I AM A JEW (PART XVII - A Return to a Defense of Israel’s Policies & a Rebuttal Continued - Pt. 2)

As the title shows this is the 16th part (actually the 17^th, if you count the Special Bulletin) of the series. If you haven’t read the other parts I urge you to do so. They are, after all a continuum. Easy access to the others can be obtained by clicking on the parts.

Part I, Part II, Part III, Special Bulletin, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X, Part XI, Part XII, Part XIII, Part XIV, Part XV and Part XVI.

This is a continuation to a Defense of Israel’s Policies & a Rebuttal but it no longer rebuts the article entitled “Israel’s Borders,” but rather moves on to the article referenced in "Israel’s Borders," namely a Eugene W. Rostow article that appeared in The New Republic on October 21, 1991, some 23 years ago. It appears that time stood still. The same articles are being cited. In any case the article can be found here.

To a limited extent it brings to my consciousness a portion of United Nations Security Resolution 242 that I paid too little attention to. 242’s preamble says:

which should include the application of both the following principles: (emphasis added)

and the second principle set forth is:

(ii) Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force;

So I was wrong to essentially ignore this second principle of an inseparable resolution.

And it could be argued that Israel under this resolution did not have to withdraw its armed forces from occupied territory until “acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force;”

But exactly how this resolution justifies the settlement of an ever-increasing Jewish hostile, permanent occupying force, is beyond me.

The state of belligerency in effect ended when the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist within the 1967 borders as long ago as 1993. That is more than 20 years ago.

On September 9, 1993 the P.L.O. chairman, Yasser Arafat exchanged letters with then (soon to be assassinated) Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin.

The PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security.The PLO accepts United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.

If there was ever any justification for the continued presence of the occupation and the continued expansion of settlements on Israeli territory, it ended on this date. As a matter of fact even Hamas has now recognized Israel’s Right to exist. As I pointed out in my post "I AM A JEW (PART VIII - Hamas & Likud)," the British newspaper The Global Mail reported days ago:

Hamas is endorsing Mr. Abbas’s plan for establishing a state within the so-called “1967 borders” that delineated the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In effect, Hamas now accepts Israel’s existence and the previous agreements arrived at between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel. See here.

But none of this matters. When a state is bound and determined at conquest, facts don’t matter. Its objective remains the same, as it has always been, at least in the eyes of Likud, and its leader, Netanyahu.

But allow me to return to Rostow’s presentation.

Mr. Rostow writes:

The United States has remained firmly opposed to the creation of a third Palestinian state on the territory of the Palestine Mandate.

But Rostow gives no source or citation for this bald statement. Any examination of American policy under numerous Presidents, including Reagan, shows that the US has consistently opposed Israeli settlement policies in the West Bank of Palestine.

And then Rostow makes the most incredible statement of all. One that shows his contempt for Human Rights. He urges:

Provisions for a shift of populations… are a possible solution for those West Bank Arabs who would prefer to live elsewhere.

In other words, Mr. Rostow sees nothing wrong with ethnic cleansing. If they don’t like living under a foreign oppressive state, they can pack up and become refugees, like so many already have. In Rostow’s view Palestinians, have no right to self-determination. In fact they have no rights at all.

And so I will deal with only one other article that deals with the Palestinian People (and here I must stress people, for in the end all the juridical arguments that can be made aside, what we are dealing with is people, and people are entitled to govern themselves and not be driven from their homes, or be invited to leave their homes and become refugees if they do not like to live under foreign domination.

Finally, Rostow makes this incredibly deceptive allegation:

The Bush administration seems to consider the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to be "foreign" territory to which Israel has no claim. Yet the Jews have the same right to settle there, as they have to settle in Haifa.

This is sophistry at its worst. Jews, as individuals, may have the right to settle in occupied territory, though that it is far from established, but clearly an occupying power does not have the right to annex the territory, and indeed the private property of people in an occupied land, in order to change the ethnic character of that land. The building of settlement compounds with state funds is not the same as the right of individuals.

