Re: What the Palestinians Really Want.

by Evelyn Gordon

In his post on Friday, Rick correctly identified the myth that has foiled every peace-making effort for decades: namely, that the Palestinians actually want a state.

To understand just how untenable this myth is, it's worth comparing Palestinian behavior with that of the Jews in 1947. The UN Partition Plan proposed that year gave the Jewish state only 12 percent of the territory originally allotted to it under the 1922 League of Nations Mandate, and only 56 percent of what remained after Britain tore away 78 percent of the original territory to create Transjordan (today's Jordan). Moreover, it excluded Jerusalem, the focus of Jewish national and religious longing throughout 2,000 years of exile. And its borders were completely indefensible, as the plan's map shows.

Nevertheless, the pre-state Jewish leadership accepted it. Why? Because two years after the Holocaust — which not only proved the dangers of not having a state, but left hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors as stateless refugees in desperate need of a home — this leadership believed any state, even one so badly flawed, was better than none. Only a state could resettle the survivors and allow them to rebuild their lives; only a state could make "never again" a reality rather than an empty slogan.

The Palestinians, according to their own universally accepted narrative, are in a similar situation today. For 42 years, according to this narrative, millions of them have lived under brutal occupation. For 61 years, millions more have lived in squalid refugee camps, with no hope and no future. Only statehood can end these evils.

Under these circumstances, one would expect Palestinian leaders to jump at any offered state, however flawed, that would end the occupation and enable them to rehabilitate their refugees. Instead, they have repeatedly rejected statehood offers.

Moreover, they did not merely reject ridiculously inadequate offers like the one the Jews nevertheless accepted in 1947. They rejected offers equivalent to 95 and even 100 percent (the Clinton and Olmert plans, respectively) of the territory they ostensibly want, including most of east Jerusalem and even the Temple Mount. In short, they rejected everything they could possibly get under any formula leading to a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one.

And that is the problem — as becomes clear upon examining why the Palestinians repeatedly rejected such offers. First, Palestinians refused to abandon their demand that the refugees be resettled not in the Palestinian state, but in the Jewish one — thereby effectively eradicating the latter. They also refused to acknowledge Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. They even refused to acknowledge any historical Jewish connection to this land, and especially to the Temple Mount — though they would have controlled the Mount in practice.

In short, what the Palestinians really want is not a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one; if they did, they could have one at any time. What they want is a Palestinian state instead of the Jewish one. And until that changes, Israeli-Palestinian peace will remain a mirage.

 

Evelyn Gordon

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Arab Writer Finds Obama Scary for the Moderates, Reassuring for the Radicals.

 

by Barry Rubin

Here’s a remarkable article from Michael Young of the Beirut Daily Star that tells you more about what’s happening in the world than anything you’ll read in the Western media. To give you a clear sense of the contents the title is, “Barack and Hassan concur, the US is waning.”

It begins:

“It’s not often that Barack Obama and Hassan Nasrallah [the leader of Lebanese Hizballah, a Lebanese Islamist group backed by Iran and Syria] agree, but both made important speeches this week, and both appeared to concur that American power was on the decline.”

The reference is to the president’s speech at West Point, which Young sees as gloomy and pessimistic, highlighting American problems and disunity; economic weaknesses; and eagerness to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan (though he is sending some more soldiers there temporarily).

Young continues:

“Listening to Hassan Nasrallah gloat at the weakness of the United States, you had to wonder if the U.S .president misses the point. Power and success are in many respects fruits of perception. Just look at Nasrallah himself, who persuaded many a fool that the hecatomb of 2006 was a divine victory for Lebanon. Modesty in the exercise of foreign policy is a bad idea, particularly for the leader of the world’s most powerful country whose destabilization, whether we like it or not, only destabilizes the global political and economic order.”

Young adds:

“The president might also want to consider how America is viewed overseas….Expect America’s foes in the Middle East to take more advantage of this situation. The Iranian regime, rather visibly, does not believe the Obama administration will attack Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear capability. And Obama’s haste to get out of Iraq, or Afghanistan as soon as he can, like his bellyaches about the economic difficulties facing the republic, exhibit far too little American nerve to frighten Tehran.

“In Lebanon, Iraq, and on the Palestinian front, to name only these, the US has also had little to show for itself. The `peace process,’ which Obama had described as the centerpiece of his regional considerations, remains hopelessly stalled; the Obama administration is so keen to pull out of Iraq that it has looked the other way while Iran has continued to increase its influence in Baghdad, and while Syria has allowed more Al-Qaeda militants through its borders to murder Iraqi civilians.”

The administration doesn’t even seem to notice that the Saudis have basically accepted Syrian-Iranian hegemony in Lebanon because they got no support from Washington, “and the U.S. Embassy in Beirut has sometimes seemed more preoccupied with development projects than with Lebanon’s role in the regional rivalry between the U.S. and Iran.”

Young concludes:

“The mounting perception of American weakness will, arguably, be the most destabilizing factor in the Middle East in the coming years. It will alarm Washington’s allies and empower its foes, and Barack Obama’s stiff-upper-lip displays of candor, his persistent enunciation of American inadequacies, will only make things worse. Power may be a source of great evil, but not nearly as much as a power vacuum.”

In the Middle East and lots of other places in the world, people are still playing hardball realpolitik, while in Western Europe and North America the name of the game is musical chairs without anyone ever losing. When these two styles clash, unquestionably practitioners of the first one will win, unless the second group gets wise.

What Young is saying in public, Arab leaders (and those in Central Europe and lots of other places in the world) are saying in private. Obama doesn’t delight them, he scares them. The administration seems not to have a clue as to what’s happening, while the American media is just starting to catch on.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal.

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Newest Jewish Invention: Zionism without Zion.

 

by Ami Isseroff

We Jews are no doubt a very clever people. Just ask any Jew and he or she will tell you about our Nobel prize winners, about Maimonides, about Baruch d'Espinoza, about Albert Einstein and many others. Any Anti-Semite will also tell you how clever and shrewd we Jews are. So it is not surprising that one of the tribe has come up with an earthshaking proposal that will make the Middle East safe for peace. He is not just any Jew. He is a journalist for Ha'aretz, which considers itself the cleverest and most sophisticated of all Israeli newspapers, and he is not just any journalist. He is the internationally renowned Yossi Melman. Everyone knows how clever and knowledgeable he is.

