‘Palestine’ In The Land Of Israel?
I have been writing about the legal right of the Jews to J&S for many years. I agree with everything he wrote here. The Government of Israel refuses to advance these arguments and instead only talks about our historical rights. Why? Ted Belman
By Jerold S. Auerbach, Jewish Press
Would the creation of a Palestinian state by vote of the United Nations General Assembly, expected in September, be illegal?
Yes, according to a recent letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. Signed by an array of lawyers, law professors and international law experts, it asks him to block the forthcoming resolution, promoted by the Palestinian Authority, for recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1949 Armistice lines.
The letter was drafted by lawyers affiliated with the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel, a non-profit organization founded in 2004 to find “fair and equitable solutions” for Israelis then about to be evacuated from Gaza.
Among its distinguished signers were Alan Baker, former legal adviser for the Israeli Foreign Ministry and ambassador to Canada, and Meir Rosenne, another former legal adviser for the Foreign Ministry and ambassador to the United States. They claim that UN recognition would be “contrary to international law, UN resolutions and existing agreements.”
Their letter, in effect a legal brief, argues that such a resolution would contravene UN Security Council Resolutions adopted after the Six-Day and Yom Kippur wars. It would be “in stark
violation” of existing agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.
Indeed, “the legal basis for the establishment of the State of Israel,” they indicate, goes back to 1922 when the League of Nations affirmed “the establishment of a national home for the Jewish People in the historical area of the Land of Israel.”
Empowered to enact international law for the new postwar world order, the League conferred on Great Britain a Mandate for Palestine. “Palestine” was defined as the land east and west of the Jordan River, now comprising Jordan, the West Bank and Israel.
But in what became the first partition of Palestine, now long forgotten or ignored (even by Israeli government officials), the British government lopped off all the land east of the Jordan River, three-quarters of the designated Mandatory territory, and bestowed it upon Abdullah, son of the Sharif of Mecca, for his own kingdom of Trans-Jordan.
The entire remainder, west of the Jordan to the Mediterranean, was redefined as “Palestine” and designated for the “Jewish National Home,” a phrase borrowed from Lord Balfour’s famous letter of November 2, 1917. But the League went beyond that vague and indeterminate assurance. Article 6 of the Palestine Mandate explicitly protected “close settlement by Jews” in the shrunken land to be called Palestine.
That guarantee remains the international legal foundation for Jewish settlements built ever since the Six-Day War returned Israel to its ancient Jewish homeland. It has never been rescinded.
As signers of the Legal Forum letter indicate, any General Assembly attempt to create a Palestinian state in that territory would violate an array of international guarantees. Among them, most crucially, is Article 80 of the UN Charter. It explicitly protected the rights of “any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments to which members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.”
Drafted by Jewish representatives (including Prime Minister Netanyahu’s father), Article 80 became known as “the Palestine clause.” It preserved, under international law, the rights of the Jewish people to “close settlement” in all the land west of the Jordan River, even after the British Mandate had expired and the League of Nations had ceased to exist.
Those rights were flagrantly violated when Jordan invaded the fledgling Jewish state and claimed sovereignty over the West Bank in 1949. But the Jordanian claim had no standing in international law and was never recognized.
After the Six-Day War, Security Council Resolution 242 permitted Israel to administer the West Bank until “a just and lasting peace in the Middle East” was achieved. That, of course, has not yet happened.
Even then, however, Israel would only be required to withdraw its armed forces “from territories” – not from “the territories” or “all the territories” (proposals that were defeated in both the Security Council and the General Assembly).
The absence of “the” – the now famous missing definite article – was neither an accident nor an afterthought.
It resulted from what Yale Law School Professor Eugene W. Rostow, then undersecretary of state for political affairs, described as more than five months of “vehement public diplomacy” to decisively clarify the meaning of Resolution 242.
No prohibition – or even limitation – on Jewish settlement, guaranteed west of the Jordan River under the League of Nations Mandate forty-five years earlier, was adopted.
As the Legal Forum letter indicates, “1967 borders” (so labeled recently by President Obama) “do not exist, and have never existed.” Under the terms of the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and the invading Arab states, the newly established “Armistice Demarcation Lines” were “without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines.”
Therefore, the letter signers conclude, those borders “cannot be accepted or declared to be the international boundaries of a Palestinian state.”
