Annapolis allergy.

by Mladen Andrijasevic   

Years ago, when I still read The Economist and listened to the BBC World Service as a foreign student in the USSR, I could never quite get to the bottom of Soviet propaganda. What was its purpose? How could it be that it was so crude, so simplistic, so transparent? Did the authorities really believe that my fellow students who had just been solving partial differential equations one moment would fall for this nonsense the next?

It did not make sense. Until one day a Russian friend took the just published draft of the brand new Soviet constitution, threw it on the floor and stumped and squashed it with all his strength. I finally got it.

The purpose of propaganda was not to inform or even dis-inform. It was to declare who was the boss. To establish without any doubt that everyone else was powerless and therefore should keep quiet. In a way it said: " We know you do not believe this nonsense we put out, but there is nothing you can do about it." The purpose of propaganda was to make people feel guilty for accepting such primitive, crude garbage and make them even less determined to fight.

But the other day after the Annapolis meeting I suddenly felt a sense of deja vu. The solution to the Middle East problem by 2008. Failure is not an option. If the year had been 2010 I would have though it was part of a five-year-plan.

While it is doubtful that Galileo actually threw balls off the leaning tower of Pisa to demonstrate that acceleration of objects is independent of their mass, I am quite sure that he never would have postulated that starting in 1608 the balls would begin to hover in midair by themselves. This would have been counter to all the observation he had already done, although the exact laws of gravity were not formulated until Newton came upon the scene, and he was born the year Galileo died -- 1642. Politicians, on the other hand, issue proclamations with ease which have almost no relation to the real world.

If the Annapolis final declaration had said something like the following I would have understood: "The problem to the solution in the Middle East is the jihadist ideology to whose followers it is their religious duty to fight the infidels and therefore any peace treaty or hudna can only be temporary. Peace is by definition impossible until we tackle the jihadists".

But nothing of this sort emerged. Instead, we got that the two parties expressed a determination to "confront terrorism and incitement, whether committed by Palestinians or Israelis"!? Excuse me? How could Olmert and Bush sign this?

I am puzzled. This is supposedly the West 2007. This is not 1970s USSR with its controlled media. The West today has an educated population and an Internet that provides access to purchase any book on this planet. We have read dozens of books on the Middle East and Islam (or have we?). We have traveled to every corner of the globe. Most of all, we can think for ourselves -- we have the capability to make the connection between events with the teddy bear in the Sudan and the prospects for peace in the Middle East.

So how is it that we tolerate these proclamations whose only purpose seems to be to convey that they are "trying to do something"? How is it that that the leaders themselves are not embarrassed such proclamations in the first place?

The only difference between a Soviet politburo declaration and the Annapolis joint understanding is that on the latter I can comment while on the former I would have landed myself a stint in a Soviet psychiatric clinic if I had been a Soviet citizen.

It is an essential difference. On the other hand this difference will peter out if we continue to appease and self-censor. Only by exercising our rights of free speech can we reach a critical mass whereby our leaders will take note that they are not dealing with passive ignorant half-wits.

We understand the danger our civilization is facing and we must demand of our leaders to act accordingly. They must become aware that we will vote them out of office and choose a government that does.

 

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

 

Facing Iran, Alone

by Mladen Andrijasevic

We are back in May 1940.

 

In May 1940 Britain stood alone facing Nazi Germany. The USSR had signed the Ribbentrop-Molotov nonaggression pact; the US had not entered the war yet.

On May 7, Leo Amery spoke in the Commons, attacking Neville Chamberlain's government, quoting Oliver Cromwell: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"

On May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister.

Ever since the US government's National Intelligence Estimate report it has become increasingly probable that Israel will be the one to tackle Iran. With the election of Barack Obama this is now almost certain. We are back in May 1940.

There are many who believe that, for all their talk, the Iranians would never launch a nuclear attack. The 12th Imam is for the masses, the way Marx was, the argument goes, and not to be believed in verbatim. How many Arab or Muslim leaders have become suicide bombers to get the virgins? None.

But comparing Communists with the followers of the Islamic prophet is misleading. For one, the Communists never produced suicide bombers and we already have had 148 explode here in Israel. Muhammad Atta was not the top leader, but he was among the educated, for whom education was just a tool to be used in accomplishing his jihadi goals. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an ardent believer in the Mahdi, the Hidden Twelfth Imam, the four-year old who went into hiding in a well 1,140 years ago. The idea that Iran itself may become a nuclear suicide bomber is real.

Those who question Iranian motives are projecting Western values, almost patronizingly so. The privileged party members in the USSR, the so-called priviligentsia, would not dream of sacrificing themselves. They had their closed shops, hospitals and pharmacies, access to foreign media and, most coveted of all, access abroad. They enjoyed their privileges. The Iranian mullahs are no Bolsheviks.

