By Ted Belman
Barak made a generous offer in 2001. Livni was even more generous and Olmert went “as far as Israel could go”. Now its Netanyahu’s turn to give away the land.
David Radek, HAARETZ, reports Netanyahu examining possible future borders of a Palestinian state.
You will recall that Obama wanted Israel to present a map. Evidently Netanyahu has been working on one with the advice of Tezra, who prepared the map for the Olmert offer.
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During the peace talks that followed the Annapolis Conference in November 2007, Terza was part of the negotiating team on border issues. He was the one who drew up the withdrawal map that Olmert presented to Abbas in August-September 2008. The Olmert map included an Israeli withdrawal from 93.2 percent of the West Bank, with a land swap encompassing 6.5 percent of the territory.
netanyahu – Michal Fattal – August 30 2011
Terza also drew the map that Livni presented in her talks with PA official Ahmed Qureia. The Livni map included an Israeli withdrawal from 92.7 percent of the West Bank.
[..] The Prime Minister’s Bureau has confirmed that Terza is advising Netanyahu. “The prime minister is meeting with Danny Terza in order to learn from him about the history of the efforts to put together maps of the area of Judea and Samaria during the term of the previous government,” said a statement from the Prime Minister’s Bureau. “No border line was decided upon at the meetings, and no agreed upon map was drawn.
What this illustrates to me is that Netanyahu is not thinking of any bold moves. He is entertaining very minor variations of a lousy deal that Olmert offered to Abbas.
Howsoever you choose to characterize the Bible is supremely irrelevant, AE.
It is enough that — for WHATEVER your reasons — you don’t attend to it for historical authority.
I therefore don’t use it as an authority where YOU are concerned. I had SAID that once already.
Move on.
You cannot ‘supercede’ an international treaty except by another such treaty, which declares the former one henceforth null & void
— or by something within the treaty which, of its own operation, will bring about the treaty’s expiration.
This has never been done as to the San Remo Resolution.
Have you got that? — never been done.
Furthermore, even in those cases where a treaty DOES expire or IS superceded, the fact remains — and it IS a fact — that articulated rights & duties within treaties, having no statute of limitations, do not, as a matter of course, ‘expire’ with their original incorporating instruments, a legal reality affirmed by long-settled practice, and known colloquially in international jurisprudence as the Acquired Rights Doctrine.
This was codified in law in 1969 — IS 1969 RECENT ENOUGH FOR YOU? — as an integral part of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties [informally, “the Treaty on Treaties”], Article 70 (1) b:
“Unless the treaty otherwise provides or the parties otherwise agree, the termination of a treaty, under its [own] provisions OR in accordance with the present Convention, does not affect any right, obligation or legal situation of the parties created through the EXECUTION of the treaty prior to its [i.e., the treaty’s] termination…”
“Not even”? — as if G.O.I. were the substance of legitimacy OR currency of thought; the Last Word on the matter (like Mohammad, the very “sum” and “seal” of prophetic revelation).
Governments are typically the last elements to reflect currents of perspective — so your assertion at this point is meaningless. G.O.I. hasn’t pushed the rights of the Jewish People under law, because until now it hasn’t had to. When its back is pressed to the wall, we’ll see what develops. What’s more, as I said [above], “if the Pali’s [and their various-&-sundry cheering sections] actually try pushing a legal case on substantive legal grounds, they WILL… have to confront the implications of what I’ve… laid out.”
Actually, you’ve got that old expression inverted, AE:
When it’s appropriate to assert, it’s called “a distinction without a difference,” not vice versa.
But it’s not appropriate to assert, because there IS in fact a significant difference: between the historical reality and the outrageous, self-serving, condescending, SPIN JOB you placed on the facts.
You say that NOW, because I called you on it and rubbed your nose in your mess.
But until I did, you had previously written:
“The land was taken away and occupied by conquerors and lost to Israel until the Brits wrested it away from the Ottomans and were good enough to give Israel a small slice back as a safe haven…”
“Safe haven”? — from what?