Should the UN General Assembly approve the current Palestinian proposal, the Palestinians would also be in “fundamental breach” of the 1995 Israeli-Palestinian Accord, when the signatories agreed not to attempt to change the status of contested territory before permanent status negotiations were concluded – certainly not before they were even begun.
* * * * *
After the Six-Day War the core Zionist commitment to settling the land of Israel, which had driven state-building efforts since the 1880s, passed from secular to religious Israelis. That transformation surely explains why successive Israeli governments, whether led by Labor or Likud, have either maintained silence – or demonstrated intense hostility – toward Zionist settlers wearing kippot or long skirts.
At best ambivalent – and usually hostile – toward Jews in Judea and Samaria, government officials have resolutely maintained silence about the international guarantees for the “close settlement” of Jews west of the Jordan River.
Joined by a chorus of academic intellectuals, journalists, and cultural luminaries, they have been exceedingly leery of strengthening religious Zionism by authorizing new settlements or enlarging existing ones. The special venom toward settlers displayed by current Defense Minister (and former prime minister) Ehud Barak expresses the deep-rooted hostility of Labor Party and left-wing Zionists toward their despised ideological challengers.
Not all settlers, to be sure, are religious. The majority doubtlessly chose to live in Judea and Samaria because housing prices were lower, and the quality of life better, in their sparkling new communities than where they previously lived.
Perhaps one hundred thousand settlers are religious Zionists who claim the land as Israel’s biblical birthright and inheritance. Unlike Tel Avivians, who gaze across the Mediterranean to Los Angeles and the Silicon Valley for their sources of cultural inspiration, these Israelis stand on the bedrock of Jewish history, looking to the past and to sacred texts, not to the West, for inspiration.
Critics from the secular left have been unrelenting in their castigation of settlements. In Lords of the Land (2007), the first comprehensive history of the settlement movement, historian Idith Zertal and Haaretz journalist Akiva Eldar lacerated settlers for their illegal occupation of “Palestinian” land. The “malignancy of occupation,” they wrote, “in contravention of international law,” has “brought Israel’s democracy to the brink of an abyss.”
But persistent efforts to undermine the legitimacy of Israeli settlements, wrote international legal expert Julius Stone thirty years ago, have been nothing less than a “subversion of basic international law principles.” They still are. Yet the United Nations, with an international constituency that has been relentlessly hostile to Israel ever since it first hallucinated that “Zionism is racism” in 1975, keeps trying.
Catering to international support for Palestinian victimization claims, the International Criminal Court, established by the UN General Assembly in 1998, made Jewish settlement a “war crime.” But Israel (like the United States) “unsigned” from the statute of authorization for the Court; furthermore, as international legal scholar Jeremy Rabkin indicates, the Court lacks jurisdiction over “crimes” committed before 2002. By then, virtually all the currently existing Jewish settlements had already been established. That renders any designation of settlements as “war crimes” meaningless ex post facto rhetoric – although not without power to elicit ever more anti-Israel venom.
The question never asked is whether a Palestinian state in the land reserved under international law for “close settlement” by Jews is even legal. The Jewish claim, forged by three thousand years of history in the Land of Israel, including two eras of national sovereignty, reinforced in the modern era by a succession of international legal guarantees, is indisputable.
The Palestinian claim, by contrast, is a contrived recent invention. Palestinians, as Barbara Lerner has written (National Review Online, June 17), “are not a people distinguishable by virtue of their common genes and/or language, religion, culture, history, or form of government.”
Devised by Arabs who only recently identified themselves as “Palestinians,” it is built on the foundation of perpetual victimization claims, the international determination to delegitimize Israel, and – perhaps most revealing – the pillaging of Jewish and Zionist history.
“Palestine” was so named by the Romans after they crushed the Bar Kochba rebellion in 133 CE. Any ancestors of present-day Palestinians who may have lived in Palestine under Ottoman or British rule were considered by others, and by themselves, to be Arabs. In 1948, without undue protest, they became Jordanians.
Not until the creation of the PLO by Arab states at the Arab League Summit (1964) did they become “Palestinians.” It took another decade, which included the stunning victory of Israel in the Six-Day War, before statehood was mentioned on the Palestinian wish list.