The world watched Hitler rearm, reoccupy the Rhineland in 1936, annex the Sudetenland in October 1938 and the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, and rape Austria in 1938. As Churchill put it, they kept feeding the crocodile hoping they would be eaten last.

Anyone who reads about the policies and the press of the 1933-1940 period cannot but be struck by the similarities. We know what happened then, yet we are following almost the same path. Scary.

Might Israel strike at Iran before Obama takes over? As reported in the Jerusalem Post, Benny Morris says yes. Most other analysts disagree. I believe that it is in the US interest for Israel to destroy the Iranian nuclear sites, since the destruction and the rise in oil prices resulting from a non-nuclear Iranian retaliation would still be much less than the consequences of a nuclear war following an Iranian nuclear strike on Israel and an Israeli nuclear retaliation.

There is only one remaining scenario left.

On February 10 Israel goes to the polls. The leaders we elect will be our last line of defense. Help will not come from the Europeans, the United Nations and not even from the US. The decisions that will determine the survival of this country will come from Benjamin Netanyahu, Moshe Yaalon, Benny Begin or Tzipi Livni. Make your pick.

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

 

The Mumbai Atrocities: Where is the Outrage?

by Cinnamon Stillwell

It was often said after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that everything had changed. And for a few years afterwards, indeed it had. After decades of denial, America and its allies went on the offensive against Islamic terrorism, both militarily and morally. Most importantly, there was no hesitancy to name the enemy or to condemn his inhumanity.

But if the lack of outrage over the Islamic terrorist assault on Mumbai, India last month was any indication, everything has changed back.

The obfuscation that characterized much of the early reporting on Mumbai is partially to blame. Watching a number of television reporters go through visible pains not to use the word "terrorist" to describe a four-day reign of terror that would eventually kill more than 170 people and injure hundreds was a surreal spectacle. Initial articles described "militants," "gunmen," and "extremists," but rarely terrorists, and rarer still, Islamic terrorists. So-called experts prattled on vaguely about the perpetrators' motivations, as if the ideology fueling a group called the Deccan Mujahedeen was a complete and utter mystery. ("Deccan" refers to a historic Islamic claim on the Deccan Plateau, the territory which stretches between Mumbai and Hyderabad, while "mujahedeen" are Muslim fighters engaged in jihad.) Links to the Pakistan-based terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba added further confirmation and yet still, many of the talking heads remained stubbornly ambiguous. Indeed, the attack was largely presented as if it were occurring in a vacuum.

Perhaps they were taking a cue from last year's Departments of State and Homeland Security internal memorandum forbidding employees from using Islam-specific terminology to discuss Islamic terrorism or the British politicians who earlier this year adopted the phrase "anti-Islamic activity" to describe it. In any case, Orwell would have been proud.

When it was learned that the terrorists had attacked a Chabad center in Mumbai, the only specific target other than hotels and restaurants catering to Western tourists and wealthy Indians, the coverage become stranger still. No context was provided for the torture and murder of the Chabad Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, his wife, Rivka, and four other Jews, although it was obvious why they were targeted. The Holtzberg's surviving toddler son, Moshe, who was rescued by his Indian nanny, was certainly not the first Jewish child orphaned by Islamic terrorism. No connection was made to the virulent anti-Semitism fueling jihadist ideology. Nor to the Nazi-like propaganda promulgated throughout the Muslim world and fed to children so that they too will grow up to hate Jews, whether Israeli or not.

Similarly unexamined were the implications of the terrorists' barbarism. Witnesses described victims being lined up and shot execution-style and terrorists spraying bullets indiscriminately into crowds of men, women and children. Some survived by feigning death for hours under the weight of countless dead bodies. If not for the heroism of the hotel and restaurant staff, as well as others who rose to the occasion, more lives would have been lost. But lacking analysis, these horrific details were soon forgotten. Is it any wonder that the world no longer grasps the utter depravity and cruelty of the formidable opponent it's facing?

This is the same enemy who held hostage and slaughtered Russian children in Beslan; who lobs rockets at schools, uses women and children as human shields, preys upon the weakest in their own societies - women and children -- to mold them into suicide bombers, targets mosques and plans attacks on Muslim holidays, murders school teachers and aid workers, commits beheadings, hangings, stonings and honor killings, puts children and pregnant women into car bombs so they can more easily pass through checkpoints, indiscriminately targets civilians the world over, and who seeks to squelch all human achievement and progress.

