Tuesday, June 14, 2016

The Jewish claim to “Palestine” versus the two-state solution - Prof. Paul Eidelberg




by Prof. Paul Eidelberg

The Judeo-Christian West and Islam represent what Harvard professor of political science Samuel Huntington famously called a “clash of civilizations.”

The Muslim credibility problem

Before discussing the Jewish claim to “Palestine,” let us review the credibility of the Muslims who claim this land as their own.

We begin with a statement of Professor Ephraim Karsh the founding director and emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King’s College London.

Since 2013, Karsh he has also served as senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. On the issue of Palestine he quotes the eminent Arab-American historian Philip Hitti who, in 1946, described the common Arab view:

“There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not.”  Palestine was never “perceived as a distinct entity deserving national self-determination but as an integral part of a regional Arab order.

The Arab claim to Palestine is a hoax.  The hoax and  the Arab’s sinister appropriation of the name “Palestinians” are thoroughly discussed in the monumental work of Howard Grief, The Legal Foundations and Borders of Israel under International Law (Jerusalem; Mazo Publishers, 2008), Section Four. Chs. 16-18.

The Arab hoax is intended to negate the Jewish People’s claim to their ancestral homeland. The hoax is typical of the Arab myth-making culture, a polite way of referring to the Arab’s tendency to prevarication. Middle East expert Professor Y. Harkabi says in Arab Attitudes to Israel (Keter Publishers, 1972): “The use of falsehood” and “distortions of the truth” are typical of Arab political life.” Political scientists, sociologists and historians, he adds, “seem to feel reluctant to mention this aspect of their analysis of the Arab world” (p. 337).

Harkabi goes so far as to say that mendacity is “second nature” to the Arabs, and that one may regard “falsehood as an expression of [Arab] national character.” He quotes the liberated Arab sociologist Sonia Hamady:  “Lying is a widespread habit among the Arabs, and they have a low idea of truth” (p. 348).

Civilization

Various writers paint a bleaker picture. Scholars from diverse nations say that Muslims are inclined to violence and rape, precisely what is occurring today in the invasion of Muslim migrants in Europe. It’s an ugly truth, but violence and rape are endemic in Islamic culture, which suggests that Islam has deep-seated homicidal tendencies. There is a great deal of evidence supportive of this seemingly extreme, but by no means “racist,” conclusion, if only because of the 1.5 billion Muslims on planet earth, some scholars estimate that as much as 50 percent of this Muslim population supports Jihad – which has become a euphemism for murder!


This high estimate, even if halved, has been made plausible by the Center for the Study of Political Islam. According to the Center’s February 21, 2007 issue of FrontPageMagazine, Muslims have slaughtered approximately 270 million people since the ascendancy of Muhammad! Such slaughter is encouraged by the bellicosity of Islam’s sacred scriptures. Killing “infidels” in the name of Allah seems to be Islam’s most distinctive religious imperative.

Religiously animated murder may be traced to Islam’s origin in seventh century paganism and love of bloodshed. This is “necrophelia,” encapsulated in verse Sura 9:111 of the Qur’an, which exalts the Muslim who “slays and is slain for Allah.”

The homicidal proclivity of Islam is probably the basic reason Syrian-born psychiatrist Wafa Sultan, who now lives in America, does not regard Islam as a civilization. The philosophically astute Lee Harris agrees.

Harris, who rejects the cultural relativism of Western academia, defines civilization as having four prerequisites: (1) a stable social order, (2) the co-operation of individuals pursuing their own interests, (3) the ability to tolerate or socialize with one’s neighbors, and (4) a hatred of violence.  To the preceding I would add (5) respect for truthfulness, a quality precluded by the Muslim doctrine of taqiyya, which regards deceit and dissimulation as virtues. Islam thus lacks the prerequisites of civilization. The insights of Dr. Wafa Sultan confirm this conclusion.

Now, it should be noted that the four prerequisites of civilization enumerated by Harris conform to classical liberalism, according to which men can be friends despite their differences. This principle, which agrees with modern as opposed to pre-modern Christianity, has always been evident in the caustic yet friendly debates among the rabbis of the Talmud.

