The Immorality of Losing

by DakotaRed 21 Replies latest jw friends

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  ThiChi

  TH: Here you have a democracy surrounded by dictators , and you don’t understand why we help? You are some piece of work!

  SS:

  Its all about history:

  The standard definition of an occupation under international law is found in the Fourth Geneva Convention, which applies explicitly to "partial or total occupation of the territory of a High Contracting Party" (Article 2, emphasis added). In other words, "occupation" for the purposes of the convention means the presence of one country's troops in territory that belongs to another sovereign state the only type of entity that can be a contracting party to the convention.

  But when territory that does not clearly belong to another sovereign state is captured by one of the possible legitimate claimants as, for instance, in Kashmir, which is claimed by India, Pakistan, and the Kashmiris the term generally used is "disputed," not "occupied."

  And that is precisely the situation in the West Bank and Gaza.

  Neither of these territories belonged to any sovereign state when Israel captured them in 1967; they were essentially stateless territory. Both had originally been part of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine and, according to the UN partition plan of 1947, they should have become part of a new Arab state when Britain abandoned the Mandate in 1948.

  But since the Arabs themselves rejected this plan, not only did that state never come into being, it never even acquired theoretical legitimacy: The partition plan was no more than a non-binding "recommendation" (the resolution's own language) adopted by the General Assembly. Once rejected by one of the parties involved, it essentially became a dead letter.

  The West Bank and Gaza were therefore not owned by anyone when they were seized by Jordan and Egypt, respectively, in 1948; and since their annexation by these countries was never internationally recognized (Jordan's annexation of the West Bank, for instance, was accepted only by Britain and Pakistan), they were still stateless territory in 1967.

  Moreover, Israel had a very strong claim to both territories. Even aside from the obvious historical claim the heart of the biblical kingdom of Israel was in what is now called the West Bank the terms of the original League of Nations Mandate quite clearly assigned the West Bank and Gaza to the Jewish state.

  The preamble to the Mandate explicitly stated that its purpose was "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people."

  DOES THIS mean that all of Mandatory Palestine which included not only modern-day Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, but also the modern-day state of Jordan was supposed to be a Jewish state? An answer can be found in Article 25, which reads: "In the territories lying between the Jordan [River] and the eastern boundary of Palestine... the Mandatory shall be entitled, with the consent of the Council of the League of Nations, to postpone or withhold application of such provisions of this mandate as he may consider inapplicable to the existing local conditions."

  No such permission, however, was given west of the Jordan. In other words, while the Mandate arguably gave Britain and the council together the right to "withhold application" of the Mandate's stated purpose east of the Jordan, the land west of this river which includes the West Bank and Gaza, as well as Israel was unequivocally earmarked for the Jewish national home. And the fact that both territories were captured in a defensive war from states that originally seized them through armed aggression strengthens Israel's claim still further.

  How, then, did the myth of "occupation" i.e., the myth that these territories indisputably belong to someone other than Israel gain such universal credence? Sadly, the main culprit is Israel itself.

  When Israel captured the territories in 1967, the government did not assert its claim. Instead, it insisted that Israel did not want these lands and was merely "holding them in trust" to be "returned" to the Arabs in exchange for a peace treaty. And every subsequent government reiterated this line. But since no third party could be expected to press a claim that Israel refused to press for itself, the Arab claim, by default, became the only one on the international agenda. And since territories cannot be "disputed" if there is only one claimant, the only alternative was to view them as belonging to the sole remaining claimant leaving Israel as the "occupier."

  Israel did, of course, lay claim to one section of these territories from the start: east Jerusalem. But legally speaking, Israel's claim to east Jerusalem is no different from its claim to the rest of the West Bank. By essentially denying the latter claim, Israel badly undermined the former.

