Benzion Netanyahu, who died Monday in Jerusalem at the age of 102, has been widely scrutinzed this week for his myriad contributions to the history of Zionism in Israel and the United States. Yet arguably the most important one has been overlooked. After World War II, Benzion Netanyahu, along with Irgun activist Peter Bergson, nephew of Mandatory Palestine Chief Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, and liberal American Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, drafted an article for inclusion in the United Nations Charter that could yet save the Jewish state.
The article became known as the “Palestine clause” for the protection it afforded to the right of Jewish settlement throughout the Land of Israel west of the Jordan River. Article 80 extended the guarantees to Jews afforded by the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine following World War I. The Mandate had recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and “the legitimacy of grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” Jews were guaranteed “the right of close settlement” throughout Palestine.
But where was “Palestine”? According to the Mandate, it comprised the land east and west of the Jordan River, stretching from Iraq to the Mediterranean. Jewish settlement rights in Palestine were limited only in one respect: Great Britain, the Mandatory Trustee, was empowered to “postpone” or “withhold” the right of Jews to settle east — but not west — of the Jordan River. To reward the Hashemite sheikh, Abdullah, for his wartime assistance, the British colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, removed the land east of the river, comprising three-quarters of Mandatory Palestine, to create the kingdom of Trans-Jordan.
No Jews would be permitted to settle there, but the internationally guaranteed right of Jewish settlement throughout truncated Palestine west of the river was preserved. It was that right that Article 80 secured after the expiration of the League of Nations. It explicitly protected the rights of “any peoples” and “the terms of existing international instruments to which members of the United Nations may respectively be parties.” The “Palestine clause” thereby guaranteed to Jews the right of “close settlement” throughout their remaining land west of the Jordan River, as the League Mandate had done.
With their careful draftsmanship Benzion Netanyahu, Peter Bergson, and Rabbi Wise extended League of Nations guarantees and secured United Nations authorization for Jewish settlement throughout the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. The legal right of Jewish settlement, except in the land siphoned off from Palestine as Trans-Jordan in 1922, has never been abrogated. Persistent efforts to undermine the legitimacy of settlements, according to international legal expert Julius Stone, have been nothing less than the “subversion . . . of basic international law principles.”
Article 80 was unaffected by the Six-Day War, which obliterated Jordanian control over Judea and Samaria (its “West Bank”). According to Security Council Resolution 242, Israel was permitted to administer that land until “a just and lasting peace in the Middle East was secured.” That has not yet happened, to be sure, but even then, Israel would only be required, under its carefully drafted language, to withdraw its armed forces — civilians were not mentioned — from “territories,” not from “the territories” or “all the territories.”
The “Jewish right of settlement,” according to Eugene V. Rostow, then America’s state undersecretary political affairs, “is equivalent in every way to the right of the existing [Palestinian] population to live there.”
Article 80 has never been repealed. But Benzion Netanyahu’s son, Prime Minister Netanyahu, seems inclined to disregard it. During his first term he signed the Hebron Protocol, confining 600 Jewish residents to a tiny ghetto in their ancient holy city. His critics may insist that he remains under the influence of his father’s right-wing dogmatism. But abundant evidence suggests otherwise, which is no doubt why his father often expressed concern that he son wasn’t tough enough to serve as prime minister.
Benzion Netanyahu helped to write the fundamental principle of Zionism, the right of Jewish settlement throughout the Land of Israel, into the United Nations Charter. How sadly ironic it would be if Benjamin Netanyahu, whose graveside eulogy paid loving tribute to his father’s great gift to his sons of “a sense of responsibility to our nation,” surrenders the land that his father tried with passionate determination and perseverance to preserve for the Jewish people.
Mr. Auerbach, professor emeritus of history at Wellesley College, is the author of “Hebron Jews, Brothers at War” and, just published, “Against the Grain: A Historian’s Journey” (Quid Pro Books).
@ CuriousAmerican:
Depends on what you’re trying to do.
If you’re trying to impress the world to respect your claims, then yes, it IS a waste of time.
But that would be the case regardless of HOW Israel went about it
— the world doesn’t give a flying fork about law. (That’s the JEWS’ bailiwick — not the world’s.)
OTOH, as LBJ used to say in an entirely different context:
— “grab ’em by the [uh, ahem. . . . ‘stones’?]
and their [the world’s] hearts & minds will follow along just nicely.”
That is to say, if you spend your time showing the JEWS how they are right, in Law
— then it’ll be time well spent
and not-at-all a waste of it.
CuriousAmerican Said:
I repeat that, to be binding,SC resolutions must state that it is a Ch VII resolution.
In fact Wikipedia makes the point
I have yet to see a SC resolution telling Arabs to stop fighting. Such resolutions are only directed against Israel when it is winning. The UN is corrupt and its determination of threats to the peace are only directed to us. Israel shouldn’t follow a corrupt law or demand. So I am with you in saying Israel shouldn’t listen to them even if it is a Chap VII resolution that prejudices Israel. The UN shouldn’t be the arbiter of what threatens peace. I will post a very important article to this effect.
@ Wallace Brand:
Amen.
For better or for worse.
@ CuriousAmerican:
I’m doing nothing of the sort.
I’m simply telling you how Jews think.
Not how they OUGHT to think.
But how they actually do think.
It’s you, with all due respect, who are distracted.
You’re saying, ‘Be rational.’
I’m saying, ‘But they’re not rational.
— and you have to meet them not where you’d like them to be
but where they ARE.’
Doesn’t MATTER what the Arabs (or any other folks) think
— matters only what the JEWS think
because only that determines whether they’ll fight.
And Israel’s existence depends solely on whether Jews WILL fight.
If it suits his purposes, the Arab will find a way to explain it away
— ‘The Jews put that in there, so they could pull it out.’
The Arabs believe their own PR. — Why would artifacts impress them? — Get real.
@ yamit82:
He didn’t actually do that much time.
Kahane got himself arrested DOZENS of times — maybe several dozens of times; usually to make a statement (more often than not).
Kahane seems to have made a hobby of it.
But I think the most time he ever did at one stretch was 6 months, in Ramla.
And I seriously doubt that that happened more than that one time.
But this is really beside the point; even if he’d done twenty years, it might not necessarily reflect credibility so much as compulsiveness.
I’m NOT saying he ‘wasn’t’ credible — but rather that amount of time in stir is, of itself, no criterion.
@ CuriousAmerican:
Again, this is a misstatement of the significance of International Law.
Nobody is saying — okay, YoursTruly isn’t saying — that ‘Israel’s existence is based on International Law.’
Rather, Israel’s existence is based on the willingness of Jews to fight for it; nothing more, or less.
Got that? — not International Law, but the willingness of Jews to spill blood.
But Jews, in turn, WON’T spill blood without the certainty that what they do IS lawful.
That’s what makes law essential — not that International Law itself is the basis for the Jewish State, but rather that
— Law alone will MOTIVATE the Jew to fight.
Res 181 WAS a mistake.
It violated the Mandate.
The Mandate was in the nature of an International Treaty, complete with full ratification — and part of the same system which made Arab independence of the Turks possible.
Abandon the one, abandon the other.
