Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: international law

Showing posts with label international law. Show all posts

Friday, June 02, 2023

This week's EoZ memes and posters - and they are good

I am particularly proud of most of the memes I made this week.

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Guess who wanted to see Arabs transferred out of Palestine in the 1940s?

Zachary Foster of Princeton University tweets a "gotcha:"

This appears to be an accurate representation of what Weitz wrote in his diary in 1941. But what Foster leaves out is that David Ben Gurion rejected Weitz's desire to create a transfer committee in 1948, during the actual fighting.

Was the idea of population transfer mainstream in Zionist thought? It wouldn't be a huge surprise if there were prominent Zionists who felt that this was the best possible solution to avoid huge amounts of bloodshed. What the critics of Israel don't want people to realize is that while transfer is considered a war crime today, up until the 1940s it was considered a viable solution for many conflicts (see India/Pakistan for a classic example, as well as some 20 million Europeans transferred in the years after World War II.) Before World War II there were mass population transfers also to avoid ethnic conflict that were approved by the League of Nations.

Jews at the time are being subject to the international law of today. That is yet another form of antisemitism.

In 1944, a prominent group of people promoted the idea of population transfer of Arabs out of Palestine.

The British Labour Party.

The Palestine Post⁩, 26 April 1944⁩

If anything, based on all available evidence, the Labour Party was far more enthusiastic with the idea of population transfer of Arabs than the Zionist Jews were.

Yet no one today damns the British Labour Party as promoting ethnic cleansing in the 1940s. Only the Jews of the 1940s are tarred with that particular brush. And they still are today, despite all the evidence showing it is a lie.

Without context of how the world not only accepted but promoted all kinds of population transfers in that time period, the charge against Zionist Jews of the 1940s is deceptive at best, and a malicious slander at worst.

Which goes to show yet again that antisemitism never went away - it just morphed into new and sophisticated forms.

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According to Arab interpretations of international law in 1930, Jews have the sole right to the Temple Mount today!

Kotel, circa 1920

According to Palestinian media, the League of Arab States declared that the 1930 international commission that declared that Muslims had legal ownership of the Western Wall is still true, and the Western Wall - as well as the plaza in front of it - is all Muslim Waqf land where Jews have no legal rights.

While US and European leaders have fallen over themselves to condemn Bezalel Smotrich for saying that the Palestinian people are a recent invention, saying that statements like that are inflammatory, there is silence in both diplomatic circles and the media about the Arabs denying any rights of Jews to the very place that they have prayed towards for thousands of years.

Selective outrage is the norm, of course. Arabs are expected to say inflammatory, inciting and false statements - they do this every day - but only Jews are expected to speak in measured tones and not to plainly state the truth if it might upset the touchy Arabs.

But there is a very interesting angle to the newfound Palestinian love of the 1930 Western Wall Commission report. (They made it clear at the time that they do not accept that the Commission has any legal right to rule on the issue.)

If you look closer at the specific Muslim claims in 1930 quoted in the Commission report, you find out that according to their logic at the time, Israel is the legal owner today not only of the Kotel but of all of Jerusalem.

The Muslim side, represented by Ahmed Zaki Pasha, declared the Muslim legal case to the Commission:

History shows that after having acquired Palestine by the right of conquest, the Jews were definitely driven out of the country by the Romans after the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus. The Christians then ruled the country until the Arab conquest under Omar. With the exception of 90 years during the epoch of the Crusades the effective possession of the country has been in the hands of the Arabs from generation to generation. The Jews who came to Palestine were not interfered with by the Arabs and were fairly well treated by the Moslem rulers of the country. During this long period there were no incidents at the Buraq. The Jews never claimed any rights to the Wall and were content to go now and them to lament at that place, contented in the assurance that the tolerant Arabs would not interfere with them. It is the Balfour Declaration, reiterated in the Terms of the Mandate, that has been the cause of the discussion which finally brought bloodshed over Palestine and incited the Jews to urge claims which they had never thought of before. The creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine, an Arab country, lost for ever by the Jews hundreds and hundreds of years ago, can only give rise to perpetual troubles and dissensions. The country which the Jews had taken over by right of conquest was again lost, and the Arabs in their turn conquered it, not from the Jews, who had been driven out of Palestine several centuries before, but from the Byzantines. It was not a Jewish kingdom that the Arabs occupied in the 7th century, but a country to which the Jews had no right whatever.