The validity of the Palestinian historical claim can be measured by its sources – nearly all of which, revealingly, are Jewish. In a remarkable inversion, a people without an identifiable national identity or history until well into the 20th century has plundered Zionist history to create its own illusory past in a land that was never theirs.
Relying on the Hebrew Bible, Palestinians (like Arabs throughout the Middle East) claim Ishmael, Abraham’s son by his servant Hagar, as their founding ancestor. They adopted as their ancient forebears the Canaanites, who, according to the biblical narrative, were displaced by conquering Israelites. (Palestinian history not only invents itself; it anticipates itself.)
Insisting that Jews never had national commonwealths in the Land of Israel many centuries before the birth of Islam, Palestinians reject irrefutable historical and archeological evidence to the contrary.
So, too – like Muslims throughout the Middle East – they resolutely deny that there ever was a Temple in Jerusalem and that the Western Wall has been a Jewish holy site ever since its destruction in 70 CE. Yet triumphant Islam built the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aksa mosque on the Temple Mount precisely because it had been sacred Jewish space.
In Hebron, similarly, Muslim conquerors seizedthe Cave of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs where Jews had already worshipped at the graves of their biblical ancestors for more than ten centuries. Transforming it into a mosque, Muslims barred Jewish “infidels” from entry for seven hundred years – until the Six-Day War forced open the doors.
Even the flotillas to Gaza, beginning with the notorious Mavi Marmara a year ago, are modeled after the rickety refugee ships that tried to bring desperate Jews, fleeing from Nazi terror and extermination, to Palestine before and after World War II. The most famous of these was the Exodus, with thousands of Holocaust survivors on board, turned away by the British government in 1947. Any resemblance is, of course, purely intentional – and patently absurd.
* * * * *
Might there be an alternative to Palestinian usurpation of the ancient Jewish homeland? Certainly West Bank Palestinians must be guaranteed the right to remain in place, living in their cities and villages and farming their land. They should have the option of citizenship in the Kingdom of Jordan, occupying two-thirds of Mandatory Palestine, where more than half the population is already Palestinian. The distances are not far: from Nablus (biblical Shechem, where Jacob dwelled), the second largest Palestinian city, to Amman it’s only 68 miles.
King Abdullah might prefer not to have an even more menacing democratic challenge to his Hashemite minority rule, but that would be a small price to pay for peace.
Jewish settlements, and other land legally owned by Jews in Judea and Samaria, would become part of the Jewish state. On Israeli land there would be no distinctive restrictions on development. A joint Israeli-Palestinian police force could continue to patrol the land between Palestinian and Jewish communities, as has now been done for nearly twenty years.
In Hebron, where the special challenge of a divided city exists, Jews would be free to inhabit Jewish-owned property, which they often cannot (by edict of their own government), and to purchase land and buildings from willing Arab sellers. A continuing Israeli military presence in the Jewish zone of the city, where Arabs also live, would be required indefinitely for the safety of Jewish residents.
In May 1967, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook memorably cried out to his graduates, assembled at the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva in Jerusalem to celebrate Independence Day: “They have divided my land. Where is our Hebron? Have we forgotten it? And where is Shechem? And our Jericho – will we forget them?”
One month later, at the Western Wall, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan promised the victorious nation: “We have returned to all that is holy in our land. We have returned never to be parted from it again.”
President Obama, of course, demands otherwise. But his insistence on the 1949 Armistice lines as the framework for negotiation, his determination to propel Palestinian statehood by the end of this year, and his silence on the Palestinian “right of return” (to Israel) easily qualify him as the president most hostile to the Jewish state since 1948 (with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter).
Having quickly turned against a longtime American ally in Egypt, then “leading from behind” in Libya, and now remaining silent while the Assad regime slaughters innocent Syrian civilians, Obama focuses relentlessly on Israel as the primary source of Middle East problems.
The return of Jews to the Land of Israel is what Zionism has always been about. A Palestinian state in the Jewish homeland will undermine it from within.
Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of “Brothers at War: Israel and the Tragedy of the Altalena,” published in May by Quid Pro Books.
The whole concept of a “Palestinian” state is just one big lie. And this lie has been repeated ad nauseum until the masses all begin to believe this tremendous lie.