@ Wallace Brand:
Part Five of the NILI-Aaronsohn Story
Twenty years after the War, and languishing yet in the political wilderness, Churchill would reflect on the consequences of the decision of Gen. Robertson & the Admiralty to forego Aaronsohn’s orig. proposal of a No. coastal invasion. He properly credited Allenby, TBS, for his eventual victory. However, he noted pointedly that “it would have been far safer and far cheaper in life and resources to run a greater risk for a shorter time. The advantage of command of the sea should not have been neglected. If while Allenby held the Turks at Gaza, a long-prepared descent had been made at Haifa or elsewhere on the seacoast behind them, and if the railway by which alone they could exist had been severed in September by a new army of six or eight divisions, the war in Syria would have been ended at a stroke.” [Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis (Odhams Press, London, 1938), p. 1208]
This, in turn, would have freed-up the EEF for transfer to the Western Front in good time to take on the German spring offensive [March 1918] — which, in its own turn, might actually have accelerated the ending of the War, & even brought it to a more decisive conclusion. “What I dread,” pondered at the time the prescient Black Jack Pershing [commander of all US Expeditionary Forces in Europe, Gen. John J. Pershing], “is that Germany doesn’t know she was licked.” [cited in Kevin Baker, “Black Jack Pershing,” Military History, Oct 07, p. 52]
Sir Winston mused further: “It will be incredible to future generations that the strategists of an island people then blessed with the unique and sovereign attribute of Sea Power should…have failed so utterly to turn it to offensive profit.” [Churchill, Ibid]
As you’ve noted, Wallace, the price paid by the NILI agents for their devotion — upon exposure of the network [quite by chance, actually, in Sept 1917, when a carrier pigeon fell into Turkish hands] — was enormous. “Djemal [Djemal Pasha, Ottoman C-I-C] was beside himself with rage.” [Ephraim Karsh & Inari Karsh, Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923 (Harvard U. Press, Cambridge, 1999), p. 169]
Imprisonment & torture (no, I don’t mean “water-boarding”; I mean torture) descended like a hammer on the group, & the agricultural station was totally demolished — most of this barely a month before the drama at Be’er-sheva that would crown the spectacular success of NILI’s efforts: indeed, scarcely a few poignantly ironic weeks before the early November issuance of the very Balfour Declaration that might have protected them, and just 5 more before Allenby’s taking of Jerusalem on 9 Dec.
[Fearing the propaganda value of the announced Declaration — which was hailed by countries around the globe & as far away as Siam {after 1932, Thailand} — the Central Powers: Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria & Turkey, upon learning of Balfour’s announced Pledge, had all gone out of their way to issue comparable, if belated, expressions of support for Jewish immigration, Jewish settlement & Jewish autonomy in Palestine.]
Yet for some of the Zichrohn operatives, there would be more, & far heavier, consequences of their work & its discovery by the Turks: 2 of the leaders were hanged in Damascus [16 Dec], and during a pause in the extended torture session that she was subjected to, Sarah Aaronsohn secured the use of a hidden pistol & killed herself, to insure that she would not, in a moment of weakness & exhaustion, reveal vital information to her tormenters.
[Looks like Part Four: The Raid (which I MAY have mislabeled “Part Three”) has gone into the ozone — though I’m sure it’ll come out again, shortly. If it doesn’t, I’ll put it together anew. Cheers — dw]
@ Wallace Brand:
Part Four of the Nili-Aaronsohn Story
The critical & telling significance of the Zikhrohn group’s contribution was a conclusion fully shared by the Commander’s deputy military secretary & biographer, Capt Raymond Savage: “It was very largely the daring work of the young spies, most of them natives of Palestine, which enabled the brilliant Field Marshal to accomplish this undertaking so effectively. The leader of the spy ring was a young Jewess…Sarah Aaronsohn.” [quoted by Anita Engle (author of The NILI Spies) in the Times Literary Supplement, 7 May 1993; see also Raymond Savage, Allenby of Armageddon: A Record of the Career and Campaigns of Field Marshal Viscount Allenby (Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1926)]
This assessment was confirmed, as well, by Allenby personally — upon hearing of Aaron Aaronsohn’s postwar death, at 43, when the latter’s RAF mail flight [15 May 1919] went down in fog over the English Channel, near Boulogne, on the way to the Paris Peace Conference: where Aaronsohn (to whom HMG was so greatly indebted, and thus as Weizmann’s choice to lead the Zionist campaign), had been bound, on one of his frequent missions to the Versailles proceedings on behalf of the Zionist Organization. In a 19 July 1919 letter of condolence to Dr Montague David Eder, the British psychoanalyst who became the first diplomatic representative of the Zionist Executive in Palestine, Allenby acknowledged that it had in fact been Aaronsohn who “was mainly responsible for the formation of my field intelligence organization behind the Turkish lines.”
Col. [later, Brig.] Walter Harold Gribbon, an Allied specialist in Turkish matters, estimated that, by providing the basis of an ultimately successful alternative to the original battle plan of the dogged (& occasionally less-than-imaginative) Allenby, NILI intel had spared the Allies some 40,000 British & ANZAC casualties in the Battle for Be’er-sheva alone — nearly 4 times the combined losses of the earlier two southern assaults on Gaza.
As it was, the town’s wells were taken in a lightning raid [31 Oct 1917] by 800 of the 4th & 12th Regiments of the Brig. Wm Grant’s Fourth Australian Light Horse & NZ Mounted Rifles Brigade, led by Lt. Col. Murray Bourchier. Armed with NILI intel, the raiders penetrated Be’er-sheva’s defenses & secured 15 of the 17 wells before the surprised, befuddled & demoralised Turkish defenders — who had been expecting a repeat of the earlier frontal offensives at Gaza — could execute a prepared plan to contaminate them.
The latter, commanded by German Gen. Kress von Kressenstein, had been successfully hornswoggled: misled in the field by Col. Richard Meinertzhagen’s “Haversack Plan,” a cleverly conceived ruse entailing misinformation, convincingly planted — at great personal jeopardy (and by that, I mean, while being shot at) — by the Colonel himself. [See Richard Meinertzhagen, Middle East Diary, 1917-1956 (Cresset Press, London, 1959)]
Allied casualties — in what constituted the first-ever Allied victory in the Land of Israel, and what has been characterized as the last successful mounted infantry charge in history — were limited to 31 dead, 36 wounded. [Those who did fall that day rest to this day, 95 years hence, in Be’er-sheva’s Old City.] What’s more, the shock & panic generated among the Ottoman forces by the charge and by subsequent feints, phantom encounters, bogus encampments & other diversionary manoeuvers — typically of the creative Aaronsohn’s own devising — led the Turks to abandon Gaza altogether, without firing a shot, and to retreat for a final stand at Jerusalem, which Allenby took, likewise without violence, the following month. This marked the first time in the better part of a millennium that the City was under non-Muslim control. Coming up: Part Five — The Consequences.
