[It's actually Jews who are prevented from praying, but who cares about that?]

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984/themes.html

George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four
Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Dangers of Totalitarianism

1984 is a political novel written with the purpose of warning readers in the West of the dangers of totalitarian government.

Having witnessed firsthand the horrific lengths to which totalitarian governments in Spain and Russia would go in order to sustain and increase their power, Orwell designed 1984 to sound the alarm in Western nations still unsure about how to approach the rise of communism. In 1949, the Cold War had not yet escalated, many American intellectuals supported communism, and the state of diplomacy between democratic and communist nations was highly ambiguous.

In the American press, the Soviet Union was often portrayed as a great moral experiment. Orwell, however, was deeply disturbed by the widespread cruelties and oppressions he observed in communist countries, and seems to have been particularly concerned by the role of technology in enabling oppressive governments to monitor and control their citizens.

In 1984, Orwell portrays the perfect totalitarian society, the most extreme realization imaginable of a modern-day government with absolute power. The title of the novel was meant to indicate to its readers in 1949 that the story represented a real possibility for the near future: if totalitarianism were not opposed, the title suggested, some variation of the world described in the novel could become a reality in only thirty-five years.

Orwell portrays a state in which government monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought is against the law. As the novel progresses, the timidly rebellious Winston Smith sets out to challenge the limits of the Party’s power, only to discover that its ability to control and enslave its subjects dwarfs even his most paranoid conceptions of its reach.

As the reader comes to understand through Winston’s eyes, The Party uses a number of techniques to control its citizens, each of which is an important theme of its own in the novel. These include:

Psychological Manipulation

The Party barrages its subjects with psychological stimuli designed to overwhelm the mind’s capacity for independent thought. The giant telescreen in every citizen’s room blasts a constant stream of propaganda designed to make the failures and shortcomings of the Party appear to be triumphant successes. The telescreens also monitor behavior—everywhere they go, citizens are continuously reminded, especially by means of the omnipresent signs reading “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU,” that the authorities are scrutinizing them.

The Party undermines family structure by inducting children into an organization called the Junior Spies, which brainwashes and encourages them to spy on their parents and report any instance of disloyalty to the Party.

The Party also forces individuals to suppress their sexual desires, treating sex as merely a procreative duty whose end is the creation of new Party members. The Party then channels people’s pent-up frustration and emotion into intense, ferocious displays of hatred against the Party’s political enemies. Many of these enemies have been invented by the Party expressly for this purpose.

Physical Control

In addition to manipulating their minds, the Party also controls the bodies of its subjects. The Party constantly watches for any sign of disloyalty, to the point that, as Winston observes, even a tiny facial twitch could lead to an arrest. A person’s own nervous system becomes his greatest enemy.

The Party forces its members to undergo mass morning exercises called the Physical Jerks, and then to work long, grueling days at government agencies, keeping people in a general state of exhaustion.

Anyone who does manage to defy the Party is punished and “reeducated” through systematic and brutal torture. After being subjected to weeks of this intense treatment, Winston himself comes to the conclusion that nothing is more powerful than physical pain—no emotional loyalty or moral conviction can overcome it.

By conditioning the minds of their victims with physical torture, the Party is able to control reality, convincing its subjects that 2 + 2 = 5.

Control of Information and History

The Party controls every source of information, managing and rewriting the content of all newspapers and histories for its own ends. The Party does not allow individuals to keep records of their past, such as photographs or documents. As a result, memories become fuzzy and unreliable, and citizens become perfectly willing to believe whatever the Party tells them.

By controlling the present, the Party is able to manipulate the past. And in controlling the past, the Party can justify all of its actions in the present.

Technology

By means of telescreens and hidden microphones across the city, the Party is able to monitor its members almost all of the time. Additionally, the Party employs complicated mechanisms (1984 was written in the era before computers) to exert large-scale control on economic production and sources of information, and fearsome machinery to inflict torture upon those it deems enemies.

1984 reveals that technology, which is generally perceived as working toward moral good, can also facilitate the most diabolical evil.

Language as Mind Control

One of Orwell’s most important messages in 1984 is that language is of central importance to human thought because it structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing.

If control of language were centralized in a political agency, Orwell proposes, such an agency could possibly alter the very structure of language to make it impossible to even conceive of disobedient or rebellious thoughts, because there would be no words with which to think them.

This idea manifests itself in the language of Newspeak, which the Party has introduced to replace English. The Party is constantly refining and perfecting Newspeak, with the ultimate goal that no one will be capable of conceptualizing anything that might question the Party’s absolute power.

Interestingly, many of Orwell’s ideas about language as a controlling force have been modified by writers and critics seeking to deal with the legacy of colonialism.

During colonial times, foreign powers took political and military control of distant regions and, as a part of their occupation, instituted their own language as the language of government and business.

Postcolonial writers often analyze or redress the damage done to local populations by the loss of language and the attendant loss of culture and historical connection.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Doublethink

The idea of “doublethink” emerges as an important consequence of the Party’s massive campaign of large-scale psychological manipulation. Simply put, doublethink is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s mind at the same time.

As the Party’s mind-control techniques break down an individual’s capacity for independent thought, it becomes possible for that individual to believe anything that the Party tells them, even while possessing information that runs counter to what they are being told.

At the Hate Week rally, for instance, the Party shifts its diplomatic allegiance, so the nation it has been at war with suddenly becomes its ally, and its former ally becomes its new enemy. When the Party speaker suddenly changes the nation he refers to as an enemy in the middle of his speech, the crowd accepts his words immediately, and is ashamed to find that it has made the wrong signs for the event.

In the same way, people are able to accept the Party ministries’ names, though they contradict their functions: the Ministry of Plenty oversees economic shortages, the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth conducts propaganda and historical revisionism, and the Ministry of Love is the center of the Party’s operations of torture and punishment.