It is here a question about property which has belonged to the Moslems for many centuries.

The Arab side is saying explicitly that the way that land in Palestine changes legal ownership is by the right of conquest. They admit that Jews owned the land before any Arabs did, legally, by conquering it. Then the Romans, Byzantines and finally Muslims had legal ownership because of their subsequent conquests. And even the Muslim ownership of the Temple Mount and Western Wall had only been for "many centuries" because of the Muslim conquest of the land.

Since then, of course, the Jews re-conquered the land of Israel. And therefore, according to the Muslim's own testimony to this commission that they now say has legal weight, Jews have complete ownership of all of Jerusalem today, having conquered the city in 1967.

This is not the only part of the Muslim claims from 1930 that undermine their claim today.

One is that the 1930 claims admitted that the original holiness of the Temple Mount came from the Temples themselves, which today's Palestinian deny ever existed:

It ought to be observed that when Mohammed came to Jerusalem, the site of the ancient Temple, which was already an object of veneration for the Moslems, was called Masdjed Al Aqsa (i.e., remote oratory) in contrast to the Mosque of Mecca or Masdjed Al Haram (i.e., oratory, sanctuary). At that time Mecca was hostile to Mohammed. Owing to that, Jerusalem and especially the Temple area, for a certain period, became the first Kibla (direction) for the Moslems, i.e., during that period they turned their faces in the direction of Jerusalem when praying and it was not till later on that Mecca became definitely the Kibla.

Another most interesting section notes that according to Sharia law, once land is declared sacred Waqf land, it cannot lose that status - except for one case:

A Waqf property cannot be acquired by usucaption unless the usucaptor has enjoyed a peaceful and uninterrupted possession ab antique, i.e., for at least 33 years.

Israel has certainly had unquestioned possession of the Kotel since 1967, and arguably all of Jerusalem. (This is probably a very weak argument under Sharia; I imagine any dispute by the previous owner would make usucaption invalid, but it is a fun argument.)

Perhaps the Palestinians shouldn't be so quick to embrace the 1930 international commission report. It shows that the same Muslim legal reasonings that sounded good to them in 1930 can now be used against them.

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Even the most "moderate" Palestinians support shooting Jewish civilians

The shooting of David Stern as he drove with his family today resulted, as always, with great celebrations by Palestinians.

Here a crowd goes to his house to celebrate.

And here are the obligatory fireworks celebrating the shooting of a Jew.

But, you may say, these are only the extremists. Certainly normal, sober Palestinians support shooting random Jewish civilians.

Well, Muhammed Shehada - who has bylines in Haaretz, Newsweek, Vice and elsewhere, and is a columnist for the Forward, and who also has a job working for a "human rights" NGO - went out of his way to justify Stern being shot twenty times:

The settler wounded in today's shooting near Huwara is David Stern, a former US Marine soldier who provides combat & weapon training to #Israeli settlers.

He's Israeli-American & lives in the Itamar settlement, built on land confiscated from 5 Palestinian villages.

Under international law, Stern is a civilian. His job and where he lives does not affect that designation. So this celebrated writer who pretends to be a human rights professional is justifying a war crime.

And he is considered moderate enough to write for Jewish-owned media.

If this is the best example of morality from Palestinian society, then Palestinian society is rotten to the core.

(h/t Adam Albilya)

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The Washington Post documented a war crime in Nablus - but it was done by Palestinians, not Israelis

This frame appears to show a muzzle flash, but the WaPo can't see it.

The Washington Post has an article that they believe damns IDF troops - and they are so excited about it they took away the paywall so everyone can see their computer-modeled 3D analysis.

They did indeed document a war crime, but not the one they are pretending to have uncovered.

Israeli security forces in an armored vehicle fired repeatedly into a group of civilians sheltering between a mosque and a clinic after a Feb. 22 raid in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, killing two people, including a teenager, and wounding three others, according to witnesses and a visual reconstruction of the event by The Washington Post.

For all the fancy 3-D modeling and hundreds of photos they claim to have used, the newspaper relies completely on one video, taken from above, showing a man with his arm extended with what appears to be a gun, and then running for cover. It is in the third part of this video:

The newspaper tries to claim that there is no evidence that the gunshot one can hear was from that gun, and even says, " The videos reviewed by The Post do not clearly show whether the man had a gun or fired, and none of the witnesses interviewed by The Post said they saw a gunman fire at the Israelis." Yet there appears to be a muzzle flash at the very beginning of the video (see photo above.) It is ignored by the Post.

