Tel Aviv, November 21 - An activist worried that human-driven climate change will doom civilization and disrupt the planet's fragile ecosystems within twelve years has found a kindred spirit in a homeless man who spends much of his time pacing back and forth near a downtown street corner with a placard warning of the imminent demise of humanity.
Yona Kassander, 27, came upon a man two weeks ago known to locals as Efi, a street-dweller who most observers estimate has reached past the age of seventy, and whose chief pursuit involves warning passers by of the coming end of the world, both by means of signs declaring the apocalypse nigh and by yelling. Kassander found the man's message resonated with her ecological sensibilities, and in the time since has dedicated at least two hours per day to sitting, marching, holding signs, and chanting at others with her new friend about society's imminent collapse.
"I feel like I've crossed some important borders with this initiative," she gushed on her way to a yoga session following an afternoon with Efi. "Too often the movement to raise awareness and effect real change fails to engage the disempowered elements of society. It's gratifying to know that I've established this connection with someone far outside my socioeconomic stratum, with whom I have so little in common, but with whom I can partner on challenging to world to wake up and do something before we destroy our planet."
"Repent!" concurred Efi, waving a placard at a reporter. "Repent! Mend your ways! Doom is coming for all! Got any spare change?"
Pedestrians, commuters, cyclists and others in the vicinity remarked on the incongruity of the two different personalities demonstrating together. "Who?" wondered a software developer returning to work from lunch. "Oh. Huh. Well, you don't have to be homeless to be crazy, I guess."
"I don't know what that's all about," commented a delivery driver, "but I do know whatsername's favorite herbal infusion has to be delivered from the Far East, and it's not walking here itself, so I don't know whom she thinks she's kidding with that carbon emissions crap."
"It's coming," added Efi, wagging an admonishing finger at a group of tourists who kept their distance. "No one will escape! Not you in your fancy car, not you in your iPhone!"
The septuagenarian hobo expressed only confusion when asked how the current environmental and ecological crisis relates to his prophecies of doom.
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Canada has reversed course and voted in favour of a United Nations resolution condemning Israel for its “occupation” of Palestinian Territories, prompting a backlash of anger from Jewish groups.
The move marks a further departure between the U.S. and Canada on their posture toward Israel and a potential reversal of long-standing Canadian foreign policy.
The Trudeau government on Tuesday supported a resolution put forward by “the state of Palestine”, North Korea, Zimbabwe and others that calls for a “just, lasting and comprehensive peace settlement” to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and explicitly refers to contested lands between the two countries as “Occupied Palestinian Territories.” It also cites a 2004 International Court of Justice decision that said Israel’s construction of a protective wall in the West Bank “severely impedes the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”
The U.S. was among five countries that rejected the resolution, while Australia abstained. A total of 164 countries voted in favour, including the U.K., Germany and others.
The vote could mark a departure in Canadian foreign policy, which has been loosely aligned with the United States’ more pro-Israel stance since the early 2000s, when Paul Martin shifted his posture away from the previous government. The Conservatives under Stephen Harper then became an even more regular supporter of Israel.
Pro-Israel groups blasted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for the vote on Tuesday, saying it was a betrayal of more than 10 years of staunch support for the country.
“Trudeau is trading Canada’s bedrock principles of fairness & equality for a UN Security Council seat,” Hillel Neuer, founding chairman of the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, said on Twitter. Neuer was referring to a bid by Canada to gain a UN Security Council seat next year. “By voting for a resolution co-sponsored by North Korea & Zimbabwe, he has entered a Faustian bargain with dictatorships that does not bode well for a free & democratic society.”
He said Canada had “joined the jackals” in a separate tweet.
The world once feared the Arab-Israel conflict could trigger a global war. Since then, Israel made peace with Egypt & Jordan. Today it seems many in the Arab world could make peace with Israel—but that Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Roth & EU diplomats who need to condemn Israel never would.
2. Trudeau's motive was not what you claim. Why didn't you mention that Canada is lobbying for a seat on the Security Council and that—as Australia's PM Kevin Rudd tried to do ahead of the 2012 vote—Trudeau is trying to buy support by voting against Israel?https://t.co/GWpflJFm2D
Liberal critics are condemning the announcement as unprecedented—but in fact the U.S. position that settlements are illegal under international law only dates to the final days of the Obama administration. The Trump administration is bringing U.S. policy in line with the positions held by successive Republican and Democratic administrations dating back to 1967, when Israel acquired the West Bank in the Six Day War.
It was only in late December 2016, after President Trump won the presidential election and weeks before Inauguration Day that the Obama administration supported a U.N. Security Council resolution declaring settlements a violation of international law. The move was widely condemned by pro-Israel groups and even many Democrats as a spiteful, abrupt, and illegitimate policy shift by an administration days before its departure from the White House.
In fact, during the Obama administration in 2011, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice vetoed a similar resolution declaring settlements illegal, consistent with longstanding U.S. policy to both reject their illegality and to block anti-Israel activism in the Security Council. Until the administration reversed itself in late 2016, it regularly referred to settlements as "illegitimate," but not illegal.
Before that, in 2004, the United States exchanged letters with the Israeli government explicitly endorsing Israel's retention of major West Bank settlement blocs in any peace deal with the Palestinians. As part of Israel's plan to withdraw from Gaza the next year, President Bush wrote to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that:
On November 5, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected Human Rights Watch's demand that Israel renew “Israel/Palestine Director” Omar Shakir’s work visa- acknowledging his BDS activism. How did the court come to this decision? What was NGO Monitor’s role in the case? Join our host Yona Schiffmiller, Legal Expert Anne Herzberg, and Researcher Ariella Esterson as they explain this story.
Host: NGO Monitor Director of Research Yona Schiffmiller
Guests: NGO Monitor Legal Advisor Anne Herzberg and Harry C Wechsler Fellow Ariella Esterson
Not surprisingly, the reaction to Trump's recognition of the legality of the Israeli settlements has led to one more uproar in opposition to his Middle East policy.
