On Settlements, Agreements and Legitimacy: Part II
Continued from Part I.
[1] [emphases added]
[2] over—its then-sparsely populated, scarcely cultivated,[3] ancestral motherland (plainly, the only logical place for it),[4] the Mandate’s Preamble had pointedly cited
[5]
[6]
These conclusions find concurrent expression and development in the remarks of the distinguished author and diplomatic envoy, H.E., Dore Gold, President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, and Former Ambassador of Israel to the UN [1997-99]:
Significantly, the League of Nations Mandate did not create new rights, but rather acknowledged a pre-existing right which, in the view of the international community at the time, had clearly not been forfeited by the Jewish people or suspended by international law after successive empires occupied and ruled Jerusalem and the rest of the area of Palestine in the intervening centuries.
[7] [emphases added]
[8] has the gargantuan effrontery to be demanding that the State of Israel—authorized representative, agent and guardian of the sovereign Jewish People (the duly designated heir and lawful beneficiary of the Mandate)[9]—ignore the fact that the indefeasible Title Deed to the parcel has the Jews’ name written virtually all over it§ (and nobody else’s, anywhere on it), and that the Jewish State instead end what the cheeky Chief, resorting again to the trendy, formulaic spin, characterizes as “the occupationΣ which began in 1967”: a further flight of rhetorical fancy—in which the aforesaid Mr Erekat, once again (surprise, surprise!), avidly, vigorously and instantly joined him.
[10] capital of Israel: the sector containing the Temple Mount and Kotel HaMa’aravi, its Western Wall,[11] as well as Hebrew University, the City of David, Hadassah Hospital, etc, together with the provinces of Judea, Samaria and Gaza—all of which lands & locales were part of geographic Palestine, the historic Land of Israel, and which had been originally intended by the League, and thus so projected in the international Mandate and its commissioning (and never legally vacated or superseded), San Remo Resolution, for incorporation within the Jewish National Home—had been unlawfully seized from the United Nations temporary trusteeship,Λ and retained, in defiance of the Security Council, by two of the five neighboring, Arab states.
to assure that she would thereafter stay dead, of, quite literally, exterminating her Jewish citizenry.
à would turn out to be “nothing but a line of fire and blood.” [12] (Some neighborhood, eh Toto? But then, we’re not in Kansas anymore.)
[13] For these governments, solicitude for the well-being of Palestinian Arabs—who didn’t even live in those areas—provided but the sheerest of pretexts for the assault.
Ð (one percent of this country’s [present] citizenry would well exceed three million)—as well as another five times that number, seriously wounded;
[17] —and the world body acknowledged the legitimacy of the Jewish Commonwealth in ensuing resolutions characterizing Israel as a “peace-loving state” at the time she applied for UN membership in 1949.
‡ had been foiled. However, the illegal possession and occupation of the aforementioned, snatched territories did not end at this time—as the “Nefarious Zionist Entity” made no move to take them from the usurpers,[18] who continued thus to hold them, heedless of legal niceties.
x
[19]—clothe your nakedness by blaming the victim: always a winning gambit (time-proven), and no one will care afterward (provided of course that the victim cooperates in his dispatching; an uncooperative victim is arguably the worst kind).
How prescient he was. Δ and 30-century-long capital of the Jewish People—the only people at any point in time in all those centuries, and for better or for worse, to have ever bothered, or cared—or even proposed—to make that city its capital.
All of which quite naturally prompts two vital, inescapable (sets of) questions:
?
or in the then Egyptian-held, Gaza Strip?
And:
[20]
? decision in 2005, and army-implemented operation late that summer, to forcibly evacuate all 9000 of its own, resident Jewish citizens from the 21 thriving, industrious, unobstreperous Jewish communities of Gaza—and the consequent power vacuum created inevitably thereby—that made possible the Palestinian Arab electoral burlesque of four months later (a cheery enough choice: to fertilize the garten of succeeding generations of fresh-faced, ethnic-Arab kinder with EITHER the bovine manure of Fatah OR the porcine manure of Hamas, most assuredly an embarrassment of riches)—thus opening the way, the following year, to the vicious, bloody coup [June 2007] that brought to prominence there the more openly baneful (though perhaps less cleverly calculating) of the local death cults, Hamas.
? to add to the previous five years of same; nearly ten thousand rockets in those eight years), and despite countless warnings to desist—thereby precipitating the inevitable, three-week-long, Operation Cast Lead, the long-overdue, Gaza War of late December 2008 and January 2009:
Very well, then:
In his own, Most Hallowed Name, amen and everlastingly (or at least till 2012)
and Sixties-retro, heavy-revvie, Maoist power-trippers (or perhaps the late-blooming, Jurassic Park, original version, lo and behold):
J together with the subsequent Arab inductees into the ranks,? these latter entrants’ enrollment explicitly conditioned by, among other things, their recognition of all the League Mandates—and in addition, per operation of the Convention, from 1925 forward, the government of THIS country: all of said governments to be
[22] had made the matter clear. That Resolution, adopted [30 June 1922] without so much as a single dissenting, abstaining or “absent” vote from any legislator of either party, in either chamber, was signed into law by President Warren Gamaliel Harding less than 90 days later [21 September].
