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.

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

As the title shows this is the 15th part (actually the 16^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 and Part XIV.

In this segment I find it necessary to re-produce the assertions for the apologists for Israeli expansionist and oppressive policies and to insert the rebuttal after each assertion. I will show the assertions in brown and my response in black type.

The first is entitled: “Israel’s Borders," followed by a sub-heading: “Are they "legitimate"? Should they be changed?” and then the following introduction:

Many in the Arab world insist that the State of Israel is "illegitimate" and that, in order to be considered for "recognition," it must, at the very least, "adjust" its borders. In order to justify that insistent demand, Arab propaganda has created many myths. By dint of constant repetition, some of these myths have come to be accepted as reality.

It is difficult to respond to this because it is not clear, at least from this paragraph, what borders the author is talking about.

So I will pass on to the next part:

What are some of these myths and what are the facts? 

Myth: The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 changed border arrangements that had existed for centuries. 

Fact: The borders in the Middle East were drawn arbitrarily after World War I by Britain and France. In the spoils, Britain got Iraq and Palestine. In 1922, contrary to the Balfour Declaration and to its Mandate from the League of Nations, Britain gave the area east of the Jordan River (77% of Palestine) to the Hashemite tribes.

I will not respond to this because it is a straw man. I know of no source that asserts or believes, “The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 changed border arrangements that had existed for centuries.”

Myth: Israel has been expansionist since its establishment. 

Fact: In 1974, Israel returned to Syria territories captured in the 1967 and 1973 defensive wars. In exchange for a peace treaty, Israel returned the vast Sinai area in Egypt, with flourishing cities, strategic installations, and economic assets. Thus Israel proved conclusively that peace and security -- not extra land — are its top priorities.

Here I assert that the so-called myth, that “Israel has been expansionist since its establishment” is irrefutable. According to the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (Partition Plan) November 29, 1947 “called for the partition of the British–ruled Palestine Mandate into a Jewish state and an Arab state.” And it shows the following map.

Even this partition was objected to by many in the US State Department on the grounds that:

the partition plan, adopted by the United Nations on November 29, 1947. (is) Patently unfair (for), it awarded 56 percent of Palestine to its 650,000 Jewish inhabitants, and 44 percent to its 1,300,000 Muslim and Christian Arab inhabitants.

I, personally think this was the wrong analysis because the land to be given to the new State of Israel was not just for the inhabitants then there residing, but for the expected influx of refugees who were expected to, and did arrive from places where Jews had recently been displaced and places were they continued to face oppression such as Russia.

But to say that the Israel has not been expansionist is to fly in the face of the facts as can be seen from any map. But the claim that Israel has not been expansionist is also repeated by the Jewish Virtual Library, which also describes this as a myth and then sets forth a list of examples showing that Israel has as part of various peace treaties relinquished some territory that it occupied as a result of military conquest.

This is undoubtedly true. Israel has at times withdrawn from previously captured territory, but it is irrelevant to the question. To be expansionist does not mean that a state has to hold onto every inch of territory that it has captured. It simply means that it has expanded, beyond the territory given to it by the UN resolution of 1948, which is the only territory to which it has de jure title.

Reverting now to the Jewish Virtual Library it sets forth a map of Israel as it is now constituted, using it to argue that Israel’s security requires it to further expand. But that is a way of justifying expansion. It does not show either that it has not expanded, or that it does not intent to expand. In fact in arguing for the justification for expansion for security reasons, it admits that ambition.

But beyond that, and If we focus on the issue as stated, is Israel an expansionist state, the answer is obvious from a simply comparison of the map showing the territory that Israel occupies under the so-called 1967 armistice line, or green line, (See the map below) and the land that was granted to Israel by the UN. (See the map below that) Though the Jewish Virtual Library (Ibid) argues that the new 1967 armistice line are not defensible, it is impossible to argue that they do not encompass a territory larger than that granted to Israel by the 1948 UN resolution.

But we need not rely on a comparison of maps. If we look at another web site that argues that the borders that the UN created were indefensible, we find that the original state created and sanctioned by the UN had an area of “5,500 square miles”.

But after the 1948 war according to a pro-Israel article in the Seattle Times, Israel’s territory encompassed 8,000 square miles, an increase 2,500 square miles or almost a 50% increase. But Israel has not been content with this huge increase in its territory. It covets the rest of the West Bank as can be seen from the settlement activity shown on the map below,

An even better map showing the extent of the settlements can be found here, where an article in the Wall Street Journal argues that the settlements require the annexation of most, if not all of the West Bank.

If these are not the acts of an expansionist state it is difficult to imagine what would be. It is difficult to imagine that Israel’s territorial ambitions extend beyond that.

All this is attempted to be justified on the ground that Israel’s 1948 borders were not defensible. That indeed the Armistice or Green line is not defensible. And so Israel has to keep expanding until it reaches a defensible line. It is becoming apparent that this line is the Jordan River, or the complete annexation of the West Bank.