They consult two experts about the two bangs heard, who say wildly different things: one says that they are not gunshots at all, and the other says they are gunshots but come from the Israelis, without saying how he could make such a distinction.

If two experts cannot even agree if a sound is gunfire or not, then what value do they add? The answer is that the WaPo can claim that they consulted audio experts when coming up with their foregone conclusion, even when they don't agree on anything!

When you look at the video of the man who appeared to be pointing a weapon then running to where the civilians are trying to avoid gunfire, it is obvious that he is holding something heavy like a gun. If his hands were empty he would not be running with his arms close together in front of him; his arms would be pumping at his sides the way normal people run.

Moreover, the civilians are running away before the IDF vehicle is shooting anything. (Look at the ones in the sunken plaza.) It appears they are running away from previous Palestinian gunshots, not Israeli.

The nature of open source forensics is that they are necessarily incomplete. We have no idea if there are any gunmen in the building behind the civilians, or on surrounding roofs, or across the street that may have shot the victims. The IDF did certainly fire in this video; we can see that some shots hit the pillar. But even if the IDF did shoot at the gunman and accidentally hit the victims, it is not a war crime. It is a split-second decision based on the information the soldiers had - they were being shot at, the gunman went for cover behind a stone pillar, and they were responding to the likelihood that the gunman would resume shooting at them as they passed the pillar. It is unclear that the soldiers even saw the civilians on the top of the stairs before the gunman ran to cover behind the pillar.

The entire life and death decision needed to be evaluated and made in fractions of a second.

Under the laws of armed conflict, while the existence of civilians is one factor to be weighed in such a decision, it is not the only factor. Troops are allowed and expected to defend themselves. A known gunman who runs for cover behind a pillar and who is about to be in line of sight is certainly a legitimate military target.

In peacetime, police are held to this higher standard of doing everything possible to avoid accidentally hitting civilians even if it means the gunman gets away. For armed conflicts, the laws are different. But the Washington Post doesn't say that - their entire article is geared towards the idea that the IDF had no right to target an armed man who was hiding among civilians. (And they know quite well that the civilians were not the intended targets.)

Isn't it interesting that the Post spent weeks and used four reporters with several experts consulted, and yet didn't even ask an international law expert whether Israel violated the laws of armed conflict?

And that brings up the other omission in the Washington Post's coverage: the armed man ran for shelter among civilians, making them into human shields. I mean this literally - he placed himself behind civilian bodies knowing that he was a target, possibly even shoving one person aside. And that really is a war crime!

Apparently, the reporters know quite well that the IDF didn't violate any laws. And that the Palestinian gunman did. And they don't want their readers to know that.

Remarkably, whenever the news media spends lots of time and money putting together elaborate 3D models of something involving Israel, it is always to say Israel is guilty. They try to replace honest investigations with razzle dazzle. And they are nearly always wrong.

When you put it all together, this article, like the others, is not meant to illuminate the truth, but to obfuscate it.

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Palestinian PM claims Israeli law to strip citizenship from terrorists is illegal under international law. Of course he is lying - and a hypocrite.

From Times of Israel:

The Knesset approved a law on Wednesday to strip convicted terrorists with Israeli nationality of their citizenship — provided they receive funding from the Palestinian Authority or an associated organization.

The law, an amendment to Israel’s 1952 Citizenship Law, applies to both Israeli citizens and permanent residents incarcerated following a conviction for terror, aiding terror, harming Israeli sovereignty, inciting war, or aiding an enemy during wartime, and enables the interior minister to revoke their status after a hearing.

The law enables citizenship to be revoked even if the person lacks a second citizenship, provided they have a permanent residence status outside of Israel. Once citizenship is revoked, the person would be denied entry back into Israel.

The Palestinian prime minister Muhammad Shtayyeh reacted angrily, claiming the law is "racist" and illegal:

Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh said in a statement that this decision is a racist practice and a flagrant violation of international law and international humanitarian law. calling on the United Nations, the United States, and the European Union to denounce the resolution, and to put pressure on Israel to force it to cancel it .

Is it illegal to revoke citizenship of terrorists? Of course not. Western nations do it all the time. The US Department of Justice has an entire section for pursuing denaturalization for terrorists and other criminals. The UK, France and Britain have laws to strip citizenship away from terrorists, and the European Court of Human Rights has upheld their decisions.

