Violence in Palestinian refugee camp Lebanon

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The heavy clashes in the Ain al-Helweh Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon

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Lebanon: 6 Palestinians killed in clashes in refugee camp

i24NEWS and agenciesJuly 30, 2023 at 10:28 PMlatest revision July 30, 2023 at 10:58 PM


A militant takes cover amid clashes between Fatah movement and Islamists at the Ain al-Helweh Palestinian refugee camp.

Lebanon's Ain al-Helweh Palestinian refugee camp has gained notoriety as a hotbed for extremism and violence

At least six people were killed Sunday in clashes in south Lebanon's restive Ain al-Helweh Palestinian refugee camp, according to the Fatah movement and sources at the camp.

The fighting between Fatah and Islamists in the camp, which erupted overnight and subsided by the evening, killed a Fatah military leader and four of his colleagues, the secularist movement said.

A Palestinian source inside the camp, speaking on condition of anonymity, said an "Islamist from the al-Shabaab al-Muslim group" was also killed and six others including the group's leader were wounded.

Lebanon's official news agency NNA gave a "provisional toll" of six dead and more than 30 wounded at Ain al-Helweh, the largest of the 12 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon located just southeast of the coastal city of Sidon.

Fatah in a statement confirmed the death of commander Ashraf al-Armouchi and four of his "comrades" during a "heinous operation."

The statement denounced an "abominable and cowardly crime" aimed at undermining the "security and stability" of the Palestinian camps in Lebanon.



Fighting between rival groups is common in Ain al-Helweh, which is home to more than 54,000 registered Palestinian refugees who have been joined in recent years by thousands of Palestinians fleeing the conflict in Syria.

By long-standing convention, the Lebanese army does not enter Palestinian refugee camps in the country, leaving the factions themselves to handle security.

The camp has gained notoriety as a refuge for extremists and fugitives.

More than 450,000 Palestinians in Lebanon are registered with UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.

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8 years ago

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Edward Wadie Said (1 November 1935 – 24 September 2003) was a Palestinian American academic, literary critic and political activist. A professor of literature at Columbia University he was among the founders of postcolonial studies. Born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States by way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.

Educated in the Western canon at British and American schools, Said applied his education and bi-cultural perspective to illuminating the gaps of cultural and political understanding between the Western world and the Eastern world, especially about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the Middle East; his principal influences were Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Michel Foucault, and Theodor Adorno.

As a cultural critic, Said is known for the book Orientalism (1978), a critique of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism—how the Western world perceives the Orient. Said's model of textual analysis transformed the academic discourse of researchers in literary theory, literary criticism, and Middle Eastern studies—how academics examine, describe, and define the cultures being studied. As a foundational text, Orientalism was controversial among scholars of Oriental studies, philosophy, and literature.

As a public intellectual, Said was a controversial member of the Palestinian National Council, due to his public criticism of Israel and the Arab countries, especially the political and cultural policies of Muslim régimes who acted against the national interests of their peoples. Said advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state to ensure equal political and human rights for the Palestinians in Israel, including the right of return to the homeland. He defined his oppositional relation with the status quo as the remit of the public intellectual who has "to sift, to judge, to criticize, to choose, so that choice and agency return to the individual" man and woman.

In 1999, with conductor Daniel Barenboim, Said co-founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, based in Seville. Said was also an accomplished pianist, and, with Barenboim, co-authored the book Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), a compilation of their conversations and public discussions about music held at New York's Carnegie Hall.

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In 1967, consequent to the Six-Day War (5–10 June 1967), Said became a public intellectual when he acted politically to counter the stereotyped misrepresentations (factual, historical, cultural) with which the U.S. news media explained the Arab–Israeli wars; reportage divorced from the historical realities of the Middle East, in general, and Palestine and Israel, in particular. To address, explain, and correct such Orientalism, Said published "The Arab Portrayed" (1968), a descriptive essay about images of "the Arab" that are meant to evade specific discussion of the historical and cultural realities of the peoples (Jews, Christians, Muslims) who are the Middle East, featured in journalism (print, photograph, television) and some types of scholarship (specialist journals).

In the essay "Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims" (1979), Said argued in favour of the political legitimacy and philosophic authenticity of the Zionist claims and right to a Jewish homeland; and for the inherent right of national self-determination of the Palestinian people. Said's books about Israel and Palestine include The Question of Palestine (1979), The Politics of Dispossession (1994), and The End of the Peace Process (2000).

