Alan Baker: Israel Has an Historic Right to Judea and Samaria
As you may know, various voices emanating from the international community attacked the validity of the Levy Report. Baker held his ground and insisted that the Levy Report has it right. Good.
Dr. Alan Baker, an expert on international law and a member of the committee headed by Judge Edmond Levi recommending the extension of Israeli law to Jewish towns in Judea and Samaria, said at a conference discussing the matter Tuesday night that Israel would be fully in its rights to do so.
“The task of the Levi Committee was to look at the construction situation in Judea and Samaria and make the appropriate recommendations on how to proceed,” Baker said at the event sponsored by the Women in Green organization. The recommendation to authorize all construction in Judea and Samaria made by the committee was a very important one, he said.
Until very recently, the guiding document for governments in Israel had been a 2004 report authored by leftist attorney Talia Sasson, who recommended the dismantling of many new communities, termed “outposts,” in Judea and Samaria. Sasson later ran for Knesset on the far-left Meretz party list.
Baker said that much of the trouble relating to these communities was due to Sasson’s bad faith in preparing the report. She had been asked by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to prepare a report on “unauthorized outposts, but when she produced the report she termed them ‘illegal’ outposts.” The government, Baker said, had no choice but to act on removing the communities, because “she turned anyone who builds there into criminals.”
Because of that report, Presidents Bush and Obama also adopted the attitude that the communities were illegal, Baker said. This attitude was mistaken, he claimed. “Not having authorization is not a crime…Our mission was to clarify the situation and make appropriate recommendations.”
The committee examined the rights of Israel to build in Judea and Samaria altogether. Leftist groups, said Baker, attempted to prove that only Arabs had the right to build on non-privately owned lands in the the region, but those proofs were rejected by the committee, he said.
“After and extensive investigation, we determined that Judea and Samaria were not legally ‘occupied.’ It was not under legal control of any entity,” including Jordan, whose declaration of sovereignty over the region was never recognized by international organizations like the UN, said Baker. As a result, “building by Israel in Judea and Samaria does not violate the Geneva Convention.”
In contrast, Israel, as the representative of the Jewish people, could claim an historic right to build in Judea and Samaria. “No one can deny this historic right. There are no pacts, treaties, or any other documents that attribute Palestinian rights to the region.” Baker added that he had presented the committee’s conclusions to many diplomats, and all accepted them – except for Israel.
@ Allen Z. Hertz:
Well, of course it’s offensive. But that is precisely because that identity is of such long standing, and in no objective way comparable to the local ethnic Arab charade of the past 55-something years.
It took the Jews centuries to become a people (let alone, a nation). The collection of clans that left Egyptian slavery ca 1300-1400 BC was hardly a ‘people’ by any stretch of the imagination. It constituted some 3 million persons with a shared experience of bondage linked to a common (yet increasingly remote) memory of shared ancestry; nothing more. Nor was it a ‘people’ that crossed the Jordan into Cana’an after wandering for 4 decades in the wilderness.
It would be literally hundreds MORE yrs till those fractious & often mutually antagonistic descendants of slaves would be forced by circumstances (primarily, the Philistine threat) to gradually begin putting aside their internecine squabblings & tribal fealties in favor of developing a rudimentary national sensibility with a civic underpinning.
Moreover, and with all due respect, to characterize the "ethnogenesis" that you speak of as having occurred around the 6th century BC is, I would submit, to miss the forest for the trees:
Had that ethnogenesis not been established & solidified well BEFORE the Babylonian Captivity (to which I assume you refer in citing the 6th century), then there would have been no cohesive Jewish People remaining to begin making the return to The Land when a victorious Cyrus gave the okay half-a-century later.
What is TRULY offensive is the notion that such a tempering & moulding over those many centuries should be EQUATED with the cheap, strictly P-R Pali effort of the past 55 years since 1967 —
let alone, discounted IN FAVOR of it — over the matter of who is, and isn’t, a people.
Offensive? — good God, it’s friggin’ OUTRAGEOUS. . . .
@ Allen Z. Hertz:
I think you know that you’re begging the question here, Allen; “assuming facts not in evidence.”
— Inserting the word probably is just a device for hedging your bets.
Yet the remark is in the nature of an objective statement. To say that something exists is to indicate that its presence is independent of anybody’s opinion (even its own) about its existence.
You assert that the Palestinian Arabs’ peoplehood is for them to decide & declare — and for the world to confirm.
Only if nobody laughs when they declare it.
You see, BOTH halves of your assertion are subjective, not merely the first half. What the world thinks (or says it thinks) — yea, verily, even the whole world — is every bit as subjective as what the ARABS think (or say they think).
IF the Emperor is not in fact clothed in gold-trimmed raiment, but is in point of fact, naked as a jaybird
— it isn’t for us to stand back and nod just because everybody else is cheering.
Quite the contrary, it only remains for us to tell the truth.
Creatively & cheerfully, to be sure.
But loudly and persistently
— and faithfully.
dweller Said:
Very well stated!