But in contrast to the reactions that are either in favor or against the decision, one of the more novel reactions was by Shmuel Rosner, that international law is just a bluff anyway; it doesn't really matter.
He bases this on Secretary of State Pompeo's own statement, that "the hard truth is that there will never be a judicial resolution to the conflict, and arguments about who is right and who is wrong as a matter of international law will not bring peace."
Rosner takes this one step further, that not only does international law have no practical meaning when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but more than that:
Inserting it into the conversation is a disruption. Inserting it into the conversation is a manipulation. It is a tactic aimed at presenting Israel as a pariah state, a state guilty of criminality.
You'd be hard-pressed to argue otherwise.
Social media is full of self-described experts on Israel and international law. They are always available to declare which (if not all) of Israel's actions are in violation of international law.
Either they merely claim this matter of factly.
Or they will claim this is the international consensus.
After the incident of the Mavi Marmara, the UN Security Council, whose members do not not have expertise in international law, declared Israel's blockade of Gaza illegal.
A long-awaited United Nations review of Israel’s 2010 raid on a Turkish-based flotilla in which nine passengers were killed has found that Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza is both legal and appropriate. [emphasis added]
Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 war and has occupied the territory ever since. The Fourth Geneva Convention, ratified by 192 nations in the aftermath of World War II, says that an occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” The statute that established the International Criminal Court in 1998 classifies such transfers as war crimes, as well as any destruction or appropriation of property not justified by military necessity.
Israel argues that a Jewish presence has existed on the West Bank for thousands of years and was recognized by the League of Nations in 1922. Jordan’s rule over the territory, from 1948 to 1967, was never recognized by most of the world, so Israel also argues there was no legal sovereign power in the area and therefore the prohibition on transferring people from one state to the occupied territory of another does not apply.
The International Court of Justice rejected that argument in an advisory opinion in 2004, ruling that the settlements violated international law.
In a bait-and-switch, the article starts off talking about Jordan and its questionable rights to the West Bank and just a few paragraphs later is talking about "privately-owned Palestinian land" -- without ever addressing the question of how the Palestinian Arabs acquired sole rights over an area from which Jews were ethnically cleansed by Jordan in 1949.
The article references the argument that Israel violated the Fourth Geneva Convention according to which an occupying power "shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies" and volunteers that Israel's defense is "that a Jewish presence has existed on the West Bank for thousands of years and was recognized by the League of Nations in 1922."
There is no mention that the Fourth Geneva Convention is addressing the issue of forced deportations and transfers, something that is not applicable to Israelis who willingly move there on their own.
And the League of Nations did more than just recognize the Jewish presence, it was actually a recognition of legal Jewish legal rights to the land, which formed the basis of the Palestine Mandate similar to the mandates for Syria and Iraq, the goal being the administration of those areas until they had the ability to assume their independence.
This recognition of Jewish rights in then-Palestine was then verified at international conferences in San Remo, Sevres and Lausanne and had the force of international law.
The article, after assuming what Israel's argument should be, then knocks it down: "The International Court of Justice rejected that argument in an advisory opinion in 2004, ruling that the settlements violated international law."
Left unsaid is the fact that:
o As an advisory opinion, it has no legal weight, especially since Israel had no role in the proceedings and did not present its side o The actual case before the court was the security fence. The court mentioned the legality of the settlements in response to the phrasing of the question brought before them -- without actually deliberating on the issue of the settlements o One of the judges, Justice Kooijmans, wrote a separate opinion where he says specifically that under the circumstances:
The Court has refrained from taking a position with regard to territorial rights and the question of permanent status
This New York Times is not alone in playing this game of disinterested observer objectively presenting the facts.
Palestinians have condemned a decision by the US to abandon its four-decades-old position that Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank are inconsistent with international law.
Secretary Pompeo’s statement marks a return to the policy of US administrations between 1981 and December 2016. In other words, the “position” described by the BBC is three years old rather than “four-decades-old”.
The Trump administration declared on Monday that the United States does not consider Israeli settlements in the West Bank a violation of international law, reversing four decades of American policy and removing what has been an important barrier to annexation of Palestinian territory.
“The United States, Israel’s strongest military supporter, has consistently held that settlement building in the occupied territories is illegal and detrimental to seeking a lasting peace.”
The basis for the short-lived US position that the Israeli settlements are illegal is based on a memo, 4 pages long, written by Herbert Hansell, Jimmy Carter's legal adviser, in 1978.
Even on its own terms, the memo’s conclusions no longer apply. Because occupation is part of the law of war, Hansell wrote, the state of occupation would end if Israel entered into a peace treaty with Jordan. In 1994 Jerusalem and Amman signed a full and unconditional peace treaty, but the State Department neglected to update the memo.
The attempts to cow Israel into submission with claims of international law recently went beyond words with the decision by the European Union's Court of Justice that Israeli products from the disputed areas must be labeled.
Rosner sees this no differently than other attempts at disruption, and he sees Pompeo's statement as a specific reaction to it:
Pompeo's declaration is a clear and immediate rebuff of this unwise decision by the court. Again, it is calling a bluff: this is not a judicial decision based on law, it is a political decision expressing Europe's opposition to settlement activity.
Whether resorting to fabricated accusations of illegality or to actual legal measures that have more bite, this is not really an issue of law.
It is politics.
Whether it is coming from social media, mainstream media, politicians or countries -- this is an evasion of the hard work of negotiation, relieving the Palestinian Authority of the need to come to the table and negotiate.
One can argue with the effect of recognizing the legality of the settlements on peace, but it does help put Israel on an equal footing with the Palestinian Arabs and suggest the need for the two sides to talk about "the West Bank" -- perhaps not everyone knows what peace will look like after all.
Maybe that is why some people are so angry.