Should not this grave threat to human rights be called what it is? Should not the world rally against this cancer within its midst and spare no expense or effort to stop it from metastasizing? Should not human rights groups make defeating this ideology its chief priority? Should not women's groups make the oppression of Muslim women, both within and without the Muslim world, its first priority? Should not gay rights groups turn their attention to the hangings of young men across the Muslim world? Should not Jewish groups condemn the hateful, anti-Semitic propaganda that is brainwashing Muslim youth? Should not those who believe in religious freedom denounce the persecution of religious minorities, apostates, and atheists in the Muslim world? Should not those who advocate free speech condemn the campaign to silence journalists and activists in the Muslim world, as well as attempts to do the same in the West? Should not the international community do everything in its power to prevent fanatical Islamist regimes from acquiring nuclear weapons and wreaking unprecedented havoc on the planet?

The answer to these questions would seem to be self-evident, but sadly, the world continues to waffle. Just as in the past when aggression and brutality were met with indifference or appeasement, today we are at risk of falling into the same trap. The old habit of believing one can mollify one's enemies by understanding his alleged grievances, avoiding offense, and indulging in self-blame is back in full force. Those who argue for forthright terminology and decisive action are demonized and bullied, while those who peddle in pacification and platitudes are glorified. Without leadership and moral clarity, we have become numb to the horrors at hand. Meanwhile, the enemies of civilization gain strength from our lack of fortitude.

There are those trying to call attention to the threat of radical Islam, but increasingly they are voices in the wilderness. Either that or they persecuted under the aegis of "Islamophobia." Defying this characterization, Muslim and Arab reformers are forthright about the conflict raging within Islam and the religious nature of the ideology fueling the jihadists. An inspiring show of opposition came from Mumbai's Muslims, who refused to bury the dead terrorists and who marched against their hate and violence. While such demonstrations are few and far between in the Muslim world, they should be broadly recognized and supported when they do occur.

Similarly, reformers in the West such as M. Zuhdi Jasser, founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, Ali Alyami, executive director of the Center for Democracy & Human Rights in Saudi Arabia, and former Dutch parliamentarian and women's rights advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali, should be supported as modern-day dissidents. But instead, they are hardly household names and in some cases face castigation, even as they risk their lives to tell the truth. Perhaps the problem is the world is not ready to hear the truth.

Until there is a united will to defeat this modern-day fascism, this threat to human rights, this abject evil, it will continue to thrive and to leave atrocities in its wake. And we will have no one to blame but ourselves for letting it happen.

Cinnamon Stillwell is a San Francisco Bay Area writer.

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

 

Liar, liar, pants on cease-fire .

By Barry Rubin

 

you can understand why Hamas is ending its cease-fire with Israel, you can comprehend Middle East politics. And if you can't, you can't.

From of a Western moderate pragmatist standpoint, Hamas's decision makes no sense for several reasons:

 

§                                 Hamas cannot defeat Israel militarily. Thus, fighting won't improve Hamas's strategic situation or bring victory.

§                                 Israeli counterattacks will cause both injuries and material damage in the Gaza Strip, inflicting big costs on Hamas's domain and subjects.

§                                 Returning to warfare will ensure Hamas remains politically isolated and blocks international recognition or aid that would help its cause or end economic sanctions against the Gaza Strip.

§                                 Going back to fighting makes certain that the Gaza Strip faces continued, even heightened, reductions in the material let in, thus ensuring more Palestinian suffering there.

 

 

And Hamas is seemingly making three additional mistakes regarding timing.

The first is that it is ending the cease-fire while George W. Bush is president. Certainly Israel feels freer to hit back at Hamas now than after Barack Obama is inaugurated simply because the new administration would want to avoid a crisis before it consolidates its plans and team. Also, the US is likely to prefer quiet as it begins withdrawing from Iraq.

Second, the cease-fire is being suspended on the eve of a major Palestinian crisis as Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas announces a self-extension of his term in office. One might think Hamas would prefer to keep the Israel front quiet for a while to focus on battling Fatah and the PA.

Finally, there's the Israeli election campaign. While this doesn't make large-scale retaliation inevitable, such a move would make the current government more popular with the electorate.

Therefore, Hamas's behavior, an outside observer can easily conclude, seems stupid. But having built a mass movement, sizable army, seized the Gaza Strip and built broad support throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, Hamas may be composed of genocide-oriented fanatics but not fools. What then explains this apparently silly behavior?

 

Here's a case study of how Middle East politics really work:

• Hamas really believes its own propaganda, expecting victory despite the odds. Costs and casualties are irrelevant. The battle will go on until total victory even if that takes decades. This indicates Hamas will not moderate - the same applies to Hizbullah, Syria and Iran.