The truth is that there is no palestinian state within the borders of Israel. The only potential palestinian state today is Jordan. The nations of the world want to purposely weaken the state of Israel by placing a farcical palestinian state within our borders. We must stand up to those who want to steal our land and let them know in no uncertain terms that the Land of Israel belongs solely to the Children of Israel.
very good to have this legal analysis in hand, although I shall continue to say to anyone who says ‘the palestinians deserve a state’, my response will always be “they already have one. It is called Jordan”. sometimes I say “two. Jordan and Gaza” , even though I think the muslims in Gaza should change places with the Copts of Egypt, who should also gain the entire Sinai as their safe haven from intolerant, imperial islam.
the anti-IsraelJewishState, and anti-palestinians-in-Jordan bedouin can all move to Yemen
Ted: in answer to your “why?”, I believe Israeli governments have bent over to keep the Hashemite Kings of Jordan at peace with Israel.
Unless you foolishly take “international law” seriously, UNO votes count for nothing: arguments about whose land it is or isn’t count for nothing; propaganda generated by Arabs, friends of Arabs, Jews, friends of Jews, all count for nothing; arguments about historical rights count for nothing.
The only thing that counts is the ability of a nation to generate enough power to force any such issue. Winners of wars take the lands of their conquered enemies. They expel the alien inhabitants of these lands; or for those conquered aliens whom the conquerors allow to remain, they either subdue them into members of their own culture, or degrade them to persons with few or no rights.
As members of the Jewish nation, we want not merely Judea and Samaria to be annexed. We want to exploit the enemy’s boundless hatred of us and all that we represent as tools to cause them to blunder into more wars against the Jewish state. And we then want the Jewish state and its military forces to quickly destroy the enemy’s armed forces on any such territory. The next step is to annex the territory in question, put it under Israeli governmental control, and populate it thickly with Jews. Then await the next foolish attempt of the enemy, believing their own culturally-induced fairy tales of their military prowess in contrast to that of the armed Jews of Israel, to repeat the cycle, take more land, expel or degrade the enemy inhabitants, and rebuild the newest territories as Jewish national provinces.
Or at least, that is what any healthy nation graced with a healthy culture and an equally healthy sense of its manifest destiny, does. That is the way the winning cultures and their commonwealths have done throughout history.
And that is precisely what Jew must learn to do.
Because if they do not — which means that if WE do not, then will once again will be history’s victims.
Peace would indeed be nice. But if you cannot have peace, then even nicer is absolute and decisive victory and the national power than is bestowed with such victory.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
No nation can afford a “Palestine” inside its heart. Palestine being a lie. A monstrous invention “constructed” to eat up Israel’s insides, destroying all that Jews are building. Palestine is the negative of Israel, darkness over Israel’s bright light. It is a total miracle that Israel is still existing, prospering after almost 50 years of this devouring fata morgana called “Palestine”. For this great miracle I cannot find an explanation. It is, it has to be an act of G’d.
And if Israel refused to recognize it, or even ignored it, would it be relevant?
To Arnold,
I fully agree with everything you said. The problem in this entire equation is not the Palestinians, it is the Jews. And the problem with the Jews is that they forgot to be Jewish to become Israeli. Most Israelis today in the Left fully believe that Israel’s existence is a sin committed against the Palestinian people, they see no connection to most of the Land of Israel. The bigger problem is that the Left has managed to maintain the majority of israelis Jewishly ignorant enough to convince them that any claim to the land, historical or religious, is without merit. The Haredi have cooperated in this travesty by being increasingly more insular as a defense mechanism against the potential allure of the liberal Left, and by acting like prostitutes willing to sell their souls to the highest bidder even if against the overall betterment of the nation. The Religious Zionist are alone in the struggle to maintain Israel Jewish and strong. They are few in number and lack a true leader. But they are a force to reckon with, just wittness the constant efforts waged against them by the establishment. Once a true national religious leader emerges, one who can shlep the Hareidi to its ranks and get them out of the ghetto, one who can appeal to the vast majority of israelis who retain a “pintele yid” and who need not be scared of a leader with a kippah, then you will have change.
The problem is that if such a leader doesn’t emerge soon, it may be too late for Israel.
If psychological and behavioral traits (or at least tendencies) can be inherited, and I believe they can, Jews will have to overcome the 2,000 years of weakness and dispossession wired into their DNA. There are deep, dark, compelling forces at work within the Jewish psyche that perversely drive him from being rooted in his own land.
The real problem is(as far as I am undesrtand)the New World Order created by illuminaty’s of which Obama and BB are protogonists or useful tool at least.