There are two potential arguments against stripping citizenship.

One is that this law is discriminatory, since it only applies to Palestinians and not Jewish terrorists. But that is only because the only recipients of Palestinian Authority payments are Arabs - if Jews would be convicted of terrorism for the Palestinian cause, and if the PA would pay them, the law would apply to them as well. Similarly, any Israeli Arab in prison can refuse to accept payments from the Palestinian Authority and therefore be immune from being denaturalized. The fact that they accept money from those who want to see Israel destroyed is a pretty good argument that they are not good citizens.

The second argument is that stripping nationality, leaving someone stateless, is illegal altogether. There is a UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness written in 1961 that never received a majority of UN votes - but even many of its signatories included reservations that made it clear that they maintain the right to revoke citizenship for specific acts by citizens. For example, Austria said, "Austria declares to retain the right to deprive a person of his nationality, if such person enters, on his own free will, the military service of a foreign State."

Shtayyeh's calling denaturalization "illegal" and "racist" is especially hypocritical. Only a day beforehand, he called on Western nations to revoke the citizenship of Jews (and only Jews!) who live across the Green Line. Arabs who moved across the Green Line are, of course, not "settlers."

There would be a further irony if critics refer to the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness to claim that this is illegal. Because nearly all Arab states refuse to sign that convention - if they did, they would be required to provide citizenship to children born to Palestinians there, and the Arab League says that Palestinians should remain stateless!

Once again, we see that "critics of Israel" aren't basing their critiques on international law, or morality, or really any framework that doesn't prove that they are hypocrites. The only consistency they show is antisemitism.

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.@UNRWA makes up a new international law to @CNN @NicRobertsonCNN @VascoCNN

Since the Jenin "massacre" story started fading from the headlines, CNN has a story about the family whose apartment was used by the IDF as a firing position against the group of Jenin terrorists planning a major attack.

No doubt the family was severely affected by being invaded by IDF troops. But the story says this:

Representatives of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) visited Jenin in the days after the incident and spoke to al-Hayja and his family. "Their children were noticeably traumatized," Adam Bouloukos, director of UNRWA Affairs in the West Bank told CNN. "This kind of invasion violates not only international law but common decency."

The UNRWA official is lying about international law and, as usual, the media doesn't bother to fact check.

The main relevant section of the Fourth Geneva Conventions, Article 53, says:

Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.

The ICRC commentary to Article 53 says:

The occupying forces may ...undertake the total or partial destruction of certain private or public property in the occupied territory when imperative military requirements so demand.
Furthermore, it will be for the Occupying Power to judge the importance of such military requirements. It is therefore to be feared that bad faith in the application of the reservation may render the proposed safeguard valueless; for unscrupulous recourse to the clause concerning military necessity would allow the Occupying Power to circumvent the prohibition set forth in the Convention. The Occupying Power must therefore try to interpret the clause in a reasonable manner: whenever it is felt essential to resort to destruction, the occupying authorities must try to keep a sense of proportion in comparing the military advantages to be gained with the damage done.

Israel's right to attack military targets under international law is undisputed. It must minimize damage to civilian property as much as possible while protecting its own troops. And, in this case, it did: the only alternative would have been to bomb the targeted building from the air, which would have killed far more civilians.

What about the IDF forcing the family who lived there to stay sheltered in one room while the bullets were flying? At first glance, it appears to be a violation of Article 31 of the Conventions:

No physical or moral coercion shall be exercised against protected persons, in particular to obtain information from them or from third parties.

The ICRC commentary shows that it is not a blanket prohibition, because otherwise it contradicts other articles of the Convention:

[T]here is no question of absolute prohibition, as might be thought at first sight. The prohibition only applies in so far as the other provisions of the Convention do not implicitly or explicitly authorize a resort to coercion. Thus, Article 31 is subject to the unspoken reservation that force is permitted whenever it is necessary to use it in the application of measures taken under the Convention. ....Thus, a party to the conflict would be entitled to use coercion with regard to protected persons in order to compel respect for his right to requisition services Articles 40 , 51 ), to ensure the supply of foodstuffs, etc. to which he is entitled (Article 55, para. 2 , Article 57 ), to carry out the necessary evacuation measures (Article 49, para. 2 ), to remove public officials in occupied territories from their posts (Article 54, para. 2 ) and in regard to everything connected with internment (Articles 79 et sqq.).