@ Wallace Brand:
Part Three of the NILI-Aaronsohn Story
The ancient town of Be’er-sheva [< Heb.: “Well of the Oath,” i.e., the oath attendant to Abraham’s covenant with Avimelekh] at the No. edge of the Negev — built on the bank of a wadi that would flood with rain water in winter, and first mentioned in the 21st chap. of Genesis [2000 BC] — had been rebuilt in modern times by the Turks in 1900 as an administrative center for So. Palestine. It was the only reliable source of water supply for any army bound west, by an inland route, for Gaza: gateway to Palestine from the South — and to Suez from the North. At Gaza the EEF, commanded by Allenby’s predecessor [Gen. Sir Archibald Murray], had already been stopped, twice, just a few months earlier, by a muscular Ottoman defense which had turned aside direct frontal assaults from the South while dealing heavy casualties (11,000) in the process, & whose defenses were now greatly augmented.
Clearly an alternative approach was called for. Aaronsohn favored a coastal attack: with landings preferably at Haifa, or possibly at Acre or Jaffa, or even Atlit, or at some other point along the No. Palestinian or Lebanese shoreline — rather than a land-based assault, across the Sinai Peninsula from EEF headquarters in Cairo: as he knew from his own careful observations that Turkish coastal defenses were notably weaker than Britain’s War Office realized. Such a coastal strategy offerred the especially promising prospect of enabling Allenby to cut the railroad line constituting the sole communications & supply line of the Ottoman forces in Gaza. However, the Admiralty War Staff & the C-I-C of all British forces, Gen. Sir William Robertson himself, were understandably gun-shy at considering another sea-borne invasion after the 9-month-long Gallipoli catastrophe of 1915.
[This refusal of the strategists to pursue a coastal plan was the reason Jan Christiaan Smuts had turned down Lloyd George’s offer of the command as Archibald Murray’s replacement, and chosen instead to serve in the UK Imperial War Cabinet — whereupon the command was offerred to the PM’s 2nd choice, Allenby.]
In view of the Admiralty’s skittish & short-sighted reservations, Aaronsohn proposed a fallback option, a more indirect approach, perhaps from inland — hence, Be’er-sheva. However, without knowing the precise positioning & configuration of Be’er-sheva’s wells & its defenses, Allenby’s forces couldn’t possibly have known whether the 35,000 troops of the defending 27th Ottoman Div would have time to destroy or contaminate the wells before being overwhelmed by the approaching, superior British force. Water & access to it would play a major role in the success or failure of any campaign in the region.
If there was to be sufficient time for the Turks to destroy the wells, it would mean Allenby’s mounted infantry — their horses, needed for both transport AND combat, and by now, already without water for 3 days — would be greatly encumbered & slowed: by virtue of the army, a massive force of 88,000, having to secure & carry its own water supplies as the campaign proceeded to its anticipated Gaza showdown. This would rule out a surprise attack & necessitate a vast commitment of men & materiel to frontal assaults like the previous 2 attempts I mentioned — and, as before (or worse than before), a far greater loss of life than an effectual surprise attack would entail. Coming up: Part Four — The Raid.
@ Wallace Brand:
Part Two of the NILI-Aaronsohn Story
The NILI espionage project was facilitated by Aaron Aaronsohn’s family living in Zikhrohn, especially his extraordinarily capable & dedicated sister, Sarah — who had personally witnessed the Armenian genocide from the train, in 1916, during the 3-week trip back to Palestine from Constantinople. Aaronsohn’s friends & his research associate from nearby Khedera: the poet Avshalom Feinberg — as well as the latter’s friend, Yosef Lishansky, head of the Jewish security organization, haMagen [“The Shield”] — played crucial roles in the endeavor. The NILI operations were based at Aaronsohn’s US. Dept. of Agriculture-registered and -promoted (though privately American-underwritten), experimental agricultural station in the neighboring coastal village of Atlit, a few miles south of Haifa. The Station was built in 1910 on land purchased & donated by the Jewish National Fund.
It had been originally created, because, altho the US govt (as then constituted) was unwilling, at the time, to fund it, American “plant hunters” — like David Fairchild, the agricultural explorer in charge of the US Dept of Agriculture Bureau of Plant Industry, & other USDA colleagues, like Walter Swingle, as well as the world’s then-perhaps premier expert in the field, Prof. Hilgard, of UC Berkeley — had, nonetheless, all shared an enthusiastic interest in Aaronsohn’s work, and, moreover, regarded it as most desirable for the scientific community to have an ongoing & “up-to-date Experimental Station and plant-breeding garden somewhere at the eastern end of the Mediterranean…[from which]…we could learn more about the agricultural crops of that region, and their suitability for cultivation in California.” [cited in Shmuel Katz, The Aaronsohn Saga (Gefen Publ Hs, Jerusalem, 2007), p. 17]
This project was in fact to be the beginning of the long & continuing “cross-pollination,” as it were, of mutually fruitful agricultural research between California & Eretz Israel. The Station was registered as an official US institution. American Jewish philanthropists, like Nathan Strauss & Jacob Schiff, as well as Julius Rosenwald (founder of Sears, Roebuck), arranged for the financing, and the Station’s trustees’ committee included Judges Julian Mack, Louis Brandeis & Felix Frankfurter (the latter two, subsequently raised to the SCOTUS bench), in addition to Rabbi Judah P. Magnes, Otto Warburg, Selig Soskin. Henrietta Szold (who would found Hadassah 2 yrs later) became its secretary. Of the group, at the time, only Szold, Soskin & Warburg were self-declared Zionists.
NILI’s 30 full-time operatives & their numerous contributing helpers were coordinated on the ground by Sarah Aaronsohn & they functioned behind Turkish lines. The network busied itself in collecting vital & indispensible data regarding Ottoman troop movements & defenses around Be’er-sheva, weather & road conditions, the locations of water sources & malarial swamps and the precise condition of every known route to Be’er-sheva from the Negev — and transmitting the crucial information to a British frigate that would anchor fortnightly just off-shore. This was essential & timely intel: which facilitated Allenby’s southern invasion & enabled his seemingly audacious operations in the field to be grounded in the assurance that his battlefield risks were in fact reasonable ones. Case in point: Be’er-sheva — coming up in Part Three.
@ Wallace Brand:
Actually Aaron Aaronsohn himself wasn’t executed, or even caught. (Others were, however — by the Ottomans.) His own death, however, shortly after the war, while he was still quite young, had a special poignancy all its own — which I’ll come to presently. The Aaronsohn story is a magnificent tale, beautifully described in (among other places) one of Shmuel Katz’s final offerings before his death a few years ago — and which story will, at some point, I am confident, make it to the silver screen. (I just hope they don’t botch it when it does.) I’m going to give it to you in chunks; it’s way too long for one post, or even 2 or 3. First, though, if I may, a little background; it’s important, the mise-en-scène.
Crucial to the success of the Palestine campaign — after Allenby, in spring of 1917, assumed command of the joint UK-ANZAC Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) — was the brilliant & effective but inescapably perilous work of the underground network code-named “N.I.L.I.” [from the Hebrew-language initials of its password: “Nehtzakh Yisrael Lo Yishahqair”—”The Eternal of Israel shall not fail {lit.: ‘lie down’}” (1 Sam 15:29)].