Urban Decay

Urban decay proves a pervasive motif in 1984. The London that Winston Smith calls home is a dilapidated, rundown city in which buildings are crumbling, conveniences such as elevators never work, and necessities such as electricity and plumbing are extremely unreliable.

Though Orwell never discusses the theme openly, it is clear that the shoddy disintegration of London, just like the widespread hunger and poverty of its inhabitants, is due to the Party’s mismanagement and incompetence.

One of the themes of 1984, inspired by the history of twentieth-century communism, is that totalitarian regimes are viciously effective at enhancing their own power and miserably incompetent at providing for their citizens. The grimy urban decay in London is an important visual reminder of this idea, and offers insight into the Party’s priorities through its contrast to the immense technology the Party develops to spy on its citizens.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Big Brother

Throughout London, Winston sees posters showing a man gazing down over the words “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” everywhere he goes. Big Brother is the face of the Party. The citizens are told that he is the leader of the nation and the head of the Party, but Winston can never determine whether or not he actually exists.

In any case, the face of Big Brother symbolizes the Party in its public manifestation; he is a reassurance to most people (the warmth of his name suggests his ability to protect), but he is also an open threat (one cannot escape his gaze).

Big Brother also symbolizes the vagueness with which the higher ranks of the Party present themselves—it is impossible to know who really rules Oceania, what life is like for the rulers, or why they act as they do.

Winston thinks he remembers that Big Brother emerged around 1960, but the Party’s official records date Big Brother’s existence back to 1930, before Winston was even born.

The Glass Paperweight and St. Clement’s Church

By deliberately weakening people’s memories and flooding their minds with propaganda, the Party is able to replace individuals’ memories with its own version of the truth.

It becomes nearly impossible for people to question the Party’s power in the present when they accept what the Party tells them about the past—that the Party arose to protect them from bloated, oppressive capitalists, and that the world was far uglier and harsher before the Party came to power.

Winston vaguely understands this principle. He struggles to recover his own memories and formulate a larger picture of what has happened to the world. Winston buys a paperweight in an antique store in the prole district that comes to symbolize his attempt to reconnect with the past. Symbolically, when the Thought Police arrest Winston at last, the paperweight shatters on the floor.

The old picture of St. Clement’s Church in the room that Winston rents above Mr. Charrington’s shop is another representation of the lost past. Winston associates a song with the picture that ends with the words “Here comes the chopper to chop off your head!” This is an important foreshadow, as it is the telescreen hidden behind the picture that ultimately leads the Thought Police to Winston, symbolizing the Party’s corrupt control of the past.

The Place Where There Is No Darkness

Throughout the novel Winston imagines meeting O’Brien in “the place where there is no darkness.” The words first come to him in a dream, and he ponders them for the rest of the novel.

Eventually, Winston does meet O’Brien in the place where there is no darkness; instead of being the paradise Winston imagined, it is merely a prison cell in which the light is never turned off.

The idea of “the place where there is no darkness” symbolizes Winston’s approach to the future: possibly because of his intense fatalism (he believes that he is doomed no matter what he does), he unwisely allows himself to trust O’Brien, even though inwardly he senses that O’Brien might be a Party operative.

The Telescreens

The omnipresent telescreens are the book’s most visible symbol of the Party’s constant monitoring of its subjects. In their dual capability to blare constant propaganda and observe citizens, the telescreens also symbolize how totalitarian government abuses technology for its own ends instead of exploiting its knowledge to improve civilization.

The Red-Armed Prole Woman

The red-armed prole woman whom Winston hears singing through the window represents Winston’s one legitimate hope for the long-term future: the possibility that the proles will eventually come to recognize their plight and rebel against the Party.

Winston sees the prole woman as a prime example of reproductive virility; he often imagines her giving birth to the future generations that will finally challenge the Party’s authority.

From Professor Hillel Weiss

“Ye shall love truth and peace,” says the prophet.

Peace cannot be based on a lie! There is no truth without peace and no peace without truth. This is written is written in the Bible and accepted in natural law. Truth is based on justice whose role is to save the oppressed from the hand of his oppressor.

The question that we face is: Who is the oppressor and who is the victim? Who is the occupier and who is being deprived? For those who are devoted to what is written in the Bible, the issues are clear and simple.

But for now, let us look at international law, which is binding, and begin with a short survey:

Professor Alan Dershowitz, a Jewish liberal, moderate leftist, and lover of Israel, one of the top legal experts in the United States, has again recently condemned the International Court of Justice at Hague for delivering political decisions.

This is in contrast to the International Criminal Court at the Hague which refused to act as a rubber stamp: It did not recognize Palestine as a state and rejected a series of proposed resolutions that Palestinians submitted against Israel for war crimes, during “Operation Cast Lead”.

Dershowitz levels lethal criticism against the UN, among others, as the leader of the double standard against Israel, and regards it as a corrupt organization that aids and abets terror.

And indeed, after three “Durban Conventions” , after the prostitution of the word ‘racism’, and after accepting Libya in 2003 as a member of the UN Commission on Human Rights, much like in May 2012 -  and now in May 2012, accepting Syria to that same position as a leading member of the Commission on Human Rights and the representative of Asia - every honest person must view the UN as a cynical group whose main concern is to protect terrorism.

It is the main cause of the corruption of the ethics of human rights as formulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations itself, the gift to the world of the French Jew, Rene Cassin.

We have mentioned the Jewish contribution to the struggle against racism and we shall again mention that the Torah of the people of Israel, preceding every other monotheistic religion that purports to supplant it, was the first to claim that “There is one father of us all”, blacks and whites, Arabs, Germans, and Jews, and that father is Adam.

And therefore, if there is a non-racist message in the history of mankind, it is in the Torah of the people of Israel.

The religion of Israel is its national religion - and this and only this element is what defines its identity as a nation – and allows every human being the option to convert to Judaism. To be Jewish is not a matter of race or blood.

It is only barbaric peoples, who rummaged around looking for racial purity, who should rightly be called ‘racists’. For example, the Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas, who has said more than once that in the Palestine he envisages, there is no room for Jews.

