Hamas Founder's Son Spied for Israel

Here’s a surprise from the Middle East: the son of Hamas founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef spied for Israel for more than ten years.

The son of one of Hamas’s founding members was a spy in the service of Israel for more than a decade, helping prevent dozens of Islamist suicide bombers from finding their targets, it emerged today.

Codenamed the Green Prince by Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of Hamas co-founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, supplied key intelligence on an almost daily basis from 1996 onwards and tracked down suicide bombers and their handlers from his father’s organization, the daily Haaretz said.

Information he supplied led to the arrests of some of the most wanted men by Israeli forces, including Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah leader often tipped as a potential president who was convicted of masterminding terrorist attacks, and one of Hamas’ top bomb-makers Abdullah Barghouti, who is no relation of the jailed Fatah chief.

Yousef converted to Christianity and has a book about his undercover work coming out — which doesn’t make Israel’s security service Shin Bet happy. But the revelations in the book will be much more damaging to Hamas; about the terrorist group, Yousef said this to the Times Online:

“Hamas cannot make peace with the Israelis,” he told the daily. “That is against what their God tells them. It is impossible to make peace with infidels, only a cease-fire, and no one knows that better than I. The Hamas leadership is responsible for the killing of Palestinians, not Israelis.”

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Feisal-Frankfurter Correspondence further to Arab proposal for Jewish Homeland March 3, 1919

http://hegabs-nekabs.blogspot.com/2010/01/blog-post_06.html

http://www.crethiplethi.com/agreement-between-emir-faisal-husseini-and-dr-weizmann/historical-documents/2009/


A letter from his His Majesty King Feisal Ebn Hussein,
king of Syria and Iraq to
Felix Frankfurter, associate of Dr. Chaim Weizmann:

DELEGATION HEDJAZIENNE,
Paris, March 3, 1919.

DEAR MR. FRANKFURTER:

I want to take this opportunity of my first contact with American Zionists to tell you what I have often been able to say to Dr. Weizmann in Arabia and Europe.

We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together.

We Arabs, especially the educated among us look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organisation to Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.

With the chiefs of your movement, especially with Dr. Weizmann, we have had and continue to have the closest relations. He has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed I think that neither can be a real success without the other.

People less informed and less responsible than our leaders and yours, ignoring the need for co-operation of the Arabs and Zionists have been trying to exploit the local difficulties that must necessarily arise in Palestine in the early stages of our movements. Some of them have, I am afraid, misrepresented your aims to the Arab peasantry, and our aims to the Jewish peasantry, with the result that interested parties have been able to make capital out of what they call our differences.

I wish to give you my firm conviction that these differences are not on questions of principle, but on matters detail such as must inevitably occur in every contact of neighbouring peoples, and as are easily adjusted by mutual good will. Indeed nearly all of them will disappear with fuller knowledge.

I look forward, and my people with me look forward, to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the community of civilised peoples of the world.

Believe me,
Yours sincerely,
(Sgd.) Feisal. 5th MARCH, 1919

Prof. Irwin Cotler about Jewish Refugees from Arab States

Canadian MP and former Minister speaks about an issue overlooked by the both International Community and Israel itself. Israel Channel 11, 23.2.08

Azmi Bishara: "I don't think there is a Palestinian Nation at all"

"Well, I don't think there is a Palestinian Nation at all. I think there is an Arab Nation, I always thought so and I didn't change my mind.

I don't think there is a Palestinian Nation, I think it is a Colonial invention. When were there any Palestinians? Where did they come from?

I think there is an Arab Nation, I never turned to be a Palestinian Nationalist, despite of my decisive struggle against the Occupation. I think that until the end of the 19TH century, Palestine was the South of Great Syria."

A PALESTINIAN MYTH فلسطينية الأساطير جملة

The Forgotten Refugees II - How much did the Jews lose?

How many Jewish refugees were there? 870,000 (not including refugees from Iran).

How much did the Jews lose? No official figures exist. The property and belongings of the Jewish refugees, confiscated by the Arab governments, has been conservatively estimated at about $2.5 billion in 1948 dollars. Invest that money at a modest 6.5% over 57 years and you have today a sum of $80 billion.

In an interview in June 2007, 'Righting a historical injustice', Dr Heskel Haddad of WOJAC estimated that the value of Jewish property seized at today's prices is between $200 and 300 billion. In an article dated 13 February 2003, Itamar Levin of Globes Online estimated the value of Jewish property lost at $30 billion, with that seized in Iraq, Syria and Egypt alone at between $8 - $10 billion. Article in French here.

Some claim that Jewish property lost in Iraq alone amounts to $20 billion.

Palestinians: in the early 1950s, the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine estimated the value of lost Palestinian property at £122 million, or approximately $1.85 billion 1990 US dollars. This was the only independent study ever done of Palestinian losses. In 1999, the Palestinians presented a $670 billion compensations claim before the European Union Commission for lost assets, use of those assets and emotional distress (p.223 Locked doors by Itamar Levin).

Jewish-owned land lost in Arab countries:38,625 sq miles [By way of comparison, Israel's total land area is 7,992 square miles.]

WOJAC has also estimated deeded property lost in Arab lands to cover 100,000 sq.km. According to a UN report of 20 November 1951, Palestinian land lost amounted to 6,3027 sq.miles (16,324 sq km), of which 1,766 sq. miles were cultivable.]

Background reading:Jewish property in Iraq, Egypt and Syria:can it be retrieved in court? by Itamar Levin ( Justice no.36, summer 2003, page 9)

Israel tallies up compensation claims by Iraqi Jews by Michael Fischbach

Locked doors:the seizure of Jewish property in Arab lands by Itamar Levin - book review

BICOM report: The Middle East's ignored Jewish refugees

Private property: keep out! by Peter Hirschberg

Jews who fled Arab lands now press their cause - San Francisco ChronicleThe other side of the refugee coin - Time magazine

Other must-read articles

The Forgotten Refugees

A film about the mass exodus of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa in the 20th century. The Forgotten Refugees explores the history, culture, and forced exodus of Middle Eastern and North African Jewish communities in the second half of the 20th century.

Using extensive testimony of refugees from Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, and Morocco the film recounts the stories - of joy and suffering - that nearly one million individuals have carried with them for so long. The film weaves personal stories with dramatic archival footage of rescue missions, historic images of exodus and resettlement, and analyses by contemporary scholars to tell the story of how and why the Jewish population in the Middle East and North Africa declined from one million in 1945 to several thousand today.