The fear is that if this were to happen as expressed by the US President, the Secretary of State and indeed former Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, who according to CNN said as long ago as 2010:

As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel, it is going to be either non-Jewish or non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.

This fear was also expressed by US Secretary of State John Kerry in February of 2014 as reported by Fox News and I quote:

The U.S. secretary of state himself has started warning Israel that it stands to become a binational state unless it ends the occupation of the lands it captured in the 1967 war. Kerry, who is expected to present a framework for a deal soon, said last month that failure "will make it impossible to preserve (Israel's) future as a democratic Jewish state."

But many discount this danger, as for example, an article in the Boston Globe of June 26, 2013 explains:

In the 1960s, when the fertility rate for Israeli Arabs (9.2 births per woman) soared far above that of Israeli Jews (3.4 births per woman), that demographic challenge certainly seemed plausible. Yasser Arafat liked to say that the ultimate weapon in his arsenal against the Jewish state was “the womb of the Arab woman.” The Palestinian Authority has always understood the propaganda value of population data. As the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics began its first census in the West Bank and Gaza in 1997, the bureau’s director, Hassan Abu Libdeh, assured The New York Times that the results would amount to nothing less than “a civil intifada.” In 2005, the bureau predicted that Jews would be a minority in “historic Palestine” (i.e., west of the Jordan River) by 2010. Now it says the tipping point will come by 2020.

 Don’t count on it.

 Arafat’s boast notwithstanding, Palestinian women, like women throughout the Muslim world, are bearing far fewer children than they used to. Within Israel proper, the birth rate among Muslims has trended steadily downward and stands now at 3.5 children per woman. It is even lower for Palestinians in the West Bank — just 2.91, according to the CIA Factbook. In a 2012 survey by the Population Reference Bureau of family planning attitudes in the Arab world, 72 percent of married Palestinian women (ages 15 through 49) said they preferred to avoid a pregnancy. That was typical of the modern Middle East: The same survey showed most Jordanians, Egyptians, and Syrians felt the same way.

 But while Palestinian birth rates have dramatically declined, Jewish birth rates in Israel have been heading up. Israel now has the highest fertility level of any modern industrialized nation. The fertility gap between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, a yawning 5.8 in the 1960s, is just 0.5 today. Defying longstanding conventional wisdom, writes former Israeli diplomat Yoram Ettinger, it is Israel’s Jewish population that is undergoing a remarkable surge, rising from about 80,000 births per year in 1995 to 130,000 in 2012. (The annual number of Israeli Arab births has held steady at between 35,000 and 40,000). “Anyone suggesting that Jews are doomed to become a minority west of the Jordan River is either dramatically mistaken or outrageously misleading,” Ettinger argues.

But whoever is right on the demographics, the very discussion of the question clearly shows Israel’s designs on all of the West Bank, or to put it another way on all of Palestine.

If this is not the ambition of an expansionist state, it is difficult to imagine what one is, or can be.

I will continue this discussion in my next post.

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 IX - The Palestinian Diaspora & The Right of Return)

As the title shows this is the ninth part (actually the 10^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 titles: "I AM A JEW (Part I)," "I AM A JEW (Part II)," "I AM A JEW (Part III)," "I AM A JEW (Special Bulletin)," "I AM A JEW (Part IV - The Torah & The Talmud)," "I AM A JEW (Part V - Gaza Is A Huge Prison)," "I AM A JEW (PART VI - The Palestinians)," "I AM A JEW (PART VII - A Defense of Israel’s Policies and a Rebuttal)" and "I AM A JEW (PART VIII - Hamas & Likud)."

In talking about a disposition of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict it has consistently been made to appear that the sticking point to a resolution is the Right of Return of Palestinians to Israel, thereby endangering, if not totally destroying, the character of Israel as a Jewish state. It is a phony issue!

To be sure United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, which was adopted on December 11, 1948 sets forth in paragraph 11:

…that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible; Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of the refugees and the payment of compensation, and to maintain close relations with the Director of the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees and, through him, with the appropriate organs and agencies of the United Nations;

It has been argued that if all the refugees who fled the area that is now Israel and their descendants, now numbering “more than 1.5 million individuals” were to return to Israel, which according to the The Jewish Virtual Library has a total population of 8,252,500 (See here) it would destroy the character of the Jewish state. But would it? Of those 8,252,500, 6,186,100 are Jewish. Only 1,709,900 are Arabs. So that even if all the Arab refugees were to be allowed to return, the Arab population of Israel would still only amount to a little over 2,200,000, just over a quarter of the Jewish population, hardly a threat to the Jewish character of the Israeli state. The problem obviously becomes much greater if we accept the UN definition (See here) that:

…the legal status of refugee (is) something that can be inherited

which means that:

today it classifies more than 6.6 million Palestinians as refugees.

which makes the possibility of resettlement in Israel impossible. But of course if we limit the Right of Return to Israel as being limited only to those who in fact fled, excluding their descendants, we would be looking at an elderly easily manageable population.