What has to be said, I think is that there is a large gap between theory and “the facts in the field”.
Israel as a society is much stronger than is being pictured here. The sentence”let’s save it before it is too late” is not rooted in reality. Israel is still evolving, new immigrants arrive daily and the difference between now and the fourties and fifties may be that they are being absorbed, integrated, becoming full fledged Israeli’s much faster. Because the population has grown so much? Because there exists such total information?
Tne National Religeous Camp is also much larger, much more influential than is being feared. With an influence far beyond their numbers. Youth. Israeli youth is Bne Akiva youth. Others seem so irrelevant.
The yearly manifestation in Jerusalem, the “dancing with flags” shows one a sea of knitted kippot. If Israel has a “secular youth”? I would rather call those youngsters that were robbed of their birthright kind of new immigrants too. All the time we see a return to Jewish roots in youth and in grown ups too. Israel is so totally different from any other society were secularisation is the trend now and I would rather not give an opinion why that is. May be say that any ideal without a foundation of truth will disappear.
And…Everything happening in and about Israel is MEANT to happen. It’s all according to PLAN.
It is a tremendous privilege to be part of this miracle.
The only defense against the illegitimate “Palestinian State” onslaught is a strong offense. This of course presupposes a radical change in the Israeli leadership to one befitting a proud and unafraid people. The first step is to declare that the land in Judea and Samaria is part of the Sovereign state of Israel, with the exception of those areas densely populated with Arabs. Secondly, throughout Israel policies should be adopted that encourage voluntary transfer. Thirdly, there should be no limitations on jewish expansion and development in any areas. During this whole process it must be made very clear that the jewish claim to the land far outweighs the “Palestinian” one.
Once the jews learn to stand up for themselves and show strength, the world will go along. As long as the present leaders seek to curry favor with llegitimate ones, like Obama, the Zionist enterprise is doomed.
This posting on International Law is a very important statement, and appears to be soundly based contribution to why there must not be a Palestinian State west of the Jordan. Its contents need to be distributed around the world.
Nevertheless, the answer to the question why the Israeli Government does not persue this line of argument is I believe because they have recognised a dilema.
If the permanently established arabs living west of Jordan are not to be given a separate State, then – by Western Democratic standards, they should be incorporated into the State of Israel, and given citizenship status and democratic voting rights.
Such a move would result in a single State of Israel west of the Jordan, but it would become even more of a secular State than today, and would have increasingly less justification to make distinctions between its citizens on ‘religious’ lines.
Thus we might “win” the battle to keep a State of Israel, but potentially lose the war to keep Israel a JEWISH STATE.
What is most sad is that the one section of Israeli society which has proven most consistently loyal to the concept of a Jewish State, who has done proportionally most to settle the ‘disputed’ lands and who has the highest Jewish birth-rate – essential in a democracy with a growing moslem-Arab population is of course the various Religious Jews of Israel.
Thus the Israeli Government sits between a ‘rock and a hard place’ – either to accept a 2 State Solution – assuming the arabs would ever accept Israel as a ‘Jewish State’, or to face the reality that a single democratic State of Israel can only maintain its Jewish State status by encouraging the growth and success of the ‘religious sector’ of society.
warrenbraham@aol.com
Does Mr Rapoport see Israeli’s as cowards, their “enterprise” as doomed? And can he explain what he means by a “Palestinian claim”? Is this not pure fiction? And have the Jews of the land NOT stood up for themselves in the last half century of constant war? Are they NOT standing up for themselves? So who is?
I have lived in Israel for more than half a century and I have NO IDEA what “the Zionist enterprise” is.
For me, born in Holland, Israel is and always was our holy land, and when Return was possible…we returned. Zionist enterprise? One of the oldest civilisations on earth, exiled from its land for many centuries by a stream of enemies returned. To call this a Zionist enterprise sounds cheap, really deprecating to me.