Melman's proposal is that Israel will give up claiming Jerusalem as its capital. Don't get excited, it's only temporary, maybe for a thousand years or so, until tempers cool down a bit. After all, we waited 2,000 years, so what's another little temporary delay for us Jewish people? This will, Melman assures us, remove a major obstacle to peace. Who among us is not ready to make sacrifices for peace? Melman also proposes that the Palestinians will give up claiming Jerusalem as their capital. Since the Palestinians do not have men of genius among them like Melman, that is not likely to happen until Hell freezes over, so perhaps Melman's proposal is a bit impractical. On the other hand, Melman's proposal is timed impeccably to coincide with the EU resolution proposed by the Swedes. That which would recognize a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, but would not recognize West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The Swedes will love the Melman plan.

Melman's reasoning is that Israel and the Palestinians are the only two peoples who claim a city as capital for "religious reasons." That is why Melman thinks we claim Jerusalem as our capital. Perhaps we want to rebuild the temple there and have animal sacrifices. There are a few people who would like to do that, but of course that is not the reason we want Jerusalem as the capital, and contrary to Muslim propaganda, there are no plans to rebuild any temple. Saudi Arabia, Melman notes, does not make its capital in Mecca. One reason that might be so is that non-Muslims are not allowed to enter Mecca, which would make foreign relations a bit difficult. Melman also thinks evidently, that it is only a coincidence that the Palestinians claim the same city as a capital as the Jews. It must be well established, in Melman's view, that Jerusalem was always the capital of the Palestinian state, right? I didn't here of any such state, but Melman is the expert on the Middle East, not I. Melman doesn't suspect that Palestinians might have an impure ulterior motive in claiming Jerusalem as their capital.

Very well then. For the sake of peace, relying on the word of an expert, we shall relinquish Jerusalem as our capital, as per the Melman plan. We can adopt, for example, Tel-Aviv or Herzliya Pituach as our capital. These are fine examples of forward - looking Zionist industry, a pleasant contrast to the backward and filthy Jerusalem. We shall change the lyrics of our national anthem, Hatikva, so that the words are "to be a free people in our own land, the land of Israel and Herzliya Pituach." And we shall change the name of our national movement to Herzliya Pituachism, because "Zion" after all, is a place in Jerusalem and a poetic allusion to Jerusalem.

There are people who will tell you that Yossi Melman has forgotten more about the Middle East than most of us ever knew. In any case, he certainly forgot a few important things. The Emperor Vespasian understood that Jerusalem is the key to this country, and that whoever holds Jerusalem and makes it his capital will rule here. The next person to teach this lesson was Salah al Din (whom you may know as Saladin) who ousted the Crusaders "temporarily" from Jerusalem. The Crusaders did not understand that they would never return, but Salah al-Din did.

Yossi Melman does does not understand that if we give up Jerusalem as our capital "temporarily" we shall not return there for a millennium most likely, but Mahmoud Abbas and Abbas Zaki can teach him. Zaki, the PLO ambassador to Lebanon explained in 2008:

LET ME TELL YOU, WHEN THE IDEOLOGY OF ISRAEL COLLAPSES, AND WE TAKE, AT LEAST, JERUSALEM, THE ISRAELI IDEOLOGY WILL COLLAPSE IN ITS ENTIRETY, AND WE WILL BEGIN TO PROGRESS WITH OUR OWN IDEOLOGY, ALLAH WILLING, AND DRIVE THEM OUT OF ALL OF PALESTINE."

To underline the point, he expanded his thesis in 2009:

"WITH THE TWO-STATE SOLUTION, IN MY OPINION, ISRAEL WILL COLLAPSE, BECAUSE IF THEY GET OUT OF JERUSALEM, WHAT WILL BECOME OF ALL THE TALK ABOUT THE PROMISED LAND AND THE CHOSEN PEOPLE? WHAT WILL BECOME OF ALL THE SACRIFICES THEY MADE – JUST TO BE TOLD TO LEAVE? THEY CONSIDER JERUSALEM TO HAVE A SPIRITUAL STATUS. THE JEWS CONSIDER JUDEA AND SAMARIA TO BE THEIR HISTORIC DREAM. IF THE JEWS LEAVE THOSE PLACES, THE ZIONIST IDEA WILL BEGIN TO COLLAPSE. IT WILL REGRESS OF ITS OWN ACCORD. THEN WE WILL MOVE FORWARD."

Yossi Melman and the editors of Ha'aretz will be very surprised to find out that after we give up Jerusalem and make, for example, Herzliya Pituach our capital, in order to avoid strife, the Palestinians will prove that a PalestinianstatewithHerzliyaPituach as its capital is what is needed to end the conflict, that it is a legitimate right of the Palestinian people, guaranteed in international legitimacy and stated in all the applicable UN resolutions, as well as the UN Charter and the vouchsafed by the European Union and the International Court of Justice. Justice Goldstone will no doubt back their claim, as will Richard Falk.

The lands of Tel-Aviv and Yaffo ("Jaffa") were likely part of Philistia and not Judea, and the Palestinian Arabs could claim them as their own. Yaffo, under "international legitimacy" (UN General Assembly Resolution 181) was to have been part of the Arab state, not the Jewish state. Tel Aviv, as claimed by the boycotters of the Toronto Film Festival, was built on Arab villages. If Muhammad did not park his flying horse there, then perhaps he visited it with a flying camel. No matter that the land was purchased a hundred years ago. Once someone makes a claim in "international legitimacy," we must obediently honor the claim. Jewish religious and historical claims may be treated as "myths," but the journey of Muhammad on his flying horse is to be reverenced as rock-solid proven fact. If Muhammad got to Jerusalem on a flying horse, and tethered his horse at the Wailing Wall (which just by coincidence happens to be holy to the Jews), he certainly must've reached Tel-Aviv-Yaffo, and tied up his horse, al-Buraq, at the Yaffo clock tower. It will be discovered that the Yaffo clock tower was long known as al Buraq.