• At the same time, Hamas is not only indifferent to its own people's welfare, it actually seeking to inflict suffering on them as a political strategy. The worse off Palestinians are, Hamas believes, the more likely they will fight and die. This "the worse things are, the better they are" is the exact opposite of Western perspectives.

But Hamas goes even further. It knows suffering can be blamed on Israel. Western pragmatists reason that obviously the Palestinians must prefer peace, prosperity and statehood. Rejectionism must then be due to desperation and the lack of a good offer or faith in the West. In fact, though, the situation is not due to our mistakes but to their deliberate choices.

Thus, Hamas can well conclude that the best way to put pressure on Israel and - in its own mind at least - gain Western help is to be more radical, not more moderate.

To cite one example, what is considered America's leading newspaper recently reported that both sides violate the cease-fire: Hamas fires rockets at Israel; Israel retaliates by closing the border. By this definition, the fact that Hamas and its allies fire rockets at civilians doesn't allow any Israeli response, military or otherwise. This is the kind of thinking Hamas seeks to promote.

Then, too, setting off a crisis, Hamas expects, will draw peacekeepers like hardworking ants, giving press conferences in which they will insist that "something must be done to defuse the crisis." That "something" usually seems to be unilateral Israeli concessions. In short, the international community may rush in to save Hamas or the Palestinians in spite of themselves.

At the same time, though, Hamas believes that its intransigence and aggressiveness will increase support in the Arab and Muslim worlds. As with Hizbullah, waging a war and portraying it as victory - even though the facts are otherwise - makes one a hero and attracts financing. This is also a judgment regarding Palestinian responses. More popular support can be garnered by producing martyrs than by producing higher living standards. Thus, Hamas will do better in its rivalry with the PA by fighting Israel than by fighting poverty.

I am not saying this strategy will work completely, but it does succeed in part. If one believes the short run is irrelevant and the deity is on one's side, reality looks rather different. In addition, macho militancy in the Middle East does bring popularity, both domestic and international. The last quarter-century has also shown that Western sympathy can be manipulated by increasing violence and blocking solutions to the conflict in a way that will be blamed on Israel.

Yet this world view is also illusory. Impoverishing one's people and destroying the infrastructure over which one rules makes such groups weaker rather than stronger, especially as Israel focuses on material gains. Western patience with the Palestinians has waned; Arab states are not so eager to help. A strategy depending on suicide bombers is also ultimately suicidal.

Ironically, too, regarding the West, Islamists cannot get away with what radical Arab nationalists can. Too many Western intellectuals, journalists, leftists and even politicians might have been carried away with revolutionary romanticism for Fatah - seeing Yasser Arafat as merely an ugly version of Che Guevara. Far fewer see radical Islamists as heroic liberators.

The bottom line is that Hamas will remain isolated and weaker than it could be if it kept things quiet, consolidated its hold on the Gaza Strip, built up its armies and base of support and had more patience.

But Hamas will also survive, ideology undiluted, able to utter war cries about wiping Israel off the map and intoxicated with the belief it is following divine will. That's enough for Hamas's leadership and followers.

 

Barry Rubin

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

 

Severe Human Rights Violations in Gaza.

 

Navanethem Pillay
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights

Esteemed Commissioner Pillay,

I wish to call your attention to egregious violations of human rights in Gaza, and to the part played by the UN as an accomplice after the fact in those violations.

The United Nations has maintained an incessant barrage of complaints regarding alleged Israeli violations of human rights in Gaza, allegations of a dire humanitarian crisis and impending disaster. Under the direct pressure of the United Nations, Israel recently transferred a large sum of money to the Hamas government in Gaza, ostensibly to pay salaries.

A part of this sum was used to finance a grotesque and barbaric public humiliation of the hostage (or "Prisoner of War") Gilad Schalit. The allegedly starving people of Gaza turned out en-masse to view this passion play elaborately staged by the Hamas masters of Gaza. This spectacle was no doubt watched by Schalit's parents and relatives, and very likely by Schalit himself, and could not fail to produce its intended effect: bottomless humiliation and agony.

Hamas treatment of Schalit has violated very norm of human decency as well as conventions regarding prisoners of war. No agency of the United Nations has done anything to secure his release or his treatment according to the Geneva conventions. Nor, for that matter, has the UN done anything whatever about the rain of missiles that are shot indiscriminately from Gaza on Israeli targets.

If the Gaza regime has rights under law, then they also have obligations and if so, Schalit is a prisoner of war and must be treated as such. If the Gaza regime are just barbarian criminal gangsters, then they need to be treated as such.

Under the terms of the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War please note the following:

Article 3

....To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

...(c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;


...
Article 71

Prisoners of war shall be allowed to send and receive letters and cards...

