The Myth Of Jewish Refugees From Arab Land

April 23, 2007

By Dr. Elias Akleh


Victimizing the Jews has been the successful old political trick Zionists have been using to gain international political sympathy for the Israeli cause, and to justify all aggression and terror the Israeli army perpetrates on Palestinians and on the neighboring Arab countries. Whenever the international views turn against Israel, due to its aggression, a new Jewish victimizing story pops up.

One such late story I happened to come across on page 106 of March 19th. 2007 issue of U.S. News Magazine, was titled “You deserve a factual look at… The Forgotten Refugees. Why does nobody care about the Jewish refugees from Arab lands?” The article was published as an advertisement by FLAME (Facts and Logic About the Middle East), who claims to “publish the truth about Israel and the Middle East conflict in advertisements and letters to editors nationwide.”

The advertisement claims that there exist what it called Jewish refugees from Arab countries, and makes some comparison between these Jewish refugees and Arab refugees in an attempt to point to alleged international injustice when the UN spends “... many billions of dollars” on the Arab refugees while forgetting the Jewish refugees. The advertisement tries to avoid calling the Arab refugees by their true name: Palestinian refugees, in an attempt to deny any moral and legal responsibility of Zionist Israel in violating Palestinians’ human rights and creating Palestinian refugee problem.

The advertisement attempts to refute “A myth that Jews had an easy life in Muslim/Arab countries”. It claims that Jews under Islam were treated worse than second class citizens “governed by a system of discrimination intended to reduce Jews … to conditions of humiliation, segregation and violence”.

The truth is that Jews were treated, under Islam in the Arab World, better than any other place they had lived in the whole world at the time. They were treated like any other ethnic groups, e.g. Christians, with full citizenship that included freedom and rights like the rest of the citizens. They were allowed to live and worship freely in Jerusalem, where they were barred entrance by ancient Romans and European Christian Crusaders. When European Jews faced persecution since the start of Crusaders campaigns, they did not find any safe haven for themselves except in Islamic and Arab countries in North Africa and in the Middle East. Many of those Jews fought along side Muslim and Christian Arabs against the Crusaders, who called for the slaughter of every Jew for crucifying Jesus. In his book “Bitter Harvest” Palestinian scholar Sami Hadawi described this Jewish haven as follows:

“During the Middle Ages, North Africa and the Arab Middle East became places of refuge and a haven for the persecuted Jews of Spain and elsewhere… In the Holy Land they lived together in harmony, a harmony only disrupted when the Zionists began to claim that Palestine was the ‘rightful’ possession of the ‘Jewish people’ to the exclusion of its Moslem and Christian inhabitants”

The Jewish writer Dan Peretz described this situation in his book “The Arab Israeli Dispute” as follows: “Most Jews in Palestine belonged to old Yishuv, or community, that had settled there more for religious than for political reasons. There was little of any conflict between them and the Arab population. Tension began after first Zionist settlers arrived in the 1880’s”

Although given freedom like any other citizens a group of the Jews, believing themselves to be the elite God’s chosen people, who should not mix and mingle with the others, “Goyims”, as been taught by their prophets, had isolated themselves into ghettos the same way they had lived throughout Europe. Those, who had the courage to venture out of the ghettos, had flourished and reached high employment positions in Arabic governments and societies. Many had become the financial and trade centers of the Arab World. This fact contradicts the advertisement claims that Jews “… were excluded from society, from government, and from most professions ... They were barely tolerated and often… were victimized by vicious violence” Some extremist fundamentalist Jews, who had their noses up in the sky believing themselves to be the chosen people and better than all other nations, had invited rejection and intolerance from all nations, not just from Arabs, to such snobby racist attitudes.

The advertisement goes on further to claim that Jews in the Arab World were subjected to systematic violence and persecution after the establishment of Israel in 1948 and after Six Days War in 1967. “When Israel declared its statehood in 1948, programs broke out across the entire Arab/Muslim world. Thousands died in this violence… The vast majority of those Jews fled from where they had lived for centuries. They had to leave everything behind. Most of those who were able to escape found their way to the just-created state of Israel”

The programs, the advertisement does not clarify, were terrorist acts perpetrated by Zionists against Jewish communities in the Arab World, as well as throughout European countries to coerce the Jews to immigrate to Palestine to establish the alleged safe haven; Israel, on usurped Palestinian land. Zionist zealots and some mercenaries had fire-bombed Jewish synagogues and shops, damaged Jewish cemeteries, and painted hate graffiti to create anti-Jewish climate. Zionist offer of free transportation, free housing, and free salaries had encouraged a lot of Jews to surrender their fate to the Zionist plan. Those, who immigrated, had plenty of time to sell their properties before leaving.

The Arabs, contrary to the claims, did not subject their long-time neighboring Jews to violence since they distinguished between a Jew and a Zionist. Yet those Jews, who were disillusioned by Zionism and became “enemy combatants” and spies within the Arab World, had to be dealt with as such.

The advertisement brags about “Israel received every one of those Jewish refugees from Arab countries with brotherly open arms; it housed, fed and quickly integrated them into Israeli society”. It is true that Zionist Israel had received immigrant Jews, paid all expenses including transportation, rent, and monthly salaries until they were integrated in Israeli society. Yet this reception was not out of brotherly love. Those immigrant Jews were, deliberately, drowned into financial debt so that they could not leave Israel, after discovering the trap set for them, without repaying all the expenses plus interests. Young Jewish immigrants, and every new generation of their offsprings, have been conscripted into the Israeli terrorist army to kill and to be killed for the interests of rich pro-Zionist corporations of the West.

The advertisement repeats the old myth, that had been told and refuted so many times, that Palestinians had fled from Palestine after the Israeli occupation “... following the strident invocations of their leaders …so as to make room for invading Arab armies”, who according the advertisement will kill all the Jews so that Palestinians “could return to reclaim their properties and that of the Jews, all of whom would have been killed ...” by Arab armies.

Palestinians, like any other people, would never leave their homes voluntarily, and Arab leaders had never invoked them to leave. Sami Hadawi refuted this claim in his book “Bitter Harvest” stating the fact that “British Broadcasting Corporation monitored all Middle Eastern broadcasts throughout 1948. The records, and companion ones by a US monitoring unit, can be seen at the British Museum. There was not a single order or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine in 1948. There is a repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put”.

This myth aims to erase guilt and moral responsibilities off Jewish shoulders for perpetrating the cruelest and ugliest massacres against mostly unarmed Palestinian villagers, and parading their women and children in the streets of Jerusalem to terrorize the rest of the Palestinians into fleeing out of their villages for their lives and for their honor when Zionist terror organizations, such as Irgun and Hagana, spread the rumors of their plans to attack Palestinian villages. Jewish historian Ilan Pappe, in his book “The Link”, mentions this fact: “The Israeli forces expelled the Palestinians from every village and town they occupied. In some cases, this expulsion was accompanied by massacres of civilians as was the case in Lydda, Ramleh, Dawimiyya, Sa’sa, Ein Zietun and other places. Expulsion also accompanied by rape, looting and confiscation”.

During wars people panic and flee their homes searching for safety. Yet they have always been able to return to their homes when danger subsides. Military conquest does not abolish private rights to property, nor does it entitle the victor to confiscate properties of civilian population. Even if the claims were true that Palestinians left their homes on the commands of their leaders, they still have the right to return to their homes and properties that had been stolen by Zionist immigrants. This right is protected by international law as noted by the noted Jewish writer and thinker Professor Erich Fromm “In international law, the principle holds true that no citizen loses his property or his right of citizenship; and the citizenship right is de facto a right to which the Arabs in Israel have much more legitimacy than the Jews”.
Israel’s rejection of Palestinians’ right of return has been on the top of their political agenda, which led them to break all UN resolutions regarding this matter, break all international laws, violate Palestinians’ human rights, and reject all Arab peace initiatives.

The advertisement continues with its allegations “… the Arab countries resolutely refused to accept Arab refugees into their societies. They confined them into so-called refugee camps …to keep them as a festering sore and to make solution of the Arab/Israel conflict impossible. These refugees, whose number has by now miraculously increased from their original 650 thousands to 5 millions, are seething with hatred toward Israel, and provide the cadres for terrorists and suicide bombers”

The Arab countries, mainly Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon, had received the majority of Palestinian refugees, who became a burden on the already impoverished economy of these countries, who, unlike Israel, were not receiving three billions of Dollars annually from the US. The majority of these refugees (now numbers about 7.5 million and not only 5 million) want to go back to their own homeland and their homes that were illegally occupied by terrorist Israelis. They fight to regain what is rightfully theirs, unlike the terrorist Israeli army, who fight to usurp lands of other people.

As for the solution of the Arab/Israeli conflict, the Arabs had offered Israel many peaceful solutions, yet Israelis categorically rejected them because without the conflict they could not keep usurping more lands to build “Greater Israel”. The latest Arab peace initiative of last month, March 2007, offered Israel to keep 78% of Palestine for permanent peace and normalization of diplomatic relationships with all Arab countries. Yet Israel, as usual, rejected this offer.

