by Jason D. Hill
Reclaiming ownership of indigenous lands - and governing those outside the process of history.
With some degree of the annexation of Judea and Samaria imminent in
the next few months in Israel, recent statements by Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (who oversees a massive kleptocratic
terrorist regime that endorses a massive Pay-for-Slay program that
provides Palestinian suicide bombers, terrorist murderers, and their
families with lifelong financial security), sound more like conceptual
inanities than they do reasoned disagreements by a serious politician.
Abbas said last week that he was terminating all agreements with
Israel and the United States as a result of Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s plan to extend Israeli law to parts of Judea and Samaria
under the stewardship of the Trump peace plan. Well, no one really cares
if he terminates any agreement with the United States. The PA is
irrelevant to the United States except as a disgraceful moral stain on
our foreign policy record for having financed a terrorist rogue
political institution for decades. What would be truly humorous, were it
not backed with the routine rampant anti-Semitism and support of the
European Union, is his statement on the order of: Israel has “annulled”
the Oslo Accord with its intention to apply Israeli law in occupied
Palestine.
No Abbas, the Palestinian National Authority and other militant
groups acting under its aegis long ago nullified the Oslo Accord with
the Second Intifada when it sought to repay Israel’s generous
peace-and-land offerings by repeated bloody attacks against the state of
Israel and her people from September 2000 until February 2005. By all
accounts, the Intifada lasted for 4 years, 4 months, 1 week, and four
days. Four years of bloody murder and unleashed terror against Israelis
for their generosity.
But let us retreat for a moment. The Oslo Accord was always a sham
agreement made to cripple Israel to begin with. This will be debated by
many. What is not debatable is that the Oslo Accord was never legitimate
because it was nullified on origination by the charters of the PLO/PA.
Once said charters remain in existence, they are, indeed, permanent
declarations of war against Israel. All Palestinian charters, including
the one created by Hamas, call for the obliteration of the state of
Israel and the removal of Jewry from the region.
Along with the indoctrination school curriculum promulgating hatred
and debasement against Jews and Israel by the PLO/PA, the charters
support all Palestinian political parties that engage in a state of war
against Israel. The Second Intifada, orchestrated by then PLO leader
Yasser Arafat, completely neutralized the Oslo Accords. This means that
any action Israel takes against the PA and those who vote it into
power—such as the refusal to confer citizenship and voting privileges to
a population that votes terrorist organizations into power—are moral
responses to a declaration of permanent war by sworn enemies of the
state. There can be no peace once those charters exist.
The only moral response the U.S. can have to Abbas’ revocation of ties with the United States of America is:
Good riddance! What was offered by the United States
was never really a peace plan which was made impossible by the mere
existence of the PA’s charter. It was a Security and Victory Plan
morally delivered to the ethical state of Israel.
Aid to the PA has been futile against the historical backdrop of how
the Palestinian National Authority has neutralized the Oslo Accords by
invoking the Second Intifada after the 2000 Camp David Peace Summit. So,
let us briefly recall two major issues. They are ways in which Arafat
and then Abbas twice rejected generous peace offerings and a literal
Palestinian state inside the state of Israel.
In July 2000, President Clinton brought Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat
and their negotiating teams to Camp David for a peace deal that was
unprecedented. Barak offered the Palestinians shared sovereignty over
Jerusalem—something that, as Israeli-American journalist, Caroline Glick
has pointed out numerous times, had never been offered before. He
offered them all of Gaza, 92 percent of Judea and Samaria (the West
Bank), and control of the Jordan Valley. Fortunately, Ehud Barak refused
to compromise on the right of return. Why? Because like any sensible
person, he knew that this would have resulted in the destruction of
Israel. At a later point in time President Clinton did broker an
arrangement that offered Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount
in Jerusalem.
Arafat responded by returning to Israel and launched the Second
Intifada. It is reported that he said his own people, Palestinians,
would have killed him had he accepted the offerings. So much for talk of
non-complicity between Arafat, his people, and the failure of a
Palestinian state.
And so much for Israel’s culpability in nullifying the Oslo Accord.
Again, in September of 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made
Abbas a comprehensive offer of peace and Palestinian statehood. It
should be noted that this political and moral peace offering was more
beneficent and certainly more expansive than the one made by Barak.
There was a single conditional Abbas had to agree to in order to end the
conflict: and it was this: Israel offered him 94 percent of Judea and
Samaria, and an additional 327 square kilometers of land within
sovereign Israel adjacent to the Gaza strip and northern Samaria. The
Palestinians were also offered complete sovereignty over the Arab
neighborhoods of Jerusalem.