Occupying powers can force civilians to do far more than stay in one place for several hours if needed for military purposes. And whie most articles about the Jenin operation try to airbrush the facts, no one has seriously argued that there was no military necessity behind it.

CNN has every right to report on how Palestinians feel about their homes being invaded. But it does not have the right to report that Israel violated international law in doing so when it didn't.

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"Human rights expert" from EU-funded Al Haq supports and praises murdering Jews

In late 2021, when Israel declared Al Haq and several other Palestinian NGOs to be illegal, the reaction from "human rights" groups was immediate and fierce. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch called the move "a brazen attack on human rights" and referred to their members as "human rights defenders." The New York Times called them "human rights groups," as did AP. The UN issued a statement from 17 "experts" calling it "a frontal attack on the Palestinian human rights movement, and on human rights everywhere."

As usual, Israel is right and the "experts" are wrong.

Meet Isam Abdeen, "human rights defender." Although it is unclear whether he stills works there, he was the head of the Local and Regional Advocacy Department at Al Haq when Israel labeled it a terror group and his papers are still on its site. As of last summer he was described as a legal advisor for the Al Haq Foundation.

Abdeen, considered one of the more prominent Palestinian human rights activists, fully defended the murder of seven Jews outside the synagogue in Neve Yaacov on Friday night.

His immediate reaction on his Facebook page was to say, "The shooting by the son of the capital alone in occupied Jerusalem is legitimate in international law, and no justification is needed."

Abdeen expanded on that in a full article where he wrote, "What happened in the occupied Jerusalem, that a holy young man of the capital, alone, committed a resistance act on Palestinian land (occupied Jerusalem) the land of his parents and ancestors, a legitimate act under international humanitarian law, human rights law and dozens of United Nations resolutions that all pour into the pot of the original right of peoples in destiny determination; And he is a legal argument on the world."

Murdering civilians is illegal under international law under all circumstances. The entire Fourth Geneva Convention is meant to protect civilians in a time of war. In 2004, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan directly dismissed the argument of terrorists and their supporters: "There is nothing in the fact of occupation that justifies the targeting and killing of civilians."

This Al Haq "human rights defender" is directly supporting, advocating and praising murdering Jews.

And this supporter of murdering Jews also trains other human rights professionals!

There cannot be a more grotesque perversion of human rights than having a "human rights lawyer" train others that murdering humans is not only allowed but praiseworthy.

And this is who Amnesty and Human Rights Watch and the UN support.

Al Haq is funded by the European Union, Norway, Ireland, Italy, France, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Spain.. It has never condemned any terror attack against Jews, to my knowledge. it has ties to the PFLP terror group which recruits and brainwashes child soldiers - another human rights violation the group has never condemned.

And now one of its prominent members directly praises the murder of innocent civilians.

The only way this can be considered a human rights organization is if it considers Jews to be subhuman.

Exposing this hypocrisy is the single most important thing that can be done to combat terror. In this sense, the media has failed in its most basic responsibility.

(h/t NGO Monitor)

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Jordan trying to change the status quo on the Temple Mount

There was a brief international incident at the Temple Mount on Tuesday:

Jordan’s ambassador to Israel visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on Tuesday after earlier leaving the holy site in protest at being held up by police at the entrance, prompting a diplomatic protest from Amman.

The Jordanian foreign ministry said it summoned Israel’s envoy Eitan Surkis after Ghassan Majali was allegedly “refused entry” to the Temple Mount. A statement from the ministry said Surkis was handed a letter of condemnation.

But Israeli police — and also Jordanian reports — indicated that rather than refusing him entry, cops briefly held him up since he hadn’t coordinated the visit with them.

The Jordanian Foreign Ministry issued a statement rejecting that visits of Jordanians to the site need to be coordinated with Israel:

The political advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, Ambassador Ahmed Al-Deek, considered the statements of the Israeli spokesman a flagrant violation of the existing historical, political and legal situation in the mosque.

He noted that the attempt to justify the Jordanian Ambassador Ghassan Majali's objection to the reason for the absence of "prior coordination" is also a change in the legal status of the mosque.