The advertisement acknowledges that “since 1947 there have been over 100 UN resolutions concerning Palestinian refugees, but there has not been one single resolution addressing the horrible injustice done to the nearly one million Jewish refugees from the Arab states”

This paragraph refutes the advertisement’s claim by showing that the international community has recognized and acknowledged the existence of a genuine Palestinian refugee problem, and the non existence of the false called-for Jewish refugees from Arab countries. That is why “a special branch of the United Nation (UNRWA) exists for the maintenance of those refugees” (created by Israelis) as the article notices. Israel, backed by successive American administrations, had ignored those UN resolutions that aimed to solve the Palestinian refugees’ problem, rather than spending billion of Dollars “contributed by the US” as the advertisement objects. It, also, totally ignores the attention the world had focused on the issue of the Holocaust, the compensation in hundreds of billions of Dollars to Israeli Jews, making even the study of the Holocaust an international crime, and sentencing, fining and imprisoning all the renowned historians, who questioned some of its details.

The advertisement criticizes the Arab’s justifiable right to ask for compensations, and the Palestinian refugees’ legitimate right to return to their homeland, “what has been Israel for almost 60 years”, where Palestinian tribes had lived for over than three thousand years. It concludes by stating “But if there is to be any compensation, those forgotten Jewish refugees are certainly entitled to such compensation as much as the Arab refugees. Anything else would be an outrage and a great injustice”

The advertisement neglected to mention the most important point in this refugee issue, namely that the Palestinian refugees were forcefully ejected from their homes according to the Zionist ideology that is based on the idea of “people substitution”; the expulsion ‘transfer’ of Palestinians out of Palestine, and the implanting of Jews in their place. The idiom of “Jewish state is unthinkable without compulsory transfer of the Arabs to the Arab states” had been adopted since the first Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897, and had been repeated by notorious Zionist leaders such as British Zionist Israel Zangwill, Haim Weisman, Theodor Herzl, Nahman Syrkin (founder of Social Zionism), Selig Soskin (director of Jewish National Fund), and many others.

On the other hand the so-called Jewish refugees (Zionist Jews) from Arab countries had plenty of time to plan their leave and to liquidate all their properties, and to be fed, resettled and compensated directly by American tax money, where the annual three billion Dollars financial aid pays almost $3,000.00 monthly for every Israeli, not mentioning all the economic aid and tons and tons of military equipment that are given freely to the terrorist Israeli army to inflict terror on Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqis and Iranians.

Finally the advertisement gives a comparison between bogus numbers of the Jews in some Arab countries before and after 1948; countries where Zionists had successfully transferred their Jewish population to occupied Palestine (Israel). It ignores to mention the large number of Jews, who are still living, flourishingly, in Northern African Muslim Arab countries, in Turkey, and even in Iran (the so-called extremist Islamic and terrorist supporting country), that houses the largest Jewish population, 25,000 of them, in the Middle East outside Israel, and are represented by a Jewish MP, Maurice Mohtamed.

The publishing organization (FLAME) of this so-called “factual look”, whose claimed purpose is the research, publication of facts, and exposing false propaganda about the Middle East, seems to do the exact opposite; it distorts the facts and spreads false propaganda instead.

The simple truth of the Arab/Israeli conflict had been reflected by Indian leader and peace teacher Mahatma Ghandi when he stated: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English and France belongs to the French”

Into the Iraqi Diaspora

Tomgram: Dahr Jamail, Into the Iraqi Diaspora

Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) released new figures on the disintegrating health situation in Iraq where, according to the group, 100 people a day die, on average, and countless more are wounded. Of the injured who manage to make it to an emergency room, 70% face a chance of dying there. Many don't reach clinics or emergency rooms at all, given the horrendous security conditions in the country. (Most knowledgeable observers believe that all death counts are low-ball numbers, given the increasing problem of gathering accurate figures amid the mayhem.)

In Iraqi hospitals, drugs and equipment are increasingly scarce, while ever more health professionals have joined the general exodus from the country. "The daily violence coupled with the difficult living and working conditions," reports WHO, "are pushing hundreds of experienced health staff to leave."

Here are a few other bits of information from the WHO report, according to Elisabeth Rosenthal of the New York Times:

"80% of Iraqis lack access to sanitation, 70% lack regular access to clean water and 60% lack access to the public food distribution system… As a result of these multiple public health failings, diarrhea and respiratory infections now account for two-thirds of the deaths of children under 5… According to a 2006 national survey conducted by UNICEF, 21% of Iraqi children are chronically malnourished."

And then there's the poorly covered refugee crisis -- probably the worst on the planet at this moment -- gripping the country. Almost 4 million Iraqis have had to leave their homes, according to Refugees International. But don't just rely on some impartial NGO for your information. Here's a ball-park estimate quoted recently in an interview with David Petraeus, the general in charge of the President's "surge plan" in Iraq:

"'It's a big competition right now among a variety of groups; and, again in an environment, in Baghdad in particular, [that is] very heavily colored by an influence of the sectarian violence.' Neighborhoods have been depopulated and General Petraeus believes that ‘hundreds of thousands, maybe millions' of Iraqis have been displaced."

Recently, Tomdispatch regular Dahr Jamail, who covered the war in Iraq from Baghdad for a while, visited some of the beleaguered refugee camps and centers in Syria that are trying to cope with the tens of thousands of desperate Iraqi refugees arriving each month. Jamail is a remarkable figure. A young man who originally went to the region on his own to cover the war, he gives "independent" journalism a name to be proud of. Our premier investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, said this of him recently, in offering criticism of American mainstream journalism's attribution practices at an al-Jazeera media conference:

"There is a young journalist here, Dahr Jamail, whose stuff has been very prescient, and I've four or five times included the brave accounts of some of his work in my stories… It's not just at the New Yorker, it's [also] at the New York Times where I worked very happily for a decade -- the first thing you [editors] cut out is any mention of anybody else. That's such a disagreeable aspect of our profession, the competition. Rather than credit a competitor we'll ignore the story. This is general. You all know what I'm talking about."

Now, consider the view from Syria through Dahr Jamail's eyes and click to accompanying photos by photojournalist Jeff Pflueger. Tom

"I Am Now a Refugee"

The Iraqi Crisis That Has No Name

By Dahr Jamail

Since the shock-and-awe invasion of Iraq began in March 2003, that country's explosive unraveling has never left the news or long been off the front page. Yet the fallout beyond its borders from the destruction, disintegration, and ethnic mayhem in Iraq has almost avoided notice. And yet with -- according to United Nations estimates -- approximately 50,000 Iraqis fleeing their country each month (and untold numbers of others being displaced internally), Iraq is producing one of the -- if not the -- most severe refugee crisis on the planet, a crisis without a name and without significant attention.

For the last two weeks, I've been in Syria, visiting refugee centers and camps, the offices and employees of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and poor neighborhoods in Damascus that are filling up with desperate, almost penniless Iraqi refugees, sometimes living 15 to a room. In statistical and human terms, these few days offered a small window into the magnitude of a catastrophe that is still unfolding and shows no sign of abating in any immediately imaginable future.

Let's start with the numbers, inadequate as they are. The latest UN figures concerning the refugee crisis in Iraq indicate that between 1-1.2 million Iraqis have fled across the border into Syria; about 750,000 have crossed into Jordan (increasing its modest population of 5.5 million by 14%); at least another 150,000 have made it to Lebanon; over 150,000 have emigrated to Egypt; and -- these figures are the trickiest of all -- over 1.9 million are now estimated to have been internally displaced by civil war and sectarian cleansing within Iraq.

These numbers are staggering in a population estimated in the pre-invasion years at only 26 million. At a bare minimum, in other words, at least one out of every seven Iraqis has had to flee his or her home due to the violence and chaos set off by the Bush administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Yet, as even the UN officials on the scene admit, these are undoubtedly low-end estimates. "We rely heavily on the official numbers given to us by the Syrian government concerning the Iraqi refugees coming here," Sybella Wilkes, the regional public information officer for the UNHCR told me, while we talked recently at the main refugee processing center in Douma, a city on the outskirts of the Syrian capital. Even the high-end UNHCR estimate of 1.2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria (a country of only 17 million people) was, she told me, probably too low.

According to Wilkes, the Syrian government, using tallies taken from its southern border posts, privately estimates the number to be closer to 1.4-1.5 million Iraqis in Syria. The UNHCR operation here, desperately under-funded and short of staff, does not have people on the border tallying numbers and has no way to check on the real magnitude of the disaster underway.

Yet, in their work, they can feel its oppressive weight daily. Erdogan Kalkan, a 35-year-old Turkish UNHCR employee of 15 years, told me that the overworked staff has already scheduled a total of 35,000 appointments with refugees seeking aid in Syria; only 25,000 of those have actually had their cases addressed -- and that barely scratches the surface of the problem. "We have been increasing our processing capacity from the beginning," he said, while puffing on a cigarette. We were speaking in a newly converted warehouse where Iraqi families now can meet with UNHCR workers in cramped white cubicles and be interviewed about why they left Iraq and what their most immediate needs are.