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Boycotting Israel is a failure, and has only helped that country while damaging Arab nations that have long shunned the Jewish state, according to a small new group of liberal-minded Arab thinkers from across the Middle East who are pushing to engage with Israel on the theory that it would aid their societies and further the Palestinian cause.
The group has brought together Arab journalists, artists, politicians, diplomats, Quranic scholars and others who share a view that isolating and demonizing Israel has cost Arab nations billions in trade. They say it has also undercut Palestinian efforts to build institutions for a future state, and torn at the Arab social fabric, as rival ethnic, religious and national leaders increasingly apply tactics that were first tested against Israel.
“Arabs are the boycott’s first — and only — victims,” Eglal Gheita, an Egyptian-British lawyer, declared at an inaugural gathering this week in London.
Calling itself the Arab Council for Regional Integration, the group does not purport to be broadly representative of Arab public opinion. Its members espouse a viewpoint that is, to put it mildly, politically incorrect in their home countries: Some have already been ostracized for advocating engagement with Israel and others said they feared retribution when they return.
Some participants urged measures like establishing a teachers college and research institute with campuses in Casablanca, Amman, Haifa and Manama. And an Iraqi counterterrorism expert living in Germany, Jassim Mohammad, urged Arab security services to stop the spread of “radicalism and hate” in the media, schools and mosques and to spread “corrective content about Israel and Jews” instead. He called this a “matter of Arab national security.”
Al Khaleej Online adds:
Participants, particularly from Bahrain, Tunisia and Algeria, went on to praise the social, cultural and heritage role of Arab Jews in their countries, both in the past and in the present.
Representatives from Arab countries that witnessed a multi-motivated Jewish exodus, such as Lebanon, Libya, Yemen and Algeria, expressed regret over the loss of their Jewish citizens, who had an important role in the development, culture and economy of their societies.
Extremism and terrorism were deplored, and concern expressed about “brainwashing” of children in school and of students at university level; and, remarkably, from the clerics Hassen Chalghoumi, a condemnation of the “politicization” of Islam, and from Lebanon’s Saleh Hamed, a plea to Europe to crack down on the number of mosques in which imams were preaching hatred.
The event was sponsored by the US-based Center for Peace Communications, whose board of directors is headed by Dennis Ross. The CPC describes itself as “a group of Americans who believe that security and prosperity in the Middle East and North Africa require a peace between peoples.” Joseph Braude, the convenor of the conference, is a senior fellow at the Middle East Program of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, in Washington D.C., and is CPC’s founder and president.
No Israelis were present, because some of the delegates could have been subject to prosecution in their home countries for the “crime” of normalizing relations. It was clearly, Braude said, “a civil initiative in which no government had a hand,” but the views expressed are bound to resonate throughout the Middle East.
We've seen a pattern emerging in recent years of lone voices in the Arab world starting to speak up against the insane anti-Zionism and antisemitism in that world. It used to be articles that were primarily critical of Arab regimes that would incidentally say that Arabs under Israeli rule have it better, or articles that would point out that Israel had more Nobel Prizes than all the Arab nations combined. It has accelerated into open calls for dialogue with Israel.
The events prompting this small revolution include, above all, the understanding of the Iranian threat to the region and the realization that Israel is the best ally in that undeclared war. But there has also been a significant drop in support for the Palestinian cause as the Palestinians themselves have shown no interest in peace, and maintained its split between Hamas and Fatah. Finally, the Internet - and education of Arab intellectuals in the West - has allowed the Arab world to be exposed to points of view that were simply unavailable to them even a decade ago. Israel itself has been energetically pursuing relations with the Arab world and standing up for itself in international forums, such as sports. Its economic and military strength evokes respect among Arabs.
Put all of that together and Israel is now in higher esteem among Arabs than it has ever been.
To be sure, antisemitism and anti-Zionism is still the norm in the Middle East. But that position is no longer unified, and opposition to it no longer turns the "radicals" into pariahs as much as it used to.
It is a sea change in direction, but there is a long way to go.
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Supporting Jews is antisemitic and supporting the enemies of Jews is fighting antisemitism, in the newspeak of the anti-Zionist crowd.
It used to be that the Jew-haters would claim that they aren't antisemitic because "Arabs are Semites," an early form of antisemitism inversion.
But the new versions are more sophisticated.
One strain, popular at Electronic Intifada, claims that antisemitism is a form of racism, Zionism is a form of racism, so therefore anti-Zionists are fighters against antisemitism. They will also update an older argument of finding times that Zionists have worked together with antisemites (going back to the Haavara agreement with Nazi Germany) in order to save Jewish lives as evidence of Zionist "collaboration" with antisemites.
Another is to find a neo-Nazi who expresses support for Zionism as a form of white nationalism as proof that Zionism supports neo-Nazism. This violates a fundamental rule of logic but the modern anti-Zionist antisemites don't quite care.
The logic here is not expressed, perhaps because there is none. But the idea seems to be that all forms of "struggle" are the same - as long as they are the right (or Left) forms of struggle.
Obviously, the Jewish struggle for self-determination, or the Israeli struggle to be treated with the same yardstick as every other nation, are not "struggles" that can be compared to the progressive-approved "struggles."
The "struggle for Palestinian freedom" is the desire to deny Jewish self-determination and the desire to destroy the Jewish state. It is the embodiment of the antisemitism Palestinians express when asked.
When IfNotNow clams to support the Palestinian "struggle for freedom" this is what they are supporting - the actualization of Palestinian antisemitism.
It is willful blindness to overlook the antisemitism that has always animated Palestinian nationalism since the Mufti in the 1920s accused Jews of trying to destroy Al Aqsa. It is only slightly less self delusional to pretend that Arab antisemitism is a response to Zionism when it pre-dates Zionism.
One cannot separate Palestinian Jew-hatred and their "struggle for freedom." But modern antisemites who pretend to be merely anti-Zionist not only separate them, they invert Palestinian antisemitism into a struggle against antisemitism.