Article 72

Prisoners of war shall be allowed to receive by post or by any other means individual parcels or collective shipments containing, in particular, foodstuffs, clothing, medical supplies and articles of a religious, educational or recreational character which may meet their needs, including books, devotional articles, scientific equipment, examination papers, musical instruments, sports outfits and materials allowing prisoners of war to pursue their studies or their cultural activities.

Given that the UN has taken great pains to ensure the welfare of the Hamas regime in Gaza, they have, instead of being custodians of human rights, become accomplices after the fact in grotesque barbarities. This inhuman behavior, in disregard of every civilized norm is possible only because of resources and funds supplied to the Hamas government at the express insistence of the United Nations. If there was any justice in the matter, every UN official implicated in justifying or supporting the Hamas regime, accepting Hamas claims without substantiation and insisting on "humanitarian" support for this regime, would be tried as a war criminal.

Could you kindly explain why the United Nations has done nothing whatever to ensure the enforcement of these provisions of the Geneva Convention in the case of Gilad Shalit? Why has the United Nations done nothing to bring about cessation of bombardment of Israeli civilians as well as outrages committed by Hamas against its own subject population, including persecution of Christians and political opponents?

Doesn't it behoove the United Nations to maintain at least the verisimilitude of fairness in the handling of human rights issues?

Sincerely,
Ami Isseroff

Addresses:
InfoDesk@ohchr.org
Press-Info@ohchr.org
Postal address:
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
Palais des Nations
CH-1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland

Original content is Copyright by the author 2008.

UN's obsession is grotesque and Orwellian

By Jeff Jacoby

 

THE PRESIDENT of the UN General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, has denounced the policies of a certain Middle Eastern nation. They are "so similar to the apartheid of an earlier era," he said, "that the world must unite against them, demanding an "end to this massive abuse of human rights" and isolating the offending nation as it once isolated South Africa: with a punishing "campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions."

Of which country was he speaking?

Was it Saudi Arabia, where public facilities are segregated by sex, and where a pervasive system of gender apartheid denies women the right to drive, to dress as they choose, to freely marry or divorce, to vote, to appear in public without a male "guardian," or to give testimony on an equal basis with men?

Was it Jordan, where the law explicitly bars Jews from citizenship and where the sale of land to a Jew was for decades not only illegal, but punishable by death?

Was it Iran, where homosexuality is a capital crime — at least 200 Iranian gays were executed last year - and whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, asserted at Columbia University that there are no homosexuals in Iran?

Was it Sudan, where tens of thousands of black Africans in the country's southern region, most of them Christians or animists, have been abducted and sold into slavery by Arab militias backed by the Islamist regime in Khartoum?

It was none of these. The General Assembly president, a radical Maryknoll priest who served as Nicaragua's foreign minister during the Sandinista regime in the 1980s, was not referring to any of the Middle East's Muslim autocracies and dictatorships, virtually all of which discriminate against ethnic and religious minorities. He was speaking of the Jewish state of Israel, the region's lone democracy, and the only one that guarantees the legal equality of all its citizens - one-fifth of whom are Muslim and Christian Arabs.

D'Escoto's call for Israel to be shunned as a pariah and strangled economically came on the UN's Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, an annual occasion devoted to lamenting the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty in the 20th century, denouncing the national liberation movement — Zionism - that made that rebirth possible, and championing the cause of the Palestinian Arabs. The event occurs on or about Nov. 29, the anniversary of the UN vote in 1947 to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. There are impassioned speeches, in which Israel's sins are enumerated and condemned, and the statelessness of the Palestinians is bewailed. Unmentioned is the fact that Palestine's Arabs would have had their state 60 years ago had they and the Arab League not rejected the UN's decision and chosen instead to declare war on the new Jewish state.

Like so much of what takes place at the UN, the obsession with demonizing Israel and extolling the Palestinians is grotesque and Orwellian. More than 1 million Israeli Arabs enjoy civil and political rights unmatched in the Arab world — yet Israel is accused of repression and human-rights abuse. Successive Israeli governments have endorsed a "two-state solution" - yet Israel is blasted as the obstacle to peace. The Palestinian Authority oversees the vilest culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich, and wants all Jews expelled from the land it claims for itself - yet Israel is labeled an "apartheid state" and singled out for condemnation and ostracism.

Make no mistake: In likening Israel to apartheid-era South Africa, the UN is engaged not in anti-racism but in anti-Semitism. In the 1930s, the world's foremost anti-Semites demanded a boycott of Jewish businesses. Today they demand a boycott of the Jewish state.