UNHCR's budget for Iraqis in Syria in 2006 was a bare $700,000, less than one dollar per refugee crossing the border. UNHCR needs far greater financial resources even to begin to help the mass of Iraqi refugees in the country, as well as food, medicine, and aid from other UN agencies. At the moment, it is essentially the only UN agency assisting Iraqis in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. UNICEF and other UN agencies have voiced interest, but as yet have provided little support in Syria, according to Kalkan.

Adham Mardini, the public information assistant for UNHCR in Damascus, told me their budget in Syria has risen precipitously to $16 million for 2007, although that, too, remains far below what would be necessary simply to fulfill the most basic needs of the most desperate of the refugees. It adds up to a little over $13 per Iraqi refugee per year -- if you don't include the refugees in Syria from Somalia, Palestine, Afghanistan, and other war-torn areas for whom UNHCR is also responsible (along with UNHCR overhead). Iraqi refugees receive food supplements from UNICEF, but only in the most severe cases of need, and cash is simply unavailable for distribution.

Back in late 2006, UNHCR in Damascus started out as the most modest of operations -- with two processing clerks, each seeing between five and seven cases daily. Now, there are 25 clerks processing more than 200 cases daily, not to mention guards, drivers, new computers, a Red Crescent aid station at the center, a new bathroom, and plans for adding a child center, psychological counseling services, and a community center before the Secretary General of the UN visits later this month.

Yet all of this is still nowhere near enough to keep up with the implacable flood of Iraqis entering Syria every month. Iraqis, who now comprise a little over 8% of the population of this small country, tell stories about why they left their land and what they are dealing with today, which these numbers, staggering as they are, do not.

More Than Numbers

"I left everything behind," Salim Hamad, a former railroad worker from Baghdad, told me. "My house was empty when I left, and I have no idea what became of it." We met in a small tea shop in the sprawling Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus. It is perhaps not inappropriate that Yarmouk is primarily a Palestinian refugee camp, since the Iraqi diaspora represents the largest exodus of refugees in the Middle East since the state of Israel was created in 1948. The camp is an uninspiring mass of high, grey apartment buildings through which snake crowded roads. According to locals, tens of thousands of Iraqis have already joined their ranks, with the numbers increasing daily, and Salim Hamad is not atypical of the new arrivals.

Five months ago, Salim had to sell his car, his furniture, and most of his other belongings simply to raise enough money to bring his wife and three children to Syria. They had grown tired and fearful, he told me, of seeing corpses in their streets every day.

Because Jordan's pro-U.S. King Abdullah had long since clamped down on Iraqi entry to his country, for Salim and countless others, Syria has been the only available destination. Yarmouk, with electricity and running water, is, in fact, one of the better areas for refugees. The two other main refugee camps into which Iraqis are now flooding, Jaramana and Sayada Zainab, present far grimmer living conditions, including more than 10 people sleeping in rooms without beds, lacking potable drinking water and in some cases heat, and with intermittent electricity.

Other Iraqis are living in poorer city neighborhoods, eating up their savings, sometimes relying on the goodwill of Syrian friends or relatives. Given visa restrictions, which prohibit Iraqis from working here (except, of course, in the black market economy), when often meager savings run out, the crisis is sure to worsen exponentially.

UNHCR recently offered the following staggering projection: According to its best estimates about 12% of Iraq's population, now assumed to be about 24 million people, will be displaced by the end of 2007. We're talking about nearly 3 million ever more destitute Salim Hamads by the New Year. (Add to that Iraq's growing population of internal refugees and its spiraling civilian death tolls and you have the kind of decimation of a nation rarely seen -- with, undoubtedly, more to come.)

A report released March 22 by the NGO Refugees International calls the flight of Iraqis from war-torn Iraq "the world's fastest growing displacement crisis."

"The situation now is pushing Syria and Jordan to the maximum," the UNCHR's Wilkes told me. "Syria's 'open door' policy is extraordinary, but economically and socially we wonder how long it can be maintained. We're very aware of the impact on these governments this crisis is having. We're hoping the international community will help share the burden."

The primary trigger for this crisis was the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, and yet President Bush and his top officials have taken no significant steps whatsoever to share in the resulting refugee burden. To date, the administration has issued only 466 visas to Iraqis. Under recent pressure from the UN, it has said that it would offer an additional 7,000 visas -- but without either announcing the criteria for accepting such refugees or even when the visas might be issued. Upon hearing this paltry number, an Iraqi refugee said to me in disbelief: "Seven thousand out of over four million Iraqis who have either fled their country or are internally displaced?… I don't know if he could insult us more if he tried."

"I ask all nations, particularly the United States, to do all that they can to help us," was the way Qasim Jubouri, a banker who fled Baghdad with his family in order to keep them alive, put the matter to me. "Since the U.S. government caused all of this, shouldn't they also be responsible for helping us now?"

Like Salim, he too left for Syria with nothing more than some clothing and his meager savings. Now, the money he brought is running out and he has no idea how he will feed his family when it's gone.

Thirty-two year-old Ali Ahmed has a similar tale to tell. "I was a financial manager of seven companies in Baghdad, but I had to leave my house, my car, and just about everything." After militiamen fired on his car in the once upscale Mansoor district of Baghdad, Ali fled to Jordan. He returned to Iraq to try again, but once more faced death in an attack in which six employees from his management firm were killed.

And even that wasn't the end of it. "We had 11 engineers from one company detained by the Mehdi Army [the militia of Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr]. We never heard from them again. I knew then that I had to drop everything and run for my life."

Ali does not see himself returning soon. "I don't expect to go back for at least 15-20 years. I have left everything behind, and now I have nothing but a small food store I run here. But it is not enough. Not the UN, nor any government, least of all the Iraqi government, is doing enough to help us." (The Syrian government, thus far, maintains a policy of looking the other way when it comes to modest or menial jobs Iraqis find which don't put Syrians out of work.)

Another Iraqi refugee told me of being detained by Mehdi Army militia members and having a rod forced down his throat as part of his "interrogation." He was lucky to come out of the experience alive. Many, on either side of the worsening sectarian struggle, do not. The slaughter of Sunnis by the Medhi Army and the slaughter of Shiites by Sunni extremist groups have become commonplace.

Despite the fact that Sadr recently ordered his militia to focus all its attacks on occupation forces, scores of dead bodies turning up on Baghdad's streets each day prove otherwise.

Iraqis who worked with, or have been in any way associated with, the American military or occupation authorities are faring at least as badly, if not worse. Everyone collaborating in any way with U.S. forces in Iraq is now targeted -- along with their families.

"I used to work with the Americans near Kut," Sa'ad Hussein, a 34-year-old electrical engineer told me, "I worked for Kellogg, Brown, and Root [then a subsidiary of oil-services giant Halliburton] to construct an Iraqi base there until I got my death threat on a piece of paper slipped under my door on my return to Baghdad. I had no choice but to flee."

"Things are getting so much worse in Iraq," was the way Salim Hamad, who fled five months ago, summed up life in his former homeland as our interview was ending. "There is a big difference between those who left four years ago and those who left four days ago. Everything in Iraq is based on sectarianism now and there is no protection -- neither from the Americans, nor the Iraqi government."

Fleeing "Freedom and Democracy"

Sa'ad Hussein, who arrived in Damascus only three months ago, described the Baghdad he left as a "city of ghosts" where the black banners of death announcements hang on most streets. There is, he claimed (and this was verified by others we spoke to among the more recent refugees), normally only one hour of electricity a day and no jobs to be found.

"I was an ex-captain in the Iraqi Army, and I think that's why I was threatened, in addition to working with the occupation authorities," he explained. When asked how many of his former Sunni army colleagues had also received death threats, he replied, "All of them." It was not safe, he told me, for him to go back to the now largely Shi'ite Iraqi Army because, "I may be killed. This is the new freedom and democracy we have."

On all measurable levels, life in Baghdad, now well into the fifth year of U.S. occupation, has become hellish for Iraqis who have attempted to remain, which, of course, only adds to the burgeoning numbers who daily become part of the exodus to neighboring lands. It is generally agreed that the delivery of security, electricity, potable water, health care, and jobs -- that is, the essentials of modern urban life -- are all significantly worse than during the last years of the reign of Saddam Hussein.

"The Americans are detaining so many people," Ali Hassan, a 41-year-old from the Hay Jihad area of Baghdad said as we spoke in front of the central UNHCR office in downtown Damascus. "And my brother was killed by Shi'ite militiamen after he refused to give them the keys to empty Sunni houses we were looking after."

As scores of other refugees crowded around photographer Jeff Pflueger and me, wanting to tell their stories, Hassan, a Shi'ite who also fled Baghdad just three months ago, added, "Now I can't go back. I am a refugee and I still don't feel secure because I still fear the Mehdi Army."

"So many Iraqis never leave their homes now because they are too afraid to go out due to the militias," Abdul Abdulla, a 68-year-old who fled Baghdad with his family insisted, having literally grabbed the microphone I was using to tape my interview with Hassan.

From the volatile Yarmouk area of Baghdad, Abdulla, a Sunni, said Shia militia members waited on the outskirts of his neighborhood in order to detain anyone trying to leave. "We stayed in our homes, but even then some people were being detained from their own houses. These death squads started coming after [former U.S. ambassador John] Negroponte arrived. And the Iraqi Government is definitely involved because they depend on [the militias]."