And so we come to Maurice Ostroff’s article of June 11, 2011

He finds a simple way out of the conundrum of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. He tells us the West bank is not occupied. It is disputed territory.

But for all these years the world has recognized the West Bank as occupied territory, not part of the territory assigned to Israel by the UN resolution and the only, I stress the only basis for Israel’s existence and the only basis for the territory that Israel is to occupy. Any territory beyond that is occupied, as a result of military action. That even includes the territory that Israel occupied between 1948 and 1967. Why nobody has challenged that annexation is difficult to understand. That is the recognized term for occupied territory. The canard about defensive wars allowing for captured territory to be annexed has no basis in law or in fact, and would have made Germany’s annexation of France legal, for it was France that declared war on Germany, not the other way around. In fact had Germany invaded Britain, according to this reasoning, Germany’s annexation of Britain would have been legal. Surely no one would want to stand by such absurd reasoning, and it should be noted that except for its constant repetition, no convincing legal citation has been produced. In fact, as he himself points out, even Sharon used that term.

But regardless of the outrages committed in the “disputed” territory of Kashmir, the proper way to settle such a dispute is to immediately have a plebiscite, and to allow the people of the “disputed territory “to decide their own fate. But that is clearly not what Mr. Ostrov champions, nor does Netanyahu, at least not until after Israel, through its policies, moves enough settler into the occupied territory so as to have a majority, or drives enough Palestinians out of the territory so as to accomplish the same end.

It has become clear that Israel is no longer interested, if it ever was, in negotiating a peace treaty with the Palestinians. It is only interested in annexation driven by a religious fervor based on nothing more than to re-establish a biblical nation.

This messianic drive has become the raison d'être of modern Israel. Unfortunately, it leaves no room for other ethnic groups, except as a despised and oppressed minority within the body politic.

I welcome comments, but will not publish any, unless they have a unique relevance to the segment under discussion, until this series is complete.

I AM A JEW (PART XVI - A Return to a Defense of Israel’s Policies & a Rebuttal Continued)

As the title shows this is the 16th part (actually the 17^th, if you count the Special Bulletin) of the series. If you haven’t read the other parts I urge you to do so. They are, after all a continuum. Easy access to the others can be obtained by clicking on the parts.

Part I, Part II, Part III, Special Bulletin, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X, Part XI, Part XII, Part XIII, Part XIV and Part XV.

This part of my dissertation picks up where I left off in discussing the article “Israel’s Borders."

I left off by thoroughly rebutting the assertion that "Israel having been an expansionist state since its establishment, is a myth," and showed that this is clearly not a myth, but rather, an established fact."

Now the next assertion in the article at hand, or as the author of that article likes to put it:

Myth: Judea and Samaria (also called "the West Bank") are part of Jordan.

This is hardly a myth. It is another straw man. Of course the West Bank is not part of Jordan!!!

On August 1, 1988, as reported in the New York Times: 

King Hussein of Jordan tonight abandoned to the Palestine Liberation Organization any claim to the Israeli-occupied West Bank

Now I begin to feel that the article is hardly worth further rebuttal. It is so full of deception and misinformation that it discredits itself, so I will address only one more assertion.

Myth: Israeli settlements in Judea/Samaria (the "West Bank") are illegal, an obstacle in peace. 

Fact: Contrary to what Arab propaganda suggests, Jordan was never sovereign in Judea/Samaria (the "West Bank"). Thus, the constantly repeated accusation of "Israeli occupation" is pointless. Numerous international legal authorities, among them Eugene Rostow, have shown conclusively that Israel's rights in Judea/Samaria (the "West Bank") are based on international law and are further affirmed by U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338. President Reagan concluded that Jewish settlements are not illegal and that "...all people — Moslems, Jews, and Christians — are entitled to live in the West Bank."

