AFSILA Articles

NO JEW HAS THE RIGHT TO GIVE UP (Eretz Yisrael) THE LAND OF ISRAEL

By David Ben Gurion

"No Jew has the right to yield the rights of the Jewish People in Israel. No Jew has the authority to do so. No Jewish body has the authority to do so. Not even the entire Jewish People alive today has the right to yield any part of Israel. 

It is the right of the Jewish People over the generations, a right that under no conditions can be cancelled. Even if Jews during a specific period proclaim they are relinquishing this right, they have neither the power nor the authority to deny it to future generations. No concession of this type is binding or obligates the Jewish People. 

Our right to the country - the entire country - exists as an eternal right, and we shall not yield this historic right until its full and complete redemption is realized." 

This quotation of David Ben Gurion made at the Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1937, more than 76 years ago.

BEN-GURION’S DECLARATION ON THE EXCLUSIVE AND INALIENABLE JEWISH RIGHT TO THE WHOLE OF
THE LAND OF ISRAEL:
at the Basle Session of the 20th Zionist Congress at Zurich(1937)

No Jew has the right to yield the rights of the Jewish People in Israel -
David Ben Gurion

(David Ben-Gurion was the first Prime Minister of Israel and widely hailed as the State's main founder).

"No Jew has the right to yield the rights of the Jewish People in Israel.
No Jew has the authority to do so.
No Jewish body has the authority to do so.
Not even the entire Jewish People alive today has the right to yield any part of Israel.
It is the right of the Jewish People over the generations, a right that under
no conditions can be cancelled.
Even if Jews during a specific period proclaim they are relinquishing this right, they have neither the power nor the authority to deny it to future generations.
No concession of this type is binding or obligates the Jewish People. Our right to the country - the entire country - exists as an eternal right, and we shall not yield this historic right until its full and complete redemption is realized."

Preventing Jewish Building of Towns and Villages (settlements) in Judea and Samaria is a violation of international law-Treaties, The 1919 Faisal Weizmann Agreement and League of Nations implementation of those agreements

The “Mandate” Defined Where Jews Are and Are Not Permitted to Settle

The “Mandate for Palestine” document did not set final borders. It left this for the Mandatory to stipulate in a binding appendix to the final document in the form of a memorandum. However, Article 6 of the “Mandate” clearly states:

“The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.”

"It should be remembered that in 1918, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France were handed more than 6,000,000 square miles to divvy up and 99% was given to the Arabs to create countries that did not exist previously. Less than 1% was given as a Mandate for the re-establishment of a state for the Jews on both banks of the Jordan River. In 1921, to appease the Arabs once again, another three quarters of that less than 1% was given to a fictitious state called Trans-Jordan."   (Jack Berger, May 31, 2004.)

The total for all the 22 Arab League countries is 6,145,389 square miles (SM). By comparison, all 50 states of the United States have a total of 3,787,318 SM. Israel has 8,463 SM, about one-sixth of that of the State of Michigan. Iran, Turkey,

Pakistan and Afghanistan are Muslim but not Arab and are not included.
     World Arab population: 300 million; World Jewish population: 13.6 million; Israel's Jewish population: 5.4 million.  (Dr. Wilbert Simkovitz, http://dehai.org/archives/dehai_news_archive/apr04/0223.html)

"... during the late 1940s, more than 40 million refuges around the world were resettled, except for one people. They [Palestinian arabs] remain defined as refugees, wallowing 60 years later in 59 UNRWA refugee camps, financed by $400 million contributed annually by nations of the world to nurture the promise of the "right of return" to Arab neighborhoods and Arab villages from 1948 that no longer exist."  (Noam Bedein, Jerusalem Post, January 6, 2009.)

