New Media

We learned this week that Canada is the first Western nation to pull the plug on UNRWA, the United Nations-run relief operation for Palestinian refugees of the West Bank and Gaza. The government has been quick to clarify that relief is still on the way. It will now be dedicated to specific projects like food aid; hopefully with enough oversight to prevent mismanagement and inadvertent support to a terrorist organization.

The government’s move is also a not-so-subtle indictment of a broken refugee support program that has arguably only perpetuated Palestinian misery and held up the Middle East peace process. As we look forward, the international community might take a lesson from the other side of the border from the UNRWA camps to Israel, which may fairly take the title of most successful refugee camp in modern history.

The Forgotten Refugees
When someone uses the phrase, “refugees” in the context of the Middle East, we typically think of the Palestinian refugees who lost their homes during the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967. The common narrative also holds that when we talk of Jewish refugees, we’re talking about white, European Jews who escaped the Holocaust to seek some measure of safety not only in the Holy Land, but also in the USA, Canada and elsewhere. But these narratives overlook a movement of nearly one million Jewish refugees from Arab countries during those same years, roughly equivalent in number to the original Palestinian refugees. They were largely persecuted, second-class citizens set upon by their neighbors and governments.

“We call these people the forgotten refugees,” says Regina Waldman, founder of JIMENA, an organization seeking recognition for these people in the context of an overall settlement in the Middle East. Waldman was herself a refugee from Libya in 1967, surviving anti-Jewish riots and other violence that claimed the lives of her friends and neighbors before escaping the country. Waldman wants to see a regional peace deal that puts Palestinians’ claims “on an equal footing with the Middle Eastern and North African Jews”.

“When the Six-Day-War broke out between Israel and its Arab neighbors, I was 19 year old,” Waldman remembers. “My mother called me at work to tell me that thousands of people had taken to the streets rioting and burning Jewish properties… Killing people, rampaging and burning Jewish properties went on for days. I lived in hiding for a month before returning home.”

A Jewish community that had lived in that country for over 2,000 years, albeit under second-class Dhimmi status, was wiped out as Jews fled lynchings, mob violence and torture and imprisonment by the government. This process was repeated across the region in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Iran.

One Group Finds Haven, Another is Rejected
Most of the refugees were resettled in Israel. For many, their first stop looked much like refugee camps elsewhere: a sprawling tent city in the middle of a wasteland. But these traumatized survivors would have a vastly different outcome than their counterparts elsewhere, particularly the Palestinians. The refugee tent cities were way-stations, not permanent residences. “All of these people were absorbed into Israel and became part of the society, and without even taking a nickel from the United Nations,” Waldman noted. Israelis ignored the obvious difficulties for a tiny relatively poor state to take in so many refugees at once, understanding that the priority was to give people with a common heritage a home and a chance for better life.

In contrast, where Palestinians attempted to find homes among their Arab neighbors, they were nearly always turned back, despite the ancient links of culture, ethnicity, religion, trade and even close family ties that formerly bound them to other countries in the region. Notably, many Palestinian refugees have migrated quite successfully to countries well outside the Arab world such as Canada. But for the Palestinians who remain in the camps, they have inherited a United Nations welfare state. They’ve received billions of dollars since 1948. Meanwhile, conditions in the Palestinian territories remain atrocious.

Canada’s decision on changing its funding vehicle for Palestinians works as a wake-up call to the international community that we don’t want to keep reinforcing failure. We want to see better outcomes. Hopefully, when a solution does come, it will recognize the claims of all the refugees, including the forgotten ones.

NEW MEDIA EDITOR’S NOTE: If you are a Jewish refugee from the Arab world, the people at JIMENA would be grateful if you would share your personal story with them. They have a growing collection of personal stories of the refugees who immigrated to Israel and other countries. You can contact them here.

A Record of the Forgotten Refugees

Two seemingly unrelated yet dramatic developments occurred this week. South Korea launched a rocket into space. Meanwhile, the Israelis and Palestinians announced the possible re-start of peace talks.

The satellite the Koreans were trying to put into orbit sadly fell back to Earth, burning in the atmosphere. The plucky Koreans are surely undeterred. You can depend on them to ultimately succeed.