And too many people - often primed to hate Israel the same way people have been primed to hate Jews for millennia - buy into this inversion of antisemitism.
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Q: Why do you say “Jewish Communities” and not “settlements,” and why not “West Bank?” A: “Settlements” implies that they are outside of Israel. “Communities” is neutral. “West Bank” is a name invented by the Jordanians in 1950, after they ethnically cleansed the area of Jews and illegally annexed it to Jordan, an action recognized only by the UK and possibly Pakistan. “Judea and Samaria” is the traditional name used from biblical times, even by the UN before 1950.
Q: The Arabs, the EU and the UN often say that “settlements” are illegal under international law. What international law are they talking about? A: Usually they mean the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prescribes conditions for a belligerent occupation. Article 49, paragraph 6 says “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” There are also other limitations on what an occupying power can do in the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Convention of 1907, roughly based on the idea that the territory doesn’t belong to the occupier unless or until a formal treaty establishes its status.
Q: Why did the American government agree with them? A: The State Department had been wedded to the idea that Israel should return to her pre-1967 borders since the oil shock of the 1973 war. The requirement for “secure and recognized boundaries” in UNSC resolution 242 in 1967 receded into the background, disappearing entirely by the time of Barack Obama.
Naturally settlements were a problem. President Carter very much wanted to include Israeli withdrawal from Judea, Samaria and Gaza in the Camp David agreement that returned the Sinai to Egypt, but was unable to do so; the Camp David talks did produce a “Framework for Peace in the Middle East,” but it did not mention settlements, and was scuttled anyway by the PLO and the UN. The arguments that settlements were inconsistent with international law were set out in an opinion written for President Carter in 1978 by State Department legal advisor Herbert J. Hansell, and never changed until Pompeo’s announcement.
Q: Why do you disagree? A:Two reasons: first, it is a misapplication of 4th Geneva 49-6, which was intended to prevent forced transfers of population such as Germany’s deportation of Jews to occupied Poland, and not the voluntary movement of people. Second, because Israel’s legal claim on the territory is stronger than that of any other country, there is no belligerent occupation: the land is more properly considered disputed rather than occupied.
Q: What do you know? You’re not an expert in international law! A: No, but Eugene Kontorovich is. And here is what he said about this issue:
Under international law, occupation occurs when a country takes over the sovereign territory of another country. But the West Bank was never part of Jordan, which seized it in 1949 and ethnically cleansed its entire Jewish population. Nor was it ever the site of an Arab Palestinian state. Moreover, a country cannot occupy territory to which it has sovereign title, and Israel has the strongest claim to the land. International law holds that a new country inherits the borders of the prior geopolitical unit in that territory. Israel was preceded by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, whose borders included the West Bank. Hansell’s memo fails to discuss this principle for determining borders, which has been applied everywhere from Syria and Lebanon to post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine. Even on its own terms, [Hansell’s 1978] memo’s conclusions no longer apply. Because occupation is part of the law of war, Hansell wrote, the state of occupation would end if Israel entered into a peace treaty with Jordan. In 1994 Jerusalem and Amman signed a full and unconditional peace treaty, but the State Department neglected to update the memo. Even if there were an occupation, the notion that it creates an impermeable demographic bubble around the territory—no Jew can move in—has no basis in the history or application of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Almost every prolonged occupation since 1949—from the Allies’ 40-year administration of West Berlin to Turkey’s 2016 occupation of northern Syria—has seen population movement into the occupied territory. In none of these cases has the U.S., or the United Nations, ever claimed a violation of this Geneva Convention provision.
Q: But what about those countless UN resolutions condemning Israel? Didn’t the Security Council pass a resolution (2334) that clearly declared Israeli settlements illegal? A: General Assembly resolutions are non-binding, and even Security Council resolutions do not have the force of international law unless they are passed under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, “Action With Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression.” Resolution 2334 – which passed because the Obama Administration abstained in December of 2016 – was not such a resolution.
Q: But the UN, the EU, the New York Times, and many other organizations say Jewish communities are “illegal” or (as Obama liked to say) “illegitimate?” Doesn’t the international consensus count for something? A: International law isn’t a popularity contest, and the UN is not a world government that can make or (except in special circumstances) enforce laws. The fact that many nations and individuals dislike Israel as a result of their religious beliefs, the remnants of cold-war Soviet propaganda, their relationship with oil providers, their desire to stick it to the US, or plain old Jew-hatred, does not matter.
Q: What exactly did Pompeo do? A: Pompeo made it clear that the US did not intend to judge whether any particular community was legal (I presume he meant that one built on land that was privately owned by someone else would be illegal), but that it was no longer the case that the US would consider a Jewish community illegal simply because it was located in Judea/Samaria – or, to put it another way, that a community in Judea/Samaria would be considered illegal simply because it was composed of Jews.
Q: Does this actually matter? A: Yes, for two reasons. One is that various groups are taking actions (boycotting products from the communities or requiring special labeling on them) on the basis of their opinion that they are illegal. The fact that the US does not agree is a powerful argument that these actions are unfairly discriminatory, and might be a basis for legislation against them in the US.
The other reason is that the idea that these communities are illegal presupposes a certain view of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, in which land east of the Green Line is “Arab land” rather than a disputed territory on which both sides have claims. This clearly prejudges the outcome of any negotiations, and leads to the Arabs demanding the freezing or evacuation of Jewish communities as a precondition for negotiations. One might reasonably ask how the illegal ethnic cleansing and 19-year occupation of Judea and Samaria by Jordan converted the land set aside for “close settlement” by Jews in the Palestine Mandate into “Arab land.”