Some 950,000 Jews left behind $300 billion in assets when they were forced to flee for their lives from the Arab countries in the 1940s. They hold deeds for five times Israel's size.  (Independent Media Centre, Winnipeg)

Re Israel's irrevocable ownership of Israel, Golan, Samaria, Judea and Gaza: "Nothing that Israel's legal system says can change the facts that: (1) the legal binding document is the Mandate of the League of Nations and (2) the obligations of the Mandate are valid in perpetuity."  (Professor Julius Stone)

"By 1920 the Ottoman Empire had exercised undisputed sovereignty over Palestine for 400 years. In Article 95 of the treaty of Sevres, that sovereignty was transferred to England in trust for a national homeland for the jews. The local Arabs had never exercised sovereignty over Palestine and so they lost nothing. Their rights were fully protected by a provisio in the grant: '...it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine...' The proviso has been fully observed by the Israelis. Since 1950 the Arabs have built some 261 new settlements in Judea and Samaria — more than twice as many as the Jews, but you never hear of them. They fill them with Arabs from Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan and by the grace of God they become Palestinians. Allahu Akbar! The Arabs call Judea "the West Bank' because they would look silly claiming that Jews are illegally living in Judea."  (Comment by Wallace Brand on Martin Peretz "Narrative Dissonance" The New Republic, July 1, 2009)

Unless Palestine "dumps" Hamas and denounces openly Hezbollah then peace is not going to happen

When enough is enough – Israel it is time to take off the gloves and defend your citizens - no holds barred 

No sane country in the world would stand for hundreds of missiles fired at her citizens in a few days without an extreme response.  The hell with world opinion or the leftist distorted Media. People respect a country that defends its citizens and not put it citizens in harms way.

This is the results of years of concessions by Israel. To the Palestinian Arabs a concession is a sign of weakness.

When Israel had the policy of retaliating with a heavy hand many years ago, this escalation would have never happened. 

I would like to see us Americans tolerate hundreds of missiles coming at us across our borders and bombing our territories our schools and our homes. 

The outcry by the American population would be respond with extreme power and stop the missiles, no matter what the cost.

In 1962 the Russians put missiles in Cuba without firing on the United States that almost started a nuclear World War 3.

At what point will Israel and its leaders realize that no matter what they do, it doesn't matter in the world's eyes and they need to stop trying to please the world and do what is necessary for the security and safety of its own people?

At this point I for one think that Israel needs to just take off the gloves and treat those who want war with exactly what they want. It's called survival.

Israel must complete the mission and destroy all terrorists arms along with the terrorists, no stopping until the mission is complete.

No cease fires until all the missiles are destroyed and no further missiles are allowed in Gaza.

Israel has the means to destroy Hamas. Why not destroy Hamas once and for all.

When a poison strikes the human body, the only way to address it, is to remove it and destroy it completely. That is the way the terrorist organizations should be treated.

The Qur'an 17:104 - states the land belongs to the Jewish people

Let the cleanup begin.

I strongly support an extremely strong action against terrorism and missiles.

YJ Draiman. Los Angeles, CA

Israel has the right and obligation to defend its citizens

Israel is guilty of anything it’s of disproportionate restraint.

Israel has the right and obligation to defend its citizens – Protect its borders 

The brutal slaughter of a family of 5 in Itamar just shows that we are dealing with a barbaric mentality. 

Add to it the bomb at a bus stop in Jerusalem.

A rocket at a school bus. 

The daily launching of rockets from Gaza against civilian population and schools.

No country and government that cares about its citizens would tolerate such atrocities. 

Terror should be handled in the following manner. When a poison strikes the human body, the only way to address it, is to remove it and destroy it completely.

It is a known fact that any country if attacked, its citizens kidnapped, rocket bombardment on a daily basis.

Has the right and obligation to defend its citizens. 

It is sad that innocent civilians are hurt, but that is the cost of war and conflict.

Any government and its citizen who do not resist terrorism and let terrorist organization entrench themselves in their country and utilize those countries as bases of armed terrorism against a neighboring country. Eventually pays the price for permitting such actions. 