The Shoah was over. A third of the world’s Jews were soap, lampshades & other household trinkets.
Controlled it only with the permission of the League of Nations.
As I’ve said, you still have no comprehension of the mandate system created by the League.
The old imperial manner did not hold sway as before.
HMG had to answer to the League:
regularly,
in person
and in writing
as to each of their mandate trusts.
If it were not for them [the UK], there would have been no Shoah
— because the Jews would have been able to flee Europe to their ancestral homeland,
the only place that would have them,
the only place they would’ve been reasonably safe.
What you are doing, Eagle, is trying to make use of the moral capital generated by the Lloyd-George Cabinet between 1917 & 1922
— to justify everything thing that each of the subsequent British cabinets did to the Jews thereafter.
Well, there’s no way you can square that
— no way, Sir.
The Bible is a religious text based on faith beliefs – not useful as “evidence” in the real world of politics.
This has been obsolete for decades, superceded by scores of other events and decisions. Not even the Israeli government claims this “river to sea” baloney.
We call this a difference without a distinction. To begin with, no one wins a WW single-handedly. Secondly, the Brits controlled the Levant after the Ottomans collapsed. If it were not for them there would be no Israel in their ancestral homeland.
You are assuming I take the deed-of-trust to be the Bible. Wrong. I did not say (or suggest ) that.
Since you don’t take the Bible seriously I never use it as an authority when corresponding with you specifically. (With others I might, but not with yourself.) The only time I reference the Bible (or its contents) with you, AE, it is to illustrate for you the appalling extent of your ignorance & misinformation in regard to Judaism and the Jewish People.
The “deed-of-trust” to which I alluded was the San Remo Resolution [of Apr 24-25, 1920], which ordered creation of the Mandate for Palestine, and awarded it to His Majesty’s Govt as League of Nations Mandatory.
Your narrative shows, rather glaringly, however, not only that you have not studied the three decades of Palestine Mandate history, but also that you have no comprehension, as yet, of what the mandate system created by the Principal Allied Powers was all about.
Contrary to your above-noted, cock-&-bull story, the Brits did NOT single-handedly win the War in the M-E and then nobly give a scrap of it to the Jews 30 years later… That silly narrative is the shallowest, self-serving twaddle, and would make even the most ardent propagandist in the Foreign Office gag — blushing all the while.
The Mandate was awarded to HMG by the Principal Allied Powers (four, of which the UK was one) and the Associated Powers (of which there were many) — because of a wartime promise the Lloyd-George Cabinet had given to the Jews [the Balfour Declaration]: to wit, that the UK would do what it could to foster the restoration of the Jewish National Home in its traditional country after the fighting ended. It was not a legally binding promise at the time it was made, as the War was still raging & the country was still held as a chunk of the vast Ottoman Empire — hardly something for HMG to be making ‘promises’ over.
After the War, however, the Principal Allied Powers awarded the Mandate to the Brits (rather than one of the other powers) BECAUSE of Balfour’s (eponymous) wartime pledge, and now ordered HMG to keep the pledge — an order and duty which HMG accepted: thereby making it thereafter a legally obligatory, International Treaty. This was the San Remo Resolution , that I cited earlier.
By the terms of the Mandate which that Resolution ordered, the UK was to prepare the Jews for self-govt in their own, acknowledged, historic national home — as explicitly recognized in the Mandate Charter’s Preamble [and it’s about time you read it] — and the British Mandate Administration in Jerusalem was required to issue an annual progress report to the League’s designated “watchdog,” the Permanent Mandates Commission.
Otherwise the UK could lose the Mandate.
That was the sole and entire PURPOSE of the Palestine Mandate, to prepare the Jews and the Land for sovereignty — Jewish sovereignty — it had no other purpose than that.