The network was organized in 1915 on the personal initiative, as you have noted, of the internationally celebrated (& largely self-taught) agronomist Aaron Aaronsohn [1876-1919]. The promethean & multi-faceted Aaronsohn was an Ottoman citizen of Palestinian Jewish farming family — his parents, among the original, 19th century, Romanian-born, pioneering founders of Zikhron Ya’akov. The young Aaronsohn had conducted researches in dry-farming & soil revitalization, and, in a development widely heralded within the international ag-science community, his on-site, botanical & geological studies of the Holy Land had led directly, when he was scarcely 30 years of age [1906], to Aaronsohn’s discovery — on the E slope of Mt Hermon (Upper Galilee region) — of a weather-resistant strain of primeval wheat: which he had hoped might grow in the still largely inhospitable soil of long-derelict Palestine.
Now, less than a decade later, Aaronsohn had become both personally & professionally alarmed that, if the recently begun War did not end soon, the Yishuv might not survive the region’s developing famine — largely a result of the Ottoman blockade of the Lebanese & Syrian coastline — accelerated & enormously aggravated now by the massive locust infestation which was devastating the agriculture of Palestine [Feb to Oct of 1915], and whose calamitous repercussions would have long-enduring effect.
Even more disturbing in Aaronsohn’s considered judgment was the manifestly astonishing brutality of the Turks & the likelihood that Beha-ud-Din would indeed make good on his threat of replicating the Turkish treatment of their own Armenian citizens upon the troublesome, ‘and anyway, probably disloyal’, Jews of Palestine. Just days after the Sublime Porte had joined itself to the Kaiser in the Great Struggle, Beha-ud Din (principal officer of the Ottoman 4th Army Commander) returned from the mass slaughter of the Armenians, and “openly boasted of doing much the same to the Jews if he ever got a chance.” [Simon Schama, Two Rothschilds in the Land of Israel (NY, 1978), p. 212]
Then, compounding matters, in the autumn of 1916, Aaronsohn had received ominous news of increasing deployments of Ottoman troops massing for a 2nd invasion attempt on the Suez Canal. A way had to be found of alerting the Brits — & of putting at their disposal his unrivalled knowledge of the country’s geography, as well as his established mobility through Turkish lines, a freedom that came with his formidable scientific credentials. Part Two, coming up.
@ Wallace Brand:
Actually the part which is directly from Toynbee was just the part that I’ve boldfaced above. The rest comes to you courtesy of that li’l old winemaker, me.
Yes, quite so. Thomas was Lawrence’s megaphone; he coined the phrase “Lawrence of Arabia.” Lawrence had a love-hate relationship with fame and never forgave Thomas for exploiting his image, calling him a ‘vulgar man’.
When asked about Lawrence’s aversion to celebrity, Thomas quoted an old Turkish saying, “He had a genius for backing into the limelight.”
As for Lawrence’s “finally” admitting his overstatement of Arab support to the Allies, actually he admitted it pretty early in the game, in private.
In one of his confidential reports, later published in Secret Despatches from Arabia [Golden Cockerell Press, London, 1939], the ever-resourceful & endlessly imaginative Thomas Edward Lawrence had acknowledged in 1918, at the height of his boisterously & obstreperously celebrated campaign to register the accomplishments of the Arabs, that Arab ‘nationalism’ was as yet a will-o’-the-wisp; indeed, in any concrete sense, a fabrication.
“The phrase ‘Arab Movement’ was invented in Cairo as a common denominator for all the vague discontents against Turkey which before 1916 existed in the Arab provinces. In a non-constitutional country, these naturally took on a revolutionary character and it was convenient to pretend to find a common ground in all of them. They were, most of them, very local, very jealous, but had to be considered in the hope that one or the other of them might bear fruit.” [p. 158]
Yes, at Gallipoli — the Zion Mule Corps [a supply outfit, muleskinners]. Then, later in Transjordan — this was Jabotinsky’s Jewish Legion: the 38th, 39th, 40th Battalions of the Royal Fusiliers; commanded by J.H. Patterson. His superb memoir: J.H. Patterson, With the Judaeans in the Palestine Campaign (Hutchinson & Co., London, 1922.
@ yamit82:
Most Jews, for sure. Period.
Full Stop.
Not sure that’s what it’s about, though I can see why you’d make the assumption.
Granted, but there aren’t enough of those to provide a substantial enough critical mass for the struggle ahead.
Don’t shoot the messenger; I don’t ‘make’ the news. I’m just reporting it.
If the Mandate subsumed those other things then the Mandate is not the justification.
It is sort of like saying: Good looks and 5 cents will get you a piece of bubble gum. The irony is that if you have the 5 cents, you do not need good looks at all.
You are arguing that “good looks” are essential. I am saying they are ultimately a distraction.
To appeal to an International Law, while Arabs consider Sharia to be the ONLY basis for International Law, is insanity.
The International Law, which framed the Mandate, was done at a time when the West was sincerely a Christian culture; and had some respect for the Bible and Jewish claims.
The West is post-Christian. Islam is now militant. International Law is too fickle.
From the Arab point of view, the whole Mandatory claim is insanity. It is illegitimate; and should never have happened. It is the lies of infidels.
However, pull a piece of Jewish artifact out of the ground in Judea and Samaria, and you have something the Arab cannot contest.
@ yamit82:
If you re-read the posting sequence, you’ll see that Curio was making (what I see as) a false distinction between International Law — which he regards as shifting & thus unreliable — and history, archeology, continuous presence in the land, and the Covenant — which he views as more solid as a basis for defense.
My point in making the above remark was not necessarily that the one is, or is not, objectively stronger than the other, but rather that the DISTINCTION he draws is more illusory than real. Examine the Resolution [San Remo] and Charter [Mandate] long enough, and it becomes clear that they subsume all those other things.
Jews — secular OR religious — won’t fight over power.
SOME peoples will,
SOME peoples would,
SOME peoples did.
Jews won’t.
Maybe so (to both parts of that proposition), but if you think you’ll be able to motivate, at any time during the present era, a sufficiently large, critical mass of Jews to spill blood — anybody’s blood (including their own) — over that argument, then you’ve really been snortin’ the wrong white powder, bubbele.
I warned you about that Dutch Cleanser; told you it was bound to short out your synapses. Now look what you’ve gone & done. Vey iz mir.
@ CuriousAmerican:
Curiously enough, Israel ALSO holds the record for being the only country that, effectively, isn’t permitted to ever sit on the Security Council.
(D’ya s’pose there might be a connection BETWEEN those two facts?)
Israel has been independently sovereign since 1948.
She’s never been permitted to take a rotating turn on the Council.
Not once.
Libya has.
Syria has.
Iran has.
Lotsa real winners.
Not the Jewish State.
I find it the oddest thing that virtually NOBODY — pro-Israel or con — ever takes much note of the fact. (And if they do, they sure-as-blazes don’t make heavy weather of it.)
There are countries that weren’t even members of the UN when Israel entered the ranks
— and THEY’VE sat on the Council (some of them, more than once).
There are countries that weren’t even STATES when Israel joined the UN
— and THEY’VE sat on the Council.
Not Israel. Not one freakin’ time.
And the Security Council should dictate to G.O.I.?
— about what, exactly?
About matters directly related to Israel’s very existence?
— LOL. . . .ROF. . . .LMAO. . . .
I’ve talked with Zunes about Israel — on the air, maybe 16-18 months ago.
He was being interviewed on a call-in show on talk radio — a prestigious, center-to-left, No. Calif. liberal am station with a massive 50,000 watt, “flame-thrower” signal that blankets the west coast of the North American continent (and a “skip signal” that embraces one helluva lot more than that at night).