If you gave the Arab population a vote in Israel and the west bank and Jerusalem the option to vote freely and without intimidation, you would find out, that they would rather be living under Israel’s government. They derive more stability more benefits, pensions, welfare, etc.

If the United States or any other government were to be attacked from across the border on a daily basis, have its citizens kidnapped, rockets launched at them on a daily basis, the citizens would demand that immediate military action be initiated with no holds barred, collateral damage or not. That is the fact of life. 

Terrorist and those who support them do not know what peace is, they thrive on violence. That is the only way they control the masses. Any negotiations or compromise only strengthen those terrorist organizations.  When a poison strikes the human body, the only way to address it, is to remove it and destroy it completely.

There is no such thing as a “disproportioned response to terror.”

Our problem today is “Israel’s Disproportionate Restraint.”

This puts Israel and its citizens in grave danger.

When a poison strikes the human body, the only way to address it, is to remove it and destroy it completely.

That is the way the terrorist organizations should be treated.

“Like all sovereign nations, Israel has not only a right, but moreover, an obligation, to ensure the safety and security of her citizens”. 

As quoted in a statement “the only time of a chance for peace is, when the Arab mother would love her children more than she hates the Israelis.

The big mistake is that people are missing the economic benefits for Israel and its neighbors. That is if there was a true peace, you take the Israeli Technology and know how, add to it the Arab labor and natural resources – and you have an economic prosperity beyond your widest dreams. 

Nothing will change, nothing can change until the Palestinian people recognize this reality; their greatest enemy is not Israel. The greatest threat to the Palestinian people is, and always has been, their own leaders.

And Israel cannot negotiate with Hamas, anymore than Chamberlain could negotiate with Herr Hitler.

The Qur'an 17:104 - states the land belongs to the Jewish people

Every time there is a terrorist act, Israel should vacate an Arab village and raze it.

Any Arab rioting and or throwing stones at Israelis and violating Israeli laws – should be deported and his home destroyed. 

There never was a Palestinian Arab State and there will never be an Arab Palestinian State on Jewish land - Anyone who thinks that there is going to be one is delusional.

YJ Draiman 

NO PALESTINIANSTATE – No land concessions R7.

Imagine that the various people who settled in the United States for the past 300 years decided one day that they one to parcel the United States into an independent State just for them, would the American public go for it. The Answer is absolutely NO.

The situation in Israel today is no different. The Arabs there are not Palestinians, there is no such Arab nation as Palestine or Palestinian people.

Europeans countries today are consisting of numerous people from other countries. Would the Europeans people cede part of their country to set up another State in their midst. The answer is absolutely NO.

Archeological excavations and historical data is the best proof Israel belongs to the Jewish Nation and non-other.

All the Arabs in Israel and surrounding areas are from the various Arab nations, such as Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and other Arab nations.  

Transfer all Arabs from Israel to Jewish Land and Homes confiscated by Arab Countries.

Prominent PLO Arab says there are no 'Palestinians' and no "Palestine"

PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein admitted in a March 31, 1977 interview with a Dutch newspaper Trouw.

"The Palestinian people do not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism. " 

The Qur'an 17:104 - states the land belongs to the Jewish people

If the historic documents, comments written by eyewitnesses and declarations by the most authoritative Arab scholars are still not enough, let us quote the most important source for Muslim Arabs:

"And thereafter we [Allah] said to the Children of Israel: 'Dwell securely in the Promised Land. And when the last warning will come to pass, we will gather you together in a mingled crowd'.".

017.104
YUSUFALI: And We said thereafter to the Children of Israel, "Dwell securely in the land (of promise)": but when the second of the warnings came to pass, We gathered you together in a mingled crowd.
PICKTHAL: And We said unto the Children of Israel after him: Dwell in the land; but when the promise of the Hereafter cometh to pass We shall bring you as a crowd gathered out of various nations.
SHAKIR: And We said to the Israelites after him: Dwell in the land: and when the promise of the next life shall come to pass, we will bring you both together in judgment.
- Qur'an 17:104 -

Any sincere Muslim must recognize the Land they call "Palestine" as the Jewish Homeland, according to the book considered by Muslims to be the most sacred word and Allah's ultimate revelation. 