As for Herzliya Pituach, it is the location of the famed Sidna Ali Mosque, and used to the the location of the village of Al Haram, which any Palestinian Arab patriot will no doubt inform you was a bustling and prosperous metropolis before the wicked Zionists depopulated it. Yossi Melman would certainly advise us not to make a capital there. In short, there is no place in Israel that could be made the capital city of a Jewish state without arousing the ire of the Palestinians and of the Swedish government, and bringing down on our heads all the imprecations due to those who violate "international legitimacy" as interpreted by the Mufti of Jerusalem.

The next logical and inevitable step for any persecuted people needing asylum is to seek a new home, It would be a temporary home of course, until all the bad feelings quiet down, a Nachtasyl as it is called in German - a night refuge. After all, the Jews, as Yossi Melman and Ha'aretz will remind us, are the only people who attach a religious significance to their homeland. We could just as well (or better) live in New Zealand, where there are friendly people and lots of water, or perhaps East Africa or the Jewish Autonomous Area in Birobidjan.

Territorial Zionism, the search for a territory outside the land of Israel for the Jewish people, was, of course, already tried. What in theory might have been a promising idea that could have saved the Jews of Europe, was in practice a miserable failure. It turns out that you can't take the Zion out of Zionism. The Jews would not accept it. This was true not only of religious Jews, but of radical Marxist atheist Jews.

It is a great plan, but nationalism is not logical. Aside from the Jews and almost everyone else, nobody would object. The Jews would not move to a new land, and defend their right to that land, were it not the ancient land of our forefathers. And were it not the ancient land of our forefathers, there would be no right for the Jews to defend -- no right that anyone would recognize. Alas for the Jews! We awakened too late from our national slumbers. Had we gone searching for a home a few hundred years earlier, we might have discovered America and claimed that. But by the end of the nineteenth century there were no more lands open to colonization. The Jewish people had no place on Earth to go but home, and would not move en masse to any other place. Just as they would not accept East Africa as their home, Jews will not accept Tel Aviv or Herzliya Pituach as their capital.

Yossi Melman is quite right that the earthly Jerusalem is a fairly miserable place. With its armies of black -coated and fur-hatted (they do not recognize the Zionist weather) anti-Zionist Haredi Jewish religious fanatics, and its growing armies of Arab Muslim religious fanatics, its lack of industry and poor infrastructure, it is redolent of the Jerusalem of my great grandparents, a place of the "old Yishuv" - the ultra-orthodox community of Jews that came to Jerusalem to die or to mourn the temple or to hasten the coming of the Messiah at the behest of their Hassidic rabbis and Kabbalist leaders. Over a century of Zionist development has failed to make much of Jerusalem into a part of the rebirth of the Jewish people.

However, for the rest of the world, including the Jews of the Diaspora, our non-Jewish friends, and our non-Jewish opponents, Jerusalem has a different significance. They do not think in terms of the earthly Jerusalem. They think in terms of a heavenly, theoretical Jerusalem, the idea of Jerusalem as a symbol of the eternal Jewish people. Rightly or wrongly, they see Jewish possession of Jerusalem as the goalpost by which to measure the reconstitution of the Jewish nation in its homeland. Not as a religious venue, but as the national polis or city-state of the Jewish people. That is why our friends want to see our capital in Jerusalem, and that is precisely why our enemies want to prevent Jerusalem from being our capital. And that is the compelling reason why the Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their capital - because it is the symbol of Jewish nationalism.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, ancient peoples reconstituted their polities and placed their capitals in the cities that symbolized their national aspirations. The Greeks no longer worship Zeus, and the Italians no longer give homage to Jupiter Stator. Their choices of capitals were not based on religious considerations. Can we imagine Greece with its capital in Piraeus instead of Athens, because the Turks claimed Athens or because Athens was backwards? Can we imagine Italy with its capital elsewhere than in Rome? Why not? Rome is full of religious people, it was claimed by the Popes in fact, and Italian industry is centered around the north of Italy and Milan. Yet the suggestion that Milan, rather than Rome, should be the Italian capital would be greeted with ridicule. Athens was never really the capital of a united Greece, and the later Roman emperors made their capitals in Mediolanum (Milan) and Ravena. The Italians are a gracious people and quick to admit the truth, even if it is not always flattering. Therefore they will forgive me for also mentioning that while Italians are not all descended from Khazars, as is falsely claimed of the modern Jews, modern Italians are in large part the descendants of Gothic and Visigothic invaders, and not the purebred descendants of the ancient and illustrious Roman and Italian peoples. But Rome and Athens symbolize the national aspirations of the Italian and Greek peoples, and the whole world accepts that it is natural that these cities are the capitals of those countries.

You do not have to be a learned expert to know that Jerusalem is to the Jewish people at least what Rome is to the Italians and what Athens is the Greeks. If earthly Jerusalem is a disgrace to Israel, we must ask why we have failed her, and we must repair our capital and make it worthy, rather than abandoning it. For without Zion there will not be Zionism for long, and without Zionism, there will not be a Jewish state of Israel.

Ami Isseroff

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

 

Prolonging the deadlock.

 

by Elie Fawaz

Since the May liberation of 2000, the Lebanese have pondered the fate of Hezbollah’s weapons, as many people thought that, with the goal of the weapons having been achieved, the party lost the justification for its military presence inside Lebanon.

However, to the surprise of those who believed as such, it became apparent in the party’s literature that Hezbollah did not want to hand over its weapons to the state. The party gradually transformed the mission behind its weapons from that of liberation, to that of resistance, to deterrence, with arms to defend arms, making their weapons sacrosanct whereby debate on the issue was unacceptable. The Resistance, according to its theorists, became “not an armed group which wants to liberate a strip of land nor an instrument of circumstance, the role of which ends when [its] pretext ends.”

The role of the party and its weapons was manifested first with the occupation of downtown Beirut, taken over after destructive aggression by Israel in 2006—against the whole of Lebanon—and then with the party’s continual obstruction of the works of the Council of Ministers and the government; its prevention of a new president from being elected; and subsequently its invasion of west Beirut, bringing us to Qatar where obstruction [of power] came to be imposed by an obscure clause within the Doha Agreement.

This dispute between the state and Hezbollah erupted into the open after the assassination of former PM Rafik Hariri and the subsequent withdrawal of Syria—a country which until then had been balancing the fragile coexistence between the two—from Lebanon.

