Jewish state a substantial area of land that had never been an integral part of any ancient Israelite kingdom (including the coastal plain between Ashkelon and Ashdod), and that, on the other hand, it assigned to the Arab-Palestinians several areas which were part of ancient Israelite kingdoms. Moreover, according to the Arab-Palestinians, the UN did not adequately take into account their economic and social needs: they were in fact precluded from having a strategic port on the Red Sea or a direct communication route to Syria. This is besides the fact that about one-fifth of the land cultivated with wheat, and all the area cultivated with citrus fruits, went to the Jewish state. In the words of the then-secretary of the Arab League office in London, Edward Atiyah (1903-1964):

“Not only were the Jews…given the larger and more fertile part of the country with the most useful section of the coastal plain and the only good port, so that the Arabs were almost debarred from effective sea communications, but also 500,000 Arabs (or nearly half of the Arab population) were to be left in the Jewish state. A large number of these were the inhabitants of Jaffa, the biggest purely Arab city in Palestine and the Arabs’ principal seaport.”

Who Voted for the Partition Plan?

Resolution 181, passed on November 29 of 1947, had by far the most meaningful international reverberations in UN history. However, it is important to note that the resolution was not discussed at a General Assembly composed of the 193 countries that comprise it today. In fact, the General Assembly was made up of only 56 states, representing about one-fifth of the world population. More precisely, the resolution was approved by thirty-three countries, while thirteen expressed their opposition, and ten abstained.

Out of 56 member states, the votes of 37 countries would have been necessary to meet the two-thirds majority needed for approval. However, because the abstaining states were excluded from the overall count, the resolution was able to pass with only the yes-vote from thirty-three member states. Had the abstaining states been counted, as was the case with other resolutions, the resolution might not have passed.

The countries that did not participate in the vote because they were not yet member states were Switzerland, Sweden, Malta, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and, of course, the main losers of World War II: Germany, Italy, Japan, Austria, and Romania. Also excluded was almost the whole of Africa, whose countries were still under the rule or direct influence of colonial powers such as Great Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, and Spain. Apart from Ethiopia (“liberated” by the British in 1941), Liberia (established on the base of “the political principles of the United States Constitution”) and Egypt (which voted against partition), the only non-Arab African state admitted to the General Assembly was apartheid South Africa.

The situation in Asia was not dissimilar. It is enough to mention that the figure chosen by Western powers to represent China was Chiang Kai-Shek, a despotic anti-communist leader heavily supported and funded by the United States and its allies. Even in the years and decades to follow, Western powers continued to provide unconditional support to Chiang Kai-Shek, and when the latter was forced into exile on the tiny island of Taiwan (1949), the majority of Western governments recognized him as the sole representative of the world’s most populous country. Despite having neither control nor sovereignty over almost the entirety of the country, Chiang Kai-Shek’s “Republic of China” continued to represent the whole of China at the UN until 1971.

The countries that voted in favor of Resolution 181 included the states of Central and South America, which at the time were little more than satellite countries of the United States, economically fully dependent on Washington. Other countries that approved the resolution included states that, at best, had limited sovereignty such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the other countries that had been freed by the two emerging superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. Regarding the latter, Bernard Lewis noted that Stalin “saw in Jewish migration to Palestine and the struggle for a Jewish state a useful way of weakening and eventually eliminating the power of Britain, then still his principal Western rival in the Middle East”, while Daniel Pipes went a step further and contended that “Stalin apparently believed in a Jewish power so vast that, in league with the British, it would overwhelm Soviet efforts”.

All this illustrates that the Soviet Union, Western powers (with the exception of Britain, which abstained on Resolution 181), and their “subordinate countries” suggested a solution that supported their specific interests and had very limited international support.