As for the peace talks I mentioned, they will probably go nowhere fast, just like most recent efforts. But even if they do make progress, it really doesn’t matter. Real peace, not just fragile cease-fires pretending to be peace, will require a different kind of thrust than mere diplomacy.

Let us imagine that the latest announcement of a new beginning for peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians leads to something really genuine. Further suppose that talks gather momentum, somehow breaking the perennial deadlock of settlements, borders and the status of Jerusalem. Finally, let us visualize, on the eve of the signing of this historic treaty, the leaders of all of the Arab states and Iran are swept up by this peace fever and line up at the UN to sign a 1000-year peace treaty with Israel.

It would not matter.

Treaties may get both sides to not shoot at each other (which for the most part, has already been achieved, even between Israel and the Arab states with which it is still formally at war). But a lasting peace in the Middle East will not come so long as terrorists (think Hamas and Hezbollah) or revolutionaries (a la the innumerable Islamist political opposition groups) threaten to overthrow the Arab regimes. The horrendous social and economic conditions of the Arab make it likely that any peace agreement that might be reached in the short term would be overturned by radicals aching to tear up those treaties the deposed regime made with the “Zionist entity”.

This is not to let Israel and its backers off the hook. Peace in the region is still a far greater guarantor to Israel’s security than it’s current military superiority. But to truly achieve something more than a decades-long ceasefire, radicalism among its neighbors must be squelched.

Anti-Semitism plays a part, but is certainly not the most important reason why increasing numbers of Arabs are turning to radical Islam. Syria, Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Iran and others just have too many young people, not enough jobs to go around, and no ability to change their situation so long as the thuggish regimes of the Middle East continue to hold sway. To drain the swamp of radicalism, these states themselves will have to open up their sclerotic political and economic systems, provide some measure of freedom and prosperity to their people and thus engender the kind of stability that can lead to true peace in the Middle East.

This brings us back to Korea. From a xenophobic and technologically backward hermit kingdom at the turn of the twentieth century, this place went on to be in turn an enslaved Japanese colony, a splintered yet liberated American protectorate, and finally a devastated war-torn mass of ruined villages and refugees the North Koreans left in their wake in the South. In 1950, this tiny country was broken, worse off even than the Arab Middle East of the time.

Sixty years later, South Korea is the 15th largest economy in the world, with an entrenched democratic political system and, despite the temporary setback of this week, an active space program. No one worries that South Korea, or a radical group within that country, will suddenly provoke war with it’s neighbor (which is particularly nice, since now we only have to worry about the North Koreans setting off a war along the most heavily fortified border on the planet). And Korea is merely one of the more dramatic examples of what a nation bereft of natural resources but willing to invest in its human capital can achieve within two generations.

But back in the Middle East, all of the Arab states, comprising a far larger population and geographic area than South Korea, have a combined GDP less than the country of Spain (at one time a Muslim outpost in Europe). Space program? The closest thing to an Arab astronaut we might see in the next while could only be a Hamas suicide bomber strapped to an augmented Ashoura rocket.

The point being, that for real, sustainable peace between Israel and its avowed enemies to take hold, extreme transformations must take place in the Arab world and Iran. Economic development alone is no guarantor of peace, since certain Arab states and Iran may simply continue to buy more weapons or fund terrorist groups. The transformation will be more about their young people getting trained to produce and sell the products and ideas that the rest of the world wants, rather than spending long hours considering the evil of Western influence and the extent to which Jews are biologically related to pigs and monkeys. It will be about political leaders focusing on building themselves up, not on the evils of foreign devils. These societies surely won’t change in order to make peace with Israel, but rather because this kind of development is what their people want. Peace could simply be a by-product.

With great resolve from the concerned nations of the Middle East to meet their internal challenges and defeat radicalism, “peace in the Middle East” can mean far more than just ink on paper .

Social hacktivists armed with little more than Twitter accounts, web browsers and an earnest desire to stick it to their perceived oppressors are hitting out at the Iranian regime’s online presence. It’s going to take much more than cyber warfare to bring down the mullahs, but it is an intriguing sideline in this protest against a regime accused of subverting democracy.