In the same interview that Dershowitz gave to the Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon on April 27 , 2012, he says “Western society has a tremendous problem today with international law, which has become in many cases a source of evil and which serves the hardcore left and Islamist right as ammunition against the democratic values of the West (...)”

The hardcore left was never interested in law and justice. Its ideology permits the use of the law for political purposes. In his opinion, “the State of Israel must create for itself an independent corpus of international law that will be reflected in the decisions of its High Court of Justice and will be based on the principles of international law.”

...The law known as “Human Dignity and Freedom” , a Basic Law in the State of Israel, should make it illegal to expel a Jew from his own land, but does not. The entire law was legislated for the “other”. The law was designed for the Arab population but is a dead letter/ a law no longer enforced for the Jews who are known as ‘settlers’. That was what happened with the expulsion of 10,000 Jews from their land which is recognized in international law as the national home of the Jewish people alone, as we shall see shortly.

An American justice provides strong support for our position – a Jew who sits on the Federal Appellate Court, Richard Posner, who wrote a scathing critique of the judicial theory of retired Israeli High Court Justice Aharon Barak. Posner’s critique appeared in an article written on the English edition of Barak’s book Judge in a Democratic Society.

The article was published in the New Republic and in it, Posner attacks Barak in the sharpest language: “Barak establishes a world record for judicial hubris,”(...) He is a legal buccaneer”.  According to Posner, his writing is “to be considered Exhibit A for why American judges should be extremely wary about citing foreign judicial decisions.[…]”

“What Barak created out of whole cloth was a degree of judicial power undreamed of even by our most aggressive Supreme Court justices […]But only in Israel (as far as I know) do judges confer the power of abstract review on themselves, without benefit of a constitutional or legislative provision. One is reminded of Napoleon's taking the crown out of the pope's hands and putting it on his own head.”

Let us return to the central issue: Is a Jew living in Israel in areas that were liberated by the Israeli Army in 1967 indeed a foreign occupier who is violating the Geneva Convention designed to protect human rights, to prevent the theft and dispossession of an occupied people?

And in the Land of Israel under the international law in effect today , is the Jew a foreign occupier of a territory that does not belong to him, but to a state that does not exist and never existed, a state called by the name of Palestine?

In the words of its own heads such as Yassar Arafat, Faisal Husseini, Zuhair Mohsen of the terror organization Al Saika, and even former Knesset member Azmi Bashara - all of it was invented for no other purpose than to be a Trojan horse whose reason for existing is to destroy the state of Israel.

Only a week ago, one of the Hamas leaders from Gaza was photographed imploring Egypt and complaining of the lack of raw materials. He says: We are all brothers. Half of the PA Arab families in Gaza are called al-Masri, meaning from Egypt, and they come from Egypt and the other half from Saudia Arabia. The film may be seen on Youtube.

Dr. Ohana-Arnon, in his article on the origin of the Arab immigrants, says: “Palestinian society is built on a clan or hamula system. The origin of the hamula can be learned from its name: the al-Masri hamula is from Egypt., al-Hindi from India, al-Mugrabi from Algeria, al-Ajami from Iran, al-Turki from Turkey., al-Hawari from Hawara in northern Sudan, now living in Nazareth. Al-Araqi is from Iraq (they settled in the Israeli cities of Tira and Taibeh). Abu-Kask is from Egypt settled (in the inner coastal region) Huran from Mt. Huran – Mt. Druzim south of Damascus, Bushnak from Bosnia (now in Caesarea). Masarwa –from Egypt. Habash from Ethiopia, now in Lod. Barnawi from Borno in Nigeria, now in Jerusalem, Turkeman from the Causcasus.

Not all of the Arabs in the land of Israel are immigrants, but it is foolish to ignore two basic facts: first: that from the late 19th century and until the British mandate, there was a great wave of Arab migration towards Israel, and the second – that in order to create a significant “refugee problem” UNWRA determined in an arbitrary and unprecedented manner that only two years of residence in the country before 1948 is sufficient to define a person as a Palestinian refugee for all of his life, allowing him and his descendants to demand the “right of return.

The world’s enthusiasm for the Palestinian issue does not attest to a sense of justice but to a fervent hatred of Israel. The nations say: “Let us go and destroy them from among the nations, and the name of Israel shall no longer be remembered”. This is the garden-variety brand of anti-Semitism, which must inevitably bounce back to those who launch it, when they will feel remorse and shame. The punishment for nations who try to dispossess the people of Israel from God’s land and take it over is written many times in the Book of Books. I will just refer you to one chapter regarding the nations being judged in the Valley of Jehosaphat, from the Book of Joel, chapter 4:

1 For, behold, in those days, and in that time, when I shall bring back the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem,
2 I will gather all nations, and will bring them down into the valley of Jehoshaphat; and I will enter into judgment with them there for My people and for My heritage Israel, whom they have scattered among the nations, and divided My land.
12 Let the nations be stirred up, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat; for there will I sit to judge all the nations round about.
16 And the LORD shall roar from Zion, and utter His voice from Jerusalem, and the heavens and the earth shall shake; but the LORD will be a refuge unto His people, and a stronghold to the children of Israel.
17 So shall ye know that I am the LORD your God, dwelling in Zion My holy mountain; then shall Jerusalem be holy, and there shall no strangers pass through her any more.

This is the question that confronts us here too. Did the Jews conquer a country which was not theirs and mistreat the original inhabitants? Or perhaps it is exactly the opposite: the Arabs’ continuing conquest of the Land of Israel and now of Europe as well is the topic of the discussion.

The foreign occupation is Arab occupation – and it doesn’t matter if it began in the 7th century. The Ottoman conquest was stopped in Vienna in 1683, the Moslems conquered the Iberian Peninsula in 711 and were expelled from there hundreds of years later in the Reconquista. Rome occupied Israel and destroyed the Holy Temple on the Temple Mount in the year 70, expelling al the Jews from their land.