Any building of housing in The Greater Israel is the right and duty of the Israeli government. There is no such a thing as occupied territory. It is the land of Israel for over 4,000 years.

Sequence of historical events, agreements and a non-broken series of treaties and resolutions, as laid out by the San Remo Resolution, the League of Nations and the United Nations, gives the Jewish People title to the city of Jerusalem and the rest of Israel totaling approximately 45,000 square miles, as mandated by the League of Nations in July of 1922.  The process began at San Remo, Italy, when the four Principal Allied Powers of World War I - Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan - agreed to create a Jewish national home in what is now the Land of Israel.  (You might as well break apart Syria which was mandated at the same time).

YJ Draiman. 

PS

20 Years of Research Reveals Jerusalem Belongs to Jews 

(IsraelNN.com) Jacques Gauthier, a non-Jewish Canadian lawyer who spent 20 years researching the legal status of Jerusalem, has concluded: "Jerusalem belongs to the Jews, by international law.".

Gauthier has written a doctoral dissertation on the topic of Jerusalem and its legal history, based on international treaties and resolutions of the past 90 years.  The dissertation runs some 1,300 pages, with 3,000 footnotes.  Gauthier had to present his thesis to a world-famous Jewish historian and two leading international lawyers - the Jewish one of whom has represented the Palestinian Authority on numerous occasions.

Gauthier's main point, as summarized by Israpundit editor Ted Belman, is that a non-broken series of treaties and resolutions, as laid out by the San Remo Resolution, the League of Nations and the United Nations, gives the Jewish People title to the city of Jerusalem.  The process began at San Remo, Italy, when the four Principal Allied Powers of World War I - Great Britain, France, Italy and Japan - agreed to create a Jewish national home in what is now the Land of Israel.

We must unleash the wrath of G-D against the enemies of Israel and those collaborating with the enemy.
 