Aside from the Jews, no other people, nationality or ethnicity was promised sovereignty in this particular Mandate. All that was assured any other existing communities or persons there were the same civil rights, property rights and freedom of (peaceable) worship that was granted to ALL — as individuals. Sovereign rights of nationality in Palestine were accorded explicitly & exclusively to world Jewry — i.e., not merely those 85,000 Jews then presently in-country, but to the world’s then-14 million Jews scattered across the globe.
The Jewish National Home [JNH] was understood to embrace everything from River to Sea. That included the provinces of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. If the local ethnic Arabs didn’t want to live amongst free Jews, they were to be permitted to relocate to Transjordanian Palestine: the 80 percent of the Mandate that was gouged out of the JNH (arguably fraudulently), to seal the deal and presumably mollify any Arabs who begrudged the (until-then, customarily dhimmi ) Jews the right to self-determination.
As WWII approached, however, HMG threw the Jews overboard (about nine months after joining the French in selling out the Czechs at Munich), in order to curry favor with the Arab world: HMG issued a White Paper [May 1939], which violated an International Treaty by effectively countermanding the Mandate Charter . It made Jewish immigration to Palestine subject to a local Arab veto — and therefore, an Axis one as well: thus facilitating and expediting the Holocaust. The Permanent Mandates Commission cried foul, and could have taken away the Mandate from the Brits right then & there — but by now the War had overtaken everything else. The panzers & stukas crossed the Polish frontier, and legal niceties became a sad memory.
This kissing of Arab ass, BTW, turned out to be a fruitless gambit, as most of them threw in with the Nasties anyway. (Poetic justice of a most perverse sort.)
Even after the War, the Brits continued to renege on their solemn Mandate obligations to the Jews to prepare them for independent sovereignty.
So the Jews — at long last — took it to the streets. You could say that, in the end, HMG was “dishonorably discharged.”
Britain surrendered the Mandate back to the UN, successor to the League, but in so doing they put the matter explicitly into the hands of the General Assembly (not the Security Council). The Gen. Assembly endorsed partition/independence. But the UN Charter makes clear that Gen. Assembly has no authority to create (or approve creation) of states — let alone, otherwise dispose of Mandate territories. It can only PROPOSE or EXHORT — not command or create. So UNGA 181 [the Partition-qua-Independence Resolution] had no legal force to creat ANY state: Arab, Jewish, or Martian.
The truth is that what created the Jewish state was the Jewish Declaration of Independence [15 May 48] — and the Jewish blood & tears that went to defend it. In other words, fromthe standpoint of the Mandate and International Law, it was a Declaration which COULD have been made at any time after the Mandate Charter was ratified [24 July 1922].
Whether HMG would have tolerated such a move, and whether the Yishuv [the Jewish community in Palestine] would’ve had the wherewithal at that juncture to force the issue, as they eventually did after WWII, is a separate question, TBS, but legally the Jewish Agency [created in Article 4 of the Mandate] could have declared independence at any point subsequent to the 1922 Ratification.
And if the Pali’s — or their simpering sycophant toadies in the media, academic & diplomatic universes — actually try pushing a legal case on substantive legal grounds, they WILL, I quite assure you, have to confront the implications of what I’ve just laid out.
Guaranteed, or your money back.
“Not quite so” was a poor choice of words on my part.
My point was that a purported Pali state wouldn’t be ONLY on both sides of the Jewish state — and nowhere else
— the way that, for example, Pakistan was ONLY located on both sides of the Indian Republic (from 1946 till the 1971 independence of BanglaDesh in place of what had been East Pakistan).
The point in my post was that a “connecting corridor” would mean that such a new state would interpenetrate Israel as WELL as border her on the East & Southwest. In THAT sense, certainly, Yidvocate is correct in saying a Pali state would then exist within the heartland of the Jewish state. More significantly, though, it would create a much, much longer BORDER than would otherwise be the case — and the patrolling of it, a logistical nightmare that would spread the IDF manpower pool dangerously thin.
Yidvocate, you are not making any sense, man. If the Palis were civilized and peaceful you would not have had the senseless conflicts of the last 65 years. What you would have had was a democratic Pali state living in economic cooperation and harmony with a Jewish state.