Everything that has been happening since is a continuation of this conquest and occupation. Each time there has been a new conqueror and occupier until the present day when the true owners of the land are finally returning and putting an end to a 2000 year occupation.

The God of Israel who has a design for human history- the God of the universe keeps an account. An account of every Jew who perished in the Holocaust, as well as in Egypt under the Pharaohs who embedded Jewish infants in bricks.

Wherever they hurt, strangled, and slaughtered Jews, the God who keeps accounts will come and when it pleases Him, He will exact payment. About that, we have no doubts...

Gunter Grass is a friend of the radical left in Israel. Grass likes to cite the influence of Israeli writer Amos Oz on the subject of Israel. The Israeli leftists deny the natural and normal right of self-defense to the State of Israel, like Charles de Gaulle who denied Israel the right to the first shot. No one denies Israel its classic right to be the victim.

Even if Israel were destroyed - God forbid - by Iran, it would not have the moral right to make a second strike, according to the Goldstone Report. Just like the Turkish response to our stopping the flotilla to Gaza, so would be the nations of the world’s reaction to an Israeli victory over Iran. That is a very sick thought.

Professor Alan Dershowitz said in his interview: “First I want to say that those Israelis are not only the greatest enemies of Israel; they are also the most dangerous”. He mentions names and adds: “These are all people who wrap themselves in the Israeli flag just so they can burn it”.

The State of Israel has been radically poisoned by accusations of occupation until it does not notice that it itself has been occupied by groups of assimilated or kowtowing Jews.

That is not to mention the anarchists who criticize us every day of the year organized and funded by authorities who turn a blind eye and abandon the army to their provocations. Israel has wittingly and unwittingly opened its gates wide to all that seek her destruction. And that is not just a metaphor. Other examples are encouraging the illegal African immigrants who come to Israel by the thousands, flooding the country

But look at yourselves in Europe today. How did you get to where you are? Was it those ideologies that deny nationalism under the guise of multiculturalism, inventing the obligation to identify with the legitimacy of the enemy’s narrative and obliterating truth as a basic tool of human existence.

Have they not destroyed morality, law, science, and the economy?

Have they not destroyed the culture of the West?

The radical left argues that nationalism, all nationalism, is the religion of the murderers. Now all over Europe we are hearing more and more voices of regret over the multicultural tactic which means Europe surrendering without firing a shot. That is the main reason that the Right is winning elections in European countries such as France, and the reason that I was invited here.

But those sleeping European leaders continue, they still continue to encourage the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the enormous resources they possess. They invest hundreds of billions into a black hole. As long as this contradiction exits, Europe will continue to turn into Eurabia.

Cosmopolitan perceptions open the doors of Europe to millions of work immigrants and give them the rights of citizens. Very soon there will be no Europe, as your host city proves. Why is the false claim that “Islam is shaking off the post-colonial conquest in Europe” not accepted in Europe, and why is it applied to Israel as an occupying nation? What is this double standard of morality?

Indeed, one of the examples of international law in the view of universal justice is found in the Bible. Certainly an enlightened individual would ask himself what is the validity of the Bible. What is the validity of God? Has he left His job or changed the rules and forgot to inform us?

Is the Bible the last refuge of the scoundrel? Church heads in the Middle East as well as extreme rightwing Islamists maintain that the Jews of today have no connection to the nation mentioned in the Bible! And indeed these things are examined every day.

The very fact that there are six million Jews in the Land of Israel today organized into a state and not like ashes that were spewed out at Auschwitz and scattered over the continent is perhaps proof that God’s power is greater than the power of all the enemies of Israel from within and from without. If so, who is right? Does justice represent only the entity by whose hand it is suppressed? Does it represent only might and woe to the vanquished?

In 1947 the Arabs refused the UN General Assembly proposal to partition the Land of Israel into two states. A recommendation which was not accepted as a decision. It was refused and the seven Arab countries launched a war against the State of Israel on its first day of existence. Israel had accepted the recommendation to partition. The Arabs were defeated in battle as usual.

But Jordan illegally occupied the territory that was designated for an Arab state that didn’t exist and never had. This occupation was recognized only by Pakistan and Great Britain. When Jordan was defeated in 1967, and expelled from the territory by the State of Israel, the territory reverted to its original owners both according to the Bible and to positivist international law of today.

What is interesting here is international law and Israel did restore to itself the territory that Britain had received as a mandate in 1920 from the League of Nations at the San Remo Conference, a mandate for a Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel. Without infringing upon the personal rights and religious rights of the non-Jewish inhabitants of the land, namely the Arabs. That is the legal status to this day.

Appearing on the website of the Land of Israel loyalists is a document, written by Yoel Lerner, a student of the legal expert Howard Grief together with Gedalia Glazar, that shows the continuity of international law and conventions on this subject.

The one who conquers territory from a conqueror wins that area. We Jews say that what is called potentially Palestine under the partition proposal known as resolution 181 was purified through Abdullah father of Hussein and with the defeat of his son , and his willing surrender of the West Bank in 1988. And the Peace Agreement between Israel and Jordan 1994, according to which Jordan gave up all her claims in the west bank.

We are not occupiers in our own homeland. That was also said by Netanyahu in his speech to both Houses of Congress last year. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs says the same thing, thanks to the organization that we have established “the Land of Israel Loyalists” developed by legal scholars Howard Grief, Eliav Shochetman, and Talya Einhorn.

However, because Israel law has been occupied by the left, and for other psycho-political reasons, Israel has generally refrained from using these arguments because it feels that rights which are based on the Bible are not suited to an enlightened state.

The State of Israel’s obsessive pursuit of peace, peace until the last Jew, is a dangerous compulsion that inflames the hatred of our enemies and intensifies all future war.