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Palestinian National Council

From 1977 until 1991, Said was an independent member of the Palestinian National Council (PNC). In 1988, he was a proponent of the two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and voted for the establishment of the State of Palestine at a meeting of the PNC in Algiers. In 1993, Said quit his membership in the Palestinian National Council, to protest the internal politics that led to the signing of the Oslo Accords (Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements, 1993), which he thought had unacceptable terms, and because the terms had been rejected by the Madrid Conference of 1991.

Said disliked the Oslo Accords for not producing an independent State of Palestine, and because they were politically inferior to a plan that Yasir Arafat had rejected—a plan Said had presented to Arafat on behalf of the U.S. government in the late 1970s.[72] Especially troublesome to Said was his belief that Yasir Arafat had betrayed the right of return of the Palestinian refugees to their houses and properties in the Green Line territories of pre-1967 Israel, and that Arafat ignored the growing political threat of the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories that had been established since the conquest of Palestine in 1967.

In 1995, in response to Said's political criticisms, the Palestinian Authority (PA) banned the sale of Said's books; however, the PA lifted the book ban when Said publicly praised Yasir Arafat for rejecting Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offers at the Middle East Peace Summit at Camp David (2000) in the U.S.

In the mid-1990s, Said wrote the foreword to the history book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (1994), by Israel Shahak, about Jewish fundamentalism, which presents the cultural proposition that Israel's mistreatment of the Palestinians is rooted in a Judaic requirement (of permission) for Jews to commit crimes, including murder, against Gentiles (non-Jews). In his foreword, Said said that Jewish History, Jewish Religion is "nothing less than a concise history of classic and modern Judaism, insofar as these are relevant to the understanding of modern Israel"; and praised the historian Shahak for describing contemporary Israel as a nation subsumed in a "Judeo–Nazi" cultural ambiance that allowed the dehumanization of the Palestinian Other:

In all my works, I remained fundamentally critical of a gloating and uncritical nationalism. . . . My view of Palestine . . . remains the same today: I expressed all sorts of reservations about the insouciant nativism, and militant militarism of the nationalist consensus; I suggested, instead, a critical look at the Arab environment, Palestinian history, and the Israeli realities, with the explicit conclusion that only a negotiated settlement, between the two communities of suffering, Arab and Jewish, would provide respite from the unending war.
In 1998, Said made In Search of Palestine (1998), a BBC documentary film about Palestine, past and present. In the company of his son, Wadie, Said revisited the places of his boyhood, and confronted injustices meted out to ordinary Palestinians in the contemporary West Bank. Despite the social and cultural prestige afforded to BBC cinema products in the U.S., the documentary was never broadcast by any American television company. In 1999, the American Jewish public affairs monthly Commentary cited ledgers kept at the Land Registry Office in Jerusalem during the Mandatory period as background for his boyhood recollections, claiming that his "Palestinian boyhood" was, in fact, no more than occasional visits from Cairo, where his parents lived, owned a business and raised their family.

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Pieter

It is as presented, that Mr. Edward Said is one of the few Western voices of understanding of the past and present Arab {Palestine} situation, in regard to the presence of Israel as a state and relations with the Arab world. Fact of the matter though, is Israel will be as it stands, the only European state in the Middle East and that is a fact that sticks in the craw of many Arabs.

Karl

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Aug 3, 2023 17:08:54 GMT -7 karl said:

Pieter

It is as presented, that Mr. Edward Said is one of the few Western voices of understanding of the past and present Arab {Palestine} situation, in regard to the presence of Israel as a state and relations with the Arab world. Fact of the matter though, is Israel will be as it stands, the only European state in the Middle East and that is a fact that sticks in the craw of many Arabs.

Karl

Karl,

Edward Said was indeed a Christian Palestinian whom understood the British and Ottoman Palestine 🇵🇸 of his parents and grandparents and ancestors, Israël 🇮🇱, Gaza and the Westbank 🇮🇱 🇵🇸, Arab East-Jerusalem and the largely Arab North Israel.

I think Israel 🇮🇱 is not only a European state but also an Americanized state due to the large and dominant influence of American Jews there. Ashkenazim, Jews of Eastern-European and Western European descent (Central-Europe, Eastern-Europe, North Eastern Europe, and the USA 🇺🇸 , Canada 🇨🇦, South-Africa ) are estimated to be 31.8% of the Israeli population.

