Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Sunday, September 11, 2016

Childish Barbarians and SFSU's Squishy Response to their Calls for Bloodshed (Michael Lumish)

Edward Said Mural at SFSU

Last April students from the San Francisco State University (SFSU) chapter of the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) called for "intifada" directly in the face of Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat.

Barkat dropped by at the invitation of SFSU Hillel and subsequently found himself subject to cries of "Intifada! Intifada! Long live the Intifada!" within the venue, itself.

Because Israel is the dhimmi that got away, the Qur'an is very clear on Muslim obligations to Allah concerning those intransigent former social inferiors:

Death.

Or, in the current vernacular, "intifada."

It is unclear just what type of intifada SFSU GUPS was calling for, however.

The most recent intifada in Israel took various forms. For awhile the press referred to the "Stabbing Intifada." That is, young Arabs - inspired by what is ultimately a Qur'an-based call to murder Jews who refuse dhimmi status - grabbed kitchen knives or hand-axes and rushed into the streets attacking pretty much any Jews that they met, including old ladies and small children.

/And please make no mistake, the source of the conflict is a malicious seventh-century theocratic-political ideology that insists that any bit of land, however small, that was once grabbed by the Ummah, the Muslim community, must always, and forever, remain part of the Ummah./

Shortly thereafter, however, the Stabbing intifada merged into what they started calling the "Car Ramming Intifada" in which Arabs of driving-age sought to plow their vehicles into perfectly innocent people standing on the sidewalk or at bus stops within Israel.

This style of murder, it should be noted, may represent the inspiration behind the Bastille Day Massacre in Nice, France (July 14, 2016), where a jihadi rammed a 19 ton cargo truck into a crowd of celebrators slaughtering 86 people in the name of Allah.

But whatever type of intifada SFSU GUPs might have had in mind, one thing is clear:

They were calling for the murder of Jews.

As far as I know, I am the only person to even acknowledge this undeniable fact in print.

If there is no murder, or attempted murder, it is not an intifada. If it is an intifada, that means murder and attempted murder.

This is not a matter of interpretation, but a matter of fact.

Thankfully, Bay Area Jewish leadership successfully encouraged SFSU President Leslie Wong to take some action on the matter.

Finalized on August 29 of this year, the SFSU approved document, in response to the official investigation (pdf) of the Barkat fiasco, is entitled, "Initiatives and Interventions in Response to Incidents at Mayor Nir Barkat Event, April 2016". (pdf)

This is the document that tells the world just what SFSU intends to do about the fact that not only was the Barkat event disrupted by childish barbarians, but that the childish barbarians doing the disrupting called specifically for intifada which is exactly equivalent to the call for the murder of Jews... thereby transmogrifying themselves into childish barbarians.

{I am sure that their mothers are very proud.}

The Squishiness Factor

The primary action that SFSU is taking on this issue, according to that document, is to install new protocols for reacting to student disruptions of campus political events. If you read the "Initiatives and Interventions" pdf file above you will see that from now on when GUPS calls for intifada, while disrupting Jewish student events, they will only get four opportunities to do so before being removed by campus police.

In the first instance, the Dean of Students (or designee) will politely request that they cease screeching for Jewish blood.

In the second instance, the Dean of Students (or designee), accompanied by a campus police officer, will politely request that they cease screeching for Jewish blood.

In the third instance, the Dean of Students (or designee), accompanied by a campus police officer, will again politely request that they cease screeching for Jewish blood.

In the fourth instance, the Dean of Students (or designee), accompanied by a campus police officer, will again politely request that they cease screeching for Jewish blood. This time, however, if the barbarian screeching continues they will be removed from the premises by the University Police Department (UPD).

If they return for a fifth peak experience then they may end up in police custody.

Needless to say, GUPS is free to call for intifada at the Malcolm X Student Plaza whenever they please, so long, I suppose, as they do not do so during an actual student event at that venue.

Of course, the document fails to acknowledge that calls for intifada are equivalent to calls for the murder of Jews.