So far, official Iranian government websites and propaganda outlets including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Official Blog, Office of the Supreme Leader, Sayyid Ali Khamenei, the vile scab-ridden Iranian Press TV and a long list of others are either under attack, unresponsive, or providing only “Service Unavailable” messages (Zero Day). The hacktivists’ tactics are simple: use Twitter to organize and enable large groups of instant hackers through use of automated tools that overload websites with repeated web-page refresh requests.

It’s far from clear whether the cyber-offensive, supposedly launched by the Iranian opposition and supported by hackers outside Iran, will cause enough disruption to give the regime real cause for concern. The leadership and government bigwigs that have already shown willingness to shoot, jail and torture protesters who are demonstrating against a perceived electoral miscarriage (NP), may not feel overly inconvenienced by the online disruption.

Hijacking online communications as a means to spread the opposition message is a tactical victory. The question is whether they’ll be able to do far more. If hackers are able to shut down critical infrastructure, and if it turns out that there’s a mass movement of protesters across the country, not just in Tehran, just waiting for the chance to beat down the leadership, then this initial hacktivism could turn out to be a historic victory of Web 2.0 tools over tyranny.

By way of comparison, those who know a bit about the increasing capabilities of cyber-warriors point to attacks on critical infrastructure and government sites in Georgia last year, leading up to Georgians going toe-to-toe with the Russians (AFP). But the reality is that Georgia was not deterred from sending forces into South Ossetia after the cyber attacks started. And Georgia didn’t ultimately give up because the hackers killed the electricity. It was an overwhelming mass of Russian army soldiers, airpower and tanks that brought the tiny Eastern European country to its knees. The cyber-attacks were a sideshow while the real blood-and-guts war was happening.

The point is that even if the hacktivists in and outside Iran can step up the pace and severity of attacks to do things like disable police and military infrastructure, these tactics won’t have lasting effect without a mass movement willing to face down attacks with their own brand of violence.

Riot cops with clubs and guns don’t need much technology to do the dirty work of the regime. It’s not at all clear that the Iranian opposition will have the stomach for the kind of knock-down, drag-out fight required to oust a thuggish government.

Mind you, the regime is doing an excellent job of creating a resistance movement willing to spill blood through its harsh crackdown, and undoubtedly social media tools are helping incite the masses with live reporting of atrocities against protesters. The question is whether Iranians in the rest of the country, particularly the countryside, will also be seeing these images.

The mullahs won’t be brought down by a ragged band of hackers, bloggers and Tweeps. But there is a chance that Web 2.0 will make this protest against the government go viral in a way that the leadership – and quite possibly, the opposition – never expected.

At least the Iranian regime has learned that Saddam-esque electoral victories of 99 per cent voter approval just aren’t all that convincing to outsiders (not to mention domestic voters). But the “Orwellian” tactics they are using suggest that the world – and ordinary Iranians – can look forward to several more years at least of bad news. From Times Online:

And it was not just their presence that the regime was using to quell dissent as it turned to electronic jamming and censorship to suppress attempts to publicise protests that were raging barely a mile from the presidential office, where Mr Ahmadinejad gave a surreal, Orwellian press conference.

Mr Ahmadinejad dismissed the protests as unimportant, comparing the rioters to disappointed football supporters after a match. He said there was no evidence that he had stolen the election, and that his margin of victory — 28 per cent — was so great that it was absurd to question his legitimacy. “Don’t worry about it. Freedom prevails absolutely in our country,” he told incredulous foreign journalists.

I came across a protest against the Israeli “apartheid regime” and the BC liquor store’s sale of wines produced on the Golan heights in downtown Vancouver on the weekend. The protesters appeared to be the usual mix of starry-eyed but misinformed activists and fellow travelers for regimes and groups that oppose the West. Not all of the bystanders were on board with the small gathering’s message, to say the least. Hilarity ensued.

My video camera came out, used iMovie to put all the unruly shenanigans into an entertaining little four-minute doc, and presto-YouTube, we’ve got Harsh Words: Arguing the Israel-Palestine conflict on the streets of Canada.

One of the reasons I recorded this was to find out why some people get involved in these protests. Clearly, it ain’t just about Israel or Middle East politics. Watch for the older Palestinian dude from Bethlehem calling for the downfall of America. Enjoy.