The host, a pleasant enough guy, but steeped in all the usual lefty-liberal nostrums, was asking Zunes lotsa softball questions — and they were patting each other on the back right about having all the ‘correct’ insights
— right up until he got around to taking my call.
I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow. I’ll just say this much:
Zunes’ title is “Professor of Politics & International Studies”; he’s in his mid-to-late 50’s; he’s been teaching at USF for 17 years; he Chairs their Middle East Studies Dept; his specialty is International Law
— and he’d (quite literally) never heard of the late Prof. Julius Stone.
‘Nuff said?
@ yamit82:Certainly Schmuel Katz thought so too. But objective people can disagree on whether the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan were worthwhile, even if only temporary and “cold”, if they held for a long time and were not relied on unduly.
@ CuriousAmerican:Your support by Security Council resolution 580 is not much of a fact. Israel invaded because it had been attacked. Even during the truce that had been agreed to, Israel was attacked 240 times by PLO forces. The lagniappe (icing on the cake) was the attempt of the PLO to kill the Israeli Ambassador in London. Israel has the right under the UN Charter to defend itself, and even the Security Council has no authority to suspend that. Therefore Resolution 580 was ultra vires. The UN had no authority to make one side quit fighting while it was being ignored by the other side.
@ CuriousAmerican: Moses was the lawgiver. Jews have a passion to be law abiding. (Most Jews)
Jews can hold and have held Israel by force of arms, but they can fight better if they know they are obeying the law and defending what is theirs by International Law.. This doesn’t apply to the left wing. They have already decided on the “poetic truth” that it belongs to the Arabs — that can’t be dented by facts, reason or logic.
Projection! You think one Christian is one too many.
Check out the Sixth Crusade
Frederick II took control of Jerusalem.
There is a documentary on the Web which explains that upon the signed deal between Muslim and Christian, Jews were chased out.
You could go into other sources.
Shabbatzi Zvi started a migration back until the Turks forced him to recant. BTW: Some of the Hebron Jews can trace their roots to that movement.
@ CuriousAmerican:
From your link. “Council expressed concern and demanded Israel unconditionally withdraw all its military forces from Lebanon back to its internationally recognised border.
Resolution 509 went on to demand all parties observe the ceasefire in Resolution 508”
Therefore 509 was linked to 508. Was 508 kept by both parties?
CuriousAmerican in my opinion your assertion is an opinion, because, it will be hard to establish Israel ignored the UN (‘often rightly’), as ideally you would show significant evidence that there was no diplomatic activity as a result in the instance, you would have to establish that the resolutions concerned were reasonable, that Israel in the situation could comply, and that the resolution involved was capable of becoming binding and would stand up to legal scrutiny.
The relationship of Israel to the UN is complex and important. The UN itself is a curio of history. I believe that the reference to Ambassadors in reed boats of Isaiah 18 is to the historical overarching influence of Anglo-American policy in the ME and its outworking in the establishment of the UN, because remarkably at least 3 reed boats have sailed under the UN flag. The first one sank, the second made it to Barbados and the third was burnt in protest to the UN. Woe is pronounced. I suspect if Israel could ignore resolutions there would be no ‘woe’ to the UN…
@ CuriousAmerican:
Say What?
Your source for that BS?
For Christians of that time one Jew was too many unless he had something they wanted or needed, usually money.
Again what is your source?
@ BlandOatmeal:
Kahane spent enough time in prison over his principles, convictions and beliefs that would place him in the category where his credibility should not be questioned. That said he was also a realist and understood limitations but never over Torah principles. Begin was in the end a great disappointment and a truly a tragic figure. He was at the end a tragedy for us as well. All leaders should be suspect until tested.
@ Howard Jacobsen:
Howard,
Peacenik commies have more steadfastness and conviction than the Israeli PM. They forcefully pursue their unpopular views, in the face of strong opposition. Bibi is not a peacenik; he’s a milquetoast, and apparently he is for sale to the highest bidder. Ditto for all the rest of Israel’s leaders. Some of them might TALK big; but once an Israeli gets into a position of real power, he starts sitting in comfortable chairs that turn all past convictions into mush.
I believe Rabbi Kahane would also have sold out Israel, if he had become PM. If Begin could do it, so could he.
@ Wallace Brand:
I agree, but religion of Judaism gives the definition to he rest!
A Jewish Paradox
Imagine the following discussion between “Bob” and “Abe”, Bob is an activist in an American Jewish organization.
“Bob, are you religious?” – “God forbid.” – “Do you eat kosher?” – “Only if there is nothing else to eat.” – Do you observe Shabbat?” – “No.” – “Do you pray?” – “No.” – “Do you go to synagogue?” – “Once a year, to meet friends.” – “Are you religious?’ – “No.” – “What is Judaism?” – “A religion.” – “Who are you?” – “I am a Jew.”
He could have asked Abe similar questions.
“Abe – do you observe Shabbat?” – “At least once a week.” – Do you pray?” – “Three times a day.” – Do you eat kosher?” – “All the time.” – “Is Judaism religion?” – “Absolutely not.” – “Who are you?” – “I am a Jew.”
The essence of our Jewishness is being a family. For that reason the Torah does not call us Jews or Hebrews, but the “Children of Israel.” When we help absorb into Israel hundreds of thousands of immigrants form Russia and Ethiopia, we are helping our family members.
A Jew is a member of a nation defined by the religion of Judaism:
Calling Judaism a religion fails to recognize that the Jews constitute a genuine nation, in every sense of the word. A Jew can make the same claim as any nation–they have a set of laws covering every aspect of daily life and they have a land in which to practice those laws. Jews have their own unique language: Hebrew is essential to the Jewish People because language carries a culture from one generation to the next.
I cannot find any place, in the Torah, where G-d told Avraham Avinu that he would make him the father of a great religion. The promise was always positioned as nationhood. Four-hundred thirty years after that promise was made to the great patriarch, his descendants stood at Mt Sinai and HaShem told the people they would be a nation of priests.
First, understand that I am not talking about a nation meaning a country (like the STATE of Israel), which is defined by borders and passports. Rather, I am talking about a nation in the same sense we understand it in relationship to the Native American Indians. For them, we used to use the term “tribe,” but the term “nation” is more accurate. For the Jews, the analogy to a nation is a perfect analogy, because that, indeed, is what G-d told Abra(ha)m G-d would make Abra(ha)m into, in Genesis 12:2, “And I will make of you a great NATION….” We are a nation, a nation defined by our religion. Please note that the verse does not read, “And I will make you a great ETHNIC GROUP,” nor does it say, “And I will make you a great CULTURE.” We are, and were made by G-d, to be a Nation, as our religion defines us through our Bible.
My assertion is not a lie.
Israel – often rightly – has ignored the UN.
Remove Yamit’s hatred and bigotry from the above statement, and he understands the issue.
Israel’s existence is NOT based on International Law; and it is FOLLY TO ASSERT THAT.
International Law fluctuates with the viccisitudes of civilization.
Many here think I am asserting the Arab cause.
No!
Actually, I am amazed that so many Jews fight the game using regulations we Gentiles set up.
International Law in 1945 was West European in outlook.
Today, it is bending over backwards to appease the Ummah; trying to preserve a veneer of Western outlook.