Here the so-called “facts” are so numerous and so intertwined that it is difficult to deal with them within a reasonable space. But to illustrate how wrong these assertions are, I need do no more than to quote from UN Resolution 242 which says the opposite of what the author claims.

UN Security Council Resolution 242 calls for, and I quote:

Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict; 

and territories is defined by the following map:

The author here relies heavily on Eugene Rostow, not exactly an uninterested observer, but rather another polemicist on behalf of Israel’s expansionism. I will respond to his polemic in due course.

But in so far it is possible, the claims here made are dealt with in an article by David Ignatius writing in the Washington Post of June 4, 2009.

Part of his article are worth quoting because they set the record straight, instead of cherry picking it.

He writes:

President Ronald Reagan stopped the characterization of Israeli settlements as "illegal" when he took office in 1981, but he opposed the expansion of them.

Looking at what Reagan and other Presidents and Secretaries of State said we must look to the Foundation for Middle East Peace, that sets forth what the various Presidents, including Reagan, said, and it shows that Reagan was an outlier. But even the Reagan Administration speaking through its Secretary of State George Schultz in September of 1982 said:

". . . the question isn't whether they [settlements] are legal or illegal; the question is are they constructive in the effort to arrange a situation that may, in the end, be a peaceful one and be one in which the people of the region can live in a manner that they prefer.  [President Reagan's] answer to that is no, expansion of those settlements is not a constructive move." (Emphasis added)

Returning to the Ignatius article, we quote further:

Every administration since the 1967 war -- a total of nine -- has made essentially the same demand. Netanyahu, like previous Israeli leaders, has rejected it.

Ignatius goes on to write:

Year after year, decade after decade, American officials keep repeating U.S. opposition to the settlements -- and Israeli governments keep on building them. More than 120 settlements have been constructed over the past 42 years, and the Israeli population in the West Bank now totals 190,000 in the Jerusalem area and 289,000 elsewhere.

 For years, the official U.S. position was that the settlements were illegal under international law because they violated the Fourth Geneva Convention, on protection of civilians in time of war. That document, adopted in 1949, specifies: "The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." The application of this article to Israel was endorsed by the administrations of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

 An emphatic statement of the U.S. view that settlements were illegal came from George H.W. Bush in 1971, when he was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations: "We regret Israel's failure to acknowledge its obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as its actions which are contrary to the letter and spirit of this convention."

 Israel's position was that the West Bank was not "occupied" but rather "administered" territory whose pre-1967 status had been unclear under international law. Jordan had ruled the West Bank from 1949 until 1967, but most nations hadn't recognized its sovereignty. To complicate matters further, the Israeli Supreme Court has described the West Bank as "under belligerent occupation."

President Ronald Reagan stopped the characterization of Israeli settlements as "illegal" when he took office in 1981, but he opposed the expansion of them. That position has been maintained by subsequent administrations, which have termed the building of new settlements "an obstacle to peace" and said that the status of existing settlements should be resolved in peace negotiations. Israel has steadfastly refused interim attempts to curtail its settlements, including announcing a specific reservation to the 2003 "road map" for peace.

Before I close this part of my series allow me to expand upon what UN resolutions 242 and 338 actually say. For that I turn to the Reit Institute, a non-partisan non-profit strategy group based in Tel Aviv. 

I quote: 

The main articles of UN Security Council Resolution 242 (11/67) call for:

• Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the 1967 war.
• Termination of the state of belligerency.
• Mutual "acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area, and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force."
• Achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem.

Resolution 338 (10/73) reiterates the importance of Resolution 242, and calls upon the sides to begin negotiations with the aim of achieving a just and durable peace.

I hardly think that these resolutions form the basis for Israeli settlement policy or give it any legitimacy. To make such a claim strains credulity.

I welcome comments, but will not publish any, unless they have a unique relevance to the segment under discussion, until this series is complete.