I mention this to link Judaism and Christianity and thus indicate that the Judeo-Christian West and Islam represent what Harvard professor of political science Samuel Huntington famously called a “clash of civilizations.”

The violent peace process

However, in stark contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for reasons of his own, denied the existence of this clash in a speech he delivered to a joint session of the American Congress on July 10, 1996. Of course, his  “politically correct” attitude provides him with some justification for his persistent but futile peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority (PA), a consortium of Muslim terrorist groups ensconced in the Middle East.

By now, however, it should be obvious to any dispassionate observer that genuine and abiding peace between the Muslim PA and Israel is psychologically, politically, and culturally impossible.  No doubt this caustic message will not receive serious attention by academics worried about tenure, or by the New York Times struggling to survive Internet  

Small wonder that casual observers are baffled by the relentless violence in the Middle East “peace process,” despite the famous handshake on the White House lawn where Yitzhak Rabin shook the blood-stained hands of Yasser Arafat to the applause of three former American Presidents. That event occurred on April 13, 1993. It marked the historic Oslo or Israel-Palestinian Agreement; and though it has resulted in thousands of Jewish casualties, the Agreement is relentlessly honored by Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel, as if he or his country were suffering from a battered-wife syndrome!

Syndrome or obsession, Oslo should not obscure the moral and legal dimensions of this relentless and brutal conflict in which peace is no where n sight.  It’s precisely the word “peace” that obscures and prolongs the conflict.

By casting the Palestinians and Israelis as “partners” in the pursuance of peace, Netanyahu is guilty moral obscurantism. He has obscured the fact that whereas Israel is a democracy, the Palestinian Authority is a military despotism. He has therefore placed Judaism, a religion that exalts peace, on the same level as Islam, a religion that exalts war. In other words, Judaism, which is based on the primacy of reason and persuasion and elevated by a love of truth, has thus been rendered spiritually equivalent to Islam, a religion based on the primacy of force and coercion augmented by taqiyya, the Islamic art of deception and dissimulation.

Netanyahu, who is not a fool, has nonetheless fostered the moral equivalency now rampant in the West, and he has done this “partnered” by Janus-faced Palestinians addicted to moral absolutism, which leaves us to wonder which of the “peace partners” is the more cynical!

Good and evil have thus been turned upside down in the Middle East. Netanyahu does not know how to deal with this topsy turvy world. He does not understand that the “peace process” which he deems good necessitates, on his part, an ongoing practical indifference to the evil of Israel’s enemies. And this is not all.

Having set security as his highest goal, mundane things preoccupy his mind.  Of course, this is what ordinary politics is all about. 

He cannot think of ways and means to attain a loftier goal.  Setting his sights low, It seems he cannot do otherwise than purvey his conciliatory behavior toward the enemy as proper and good as justified by the quest or alluring facade of “peace.” He simply lacks, or is hiding well,  the moral outrage one might feel upon realizing that you have been played with by a cunning and unscrupulous foe, which outrage would prompt you to see that your conciliatory behavior has produced not good but evil, not peace but a continuance of conflict. Netanyahu has thus unwittingly fallen into the trap of which Isaiah warns us: “Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil.”

He may have helped pave a road leading (God forbid) to calamity. The calamity has been magnified by Israel’s good friend, the United States, who’s President, Barack Obama, a moral relativist, is intellectually and emotionally impervious to evil.  Hence it was not psychologically abhorrent for this President to conclude a “permissive” nuclear weapons agreement with a genocidal type regime like Iran, whose Mullahs gleefully expectorate the venom “Death to America!”  Indeed, that nuclear agreement, which violates the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970, will hasten Iran’s deployment of nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, just what the Mullahs need to fulfill their satanic malediction.

If the apocalyptic Muslims of Iran develop (or now have) nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles, the Muslim love of death, or necrophilia, may trigger the use of those missiles to attain paradise. Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad murdered thousands of Iranian children by having them walk over landmines before his armies marched on Iraq.  Consorting with the devil under the banner of peace is suicidal.


The legal problem with the Two-State-Solution

That is the end result of Netanyahu’s consorting with the Muslims of the Palestinian Authority and releasing many of its terrorists.  But let’s start on the legal level. It is a violation of international law, indeed, of the United Nations Charter, to release terrorists. Not only is the terrorism perpetrated by the PA via al-Fatah and Hamas proscribed by the UN Charter. The Charter obliges all UN members, including Israel, to punish these culprits. (See /Articles/Article.aspx/13610.)