While talking with Abdulla, I noticed a woman in a black abaya or gown covering her entire body, one of her arms in a cast, standing nearby.

When I approached Eman Abdul Rahid, a 46-year-old mother from Baghdad, she willingly told me her sad story, all too typical of civilian life in the Iraqi capital today. "I was injured," she said, "because I was near a car bomb, which killed my daughter… There is killing, and threats of more killing, and explosions daily in Baghdad."

"America is the reason why Iraq was invaded, so we would like the American administration to give aid to us refugees," she added, "I would like people to read this and tell Bush to help us."

Six Months and Counting

Sundays and Mondays at the UNHCR refugee processing center in Douma are mob scenes. Refugees, some of whom have been waiting several months for their first interview at the center, an event crucial to finding aid, arrive in taxis, minibuses, on foot, or on buses specially hired by UNHCR. They line up outside a freshly painted white and blue gate, manned by security guards, and slowly trickle into the converted warehouse to wait eagerly for their names and numbers to be called.

On one of my Monday visits, as my friend Jeff and I approached the warehouse-turned-processing center there were more than 1,000 Iraqis crowded around the entrance hoping to get in. Taxis honked their way through the gathering crowds of refugees, each of whom held a number representing his or her place in line, along with passports and other required papers.

As we were being escorted inside the center by UNHCR public information assistant Adham Mardini, he told us that the previous day between 6,000 and 7,000 Iraqi refugees had descended on the place. On that day alone, 2,179 future appointments had been scheduled, each representing an average of 3.6 people, since many of them are set by the heads of families.

"Sundays and Mondays are always crazy here because these are the days we set their appointments," he commented. "And these people now have to wait up to six months just for their interview."

Some Iraqis showing up are, however, in need of emergency care. Refugees often arrive without medicines, and with serious heart problems, kidney failure, sizeable burns across their bodies, or ill-healed wounds -- and that's not even to speak of the psychological problems they face from violence seen or experienced or from lives completely uprooted. All of this, the minimalist UNHCR center must try to face. A surprising number of arrivals are simply put in ambulances to be taken either to local hospitals or treated by the Syrian Red Crescent.

Under a makeshift roof outside the warehouse but inside the outer gate, families lucky enough to have their numbers come up on this day are filling out forms. Men stand writing on sheets of paper pressed against walls; women hold crying babies amid the cacophony and chaos. Periodically, a UNHCR volunteer appears at the door of the building with a bullhorn to announce the names of those who should prepare to be interviewed. Most of them have been waiting at least four months for this day.

Iraqis continue to crowd through the door from the road as I talk with Mardini. "As you can see, the Baghdad security plan is working very well," he says with a wry smile. From hundreds of miles away, it's his organization which is providing what "security" is available and it can't hope to keep up with the steadily increasing numbers of desperate Iraqis.

To make matters worse, UNHCR officials have been noticing an increase in Kurdish refugees from the previously more peaceable northern regions of Iraq. "Over 50% of all newcomers in the last two weeks are Kurds," Kalkan, the UNHCR veteran of 15 years whom I'd spoken with before, says as he joins Mardini and me at the door. The two of them express a modest mix of frustration and discouragement, given the circumstances. After all, just as UNHCR in Damascus begins to ramp up to accommodate the massive numbers of refugees they have to deal with, the flow increases confoundingly.

Perhaps an hour later, when we make our way back to the street, the hoard of refugees has miraculously dwindled to only a few dozen forlorn Iraqis outside the now-closed door. We can't understand what made them all disappear so quickly.

"I came here three times to get this appointment because it was so crowded," an Iraqi doctor tells me, as he holds number 525, showing his place in line. "I arrived today at five AM with my family of eleven for this appointment and now they have postponed it!"

He had been one away in line when the door was closed for the day. Due to the burgeoning number of refugees, half the UNHCR interviewers had to be shifted to the task of scheduling future appointments for newcomers. Thus, half of the interviews for this day had been cancelled.

"Now I have to wait another two months," the doctor told me, as I stared into his tired eyes. He's still holding his number in his hand as a small crowd begins to build around us and others start to pour out similar stories of frustration and despair. As voices rise in frustration, Jeff flashes me a look of concern and we decide to thank them for their time and move on. Other than writing their collective tale of woe and taking their photos to show the world the faces of this growing crisis, there is little else we can do.

Abu Talat

Abu Talat, a 58-year-old father of four, was my primary interpreter during my eight months in Iraq. Six months ago he finally gave up hope of remaining in his home in Baghdad, took his family, and like hundreds of thousands of other Iraqis fled to Syria. One of the luckier refugees, he had enough savings to rent a humble two-room apartment in Damascus.

He has always been, and remains, a proud man. Having served in the Iraqi Army until 1990, he holds military traits like dignity, honesty, and honor in the highest regard. While I've always offered to help him in any way I could as his life disintegrated, only once did he ever accept a meager sum of money from me.

Upon my arrival in Syria, he invited me to his home to share dinner with his family. After the meal, while we were drinking strong tea, he asked his daughter to show me the certificate from the UNHCR which proves that they are officially refugees. He handed me the paper and watched me as I read it.

The document lists him as the head of the family. A black-and-white photo of him is at the top of the page, and the names and ages of his family members at the bottom. Just above them is the following text:

"This is to certify that the above named person has been recognized as a refugee by the United Nations by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees pursuant to its extended mandate. As a refugee, (he/she) is a person of concern to the office of the United High Commissioner for Refugees, and should, in particular, be protected from forcible return to a country where (he/she) would face threats to his or her life or freedom. Any assistance accorded to above/named individual would be most appreciated."

I glanced at him, not knowing what to say, then handed the paper back. He looked it over himself, as if in disbelief, then let his gaze focus on nothing in particular, while his chest heaved as he visibly struggled to master the urge to weep. Finally, he said to no one in particular, "I am now a refugee."

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who has covered the Middle East for the last four years, eight months of which were in occupied Iraq. Jamail is currently writing for Inter Press Service and Al-Jazeera English, and is a regular contributor to Tomdispatch.com. Jamail's forthcoming book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Independent Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books) will be released this October. Jamail is currently reporting from Lebanon. His reports are regularly available on his website, Dahr Jamail's MidEast Dispatches.

Jeff Pflueger is a San Francisco Bay Area based photographer and web developer. His work has appeared in National Geographic Adventure, Men's Journal, Outside, and other periodicals. Pflueger has worked closely with Dahr Jamail for 3 years building and maintaining his website. He also maintains his own website. Some of his photos from Syria can be seen be clicking on the links in this article.

Copyright 2007 Dahr Jamail

Quote of the Week

"I found the situation worse than I expected. I spent time with the children and I was struck by their sense of hopelessness and despair. I have been in other regions where the conflict has been terrible but the children were more resilient and playful. Here they were less so, particularly in the Palestinian refugee camps," she said. Some 1,045 children have been killed in the conflict since 2000, 927 of them Palestinian. -- UN Secretary-General's Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict

INDEX ON IRAQ: A JOURNEY IN HELL

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

by Sarah Meyer

Girls look through a fence at a refugee camp in Mosul April 5, 2007.
About 250 families moved from Tal Afar town to camps in Mosul since
last weeks' violence attacks. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled al-Mousuly

"Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate" Dante, Inferno.

1. General
2. Children of Iraq
3. Cities in Iraq
4. Health in Iraq
5. Refugees in Iraq
6. Human Rights in Iraq
7. Death in Iraq
8. Resistance in Iraq
9. Videos

GENERAL

Video. Iraq street scenes before Shock and Awe.

Life in Hell: A Baghdad Diary.
06.08.06. A. Ghosh, Time / Truth Out.

In Baghdad, the American Army Erects Walls Between Communities.
16.08.06. R. Ourdan, le Monde / Truth Out.

THE CHILDREN OF IRAQ

IRAQ: Children living without limbs lack support.
04.02.07. Irin. According to Save the Children, a UK-based NGO, many children were killed or injured in the initial US-led invasion of Iraq in April and March 2003. The NGO said the injured children continue to suffer the effects of the conflict, have become more vulnerable to chronic diseases and lack assistance. … The exact number of children living without limbs in Iraq, as a result of the war and the daily violence countrywide, is not known. However, local NGOs estimate that they must be in the thousands.

"Every explosion, air strike, fighting or targeting in Iraq makes a child injured. In addition, we cannot forget the remaining UXOs [unexploded ordnance] whose victims are mostly children," Khalid Ala'a, spokesman for local NGO Keeping Children Alive (KCA), said. "If you make a summation of all these children, they are going to be thousands and we cannot forget that the number of them killed since April 2003 by diseases, explosions or bullets, has reached 260,000," Ala'a added.

IRAQ: 4.5 million children undernourished.
05.03.07. Reuters / Irin.

60,000 Marriages broken by Iraq, Including Mine.
05.03.07. Stacy Bannerman, Alternet.

Third of Iraqi children now malnourished four years after US invasion.
16.03.07. Caritas Report

70% of Iraqi schoolchildren show symptoms of trauma.
17.04.07. USA Today.