While some may consider Resolution 181 an act of justice in favor of persecuted people and/or the only practical solution, others may regard it as an unfair and unacceptable imposition on hundreds of thousands of humans, and part of a process that fostered “racialized categories”. It might indeed be all of this. However, one aspect holds true beyond question: it was in no way a solution born out of the unprejudiced judgment of the “free and sovereign” world states of the time. This consideration appears even more relevant in light of the words written by a protagonist of that historical phase (and of the decades that followed), Israeli writer and politician Uri Avnery:

“No one asked the Arab Palestinians whether to accept or reject anything. If they had been asked, they would probably have rejected partition, since—in their view—it gave a large part of their historical homeland to foreigners. The governments of the Arab states rejected partition, but they certainly did not represent the Palestinian Arabs, who were at the time still under British rule (as were we).”

Who Rejected What

In the eight months that followed the passing of Resolution 181, about 450 Palestinian villages were razed to the ground by Israeli forces. Up to 770 thousand people—including about twenty thousand Jews expelled by Arab militias from Hebron, Jerusalem, Jenin, and Gaza—were evicted in a matter of days and then forcibly denied return. Some of them fled out of fear, often after witnessing the tragic fate of their relatives and friends and the “organized seizure” of their properties. A case in point is the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the towns of Lydda and Ramle in July 1948, which accounted for one-tenth of the overall Arab-Palestinian exodus. Most of the fifty to seventy thousand Palestinians that were expelled from the two cities did so under an official expulsion order signed by then-commander of the Harel Brigade Yitzhak Rabin: “The inhabitants of Lydda,” Rabin clarified, “must be expelled quickly without attention to age”. Several hundred of them died during the forced exodus from exhaustion and dehydration.

A number of recent studies, including Shay Hazkani’s Dear Palestine, have provided a wealth of primary sources that have exposed statements by Israel’s founder David Ben-Gurion and Israel’s first agricultural minister Aharon Zisling, saying, “We must wipe them [Palestinian villages] out” and “forgive instances of rape” against Palestinian women. On the other hand, local Arab leaders and commanders explicitly warned that “houses and villages emptied by their [Arab-Palestinian] inhabitants in violation of these orders would be subject to demolition and destruction”.

Over the next seventy years, a plethora of observers and scholars would link the beginning of the Palestinian refugee problem, and more generally the Israeli­Arab-Palestinian conflict, to “the Arab rejection” of the 1947’s UN partition for Palestine. While on the surface this claim may appear to make sense, the reality of who rejected what in the 1940s is more complicated than that.

From the perspective of the Arab Palestinians, who at the turn of the century constituted about 90 percent of the population, 1947/8 did not mark the beginning of the struggle, but coincided instead with the final chapter of a war that started with the implementation of a number of rejectionist policies and strategies against Palestinians.

Periodization is of course always arbitrary. However, it is historically accurate to claim that the year that more than any other ignited the basic components of the conflict is 1907. That year, the eighth Zionist Congress created a “Palestine Office” (the Agricultural Colonization Department) in Jaffa, under the direction of Arthur Ruppin, whose main objective, in Ruppin’s words, was “the creation of a Jewish milieu and of a closed Jewish economy, in which producers, consumers and middlemen shall all be Jewish”. Indeed, “rejectionism” featured very prominently in Ruppin’s mindset.

The goal of a “closed Jewish economy” was partially implemented from 1904 on by the leaders of the second and third waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine through policies like the kibbush ha’avoda (conquest of work) and the practice of avodah ivrit (Jewish work, or the idea that only Jewish workers must work Jewish lands).

While both were dictated by the need to offer greater job opportunities to the new immigrants, they resulted in the creation of a system of exclusion that blocked at its inception, primarily on an ideological level, any potential integration with the local Arab population.

Some researchers have emphasized that the Arab population likewise tended to avoid hiring Zionist Jews. This, however, takes no account of the fact that Arabs had only a marginal interest in employing a minority of new immigrants who had much more limited agricultural experience and did not speak the language used by the native inhabitants. Their avoidance of Jewish workers was not part of an organized political campaign.

It should also be noted that the “system of exclusion” and the two parallel social and economic structures that it triggered affected other crucial issues such as that of the land and its resources. For instance, the Jewish National Fund (KKL) was established with the task of buying land in Palestine (and succeeded in purchasing nine-tenth of the total land owned by Zionist buyers).

