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Contents:
To Condi; Who is Humiliating Whom?
"Student of International History" - Jewish Legal Occupation You maintain that you are "a student of international history." International law, the UN Charter, and Article 80 of the UN Charter implicitly recognize the Mandate of the League of Nations [Mandate for Palestine]. This Mandate granted Jews the irrevocable right to settle in the area of Palestine - anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.[2] You must be familiar with Professor Eugene V. Rostow, a world renowned expert of international law who served as the Dean of Yale Law School (1955-66), who later became the U.S. Undersecretary of State, and in 1967 was a key draftee of UN Resolution 242. He explains:[3] "The Mandates of the League of Nations have a special status in international law. They are considered to be trusts, indeed 'sacred trusts.' "Under international law, neither Jordan nor the Palestinian Arab 'people' of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have a substantial claim to the sovereign possession of the occupied territories. " . . . the mandate implicitly denies Arab claims to national political rights in the area in favor of the Jews; the mandated territory was in effect reserved to the Jewish people for their self-determination and political development, in acknowledgment of the historic connection of the Jewish people to the land. Lord Curzon, who was then the British Foreign Minister, made this reading of the mandate explicit. There remains simply the theory that the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip have an inherent 'natural law' claim to the area. Neither customary international law nor the United Nations Charter acknowledges that every group of people claiming to be a nation has the right to a state of its own. " . . . it is a rule essential to international peace that claims of national self-determination be asserted only through peaceful means. The international use of force to vindicate such claims is and must be strictly forbidden by the United Nations Charter." "Humiliation" In Israel, every Israeli is searched numerous times during the course of a day. Israelis are asked to open their bags and purses for inspection. In most cases, they are subjected to body searches with a metal detector every time they enter a bank or a post office, pick up a bottle of milk at the supermarket, enter a mall or train station, or visit a hospital or medical clinic. Young Israeli men and women are physically frisked in search of suicide belts before they enter crowded nightclubs. As a matter of routine, Israelis' car trunks are searched every time they enter a well-trafficked parking lot. Daily, their cars pass through roadblocks that cause massive traffic jams when Israeli security forces are in hot pursuit of suicide bombers believed to have entered Israel. These ordinary daily humiliations now extend to similar searches when Israelis go to weddings or bar mitzvahs. No one abroad talks about the humiliation Jews in Israel are subjected to, having to write at the bottom of wedding invitations and other life cycle events, "The site will be secured [by armed guards]" - to ensure relatives and friends will attend and share their joyous occasion. To date, no one protests the fact that, since the 1970s, Jewish schoolchildren in Israel are surrounded by perimeter fences, with armed guards at the schoolyard gates. Not one Arab village in Israel in JUdea and Samaria has a perimeter fence around it. Guards are not required at Arab shops, cafes, restaurants, movie theaters, wedding halls or schools - either in Israel or in Judea and Samaria. Palestinians also do not need armed guards to accompany every school trip, youth movement hike or campout. They are not targets of terrorism. Arab children have never been willfully attacked by Jews, while Arabs have deliberately murdered Jewish youngsters at boarding schools, junior high school students on overnight trips and teens on nature hikes. Arab Palestinians attacked Jewish school buses carrying elementary school children, murdered two children playing in a cave near their homes, killed a toddler in a nursery and murdered small children hiding under their beds - all in addition to wave after wave of suicide bombings. Israelis' freedom of movement is compromised daily as countless citizens seek to avoid crowded areas or events, change their daily routines by sticking to side streets, avoid traveling close to public buses, or simply stay out of the heart of their own capital entirely. Most school trips have been cancelled or curtailed during the past four years. Israelis are told, to disguise themselves when traveling abroad - not to speak Hebrew in public and not to wear garments that reveal their Jewish/Israeli origins. On the other hand, Arabs who frequent Jewish cities and towns in Israel wear their traditional Arab headgear without fear of being attacked or harassed. In fact, Secretary Rice, the average Israeli is "humiliated and harassed" far more times a day than the average Palestinian. Contribution to Civilized Society? Make Peace with a People that Celebrates Mass Murder? You believe Palestinian Arabs "have so much to give to the international community and to all of us." In fact, culturally, Palestinians are not distinct from other Arabs. The sole contributions Palestinians can take credit for are the invention of skyjacking for political purposes in the 1960s, and lately, a special brand of suicidal terrorism that uses their own children as delivery systems for bombing pizza parlors, discos, and public commuter buses. Michael B. Oren writing in the Wall Street Journal wonders: "How can there be peace with a people that celebrates mass murder? "There is, of course, nothing new about Palestinians applauding terror. During the Gulf War in 1991, they danced on rooftops in praise of Iraqi scud missiles raining on Israeli neighborhoods. Again, in the mid-1990s, after bus bombs in Israel killed dozens--one of them was my sister-in-law--an estimated 70,000 Palestinians filled a Gaza stadium to cheer a re-enactment of the massacre.The deaths of over 3,000 a.m.ericans on September 11 was another cause for dancing in Palestinian streets, though Arafat's men suppressed foreign coverage of the fete." [4] Condi; For Jews Building a Future Was Never Easy. Segregation Was a Casual Aspect of their Life. From a report by