CITIES IN IRAQ

In Baghdad, the American Army Erects Walls Between Communities.
16.08.06. R. Ourdan, le Monde / Truth Out.

Insecurity prevents clean-up of Iraq pollution.
07.02.07. Reuters. "We have identified more than 350 priority polluted areas, which include amounts of hazardous chemicals and depleted uranium," Environment Minister Nermeen Othman said on the sidelines of a major U.N. environment conference in Kenya. Environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists have linked depleted uranium used in U.S. and British munitions to higher Iraqi cancer rates and birth defects after the 1991 war and called for swift clean up campaigns. … polluted "hot spots", like the Khan Dhari petrochemicals site west of Baghdad that was partly burned down by looters during the war in March 2003.

The Locusts
26.02.07. Felicity Arbuthnot, Global Research. Killing Civilization in Mesopotamia. After the illegal invasion, the US military did the unthinkable. They made a camp in the great turquoise memorial to the half million lost souls of the Iran-Iraq warThe locusts in uniform, who have destroyed Iraq, humanity, sustenance, its history, predating the time of Christ and the Prophet Mohammed, are never, it seems, satiated or satisfied. From the early defiling (ongoing) of Mosques, cemeteries (Muslim, Christian, Yazidi ...) even the sacred tributes to the memory of the martyrs are being destroyed and defiled.

Iraq: New Martial Law Powers Threaten Basic Rights
01.03.07. uruknet. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's new security plan for Baghdad grants military commanders sweeping powers to arrest people and restrict their basic freedoms of speech and association, Human Rights Watch said today.

BAGHDAD CHAOS PLAN.
03.03.07. McClatchy. Iraqi government call it (BAGHDAD SECURITY PLAN) and we call it (BAGHDAD CHAOS PLAN) every single member in the security system taking money from the people to be released like for example I have paid in one day 30,000 Iraqi dinars to the traffic police and the peace keeping forces to be forgiven for the mistake that I did, my mistake was that I was driving my car in the street to go to my work in the time that I not suppose to be driving I mean the government have sill! y law obligate me to drive three days a week in the street in Baghdad because the numbers of the car as you know the (odds and even ) numbers my car was odd and I was driving in the even day so can you imagine he took 15,000 Iraqi dinars to him self instead giving me the 30,000 Iraqi dinars penalty recede from the government and the keeping peace forces guy did the same thing at the time that it is non of his responsibility….

Full electricity in Baghdad 6 years off.
03.03.07. Baltimore Sun. ( is that a promise?) Getting full-time electric power turned on in Baghdad, a key wartime goal toward which the United States has spent $4.2 billion dollars, won't be accomplished until the year 2013, U.S. officials said yesterday, in what others called a significant setback for the new U.S. initiatives to quell Iraq's bloody insurgency.

US asks us to pick up litter while city is in ruins, says mayor of Baghdad.
04.03.07. Damien McElroy, Telegraph.

HEALTH IN IRAQ

Four years into the occupation: No health for Iraq.
22.03.07. Dr. Bert De Belder, Globalreserch.ca/uruknet. Iraq’s health status, four years into the occupation, is nothing short of disastrous. Iraq’s health index has deteriorated to a level not seen since the 1950s, says Joseph Chamie, former director of the United Nation’s Population Division and an Iraq specialist. People’s health status is determined by social, economic and environmental factors much more than by the availability of healthcare. Not surprisingly, all these factor! s have deteriorated in the course of the occupation...

Shortage of safe water risks cholera in Iraq -U.N..
22.03.07. Suleiman al-KhalidiReuters / uruknet. United Nations agencies working in Iraq warned on Thursday a chronic shortage of safe drinking water risks causing more child deaths and an outbreak of waterborne disease such as cholera during the summer.

Thousands without food and supplies due to failing distribution system.
17.04.07. Report, IRIN. "The effectiveness and efficiency of the PDS ... have declined significantly," said the report issued on 10 April by the Washington-based NGO Refugees International (RI), an advocacy group.

REFUGEES OF IRAQ

Iraqis on the Run.
04.02.07. P. Cockburn, Counterpunch / ICHBlog. Iraq is experiencing the biggest exodus in the Middle East since Palestinians were forced to flee in 1948 upon the creation of Israel. "We were forced to leave our house six months ago and since then we have moved more than eight times," said Abu Mustafa, a 56-year-old man from Baghdad. "Sectarian violence has now even reached the displacement camps but we are tired of running away. Sometimes I have asked myself if it is not better to die than to live like a Bedouin all my life."

War in Iraq Propelling A Massive Migration.
04.02.07. Washington Post. As the fourth year of war nears its end, the Middle East's largest refugee crisis since the Palestinian exodus from Israel in 1948 is unfolding in a climate of fear, persecution and tragedy.

Nearly 2 million Iraqis -- about 8 percent of the prewar population -- have embarked on a desperate migration, mostly to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The refugees include large numbers of doctors, academics and other professionals vital for Iraq's recovery. Another 1.7 million have been forced to move to safer towns and villages inside Iraq, and as many as 50,000 Iraqis a month flee their homes, the U.N. agency said in January.

The State Department's Rosy Deception on Iraq Refugees.
09.02.07. Electronic iraq. The message from the State Department paints a picture that is filled with the positivity of good works being carried out in the name of America. From Jordan the view is different.

Iraq: The facts on displaced persons and refugees">Iraq: The facts on displaced persons and refugees.
28.02.07. Relief Web. The situation currently facing Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons has very quickly become one of the most pressing humanitarian crises in the world.

Leaving Iraq: Tales from a new diaspora.
04.03.07. The Star. REFUGEES | Nearly 2 million Iraqis, about 8 per cent of the pre-war population, are fuelling a desperate migration.

UN Plans to Open Iraqi Refugee Office in Jordan.
06.03.07. Democracy Now.

Europe Struggles with Inlfux of Iraqi Refugees.
06.03.07. NPR/ICH. After four years of chaos and violence, nearly two million Iraqis remain outside their country, according to the UN agency for refugees.

Video Report.. Iraq’s growing refugee crisis. Channel 4 News (12.03.07)

No Child Left Behind? Iraqi Edition.
13.03.07. R. Palta, Mother Jones / uruknet. 'few of the estimated 172,000 to 230,000 school-aged Iraq War refugees living Jordan are enrolled in school. Those children, many of whom are from middle class Iraqi families, lack the proper residency status to qualify for public school, and their families lack the finances to enroll their children in private institutions. As a result, over a hundred thousand Iraqi children have been out of school for as many as 4 years now--and that's just counting those in Jordan. '

U.N. seeks $1.7M to feed Iraqi refugees.
15.03.07. AP. 'The World Food Program has launched an appeal for $1.7 million to help feed tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees who are continue to arrive in Syria and increasingly without the resources to sustain themselves.'

More Iraqi refugees expected in Europe.
16.03.07. AP / The State. The number of Iraqi refugees arriving in Europe is expected to double to 40,000 in 2007 based on trends from the first two months of the year, the U.N. refugee agency said Friday

World 'ignoring Iraqi refugees'.
20.03.07. BBC/legitgov. The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) says there has been an "abject denial" around the world of the humanitarian impact of invading Iraq. Syria says it is home to 1.2m Iraqi refugees, with up to 800,000 in Jordan.

Thousands without food and supplies due to failing distribution system.
22.03.07. REFUGEES INTERNATIONAL

Iraqi Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons: A Deepening Humanitarian Crisis?.
23.03.07. CRS REPORT.

Iraq: Time to Acknowledge and Address the Displacement Crisis.
03.04.07. Kristele Younes, Refugees International /alertnet. 'The humanitarian and displacement crisis in Iraq is growing in intensity and gravity. The UN estimates that more than two million Iraqis are now refugees in neighboring countries and more than 1.9 million have fled for safer areas within Iraq. Of these internally displaced people (IDPs), more than 730,000 have fled since the Samarra Shrine bombing of February 2006, which intensified the sectarian violence that is tearing Iraq apart.'

Child Refugees from Iraq Require Targeted Assistance in Host Countries.
09.04.07. Reuters. ' As violence in Iraq continues to add to the largest refugee crisis in the Middle East in half a century, World Vision has launched a combined advocacy and relief effort to assist children and families fleeing to neighboring countries. Some 2 million Iraqis have left their volatile homeland and many are struggling to cope without access to health care, legal employment or education for their children in host countries.'

Refugees Speak of Escape from Hell.
11.04.07. Dahr Jamail, IPS / uruknet. 'Refugees from Iraq scattered around Damascus describe hellish conditions in the country they managed to leave behind.'

Iraq: New humanitarian crisis looms as more than three million Iraqis displaced by war.
16.04.07. Amnesty International Press Release.

UN Refugee Agency Turns Spotlight on Iraqis.
17.04.07. Khody Akhavi,, Electronic Iraq. Nearly four million Iraqis have been displaced in and outside their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, making it the largest exodus of people in the Middle East since the creation of Israel in 1948. The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, on Tuesday will convene a two-day conference in Geneva to address Iraq's deepening humanitarian crisis.