"No good German is still buying from a Jew," announced Hitler's Nazi Party in March 1933. "The boycott must be a universal one . . . and must hit Jewry where it is most vulnerable." Seventy-five years later, the president of the General Assembly urges the world to throttle Israel's 6 million Jews with "boycott, divestment, and sanctions." There is no significant difference between the two cases — or the animus underlying them.

When the UN adopted its odious "Zionism is racism resolution" in 1975, US Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan minced no words. "The United States," he declared, "does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act." Where is such a voice of moral outrage today?

 

Jeff Jacoby

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

 

"The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law"

By Howard Grief

 

 

 The Only Book That Clearly Explains Israel's Legal Right To Its Land, According To Modern International Law!

 

 The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law offers a comprehensive and systematic legal treatment of Jewish national and political rights to all of the Land of Is rael.  The author, Howard Grief, is the originator of the thesis that de jure sovereignty over the entire Land of Israel and Palestine was vested in the Jewish People as a result of the San Remo Resolution adopted at the San Remo Peace Conference on April 24, 1920.

 Hard Cover, 732 pages, USD-$49, GBP-29.95, NIS-199 (plus s/h)

 

 

Introduction

 

This book is the culmination of 25 years of serious study and analysis of Israel’s legal foundation and rights to the Land of Israel under international law. My researches on this subject began=2 0in 1982 after I had met in New York with the late Dr. Paul Riebenfeld, a legal scholar on the subject of Transjordan, with whom I had subsequently, throughout the 1980s, many discussions on Israel’s legal rights and status in regard to Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Prior to my first meeting with Dr. Riebenfeld, I had followed intensely from my home city of Montreal the events unfolding in Israel ever since my teenage years when the Sinai War of 1956 was headline world news. Between 1956 and 1982, I had acquired a considerable store of knowledge of the politics, history and geography of Israel through voracious reading of newspapers and books and attending lectures, both at McGill University and in public forums. Some of the books I read that captured my interest on Israel were ones written by Leon Uris – “Exodus”, Richard Meinertzhagen – “Middle East Diary”, and Shmuel Katz – “Days of Fire”, all of which made an indelible impression on me. Another book, not surprisingly, was the Hebrew Bible, the root and backbone of Judaism and the Jewish People. The stories of the Bible always fascinated and inspired me, ever since my days as a schoolchild. In 1980, I was asked to become the representative in Canada of the newly-formed Tehiya party of Israel, a task I gladly accepted. I then proceeded to form a group to represent it in the Canadian Zionist Federation, which had the distinction of being the first official branch outside Israel.

0A

 

As a practicing attorney in Montreal since 1966, it was natural for me, sooner or later, to interest myself in Israel’s legal foundation and in the rights of the Jewish People to Palestine and the Land of Israel. This became a matter that required great attention after the Six-Day War of June 1967, since Israel’s legal position in Judea, Samaria, Gaza, the Golan and Sinai were topics of daily debate and acrimony. Israel was constantly being assailed in the 1970s, as it still is today, for its “occupation” of Arab territories, the implication being that it had no right to the territories it had repossessed or liberated from enemy occupation in the Six-Day War. To my sorrow, no satisfying legal rebuttal was forthcoming to offset this false accusation, even by committed advocates of Israel’s cause. The best response offered was that either Israel had a better “claim” to these territories than did the surrounding Arab states, or that in any case everything would be eventually settled in future peace agreements and that in the meantime the status quo could continue. Not a single jurist ever voiced the opinion, with supporting evidence, that Israel, as the agent and assignee of the Jewish People, was the actual sovereign of Judea, Samaria and Gaza or that the Golan was really an historical part of the Land of Israel rather than of Syria=2 0illegally ceded to France in a 1922 agreement that took effect the following year or finally that the Jewish People’s long connection with Sinai dating back to the days of Moses, as confirmed in the Torah, gave Israel a right to retain Sinai, a territory which historically was never a part of Egypt except by virtue of conquest during various periods in history.

 

In addition, the true importance of the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917 as encapsulated in the San Remo Resolution of April 25, 1920 was not understood or realized. In fact, no single book contained an organized and systematic presentation of Israel’s legal rights to the entire Land of Israel, not just the area included in the State of Israel, but to all the land east and west of the Jordan, north and south of the Yarmuk, and, separately, to Sinai and the territory of what is today Southern Lebanon. The latter is geographically an extension of Upper Galilee, that historically was part of ancient Israel and therefore should have been included in the boundaries of Mandated Palestine, had it not been for French obstinacy and imperial designs. It was to rectify this glaring omission that I set myself the task of composing the present book. I devoted day and night to writing it from October 2001 to March 2003, and in the succeeding years made constant additions, revisions and updates to reach the point of publication. The book thus required seven years before it was ripe for publication.