Instead, in their best imitation of the late Edward Said, they tend to think of it as a call to righteous resistance against the unjust and "illegal" military occupation of the "indigenous" Arab population within the Land of Palestine.

The SFSU administration, under President Wong, must believe that the Jews of Israel are a racist, militarist, imperialist, colonialist, apartheid gang - or some mix-and-match thereof - in order to justify funding a student organization, like GUPS, that regularly calls for violence via calls for intifada.

Either Wong, and his fellow bloodless functionaries, do not know what the word "intifada" suggests or they think that childish barbarians have every right to call for the extermination of Jews.

My guess, of course, is that they know very well what the word suggests.

Meanwhile, GUPS feels entirely vindicated.

Writing in Jweekly.com, Rob Gloster tells us:

In a Sept. 1 statement, GUPS said the group felt vindicated by the report, and claimed that the real disruption was caused by Barkat coming to campus.

“Not only were we subjected to this hate monger, but we were investigated for months and publicly smeared as violent and anti-Semitic,” the GUPS statement said, adding that the report “proves that these allegations are false.”

I guess that we are supposed to believe that in the minds of these students that killing is not OK, committing genocide is not OK, but encouraging both is just dandy.

In any case, the administration also intends to hand out First Amendment "resource cards" the next time GUPS gets together for one of their obnoxious little Hate Fests.

I am sure that will make all the difference in the world.

It was not long after, Muhammed Hammad, former president of SFSU GUPs, waved around his famous blade for tumblr, proclaiming his desire to stab an Israeli soldier, that Wong said that "GUPS is the very purpose of this great university" and went forward to forge a relationship with An-Najah University in Nablus, perhaps the most violently racist university in the world.

{Please sign the Middle East Forum's petition discouraging that partnership.}

I think, therefore, that we can reasonably conclude that Wong is absolutely sincere in his sentiments and his loyalties.

One must wonder, however, just how it is that while the university felt justified in getting rid of Mr. Hammad that it continues to fund Hammad's friends who likewise encourage intifada?

Oh, and by the way, Dr. Wong?

You did not fail the protesters, as you said in your letter.

You gave them precisely what their little hearts desire most - aside, of course, from stripping the Jews of the Middle East from any means of self-determination and self-defense - and that is legitimacy.

Certainly you took no disciplinary action because that would imply that these students are adults and thus largely responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their own behavior... heaven forfend.

You might as well have patted them on the head, given them some milk and cookies, and shooed them off to bed in their jammies.

Were I a parent with college-age kids I would think twice before sending them off to a place like SFSU, at least not without some formal training in martial arts.

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

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The hole in the sky, 15 years later

Ten years ago, on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, I created an image of the lower Manhattan skyline on which I superimposed the silhouette of the destroyed World Trade Center twin towers to give people an idea of the enormity of the terror attack.

Here is what that skyline looks like today.

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MK Zoabi describes how her party wants no Jewish or Zionist state

From Hamodia:

United Arab List MK Hanin Zoabi is a staunch believer in the two-state solution...with one state for Palestinians, and the other a “a secular democratic state of all its citizens,” with the concept of a Jewish state banned altogether.

If the two states decided to unite into one at some point, that would be fine, she added. “My vision is justice and liberation,” she said. “The exact formula – one state or two – is a technical question, as far as I am concerned. But neither of them can be a Jewish state. My party advocates a two-state solution – one a democratic state of all its citizens, with a Palestinian state next to it.” The “right of return” for the descendants of Arabs from within the Green Line would apply as well, she added.

“If these two states build relations and eventually decide to unite, that would be possible,” she said. “But we cannot have one state under the current circumstances with the settlers remaining in the West Bank. We must do away with Zionism and the Jewish state, and then we can decide how to set up the states – one or two of them, I personally don’t care.”

The talk was at the Swiss Palestine Association in Bern, Switzerland, last April.