the Palestine Royal Commission after touring Palestine in 1937:[5] "With every year that passes, the contrast between this intensely democratic and highly organized modern [Jewish] community and the old-fashioned Arab world around it grows sharper, and in nothing, perhaps, more markedly than on its cultural side. The literary output of the National Home is out of all proportion to its size. "It is the same with science. The Daniel Sieff Research Institute [today Weitzman Institute] at Rehovot is equipped with the most delicate modern instruments; the experiments conducted there are watched by chemists all over the world: yet from its windows can be seen the hills inhabited by a backward peasantry who regard it only as the demonstration of a power they hate and fear and who would like, no doubt, when their blood is up, to destroy it." "speaking generally, whether it be the Jew who has been driven from a comfortable life in a cultured milieu and is now digging all day in the fields and sleeping in a bare cottage, or whether it be the Jew who has emerged from a Polish ghetto and is now working in a factory at Tel Aviv, the dominant feeling of both is an overwhelming sense of escape. The champions of Zionism have always held - and on the whole they are now proved right-that a Jew released from an anti-Jewish environment and "restored" to Palestine would not only feel free as he had never felt before but would also acquire a new self confidence, a new zest in living from his consciousness that he was engaged in a great constructive task. Did U.S. Policy Change? On June 30, 1922, a joint resolution of both Houses of Congress of the United States unanimously endorsed the Mandate for Palestine - the irrevocable right to settle in the area of Palestine - anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.[6] On September 21, 1922 - President Warren G. Harding, (the twenty-ninth president 1921-1923) signed the joint resolution of approval to establish a Jewish Homeland in Palestine. The facts speak for themselves - The truth does not always win, but it is always right. Eli E. Hertz eli@mythsandfacts.org [1] For the full text see: http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/73895.htm. [2] For the document see: http://middleeastfacts.org/content/UN-Documents/Mandate-for-Palestine.htm. For commentary see: http://www.mythsandfacts.com/Conflict/mandate_for_palestine/mandate_for_palestine.htm#B1. [3] Eugene V. Rostow Biography at: http://www.law.yale.edu/YLR/pdf/ylr50-2/Rostow.pdf. [4] For one description of the 'culture of glorifying death,' that drives immature adolescents to blow themselves to smithereens fueled by the 'promise' of seventy virgins when they get to Paradise, see: Michael B. Oren, "Palestinians Whoop It Up: How can there be peace with a people that celebrates mass murder?" The Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal at: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110002113. (11593). [5] Palestine Royal Commission report. July 1937, chap V, 110/556 [6] "Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. That the United States of America favors the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of Christian and all other non-Jewish communities in Palestine, and that the Holy places and religious buildings and sites in Palestine shall be adequately protected."
Moral Imperative: Help Non Jews Who Are Loyal to the State of Israel I write this piece as a religious Jew, as a journalist and as someone who worked for more than a decade as a social work professional in the Galilee. A recent discussion is now occurring within groups that raise funds for the Galilee region of Israel as to whether these funds should also benefit non Jews. On the face of it, this seems like an academic question. After all, 40% of the Israeli population who live in the Galilee region are not Jews. Indeed, the villages with no Jewish population whatsoever in the Galilee were also under the gun of the Hezbollah this past summer. Of the 52 Israeli citizens who were killed by Hezbollah artillery, 24 were non-Jewish Israeli citizens. Indeed, my two sons serve in IDF combat units with many loyal non Jewish Israeli citizens who live in the Galilee - Bedouins, Druze, and Circassim - three non Jewish ethnic groups who fight for the state of Israel. The dilemma involved in aiding some of the non-Jews in the Galilee has nothing to do with their ethnicity. It has to do with their loyalty to Israel, and the extent to which their communities aid and abet the armies that are at war with Israel. Throughout the 34 days that Hezbollah fired 4,000 missiles aimed at Israel's civilian communities in the Galilee, some of the democratically elected leadership of the Israeli Arab communities who sit in Israel's Knesset expressed support for the Hezbollah, and went so far as to cross the lines to travel to Syria and Lebanon to express their support for the Hezbollah attacks. The Arab deputy mayor of Haifa was forced to resign his position after he supported Hezbollah attacks on his own city. Yet the past few months have witnessed countless polemical pieces which claim that Israel neglected to prepare its civil defense system for the Israeli Arab population in the north. The fact is that shelters were not prepared in any part of the Galilee, with the notable exception of Kiryat Shmoneh. What most media outlets have not reported is that many of the Israeli Arab municipalities simply refused to cooperate with the Israel Defense Force Civil Command. A case in point: In July, after two Arab children were killed in the Israeli Arab city of Nazareth, Ronny Sofer, the correspondent from the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot arrived on the scene and discovered that the city council of Nazareth had cut off the air raid sirens, as had other Arab municipalities, because they did not want to be bothered on Israel Memorial Day or Holocaust Remembrance Day. Some of the Israeli Arab municipalities had even refused to cooperate with the Israel Defense Force civil command in the construction of air raid shelters. So if a given non Jewish community in Israel flies the flag of Hezbollah instead of the Israeli flag, the address for their humanitarian needs may lie elsewhere. That is the dilemma for the people who contribute to the Galilee region of Israel: to help Israel's loyal citizens, not to buttress a fifth column.
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