Ambassador Al-Deek confirmed that the Islamic Endowments Department is exclusively responsible for organizing entry and exit to the mosque, and is also responsible for all mosque affairs and its courtyards, and that Muslims do not need any prior coordination or permission from the occupation police to enter the mosque.

So Jordan claims that Israeli demands for prior coordination is a new demand, and a violation of the status quo on the holy site.

Is that true? Of course not.

In 2012, Director of the Jordanian Public Security Lieutenant General Hussein Majali visited the site "under strict Israeli guard," Arab media reported. No one complained about that - the controversy about that visit is that one of the Israeli police was a woman whose hair was uncovered.

In 2013, Prince Hashem bin Al-Hussein, King Abdullah's brother, visited the Temple Mount, also "under the escort of Israeli security and police," entering through the Mughrabi Gate that visitors use. No one said a word about any violation of the status quo.

Because it was, and is, the status quo.

In 2021, however, Jordan started signaling they wanted to change the status quo. Crown Prince Hussein bin Abdullah canceled his planned visit to the Mount at the last minute because Israeli police were going to accompany him as he entered, and he felt that this was an insult.

They didn't say at the time that Israel was violating the status quo, but that the existing status quo was unacceptable to them. (You may recall that Jordan briefly blocked Bibi Netanyahu from visiting the UAE by not giving his flight permission to cross their airspace, in a diplomatic temper tantrum.)

This week's incident must be seen in that context. Jordan wants to change the status quo, and how better to do that than to insist that Israel is violating the status quo?

That's how gaslighting works, after all.

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EU delegation storms the Temple Mount, seems to agree it should be Judenrein

The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reports that a delegation from the EU visited the Temple Mount this morning, where they politely listened to anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda spouted by the head of the Waqf, Sheikh Azzam Al-Khatib.

The delegation included 35 representatives and consuls from the European Union.

Al-Khatib "stressed the importance of their visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque as an Islamic mosque under the tutelage of King Abdullah II, the guardian of Islamic and Christian holy sites in Al-Quds Al-Sharif."

Al-Khatib accompanied the 35 representatives and consuls on a tour where he described "the occupation’s attempt to change the status quo" on the site.

He then told them that the only ones that should be changing the status quo were the Muslims, claiming that there were many Hashemite construction projects there that Israel prevents from being completed.

In a sane world, new construction projects on the Temple Mount would be considered a violation of the status quo.

Al Khatib then described his description of the status quo: he called for a "return to the historic status quo of the mosque as an Islamic mosque for Muslims alone, with its 144 dunams, with all its prayer corners, courtyards and complexes, below the ground and above it."

According to Jordan News, the delegation aimed to "confirm European support for the legal and historical status quo of the holy site and its Hashemite Custodianship."

No one seemed to disagree with the Waqf's definition of that status quo as not allowing any Jews to ascend.

The signed agreement between Jordan and Israel does not give the Hashemites custodianship over the Temple Mount. It says "Israel respects the present special role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in Muslim Holy shrines in Jerusalem. When negotiations on the permanent status will take place, Israel will give high priority to the Jordanian historic role in these shrines."

Which means that Israel makes the decisions, while respecting and giving priority to Jordanian wishes. But the language makes it clear that the ultimate decisions are up to Israel.

Notice also that the agreement says nothing about Jordanian influence on Christian sites, which al-Khatib claimed are under Waqf custodianship as well.

I doubt that anyone from this delegation has ever read the actual agreement, which is the only document that matters under international law - an agreement that explicitly gives Jews "freedom of access to places of religious and historical significance."

(h/t Ibn Boutros)

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The EU redefines chutzpah: demands compensation from Israel for demolishing illegal buildings

The classic definition of chutzpah is someone murdering his parents and then throwing himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.

The EU has just hit that high standard:

The European Commissioner for Crisis Management, Janez Lenarcic, said this weekend that Israel must pay reparations for structures it demolishes in the West Bank that were built with EU funding.

Lenarcic's remarks were in response to 24 European Parliament members who contacted the commission following Israel's intention to demolish dozens of houses in the West Bank villages of the Masafer Yatta area that were built with financial aid from the European Union or its member states.

"The European Union has repeatedly requested that Israel compensate for the loss of European taxpayers' money," members of parliament wrote to Lenarcic, adding that the commission itself confessed that its diplomatic requests to Israel were ineffective.