Jewish Refugees from Arab States 

INTRODUCTION
When the issue of refugees is raised within the context of the Middle East, people invariably refer to Palestinian refugees, virtually never to Jews displaced from Arab countries.
In reality, two major population movements occurred as a result of over a half century of turmoil in the Middle East. Securing rights for these former Jewish refugees has never been adequately addressed by the international community. For any peace process to be credible and enduring, it must address the rights of all Middle East refugees, including Jewish and other minority populations that were displaced from Arab countries.
Historically, Jews and Jewish communities have existed in the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf region for more than 2,500 years. Jews in substantial numbers resided in what are to-day Arab countries over 1,000 years before the advent of Islam. Following the Moslem conquest of the region, for centuries, while relegated to second-class status, Jews were nonetheless permitted limited religious, educational, professional, and business opportunities.
It is important to note that the treatment of Jews by Arab leaders and Islamic populations varied greatly from country to country. By way of example, in some countries, Jews were forbidden to leave (e.g. Syria); in others, many Jews were expelled (e.g. Egypt) or displaced en masse (e.g. Iraq); while other Jewish communities lived in relative peace under the protection of Muslim rulers (e.g. Tunisia, Morocco).
When Arab countries gained independence, followed by the rise in Arab nationalism, state sanctioned measures, coupled often with violence and repression, made remaining in the land of their birth an untenable option for Jews.
In 1948, the status of Jews in Arab countries worsened dramatically as many Arab countries declared war, or backed the war against the newly founded State of Israel. Jews were either uprooted from their countries of longtime residence or became subjugated, political hostages of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In virtually all cases, as Jews left the country, individual and communal properties were confiscated without compensation.
Since 1948, over 950,000 Jews expelled and have left their birthplaces and their homes in some 10 Arab countries. To-day, fewer than 7,000 Jews remain in these same countries.
The fact that Jews displaced from Arab countries were indeed bone fide refugees, under international law, is beyond question.
• On two separate occasions the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
ruled that Jews fleeing from Arab countries were indeed ‘bona fide’ refugees who “fall under the mandate of my (UNHCR) office”.1
Mr. Auguste Lindt, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Report of the UNREF Executive Committee, Fourth Session – Geneva 29 January to 4 February, 1957; and Dr. E. Jahn, Office of the UN High Commissioner, United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees, Document No. 7/2/3/Libya, July 6, 1967.
• In all relevant international bilateral or multilateral agreements, (i.e., UN Resolution 242, The Road Map, The Madrid Conference, etc.), the reference to “refugees” is generic, allowing for the recognition and inclusion of all Middle East refugees - Jews, Christians, and other minorities.
This Legal Report is intended to document, and asserts, the rights of Jews displaced from Arab countries. Justice for Jewish refugees from Arab countries must assume its rightful place on the international political agenda, as a matter of law and equity.
It is important to underscore that:
1) the legitimate call to secure rights and redress for Jews displaced from Arab countries is not a campaign against Palestinian refugees. In any Middle East peace proposals, Palestinian refugees will be up for discussion. The history and truth about the plight of former Jewish refugees from Arab countries must be also be acknowledged and returned to the narrative of the Middle East from which it has been expunged;
2) This Report should not be misconstrued as ‘anti-Arab’. This Report provides an accurate historical narrative about the plight and flight of Jews from Arab countries that has never been recognized by the international community nor acknowledged by Arab countries.
Compelling evidence supports the call for justice to redress the victimization of Jews who lived in Arab countries and the mass violations of human rights that they were victims of;  and
3) This initiative is not about money, nor about launching legal proceedings to seek
compensation. This Report provides legal facts and evidence to assist all parties in any future negotiations on rights and redress for all Middle East refugees. In the absence of truth and justice, there can be no reconciliation, without which there can be no just, lasting peace between and among all peoples of the region.
The first injustice was the mass violations of rights of Jews in Arab countries. To-day, we must not allow a second injustice – for the international community to recognize rights for one victim population - Palestinian refugees - without recognizing equal rights for other victims of that very same Middle East conflict - former Jewish, Christian and other refugees from Arab countries.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
A) Why Now?
Why has justice for Jewish refugees not only been delayed, but why has it been denied all these years?
Why has the issue been absent, not only from the international justice agenda, but why has it also been absent all these years from the Middle East peace agenda?
Why is it that the U.N. is preparing, yet again, to commemorate the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People – on the 60th anniversary of the U.N. Partition Resolution of 1947 – but will ignore, yet again, the plight of Jewish refugees on that commemorative
occasion? Let there be no doubt about it: where there is no remembrance, there is no truth; where there is no truth, there will be no justice; where there is no justice, there will be no reconciliation; and where there is no reconciliation, there will be no peace.
There are a number of compelling, indeed urgent, moral and juridical considerations whose convergence warrants the publication of this Report.
First, there is the importance of rectifying the distorted historical narrative of Middle East refugees, and repressing the painful and pernicious delay and denial of justice for Jewish refugees these past sixty years. In particular, Jewish refugees from Arab countries must be restored to the Middle East narrative from which they have been expunged and eclipsed.
Second, there is the importance of the right to memory and the duty of remembrance of Jewish refugees; the importance for the refugees themselves of bearing witness; and the importance of hearing and documenting this witness testimony.
Third, there is the need to lay bare the truth, to counter the Middle East revisionism and distortion, to expose the cover-up of the historical narrative; and to combat the corruption of truth that inhibits understanding and prevents validation of a victim population, their history,
their experience, and their pain.
Fourth, this Report not only details this pattern of state-sanctioned repression of Jews throughout Arab countries, but uncovers, for the first time, evidence of an international criminal conspiracy by the League of Arab States to persecute its own Jewish populations, as set forth more fully in Chapter 2 of this report.
Fifth, there are important developments in international human rights and humanitarian law, where more has happened in the last 15 years than in the previous sixty, which now underpin a right of redress for victim populations, and which apply specifically to the case of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
Sixth, there is now panoply of remedies to implement the right of redress in international law.
These are not limited to compensation or indemnification of a victim population, but include such components as the right of memory, the duty of remembrance, the search for truth, access to justice, state-responsibility for wrongs inflicted, and the like.