***
Here is a special question for extra credit:
Q: What has Trump and his administration done for Israel so far? A: As of today, the Trump Administration has finally fulfilled the promise of the US Congress to move the US Embassy to our capital and has asserted – as previous administrations would not – that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. It cut funding for the Palestinian Authority while it continues to pay terrorists, and reduced the amount sent to UNRWA, the UN agency that nurtures and perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem. It recognized Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. It took the US out of the Iran nuclear deal, and re-imposed sanctions on Israel’s most serious enemy. It spoke out strongly for Israel in the UN, in the voice of Ambassador Nikki Haley. And now it has separated America from those who have dishonestly accused Israel of violating international law.
All of these actions are reasonable and should have been taken by prior administrations, which often voiced their support of Israel but did little to change wrong or discriminatory policies toward her. It’s been suggested that they are all cheap, merely “symbolic,” and have little effect on the ground. But if this is so, then why didn’t previous presidents act?
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Ammon News reports that Jordan's Interior Ministry canceled an interfaith conference at the last minute - because Israeli Jews were slated to attend.
It was entitled "Peace Between Religions" and was due to start Thursday and last for three days.
The ministry did not give a reason but reports say it was because of the presence of Israeli Jews.
A group called "Move Boycott" took credit for scuttling the conference.
An anti-Israel group issued a statement saying, "This conference is taking place in light of the official Arab acceleration of normalization with the Zionist entity, and the constant threat to Jordan by this enemy, as well as a clear encroachment on our national sovereignty, and daily encroachment on the sanctities under the protection and guardianship of Jordan, and comes at a time when the Zionist enemy terrorized the Palestinian people and its war on Gaza, which has not ended, and the blood of its martyrs has not dried up yet."
Here as the first page of the schedule.
No one in Jordan seems embarrassed by this debacle as far as I can tell.
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When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced this week that the U.S. no longer considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be in violation of international law, most Israelis were clearly pleased. All the major Israeli political parties greeted the announcement with support. Both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his leading rival, Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz, agreed that America was right to scrap its old insistence that Jews had no right to live outside the 1949 armistice lines.
Labeling these Jewish communities as illegal renders negotiations over the territories effectively moot. As long as the world considers the territories to be stolen property that must be returned to the Arabs - rather than disputed land whose fate must be arrived at by give and take by both sides - there's nothing to negotiate.
Like Netanyahu, Gantz understands that Israel must maintain control of the Jordan River Valley and most of the settlements even in the theoretical event that the Palestinians eventually choose to make peace as opposed to continue holding onto their century-old war on Zionism.
What the U.S. has done is to put the Palestinians on notice that if they want an end to the status quo, then they will have to talk to the Israelis. They cannot sit back and wait for the international community to hand them Israeli concessions on a silver platter.
All this pompous gobbledy gook being required for labelling the source of products made in territory disputed between Jews and Arabs for the last 100 years is deeply disturbing. There is no appeal from this decision.
The European Union could be in a real political bind as a result. The labelling requirements introduced by the European Union in 2011 and interpreted in 2015 has led it down this disastrous path promising only ridicule and contempt.
To be consistent and not be subjected to charges that it is deliberately targeting Jews and inciting Jew-hatred – the European Union needs to insist on similar stringent labelling requirements being immediately applied on goods originating from more than 150 disputed territories around the world.
Alternatively – the European Union could get itself out of this embarrassing labelling war and PR disaster by simply requiring goods originating from Israeli settlements to state “Product of Judea” or“Product of Samaria”.
Judea and Samaria – the historic and geographic terms used for the disputed territories for the last 3000 years – were relabelled the “The West Bank” by Jordan in 1950 – and enthusiastically embraced by the European Union.
The chickens from Judea and Samaria have come home to roost. Truth in labelling by the feckless European Union is long overdue.
The Dutch parliament on Tuesday approved a motion pushing back against a European Court of Justice decision that ordered the labeling of Israeli goods made in West Bank settlements.
The motion, approved 82-68, calls on the government to object to the ruling, unless similar standards are applied to all disputed territories around the world. It deems the singling out of Israel in such regard unfair and discriminatory.
Israel has heavily criticized the the court’s ruling last week, calling it discriminatory and noting that there are more than 200 territorial disputes across the world, but that the European court had never ruled on any of them.
The Dutch vote, supported by Christian groups in parliament and backed by the governing coalition, does not compel the government to act and is largely symbolic. However, diplomatic officials told the Ynet news site that the strong support from the coalition indicated it would guide government policy to an extent.
Israeli Ambassador to the Netherlands Naor Gilon thanked legislators for their support and expressed hope that if the court ruling stands, Dutch leaders “will adopt their own recommendation and not implement a discriminatory resolution.”
On Monday, Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo announced that Israeli settlements, in the view of the Trump
administration, are not illegal. Bernie Sanders, a Jew, was quick to contradict
this Israel-friendly message, stating as if it were fact rather than opinion,
the opposite viewpoint. Israeli settlements, tweeted Sanders, are illegal.
Israeli settlements in occupied territory are illegal. This is clear from international law and multiple United Nations resolutions. Once again, Mr. Trump is isolating the United States and undermining diplomacy by pandering to his extremist base. https://t.co/Vz5NNpKIVB
Pompeo’s
remarks were thoughtful and nuanced. Sanders’ tweet, on the other hand, was
a condemnation, a pointed finger full of repudiation and blame. Pompeo spoke of
peace and resolution, while Sanders used his platform to take a dig at Trump, accusing
the president of “pandering to his extremist base.”
If we were to take a crack at
what Sanders might mean by “extremist base,” it would be easy to arrive at the
Evangelical community, a large voting sector that turned out strongly for Trump
in 2016. This is as opposed to the Jews,
who, at just 3% of the voting population, cannot be any kind of voting base, extremist or otherwise. White
evangelicals do indeed care deeply about Israel and are willing to use
their voting clout on her behalf. Jews (except perhaps for the orthodox, who represent only 11% of American Jewry), on the other hand, don’t see Israel as
an electoral issue.