Lenarcic responded that "in a number of incidents, Israel has been asked to return or compensate for assets financed by the Union that that were destroyed, dismantled, or confiscated," and that the European Union is continuing to work in this regard through a range of diplomatic and political channels.

This is like demanding compensation from the police for confiscating the car you stole.

The EU-funded buildings are built illegally. Not only under Israeli law - but under international law!

Even if you call Area C "occupied," the occupier is mandated by the Geneva Conventions to maintain a system of laws in the territory. These buildings are built in violation of planning and zoning laws, haphazardly, almost always on public/state lands, with no roads and often stealing water. It is like deciding to build a house in the middle of Yellowstone National Park.

I've seen these structures first-hand, proudly displaying the EU flag.

The EU deliberately builds them in Area C, in areas that no Arabs or Bedoun have ever lived, in order to steal land from use by Israel. They move Arabs from Areas A and B, and bus students from those areas to schools they build in Area C. It is land theft.

And these illegal buildings are popping all over.

I once made an animation showing one brand new village in the Judean desert, funded by the EU and NGOs, and how it has been growing based on satellite images.

There is no infrastructure. With full EU support, the Arabs grab land, build shacks, and then claim that these are their ancient homesteads.

As The Daily Mail reported in 2015:

Alan Baker, an international lawyer who took part in drafting the Oslo Accords in the Nineties, said that the EU’s actions were illegal.

‘The EU is a signatory to the Oslo Accords, so they cannot pick and choose when they recognise it,’ he said.

‘According to international law, all building in Area C must have permission from Israel, whether it is temporary or permanent.

‘The same principle applies anywhere in the world. If you want to build, you need planning permission.

‘The EU is ignoring international law and taking concrete steps to influence the facts on the ground.’

If there is any problem here, it is that Israel has not been pro-active enough in destroying the illegal buildings, empowering the Palestinians and the EU to keep building against international law.

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A new, stupid anti-Israel argument: The Oslo Accords are retroactively illegal

Ralph Wilde, an associate professor at the Faculty of Laws, University College London, writes in OpinioJuris that Israel's presence anywhere beyond the 1949 armistice lines is illegal - not the settlements, but the "occupation" of every square centimeter.

It is a classic case where the opinion precedes the evidence, and the evidence is then shoe-horned into the argument.

There is a great deal of garbage there, but here's an argument that I had never seen before, that is profoundly stupid.

Neither United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, nor the so-called Oslo Accords, provide an alternative legal basis for the existence/continuation of the occupation. Indeed, the Oslo Accords are themselves violative of international law, because ‘consent’ to them by the PLO was coerced through the illegal use of force, and, relatedly, they conflicted with norms of international law that have a special non-derogable/jus cogens status (the prohibition on the use of force other than in self-defence, and the right of self-determination).

According to Wilde, the Oslo Accords were illegal because the PLO was coerced to sign them by Israel.

No one to my knowledge has made that claim, ever. Not during the Oslo process from 1993-2000, not during the second intifada, not afterwards.

The PLO itself certainly never made this claim; to this day, Mahmoud Abbas charges Israel with violating the Oslo Accords but he has not once said that they don't apply because the PLO was coerced

What next? Do we retroactively invalidate the Treaty of Versailles because the Germans lost World War I and therefore were subject to coercion if they didn't sign?

Wilde's illogic is remarkable. But he really tries to make it seem reasonable. In his more expansive article on the topic, he writes:

Given that much of international law operates on the basis of a fiction of sovereign equality despite de facto inequality, treaties between unequal parties are not necessarily invalid for that reason. But one red line is when the powerful party, as here, is subjugating the other party in a particular manner—through an illegal use of force—in a way that has so compromised the freedom of action of that other party when it comes to their consent to the agreement, that the agreement can be understood to have been “procured” through that particular form of subjugation. The Oslo Accords meet this test and are legally-void on this basis. Indeed, their procurement in the context of the occupation constitutes a manifest and egregious form of coercion prescribed by the equivalent rule of customary international law to the provision in the [Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties] when it comes to invalidity.

This means that every case of occupation can never be ended through negotiations because the occupied party is by definition coerced into its agreement.

Wilde's bizarre argument brings up another question. Who determines, under his fantasy version of international law, that one party is being coerced? Normal people would say that it would be the coerced parties themselves. But if the PLO doesn't claim they were coerced to sign the agreements, and indeed make constant arguments that Oslo is valid and Israel is violating it, then how can anyone else possibly make that assertion as fact?