Seventh, the whole question of refugees – and refugee claims – has now emerged at the
forefront of the peace process, be it as a subject matter of the bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, or as a subject of the forthcoming Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, or as in every narrative of discussions on the Israeli-Palestinian and Middle East peace process. Yet in each and all instances, the reference is only to Palestinian refugees, thereby cleansing Jewish refugees from the Middle East peace process narrative.
Eighth, there is the particular pernicious and prejudicial role of the United Nations, which has systemically excluded the narrative of Jewish refugees from Arab countries from any U.N. narrative on the Middle East, either by exclusively identifying only Palestinian refugees as the sole victim population of the Middle East conflict, or by asserting only Palestinian rights of redress while ignoring those of Jewish refugees.
International law now obliges us to recognize and respect the narrative of victims of human rights violations, and therefore also obliges us to respect justice for Jewish refugees from Arab countries and their case for rights and redress. Only in this fashion can there be movement from remembrance to truth, from truth to justice, from justice to reconciliation, and from reconciliation to peace - between and among all peoples and states in the region.
B) The Historical Narrative Historically, Jews and Jewish communities have existed in the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf region for more than 2,500 years.
Fully one thousand years before the advent of Islam, Jews in substantial numbers resided in what are to-day Arab countries. Following the Moslem conquest of the region, for centuries under Islamic rule, Jews were considered second class citizens but were nonetheless permitted limited religious, educational, professional, and business opportunities.
Upon the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948, the status of Jews in Arab countries changed dramatically as virtually all Arab countries declared war, or backed the war against Israel. This rejection by the Arab world of a Jewish state in their ancient homeland was the event that triggered a dramatic surge in a longstanding, pattern of abuse and state-legislated discrimination initiated by Arab regimes and their peoples to make life for Jews in Arab countries simply untenable. Jews were either uprooted from their countries of residence or became subjugated, political hostages of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Little is heard about these Jewish refugees because they did not remain refugees for long. Of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees between 1948 and 1972, some two–thirds were resettled in Israel at great expense – others emigrated elsewhere – all without any compensation provided by the Arab governments who confiscated their possessions.
Securing rights and redress for Jews displaced from Arab countries is an issue that has not yet been adequately addressed by the international community. In fact, there were more former Jewish refugees uprooted from Arab countries (over 850,000) than there were Palestinians (UN estimate: 726,000) who became refugees as a result of the 1948 war when numerous Arab nations attacked the newly established State of Israel.