The KKL’s areas were managed in a discriminatory way in relation to the Arab population. KKL farmers who were found employing non-Jewish workers were subject to fines and/or expulsion. Such policies were indeed alarming, especially considering their intended purpose, which the future first president of the State of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, outlined in a letter to his wife in 1907: “If our Jewish capitalists, say even only the Zionist capitalists, were to invest their capital in Palestine, if only in part, there is no doubt that the lifeline of Palestine—all the coastal strip—would be in Jewish hands within twenty-five years.”

Rejectionist policies had an immensely disruptive effect on intercommunal relations in Palestine. A plethora of primary sources from local actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries confirm that before the implementation of these policies and approaches, relations between different communities were much less confrontational.

For instance, an unsigned editorial published in the daily Arab-Palestinian journal Filastīn on April 29, 1914 contended, “Until ten years ago, the Jews constituted a native fraternal Ottoman element. They lived and mixed freely in harmony with other elements and entered into working relationships, lived in the same and sent their children to the same schools.”

These words, despite their apologetic tones, were not far from the truth.

Scholar and author Yaacov Yehoshua wrote in his memoir, Childhood in Old Jerusalem, published in 1965, that in Jerusalem “there were joint compounds of Jews and Muslims. We were like one family […] Our children played with their [Muslim] children in the yard, and if children from the neighborhood hurt us the Muslim children who lived in our compound protected us. They were our allies.” In the same period, almost 80 percent of the inhabitants of Jerusalem lived in mixed neighborhoods and quarters.

All this should not suggest that interreligious and/or confessional conflicts did not exist. They have been documented as far back as the Middle Ages. Yet, their nature and scope are hardly comparable to those of more recent times. On top of this, they do not reflect the actual history of most of the region’s past.

A Reciprocal Exchange of Refugees?

If the Palestinian refugee question has little to do with “Arab rejectionism,” the same can be said regarding the attempt to tie Palestinian refugees to the expulsion of Jewish communities from some Arab countries. The dominant narrative espouses that at the same time that 750 thousand Palestinians “fled” what is today Israel, an almost equal number—800 thousand Jews living in Arab countries—faced “mass displacement”. Therefore, Palestinians should then accept that there was a “population exchange” between “Arab and Jewish refugees”, and renounce their demands for return and/or compensation.

Indeed, thousands of Jews in Arab countries suffered discrimination, oppression, threats, and various forms of violence. The most well-known example is the Farhud—a 1941 pogrom against Jews in which over 180 Jews were brutally killed in Baghdad. According to Hayyim J Cohen, it “was the only [such event] known to the Jews of Iraq, at least during their last hundred years of life there”. Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with Cohen’s words, Palestinians were not responsible for what happened in Baghdad or elsewhere in the Middle East. They may be Arab, but they were and are not the same people as Iraqis.

Jews who suffered discrimination and brutality in certain Arab countries have legitimate claims; all forms of violence are equally unacceptable and must be acknowledged and condemned. At the same time, it must be noted that, contrary to Palestinian refugees, many of whom were expelled and/or fled in fear, a large percentage of Jews left out of a desire to join their “Eretz Yisrael” (Land of Israel).

One figure that is often used to justify the alleged moral responsibility of Palestinians for the conditions of Jews in Arab countries is Hajj Amin Al-Husayni, the “Grand Mufti of Jerusalem”.

Al-Husayni was a supporter of Prime Minister Rashid Ali Al-Gaylani in Iraq, who sought to establish stronger ties with Nazi Germany and Italy. It was in the aftermath of the collapse of Al-Gaylani’s government that the riots in Baghdad erupted, which led to the Farhud.

In 1941, Al-Husayni made his way first to Italy and then to Germany. Two years later, he participated in the formation of the Handschar, a Nazi division created in collaboration with SS commander Heinrich Himmler, which fought the communist partisans in Yugoslavia and committed various crimes against the local population, including many Jews. Given his alleged Islamic credentials, he was tasked with recruiting Bosnian and Serbian Muslims, who, along with some Catholic Croatian volunteers, formed the core of the unit.