Apparently, Wilde thinks that his own opinion on what constitutes coercion outweighs that of the party he says was coerced! This is no longer the pretense of interpreting international law - this is an attempt to create international law based on what a single uninvolved anti-Israel academic thinks.

Beyond that, we have another problem. If Oslo was signed under coercion, then why didn't the PLO sign the proposed peace agreements from Camp David and Taba, when they were being pressured not only by Israel but by the world's only superpower at the time, the United States? How did Arafat resist that pressure but succumb to the much milder coercion of 1993? What changed - under an international law framework - from his being unable to have free will in 1993 and his freedom in 2000?

It gets better. If Oslo is retroactively illegal, then the Palestinian Authority created by them must retroactively disappear, and any agreements that it signed over the past 25 years are also meaningless, since it never existed. And since the UNGA-recognized "State of Palestine" is simply a renaming of the PA, then it must also disappear - and its signature erased from all the treaties it signed.

Wilde, for all his erudition and expertise, proves himself to be a fraud in this argument. He is clearly twisting international law to fit his own pre-determined conclusion.

And that should disqualify him from teaching anyone.

(h/t Irene)

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15 year old PFLP "martyr" intended to die - and wrote a farewell note.

Yesterday I noted that Defence for Children International - Palestine falsely claimed that Israel had killed 3 children so far this year - one of them was 25, and the other two were active militants at the time of their deaths.

One of them, 15 year old Adam Ayyad, was killed throwing Molotov cocktails.

It might be thought that he was just like a stone thrower, play-acting at being a hero, and Israel shot him for no legitimate reason. But Arab media sites have been showing that not only was Ayyad an active fighter - but he planned to die that day.

He had a note in his pocket, written in his handwriting, with a message he intended to be seen after his death.

“I am very happy that our Lord fulfilled one of my dreams, martyrdom..and I tell you that martyrdom is not just a martyrdom death, but pride in yourself and pride in the whole world.”

He continued: “Martyrdom is a real victory. Your life is over, but it's over and you're happy."

He ended the note with, “Do not forget me, I do not want to say goodbye to you, we have a meeting in paradise.”

This was "suicide by Zionist."

Ayyad had been brainwashed to want to die a martyr's death. This is the child abuse that every single Palestinian child is exposed to - they are taught this in schools, indoctrinated with music videos, inundated with martyr posters glorifying death.

Where is the world outrage over a generation of Palestinian kids who are told by adults that they should want to die?

Perhaps there is none left over after it was expended over a man taking a walk on a hilltop.

In fact, these kids are dying because the world doesn't want to criticize this cult of death. Whether it is because of baseless fears of being accused of Islamophobia, or because they want to shore up the false narrative of Israel as evil and Palestinians as oppressed victims, the world's refusal to get involved is what allows Palestinian leaders to think it is OK to raise children this way.

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Here are the poor, innocent Palestinian "children" killed so far this year

Defense for Children International - Palestine issued a press release claiming that Israel has killed three innocent Palestinian children already so far this year.

The first one was Fouad Mahmoud Ahmed Abed, who they say was 17. He wasn't: he was 25, killed along with Mohammad Samer Houshieh, 22:

So young and innocent!

Then came the death of Adam Ayyad, 15, on Tuesday. DCI-P and Palestinian English news sources don't mention that he was a member of the PFLP terror group and was throwing firebombs at the time he was shot.

And today, another poor innocent child was killed: Amer Abu Zaytoun, 16.

He just happened to also be an armed member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

In Arabic, terror groups freely admit that he was fighting at the time. Palestine Today says, "A special force belonging to the 'Israeli' occupation stormed the Balata camp, and surrounded several houses, which led to the outbreak of armed confrontations and clashes with the resistance fighters, which resulted in the rise [to Paradise] of the boy Abu Zaytoun."

Here's his "martyr poster" from the Fatah-affiliated terror group:

It says he was a "heroic martyr."

The DCI-P NGO certainly knows all of this, including the fact that one of their "children" was quite a bit older. But they aren't a real human rights organization: they are a PFLP front whose entire purpose is to create anti-Israel propaganda.

If they were a real human rights organization, they would condemn Palestinian terror groups for recruiting and training child soldiers, which violates international law.

They never have, because that would be admitting that Israel isn't targeting innocent children but armed terrorists.

(h/t Adin Haykin)

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