But the fact is that most Palestinian Arab refugees do not want to return to Israel. According to an article in Time magazine (See here) in 2003 a:

…researcher managed to broach the subject, interviewing 4,500 refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank. Only 10% said they would live in Israel if given the option, while 54% opted for monetary compensation and a home on the West Bank or Gaza. The other third said they would prefer to live in other countries, or rejected the terms described.

So the issue of the Right of Return is at best a theoretical one, and at worst a straw man, easily knocked down.

The Israeli government makes it appear that his is the main stumbling block to a settlement, but as can be seen it is not really a problem, nor is it a legitimate bone of contention.

Furthermore, Israel rejects the UN resolution of 1948 as being a manifestation of the UN’s anti Israel bias, but its very existence stems from that same body's resolution 181 of November 1947 on which the very establishment of the Israeli State was founded. How can Israel base its legitimacy on the one hand on the UN resolution and on the other reject another passed soon after. It is difficult to avoid calling that chutzpah, or to give its rejection any credence.

While speaking about the legitimacy of Israel within the 1948 borders stemming from the 1947 resolution, it is difficult to find legitimacy in the generally accepted 1967 borders, which the UN never sanctioned. Israel’s claim to these borders stem from military conquest, albeit defensive wars. It is argued that territory acquired in defensive wars may be legitimately kept, (See here) but that is true, according to this concept, only until a peace treaty is agreed upon, and does not justify it’s arbitrary and unilateral permanent annexation. If defensive wars were a justification for the occupation and annexation of territory, then Germany would have been justified in its occupation and annexation of France, for it was France that declared war on Germany. Furthermore, the Allies set the precedence on the acquisition of territory after the end of a victorious war, by not taking any territory from the defeated nations, settling instead for a period of occupation, while helping the defeated nations rebuild. That precedence should be binding on Israel.

But the problem of the Palestinian diaspora is real and cannot be ignored by the International community or by Israel.

It is not acceptable either for Israel or the International community to ignore the plight of the Palestinian diaspora, which is far worse than the Jewish diaspora, before the advent of the Nazis ever was. Jews in Germany for example were fully assimilated, and lived full and prosperous lives, and while anti-Semitism there and in other countries including the US was ever present, the plight of Jews in their diaspora was never as desperate as those of the Palestinians.

The fact is that most of the displaced Palestinians have been denied the normal lives of people everywhere and are forced to live in refugee camps without permanent homes and without the right of citizenship.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) is trying to take care of these refugees but they are underfunded and understaffed. They provide assistance and protection for
 some 5 million Palestinian refugees. (See here)

I quote from their website:

Palestine refugees are defined as “persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” 

UNRWA services are available to all those living in its area of operations who meet this definition, who are registered with the Agency and who need assistance. The descendants of Palestine refugee males, including adopted children, are also eligible for registration. When the Agency began operations in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, some 5 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.

 Nearly one-third of the registered Palestine refugees, more than 1.5 million individuals, live in 58 recognized Palestine refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, the Syrian Arab Republic, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

A Palestine refugee camp is defined as a plot of land placed at the disposal of UNRWA by the host government to accommodate Palestine refugees and set up facilities to cater to their needs. Areas not designated as such and are not recognized as camps. However, UNRWA also maintains schools, health centres and distribution centres in areas outside the recognized camps where Palestine refugees are concentrated, such as Yarmouk, near Damascus. 

The plots of land on which the recognized camps were set up are either state land or, in most cases, land leased by the host government from local landowners. This means that the refugees in camps do not 'own' the land on which their shelters were built, but have the right to 'use' the land for a residence. 

Socioeconomic conditions in the camps are generally poor, with high population density, cramped living conditions and inadequate basic infrastructure such as roads and sewers.

 UNRWA's responsibility in the camps is limited to providing services and administering its installations. The Agency does not own, administer or police the camps, as this is the responsibility of the host authorities.

UNRWA has a camp services office in each camp, which the residents visit to update their records or to raise issues relating to Agency services with the Camp Services Officer (CSO). The CSO, in turn, refers refugee concerns and petitions to the UNRWA administration in the area in which the camp is located. 

In the aftermath of the hostilities of June 1967 and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, ten camps were established to accommodate a new wave of displaced persons, both refugees and non-refugees.

 The remaining two thirds of registered Palestine refugees live in and around the cities and towns of the host countries, and in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, often in the environs of official camps. While most of UNRWA's installations such as schools and health centres are located in the Palestine refugee camps, a number are outside; all of the Agency’s services are available to all registered Palestine refugees, including those who do not live in the camps.

Unlike the Jewish diaspora, where Jews were usually citizens of the countries in which they lived, Palestinians are living in refugee camps and are living in them generation after generation. (For a list of the camps and their populations see here)

Israel along with the International community has an obligation to end their refugee status and to allow them, and in fact help them, to resettle in permanent homes with rights of citizenship in their own sovereign country.

Jews the world over, Americans of all persuasions, and the world community cannot settle for less. The endless land grabs by Israel and the endless occupation must end. NOTHING LESS WILL DO.

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