(h/t Yoel)

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The other half of the "justice, justice you shall pursue" verse

This weekend is a favorite for the left-wing critics of Israel, because they love quoting from the weekly Torah portion of Shoftim, "צֶ֥דֶק צֶ֖דֶק תִּרְדֹּ֑ף,"which is usually translated as "Justice, justice shall you pursue." (Deut 16:20)

The word "justice" has been perverted in the cause of the Palestinian Arabs in various ways, and the use of this word in the Torah is an irresistible jumping off point for many to imply that Israel is guilty of injustice.

While the word "justice" is most often used to translate the Hebrew word "Tzedek," it usually means "righteousness." In the context of the verse, it clearly means that you are supposed to appoint judges of high moral character.

But few of the many Jewish critics of Israel who love to quote this verse mention the rest of it:..." so that you may thrive and occupy/inherit the land that the Lord your God has given you."

This verse explicitly says that God gave the land to the Jews. And this is referring to the entire land to the west of the Jordan River.

Now, why wouldn't these critics mention that part of the verse?

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09/10 Links: Israeli victory is the only way to advance peace process; Marseilles Synagogue Attack Thwarted

From Ian:

Israeli victory is the only way to advance peace process

American policy has long been to prevent Israel from achieving a decisive military victory over its adversaries. In 1956, President Eisenhower forced Israel to abandon its territorial gains from the Suez Crisis. Similarly, following the 1967 Six Day War, the U.S. helped engineer a U.N. resolution calling on Israel to return unspecified “territories occupied” in the war. The Reagan administration stopped Israel from obliterating Yasser Arafat’s PLO forces in Lebanon in 1982, and, most recently, the Obama administration pressured Israel to limit its objectives in its 2014 war with Hamas. These concessions, which are often unilateral and irreversible, include settlement freezes, prisoner releases and forfeiture of territory.
Such policies deliver pernicious results; American “restraint” of Israel encourages its enemies to take risks. Much like government bailouts encourage banks to make high-risk, high-payoff investments by removing the consequences of failure, Israel’s adversaries need not fret over irrevocable loss because they know the international community will admonish Israel for any gains it achieves.
Moreover, restraining Israel legitimizes and nourishes Palestinian rejectionism, defined as the refusal to acknowledge Israeli sovereignty and right of Jews to live in their ancestral homeland. Because it knows there will be no consequences for its sophisticated propaganda war, the Palestinian Authority can continue to demonize Israel. “To become a normal people, one whose parents do not encourage their children to become suicide terrorists, Palestinian Arabs need to undergo the crucible of defeat,” writes Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes.
When Israel has licensure, without American opprobrium, to unleash its military might after a Palestinian rocket or terror attack, as when Liberman ordered over 50 airstrikes on Hamas military infrastructure in Gaza in response to one rocket, the Palestinians retreat. The fear of crushing defeat is a potent weapon in neutralizing Palestinian resistance.
America’s handling of the Arab-Israeli conflict is preventing the kind of metamorphosis in Palestinian thinking about Israel that peace requires. It’s time for Washington to allow Israel to demolish the Palestinian dream of a one-state solution, free of Jews. As Ronald Reagan said regarding the US fight against communism, the only way to “win is if they lose.”
This doesn’t mean the U.S. should support a winner-take-all settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But we must dispense with the fallacy that Israel is only a concession or two away from an American-brokered diplomatic breakthrough. As Gen. Douglas MacArthur said famously, “there is no substitute for victory.”

Washington calls Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing video ‘inappropriate’

Washington on Friday fumed at comments made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a video released online in which he accused the Palestinians of advocating ethnic cleansing of the Jewish population in the West Bank.
US State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau told reporters the administration is “engaging in direct conversations with the Israeli government” about the video.
“We obviously strongly disagree with the characterization that those who oppose settlement activity or view it as an obstacle to peace are somehow calling for ethnic cleansing of Jews from the West Bank. We believe that using that type of terminology is inappropriate and unhelpful,” Trudeau said.
She said Israel expansion of settlements raises “real questions about Israel’s long-term intentions in the West Bank.”