At times it seems that for an unattainable peace, Israel is prepared to risk the lives of its citizens and to hand over its God-given land to its enemies, not only as a recognition of the value of peace but as a desire for legitimacy which it seeks from the nations of the world, especially from its neighbors. King David, the poet of the psalms, related to this in his psalm about neighbors and peace, for example in Psalm 120:

1 A Song of Ascents.
In my distress I called unto the LORD, and He answered me.
2 O LORD, deliver my soul from lying lips, from a deceitful tongue.
3 What shall be given unto thee, and what shall be done more unto thee, thou deceitful tongue?
4 Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of broom.
5 Woe is me, that I sojourn with Meshech, that I dwell beside the tents of Kedar!
6 My soul hath full long had her dwelling with him that hates peace.
7 I am all peace; but when I speak, they are for war.

That is why the State of Israel has been making a mistake ever since it was established when it makes so-called peace its top priority as an attainable goal, instead of decisively defeating the enemy that sees peace as only a strategy to improve their ability to destroy us.

Islam is rife with concepts involving deception such as Hudna and Tahadia which are proof of Mohammed betraying the tribe of Qurayish and his treachery against the tribes of Jews at Khayber as a symbol of his ethics in dealing with my people, the people of the Book.

To this very day the Battle of Khaybar serves as source of inspiration for Moslem soldiers in their wars, especially against Israel. During the first intifada the demonstrators shouted slogans like “Khaybar Khaybar ya yehud, Jaish Mihammad sa-yaud” meaning “Remember Khaybar, Jews, Muhammad’s army will yet return” or “Khaybar, Khaybar Jews, to Palestine we will yet return”.

Therefore one cannot sign any peace treaty with followers of Muhammad. No hudna or tahadia can be the basis of negotiations. Who in the Jewish side negotiating even tactically on the basis of these concepts can assume responsibility for the consequences of these so-called agreements, such as for example, the peace treaty with Egypt which is collapsing now with a great crash.

Peace is not a strategy. 

In conclusion, I will relate in brief to the status of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel under international law. This is in complete contradiction of the false and malicious propaganda that is poisoning the entire world as though the Jewish people, acting through its representative the State of Israel, is acting in violation of international law.

It began with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 through the Weizmann-Faisal Agreement in 1919, which is the only Jewish-Arab peace agreement, then to the important resolutions of the San Remo Conference in 1920 where the international community gave the Jewish people a national homeland which included both banks of the Jordan River.

Great Britain, acting according to its standard norm, betrayed this idea in 1922 and tore off the east bank of the Jordan from the Jewish national homeland. Even after this deed of “perfidious Albion”, the resolution was approved - that the entire west bank of the Jordan belongs to the Jewish people as a national home.

According to senior jurists, this decision is in effect and binding to this very day. It was ratified among other places in Article 80 of the UN charter which recognized all of the resolutions that under the Mandate had given rights as binding resolutions.

In contrast, the 1947 partition plan was a recommendation of the UN Assembly only and remained a recommendation which was even rejected by the Arabs who responded by launching a war against Israel that very day to annihilate it. This is what caused the refugee problem which they carefully preserve to this day to use as a weapon against the state of Israel and the Jewish people and to rob the public funds.

The claims that the State of Israel is violating the Fourth Geneva Convention under which one is prohibited from expelling a population and settling another in its stead are propaganda slogans with no basis in law. As one of the top legal experts in the world has said, this is the irony of the absurd, because Israel expelled no one from the occupied territories of a state.

The 'settlers' went joyfully to settle in their own land as part of the Divine process of Redemption ...

Those who call themselves Palestinians are not a people and they have no state. No one displaced them. Indeed, the opposite is true – Israel rehabilitated them and gave them a chance to live normal lives. The only ones in the Middle East who live this way, in what is known the Arab space, act in submission to incitement and extreme ingratitude, and use their usual culture of falsehood to fight Israel.

The Middle East has indeed collapsed.

The San Remo agreements fell because the artificial states that were created as a result of the temporary victory of the Allies in World War I was obliterated by everything that happened in the Middle East.

States like Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq are in various stages of disintegration mainly because of their own tribal rivalries and internal religious wars.

The West did manage to maintain the situation for some one hundred years through a system of bribery. But now the end has come, together with the Arab Spring.

It is still not clear what will happen in Egypt except for chaos, but the West bears heavy responsibility for what is happening in Syria and Iraq. The fall of the Qadaffi regime has repercussions all over Africa and is causing continued bloodshed that no one can solve. The UN as usual shows itself to be a factor that encourages wars and not a peace maker.

Let the Arab and Moslem nationalists return to their national habitat, and the Jews to theirs, as Abraham divided the lands between himself and his nephew Lot and between Ishmael and his brothers, and peace and truth may you love for the sake of G-d's name.

Ben-Dror Yemini
Monday, May 16, 2011

The real 'Naqba' is the story of the Arab apartheid. Tens of millions, including Jews, suffered from 'Naqba', which included theft, expulsion and becoming a refugee. Only the Palestinians remain refugees because they were victims of persecution and repression at the hands of Arab states. This is the story of the real 'Naqba'.

In the year 1959 the Arab League accepted decision number 1457 and this is its text: "Arab states will reject the giving of citizenship to applicants of Palestinian origin in order to prevent their integration into the host countries". This is a shocking decision, which stands in stark opposition to international norms on all subjects concerning the treatment of refugees during those years and particularly during that decade. The story began, of course, in the year 1948, the days of the Palestinian 'Naqba'. This is also the beginning of every discussion on the subject of the Arab-Israeli conflict, with an accusing finger pointed at Israel with the claim that she expelled refugees and turned them into miserable people. This lie has become the property of many from the academia and the media who deal with the subject.

In previous articles on the question of the refugees we have already clarified that there is nothing unique this subject to the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Firstly, Arab countries refused to accept the Partition plan and started a war of total destruction against Israel, which had barely been established. Every precedent on this subject reveal that whoever initiates a war, especially with declarations of total destruction, pays a price for that.