Clearly today, Hezbollah, via its alliances on the one hand and the force of its weapons to impose its viewpoints on the other, is trying to bring back the coexistence between the state of and the Resistance as it had existed until then.

However, in the absence of Syrian control and the security and intelligence apparatuses that accompanied it, is it possible to combine the two contradictory concepts of the state and the Resistance without the danger of slipping into civil war?

How is it possible to reconcile a state which assumes that “the people are the source of power and the bearers of [its] sovereignty” with a party which finds its origins in the Iranian theory of the Wilayat al-Faqih – a theory which claims that this post “is based on the direct law of God; not the people” and that orders which come from the Wali al-Faqih, the highest authority in the Islamic Republic of Iran, are to be considered binding law; or rather they are given precedence over any other law or constitution were those ever to contradict the supreme leader.

How do we reconcile a state which deems among its prerogatives to be decisions of war and peace with a party which purports that the Wali al-Faqih is “the one who has the authority to make decisions of war and peace?”

How do we reconcile a state whose constitution places all of the armed forces under the authority of the Council of Ministers and seeks, through the national dialogue table, to incorporate the Resistance into the army, with those who say: “What we want from national dialogue is not negotiation over keeping the weapons or not; nor is it negotiation over the Resistance being integrated into the army or the Resistance not being integrated into the army. What we want is for this strategy that we have designed to be completed and for official Lebanese decisions to be joined with us, side by side, in order fortify Lebanon and in order to maintain Lebanon’s strength through the army, the Resistance and the people.”

How do we reconcile a state - whose constitution, in following the provisions of the Taif Agreement, calls for: “executing [UN Security Council] Resolution 425 and the rest of the Security Council’s resolutions pertaining to the total elimination of the Israeli occupation,” and also calls for “commitment to the armistice agreement signed on March 23, 1949, taking all necessary measures to liberate all Lebanese territory from Israeli occupation, spreading the state’s sovereignty over all of its territory, deploying the Lebanese army in the Lebanese border region as it is recognized internationally, and working to support [UNIFIL] forces in South Lebanon to ensure Israel’s withdrawal, affording the opportunity for security and stability to be returned to the border region” - with a party which stresses that, if Israel withdrew from Shebaa, “we [would] not stop fighting them. Our goal is the liberation of Palestine. The Jews who survive this war of liberation can return to Germany or wherever they came from.”?

How do we reconcile a state that seeks to establish better relations with sister Arab states with a party that infringes upon the sovereignty of these states and makes the Lebanese residents and investors located in them vulnerable to expulsion as a result of the party’s ventures, toying with their livelihoods and undermining their futures and the futures of their children?

Finally, how do we reconcile a state that adopted the Arab peace initiative launched by Saudi King Abdullah from Beirut as a settlement to Arab-Israeli fighting with those who proclaim: “It has been, still is, and will continue to be our position to maintain a position of rejection pertaining to the peace settlement based on the principle that the choice of settlement [stands] with the Zionist entity.”

Today the Lebanese continue to ponder [the fate of these weapons] while they listen to the party’s allies concoct new pretexts for the weapons not to be handed over to the state: from “preventing the naturalization [of Palestinian citizens],” to “confronting global conspiracies” which seek “the assets of the Umma”… So what comes next, especially since the Resistance has not been able to make Lebanese society join in its plot and that the state has not been able to incorporate the Resistance?

No matter how some try to look for middle-ground solutions, their efforts will merely prolong the deadlock. And there is not one state in the world with two centers [of power] that make decisions pertaining to sovereignty.  

 

Elie Fawaz

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

Still Profiting from Terror.

 

by  Barry Rubin

 

Let me start with a true story. In 1984 I founded what was just about the first program on terrorism in the United States, at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) with a small grant from the Ford Foundation. We brought together journalists, officials, and academics to discuss the threat of terrorism to the United States and U.S. policies. I edited three books on terrorist groups.

After the grant ended I went to the Ford Foundation office in New York to discuss renewing it. The grants’ officer had made up his mind before I stepped into his room. “We aren’t going to renew the grant,” he said, “because we don’t believe terrorism will be a problem in the future.”

This experience came into my mind as I was conversing with a leading world expert on terrorism who asked me an interesting question: Has state sponsorship of terrorism declined nowadays? It was a very good question indeed.

A superficial examination would say that the answer is “Yes.” But a more careful look suggests that this is illusory in two respects. First, the state sponsorship that is continuing is largely overlooked. Second, terrorism has gone big-time and mainstream.

In the old days, a wide range of countries systematically supported terrorism internationally. These particularly included Cuba, the Soviet bloc, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan and North Korea. Iran and Afghanistan entered the field after Islamist revolutions there. Several of these countries were Communist, and with the fall of the Soviet empire in 1991 their involvement declined. With the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Iraq dropped out. The same U.S. invasion of Iraq that brought down Saddam also intimidated Libya, that most wild-eyed of dictatorships, into caution.

Then, too, there arose Usama bin Ladin and the many radical Islamist groups that formed part of his organization. The word was that terrorism had been privatized, backed by the bin Ladin family wealth rather than the treasury of any specific country. Moreover, the PLO largely transformed itself into the Palestinian Authority, which negotiated with Israel and looked to the United States as its main aid-giver. State sponsorship, it appears, has gone out of fashion.

Under intensive pressure from Turkey, Syria expelled the Kurdish terrorist PKK. Bin Ladin voluntarily left Sudan, while he and his Taliban sponsors were on the run after the post-9/11 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Cuba and North Korea quieted down, in part because they felt so much on the offensive and overt sponsorship of major terrorist attacks seemed too risky with the United States waging a War on Terrorism.

And yet while there has been a decline in state sponsorship in many ways, appearances are also deceiving and even that lull may be partly illusory. Three countries stand out today as especially energetic: Iran, Syria, and Pakistan. While stating that as a fact is not so surprising, the consequences of this sponsorship has been strongly downplayed by the media and Western governments for strategic or diplomatic reasons. After all, to admit and define a problem is to create pressure for doing something about it. In addition, the idea that al-Qaida is without state sponsorship has become a dogma which resists evidence to the contrary.