Car packed with gas cylinders parked in front of Marseilles synagogue

A week after police in Paris discovered a booby-trapped car near a tourist attraction, a suspect vehicle with gas cylinders was found outside a Jewish community center in the southern city of Marseille.
The parked car found Saturday morning outside the Bar Yohaye Jewish Community Center and synagogue in Marseille’s 4th Arrondissement east of the Saint-Charles railways station had no trigger mechanism to cause an explosion and was not stolen, Laurent Nuñez, the police commissioner of the Bouches-du-Rhône region, told La Provence.
There was no indication that the car found in Marseille was connected in any way to what police believe was a foiled attempt to carry out a terrorist attack in Paris last week involving a car with several gas cylinders that was found abandoned near Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral, Nuñez added.
Three women were arrested last week in connection with the Paris incident. They were likely planning an imminent attack, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.

Arrested French women, directed by Islamic State, planned Paris attack

One of three women arrested over a failed Islamist attack in Paris had been "promised as a bride" to two men behind attacks on police officers and a priest earlier this year, the Paris prosecutor said on Friday.
The revelations highlight the close links between members of radical Islamist circles in France, even though they might live in different parts of the country.
Sarah H, a 23-year-old Frenchwoman, was taken into custody on Thursday along with the other two women after police launched a manhunt to find them, believing they were planning an imminent attack on the Gare de Lyon train station in Paris.
The three women were being tracked after a car loaded with gas cylinders was found near Notre Dame cathedral at the weekend. Sarah H allegedly stabbed a police officer when she was arrested; another of the women was shot and wounded . Neither the police officer nor the woman shot was seriously injured.

09/09 Links Pt2: The last acceptable hatred; How the Left is propagating Anti-Semitism without knowing it

From Ian:

The last acceptable hatred

All the major Swedish news outlets reported this week that the city of Malmo is investing in a comprehensive educational effort, initiated by the Jewish community, aimed at countering the rise in anti-Semitism that has plagued the city for many years. As part of this effort, 288 teachers are receiving specific education on the topic of anti-Semitism, and newly produced educational materials in the form of books and movies will be handed out to the pupils to "facilitate a conversation" and teach them about the issue of Jew-hatred historically and currently.
More anti-Semitic hate crimes are reported in Malmo, Sweden's third-largest city, than in any other city in the country, and the Jews who live there have become used to constant harassment, having eggs thrown at them and being yelled at, degraded and even physically assaulted on a regular basis. The Chabad rabbi of Malmo, Shneur Kesselman, reported 80 anti-Semitic attacks between 2004 and 2010, and although there are no official numbers since then, it can be assumed that things have not improved.
After World War II, the Jewish population of Malmo reached a high of 4,000. In recent years, because of the city's failing economy and the rise in anti-Semitic incidents by the influx of Muslims, the city has been losing its Jewish population. Today the city's organized Jewish community has only 550 members, with more leaving for Stockholm, the United States or Israel each year.
Any effort to lessen the anti-Semitic hate crimes in Malmo is a good thing, but I am saddened that children and adults need to be specifically educated not to hate and attack Jews and, perhaps even more so, that after all these years of persecution the initiative for this comes from the Jews themselves, rather than from the political establishment.

An Inherited Culture of Hate

"I hate Christians and Jews. I don't know why. I don't have any apparent reason to hate them but I always hear my mom talking badly about them. She hates them too, and this is why I hate them, I guess. Mom has always told me that Muslims are Allah's favorite people," — F., a 15-year-old Tunisian girl.
"They said that non-Muslims deserve to die; we should have no pity for them. They will burn in hell, anyway." — M., a 16-year-old Tunisian boy.
People who do not read tend to fear things they do not know, and this fear can turn into suspicion, aggression and hate. These people need to fill the void, to remove the discomfort, so they turn to terrorism to create a goal in their lives: defending Islam.
As most Tunisians do not read, they watch TV a lot. "After watching 'The Sultan's Harem,' I wanted to be one of the Sultan's concubines, to live in the Ottoman Empire era; I wanted to be like them," said S., a 14-year-old Tunisian girl.