US and UK Bear Special Duty to Aid Refugees.
17.04.07. Statement, Human Rights Watch. Iraq's neighbors are closing off escape routes to Iraqi asylum seekers, just as the international community has begun to respond to the 2 million refugees from the war, Human Rights Watch said in a briefing paper released today. ... The briefing paper focuses on new restrictive measures taken by Jordan and Egypt to prevent more refugees from coming. Syria, which is hosting about 1 million Iraqis, denied visas to Human Rights Watch researchers seeking to document their situation. Saudi Arabia is building a US$7 billion high-tech barrier on its border with Iraq to keep Iraqis out, while Kuwait is categorically rejecting Iraqi asylum seekers.

HUMAN RIGHTS IN IRAQ

War Crimes Committed by the United States in Iraq and Mechanisms for Accountability
10.10.06. Report, Consumers for Peace. This report was prepared by Consumers for Peace.org with the advice of Karen Parker, noted lawyer in human rights and humanitarian law. Ms. Parker is President of the San Francisco-based Association of Humanitarian Lawyers www.humanlaw.org) and Chief Delegate to the United Nations for the Los Angeles-based International Educational Development/Humanitarian Law Project (IED/AHL), an accredited non-governmental organization on the U.N. Secretary-General’s list.
See also http://informationclearinghouse.info/article15261.htm

Routine Practices of Torture by US Forces in Iraq: Testimony of Abbas Z. Abid to the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission
23.02.07. Global Research.ca.

Rape Cases emerge From the Shadows
01.03.07. Dahr Jamail. Reports of the gang-rape of 20-year-old Sabrine al-Janabi by three policemen has set off new demands for justice from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government.

Iraq: An ever-worsening crisis.
11.04.07. International Red Cross (ICRC) news. In a report issued today in Geneva, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) expresses alarm about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Iraq and calls for urgent action to better protect civilians against the continuing violence.

FULL ICRC REPORT. IRAQ: CIVILIANS WITHOUT PROTECTION.

Outrage over Imminent Execution of Iraqi Women
02.03.07. Dahr Jamail. Three young women accused of joining the Iraqi insurgency movement and engaging in "terrorism" have been sentenced to death, provoking protest from rights organisations fearing that this could be the start of more executions of women in post-Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

DEATH IN IRAQ

REPORTS

The Human Cost of the War in Iraq: A Mortality Study, 2002-2006
09.10.06. Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland; School of Medicine, Al Mustansiriya University, Baghdad, Iraq; in cooperation with the Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. See also related Appendix

ACLU Releases Files on Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq
12.04.07. ACLU. Americans Have a Right to Unfiltered Information About the Human Costs of War, ACLU Says. NEW YORK - The American Civil Liberties Union today made public hundreds of claims for damages by family members of civilians killed or injured by Coalition Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ACLU received the records in response to a Freedom of Information Act request it filed in June 2006.
IRAQ: Violence distressing mental state of population.
31.01.07. Irin. Bullets and bombs are killing thousands of civilians every month in Iraq while the psychological impact of the ongoing violence is affecting the mental health of millions and is a major cause for concern for future generations, psychologists say. See Guardian headlines: here.

ARTICLES

Almost 2,000 bodies taken to Baghdad morgue (July).
09.08.06. Reuters.

U.S. count of Baghdad deaths excludes car bombs, mortar attacks
08.09.06. M Brunswick / Z. Obeid, McClatchy.

4,000 Iraq Police Killed in Past 2 Years
06.10.06. AP / Forbes.

Medics Beg For Help As Iraqis Die Needlessly
20.10.06. J. Laurance, Independent. Medical facts for Iraq.

Another US crime in Ashaqi Photographic evidence
08.12.06. Roads to Iraq, uruknet.

For hanging of Saddam Hussein, see ‘Updates, Index on US Bases, Baghdad

Unacceptable death toll in Iraq, say Americans
28.02.07. Angus Reid. 77% of respondents believe the number of U.S. military casualties and Iraqi civilian casualties has been unacceptable.

Occupation killed a family of seven members in Iraq
25.02.07. Roads to Iraq. - Residents in Aana city in Anbar-province reported that US occupation forces destroyed the Communication and Post Center building. ... An eyewitness said that US soldiers put explosives in the building and destroy it, no one injured in the process but part of the city hospital which is close to the building was damaged.

- Reported on Qudspress, an Iraqi ambulance man, reported that US military killed a family of seven people with their taxi driver, in their way to leave Iraq for Jordan. ... The eyewitness Ahmed Khalaf Aljoaani said: American forces opened fire on the car "GMC" with a family in it, a father, the mother and five children and the taxi driver in their way to Jordan to escape the deteriorating situation, all killed. The American forces blocked the area of the incident, which was on the international highway, near Al-Qaim city for an hour, re-opening after the removal of the bodies, and prevented two photo-journalists from photographing the accident.

Another Casualty: Coverage of the Iraq War
24.03.07. Dahr Jamail. 'Iraq is the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. Along with names and dates, the Brussels Tribunal has listed the circumstances under which Iraqi media personnel have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. This extremely credible report cites 195 as dead. If non-Iraqi media representatives are included, the figure goes beyond 200. Both figures are well in excess of the media fatalities suffered in Vietnam or during World War II"

(from Foreign Policy in Focus ). 'The primary reason why reporting from Iraq is dangerous for all journalists is the horrific security situation. Iraqi journalists reporting from the streets are in perpetual danger. If any of the countless militias does not want a certain story made public, it will make sure that the journalist has filed his or her last story. Not to mention the scores of reporter deaths which have been the combined handiwork of the Iraqi government, occupation forces and/or criminal gangs. . Despite President Bush’s assertion that life in Iraq is improving, a senior Iraqi journalist was found dead in the capital on March 3, 2007. On the same day the body of the managing editor of Baghdad’s al-Safir newspaper, Jamal al-Zubaidi, was found shot in the head.'

Counting the cost
27.03.07. R. Horton, Guardian. Richard Horton. It's time we held our leaders to account for the 650,000 Iraqi dead. 'Our collective failure has been to take our political leaders at their word. This week, the BBC reported that the government's own scientists advised ministers that the Johns Hopkins study on Iraq civilian mortality was accurate and reliable. This paper was published in the Lancet last October. It estimated that 650,000 Iraqi civilians had died since the American- and British-led invasion in March 2003.'

Fallujah Fears a 'Genocidal Strategy'
30.03.07. Ali al-Fadhily, Dahr Jamail website, Interpress. Iraqis in the volatile al-Anbar province west of Baghdad are reporting regular killings carried out by U.S. forces that many believe are part of a 'genocidal' strategy.

US compensation files for Iraqi, Afghan civilian deaths released under FOIA
12.04.07. The Jurist. A searchable database documenting civilian casualties. There are 479 files from Iraq and 17 from Afghanistan. 'While some claims were denied because the incidents arose from enemy action or occurred during combat situations, other incidents resulted in cash payments. When the military admits fault, the payments are labeled as "compensation." "Condolence" payments, which the military offers as expressions of sympathy, can be awarded without military admission of fault and are capped at $2500.'

Iraq: US Data on Civilian Casualties Raises Serious Concerns
12.04.07. Human Rights Watch. US government documents made public by court order raise serious concerns about the number of civilian casualties caused by American soldiers and contractors in Iraq and the standards under which it pays compensation to Iraqi victims, Human Rights Watch said today. The records, which document compensation claims made by the families of Iraqis killed by US troops, were revealed today by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The assassination of two professors from Mosul University
04.07. Al mosul. Another wave of assassination of Academics in Mosul. Dr Talal Al-Jalili and Dr Jaffer. For further information on academic deaths, see The Brussels Tribunal website See thoughtful article by Joshua Holland, Violence like that at Virginia Tech is commonplace in Iraq's universities

+

MEANWHILE: THE US/UK ARE ON ANOTHER PLANET
New York dinner raises $18m. for IDF (Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces). Bizarre and obscene?

One Picture Sits Over Differing Surveys.
26.03.07. Ali al-Fadhily, Inter Press Service. 'The Sunday Times of London published the results of a survey Mar. 18 carried out by the British firm Opinion Research Business that claimed that most Iraqis prefer life under the new government to life under Saddam Hussein.' Who paid for this “survey”?

RESISTANCE IN IRAQ

The Iraqi resistance only exists to end the occupation.
12.04.07. Haifa Zangana. 'It is important to recognise that the resistance was born not only of ideological, religious and patriotic convictions, but also as a response to the reality of the brutal actions of the occupation and its administration. It is a response to arbitrary break-ins, humiliating searches, arrests, detention and torture. According to the Red Cross, "the number of people arrested or interned by the multinational forces has increased by 40% since early 2006. The number of people held by the Iraqi authorities has also increased significantly ... Many of the security detainees are women who have been subjected to abuse and rape and who are often arrested as a means to force male relatives to confess to crimes they have not committed. According to the Iraqi MP Mohamed al-Dainey, there are 65 documented cases of women's rape in occupation detention centres in 2006. Four women currently face execution - the death penalty for women was outlawed in Iraq from 1965 until 2004 - for allegedly killing security force members. These are accusations they deny and Amnesty International has challenged. . There is only one solution to this disaster, and that is for the US and Britain to accept that the Iraqi resistance is fighting to end the occupation.’