Let’s examine the issue in detail starting with Pakistan. There is a huge amount of evidence that Pakistan sponsors the Taliban and other terrorist groups in Afghanistan as well as those attacking India. The organizations which carried out the bloody Mumbai attack in 2008 and much terrorism in disputed Indian Kashmir, for example, operate freely in Pakistan and it is hard to believe that Pakistani military intelligence is not well appraised of each detail of their plans. Indeed, it funds and protects them.

Why, then, is not this seen globally as a major instance of state sponsorship of terrorism? Because Pakistan is needed by the United States to conduct operations in and near Afghanistan. Thus, Pakistan is regarded as a U.S. ally, receives massive funding, and little criticism. The Indian government cannot retaliate no matter how great is the provocation since it lacks international support and Pakistan is a nuclear power. Thus, Pakistan has become a state sponsorship of terrorism which is immune to pressure or punishment.

As for Syria, it is an active state sponsor of terrorism on several fronts. In recent years, it was deeply involved in terrorist attacks in Lebanon against moderates who advocated the expulsion of Syrian influence and a more independent policy for their own country. In conjunction with Iran and Hizballah, assassinations were carried out that included the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. An international tribunal was set up to investigate this responsibility but despite leaks that it found involvement by the highest elements in the Syrian government, the West has not pushed for the culmination of the tribunal and Lebanon has been intimidated out of doing so.

At the same time, Syria and Iran backed two major terrorist groups, Hamas and Hizballah, in attacking Israel. They are headquartered in Damascus and while in no way purely puppets or instruments of their two sponsors certainly pay close attention to their wishes. Their weapons and budget are largely supplied from Tehran and Damascus. Yet for a variety of reasons, ranging from Israeli policy to U.S. engagement efforts, Syria does not pay much of a penalty for its behavior.

Perhaps more shocking is the fact that Syria is waging a war of terrorism against America in Iraq and the group it is sponsoring there is al-Qaida. Thus, it is an open secret that Syria is now allied with al-Qaida, the group that carried out the September 11 attacks on America, yet pointing out the logical bottom line seems to many people as some far-out or silly notion. Moreover, terrorists trained, armed, financed, and given safe haven in Syria are killing American soldiers and civilians in Iraq. Yet the U.S. government won’t even back Iraqi complaints and demands for action on this issue.

Lip service is given to Iran’s being the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism but many argue that this activity has declined in recent years. To do so, however, they must leave out Iranian operations in regard to Hamas, Hizballah, and insurgents in Iraq, which include direct attacks (often through Iranian-made roadside bombs) against U.S. troops.

The current defense minister of Iran is a wanted terrorist for his involvement in the bloody attack on the Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, while he and his predecessor, then stationed in Lebanon, were involved in the attack on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1984 which killed 241 Americans. This last point has not even been mentioned by any U.S. official. Few Americans know that a U.S. court found Iranian involvement in the terrorist attack on American military personnel in the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.

Since the emphasis now is on conciliation rather than confrontation, Western governments find it convenient to forget past and ignore present-day state sponsorship of terrorism.

All of this leads to the second point: the mainstreaming of terrorism. Hamas now rules the Gaza Strip; Hizballah has ministers in the Lebanese government. Both have run in elections. There are many in the West who argues—though this has nothing to do with reality—that these groups each have a military wing (bad) and a political wing (good). There is tremendous pressure in Europe, especially Britain, to engage with the “good” Hizballah.

Indeed, the advisor to President Barack Obama on terrorism stated that Hizballah couldn’t be a terrorist organization because its membership included lawyers. Further afield, the Sri Lankan terrorist group, the Tamil Tigers, has attained respectability, notably in Canada. The Tigers’ representative in the United States, V. Rudrakumaran, is himself a lawyer. In Europe, the PKK runs a television station, while Hizballah’s al-Manar television is shown by many cable networks—though barred from others—around the world. With the Goldstone Commission report, the UN has been transformed into a propaganda organ for Hamas, despite the report’s minor criticisms of that group which did not appear in the General Assembly’s resolution bashing Israel.

Thus, state sponsorship has been airbrushed out for political reasons, while terrorist groups have reinvented themselves as political parties without abandoning their ideology or terrorism. Since terrorism has proven to be so profitable and sponsorship so low cost, it is reasonable to worry that both phenomena will increase in future and that the current period will prove to be a lull and not an end. Unfortunately, it is a lull during which the West is helping to show that these are low-risk, high-yield policies for radical regimes.

Barry Rubin

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

 

The Illegal-Settlements Myth. Part I

 

 by David M. Phillips

1^st part of 2

The conviction that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are illegal is now so commonly accepted, it hardly seems as though the matter is even open for discussion. But it is. Decades of argument about the issue have obscured the complex nature of the specific legal question about which a supposedly overwhelming verdict of guilty has been rendered against settlement policy. There can be no doubt that this avalanche of negative opinion has been deeply influenced by the settlements' unpopularity around the world and even within Israel itself. Yet, while one may debate the wisdom of Israeli settlements, the idea that they are imprudent is quite different from branding them as illegal. Indeed, the analysis underlying the conclusion that the settlements violate international law depends entirely on an acceptance of the Palestinian narrative that the West Bank is "Arab" land. Followed to its logical conclusion-as some have done-this narrative precludes the legitimacy of Israel itself.

These arguments date back to the aftermath of the Six-Day War. When Israel went into battle in June 1967, its objective was clear: to remove the Arab military threat to its existence. Following its victory, the Jewish state faced a new challenge: what to do with the territorial fruits of that triumph. While many Israelis assumed that the overwhelming nature of their victory would shock the Arab world into coming to terms with their legitimacy and making peace, they would soon be disabused of this belief. At the end of August 1967, the heads of eight countries, including Egypt, Syria, and Jordan (all of which lost land as the result of their failed policy of confrontation with Israel), met at a summit in Khartoum, Sudan, and agreed to the three principles that were to guide the Arab world's postwar stands: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with Israel. Though many Israelis hoped to trade most if not all the conquered lands for peace, they would have no takers. This set the stage for decades of their nation's control of these territories.

The attachment of Israelis to the newly unified city of Jerusalem led to its quick annexation, and Jewish neighborhoods were planted on its flanks in the hope that this would render unification irrevocable. A similar motivation for returning Jewish life to the West Bank, the place where Jewish history began-albeit one that did not reflect the same strong consensus as that which underpinned the drive to hold on to Jerusalem-led to the fitful process that, over the course of the next several decades, produced numerous Jewish settlements throughout this area for a variety of reasons, including strategic, historical and/or religious considerations. In contrast, settlements created by Israel in the Egyptian Sinai or the Syrian Golan were primarily based initially on the strategic value of the terrain.