Secondly, we are actually talking about an exchange of populations: yes, there were between 550 -710 thousand Arabs (the most accurate calculations are those of Professor Ephraim Karsh, who counted and found numbers between 583-609 thousand. Most ran away, a minority were expelled, because of the war, and a greater number of around 850,000 Jews were expelled or escaped from Arab countries ("the Jewish Naqba").

Thirdly, the Palestinians are not alone in this story. Population exchanges and expulsions were the norm in those years. They happened in tens of other sites of conflict and around 52 million people experienced loss of property, expulsion and uprooting ("And the world lies").

And fourth, in all the precedents of population exchange which took place during or at the end of armed conflict, or against the background of the creation of national entities, or the breakdown of multi-ethnic countries and establishment of national entities – there was no return of refugees to their previous areas which had become a new nation.

The uprooted and the refugees, almost without exception, found refuge in places where they joined populations with a similar ethnic background: the ethnic Germans expelled from central and eastern Europe integrated into Germany, the Hungarians expelled from Czechoslovakia and other places found refuge in Hungary, the Ukrainians expelled from Poland found refuge in the Ukraine – and so on. In this sense, the similarity of the Palestinians originating from Mandate Palestine to their neighbours in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon was similar, or even greater than, the similarity between many ethnic Germans and the original state in Germany, sometimes after separation of many generations.

Arab countries, and only they, behaved in the opposite manner to the rest of the nations of the world. They trampled the refugees, despite the fact that they shared the same religion and were part of the same Arab nation. They adopted an apartheid system in every sense. So the 'Naqba', one must remember, was not created by the actual uprooting, as happened to millions. The 'Naqba' is the story of apartheid and persecution which the Arab refugees suffered (only later did they become 'Palestinians') in Arab countries.

Egypt:

During long periods of time there was no real distinction made between the residents of Egypt and the residents of the coastal plain (of Israel). Both groups were Muslim Arabs who lived under the Ottoman regime. According to the researcher Oroub El-Abed, commercial and trade ties existed between the two groups, mutual immigration and marriage took place as a matter of course.

Many of the citizens of Jaffa were defined as Egyptian because they arrived there in waves of immigration such as the one to Jaffa in the days of the invasion by Mohammed Ali and his sons of many areas of the coastal plain. Residents of the Ottoman Empire, which became Mandate Palestine, did not have a different ethnic or religious identity from those of the Egyptian Arabs.

Various records from the end of 1949 show that some 202,000 refugees arrived in the Gaza strip, mostly from Jaffa, Be'er Sheva and Majdal (Ashkelon). The numbers may be inflated because some of the local poor also joined the list of those receiving welfare hand-outs. The refugees arrived in a place where they were part of the majority from all points of view: ethnic, national and religious. Egypt thought differently.

For a start, as early as September 1948, the "Government of all of Palestine" was set up, under Ahmed al-Baki. This was an Egyptian-sponsored organisation, which sprang from rivalry with Jordan. The so-called Palestinian government faded away after a decade.

What happened to the people of the Gaza Strip? How did the Egyptians treat them? Strangely, there are very few items of research relating to those days. But it is a little difficult to hide that not so distant past. The Strip became a closed camp. The exit from Gaza was almost impossible. The Gazans (indigenous and refugees) were subject to strict limitations on employment, education and more. Every evening a curfew was enforced from sunset to sunrise the next day. Only in one field did Egypt help as much as it could: textbooks contained severe incitement against Jews.

As early as 1950 Egypt informed the UN that "due to over-population" it could not help the Palestinians by resettling them. That was a suspect excuse. Egypt scuppered a proposal by the UN to re-settle 150,000 refugees in Libya. Even many of the refugees who had run away earlier and were in Egypt proper were forced to move to the giant concentration camp which was being created in the Gaza Strip. In fact, all the proposals for the re-settlement of refugees were brought down by the Arab nations.

Despite the total closure, there are witness statements telling what happened in the Strip in those years. The American journalist Martha Gellhorn visited the refugee camps in 1961. She arrived in the Strip too. It wasn't simple. Gellhorn describes the bureaucratic torture involved in securing an entry visa to Gaza, the days of waiting in Cairo. She also describes the "stark contrast between the pleasantries of the clerks and the anti-Semitic propaganda flowering in Cairo". "The Gaza Strip is not a hole", recounts Gellhorn, "but a big prison. The Government of Egypt is the prison guard". She describes a strict military regime, with all the elite of the Gaza Strip residents expressing devoutly Nasserite views. And so, for instance, "during 13 years (1948-1961) only 300 refugees received temporary exit visas". The only thing the Egyptians provided for the Palestinians was hate propaganda.

This isn't the only witness. In 1966 a Saudi Arabian newspaper published a letter from a resident of the Strip:

Radio Jeddah in Saudi Arabia broadcasted the following:

Even if we take into account that these are exaggerated descriptions, in a framework of the struggle between Saudi Arabia and Nasser, still we are left with a repressive regime of two decades. And it is worth noting another fact – when Israel got to the Strip the local life expectancy was just 48. After a little more than two decades, life expectancy jumped to 72, and surpassed Egypt. More than allocating points to Israel, this just clarifies the depths in which the Strip was during Egyptian rule.

Refugees from Mandate Palestine also lived in Egypt itself. Many of them did not feel Palestinian and preferred integration. The Egyptians prevented them from achieving that.

Apart from a short period of time considered a 'golden era', in some of the years of Nasser's rule, which did not include the Gaza Strip refugees, those in Egypt too suffered restrictions on land purchase, employment in some professions and education (for instance a ban on the establishment of Palestinian schools). Egyptian citizenship law allows citizenship for anyone with an Egyptian father, and was subsequently extended to include Egyptian mothers. But in practice, limitations were placed upon those considered Palestinian.