 

I had for more than a decade prior to writing this book prepared the ground for it by composing a series of articles and papers on legal questions affecting the Land of Israel. Many of these articles appeared in the Hebrew bi-monthly publication of Nativ, where I stressed the San Remo Resolution as the principal founding document of the State of Israel. My thesis was that the Jewish People were recognized under international law as the de jure sovereign over Mandated Palestine ever since the adoption of the San Remo Resolution. This view contrasted sharply with that of other jurists who propagated the theory that there existed a “sovereignty vacuum” for Judea, Samaria and Gaza or that these regions had the legal status of unallocated (or unallotted) territories of the Mandate for Palestine. At the time this view was propounded, it appeared to many to favour Israel’s interest. However, it actually damaged Israel’s legal case, since not only did it ignore the importance of the San Remo Resolution, which had created Palestine for the exclusive national benefit of the Jewish People, but also opened the door to the local Arab inhabitants of the Land of Israel to claim ownership of the so-called “unallocated territories” for themselves and t hereby acquire national and political rights over them that they were never meant to have under the San Remo Resolution and the Mandate for Palestine. I came to the conclusion that since all of Palestine had already been allocated to the Jewish People at the San Remo Peace Conference that issued the San Remo Resolution, the Arabs therefore had no national rights whatever to any part of the territory of formerly mandated Palestine under international law, though they, together with the other inhabitants of the country, naturally enjoyed civil and religious rights. It was in the mid-1980s that I began to formulate my view that de jure sovereignty had already been vested in the Jewish People over all of the Land of Israel dating from the 1920 San Remo Resolution and then devolved upon the State of Israel upon its re-establishment. I then explained this view to Dr. Paul Riebenfeld of New York. He advised me that no one had previously expressed this position. I also mentioned my view in an article I wrote in 1989, published in The Jewish Press of Brooklyn, New York, on “the Question of Sovereignty and Final Status of Judea, Samaria and Gaza” (August 4, 1989, p.4). In that article I stated that at a meeting of the Supreme Council of the victorious Allied Powers at San Remo, Italy, on April 25, 1920 “Palestine was specifically set aside and given to the Jewish People for the establishment of a National Home… The establishment of a Jewish homeland meant eventual statehood20and hence the transfer to the Jewish People of sovereignty to all parts of the homeland including Judea, Samaria and Gaza”.

 

Over a year after I made aliya in August 1989, I was appointed by Professor Yuval Ne’eman, leader of the Tehiya party, then serving as Minster of Energy and Infrastructure in the Yitzhak Shamir Government, to be his legal adviser on Eretz-Israel. In January 1991, he asked me to prepare a paper for him on Israel’s legal foundation and rights to the country, since he was scheduled to deliver a speech in a month’s time on this subject at the Carnegie Foundation in the United States. I compiled a 93 page paper for this purpose. Professor Ne’eman not only accepted my thesis, he used what I wrote for him to very good advantage on his speaking tour before American audiences and followed this up with an article published in the journal Global Affairs (Fall 1992, Vol. VII, No. 4). In his article, he cited my work as the legal authority for his statement that “it is… at San Remo that the State of Israel draws its legal existence” and that “sovereignty over an area that would later be defined as the Palestine mandate was thereby bestowed on the Jewish People”.

 

The briefing paper I had authored for Professor Ne’eman became the impetus for the present book. However, I could not undertake this task immediately, because as a new oleh still new to the country, I had to seek employment in order to provide for my family. I was obliged to leave the Ministry of Energy when Tehiya lost its Knesset representation and Professor Ne’eman resigned his position as Minister even before the June 1992 elections and the Labour Party’s assumption of power. With the signing of several accords between Israel and “Palestine Liberation” Organization, I felt compelled to challenge the legality of these accords in the Israel Supreme Court, and for that purpose I filed a total of five petitions or applications on behalf of distinguished Israeli citizens. The Court, however, always refused to hear these petitions on their merits, because of what it determined to be the political nature of the agreements made with the PLO, as if the question of the legality of such agreements was outside the scope of its jurisdiction, thus giving the Government of Israel a blank cheque to do whatever it desired, regardless of several existing Israeli laws that prohibited the ceding of territory to any foreign state whatsover, and by natural deduction to any lesser entity, particularly to a criminal and terrorist organization.