But when Bernie Sanders speaks
of extremists, he’s not really speaking of a specific sector or community, not
of Christians or Jews, but of all God-fearing people who pray and read the
bible. Because Sanders knows that they are the ones who still hold fast to the
idea that Judea and Samaria belong to the Jewish people. To Sanders, who appears to be a person
who repudiates religion, in particular his own, the entire idea that people are
entitled to territory and self-determination in their land based on their
religion alone, is disgusting and elitist. In particular, it is disgusting for
a Jew to feel this way: that he has rights to Israel by virtue of having
descended from people with beards and payos.*
Sanders also spoke of "occupied territory." But the entire idea of an occupation is problematic since the land was restored to the Jewish people during a defensive war. Israel didn't just march in to accomplish a land grab. We were fighting for our lives, repelling invading armies that were attempting to wipe out the State of Israel and Jewish Israelis. At any rate, how is it possible for a people to "occupy" land that already belongs to them from ancient times? The connection of the land to the Jewish people is documented many times over.
But let's stipulate for argument's sake that Israel is the "occupying" power in the territory in question. The relevant clause of international law relating to occupation and settlement speaks of people being transferred or deported by the occupying power, in order to create facts on the ground. Israel did not deport anyone, and there was no transfer of people to the area. The Jews who settled in Judea and Samaria (and Jerusalem), came there of their own free will. They desired to live there because of the ancient Jewish connection to the land. No one forced them to live there. Judea and Samaria burned in their hearts. They yearned to be there.
Regarding the legal arguments, respected jurists such as Eugene Rostow, Julius Stone, Eugene Kontorovich, and Avi Bell have all ruled that Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria is legal. At the very least, Sanders might have acknowledged the strong body of proof these experts have offered in support of the idea that settlement is legal. Then it would be his right to counter and state that in his opinion, settlement is illegal, offering relevant arguments to support his theory. Instead, knowing nothing whatsoever about the law and certainly not as it applies to the settlement project, Sanders put his foot down, stating as if it were fact that settlements are illegal, completely ruling out the idea that, hey: It might be okay for Jews to build homes in their indigenous territory. Some pretty important jurists think so.
But to Sanders, you see, the legalistic debate around settlement is immaterial. He knows and cares nothing about the law, because let's face it: Bernie Sanders is no legal expert. He never studied law.
In his early professional life, for instance, Sanders worked as a Head Start teacher, a psychiatric aide, and carpenter. He wrote socialist propaganda and created “radical film strips.” The sum total of Sanders' knowledge of international law is surely into negative numbers. And he knows that, which is why, in his tweet he deferred vaguely to “international law” and the “UN” without offering any legal argument or substance to back his claims that settlements are illegal.
The law, it seems, is only a fig leaf for Sanders to hide what he feels about religion and perhaps more particularly, about Judaism. More generally, it seems that from Sanders' purview, religious devotion is a disgusting concept, so disgusting that he can’t get past what he must see
as the horrors of the bible to get to the bigger picture of why there is
nothing wrong with Jewish settlement.
Because there is nothing wrong with Jewish settlement.
Like Sanders, I am no jurist. So I think
of this issue in simple terms. The Jews are the indigenous people of Israel
with thousands of years of connection. The very name of Judea means “Jew.” It’s
where we’re from.
No one needs the Bible to know
this. Because if you’re not a believer, there are history books. There are
archaeological artifacts. The Western Wall in Jerusalem is real. You can touch it.
Connection and history aside,
how does it hurt anyone for Jews to build homes for themselves? What could
possibly be wrong with that? Jews don’t deserve shelter? A roof over their
heads?
And this business of settlements
being an obstacle to peace? What narishkeit.† We
expelled thousands of our own people from Gaza during Disengagement, and dug up our dead, too, all for
the sake of peace. Homes stopped nothing. Because homes don’t get
in the way of peace. Terror gets in
the way of peace.
Judea and Samaria, our ancestral territory, was restored to us during the course of a defensive war. We built
homes on uninhabited hilltops. We displaced no one in the building of settlement homes.
And they are homes. Nothing more. Homes go up, and can also be torn down, God forbid.
The question Bernie Sanders should
be asking himself is why anyone objects to Jews building homes in Judea and
Samaria, or anywhere else, for that matter. Why is the EU outraged at the
thought of Jews building homes for themselves in Judea and Samaria or
producing, God forbid, wine? Why are
Arabs so appalled at the thought of Jews providing themselves with shelter? What
is the problem that all of these people have with the Jews?
Why can’t they just
let them be?
What is the source of Sanders’
loathing for his own people? Was there some sort of trauma in early childhood?
Is he embarrassed by the herring and kichel, the chanting and swaying back and
forth, the refusal of these stubborn people to go away already??
"Why won’t they just die out," you can
almost hear him wondering, "so I can be like everyone else in a world where
everyone is the same, united. Accepted."
These “extremists” just refuse to
get with the plan. The plan that crowns Bernie king of the world, no longer a Jew, just a man of the people, or perhaps a demi-god.
The good news is that this will never happen. Because Sanders hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of becoming president of the United States of America. He's just too out there and old.
Bernie can make a schrei, and scream all he likes, but ain't no one going to force the Jews out of Judea and Samaria.
We've come home for good. Because whether Bernie likes it or not, this time we're not leaving.
We're not going anywhere at all.
*sidecurls
†foolishness
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From the Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics we learn that 62% of the Palestinian girls and 68% of the boys aged 10 and under are beaten by their caregivers.
The definition of physical violence in this study is shaking hard, hitting parts of the body with a stick or belt, or hitting hands or legs.
Over a quarter of the boys and 18% of the girls 10 and under experienced severe violence from their parents or caregivers, which includes hitting their face or head or regular severe beatings.
Violence is more prevalent in Gaza than in the West Bank.
Kids who grow up with violence are more likely to be violent as adults.
Of course, outside the bureaucracy that generated this report, this is not being reported anywhere.