Even an Egyptian court decision to cancel the restrictions did not help. The new regime in Egypt recently promised change. The change, if it does occur, can wipe out years of discrimination, which even reached collective punishment. For instance in 1978 the Egyptian Minister of Culture - Yussuf al Shiba'I - was murdered in Cyprus by an assassin from the Abu Nidal group. In retaliation, the Palestinians suffered a new wave of attacks and the Egyptian Parliament renewed laws putting restrictions on Palestinians in education and employment.

Jordan:


Exactly as the identity and the unity between the Arabs of Jaffa and the south of Israel and the Arabs of Egypt were one, a similar identity existed between the Arabs of the West Bank and the Arabs of Jordan. So, for instance, the Bedouin of the Majalis (or Majilis) tribe from the Al Karak area are originally from Hebron. In the days of the Ottoman Empire the eastern bank of the Jordan was part of the province of Damascus, just like other parts of what later became the protectorate of the British Mandate. The area today called Jordan was supposed to be part of the Jewish National Home, according to the Balfour Declaration.

The initial plight of the refugees on both sides of the Jordan was enormous. In the Schem area, for example, witness statements said that "Iraqi soldiers take the children of the rich and others for indecent deeds and return the children to their families the next day, the residents are frequently arrested". Yes, Arab solidarity. Jordan, so it would seem, related differently to the refugees. According to a Jordanian law from the year 1954, every refugee who was in Jordan between 1948 and 1954 had the right to citizenship. Except that this was no more than an external façade. The following is a description of the reality under Jordanian rule in the West Bank:

As these words may sound like a public relations booklet from the occupation regime, it is necessary to point out that they were published, in the name of visitors from the West Bank, in an interview in the Lebanese newspaper 'Al Huadat' on 23.4.71.

As in all the other Arab nations, Jordan did nothing to dismantle the refugee camps. Whilst Israel was receiving hundreds of thousands of refugees, from Europe and from the Arab states, into similar camps (Ma'abarot), but went through a tortuous period of rehabilitation, building of new settlements and the dismantling of the camps, Jordan behaved in the opposite manner, and prevented all rehabilitation. In those same two decades not one institution of higher education was built in the West Bank. Higher Education there began in the seventies as a result of the Israeli rule.

The citizenship which had been given to the refugees was mostly for appearances' sake. Even though the Palestinians make up more than 50% of Jordan's population, they are eligible for only 18 seats, out of 110, in the Jordanian Parliament, and only 9 senators, out of 55, which are appointed by the king. It must be remembered that in only one month, September 1970, in one clash, Jordan killed more Palestinians than all the Palestinians harmed in 43 years of Israeli rule in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Syria:

In the year 1919 in Jerusalem the first conference of associations was held, the first Arab Palestinian conference. At the conference it was decided that Palestine, which had just come under British conquest, was southern Syria – an integral part of Greater Syria. During the years of the Mandate the immigration from Syria to the British Mandate area increased. For instance, the Al-Horani family, which arrived from the Horan area in Syria, and others.

The idea of 'Greater Syria', including mandatory Palestine, was expressed in the growing involvement of the Syrians in both the great Arab revolt and the gangs which arrived from Syria during the war of independence. The refugees, therefore, were not strangers politically, religiously or ethnically. The opposite. Their fate should not been different to that of any other ethnic group which were expelled to a place where they made up the ethnic and cultural majority.

Between 70 and 90 thousand refugees arrived in Syria, the majority from Tzfat, Haifa, Tiberias and Acco. In 1954 they were awarded partial rights, which did not include political rights. Until 1968 they were forbidden to hold property. Syrian law allows any Arab to obtain Syrian citizenship as long as his permanent residence is in Syria and he is capable of supporting himself economically. But the Palestinians are the only ones excluded from the terms this law. Even if they are permanent residents and affluent, the law prevents them from receiving citizenship.

Only thirty percent of those still considered for some reason 'Palestinian refugees in Syria' live in refugee camps. In fact, they should have been considered as Syrians from all points of view a long time ago. They were part of the Arab national identity, they are linked by family connections, they should have been integrated into economic life. Yet despite this, as a result of political brain-washing, they remain in Syria as a foreign body, dreaming endlessly of 'the right of return', and beaten by their inferior situation. Most of them are at the bottom of the career ladder, in service industries (41%) and construction (27%). But there is nothing like the field of education to clarify their situation. 23% do not even get to elementary school and 3% only get academic education.

Lebanon:

In the Gaza Strip the Palestinians only suffered for two decades because of the Egyptian regime. In Lebanon the apartheid continues to this very day. The result is poverty, desolation and high unemployment. Until 1969 there were refugee camps under a harsh military regime in Lebanon. According to Martha Gellhorn's description, most of the refugees lived in a reasonable state. Many even improved their situation compared to the days before the 'Naqba'. But then in 1969 the Cairo Agreement was signed which passed the control of the camps to the refugees themselves. The situation only got worse. Terror factions took control of the camps, which turned them into sites of struggle, mainly violent, between the differing factions.

New research, published in December 2010, presents statistics which make the Gaza Strip look like paradise when compared to Lebanon. Yes, here and there appeared some slight publicity on the subject, but as far as is known, there was no international outcry, and no Turkish or international flotilla.

Unlike in Syria and Jordan, where most of those defined as refugees no longer live in refugee camps, two thirds of the Palestinians in Lebanon live in camps, which are "outposts outside the rule of the state". The most amazing statistic is that despite the fact that around 425,000 are registered with UNWRA as refugees, the research found that only between 260 and 280 thousand Palestinians live in Lebanon.

The paradox is that UNWRA gets funding for over 150 thousand people who are not in Lebanon at all. This information alone should have led to a serious investigation by the funding countries (mostly the US and Europe) – but there is no chance that will happen. The question of the Palestinians is laden with so many illusions and lies that another lie makes almost no difference. And so, UNWRA can demand from the international community budgets for 425,000 whilst on its website there appears research showing that this is fiction.