Sadr's Rising Star to Eclipse Bush's Surge? .
17.04.07. Electronic Iraq writes: "The prospect of Sadr's appeal extending to a section of the
Sunni community, with the tacit support of grand ayatollah Ali Sistani, is the nightmare scenario that the Bush
administration most dreads. Yet it may come to pass." SUPERB MUST READ ARTICLE by Dilip Hiro. 'This indeed was the case with the demonstration on April 9 in Najaf. Over a million Iraqis, holding aloft thousands of national flags, marched, chanting, "Yes, yes, Iraq/No, no, America" and "No, no, American/Leave, leave occupier." Both the size of the demonstration and its composition were unprecedented. "There are people here from all different parties and sects," Hadhim al-Araji, Sadr's representative in Baghdad's Kadhimiya district, told reporters. "We are all carrying the national flag, a symbol of unity. And we are all united in calling for the withdrawal of the Americans."... Crucially, the mammoth demonstration reflected the view prevalent among Iraqi lawmakers. Last autumn, 170 of them in a 275-member Parliament, signed a motion, demanding to know the date of a future American withdrawal.' The demonstrators arrived from all over the country in response to a call by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric, to demand an end to foreign occupation on the fourth anniversary of the end of Baathist rule in Baghdad.

Sadr raises pressure for US to withdraw
17.04.07. Damien McElroy, The Telegraph. The United States faced a fresh challenge to its presence in Iraq yesterday when supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr's radical Shia Muslim movement quit the Baghdad government to demand a deadline for withdrawal of its troops.

VIDEOS

Video. U.S. soldiers shooting Iraqi civilians (23.03.07) 2 min.

Video. US soldiers destroyed civilians houses in Baghdad (25.03.07, Roads to Iraq / uruknet)...

Expat film maker charts Baghdad's dying past.
03.04.07. reuters.

Video. Je m'appelle Baghdad

Video. US_Soldiers_Run_an_Iraqi_Off_the_Road. It would probably be nice to check on the guy that you just caused to roll his truck. To see if he's, you know, dead or something.

Unspeakable Grief and Horror.
Thewe. Photos and stories.

+

Sarah Meyer is a researcher living in the U.K.

The url to Index on Iraq: A Journey in Hell is: http://indexresearch.blogspot.com/2007/04/index-on-iraq-journey-in-hell.html
A short url is: http://tinyurl.com/2g6x7d

This blog will also appear on The BRussels Tribunal website .

Other blogs about Iraq by Sarah Meyer

US Bases in Iraq. Part I: Baghdad

US/UK Bases in Iraq. Part II. The South: Falcon-al-Sarq, Tallil, Shaibah

Iraqs US/UK Permanent Bases: Intentional Obfuscation

Iraq: The Occupation is the Disease

Iraq: Assassination of Academics: The Jalili Report

Prisons and Torture in Iraq

Victims of Violence
07.04.06. (Updated regularly) S. Meyer, Index Research. The results of ‘post-traumatic-stress on soldiers

Iraq: Security Companies and Training Camps

Totalitarianism and Obedience
13.02.07. Sarah Meyer, Index Research.

+

Tags: Index Research, Iraq, Iraq Health, Iraq Cities, Refugees, Human Rights, Death in Iraq,

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

The Zionist Project in Palestine

Saturday, April 14, 2007

When a "Jewish majority" was impossible to achieve based on Jewish immigration and natural growth, Zionists had concluded that forcible "population transfer" (Ethnic Cleansing) was the only solution to what they referred to as the "Arab Problem." To excuse the "Jewish state" from any WAR CRIMES perpetrated against the Palestinian people (specially the ones committed during the 1948 war), Zionists have concocted a myth that the Palestinian people had willingly left their homes, farms, and businesses, and as a result they have forfeited their right to return.

BASED On Declassified Israeli Documents & Personal Diaries

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Zionist Project in Palestine: Colonial Settlement, Land Robbery and Ethnic Cleansing

Nizar Sakhnini, 7 October 2005

About 8,000 Jews were living in Palestine before 1882. Creation of a “Jewish State” in such a small country with such a small Jewish community, which owned virtually no land to settle on, was practically impossible. Consequently, building an exclusive Jewish State in Palestine implied bringing Jews from the four corners of the world, acquisition of the land and ethnically cleansing it from its indigenous Arab population.


COLONIAL SETTLEMENT:

Hovevei Zion, the precursor of the Zionist Organization, sponsored the first wave of pioneer settlers, which started in 1882 and ended in 1903. About 35,000 immigrants arrived in Palestine within this wave. Almost half of them left within several years of their arrival.

Eliezer Ben Yehuda, a fanatical Zionist, was one of the settlers of the first wave. When his ship arrived in Jaffa in 1882, he found himself watching the Arab passengers on board and suddenly he realized that they were far more at home in the “Promised Land” than he was. Eventually he found that he could not swallow his doubts so he left “Eretz Yisrael” and became a Territorialist, believing that the Jews should seek a country in a land other than Palestine. (Karen Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact on Today’s World. Macmillan, London, 1988, pp. 60-64)

The second wave started in 1904 and ended with the break of WWI in 1914. It brought about 40,000 immigrants to Palestine. As with the first wave, nearly half of them left the country in later years.

According to Bar-Zohar, when the first immigrants from the Russian Zionist societies came to Palestine “it was no land flowing with milk and honey that greeted them… The hard labor, malaria, and hunger claimed many victims. Of those who survived, many decided to leave that accursed land on the first available ship. Later, Ben-Gurion was to contend that of every ten immigrants who arrived with the Second Aliyah, nine later left the country”. (Michael Bar-Zohar, Ben-Gurion: A Biography. New York: Delacorte Press, 1977, pp. 13-14)

This 2nd wave included a number of Socialist Zionists. Prominent among the new Socialist Zionist immigrants was Ben Gurion. Another socialist Zionist, Yitzhak Ben Zvi (2nd President of the State of Israel) arrived in Palestine within this wave as well.

The 3rd wave, which started in 1919 and ended in 1923, brought another 40,000 settlers. As conditions improved under the British Mandate in Palestine, few of them returned to their countries of origin.

The 4th wave, 1924 – 1929, brought 82,000 immigrants of who 23,000 left in later years.

In order to boost Jewish immigration to Palestine, the Zionist Organization entered into negotiations with the Nazis to facilitate emigration of German Jews. As a result of these negotiations, an agreement was signed, which allowed tens of thousands of German Jews to immigrate to Palestine. The 5th wave of Jewish immigrants, which took place during the period 1929-1939, brought 250,000 settlers and the 6th brought another 150,000 who arrived in Palestine between 1939 and 1948. (For a detailed discussion of the Transfer Agreement, see: Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Untold Story of the Secret Pact Between the Third Reich & Jewish Palestine. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co. London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1984)

The total number of Jews in Palestine in 1946 was 608,225 and the total land owned by them was 1,585,365 donums, which represented less than 7% of the area of Palestine. (Walid Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest, Appendix I, pp.841-843)

The ethnic cleansing operations perpetrated during the 1948 war and the Absentees Law as well as the Law of Return issued in 1950 facilitated confiscation of Arab homes and lands to build settlements for more colonial settlers who flooded Palestine following the creation of Israel.

LAND ROBBERY:

A pre-meditated and pre-planned campaign of land theft started shortly following the ethnic operations of 1948. A law was passed in the Israeli Knesset in 1950, the “Absentees Property Law ”. According to this law, any body that was not present directly before, during or after the war was, regardless of the reason, defined as “absentee” and his land as surrendered. Thus it was confiscated.

About 20 percent of the Palestinians in Israel were internally displaced in the 1948 war – in other words, while remaining in Israel, have been prevented from returning to their homes and villages. These displaced persons were considered as “absentees” and became refugees in their own country while their lands were confiscated.

More significantly was the fact that Palestinian Arabs who were driven out or obliged to leave during the war in 1948 were not allowed to return to their homes and lands. Those who tried to return were considered “infiltrators” and were shot to death by Unit 101 of the IDF, a company of paratroopers, which was formed under the command of Ariel Sharon.

Another law, “The Land Requisition Law”, was passed in 1953 to “legitimize” the expropriation of Arab lands. According to this law acts of theft and robbery of land were legal.

Moshe Smilansky, one of the pilgrim fathers of Zionism, published an article stating that: “When we came back to our country after having been evicted two thousand years ago, we called ourselves ‘daring’ and we rightly complained before the whole world that the gates of the country were shut. And now when they [Arab refugees] dared to return to their country where they lived for one thousand years before they were evicted or fled, they are called ‘infiltrees’ and shot in cold blood. Where are, Jews? Why do we not at least, with a generous hand, pay compensation to these miserable people? Where to take the money from? But we build palaces...instead of paying a debt that cries unto us from earth and heaven... And do we sin only against the refugees? Do we not treat the Arabs who remain with us as second-class citizens? Did a single Jewish farmer raise his hand in the parliament in opposition to a law that deprived Arab peasants of their land? How does sit solitary, in the city of Jerusalem, the Jewish conscience!” (From Haven to Conquest, p. 834)

ETHNIC CLEANSING:

Subjecting Palestinian Arabs to ethnic cleansing was an integral part of the implicit and explicit political Zionist thought and parlance all along.