Nevertheless, in violation of the Charter, Prime Minister Netanyahu has (1) frequently released terrorists, and (2) yielded Jewish land in violation of international conventions such as the Balfour Declaration of 1917, San Remo Peace Resolution of 1920, and the Anglo-American Treaty of 1925, all of which are still valid. Before continuing we must elaborate on San Remo.

On April 24-25, 2010, a number of seminars were delivered by spokesmen from the United States and Canada to commemorate the San Remo Convention. The seminars were followed by a ceremony held in the same house where the signing of the San Remo Convention took place in 1920. The event attracted politicians from around Europe, the U.S., and Canada. Knesset Member and Deputy Speaker Danny Danon attended and delivered greetings from Jerusalem.

At the conclusion of the event, the conference reaffirmed the San Remo Resolution, which included the Balfour Declaration and reshaped the map of the modern Middle East, as was agreed to by the Principal Allied Powers (Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States acting as an observer), and as was later approved unanimously by the League of Nations. The Resolution remains irrevocable and legally binding to this day:

[Viewed solely in the context of international law, “the San Remo Resolution, as noted by attorney Howard Grief, “is the principle founding document of the State of Israel [in] recognition of the exclusive national Jewish rights to the Land of Israel under international law”[p. 9] as per the historical connection of the Jewish people to the territory previously known as Palestine;

The San Remo Resolution laid down the Jewish legal right to settle anywhere in western Palestine, a 10,000 square-miles the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.  On July 24, 1922, fifty-one member countries – the entire League of Nations – unanimously affirmed the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine as their grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country. 

Any attempt to negate the Jewish people’s right to Palestine-Eretz-Israel, and to deny them access and control over the area designated for the Jewish people by the League of Nations, is a serious infringement of international law. 

Moreover:

● If there were any historical connection for Arabs to Palestine it was rejected in 1920 by the Supreme Council of the San Remo Conference, which, under the authority of the League of Nations, adjudicated the case after extensive representations by the Arabs. San Remo decided, in the form of a binding international treaty, to grant the land of Palestine to the Jewish People only.

● The United Nations approved the League of Nation’s position.  Once San Remo was approved, Britain, the “Mandatory,” the League, and the UN had no right to vary the terms of these treaties. They thus became Res Judicata, the principle that a matter may not, generally, be relitigated once it has been judged on the merits.

● Any attempt to negate the Jewish people’s right to Palestine-Eretz-Israel, and to deny them access and control over the area designated for the Jewish people by the League of Nations is a serious infringement of international law.

Conclusions

● The UN General Assembly has no power to change borders.  Therefore its decision or advice is insignificant from a legal perspective.

●   The UN has no power to vary an existing valid international treaty which the League of Nations, its predecessor, approved (Res Judicata) and had inherited from the League of Nations (granting Israel the lands between the Mediterranean to the Jordan River)

● The UN has no power to draw new agreements which run contrary to existing Valid International Agreements or Treaties which it had inherited from its predecessor, the League of Nations.

Summary: 

The San Remo Resolution incorporated the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. This resolution is the basis on which the Mandate for Palestine was constructed. While the decision made at San Remo created the Palestine Mandate de facto, the Mandate document signed by Great Britain as the Mandatory and by the League of Nations made it de juré. It thus became a binding treaty in international law. 

It follows that the “two-state solution” to the Israel-Palestinian conflict endorsed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on June 14, 2009 at Bar-Ilan University clearly violates the San Remo Resolution and should be deemed null and void.


Prof. Paul Eidelberg (Ph.D. University of Chicago), former officer U.S. Air Force, is the founder and president of the Israel-America Renaissance Institute (I-ARI), www.i-ari.org, with offices in Jerusalem and Philadelphia. He has written several books on American and on Jewish Statesmanship. His magnum opus The Judeo-Scientific Foundations of American Exceptionalism: Today’s Choice for the “Almost Chosen People" is in process of publication. Prof. Eidelberg lives in Jerusalem.

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/19031#.V2BqBqKzdds

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