Over the course of the years to come, there was little dispute about Egypt's sovereign right to the Sinai, and it was eventually returned after Nasser's successor Anwar Sadat broke the Arab consensus and made peace with Israel. Though the rulers of Syria have, to date, preferred the continuance of belligerency to a similar decision to end the conflict, the question of their right to the return of the Golan in the event of peace seems to hinge more on the nature of the regime in Damascus than any dispute about the provenance of Syria's title to the land.

The question of the legal status of the West Bank, as well as Jerusalem, is not so easily resolved. To understand why this is the case, we must first revisit the history of the region in the 20th century.

Though routinely referred to nowadays as "Palestinian" land, at no point in history has Jerusalem or the West Bank been under Palestinian Arab sovereignty in any sense of the term. For several hundred years leading up to World War I, all of Israel, the Kingdom of Jordan, and the putative state of Palestine were merely provinces of the Ottoman Empire. After British-led Allied troops routed the Turks from the country in 1917-18, the League of Nations blessed Britain's occupation with a document that gave the British conditional control granted under a mandate. It empowered Britain to facilitate the creation of a "Jewish National Home" while respecting the rights of the native Arab population. British Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill later partitioned the mandate in 1922 and gave the East Bank of the Jordan to his country's Hashemite Arab allies, who created the Kingdom of Jordan there under British tutelage.

Following World War II, the League of Nations' successor, the United Nations, voted in November 1947 to partition the remaining portion of the land into Arab and Jewish states. While the Jews accepted partition, the Arabs did not, and after the British decamped in May 1948, Jordan joined with four other Arab countries to invade the fledgling Jewish state on the first day of its existence. Though Israel survived the onslaught, the fighting left the Jordanians in control of what would come to be known as the West Bank as well as approximately half of Jerusalem, including the Old City. Those Jewish communities in the West Bank that had existed prior to the Arab invasion were demolished, as was the Jewish quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.

After the cease-fire that ended Israel's War of Independence in 1948, Jordan annexed both the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But, as was the case when Israel annexed those same parts of the ancient city that it would win back 19 years later, the world largely ignored this attempt to legitimize Jordan's presence. Only Jordan's allies Britain and Pakistan recognized its claims of sovereignty. After King Hussein's disastrous decision to ally himself with Egypt's Nasser during the prelude to June 1967, Jordan was evicted from the lands it had won in 1948.

This left open the question of the sovereign authority over the West Bank. The legal vacuum in which Israel operated in the West Bank after 1967 was exacerbated by Jordan's subsequent stubborn refusal to engage in talks about the future of these territories. King Hussein was initially deterred from dealing with the issue by the three "no's" of Khartoum. Soon enough, he was taught a real-world lesson by the Palestine Liberation Organization, which fomented a bloody civil war against him and his regime in 1970. With the open support of Israel, Hussein survived that threat to his throne, but his desire to reduce rather than enlarge the Palestinian population in his kingdom ultimately led him to disavow any further claim to the lands he had lost in 1967. Eventually, this stance was formalized on July 31, 1988.

Thus, if the charge that Israel's hold on the territories is illegal is based on the charge of theft from its previous owners, Jordan's own illegitimacy on matters of legal title and its subsequent withdrawal from the fray makes that legal case a losing one. Well before Jordan's renunciation, Eugene Rostow, former dean of Yale Law School and undersecretary of state for political affairs in 1967 during the Six-Day War, argued that the West Bank should be considered "unallocated territory," once part of the Ottoman Empire. From this perspective, Israel, rather than simply "a belligerent occupant," had the status of a "claimant to the territory."

To Rostow, "Jews have a right to settle in it under the Mandate," a right he declared to be "unchallengeable as a matter of law." In accord with these views, Israel has historically characterized the West Bank as "disputed territory" (although some senior government officials have more recently begun to use the term "occupied territory").

Because neither Great Britain, as the former trustee under the League of Nations mandate, nor the since deceased Ottoman Empire-the former sovereigns prior to the Jordanians-is desirous or capable of standing up as the injured party to put Israel in the dock, we must therefore ask: On what points of law does the case against Israel stand?

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International-law arguments against the settlements have rested primarily upon two sources. First are the 1907 Hague Regulations, whose provisions are primarily designed to protect the interests of a temporarily ousted sovereign in the context of a short-term occupation. Second is the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, the first international agreement designed specifically to protect civilians during wartime.

While Israel was not and is not a party to the Hague Regulations, the Israeli Supreme Court has generally regarded its provisions as part of customary international law (that is, law generally observed by nations even if they have not signed an international agreement to that effect) and hence applicable to Israel. The regulations are transparently geared toward short-term occupations during which a peace treaty is negotiated between the victorious and defeated nations. The "no's" of Khartoum signaled that there would be no quick negotiations.

Nonetheless, Israel established and maintains a military administration overseeing the West Bank in accordance with the Hague Regulations, probably the only military power since World War II other than the United States (in Iraq) that has done so. For example, consistent with Article 43 of the Regulations, which calls on the occupant to "respect, . . . unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country," Israel has for the most part continued to follow Jordanian law in the West Bank, despite its position that Jordan itself had illegally occupied it. Israel's stance has been criticized as contradictory, but general continuance of Jordanian law can be justified on grounds of legal stability and long-term reliance reflected in most legal systems, including international law.

Article 46 of the Hague Regulations bars an occupying power from confiscating private property. And it is on this point that the loudest cries against the settlements have been based. Israel did requisition land from private Arab owners to establish some early settlements, but requisitioning differs from confiscation (compensation is paid for use of the land), and the establishment of these settlements was based on military necessity. In a 1979 case, Ayyub v. Minister of Defense, the Israeli Supreme Court considered whether military authorities could requisition private property for a civilian settlement, Beth El, on proof of military necessity. The theoretical and, in that specific case, actual answers were affirmative. But in another seminal decision the same year, Dwaikat v. Israel, known as the Elon Moreh case, the court more deeply explored the definition of military necessity and rejected the tendered evidence in that case because the military had only later acquiesced in the establishment of the Elon Moreh settlement by its inhabitants. The court's decision effectively precluded further requisitioning of Palestinian privately held land for civilian settlements.