In his diaries, Herzl made it clear that “the existing landed property was to be gently expropriated, any subsequent resale to the original owners was prohibited, and all immovables had to remain in exclusively Jewish hands. The poor population was to be worked across the frontier ‘unbemerkt’ (surreptitiously)… This population was to be refused all employment in the land of its birth… In 1901, the 5th Zionist Congress founded the Jewish National Fund. According to the by-laws of the JNF, acquired land became inalienable Jewish property and could no longer be sold or leased to non-Jews…” (Documented article published by L.M.C. Van Der Hoeven Leonhard in Libertas, (Holland) Lustrum, number 1960, pp. 1-5, reproduced in Walid Khalidi, From Haven to Conquest, pp. 115-124. See also, Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1999, pp. 21-22)

David Ben-Gurion believed that the Zionists had to exert pressure to force the British to act. But if necessary, he wrote in his diary, “We must ourselves prepare to carry out the removal of the Palestinians”. (Michael Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe, p. 4, citing Ben-Gurion's Diary - published in Hebrew - vol. IV, p. 299)

In a report to the Jewish Agency Executive on 12 June 1938, Ben-Gurion stated “I am for a compulsory transfer; I don't see anything immoral in it...” (Simha Flapan, Zionism and the Palestinians, London: Croom Helm, 1979, p. 263)

Encouraged by the possibility of establishing a Jewish state as a result of the partition plan proposed by the Peel Commission in its report published in July 1937, a “Population Transfer Committee” was appointed by the Jewish Agency to come up with plans to rid the Jewish State of its Palestinian Arabs. Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Fund, who served on the Population Transfer Committee, developed a plan for this purpose. In his report, Weitz wrote that the transfer of the Arab population from the Jewish areas “does not serve only one aim - to diminish the Arab population. It also serves a second purpose by no means less important, which is to evacuate land now cultivated by Arabs and thus release it for Jewish settlement.” (Michael Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe, p. 4, citing CZA, Minutes of the Population Transfer Committee, 22 Nov., 1937)

The Peel Commission’s partition plan, which proposed to divide the country between the “Jewish colonists and the indigenous Arab population” was discussed in the meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive held on 12 June 1938. Partition as proposed by the Peel Commission would leave over 200,000 Arabs in the proposed “Jewish State”. The Jewish Agency Executive was discussing the problem of how best to get rid of these Arabs. The seventy-five year old Zionist leader, Menahem Ussishkin, stated that “There is no hope that this new Jewish State will survive, to say nothing of develop, if the Arabs are as numerous as they are today.” Berl Katznelson of Ben-Gurion’s Mapai party saw only disaster in a Jewish State with a large Arab minority and proposed a development plan to eliminate the Palestinian Arabs. He urged negotiations, with neighboring Arab States that might be persuaded to receive the expellees. (Michael Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe, pp. 1-2, citing CZA, Executive Proceedings, 12 June 1938)

Other “Transfer Committees” were appointed during the 1948 war. An unofficial “self-appointed” committee, headed by Joseph Weitz, started its activities as of the end of March 1948. After the creation of the state of Israel the Provisional Government appointed an official committee the recommendations of which were submitted to Ben-Gurion in due course and were being implemented under the cover of war.

One of the key questions from June 1967 onwards was not whether Israel should maintain a presence in the newly acquired territories, but how it could be maintained without adding over one million Palestinians to the Arab minority of Israel. The old Zionist dilemma of non-Jews in a Jewish state had to be resolved. Against this background of Zionist expansionism, transfer ideas were revived in public debates, in popular songs, in articles in the Hebrew press and, most importantly, in cabinet discussions and government schemes and policies. (Nur Masalha, A Land Without a People: Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians 1949 - 96. London: Faber and Faber ltd., 1997, pp. 60 - 61)

New proposals for ethnic cleansing were outlined in an article entitled “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s”, which appeared in the World Zionist Organization's periodical Kivunim in February 1982. The article was written by Oded Yinon, a journalist and analyst of Middle Eastern affairs and former senior Foreign Ministry official.

In his article, Yinon called for Israel to bring about the dissolution and fragmentation of the Arab states into a mosaic of ethnic groupings. He called for a policy of Israel that aims at bringing about “the dissolution of Jordan; the termination of the problem of the [occupied] territories densely populated with Arabs west of the [River] Jordan; and emigration from the territories, and economic-demographic freeze in them.” He added, “we have to be active in order to encourage this change speedily, in the nearest time”.

Yinon believed, like many advocates of transfer in Israel, that “Israel has made a strategic mistake in not taking measures [of mass expulsion] towards the Arab population in the new territories during and shortly after the [1967] war.... Such a line would have saved us the bitter and dangerous conflict ever since which we could have already then terminated by giving Jordan to the Palestinians.”

Moreover, Yinon suggested to encompass the whole Arab world, including the imposition of a Pax Israela on, and the determination of the destiny of, Arab societies: re invading Sinai and “breaking Egypt territorially into separate geographical districts.” As for the Arab East: “...the total disintegration of Lebanon into five regional, localized governments as the precedent for the entire Arab world...the dissolution of Syria, and later Iraq, into districts of ethnic and religious minorities....” (Ibid, pp. 196 - 198, citing Oded Yinon, A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s, [Hebrew], Kivunim, Jerusalem, No. 14, February 1982, pp. 53 - 58)

Failure of the different efforts to “transfer” all the Palestinians did not mean that such efforts were abandoned. Benjamin Netanyahu told Bar-Ilan University students on 16 November 1989 that the government had failed to exploit internationally favorable situations, to carry out “large-scale” expulsions at a time when “the damage [to Israel's public relations] would have been relatively small...” Netanyahu was referring to the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989 when world attention and the media were focused on China. He added, “I still believe that there are opportunities to expel many people.” Netanyahu later denied making the remarks but the Jerusalem Post presented a tape recording of his speech. (Ibid, p. 190, citing The Jerusalem Post, 19 November, 1989; Michael Palumbo, Imperial Israel: The History of the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, London: Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd., 1990 pp. 302 - 303)

After decades of Zionist efforts, Arab “demographic threat” was still haunting Israel. A conference was held on 19-20 December 2000 at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya to deal with the issue. The conference was the first of what became a series of annual conferences dealing with the strength and security of Israel. A major part of the recommendations was related with the ‘demographic threat’ posed by the Arab citizens of Israel. (For a detailed account on the conference and its recommendations see: The Herzliya Conference on the Balance of National Strength and Security in Israel, Journal of Palestine Studies, # 121, Volume XXXI, Number 1, Autumn 2001, pp. 50-61)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Israel Land Laws (Preliminary List)

1. 1943 Land (Acquisition for Public Purposes) Ordinance. Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 34, p. 190.
2. 1945 British Mandate Defense (Emergency Regulations). The Palestine Gazette 1442, no. 2 (27 Sept. 1945): 1058.
3. 1948 Abandoned Areas Ordinance, Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 1, Ordinances, 5708 (1948), p. 25-26.
4. 1948 Emergency Regulations Concerning Absentee Property, Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 1, Ordinances, 5708 (1948), p. 8.
5. 1949 Emergency Regulations (Security Zones), Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 3, 5079 (1949), p. 56.
6. 1949 Emergency Regulations (Cultivation of Waste [Uncultivated] Lands), Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 2, 5709 (1948/49), pp. 71-77.
7. 1949 Emergency Law Requisition (Regulations) Law, Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 4, 5710 (1949/50), p. 3.
8. 1950 Absentees’ Property Law, Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 4, Ordinances, 5710 (1949/50), pp. 68-82.
9. 1950 Development Authority (Transfer of Property) Law, Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 4, Ordinances, 5710 (1949/50), p. 151.
10. 1951 State Property Law, Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 5, p. 45.
11. Amendment to the Emergency Land Requisition (Regulations) Law of 1949.
Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 6, 5712 (1951-1952), p. 103.
12. 1953 Land Acquisition (Validation of Acts and Compensation) Law, Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 7, 5713 (1952/53), pp. 43-45.
13. Absentees’ Property (Amendment) Law, 5716 (1956), Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 10, 5716 (1955-56), p. 31.
14. Amendment to the Emergency Land Requisition (Regulations) Law of 1949. Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 9, 5715 (1954-55), p. 109.
15. 1958 Prescription Law (No. 38), Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 12 (1958), pp. 129-33.
16. 1965 Absentees’ Property (Amendment No. 3) (Release and Use of Endowment Property) Law, Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 19 (1953), p. 55.
17. Israel Land Law 1969. Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 23, p. 283.
18. 1970 Legal and Administrative Matters (Regulation) Law (Consolidated Version), Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 27 (1973), p. 176.
19. 1976 Absentees’ Property (Compensation) (Amendment) Law, Laws of the State of Israel, (1976).
20. Land Acquisition (Validation of Acts and Compensation) Law, 7 Laws of the State of Israel, 5713 (1952-1953), pp. 43-45.
21. The Negev Land Acquisition (Peace Treaty with Egypt) Law 1980, Laws of the State of Israel, Vol. 34, p. 1990.