Finally, in 2001, I started to compose the present book at the urging of my good friend, Mr. Yoel Lerner, an educator and linguist in Jerusalem, who recognized the importance of putting down in writing the legal knowledge I had gained over the years on the subject of Israel’s legal rights to the Land of Israel. It was a proverbial “labour of love” from beginning to end. To present Israel’s legal case I have relied on all the basic documents, agreements and acts formulated in the critical period between the years 1915-1925 that shaped the modern Middle East as it is today. As already indicated, the base document for the founding of Israel was the San Remo Resolution, as it was also for Syria and Iraq. I take pride in the fact that I have preached this point for the last two decades and that it has now become a widespread and accepted idea, directly attributable to myself as confirmed by Professor Yuval Ne’eman himself.

 

I sincerely hope that this book will be used in the future as a teaching and educational tool to inform those who know little of the depth and strength of Israel’s legal case for retaining in its possession the territories liberated in 1967 that still remain under its rule and even for the recovery – one day – of those territories already illegally given away. Arguments based on legal facts and evidence are needed to counter the enormous lies and mis-information put out by Israel’s detractors, both at home and abroad, who urge the State “to end its occupation” of territories that rightfully belong to Israel. Such facts and evidence are provided in this book. The State of Israel is entitled to rule all the lands encompassing the Land of Israel with which it has incomparable historical, geographical, religious, economic and security links.

 

A concise summary of the main points of this book has been published by the Ariel Center for Policy Research in its Policy Paper No. 147, entitled “Legal Rights and Title of Sovereignty of the Jewish People to the Land of Israel and Palestine under International Law” (ACPR Publishers, April 2003). To that source I refer interested readers who may wish to have a quick review of the main points of this book. I have also discussed the approach I have taken in presenting Israel’s legal case, as compared to that of others, in two letters I sent to Professor Ne’eman in 2004, which are reprinted infra in Appendix III.

 

Professor Ne’eman had originally intended to write his own introduction to the book, but his untimely decease in=2 02007 has made that impossible. However, the letter he wrote to a prospective publisher expressing his enthusiastic endorsement of the book is reproduced in that appendix as a substitute for the intended introduction. I have also included in Appendix IV a juridical assessment of the book composed by the late Dr. Ya’akov Meron, Professor of Moslem Law and Adviser on the Law of Arab Countries at the Ministry of Justice, who sadly passed away in the spring of 2008. He read this book in its entirety and characterized it as “a forceful and erudite pleading for the respecting of the letter and spirit of the law, not only Israeli law but also international law that came into existence in the wake of World War I”. It is certainly a great honor to receive the support of such eminent figures as Professors Ne’eman and Meron for the book as now finally published.

 

Finally, I have included in Appendix V the correspondence I had with the late Joel Carmichael, the celebrated long-time editor of Midstream, a monthly Jewish review based in New York. I had written to him concerning a article penned by one of his contributors. This article was based on my original thesis as stated above, that de jure sovereignty over all of Palestine had been vested in the Jewish People as a result of the decision taken at the San Remo Peace Conference to cre ate the new mandated state of Palestine in accordance with the Balfour Declaration and Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, though the writer of the article, having learned of this thesis directly from me, neglected to attribute it to me, nor was he authorized to make it public until I had done so in a systematic manner. Nevertheless he posted it on the internet, thus giving it widespread publicity. Mr. Carmichael accepted my analysis most eagerly, and in follow-up correspondence even requested that I submit an article for publication in Midstream, which he said he would publish as the leading article in a future issue. Unfortunately, Mr. Carmichael retired from his position as Editor of Midstream before the article was ready. The article, never published in its original format to this day, is included in Appendix V. The penning of the article marked the precipitate cause that set me on the path to the compilation of the present book, the idea and contents of which having been swirling around in my mind ever since I first presented my legal paper to Professor Ne’eman in 1991. The book is thus the final rendition of that long chain of thoughts.

 

The comments I have received on my earlier writings on the subject, as expressed in various letters and articles, give me cause to hope that the book may prove in the long run to be of=2 0actual benefit to the Jewish People and the State of Israel in their on-going process of reclaiming and repossessing all of the Jewish National Home and the remaining parts of the Land of Israel^*.

 

 Howard Grief, - Jerusalem, June 2008

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

 

 

^*The Jewish National Home and Mandated Palestine were originally meant to be synonymous terms under international law, and were supposed to correspond to the historical or biblical frontiers of the Land of Israel in the First and Second Temple Periods. However, when the borders of Mandated Palestine were finally drawn in 1920 and 1922 by Britain and France, they illegally excluded various areas comprising the Land of Israel in the definition of Palestine, thus creating an unwarranted distinction between what bec ame Palestine and what historically was the Land of Israel. Paradoxically, the distinction between Palestine and the historical Land of Israel was not reflected in the law of Palestine during the period of the Mandate, since the term used in Hebrew to designate the country was Eretz-Israel, even though certain historical parts of it were not included.