The Ashkenazi Jews number 2.8 million (full or partial Ashkenazi Jewish descent) and constitute one of the largest Jewish ethnic divisions in Israel, in line with the Middle Eastern (Arab, Kurd and Iranian) Mizrahi Jews and the Spanish, Portuguese and North African Sephardi Jews.

Ashkenazi Jews are Jews whose ancestors had settled in Central and Eastern Europe, as opposed to those who remained in the Middle East and North Africa region, or settled in other places.


Levi Brevda, pictured in the back row third from the right, and other early (Ashkenazi) Zionist pioneers on the Degania Kibbutz in the Galilee region of Israel before the declaration of statehood. Levi Brevda was part of an underground Zionist organization in Nesvizh, Belarus in the early 1900s. Brevda relocated Zionist settlers from Lyakhovichi and Minsk out of Eastern Europe to Mandatory Palestine, which later became Israel. Levi Brevda made aliyah to Israel (then known as the British Mandate) in the 1920s and elected to hebraize his name to Levi Ben Amitai.[7] Once in Israel, Brevda founded the Degania Bet kibbutz, south of the Sea of Galilee, which still exists today. Brevda's kibbutz was integral in defending the Galilee region from the invading Syrian army during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. "The heroic resistance of the Degania defenders against a regular army [of Syria] gave the people of the young state [of Israel] a large morale boost.

In Israel, the term Ashkenazi is now used in a manner unrelated to its original meaning, often applied to all Jews who settled in Europe and sometimes including those whose ethnic background is actually Sephardic. Jews of any non-Ashkenazi background, including Mizrahi, Yemenite, Kurdish and others who have no connection with the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Spain), have similarly come to be lumped together as Sephardic. Jews of mixed background are increasingly common, partly because of intermarriage between Ashkenazi and Sephardi/Mizrahi, and partly because many do not see such historic markers as relevant to their life experiences as Jews.


Ashkenazi Jewish Kibbutz workers on a Kibbutz in Palestine or early Israel

Ashkenazim have played a prominent role in the economy, media, and politics of Israel since its founding. During the first decades of Israel as a state, strong cultural conflict occurred between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews (mainly east European Ashkenazim). The roots of this conflict, which still exists to a much smaller extent in present-day Israeli society, are chiefly attributed to the concept of the "melting pot". That is to say, all Jewish immigrants who arrived in Israel were strongly encouraged to "melt down" their own particular exilic identities within the general social "pot" in order to become Israeli.


Tel Aviv in 1936. Back then Tel Aviv was a mainly Ashkenazi Jewish city with a few Arabs as well.

Folks, I Pieter, will say it bluntly, many Ashkenazi Jews look like Europeans, White Canadians, White Americans, White Russians, White South-Africans and White Australians. Some of them are 'Silver jews", meaning, white people with Blond hair, pale white skin and blue eyes. These are Jews that mixed with non-Jewish Germanic, Celtic and Slavic people (blond blue eyed Poles and Russians as well). Others are white brunettes or read heads, or people whom look like French, Italian, Spanish, Greek or Yugoslavian or Turkish people, but whom are neither Southern-European nor Turkish, but Ashkenazi Jewish. Their semitic roots gave them the darker looks, the Slavic and Germanic roots gave the white and blonde, redhead and blue eyed Ashkenazim their more Northern European or Central European looks. That is complicated for many people to understand, but that is the reality. I can understand it with my Germanic and Slavic mix. Mizrachi Jews on the other hand in their looks look more like Arabs, Palestians, Lebanese people, Syrians, Jordanians, Kurds and Iranians. Sephardic Jews look like Portuguese, Spanish and North African Berber people, Malthese people with their Semitic language or Southern Italians.


Ashkenazi Jewish children wave Israeli flags during the 2019 Celebrate Israel Parade in New York City. David Dee Delgado/Getty Images

Mizrahi Jews in Israel


Mizrahi Jews constitute one of the largest Jewish ethnic divisions among Israeli Jews. Mizrahi Jews are descended from Jews in the Middle East and Central Asia, from Babylonian and Persian heritage, who had lived for many generations under Muslim rule during the Middle Ages. The vast majority of them left the Muslim-majority countries during the Arab–Israeli conflict, in what is known as the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries.