After the Elon Moreh case, all Israeli settlements legally authorized by the Israeli Military Administration (a category that, by definition, excludes "illegal outposts" constructed without prior authorization or subsequent acceptance) have been constructed either on lands that Israel characterizes as state-owned or "public" or, in a small minority of cases, on land purchased by Jews from Arabs after 1967. The term "public land" includes uncultivated rural land not registered in anyone's name and land owned by absentee owners, both categories of public land under Jordanian and Ottoman law. Inversely, the term excludes land registered in the name of someone other than an absentee owner (regardless of whether the land is presently cultivated), land to which a title deed exists (even if the deed is unregistered), and land held by prescriptive use. The last stipulation requires continuous use of the land for a period of 10 years.

Israel's characterization of certain lands as "state" or "public" has provoked considerable controversy. In one of the most detailed and cited critiques, B'Tselem, the Israeli human-rights group, concedes that 90 percent of the settlements have been established on what is nominally "state" land but argues that approximately 40 percent of the West Bank now falls within that category. That would represent a vast expansion of the 16 percent of the West Bank that had been considered public under Jordanian control.

As B'Tselem acknowledges, however, the vast majority of this land is in the Jordan Valley, which, with the primary exception of the city of Jericho, was barely populated by Palestinian Arabs prior to 1967 (which explains why such land was both unregistered and uncultivated). The percentage may also be on the high side because of the inclusion of certain Jerusalem neighborhoods in B'Tselem's calculations. Regardless of the gross percentage, according to B'Tselem's own statistics, only approximately 5 percent of the West Bank is within settlement "municipal boundaries," and a much, much smaller percentage of land, 1.7 percent, is developed.

One of B'Tselem's most frequently cited publications argues that Ma'aleh Adumim, the largest Israeli settlement on the West Bank, several kilometers to the east of Jerusalem, sits on territory taken from five Palestinian Arab villages and therefore amounts to an expropriation. But because the villagers lack registered title or even unregistered deeds, B'Tselem argues that the nomadic Jahalin Bedouin, who intermittently camp and graze their livestock on land to the east of Jerusalem going down to the Dead Sea, have effectively earned the right of title to the land because of their prescriptive use.

Perhaps. But it is far from clear how a Bedouin right to the land has anything to do with the legal claim of Palestinian villagers 60 years earlier. B'Tselem offers this rather astonishing argument: "They grazed on village land in accordance with lease agreements (at times symbolic) with the landowners-including landowners from the villages of Abu Dis and al'Izariyyeh." At times symbolic!

In other words, only Palestinian Arab villages may be constructed and expanded on the land because Bedouin have occasionally grazed their flocks thereon pursuant to the implied consent of Palestinian villagers. But those villagers only have a right to the land because of its use by the Bedouin!

The sophistry here masks a deeper issue. Aside from its circularity, B'Tselem's argument equates whatever rights Bedouin may have with the rights of sedentary Arab villages on the outskirts of Jerusalem. The only reason for such an equation is that both are Arabs and not Jews. B'Tselem's assertion that the land belongs to these villages collapses into the contention that only Arabs, not Jews, have the right to own and use these lands.

 

 

David M. Phillips
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

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The Illegal-Settlements Myth. Part II

 

 by David M. Phillips

2^nd part of 2

 

Settlement opponents more frequently cite the Fourth Geneva Convention these days for their legal arguments. They specifically charge that the settlements violate Article 49(6), which states: "The occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into territories it occupies."

Frequently, this sentence is cited as if its meaning is transparent and its application to the establishment of Israeli settlements beyond dispute. Neither is the case.

To settlement opponents, the word "transfer" in Article 49(6) connotes that any transfer of the occupying power's civilian population, voluntary or involuntary, is prohibited. However, the first paragraph of Article 49 complicates that case. It reads: "Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive." Unquestionably, any forcible transfer of populations is illegal. But what about voluntary movements with the antecedent permission or subsequent acquiescence by the occupant?

Even settlement opponents concede that many settlements closest to Palestinian population areas, on the central mountain range of the West Bank, were built without government permission and often contrary to governmental policy; their continued existence forced the government to recognize the settlement as an existing fact. Given this history, it is questionable to claim that Israel "transferred" those settlers.

The response of settlement critics is that certain tax subsidies and other benefits conferred by the Israeli government or the World Zionist Organization that may have encouraged Jews to settle in the West Bank constructively amounts to a "transfer." This interpretation would have greater traction under a l977 protocol to the Geneva Convention or under the Treaty of Rome, which established the International Criminal Court, but Israel is a signatory to neither (both covenants were heavily influenced by anti-Israel nongovernmental organizations and the PLO).

To the extent that a violation of Article 49(6) depends upon the distinction between the voluntary and involuntary movement of people, the inclusion of "forcible" in Article 49(1) but not in 49(6) makes a different interpretation not only plausible but more credible. It's a matter of simple grammar that when similar language is used in several different paragraphs of the same provision, modifying language is omitted in later paragraphs because the modifier is understood. To Julius Stone, an international-law scholar, "the word 'transfer' [in 49(6)] in itself implies that the movement is not voluntary on the part of the persons concerned, but a magisterial act of the state concerned."

To understand the phraseology used in Article 49(1), "individual or mass forcible transfers," as well as one plausible origin of Article 49(6), some background is necessary.

According to Stone, discussions at the 1949 Geneva Diplomatic Conference "were dominated" by a common horror of the evils caused by the recent World War and a determination to lessen the sufferings of war victims." The various nations' delegates considered a draft of the convention produced at a conference of the Red Cross Societies held in Stockholm during August 1948. Final Article 49 was the renumbered and revised successor to Article 45 of the Stockholm Draft.

At a legal subcommittee meeting at Stockholm seemingly attended by fewer than 10 active participants, a Danish Jew named Georg Cohn proposed the sentence, albeit with a wider scope, that became Article 49(6). Cohn's initial sentence, in French, would have prohibited an occupying power from deporting or transferring a "part of its own inhabitants or the inhabitants of another territory which it occupies" into the occupied territory.