According to the research the refugees suffer from 56% unemployment. It seems that this is the highest figure not only among the Palestinians, but in the entire Arab world. Those who do work are to be found at the bottom of the ladder. Just 6% of those within the work-force have an academic qualification of some kind (compared to 20% in the Lebanese work-force). The result is that 66% of the Palestinians in Lebanon live under the poverty line set at $6 per person per day. That's double the number of Lebanese.

This grim situation is a result of real apartheid. A series of laws in Lebanon limits the right to citizenship, to property and to work within the legal professions, medicine, pharmacy, journalism and more. In August 2010 minimal reform was made to the employment laws but practically, the amendment has not led to any real change. Another rule prevents the entrance of building materials to refugee camps and there are reports of arrests and house demolitions as a result of building in the camps.

The partial and limited restrictions which Israel put on the entry of building materials into the Gaza Strip was a result of the firing of rockets at civilian areas. As far as is known, in Lebanon the restriction was not the result of similar firing of rockets at civilian populations. And despite that, again, beyond the dry reports of human rights organisations, from the point of view of 'they are allowed', no serious objections have been recorded, and no "apartheid week" against Lebanon has taken place.

Kuwait:

In 1991 Palestinians made up 30% of the country's population. Compared to other Arab countries, their situation was reasonable. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. In the framework of attempts at compromise which preceded the first Gulf war, Saddam brought up the 'suggestion' of withdrawal from Kuwait in return for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank.

The PLO with Yasser Arafat at its head supported Saddam. That support was the opening shot for one of the worst events in Palestinian history. After the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation began an anti-Palestinian campaign which included persecution, arrests and show trials.

The difficult saga ended with the expulsion of 450,000 Palestinians. Some of which, incidentally, had been there since the 1930s and many had no connection to Arafat's support for Saddam. And despite that, they were subject to collective punishment, transfer of proportions similar to the 'Naqba' of 1948, which barely merited a mention in the world media. There are numerous academic papers on the expulsion and fleeing in 1948. There are close to zero papers on the subject of the 'Naqba' of '91.

*****
These are the main nations in which refugees are to be found. Apartheid exists in other countries too. In Saudi Arabia the refugees from mandatory Palestine did not receive citizenship. In 2004 Saudi Arabia announced concessions, but made it clear that they did not include the Palestinians. Jordan too withholds the naturalisation of 150,000 refugees, most originally from Gaza.

In Iraq the refugees actually received preferential treatment under Saddam Hussein's rule, but since his fall, they have become one of the most persecuted groups. Twice, on the Libyan-Egyptian border and on the Syrian-Iraqi border, thousands of Palestinians were expelled to temporary camps, whilst no other Arab country would take them in. That was an amazing display of 'Arab solidarity', on behalf of 'the Arab Ummah'. And it goes on. Palestinians from Libya, refugees from the civil war, are arriving at this time at the border with Egypt, which refuses to let them in.

Time after time the Arab countries have rejected suggestions for the resettlement of the refugees, despite there being both place available and the need. The march goes on.

In 1995 the Libyan leader Muamar Gaddafi decided to expel 30,000 Palestinians, just because he was angry about the Oslo accords, with the PLO, and about the creation of the Palestinian Authority.

A Palestinian doctor, Dr. Ashraf al Hazuz, spent 8 years in a Libyan jail (together with Bulgarian nurses) having been accused of spreading AIDS. In August 2010, before the current uprising, Libya passed laws making the lives of Palestinians impossible. These were the same days in which Libya sent a 'humanitarian aid ship' to the Gaza Strip. There is no limit to the hypocrisy.

These words are just the essence of the apartheid against minorities in the Arab world as a whole, and against the Palestinians in particular. But there is a difference. Whilst the Copts in Egypt or the Kurds in Syria are real minorities, the Arabs from mandate Palestine were supposed to be an integral part of the Arab nation –the Ummah.

Two of the symbols of the Palestinian struggle were born in Egypt - Edward Said and Yasser Arafat. Both of them tried to invent for themselves Palestine as a fatherland.

Another two of the prominent symbols of the Palestinian struggle are Fawzi Kuakgi (who contended with the Mufti for the leadership of the Arab revolt against the British) and Izz a Din Al Kassam. The first was Lebanese and the second Syrian.

There is nothing strange in that. Because the struggle was Arab. Not Palestinian. And despite that the Arabs of mandate Palestine turned into a downtrodden and rejected group, as a result of the Arab defeat in 1948. In the vast majority of the descriptions from those years are of Arabs. Not of Palestinians. Later, only later, did they become Palestinians.

 טו  כִּי אֲמַרְתֶּם, כָּרַתְנוּ בְרִית אֶת-מָוֶת, וְעִם-שְׁאוֹל, עָשִׂינוּ חֹזֶה; שיט (שׁוֹט) שׁוֹטֵף כִּי-עבר (יַעֲבֹר) לֹא יְבוֹאֵנוּ, כִּי שַׂמְנוּ כָזָב מַחְסֵנוּ וּבַשֶּׁקֶר נִסְתָּרְנוּ.

'We have made a covenant with death, and with the nether-world are we at agreement; when the scouring scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us; for we have made lies our refuge, and in falsehood have we hid ourselves';

Isaiah Chapter 28 יְשַׁעְיָהוּ

Verse 15

http://www.trulia.com/crime/

http://www.ynetnews.com/home/0,7340,L-3083,00.html 

In op-ed, Atlanta Jewish Times owner Andrew Adler says US president's 'Alice in Wonderland' belief in use of diplomacy to halt Iranian nuclear program threatens Jewish state 
Yitzhak Benhorin

WASHINGTON - The owner of the Atlanta Jewish Times weekly caused an uproar when he suggested that Israel consider "a hit" on US President Barack Obama "in order to preserve Israel’s existence" in case Iran obtains nuclear capabilities.

 

In his column, published last week, Andrew Adler laid out what he said were three options available to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in countering the threat posed by Iran's nuclear program. One of the options was to "give the go-ahead for US-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice-president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States' policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies."

http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/obamas-signature-is-an-ejaculating-penis