There were no Palestinians enlisted in the Handschar; by contrast, about 12 thousand Arab Palestinians joined the British army to fight the Axis powers in 1939.

Due to his collusion with the Nazi regime, Al-Husayni is often used as an example of why the Palestinian people were supposedly responsible for their own tragic destiny. Yet, as recent studies have shown, he was not a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and was imposed on them by the British authorities to fulfill specific strategic objectives.

The Issue of “Absorption”

When many Palestinians were forced to flee to neighboring Arab countries during and after 1947/8, a meaningful percentage of them were prohibited (until very recently) from getting citizenship and were banned from certain professions. The suffering of the Palestinian refugees has been—and in some cases still is—exploited by the leadership of those countries for political gain.

Yet, a comparison between Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon or Syria, and the maabarot—that is, the refugee absorption camps in Israel in the 1950s— is largely misleading. The reason why the last ma’abara was closed in 1963 is partially connected to the establishment of a number of development towns in Israel. Even more important, however, is the fact that many new immigrants were absorbed—in many cases following a painful and violent process—by giving them emptied Palestinian houses. Any person who has visited Ein Hod, Musrara, Qira, and hundreds of other former Palestinian villages, quarters, or cities, is familiar with the thousands of houses that are still perfectly intact. Most (if not all) are today inhabited by the families of “olim” (immigrants). Palestinian refugees, on the other hand, did not have emptied houses ready to host them: this was hardly a minor detail.

It should therefore not be surprising that, in light of the above-mentioned considerations, many Israeli officials have rejected the term “refugee”. As Knesset speaker Yisrael Yeshayahu noted in 1975, “We are not refugees. [Some of us] came to this country before the state was born. We had messianic aspirations.”

Former Knesset member Ran Cohen went a step further by saying: “I have this to say: I am not a refugee. I came at the behest of Zionism, due to the pull that this land exerts, and due to the idea of redemption. Nobody is going to define me as a refugee.”

Palestinians are the only refugees who do not fall under the UNHCR and instead have their own agency (UNRWA). The reason for this and the related (and largely irrelevant) difference between “derivative refugees” and “descendent of refugee” is rooted in the full recognition of the heavy price paid by Palestinians for the decisions taken by the “international community” in the 1940s.

The Present’s Past

To be aware of all of this is not meant to downplay the claims of any of the current inhabitants of this “Land of Aching Hearts”. It is instead a way to acknowledge the many scars which lie beneath this conflict, and to understand the deeper reasoning of what Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, a hardliner of his time, wrote back in July 1921: “Today the Jews are a minority in Palestine. In twenty years’ time, they could easily be a vast majority. If we were the Arabs, we wouldn’t accept it either.”

One century after Jabotinsky’s words, it is becoming increasingly common to hear analysts and scholars claiming that Israel will be soon forced to choose between two options: “the consolidation of a one-state reality, which would then force it to become an apartheid state, or grant Palestinians full citizenship”. These and other similar claims, however, ignore or downplay a third scenario that appears far more realistic: Israel will annex Area C of the West Bank (while further sealing off the Gaza Strip) and will offer the Palestinians “autonomy on steroids”. Such a scenario, proposed by Israel’s current Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, does not require any war or the removal of most of the population residing in the area: the relatively few Palestinians that in the coming decades will still be able to reside in Area C will get the option of receiving Israeli citizenship.

Fostering a rights-based resolution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not sufficient and will not change this scenario. Redefining Palestinians’ self-determination and shifting the focus away from statehood is indeed a risky gamble. In Palestinian businessman Sam Bahour’s words, the moment in which the struggle becomes “a purely civil rights one, the game is over— even if the struggle for full civil rights lasts another one hundred years”. Ultimately, and even more so in light of history, no one should feel entitled to tell Palestinians what they can or should do with their right and quest for self-determination.

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