According to Cohn's own report to the Danish foreign ministry, his language was directed at an event the aspects of which were little known outside Scandinavia. In the waning days of World War II, as the Russian military advanced westward through the Baltic states and the Germans retreated, the Germans rightly feared that the Russians would take retribution on all German citizens and ethnic Germans who had collaborated with the Nazis. The Germans evacuated more than 2 million people into boats, hoping to land them in northern Germany.

Many of the ports had been bombed, however, and the Germans began unloading the people wherever they could, including several hundred thousand people into Copenhagen. In the spring of 1945, German children comprised a majority of the pupils in Copenhagen's schools. The Danes despised them and placed them in concentration camps after the war, waiting to deport them to Germany as fast as possible. That goal had still not been accomplished in August 1948, at the time of the Stockholm conference.

Cohn may also have been motivated to propose the language that later became Article 49(6) in light of his own strong Jewish identity. The original language on deportations presented to the Stockholm conference would not have prevented Germany from deporting its own Jews to slave and extermination camps in Poland and other occupied countries, nor would it have prevented the Germans from sending Danish Jews found in Germany to concentration camps in occupied territories, sending either Hungarian or Italian Jews to Auschwitz, and/or from transplanting Germans to portions of Poland and other occupied countries. Cohn's original language would have criminalized all these practices.

Other participants in Stockholm, led by Albert J. Clattenburg Jr. of the United States, thought Cohn's provision too broad. The phrase "or the inhabitants of another territory which it occupies" was deleted, and "civil" was inserted before "inhabitants."

At the Geneva Conference itself, both the Final Report of the Committee charged with drafting the text of the 4th Convention for consideration by the delegates as well as comments by delegates generally differentiated between transfers that were voluntary and therefore permitted and those that were involuntary and therefore prohibited. As the Final Report to the delegates stated while explaining the differences between various articles dealing with the right of an occupying power to evacuate an area, primarily in the interest of the security of the civilian population's security: "Although there was general unanimity in condemning such deportations as took place during the recent war, the phrase at the beginning of Article 45 caused some trouble. . . . In the end the Committee had decided on a wording that prohibits individual or mass forcible removals as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to any other country, but which permits voluntary transfers."

That is a key reason why Julius Stone termed the anti-settlement interpretation "an irony bordering on the absurd" and commented: "Ignoring the overall purpose of Article 49, which would inter alia protect the population of the State of Israel from being removed against their will into the occupied territory, it is now sought to be interpreted so as to impose on the Israel government a duty to prevent any Jewish individual from voluntarily taking up residence in that area."

There is simply no comparison between the establishment and population of Israeli settlements and the Nazi atrocities that led to the Geneva Convention. The settlements are also a far cry from policies implemented by the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and early 1950s to alter the ethnic makeup of the Baltic states by initially deporting hundreds of thousands of people and encouraging Russian immigration.

Nor can they be compared to the efforts by China to alter the ethnic makeup of Tibet by forcibly scattering its native population and moving Chinese into Tibetan territory. Israel's settlement policies are also not comparable to the campaign by Morocco to alter the ethnic makeup of the Western Sahara by transferring Moroccan Arabs to displace the native Saharans, who now huddle in refugee camps in Algeria, or to the variety of population displacements that occurred in the various parts of the former Yugoslavia.

All these would seem to fit the offense described in Article 49(6) precisely. Yet finding references to the application of Article 49(6) to nations other than Israel is like looking for a needle in a haystack. What distinguishes a system of "law" from arbitrary systems of control is that similar situations are handled alike. A system where legal principles are applied only when it suits the political tastes of anti-Israel elites is one that has lost all credibility. The loose use of international law, disproportionately applied to Israel, undermines the notion that this is "law" entitled to authoritative weight in the first place.

Julius Stone referred to the absurdity of considering the establishment of Israeli settlements as violating Article 49(6):

We would have to say that the effect of Article 49(6) is to impose an obligation on the State of Israel to ensure (by force if necessary) that these areas, despite their millennial association with Jewish life, shall be forever judenrein. Irony would thus be pushed to the absurdity of claiming that Article 49(6), designed to prevent repetition of Nazi-type genocidal policies of rendering Nazi metropolitan territories judenrein, has now come to mean that the West Bank must be made judenrein and must be so maintained, if necessary by the use of force by the government of Israel against its own inhabitants. Common sense as well as correct historical and functional context exclude so tyrannical a reading of Article 49(6).

Stone's pointed critique of what has since become "accepted" wisdom invites a hypothetical: Suppose a group of Palestinian Arabs who are citizens of Israel requested permission to establish a community on the West Bank. Further, assume that Israel facilitated the community's establishment, without the loss of their citizenship, on land purchased from other Palestinian Arabs (not citizens of Israel) or on state land. Would establishment of this settlement violate Article 49(6)? If not, how can one distinguish the hypothetical Arab settlements from Jewish settlements?

Concluding that Israeli settlements violate Article 49(6) also overlooks the Jewish communities that existed before the creation of the state in areas occupied by today's Israeli settlements, for example, in Hebron and the Etzion bloc outside Jerusalem. These Jewish communities were destroyed by Arab armies, militias, and rioters, and, as in the case of Hebron, the community's population was slaughtered. Is it sensible to interpret Article 49 to bar the reconstitution of Jewish communities that were destroyed through aggression and slaughter? If so, the international law of occupation runs the risk of freezing one occupier's conduct in place, no matter how unlawful.

The idea that the creation of new settlements or that the expansion of ones already in place is an act of bad faith on the part of various Israeli governments may seem without question to those who believe those settlements constitute an obstacle to the ever elusive solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Whether this argument is well-founded or not, the willingness of Israel's critics to assert that these communities are not merely wrong-headed but a violation of international law escalates the debate over their existence from a dispute about policy into one in which the Jewish state itself can be labeled as an international outlaw. The ultimate end of the illicit effort to use international law to delegitimize the settlements is clear-it is the same argument used by Israel's enemies to delegitimize the Jewish state entirely. Those who consider themselves friends of Israel but opponents of the settlement policy should carefully consider whether, in advancing these illegitimate and specious arguments, they will eventually be unable to resist the logic of the argument that says-falsely and without a shred of supporting evidence from international law itself-that Israel is illegitimate.

 

 

David M. Phillips

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

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