Of course I DONT see Israelis as cowards. Of course I DO see the Palestinian claim to the land to be PURE FICTION. And of course I realize that the Jews have stood up for themselves when no one else, especially the British during the Mandate period, would. However, two big mistakes were made. First, not annexing the territory in 1967 and at the same time letting Yassir Arafat and his PLO back into the country from their exile in Tunisia. Secondly, and more critically, since the populace was directly involved, were the events leading up to the disastrous Oslo “Peace Process”. The 1967 mistakes were made by the government but the Oslo “mentality” was as a result of people growing tired of conflict, terrorism, etc. It is painfully clear that Oslo was a failure and that the Palestinian approach is based on Israel’s destruction. I cannot state how strongly I feel that the solution for Israel is in a change in leadership. That can only come from the political camp that gets its mandate from Jewish values
and sources.
I do (1)
I do (2)
I do (3)
The brilliant Pinhas Inbari recently wrote an article regarding the aftermath of the impending September.
Pinhas Inbari is a senior policy analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He is also a veteran Palestinian affairs correspondent who formerly reported for Israel Radio and Al Hamishmar newspaper, and currently reports for several foreign media outlets. He is the author of a number of books on the Palestinians including The Palestinians: Between Terrorism and Statehood.
In his piece, “What Are the Palestinians Planning after September?,” Inbari says:
“What the Palestinians really envisage after September is to exploit a UN endorsement of statehood to legitimize an escalation of the conflict. After having the 1967 lines recognized so as to negate the results of the Six-Day War, they plan to seek recognition of the 1947 partition lines.
The post-September scenarios discussed in the upper Fatah echelons involve a return to the struggle. A senior member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, Hatem Abd al-Qader, noted that in case Israel obstructs the Palestinians’ political plans, Abbas will step down, the PA will dissolve itself, and nothing will prevent the Palestinians from returning to the struggle. And even if elections are held, the new president will come from the younger generation, abolish the Oslo agreements, and lead the Palestinians back to the struggle.”
To read more:
http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=1&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=442&PID=0&IID=7797&TTL=What_Are_the_Palestinians_Planning_after_September?
The lawyers can all dance on the head of a pin but even Ted has to concede that this notion of all of J&S “legally” belonging to Israel is a dead issue even as far as the Israeli government is concerned.
How is Israel going to legally claim what its own government does not assert? The only way that Israel is going to get all of J&S back now is if it takes the next opportunity to annex it by force and then avoids future sophistries that the territory is “negotiable”.
The only thing the Palis want to negotiate is how quickly Israel can be wiped off the map, which gives Israel every right to “defend” itself – and if in doing so it captures all of J&S, well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles when defending oneself from lethal aggression.
Not quite Catch-22…
With the world, yes, Sir, this is undeniably true.
But, then, these are Jews we are speaking of.
And that adds a wild card to the deck,
and the deal.
Ultimately, yes; quite so.
Arguably so.
But the Jew is a very special creature
– the Jewish People, indeed a special creation,
so constituted as to be incapable of calling up from within itself the will to do what is needed for the proposition you have set forth
unless that will comes from a very special Place.
You can’t GET the Jew to fight the way you are speaking of
unless he has the interior assurance that he is dead right.
(Aye, there’s the rub…)
It’s simply the way he’s constructed; if you’ve got a problem with that, I’m afraid you’ll have to take it up with the Contractor.
Other peoples may not need that assurance in order to fight in the manner you’ve elucidated.
– but the Jew most certainly does.
And that’s why the awareness of historical rights is INDEED essential
– and not to be ignored.
Not because the world needs to know it.
But because Am Yisrael needs to know it
– needs to know it with a certainty that is finally
unshakable.
No way around it, Arnold.
The devil’s only way of beating the Israelis is to confuse them into forgetting that they are right.
Alterman’s “Then the Devil Said” sums it up best.
This is Sarah Honig’s translation:
“…Satan then said:
How do I overcome
This besieged one?
He has courage
And talent,
And implements of war
And resourcefulness.
…only this shall I do,
I’ll dull his mind
And cause him to forget
The justice of his cause.”
-Natan Alterman
Welcome back AE. Now play nice.
You wrote “How is Israel going to legally claim what its own government does not assert?” .
No one has an illusion about this. Articles such as this one are intended to strengthan the case for annexation so that more people will support it and so it becomes harder for the government to reject it.
As for your comment “Ted has to concede that this notion of all of J&S “legally” belonging to Israel is a dead issue even as far as the Israeli government is concerned.”. I never said otherwise. I simply work to creat political will.
I never said our legal rights are a substitute for force. They serve to strengthen the will and our belief in the righteousness of our cause.
Shy Guy, could you explain what you meant with those 3 “I do’s”?