World’s Oldest Working Journalist, 90-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Noah Klieger, Fears Nazi Genocide Will Be Forgotten in 50 Years

One of Israel’s best-known Holocaust survivors told a packed audience in Tel Aviv on Tuesday evening about his genuine fear that the Nazi genocide will not be remembered 50 years from now.
Noah Klieger expressed this concern at an event that doubled as the release of a documentary film about his having staved off the gas chambers at Auschwitz by lying to the SS about being a professional boxer and a celebration of his 90th birthday.
Klieger, who is still on the staff of the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot — making him the oldest non-retired journalist in the world — described a bleak view of the future.
“Young people don’t know about the Bar Kochba revolt, so I’m worried the Holocaust won’t be remembered either,” Klieger said, referring to the second century Judean war against the Romans. “But as an optimist — something I’d have to be to have survived what I did and be standing here today — I hope I’m wrong.”
The biographical film, which Klieger said he was seeing for the first time with the hundreds of people gathered in his honor — among them members of the Israeli government, the media, ambassadors, rabbinical leaders, fellow survivors, IDF brass and soldiers — gave a moving overview of the trials and tribulations of a Strasbourg-born Jewish boy robbed of his youth by Hitler and his henchman.

Pro-BDS briefing - on Capitol Hill

The "US Campaign to End the Occupation" has scheduled a meeting of pro-BDS organizers - in one of the congressional buildings in Washington, the Rayburn building, next Friday at noon.

I imagine that one needs a congressperson to help arrange such a thing, but none is mentioned on their site.

They hope to attract members of Congress to their anti-Israel propaganda.

I am very interested in finding out how one goes about getting a room in a congressional building.

They have every right to meet wherever they find a venue. But whoever attends must know that they are lying, such as when they say that boycotting Israel is constitutionally protected.

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Newsweek Middle East pushes The Map That Lies, and other Palestinian propaganda

Newsweek Middle East, which is based in Dubai, just published a video to go along with a ridiculous story written a couple of weeks ago by Israel hater Ben White.

Where is Palestine? More: https://t.co/TM4AlhS6zv pic.twitter.com/3tFmpt855v
— Newsweek Middle East (@NewsweekME) September 6, 2016

The video is simply Palestinian propaganda based on the stupid argument that since there was a place called Palestine on old maps and coins, it proves that an independent Arab state of Palestine existed before 1948.

I debunked the argument most memorably here, where I humorously pointed out that the only people who proudly called themselves Palestinians before 1948 were Jews, and that essentially all institutions that used the word Palestine in their title were in fact run by Zionists.

More recently, I showed that a map of Palestine proudly published on the PLO NAD webpage was in fact a map of Jewish control of the land in the time of King Saul. Embarrassed, the PLO removed the map from their webpage.

In short, there is no relationship between what people call "Palestine" today and what people meant when they used the word before 1948.

Worse, the Newsweek video shows a particularly absurd version of The Map That Lies:

This has been debunked so thoroughly that textbooks and news networks that showed it apologized afterwards because they didn't want to be associated with such a blatant twisting of the truth. This version is even worse than most by calling the area that the UN proposed as "The Arab State" "Palestine" as well as the areas that were under Jordanian and Egyptian control before 1967, as obvious a falsification of history as can be imagined.

Yet Newsweek is happy to associate its name with fact-free anti-Israel propaganda.

The Newsweek and NewsweekME Twitter accounts, not to mention their email addresses, should be flooded with outraged comments on how they not only crossed but obliterated the line between journalism and pure lying propaganda.