  After 35 years, it may well be impossible to rectify this enormous historical error. But Israel cannot afford not to make the effort. It must explain, at every opportunity, the sound legal basis for its own claim to the West Bank and Gaza. To do otherwise is to guarantee that it begins any future negotiations from the irremediably inferior position of an "occupier."
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  ThiChi

  More:

  A common misperception is that the Jews were forced into the diaspora by the Romans after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in the year 70 A.D. and then, 1,800 years later, suddenly returned to Palestine demanding their country back. In reality, the Jewish people have maintained ties to their historic homeland for more than 3,700 years. A national language and a distinct civilization have been maintained. The Jewish people base their claim to the land of Israel on at least four premises: 1) God promised the land to the patriarch Abraham; 2) the Jewish people settled and developed the land; 3) the international community granted political sovereignty in Palestine to the Jewish people and 4) the territory was captured in defensive wars. The term "Palestine" is believed to be derived from the Philistines, an Aegean people who, in the 12th Century B.C., settled along the Mediterranean coastal plain of what is now Israel and the Gaza Strip. In the second century A.D., after crushing the last Jewish revolt, the Romans first applied the name Palaestina to Judea (the southern portion of what is now called the West Bank) in an attempt to minimize Jewish identification with the land of Israel. The Arabic word "Filastin" is derived from this Latin name. The Twelve Tribes of Israel formed the first constitutional monarchy in Palestine about 1000 B.C. The second king, David, first made Jerusalem the nation's capital. Although eventually Palestine was split into two separate kingdoms, Jewish independence there lasted for 212 years. This is almost as long as Americans have enjoyed independence in what has become known as the United States. Even after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the beginning of the exile, Jewish life in Palestine continued and often flourished. Large communities were reestablished in Jerusalem and Tiberias by the ninth century. In the 11th century, Jewish communities grew in Rafah, Gaza, Ashkelon, Jaffa and Caesarea. Many Jews were massacred by the Crudaders during the 12th century, but the community rebounded in the next two centuries as large numbers of rabbis and Jewish pilgrims immigrated to Jerusalem and the Galilee. Prominent rabbis established communities in Safed, Jerusalem and elsewhere during the next 300 years. By the early 19th century-years before the birth of the modern Zionist movement-more than 10,000 Jews lived throughout what is today Israel. When Jews began to immigrate to Palestine in large numbers in 1882, fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there, and the majority of them had arrived in recent decades. Palestine was never an exclusively Arab country, although Arabic gradually became the language of most the population after the Muslim invasions of the seventh century. No independent Arab or Palestinian state ever existed in Palestine. When the distinguished Arab-American historian, Princeton University Prof. Philip Hitti, testified against partition before the Anglo-American Committee in 1946, he said: "There is no such thing as 'Palestine' in history, absolutely not." In fact, Palestine is never explicitly mentioned in the Koran, rather it is called "the holy land" (al-Arad al-Muqaddash). Prior to partition, Palestinian Arabs did not view themselves as having a separate identity. When the First Congress of Muslim-Christian Associations met in Jerusalem in February 1919 to choose Palestinian representatives for the Paris Peace Conference, the following resolution was adopted: We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria, as it has never been separated from it at any time. We are connected with it by national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic and geographical bonds. In 1937, a local Arab leader, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, told the Peel Commission, which ultimately suggested the partition of Palestine: "There is no such country [as Palestine]! 'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria." The representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations submitted a statement to the General Assembly in May 1947 that said "Palestine was part of the Province of Syria" and that, "politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity." A few years later, Ahmed Shuqeiri, later the chairman of the PLO, told the Security Council: "It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria." Palestinian Arab nationalism is largely a post-World War I phenomenon that did not become a significant political movement until after the 1967 Six-Day War and Israel's capture of the West Bank. Israel's international "birth certificate" was validated by the promise of the Bible; uninterrupted Jewish settlement from the time of Joshua onward; the Balfour Declaration of 1917; the League of Nations Mandate, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration; the United Nations partition resolution of 1947; Israel's admission to the UN in 1949; the recognition of Israel by most other states; and, most of all, the society created by Israel's people in decades of thriving, dynamic national existence.