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Israeli settlements in the West Bank do not violate international law. That is now America's official view, repudiating the conclusions of a 1978 State Department memorandum. The four-page 1978 memo written by legal adviser Herbert Hansell was hardly a thorough study and cited no precedent for its key conclusions. Hansell concluded that Jews who had moved past the Green Line into disputed territory had somehow been "deported or transferred" there by the State of Israel.
A country cannot occupy territory to which it has sovereign title, and Israel has the strongest claim to the land. International law holds that a new country inherits the borders of the prior geopolitical unit in that territory. Israel was preceded by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, whose borders included the West Bank. Hansell's memo fails to discuss this.
Moreover, Hansell wrote that the state of occupation would end if Israel entered into a peace treaty with Jordan, which it did in 1994, but the State Department neglected to update the memo.
Almost every prolonged occupation since 1949 - from the Allies' 40-year administration of West Berlin to Turkey's 2016 occupation of northern Syria - has seen population movement into the occupied territory. In none of these cases has the U.S. or the UN ever claimed this was a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Pompeo's action shows the U.S. understands that we can't have one international law for one country and another for the rest of the world.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that U.S. would no longer take the position that Israeli civilian "settlements" in the West Bank are "inconsistent with international law." Many of those "settlements" - cities, really, some of them in existence for decades - are never going to be bulldozed. That's reality.
It has always been a mistake for the U.S. to treat Jews who returned to their ancient homeland as occupiers. For one thing, it was impossible for Israel to "occupy" Palestinian territories because no such nation has ever existed. UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 established Israel's legal right to negotiate a peace with defensible borders with existing states. Resolution 242 doesn't mention the word "Palestinian" anywhere. Nowhere does the resolution call on Israel to withdraw to the pre-Six-Day War lines. Nowhere does it stipulate that Judea and Samaria should be free of Jews.
None of the recent U.S. moves undermine peace. They simply clarify the contours of a realistic deal. Israel has done everything it can to allow responsible Arab self-governance. As Pompeo clearly states, final-status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians will be predicated no longer on a fantasy of "occupation" but rather on the reality of disputed land.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s dramatic announcement on Monday that the “establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law” sent shockwaves around the world. In retrospect, however, it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise.
Since his election three years ago, US President Donald Trump has been consistent in his efforts to reverse the policies of the administration of his predecessor, Barack Obama. Not only in relation to Israel. But his pro-Israel stance has been steady and unapologetic from the get-go, which is as it should be.
Indeed, each of his decisions – such as recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the embassy accordingly, defunding the Palestinian “pay for slay” machine and acknowledging Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights – has been geared towards cementing the natural US -Israel relationship in a healthy way. Every action that his administration has taken stems from the understanding that the so-called “Israeli-Palestinian peace process” has failed repeatedly – not only as a result of being based on a false premise, but of following the same old paradigm.
Team Trump has been engaging in what the high-tech sector refers to as “disruption.”
Its shift in settlement policy is part of the program. As Pompeo pointed out, calling settlements illegal “hasn’t worked. It hasn’t advanced the cause of peace.”
That’s for sure.
Fittingly, Washington’s latest bombshell came on the heels of a horrifying European Court of Justice ruling that all EU countries must label goods produced in Israeli settlements, so as to enable consumers to make “informed choices” – a euphemism for giving shoppers a heads-up over which “made in Israel” merchandise they should boycott.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo referred to a 1978 State Department memo that calls Israeli settlements "inconsistent with international law" when he said the current State Department reviewed it and decided that it is not correct.
He unfortunately did not discuss the legal basis for this re-evaluation.
However, the memo itself, written by State Department Legal Advisor Herbert J. Hansell, can be critiqued - by one of the people it quotes as an expert.
Hansell writes:
[T]he Israeli armed forces entered Gaza, the West Bank, Sinai and the Golan Heights in June 1967, in the course of an armed conflict. Those areas had not previously been part of Israel's sovereign territory nor otherwise under its administration. By reason of such entry of its armed forces, Israel established control and began to exercise authority over these territories; and under international law, Israel became a belligerent occupant of these territories.
...'In positive terms, and broadly stated, the Occupant's powers are (1) to continue orderly government, (2) to exercise control over and utilize the resources of the country so far as necessary for that purpose and to meet his own military needs. He may thus, under the latter head, apply its resources to his own military objects, claim services from the inhabitants, use, requisition, seize or destroy their property, within the limits of what is required for the army of occupation and the needs of the local population.But beyond the limits of quality, quantum and duration thus implied, the Occupant's acts will not have legal effect, although they may in fact be unchallengeable until the territory is liberated. He is not entitled to treat the country as his own territory or its inhabitants as his own subjects..., and over a wide range of public property, he can confer rights only as against himself, and within his own limited period of de facto rule.'J. Stone, Legal Controls of International Conflict, 697 (1959).'
Hansell quotes Julius Stone as the authority on what can be done under belligerent occupation. But he bases the idea that the territory is considered occupied on his own reasoning, with no references.
It has been shown in Chapters 3 and 7 that there are solid grounds in international law for denying any sovereign title to Jordan in the West Bank, and therefore any rights as reversioner state under the law of belligerent occupation.
The grounds on which Israel might now or in the future claim to have such tide have also there been canvassed. The initial point that arises under Article 49(6) of Geneva Convention IV of 1949 is more specific. Not only does Jordan lack any legal title to the territories concerned, but the Convention itself does not by its terms apply to these territories. For, under Article 2, that Convention applies "to cases of ... occupation of the territory of a High Contracting Party," by another such Party. Insofar as the West Bank at present held by Israel does not belong to any other State, the Convention would not seem to apply to it at all. This is a technical, though rather decisive, legal point.
What about settlements?
Hansell writes:
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, 12 August 1949, 6 UST 3516, provides, in paragraph 6: 'The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies'.Paragraph 6 appears to apply by its terms to any transfer by an occupying power of parts of its civilian population, whatever the objective and whether involuntary or voluntary. [Footnote: Paragraph 1 of article 49 prohibits "forcible" transfers of protected persons out of the occupied territory; paragraph 6 is not so limited.]