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09/09 Links Pt1: Bibi: Palestinians seek ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Jews; Glick: Mahmoud Abbas and other Soviet ghosts;

From Ian:

PM: World silent as Palestinians seek ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Jews in West Bank

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday accused the Palestinians of advocating ethnic cleansing of the Jewish population in the West Bank, and decried what he said was the world’s silence on the issue.
Speaking in English in a video message posted on his Facebook page, Netanyahu asked whether people in other parts of the world would accept such demands in their own countries.
It’s “outrageous that the world doesn’t find it outrageous,” Netanyahu said, urging viewers to ask themselves whether they would accept “a territory without Jews, without Hispanics, without blacks” in their nation.
“Since when is bigotry a foundation for peace?” he asked.
“At this moment, Jewish schoolchildren in Judea [and] Samaria are playing in sandboxes with their friends,” he said, referring to the West Bank by its biblical Hebrew name. “Does their presence make peace impossible? I don’t think so.”
He said he envisioned a Middle East “where young Arabs and young Jews learn together, work together, live together side by side in peace.”

Caroline Glick: Mahmoud Abbas and other Soviet ghosts

This then brings us back to KGB agent Abbas and his target, Israel.
Against great odds, and at a steep price, over the past 10 years Israeli society stopped listening to the voices on the Left parroting Abbas’s lies that Israel was born in sin, as a Western colonialist implant. Given the stakes, most Israelis today also have come to realize that our national self-confidence is a vital component of our long-term survival.
This understanding, along with a clear-eyed assessment of what drives our interlocutors in Moscow, Paris, New York and Brussels, must inform our foreign policy in the coming years.
When faced with foreign governments whose societies lack long-term prospects, Israel needs to put aside its yearning for long-term peace and stability and focus on short-term cooperative ties. It must also recognize that our partners’ interests are subject to change at a moment’s notice.
The revelation of Abbas’s KGB service requires us to recognize that the Soviets’ long game of subversion continues on today. Whether or not Western societies persevere and reject the Soviets’ central contention that they are unworthy of survival is not for Israel to decide. So, too, Israel will not convince the Russians to embrace a future based on freedom and the sanctity of life.
All we can do is wish them the best and play the short-term game with them – while keeping our long-term interests front and center in our minds.

'In Moscow, in the 1980s, you didn't go to university for free'

Former Shin Bet security agency director MK Avi Dichter (Likud), who now chairs the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, on Thursday addressed the report alleging that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a KGB agent in the 1980s, saying that at the time getting higher education in the Soviet Union came "with a price."
"[Abbas] went to university in the former Soviet Union," Dichter told fellow committee members. "We need to remember that in those years, going to Moscow and to university, certainly if you were Palestinian, came with a price of sorts."
Dichter added: "In Arabic there is a saying that 'only being blind and deaf is free.' In Moscow, you didn't go to university for free.
With that, he cautioned, "We need to be careful. I saw the reports that [Abbas] had a code name. Having a code name does not necessarily mean you are an agent. There are code names given for procedural reasons, and even if he provided information it doesn't mean he was an agent."
Meanwhile, the former Shin Bet chief rejected Palestinian claims that Israel's political leadership was behind the publication, calling the accusations "nonsense."
"This information came from untainted academic research and sources who acquired these documents. It's embarrassing for the Palestinians to say such things," Dichter said.

UNGA president says he is against antisemitism - BUT

From UN Watch:

When Israel, the U.S. and Canada hosted a forum on anti-Semitism at the U.N, the General Assembly president, former Danish foreign minister Mogens Lykketoft, spoke of Israeli “oppression” of the Palestinians:

“We the United Nations gave an enormous responsibility to go up against all expressions of prejudice and incitement… But we have also to be extremely careful and precise in what is and what is not antisemitism. It’s not anti-Semitic to call for an end of the occupation and oppression of the people of Palestine, and to demand an end to illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land.”
If this were a forum on discrimination against blacks, women, or gays, do you think the top U.N. official would lecture delegates on what statements are not discriminatory?

Do you think there would be any “But”?

Beyond that, it might be interesting to ask Mr. Lykketoft exactly what his definition of antisemitism is.

Is saying that Jews are not a people antisemitic?