International Law is jello. You are trying to contain jello. It is amorphous at all times.
When the West was solidly Christian you had an agreement on core principles; and International Law was grounded in some degree of Christianity, but only so far as the gunboats went. It never extended to interior China or Japan. It ignored the Ummah. Even at the height of Western Imperialism, the British, French, and Italians knew better than to suppress honor killing. Their rule extended only to ports and borders. French Algerians knew to beware of the Casbahs.
But the West is now post-Christian.
I am amazed that so many Jews attempt to justify Israel on International Law when that law can be amended overnight.
If the UN, with security council approval – and under Obama, who knows? – declares Resolution 181 to have been a mistake, will Israel politely dissolve itself?!
If they unanimously declare – and that day is coming – that the term homeland, as used in the British Mandate, merely signified a sort of autonomous reservation, and not an independent state, as the British asserted in 1939 in their White Paper, will Israel politely agree?
It is idiocy to surrender to International Law when it comes to self-existence, and yet so many try to defend Israel based on a flawed paradigm.
This is a waste of time.
Here is a list of SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTIONS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Nations_resolutions_concerning_Israel#United_Nations_Security_Council_resolutions
For ex: United Nations Security Council Resolution 509 demanded that Israel withdraw from Lebanon. (1982)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_509
Now since Israel did not withdraw until 2000, we can say Israel ignored the UN.
I am NOT saying Israel was wrong.
I am saying both sides ignore the UN.
This is the fact. NOT a criticism, just a fact.
Now, who is putting out Arab propaganda.
At every point in history, there are records of Jews being chased out of the land when their numbers reached a critical mass.
Most people know that Saladin conquered Jerusalem from the Christians. Most people do NOT know that the Christians later on re-took Jerusalem back a second time under Fredrick, because the Saladin family, his descendents, got weak and so they sued for peace. The negotiated deal was:
Christians could control Jerusalem but the Muslims would control the Muslim holy places.
WHAT THEY BOTH AGREED ON WAS THAT JEWS HAD TO BE EXPELLED. (Nice to see they agreed on something)
It seems that Jews were returning in very large numbers.
Time and again, you see this cropping up. Jews come back. Someone notices … Kick them out!
My point here is not to point out Arab propaganda, but to show you that IF ISRAEL JUSTIFIES ITSELF ON INTERNATIONAL LAW WHICH IS SUBJECT TO THE SHIFTING OPINIONS OF MANKIND, THEN THEY WILL BE BASING THEIR EXISTENCE ON JELLO.
In the 18th century the Asiento legalized and codified slave trading. In the 19th century slavery was deemed illegal.
Nothing moral had changed ONLY International Law.
History is incontrovertible. International Law changes regularly.
@ Uzi Kattan:It is Barak, not Netinyahu that is responsible for those raids. They are subject to military law. When Judea and Samaria are annexed that will stop. Even now the Knesset has under consideration taking away the power of the Minister of Defense to make those decisions to my understanding from articles in Artutz Sheva.
@ Ted Belman:Ted, you are absolutely correct. Dore Gold and said the same many times.
@ yamit82:For the Jews to be a “people”, they must be a race and not just a religion. Even secular Jews are part of the Jewish people. A fortiori, Jews who admit they are Jewish and therefore can contribute to a minyan, are Jewish, even though they are normally not observant, so long as their mothers were Jewish.
@ CuriousAmerican: That argument that Israeli disobeyed many UN resolutions is just republishing Arab propaganda. The resolutions claimed to have been ignored are simply resolutions of the General Assembly. These usually required the negotiation of the parties involved and the assent of both before they are binding. The important resolutions are those under a different chapter, resolutions of the Security Council. These are the resolutions that Iraq disobeyed. They are binding resolutions and justify military action when they are not followed.
@ dweller:You quote Toynebee as saying:
“Not merely had “the militant peoples of Islam obtained political concessions out of all proportion to their military achievements,” as observed British Foreign Office advisor, Prof. Arnold Toynbee, a few years after the Versailles settlements, but, frankly, by any rational assessment, these Arabic-speaking Muslims of the M-E had emerged from the Great War enormously more favored by its consequences, both military & diplomatic, than had — without exception — any other group of people touched by it. [Arnold J. Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs for 1925 (Oxford, 1927), p. 6]”
By then Toynebee had changed and had become an antisemite. He completely understated the facts. The Arab Tribes in the Arabian Peninsula had given a little aid to the Allies in WWI, but their particpation was overblown, by Lowell Thomas to sell newspapers, even as admitted finally by Lawrence. The relevant question is what aid was given by the Arabs local to Palestine. It was negative aid.
The Arabs in Palestine fought on the side of the Ottomans. The Jews fought on the side of the Allies in a battle group formed by Trumpeldor. They were called “The Palestinians” and they were the only “Palestinians” until the Soviet dezinformatsia invented the “Palestinian Arab People” in the preamble of the PLO Charter they drafted in Moscow in 1964. The Jews gave very useful aid to the Allies in the form of intelleigence supplied, according to my aging recollection by a brilliant and heroic Jew named Aaronson who was finally discovered and executed by the Arabs, Ottomans, or Germans. The Arabs emerged from the war no longer occupied by the army of the Caliph of the Ottoman Empire, no longer subject to the rule of colonial Turkey.
@ CuriousAmerican: I disagree with Curious American. If you leave the Arab arguments unanswered, you then appear to be admitting their truth. Israel should be using public diplomacy providing the truth in response to the lies and canards of the former Soviet (and now Russian) dezinformatsia and the propaganda of the Arabs.
If you had read further in the comments, you would have seen the story of Arutz Sheva on One lawful Jewish State being kept out of the Harvard Conference” of March 3,4. They reprinted the full ad I posted in the Crimson.
There is a very minor difference between Howard Grief’s legal view and mine. His is the seminal work, but he doesn’t go into the question of just what right the Jews got in 1920. It appears that according to Mr. Benzimra’s book, a ruling by Judge McNair said that during the periods of mandate, sovereignty was held in abeyance. It seems to me that if the mandate, as provided in the first two paragraphs of Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant were in the nature of a trust or guardianship, then, when England volunteered to be guardian, it had the legal right over the trust res, which was the exclusive political rights. But on April 25th, 1920, when they got that right, the Jews got a beneficial interest. World Jewry was the beneficiary of the trust and England had a fiduciary responsibility to them as their trustee and guardian. It broke that trust by first giving a temporary interest in TransJordan to Abdullah and his Hashemite tribe, and then in 1928, Mr. Benzimra advises me, they got became the beneficiaries in a mandate. In Col. Meinertzhagen’s diary, I find that it was Meinertzhagen who persuaded Churchill in 1922 to give Abdullah and his Hashemite tribe only a temporary interest in the hope that England would not find it necessary to give them a permanent interest. Why was it that England violated its trust and gave the sovereignty in TransJordan to Abdullah? It was to solve England’s political problem arising from the Sykes-Picot agreement. Just after WWI, when England had de facto sovereignty over Syria, it placed Feisal on the throne. The French, after the Battle of Maysalun, deposed him.