Some 607,900 Jews are immigrants and first-generation descendants by paternal lineage of Iraqi, Iranian, Yemenite, Egyptian, Pakistani and Indian Jewish communities,
traditionally associated with the Mizrahi Jews. Many more Israeli Jews are second and third generation Mizrahi descendants or have a partial Mizrahi origin. The other dominant sub-groups are the Israeli Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic Jews. Often Mizrahi and North African Sephardic Jews in Israel are grouped together due to the similarity of their history under Muslim rule and an overwhelming migration out of their countries of residence during the 20th century. As of 2005, 61% of Israeli Jews were of full or partial Mizrahi ancestry.


Mizrachi Jews in Israel

Absorption into Israeli society

Refuge in Israel was not without its tragedies: "in a generation or two, millennia of rooted Oriental civilization, unified even in its diversity," had been wiped out, writes Mizrahi scholar Ella Shohat. The trauma of rupture from their countries of origin was further complicated by the difficulty of the transition upon arrival in Israel; Mizrahi immigrants and refugees were placed in rudimentary and hastily erected tent cities (Ma'abarot) often in development towns on the peripheries of Israel. Settlement in Moshavim (cooperative farming villages) was only partially successful, because Mizrahim had historically filled a niche as craftsmen and merchants and most did not traditionally engage in farmwork. As the majority left their property behind in their home countries as they journeyed to Israel, many suffered a severe decrease in their socio-economic status aggravated by their cultural and political differences with the dominant Ashkenazi community. Furthermore, a policy of austerity was enforced at that time due to economic hardships.

Mizrahi immigrants arrived with many mother tongues. Many, especially those from North Africa and the fertile crescent, spoke Arabic dialects; those from Iran spoke Persian; Mountain Jews from Azerbaijan, Chechnya and Dagestan arrived with Azerbaijani, Russian and Juhuri; Baghdadi Jews from India arrived with English; Bukharan Jews from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan arrived with Bukhari; the Bene Israel from Maharashtra, India arrived with Marathi, Georgian Jew and Judaeo-Georgian, Jews from various other places brought various other languages with them. Hebrew had historically been a language only of prayer for most Jews not living in Israel, including the Mizrahim. Thus, with their arrival in Israel, the Mizrahim retained culture, customs and language distinct from their Ashkenazi counterparts.

Politics

The first identifiable Mizrahi politics was on the left, and arose in response to the marginalization of Mizrahim within Israeli society. It was shaped by the Rainbow Alliance and the Israeli Black Panthers, explicitly inspired by the American Black Panthers. However, beginning in the 1970s, Mizrahi allegiances began to shift rightward. Today, the Ashkenazi vote is associated with left-wing, secular and centrist parties (especially Blue and White, Meretz, Kadima and historically Labour), and the majority of Mizrahim vote for right-wing parties, especially Likud, as well as the Mizrahi-oriented splinter party Shas.

Mizrahim were a crucial pillar of Likud since its founding in the 1970s, even though the party leadership was dominated by Ashkenazim at first. Despite the increasing dominance of Mizrahi political articulation within Likud and its reliance on Mizrahi votes, there has not yet been a Mizrahi prime minister of Israel. The rightward shift of Mizrahi politics started with early Likud leader Menachem Begin enthusiastically making overtures to the community, though not Mizrahi himself. However, the association of Ashkenazim with the left and Mizrahim with the right was not yet fully crystallized at that time; it sharpened considerably beginning in 1980.

Mizrahim have become the core of support for Benjamin Netanyahu, who is known for championing Mizrahi causes. The rise of Likud from 1977 onward is nearly "universally" attributed to shifts among Mizrahi voters. By May 1977, the share of Mizrahim in the party's Central Committee grew from 10% to 50%. Meir Kahane's far-right Kach party as it emerged in the 1980s which called for the transfer of Arabs also won most of its support in economically depressed areas that tended to be Mizrahi, which Peled argues is best explained by labor market rivalries between Mizrahim and Arabs. The robustness of support among Mizrahi Israelis for Netanyahu has been credited for his political survival despite a string of scandals, court investigations, and very close elections. Likud's electoral success in 2020 has hinged on turnout in its strongholds in Beersheba and a string of northern towns inhabited by Mizrahim, while in 2015 likewise Likud was carried to victory by a wave of turnout in working-class, predominantly Mizrahi "development towns", and because this occurred in response to Netanyahu's warning about Arab voters coming out in "droves", it led to a low level wave of ethnic tensions, with mutual accusations of racism between left-wing Ashkenazi figures and their right-wing Mizrahi counterparts. Nevertheless, the Mizrahi vote for Likud has not always been fixed, and in 1992 Labor's victory is attributed in a large part to flipping Mizrahi former Likud voters.