Is saying that they have no right to self-determination antisemitic?

How about declaring that your state would expel all Jews from its boundaries - is that antisemitic?

How about demanding that Jews, and only Jews who lived in their homes for decades must be expelled (for "peace"?)

Is comparing the Jewish state, and only the Jewish state, to Nazis, antisemitic?

Is directing boycotts at only the Jewish state antisemitic?

Is endemic Jew-hatred done by Arabs antisemitic, or is it only Jew-hatred on the right?

Is expelling hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries antisemitic?

I mean, once he is drawing lines, it would be great to hear exactly where he draws his. Since he is an arbiter of morality, you know.

Mr. Lykketoft also appears to be a fervent believer in linkage, telling the UN last year without a hint of embarrassment, "with conflicts in Syria and Yemen, a major refugee crisis and violent extremism combining to create growing instability across the region, the question of Palestine [takes] on even greater significance." He also visited the PA areas without visiting Israel in 2014, blaming a scheduling conflict.

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Last year, on a TV show in South Africa, Haaretz writer Amira Hass refused to condemn the wave of Palestinian terror attacks occurring that the time.

She gives two reasons for her refusal to condemn, neither of which make any logical sense.

The first is that Israel doesn't condemn its soldiers for killing civilians. The flaws in that analogy are obvious: as the Israeli ambasssador noted, Israelis don't celebrate dead Arabs. The IDF is not targeting civilians, as Palestinians target Jewish civilians. And in the specific example that Hass gives, of the Samouni family in 2009, the family happened to include members of Islamic Jihad.

The Hass makes another argument against condemnation, saying that the source of all violence is the "occupation." Even when IDF soldiers aren't hurting anyone, they are the source of violence. When the ambassador noted that this does not justify Palestinian terror, she demurred, but didn't explain the relevance of the "occupation" to the terrorism if not as a justification for the acts of terror.

We've seen her say these sorts of things in print, but hearing exactly how immoral she is from her own mouth is far more striking.

(h/t Spotlighting)

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New paper indicates that settlement activity is not a violation of Geneva Conventions

Professor Eugene Kontorovich has just published an incredibly-well researched paper that looks at the legality of settlement activity in occupied territories from a completely new angle.

The paper takes an exhaustive look at every known example of belligerent occupation in modern times, and finds that for any occupation of more than a few years, settlement activity is a part of the occupation. Kontorovich summarizes his paper this way:

First, the migration of people into occupied territory is a near-ubiquitous feature of extended belligerent occupations. Second, no occupying power has ever taken any measures to discourage or prevent such settlement activity, nor has any occupying power ever expressed opinio juris suggesting that it is bound to do so. Third, and perhaps most strikingly, in none of these situations have the international community or international organizations described the migration of persons into the occupied territory as a violation of Art. 49(6). Even in the rare cases in which such policies have met with international criticism, it has not been in legal terms. This suggests that the level of direct state involvement in “transfer” required to constitute an Art. 49(6) violation may be significantly greater than previously thought. Finally, neither international political bodies nor the new governments of previously occupied territories have ever embraced the removal of illegally transferred civilian settlers as an appropriate remedy.

He looks at examples of settlement activity in East Timor, Western Sahara, Northern Cyprus, Syria/Lebanon, Vietnam/Cambodia, Armenia/Azerbaijan, Russia/Georgia, Russia/Crimea, and the Baltic states.

For example,

Under Russian occupation, Abkhaz authorities have embarked on an explicit settlement enterprise, designed specifically to bolster the proportion of ethnic Abkhazians in territory, at the expense of Georgians, and thus cement the split from Georgia.316 Such an enterprise faces inherent challenges, as the entire Caucuses region experiences net population outflow due to economic conditions.

The occupation authorities have established an official government entity, the State Committee on Repatriation, which encourages ethnic Abkhaz from the diaspora to move to the occupied territory. It actively recruits such individuals, and organizes their flights and transportation. The authorities also provide them with free housing, subsidies, and other assistance. Significant sums are invested in construction for the settlers.