Olmert promised to transfer sovereignty over the Temple Mount and
other sacred areas of Jerusalem’s Old City to an international body. A
limited right of immigration to a part of Israel to descendants of Arabs
who left Israel in 1948-1949 was also extended. The offer was
militantly rejected by Abbas. Not only was it rejected, Israel’s
generosity, its literal behavior as an ethical state, was met with a
cruel crusade of vengeance. Abbas launched a campaign of hatred and
smears against Israel in the United Nations and referred to all Israel
as occupied Palestine. As far as he was concerned Israel had no right to
exist within any borders. He was adhering to the charters of the
PLO/PA. He was ejecting his people from the historical and
civilizational process.
All charters of any existing governing Palestinian bodies function
in such a way that they place both the Palestinian people and
Palestinian political actors in a permanent state of war against Israel.
It is tragic that there are unwitting, decent individual Palestinians
who get caught in this crossfire.
In a previous essay,
I have written about Israel’s moral right to annex Judea and Samaria. I
want to now turn to the actual morality of annexation of Judea and
Samaria as it relates to the so-called creation of a future Palestinian
state. Annexation as it applies to Judea and Samaria is simply a
preposterous term. Israel cannot annex land that is indigenously the
land of the Jews that was repeatedly stolen from them over millennia. It
properly re-captured those lands in a 1967 offensive war against it.
The term is a non-concept here—a true misnomer. Nevertheless, for the
sake of expediency we will use it since it has traction in the political
world. The ethical upshot of annexation is two-fold.
First, it recovers territory that is historically the property of
the state of Israel. Second, it will, over time, and if applied
consistently and with moral implacability, incarcerate the terrorist
organization that is the Palestinian Authority. Some regimes can be
politically rehabilitated, ethically placed in trusteeship, and then
released back into the global commons. The PLO and then the PA have
always been politically rogue institutions. The PA today betrays
civilizational maturity by engaging in thuggery and terrorism that
engender—among other things—national destabilization.
Rogue institutions such as the PA posing as a representative of a
legitimate state or claiming the right to initiate statehood, pose
threats to those who fall within their geographical ambits. They defile
the individual rights of their citizen and residents in a way that
undermines their legal personalities and moral integrity. The PA as a
rogue governing body consciously removes the possibility of a lasting
peace by subjugating human beings in the regional, local or global
community to continuous fear by: a) exposing them directly to the threat
of war; b) compromising or destroying those institutions that are
devoted to maintaining a peaceful regional, state, and world order; and
c) inflicting deliberate political, economic and general oppression
against its own people. Rogue political governing bodies are not just
inimical to the moral order of an existing ethical state—in this case
Israel—they are political ballasts.
The morality of annexation of Judea and Samaria lies in its ability
(if its architects so desire) to dissolve, over time, the PA; to show
that its reach for autonomy and sovereignty was already violated before
it achieved any such status: its systemic violence and reigns of terror
disqualified it from any right of sovereignty. Once a rogue political
body is divested of its sovereign status then it can have no political
or legal standing in the international community—let alone demand right
of existence within a legitimate democracy such as Israel. Should the PA
seek violent reprisals against Israel’s moral right to reclaim its
historic holy lands, then Israel has the right to disband the PA,
incarcerate its political actors and practice a new form of political
eugenics that would see the radical resocialization of the moral and
political sensibilities of those Palestinians who reside within its
geographical boundaries. Such individuals who have long existed outside
the historical process largely because of their socialization in death
cults and by soul-killing ideologies, would re-achieve their right of
belonging to the state. The process could be long; it could take
generations, however, the supremacy of Israel and the rise of Judea and
Samaria simply cannot exist without the dismantling of the de jure and de facto sovereignty that the Palestinian Authority enjoys.
Individuals cannot be auctioned off. However, if the PA is divested
of its sovereignty and recognized for what it is: a morally feral
panopticon; and further, if it is divested of its sovereignty given that
it has violated the conditions under which sovereignty itself is
justified, then it exists in a state of nature. The vacuum left there is
to be filled, and residents there re-fashioned by the state. Subjects
there can re-enter the historical process and enjoy freedom in an order
governed by Israeli law. So long as Israel protects the individual
rights of the Palestinians as individuals and not as members of some
invented group, then there can be no true ethical dilemma in regards to
exercising sovereignty and rulership of individuals who, heretofore, had
been living in a state of nature, one outside the historical process.
Rescued from this political state of nature they would matriculate
within the boundaries of a civilized nation-state in a manner subject to
the procedural protocols of Israeli Intelligence and other security and
defense institutions created to protect the security and eternal
permanence of sovereign Israel.
Jason D. Hill is professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His areas of specialization include ethics, social and political philosophy, American foreign policy and American politics. He is the author of several books, including “We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People” (Bombardier Books/Post Hill Press). Follow him on Twitter @JasonDhill6.
Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/05/morality-israels-annexation-jason-d-hill/
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