Thursday, January 27, 2005

IDPs, Getting Used to a New Term

I will expand on this soon but you might as well get used to a new legal term for the residents of Jewish communities in Gaza and Northern Samaria who are scheduled to be expelled from their homes and to have their farms, hothouses, schools, cemeteries and other social institutions either destroyed or physically removed from thm.

It's IDPs which means Internal Displaced Persons.

Yes, there actually is a category like that and even the United Nations utilizes it. Here's how it is described by the Brookings Institute which adminsiters an IDP project:

Over the past decade, tens of millions of people have been forced from their homes by armed conflict, internal strife, and systematic violations of human rights but remain within the borders of their own countries.

The Project on Internal Displacement was created to promote a more effective national, regional and international response to this global problem and to support the work of the Representative to the UN Secretary-General in carrying out the responsibilities of his mandate. The Project is co-directed by Walter K×”lin, the newly appointed Representative of the UN Secretary-General on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons, and Roberta Cohen, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

(http://www.brook.edu/fp/projects/idp/idp.htm)

1 comment:

YMedad said...

Ofer's comment, I think, was supposed to be posted at the Ha'Aretz entry but nevermind.

The point is that the Jewish communities in Yesha are very legal, they were built on land that not only we Jews know is our homeland but that the world decided should be the territory of a reconstituted Jewish home.
The word "Arabs" never appears in any of the Mandate diplomacy or decisions and so, this was intended to be the Jewish state, including in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

Once a "Palestine" is to be set up, can we then expect that all Arabs in Israel will move there so as toreduce conflict? If not, on what basis do they remain in Israel? On the fact that we Jews don't normally go around killing Arabs to make them feel uncomfortable like they do in Yesha?

If "Leftist" means to be irrational, immoral and maybe even wrong, well each chooses his own reality.