This is not anomalous.

Yet Kontorovich is not establishing merely that Israel is subject to double standards. That part is obvious, but it doesn't prove that Israel isn't violating international law.

His argument is far deeper. The nearly complete absence of any criticism of these actions by the international community - even when the same international community is listing other violations of international law by the belligerent side in these conflicts - means that outside of Israel, none of these activities are considered a violation of the Geneva Conventions' prohibition of "transfer." The bar to violate Geneva is much higher, and appears to be the forced transfer of a population, not the passive or active encouragement of such population movements. (I don't think Kontorovich says this last point explicitly, but in light of his findings, I believe that this is accurate.)

Moreover, the lack of international response to these activities in itself implies that they are legal. Kontorovich quotes a major figure in international law, Malcolm Shaw:

Generally, where states are seen to acquiesce in the behavior of other states without protesting against them, the assumption must be made that such behavior is accepted as legitimate…This means actual protests are called for to the break the legitimizing process [when a new rule is being established by affirmative conduct].

Kontorovich expands on this:

In the situations studied in this Article, the failure to raise legal objections is consistent and general, and extends to international organizations and groups (the U.N.UN Human Rights Commission, the ICRC, and humanitarian NGOs like HRW), whose work it is to systematically point out violations of these norms.

Numerous other circumstances give added weigh to this silence.402 For one, the situations here are not ones that escaped international political condemnation and legal scrutiny. In most of these contexts, the international community has condemned the underlying occupation or aggression, and in most if not all cases, it has criticized the occupying power for violations of IHL and human rights norms. Thus the UN, the EU Parliament, PACE, and other bodies have been asked to denounce these activities as illegal, and have refused.

Such omission speaks loudly. Indeed, in various contexts (e.g. Cyprus, Georgia) the occupying power has been criticized by the international community for the transfer out of protected people (Art. 49(1)), but nothing was said about Art. 49(6). Finally, when some of the settlement activities were criticized by the international community (Vietnam, Armenia), they were not branded illegal. In these cases, we are not dealing with pure silence, but rather with the kind of silence that suggests the underlying conduct is either legal or not clearly illegal.

Crucially, the paper shows that in none of these other cases of occupation are the settlers demanded to be removed as part of any peace plan. That is wholly unique to Israel. (I personally believe that such a forced removal would be a clear violation of international law, as the main parts of article 49 of the Geneva Conventions explicitly deal with the violation of human rights accompanied by the forced removal of populations against their will.)

Kontorovich also makes this devastating point:

Doubtless some will attempt to dismiss the findings of this Article by saying the treatment of settlers in these other contexts was merely politics, rather than law. To be sure, geopolitics is always a presence in international law. That is why scholars must study an issue across all possible geopolitical contexts. Consistency of treatment across different geopolitical contexts suggests a legal rather than a political explanation. Moreover, the situations discussed here are not marked by an international fear of condemning the occupying power – they often are condemned, just not for illegal settlement activity.

Once one admits possible political explanations for how Art. 49(6) is applied, one would have to consider the possibility that maybe it is the exceptional treatment afforded to the Israeli case that is the political one. To put it differently, the point of looking at the broadest set of data is to help exclude alternative hypotheses like “politics.” With a data set of one, one cannot determine whether observed reactions are political or not. Expanding the sample to eight other cases raises a sharp question: what is more likely to be political – the international community’s consistent treatment of settlements across eight vastly different geopolitical situations – or its anomalous treatment of the single notoriously politicized and emotional case of Israel?

It isn't just double standards. It is that the international community has created an artificial international law to apply only to Israel, even though that law simply doesn't exist in other contexts. Not that it exists and is ignored - it doesn't exist. When legal critics give their laundry lists of violations of international law by belligerent occupiers, they simply do not consider settlement activity to be illegal.

This is an extraordinarily important paper that not only reveals much about international law, but also about how much of what people call international law in context of Israel is simply a lie.

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