Winston Churchill, thinking he was very clever solved the problem by giving Feisal the throne of Iraq. The problem was that in the Sykes-Picot agreement, England had agreed that Syria was to be in the French sphere of influence. But Feisal’s brother Abdullah created a second problem. He had marched up to East Palestine and made ready to make war on the French in Damascus. So Churchill solved that political problem of England, by giving away the political rights to Transjordan over which it was trustee but to which World Jewry was the beneficiary. As trustee of the trust res, the political or national rights to Palestine, by volunteering to be trustee it assumed a fiduciary responsibility and its urging the League of Nations to change the terms by adding Article 25 was a gross violation of that trust. As a beneficiary of the trust, then as between Abdullah and his Hashemite tribe and the World Jewry, who would have the right before a court sitting as a court in equity? The answer is not clear. However it is unnecessary to determine that because Israel, as representative of the Jews released its interest in TransJordan to Jordan in return for Jordan releasing any interest it might have in CisJordan, or Palestine West of the Jordan River. That was at the time when Israel and Jordan had entered into a peace agreement and boundary agreement.
So Professor Jerold Auerbach told the story about Bibi Netanyahu’s father’s participation in the drafting and promotion of Article 80 of the UN Charter that saved the League of Nations grant, but he did not say how this played out in making Judea, Samaria and Gaza available to Israel for annexation even now to create one lawful Jewish Majority State West of the Jordan River. As I understand, both Mr. Benzimra and I differ from Ambassador Yoram Ettinger also. He suggests that annexing both now would still give Israel a small majority. But Mr. Benzimra points out that a small majority of population doesn’t make for a strong nation — that strong nations have a people who are at least 90% of the population. So while I favor annexation of Judea and Samaria, and eventual annexation of Gaza as the Jewish immigration justifies, I would be against annexation of both of them now as Ambassador Ettinger suggests even if they are not all given citizenship but on non-citizen resident status. How to integrate these non-citizens into Israeli citizenship is left for another topic and to better minds than mine. As the thugs who were permitted back from Tunisia have educated a whole generation of young Arabs into radical Islamic ideals, this is a very difficult question. But by annexation, over time it can be done. Without annexation, Arabs will continue to build in far greater amounts than Jews in Judea and Samaria, and continue to incite their young people with radical cirricula in their schools.
@ Howard Jacobsen:
Bibi Netanyahu persecutes Jews to make life difficult for them in Yehuda and Shomron. His middle of the night raids where thousands of black uniformed storm troopers come to destroy a Jewish shack is despicable. Their behavior is similar to the Nazis and their collaborators in the holocaust where they made it a game to abuse Jews. I saw the video in Migron where a mother of a two week old infant was pushed by these animals with their riot shields and knocked to the ground to the laugh of their fellow storm troopers who were pointing their M-16 rifles at her. They cheered when the shack she was living in was toppled by a tractor after the Arabs who came to empty the home looted it (with Bibi’s approval). Arabs are building all over the country while Bibi does nothing. He does nothing against the thousands of rockets fired from Gaza, nothing against the Iranian nuclear threat and the infiltration of illegal Africans from the Sinai desert. His only concern are the Jewish outposts in Yehuda and Shomron. Bibi’s attorney general SWeinStinkgoes after a rabbi, Yitzhak Shapira for writing a Halachic book calling it incitement. Arabs and leftists call for the murder of Jews and nothing is done to them. Netanyahu also spinelessly betrayed Lt. Col. Shalom Eisner for striking a Neo Nazi Danish anarchist who entered a closed military area. In other countries, both the anarchist agitators and the press would be either arrested or shot if they wouldn’t leave but in Israel you can’t do that thanks to Netanyahu’s insane policies which tie the army’s hands.
No wonder Prof. Netanyahu criticized his son for this leftist behavior. He probably didn’t want to live to see his son give away Yehuda and Shomron and divide Jerusalem.
@ dweller:
I have to disagree with your premise re:
Some Jews for sure: Mostly atheistic assimilated Jews. They need the approval of the gentile. They have been kissing ass so long they wouldn’t know how or dare tell their gentile masters where they can stick it. So they wrap their justification in legalism and are rendered helpless mumbling baboons when what they believed were their rights engraved in Laws and treaties are ignored ripped up or raped of any meaning when their Masters decided they don’t recognize those laws treaties and agreements because they can get away with it and the chicken –shit Jew is left with at best scraps and leavings of his betters and he is content just like my dog is when I give her my leftovers.
Zionism was supposed to produce a new Jew but it’s hard to remove the vestigial remnants of 2000 years. Yet there is a New old Jewish prototype whose only loyalty and fealty he recognizes is another Law, the one that supersedes all others and could care less what the gentiles say or think; a Jew whose values are clear and unpretentious, with knowledge of what is finite and infinite, important and meaningless, permanent and transitory. Who knows what is expected of a Jew and who leaps into the battle to perform as expected, regardless of the odds against him and the pragmatic chances of success.
In the end these will be the only Jews that matter. In the end they may even be the only Jews left.
Excellent comment, dweller.
@ CuriousAmerican: One does not have to be “religious” but only to face the fact that YHWH Tzevaot does not and cannot lie. Therefore all the manmade agreements are null and void, and the same Messiah who brought them out of Egypt and into the land in the first place will bring not only Judah but also the whole 12 tribes of Israel back for the restoration of the Kingdom to Israel, which will be the answer to the question His disciples asked Him according to Acts 1:6. Then all the Jewish people who accepted His Torah but rejected Him will learn better, and all the Ephraimite people who accepted Him but rejected His Torah will also learn better. Then all this stupid religion and divisions within it will end, and we will finally and unitedly eject Ishmael and Esau from the Promised Land. Peace will begin at Jerusalem and spread to the world under the Chief Zionist, Yahushua our Messiah, and no more will mere mortals make mincemeat of the Promised Land. HalleluYAH!
@ CuriousAmerican:
I appreciate it that you weren’t talking through your hat and you had something to back it up with. I read the article but it doesn’t tell me much. As you know, the GA resolutions are only recommendations. So are the Chaper VI resolutions of the SC. They are not binding.
Article 2)7) of the Charter says;
“Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter Vll.”
Israel has complied with every Ch VII resolution.
I am puzzled by CuriousAmerican putting international law and the binding effects of a Treaty between nations beside UN Security Council Resolutions. UN Security Council Resolutions may not be always useful, a cursory scan of the top of the ‘surf’ on the subject shows a minefield of interpretation. I know enough to know I know nothing.. In an opinion from 1995 Michael C Wood http://www.mpil.de/shared/data/pdf/pdfmpunyb/wood_2.pdf quotes a 1971 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (also quoted in Wikipedia so someone thinks it important), “The language of a resolution of the Security Council should be carefully analysed before a conclusion can be made as to its binding effect. In view of the nature of the powers under Article 25, the question whether they have in fact been exercised is to be determined in each case …” Even a cursory search finds such examples as http://ejil.oxfordjournals.org/content/16/5/879.full
A barrister I met recently had used common law from 17th century Britain to help establish new case-based law in Australia. A ruling in law with no use for years became useful. The importance of the work of Ben Zion Netanyahu and co. was their use of law.
@ dweller:
Factually you are correct but then so what? You admit to the reality that Law is a function of power and those who formulated the Balfour declaration did so because they were the dominant power of their time but are not so today. All laws all agreements are by nature a function of power and are transcendental over time.