Whereas Ashkenazi prominence on the left has historically been associated with socialist ideals that had emerged in Central Europe and the kibbutz and Labor Zionist movement, the Mizrahim, as they rose in society and they developed their political ideals, often rejected ideologies they associated with an "Ashkenazi elite" that had marginalized them. Although these tensions were initially based on economic rivalries, the distinction remained strong even as Mizrahim increasingly moved up the socioeconomic latter around 1990, entering the middle class, and the disparity between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim diminished (but did not completely disappear), with Mizrahi political expression becoming increasingly linked to the Likud and Shas parties. Likud, the largest right-wing party in Israel, became increasingly influenced by Mizrahi political articulation, with the Mizrahi middle class' political coming-of-age held by political science commentators to be embodied by the rise of Mizrahi Likud politicians such as Moshe Kahlon and Miri Regev.

The Shas party was founded, as a splinter from Likud, to explicitly represent religious Mizrahi interests, as well as general Mizrahi interest, both vis-a-vis the Ashkenazi-dominated socioeconomic elite of Israel as well as the Arab states; Shas has campaigned for compensation for Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Recently there has been a "surge of memory" regarding the events of the 1950s, which has challenged the prior "Eurocentric" focus of Ashkenazi experiences by popularizing a new narrative that centers the Mizrahi Israeli's experience as relevant to national identity.

The Mizrahi turn to the right has been analyzed from many viewpoints. Some consider it a result of the failure of Ashkenazi progressive elites to adequately tackle racism against Mizrahim within their organizations. On the other hand, many Mizrahim came to credit Likud with their socioeconomic advancement, with Likud centers serving as hiring halls. Some models have also emphasized economic competition between Arabs and Mizrahim. However, other analysts partially or mainly reject the economic explanation, arguing that instead cultural and ideological factors play a key role. Whereas Ashkenazi Israelis tend to support left-wing politics, secularism, and peace with Arab peoples, the Mizrahim tend on average to be more conservative, and tend toward being "traditionally" religious with fewer secular or ultra-religious (Haredi) individuals; they are also more skeptical of prospects for peace with Palestinian Arabs. The skepticism towards the peace process among Mizrahim may be tied to a perceived history of mistreatment by Muslim and Christian Arabs from when they were in diaspora in Arab countries,[citation needed] though many doubt that this alone is sufficiently explanatory.

The greater support among Mizrahim compared to Ashkenazim (48% versus 35% as measured by Pew in 2016) for the settlements in the West Bank has also been attributed to economic incentives and the fact that many working-class Mizrahim live there, often in subsidized housing. Another contributing factor is religious views among some Mizrahim who join the settlements. Although Mizrahim form a considerable portion of the settler population, with a particular concentration in and around Gush Katif, they often are ignored by public discourse about the settlements which tends to incorrectly paint all or most settlers as having North American origins, which a disproportionately large but still minority portion do.

Mizrahi alignment to Likud and other right-wing parties is far from homogeneous, however, and has not stopped the success of cultural transformations among Israeli Mizrahi as a result of social movements that were first supported mainly by the left, such as greater tolerance toward LGBT rights and culture, and increasing acknowledgement of the LGBT Mizrahi experience. Mizrahim who stayed in Likud and did not join Shas may have played a role in checking the trend toward ultra-Orthodoxy. The Kulanu party, founded by Moshe Kahlon and Avi Gabbay (who would later join Labour), appeals to Sephardi and Mizrahi middle class, from a center to center right position. By the 2010s, all parts of the political spectrum, not just the centre-right, were giving increasing focus on the Mizrahi perspective, with some identifying a resulting trend of orientalization of Israeli public discourse. The trend is also seen in Israeli popular art and music, where an earlier renaissance in Mizrahi expression has now entered and transformed mainstream artistic expression in Israel.

The orientalization of Israeli identity and discourse and the shift from a society aiming to emulate Europe to one identifying itself as Middle Eastern is increasingly being embraced by the younger generation of Ashkenazim as well, especially on the left.

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This is very close to Arabic music, but Yemnity Jewish