I don’t see any logic in this purely emotional statement.
The Jews did not discard anything. It was taken from them by force and lost for centuries until the Brits came along. Most societies in history were unable to reclaim ancestral lands they lost by force if they were unable to develop their own force and reclaim it themselves. The Hindus who lost their ancestral lands to the Indo-Pakistani partition are a good example.
They simply moved on with their lives, as Jews did before Israel was formed.
Only if you let them. They could be dispersed over what is now Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Millions of Hindus from what is now Pakistan were absorbed by India and other countries.
Quite so. The Arabs can be relied upon for one thing for sure – they never fail to save us from ourselves. I maintain that even if they were the most civilized and peaceful of the earth, were Israel to cede J&S and any part or parts of Jerusalem to them, it would be the death knell for the Jewish state. If Israel has no right to exist in J&S and Jerusalem then it has no legitimacy in any part of the Middle East. A nation that discards it’s past and the very ethos of it’s national existence is doomed to fail and perish. The cradle of Jewish existence is in J&S and Jerusalem and sans those territories there is no survival of the Jewish state. Then there are the practical considerations. The flooding of millions of so called Arab “refugees” into those territories would exhaust the water supply and wreck untold environmental damage. This tiny sliver just can’t sustain such load.
The last time I checked Gaza and the West Bank are separated by a portion of Israel, so it is quite so.
Nonsense. There is no deed-of-trust in geo-politics much as you would like to pretend there is. The land was taken away and occupied by conquerors and lost to Israel until the Brits wrested it away from the Ottomans and were good enough to give Israel a small slice back as a safe haven after the horror of the Holocaust and other pogroms against the Jews.
If the Palis had not been hate-filled and greedy barbarians they would have been pleased with what they were given and they and the Jews could have lived happily ever after in a Semitic and democratic economic union which would have been a shining example to the radical Muslims in the rest of the middle-east. Alas, that did not happen and now they don’t deserve anything as far as I’m concerned especially since they continue to be intransigent.
It is you who is ignorant. A two state solution was accepted by Israel’s Zionist founders and remains Israeli government policy since, even though it cannot be accomplished because of the intransigence of the Palis.
dweller;
WE know it but the idiot Bibi and his collegues seem ignorant. For heaven’s sake send them an Email and wake them up.
Obviously what you meant to say, Yidvocate, was “a Pali state in the heart of the historic Land Of Israel would mark the end of the Jewish state” — since the heartland provinces are unincorporated, not presently part of the Jewish state. Hence AE’s comment.
But THIS is not quite so either, Eagle.
The said local ethnic Arabs insist that their contemplated state be “contiguous” — which would necessitate a corridor rendering Israel herself non-contiguous.
But the entire proposition is, in ANY case, spurious — even if hell WERE to freeze over and the Pali’s became “civilized,” “cooperative,” peaceful” and all the rest of it.
The simple fact of the matter is that the land isn’t theirs.
The deed-of-trust has somebody else’s name on it.
The Palestinian state would not be in “the heartland” of the Jewish state but it would be on either side. Neither will it mark the end of the Jewish state if it would remain cooperative and peaceful. However, my suggestions in No. 3 above address the fact that they have not been cooperative nor peaceful since Israel’s inception – in fact they have been downright hostile – which is why they should not be allowed statehood until they learn to be civilized – which may be sometime after hell freezes over.
Please don’t forget that they would have had a state had they acted civilized in 1947 and since by accepting Israel as a Jewish state and living in peace and economic cooperation with Israel.
A “Palestinian” state in the heartland of the Jewish state of any dimension will mark the end of the Jewish state.
There should be no Palestinian state until the dominant Palestinian organizations a) accept Israel as a Jewish state, b) renounce violence, and c) formally and publicly amend their founding charters to reflect these changes.
It’s called following-the-path-of-least-resistance
— and it’s the way a river becomes crooked.
Keep making those deals as lousy as possible.