The historical claim of the Jews is weak, we were only the sovereign for less than 500 years closer to 400 in fact. Jews have by history a stronger claim to Europe where we have a 1900 year history, which is longer than our national existence in the Land of Israel. Some Arabs and by no means most can claim an equally long presence in the Land and if some Jews can return after 1900 years why not after 60 as the Arabs claim?
That Jewish presence in the Land of Israel never ceased and the Jews are its oldest residents is irrelevant: native populations throughout the world are annihilated and subdued rather than allowed to prosper and win sovereignty; look at the Native Indians in America. Jews are not settling our historical lands now. The historical lands are exactly the “occupied territories.” The Jewish state was there while the sea coast was dominated first by Philistines, then by Greeks and Romans. Jews held it only for short time, and it was largely a pagan area.
If the direct, proven descendants of the Canaanites were to pop up now, say in Africa, and demand the right of return to their historical land, would anyone consider their demands relevant? Arabs have a stronger connection to the Land than Russians of Khazarian decent or Ethopian converts to Judaism whose ancestors never lived here etc. Much larger ethnic groups than Jews strive for independence with no international support.
Why should atheist Jews have a state in the current location? What historical right do Jews have over the Negev desert?
There is only a single justification for non religious Jews to hold on to and settle the Land we control today. Raw Power.
Everyone says that Jews cannot repeat the sixty-year old example of Czechs and Poles who evicted millions of their Germans after the WWII. Cleansing the land of sworn enemies is confused with cleansing it of an undesirable ethnic group, and condemned.
claiming a religious commandment to cleanse the land of natives, and to annex all the Promised Land that we hold, is a somewhat more acceptable way of dealing with foreign sensibilities. Few Western and even Russian politicians are prepared for a head-on assault on the Bible. Religious justification is still workable, whether you’re a believer or not.
To undermine the Bible undermines all western secular as well as religious beliefs. It’s those beliefs and values which underpin Western societies. I want to see them declaring that the bible is false?
The religious argument is Israels strongest argument maybe our only legitimate argument and the one that has never been used in defending Jewish rights to the Land of Israel.
FROM HAARETZ
I am NOT saying Israel is wrong.
I am saying that Israel ignores the UN (often rightly).
But the fact is: Israel ignores the UN. So does the USA.
Howard Jacobsen Said:
Bibi is no commie.
@ dweller:
Very well said.
CuriousAmerican Said:
Yes they interfered in the Unmah. They had the right to. But the Brits ruled India for 400 years but because they weren’t indigenous ultimately were forced to leave. The Jewish people are indigenous to the holy land.. They have had a continuous presence there and now after 2000 years they are exercising their “right of return”. Now they are in the majority and because the lands used to be part of the Unmah should be irrelevant. Southern Spain was also part of the Unmah.
But ultimately Israel’s strength both financial and military will determine if they remain there.
CuriousAmerican Said:
Name me one instance where Israel ignored international law or the Security Council.
@ CuriousAmerican:
You cannot draw a working parallel here.
The Islamic Ummah had overwhelmingly — some would say obsequiously — sided with the very forces from whose territory (upon their defeat) the Arab states were created. They should be grateful for what they got, particularly in view of what little they did to secure the victory that made it possible — and how MUCH they did to prevent that victory.
Not merely had “the militant peoples of Islam obtained political concessions out of all proportion to their military achievements,” as observed British Foreign Office advisor, Prof. Arnold Toynbee, a few years after the Versailles settlements, but, frankly, by any rational assessment, these Arabic-speaking Muslims of the M-E had emerged from the Great War enormously more favored by its consequences, both military & diplomatic, than had — without exception — any other group of people touched by it. [Arnold J. Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs for 1925 (Oxford, 1927), p. 6]
Anyone wishing to challenge that proposition is “invited…to study the history of the Versailles conference, where a deal was struck whereby the Arabs received 99 percent of former Ottoman territories [i.e., of Turkey’s Asian possessions — dw] with the understanding that 1 [one] percent would become a national Jewish home. The Arabs took the 99 percent, and then reneged on the deal.” [Daniel Doron [Pres., Israel Center for Social & Economic Progress], “Poisoning the American Mind,” Jerusalem Post, 10 Mar 04]
Had the forces with whom the Ummah sided been victorious, the Arab world would still be the very un-free possession of the turkifying Turks of the C.U.P.
Today virtually EVERY state belongs to the UN.
That mere fact alone violates the very basis of legitimacy upon which the UN was created.
If anybody can join, then obviously there is no standard of structure (or behavior) to characterize membership.
But Israel owes nothing to the UN of today OR of yesterday.
In fact, arguably, the State of Israel both survived the attempt to strangle her at birth
— and continues to exist to this day
less in ‘consequence’ of the UN than in spite of it.
I’ve told you several times, Curious — and showed you at least once — that the Mandate (which was constituted in the nature of an internationally binding treaty) was itself built on a clear acknowledgment of history, as recited in its Charter’s Preamble (whose phraseology, BTW, is explicitly linked to the Charter’s text).
Defending Israel in the eyes of the world is NOT the most vital purpose for stressing International Law.
Of course it’s slippery. Because the world doesn’t care about it. It cares only about what it thinks it can get away with, and call it ‘Law.’
It’s only the Jew who cares about law.
And he can’t escape it; he’s made that way.
He stands as a walking, breathing testimony — for better or for worse — that the architecture of the universe is constructed on a FOUNDATION of law.
When Moshiakh comes — yes, ok, returns — any ‘defense’ will indeed be predicated on something incontrovertible. . . . in the view of anybody who’s still standing.
Until then, however, as far as the WORLD is concerned, the nearest thing to “incontrovertible” will consist of cold steel & hot lead
— and the willingness of the Jews to resort to blood.
But where Jews are concerned, that willingness to so proceed will have to be grounded in international law.
In the end, it won’t matter whether the world does or doesn’t think the Jews are right (as to history OR law OR presence OR chopped liver).
Yet it will matter that the JEWS know they are right.
THAT’s the reason why (and the only reason why) International Law — San Remo & the Mandate — matters.
And why all the rest of it is . . . . window dressing.
The son is a peacenik Commie, He won’t even bomb Iran.
CuriousAmerican Said:
This comment might be re-considered. It is sloppy. Auerbach’s comment is relevant.
No other people on earth have two mandates to their land: One written by the nations recently last century, the other written in their Holy Book. Now why? Because right from the first, from Abraham, Jews have a national trait, or tendency, of meekness and doing what the Mighty Ones tell them… it’s not bad- as long as they listen to the right Mighty Ones.
Just as you decry the United Nations efforts to interfere in Israeli affairs, even so the Arabs denied/deny the right of the Mandate (and the later UN) to interfere in their Islamic Ummah.
Both sides appeal to International Law when it suits them and both sides ignore the UN when it suits them.
Ultimately the case for Israel will have to be made based on history, archeology, continous presence, and if you are religious – the Abrahamic Covenant; because International Law is not sufficient, not consisent, and unreliable.
All the efforts to defend Israel based on International Law will fail. You are defending Israel with jello. International Law is that slippery.
The defense of Israel has to be predicated on something incontrovertible. HISTORY! AND CONTINUOUS PRESENCE!