[23]
[24] And, since the late 1960’s, that goes increasingly, as well, for a calcified and clueless, smugly elitist, mainstream media.
[25]
[26]—an American Chief-of-State thereby stands likewise, and pari passu, in contempt of his own solemn oath of office,[27] and in defiance, as well, of Article 2, Sec. 3 of the US Constitution, which demands that he “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
[28]: recently attested electorally thereunto in the Republic’s periodic, trick-or-treat tryst with the ballot box,Þ may well have something to say about all that, soon enough.
Legitimacy, indeed.
THE PRINCIPLE AND DOCTRINE OF ESTOPPEL
[or sovereign power—Author] is barred from denying or alleging a certain fact or state [of] facts because of that individual’s [or power’s] previous conduct, allegation or denial…
From Black’s, Centennial Edition, 552:
Howard Grief’s remarks on the applicability of estoppel to the post-Mandate situation:
protesting the establishment of these settlements, because they are based on a right which became embedded in US domestic law after the 1924 Convention was ratified by the US Senate and proclaimed by President Calvin Coolidge on December 5, 1925.
.
NATIV online: A Journal of Politics and the Arts, Vol. 2, 2004: www.acpr.org.il/ENGLISH-NATIV/02-issue/grief-2.htm]
Part of the reason is that successive Israeli govts have failed to assert Jewish National Rights under the Mandate and San Remo.
the Allied nations, with the fullest concurrence of our own [i.e., American—-ed] Government and people, are agreed that in Palestine shall be laid the foundations of a Jewish Commonwealth…” [emphases added]
Thus, remarks Netanyahu, by way of elaboration,
And Reverend Parkes adds the observation that
Charter, Mandate for Palestine, Op cit., Preamble, Par. 3.
in PALESTINE, as they never in history had any. [boldface in original</strong>; CAPS & underscore added]
www.thinkIsrael.org/brand.jewishsovereignty.html]
www.mazopublishers.com]
www.think-israel.org/belman.israelownssamariajudea.html</a>; and, as well, for its comprehensive clarity, Wallace Edward Brand’s compendious [above-cited] “Israeli Sovereignty, etc.”
Population of Jerusalem in 1948
Jewish
100,000
61
Muslim
40,000
24
Christian
25,000
15
Total
165,000
100
Jerusalem (John Day, NY, 1974), 1; Israel Central Bureau of Statistics; Jerusalem Foundation; Municipality of Jerusalem; cited in Mitchell Bard, Myths & Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict (AICE, Chevy Chase, MD, 2001), 263]
leaving tiny pockets in Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo. And then, all memory of this awesome convulsion disappeared from the world’s consciousness—-if it had ever been noticed in the first place. [emphasis added]
Palestinian Arab evacuees (and in contrast, as well, to the generous support the organized world community has continually provided to several succeeding generations of the latter’s rapidly proliferating descendants ever since, and now well into a seventh decade)—absolutely nothing.
[w]here the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully, the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense has, against that prior holder, better title. It is a matter of history that Israel only entered the West Bank in self-defense. It is also a matter of record that the UN rejected Soviet efforts to have Israel branded as the aggressor in the Six-Day War.[emphasis added]
would-be nation.” [emphasis added]
Harding had actually expressed personal appreciation and support for the Zionist enterprise several weeks before the Resolution arrived on the floor of either chamber:
I am very glad to express my approval and hearty sympathy for the effort of the Palestine Foundation Fund, in behalf of the restoration of Palestine as a homeland for the Jewish people. I have always viewed with interest, which I think is quite as much practical as sentimental, the proposal for the rehabilitation of Palestine and the restoration [to it] of a real nationality. [emphases added]
A History of Zionism (Longmans, Green & Co, Bombay, 1919), Vol. 1, 59]
Blackstone Memorial of 1891, and antedates by several years the publication of Der Judenstaat and the Herzlian beginnings of the modern movement of political Zionism.
A Concubine in the Middle East: American-Israeli Relations, Trans. from the Hebrew, Laurence Weinbaum (Gefen Books, Newlett, NY,[email protected], 1999). From Prof. Sohar’s translated text:
[T]here was never a real marriage between [the govts of] the United States and Israel. There was no unconditional support of one another, only close relations restricted to certain matters.The American attitude was reminiscent of the way one would behave towards a concubine or kept woman.
Boughttussa Pigginnam Pokenamus Americanus: not typically fatal but unfailingly excruciating, and in many quarters, highly contagious; lowered threshhold of susceptibility associated with risky electoral behavior of a cyclical nature, believed to be brought on by residual restlessness tied to relative youthfulness of the society under scrutiny; incubationary period [non-exhibiting] can be of broadly varying protraction. [email protected] An earlier version of this article appeared at Think Israel.
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