I have not understood. Cowards? Israeli’s (and may be I get you wrong for which I shall be sorry)are many things but they are NOT cowards. They have constantly been and still are extremely courageous with a supernatural courage. They are almost invisible so small in land and numbers but they go on fighting. Politics may look less than “courageous” to many but that is the nature of politics.
I am very grateful that I am not the Prez nor the Prime Min. of Israel. It must be unbearably frightening to “have to keep the Jews alive”, while NOT being Moshe, Mozes Rabbeinu.
Shy Guy never tell a Jewish Israeli mother and grandmother that their sons, grandsons, their people are cowards. They might get violent those cowardy women.
They are links. Did you click on them and see the main headline of each one?
I’m a Jewish Israeli father and grandfather. It is the people currently in charge of the country who are the cowards.
In the past, our Geulah was a result of the righteous acts of our ancestral mothers. Bring it on!
September Song
“But if you could examine the goods they bring
They have little to offer but the songs they sing
And the plentiful waste of time of day
A plentiful waste of time…”
Going on the Offensive?
Paul Eidelberg
When Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords in September 1978, and followed this up by signing the Israel-Egypt peace treaty of March 1979, he initiated Israel’s defensive and losing strategy.
Let’s face a simple but unpleasant truth: Only a fool surrenders land won in a war of self-defense to the aggressor—surrenders land for what Anwar Sadat mockingly called “a piece of paper.”
Without firing a shot, Sadat won the greatest victory in military or diplomatic history. From an adversary superior in arms he regained the entire Sinai, including its strategic air bases built by Israel, and oil fields Israel had made productive. Begin surrendered all this—a twelve billion dollar infrastructure—for verbiage!
Sadat also manipulated Begin into abandoning the Jewish settlement of Yamit. This surrender infected Israel’s mentality with the pathological policy of “land for peace.” If this were not enough, Sadat conned Begin into signing the first international agreement that referred to Judea and Samaria as the “West Bank.”
Say what you will about Begin’s virtues, he didn’t really know what he was doing at Camp David. This pretty much sums up the story of his colleagues and successors to this day. Connect the dots: from Begin at Camp David to Bibi at the Begin-Sadat Center at Bar-Ilan University, where Netanyahu renounced the Jewish people’s biblical as well as legal claim to Judea and Samaria.
The State of Israel has been led by losers since the IDF’s miraculous victory in the June 1967 Six-Day War. It had to be miraculous, since it was achieved without the any thought or intention to incorporate Judea and Samaria into the State;! In fact, that bold but logical idea was opposed by Israel’s timid and myopic leaders. No wonder they ceded control of Israel’s holiest site, the Temple Mount, to the Arabs—who were stunned by this gesture of the conquerors.
The word “gesture” tells it all. Israel’s ruling elites think they can obtain peace through “gestures,” like yielding strategic assets for parchment—nay, for less than parchment, as witness the hero who retreated from Gaza for nothing. Let’s face it: Using a term coined by Lenin, we have to admit that for more than four decades this country has been ruled by “useful idiots,” whose mindless behavior was facilitated by Israel’s inane system of government—a system that allowed Ariel Sharon to nullify the 2003 Knesset elections and become Labor’s surrogate prime minister!
Let’s stop the pseudo-sophistication, the obscurantism: It’s not the Arabs but Jewish prime ministers that have laid the foundations for a Palestinian state. Read More
I’m glad, because the legal right it is an illusion at this point. In No. 17 above I have explained how Israel can make it a reality.
You are 100% right Paul. The only way to implement the policies you advocate is with a change in the ISRAELI leadership. A fine alternative
would be Jewish Leadership (MANHIGUT YEHUDIT).
As for MANHIGUT YEHUDIT, it got a lot of support in the last elections, especially in Jerusalem. Many of it’s members got into the Knesset but their leader, the very charismatic Moshe Feiglin was pushed down, down, down, an extremely undemocratic act, and so, again, he did NOT get into the Knesset as if the people had NOT spoken.
Miraculously the young man did not loose faith, he still goes on, sure that in the end, the people will want him and only him. And politicians will let the people have their say..
The people. After they will have tried everything else they will want simple Jewish Leadership. .
How is this alienation possible? It must have everything to do with Israel having a history of 2000 years in exile. It takes time to wash this lack of self confidence away.