It seems clearly to reach such involvements of the occupying power as determining the location of the settlements, making land available and financing of settlements, as well as other kinds of assistance and participation in their creation. And the paragraph appears applicable whether or not harm is done by a particular transfer.
The language and history of the provision lead to the conclusion that transfers of a belligerent occupant's civilian population into occupied territory are broadly proscribed as beyond the scope of interim military administration.
Another view of paragraph 6 is that it is directed against mass population transfers such as occurred in World War II for political, racial or colonization ends; but there is no apparent support or reason for limiting its application to such cases.
Hansell is not a recognized legal scholar, and he is interpreting international law here without referring to any such scholars. His assumption that the background of why Article 49(6) was written has no bearing on its interpretation is almost breathtaking in its naked self-assurance.
Here is what Stone wrote about the settlements' legality, even assuming that the territory is considered occupied. Again, this is Stone's area of expertise. I am editing this fairly ruthlessly because of its length, but you can read it all here.
It is clear that in its drafting history, Article 49 as a whole was directed against the heinous practice of the Nazi regime during the Nazi occupation of Europe in World War II, of forcibly transporting populations of which it wished to rid itself, into or out of occupied territories for the purpose of "liquidating" them with minimum disturbance of its metropolitan territory, or to provide slave labor or for other inhumane purposes. The genocidal objectives, of which Article 49 was concerned to prevent future repetitions against other peoples, were in part conceived by the Nazi authorities as a means of ridding the Nazi occupant's metropolitan territory of Jews—of making it, in Nazi terms, judenrein. Such practices were, of course, prominent among the offenses tried by war crimes tribunals after World War II. ...
...Article 49, paragraph 6, uses similar language, though with significant differences, forbidding the occupying power to "deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." Notably, paragraph 6 does not include the peremptory clause "regardless of motive," so that the spirit of its provision, as well as the letter, requires attention. Dr. Pictet's commentary acknowledges "some hesitation" and some doubts in the drafting as to its relation to the above main preoccupation of Article 49. He observes, "It is intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War by certain Powers, which transferred portions of their own population to occupied territory for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed, to colonize those territories. Such transfers worsened the economic situation of the native population and endangered their separate existence as a race."
It is clear that historically the victims of the terrible abuses that Dr. Pictet, as well as this writer, regards as a key to interpreting paragraph 1, included many thousands who were nationals of the Nazi occupying power in Nazi metropolitan territory, and who were deported (e.g., to Poland). Many of these, for example the Jews, had shortly before the relevant time been deprived of German nationality, presumably in order to expose them more easily to arbitrary action.
If and insofar, therefore, as Israel's position in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) is merely that of an occupying power, Article 49 would forbid "deportation" or "transfer" of its own population onto the West Bank whenever this action has the consequence of serving as a means of either (1) impairment of the economic situation or racial integrity of the native population of the occupied territory; or (2) inhuman treatment of its own population.
Impairment of Racial Integrity of the Native Population of the Occupied Territory. ...Despite vociferous political warfare pronouncements on both sides, it seems clear, therefore, that no serious dilution (much less extinction) of the "separate racial existence" of the native population has either taken place or is in prospect. Nor do well-known facts of dramatic improvement in the "economic situation" of the inhabitants since 1967 permit any suggestion that that situation has been worsened or impaired.
Insofar, moreover, as these or future settlements are merely directed to the requirements of military security in the occupied territory they do not violate either the spirit or the letter of this aspect of Article 49. And they also conform, as the preceding discourse has shown, to the general requirements of customary international law, embracing the relevant provisions of the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907, and its annexed regulations.
Inhuman Treatment of the Occupant State's Own Population. The second aim of the prohibition in Article 49(6) was, as has been seen, to protect the inhabitants of the occupant's own metropolitan territory from genocidal and other inhuman acts of the occupant's government. That this was part of, if not the main intention of Article 49(6) seems clear from the use of the term "deport," which clearly refers to a coerced movement of its population. The addition of the term "or transfer" does not alter this import. ...the word "transfer" in itself implies that the movement is not voluntary on the part of the persons concerned, but a magisterial act of the state concerned.
As contrasted with this main evil at which Article 49 was aimed, the diversion of the meaning of paragraph 6 to justify prohibition of the voluntary settlement of Jews in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) carries an irony bordering on the absurd. Ignoring the overall purpose of Article 49, which would inter alia protect the population of the state of Israel from being removed against their will into the occupied territory, it is now sought to be interpreted so as to impose on the Israel government a duty to prevent any Jewish individual from voluntarily taking up residence in that area. For not even the most blinkered adversary of Israel could suggest that the individual Jews are being in some way forced to settle in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank)! The issue is rather whether the government of Israel has any obligation under international law to use force to prevent the voluntary (often the fanatically voluntary) movement of these individuals.
On that issue, the terms of Article 49(6), however they are interpreted, are submitted to be totally irrelevant. To render them relevant, we would have to say that the effect of Article 49(6) is to impose an obligation on the state of Israel to ensure (by force if necessary) that these areas, despite their millennial association with Jewish life, shall be forever judenrein. Irony would thus be pushed to the absurdity of claiming that Article 49(6), designed to prevent repetition of Nazi-type genocidal policies of rendering Nazi metropolitan territories judenrein, has now come to mean that Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) must be made judenrein and must be so maintained, if necessary by the use of force by the government of Israel against its own inhabitants.
Hansell's short stint at the State Department was over before Stone's book, but the breadth of the legal analysis by Stone blows away anything done by Hansell.
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Elder of Ziyon
Tel Aviv, November 21 - An activist worried that human-driven climate change will doom civilization and disrupt the planet's fragile ecosystems within twelve years has found a kindred spirit in a homeless man who spends much of his time pacing back and forth near a downtown street corner with a placard warning of the imminent demise of humanity.