C) The Mass Violations of Human Rights
the uprooting of ancient Jewish communities from some 10 Muslim countries did not occur by happenstance. State-sanctioned repressive measures, coupled often with violence and repression, precipitated a mass displacement of Jews and caused the Jewish refugee problem in the Middle East. There is evidence that points to a shared pattern of conduct amongst a number of Arab regimes, that appear intended to coerce Jews to leave and go elsewhere, or to retain them as virtual political hostages. These are evidenced from: (a) statements made by delegates of Arab countries at the U.N. during the debate on the partition resolution representing a pattern of ominously similar threats made against Jews in Arab countries; (b) Recently discovered Draft Law of the Political Committee of the Arab League detailing a
coordinated strategy of repressive measures against Jews; (c) newspaper reports from that period; and (d) strikingly similar legislation and discriminatory decrees, enacted by numerous Arab governments, that violated the fundamental rights and freedoms of Jews resident in Arab countries.
From the sheer volume of such state-sanctioned discriminatory measures, replicated in so many Arab countries and instituted in such a parallel fashion, one is drawn to the conclusion that such evidence suggests a common pattern of repressive measures – indeed collusion - against Jews by Arab governments.
The Report contains country reports that describe these unmistakable trends. The situations in Egypt, Iraq and Libya are described in greater detail. General ‘snapshot” profiles are provided on 7 other countries, including Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Yemen, Aden, Syria and Lebanon.
D) The Discriminatory Response of the United Nations to the Plight of Jewish Refugees
From 1948 onward, the response of the international community to assist Palestinian refugees arising out of the Arab-Israeli conflict was immediate and definitive. During that same period, there was no concomitant United Nations’ response, nor any comparable international action, to alleviate the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
The sole comparison that can be made between Palestinian and Jewish refugees is that both were determined to be bona fide refugees under international law, albeit each according to different internationally accepted definitions and statutes – the former covered by UNRWA and the latter by the UNHCR.
As far as the response of the United Nations is concerned, the similarity ends there. The contrasts, however, are stark:
a) Since 1947, there have been 1063 UN General Assembly resolutions dealing with virtually every aspect of the Middle East and the Arab Israeli conflict.
b) Fully 167 of these UN resolutions refer directly and specifically to the ‘plight’ of Palestinian refugees.
c) In none of these 1063 UN resolutions on the Middle East is there a specific reference to, nor any expression of concern for, the estimated 1,000,000 Jews living in, or being displaced from Arab countries during the twentieth century.
d) Numerous UN agencies and organizations were involved in a variety of efforts, or others were specifically created (e.g. UNRWA) to provide protection, relief, and assistance to Palestinian refugees. No such attention and assistance was forthcoming from these UN agencies for Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
e) Since 1948, billions of dollars have been spent by the international community - by the UN, its affiliated entities and member states - to provide relief and assistance to Palestinian refugees. During that same period, no such international financial support was ever provided to ameliorate the plight of Jewish refugees.
UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, was established by United Nations General Assembly resolution 302 (IV) of 8 December 1949 to carry out urgent, direct relief and works programs for Palestine refugees. However, Arab governments, supported by Palestinian leaders, have consistently rejected any proposal or initiative designed to provide more permanent resettlement and housing for the Palestinian refugees, preferring to utilize Palestinian refugees’ continuing plight for political purposes.
E) The Legal Case for Rights and Redress
In the context of the Middle East, it would be an injustice to ignore the rights of Jews from Arab countries. As a matter of law and equity, it would not be appropriate to recognize the claim of Palestinian refugees to redress without recognizing a right to redress for former Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
The international definition of a refugee clearly applies to Jews displaced from
Arab countries:
A refugee is a person who "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country...”
The 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees:
On two occasions, in 1957 and again in 1967, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) determined that Jews fleeing from Arab countries were refugees who fell within the mandate of the UNHCR.
“Another emergency problem is now arising: that of refugees from Egypt. There is no doubt in my mind that those refugees from Egypt who are not able or not willing to avail themselves of the protection of the Government of their nationality fall under the mandate of my office.”

Mr. Auguste Lindt, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Report of the UNREF Executive Committee, Fourth Session – Geneva 29 January to 4 February, 1957.
“I refer to our recent discussion concerning Jews from Middle Eastern and North African countries in consequence of recent events. I am now able to inform you that such persons may be considered prima facie within the mandate of this Office.”
Dr. E. Jahn, Office of the UN High Commissioner, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Document No. 7/2/3/Libya, July 6, 1967.
At the United Nations, on November 22nd, 1967, the Security Council unanimously adopted, Resolution 242, laying down the principles for a peaceful settlement in the Middle East Still considered the primary vehicle for resolving the Arab-Israel conflict, Resolution 242, stipulates that a comprehensive peace settlement should necessarily include “a just settlement of the refugee problem”. No distinction is made between Arab refugees and Jewish refugees.
On Thursday, November 16, 1967 the United Kingdom submitted their draft of Resolution 242 [S/8247] to the UN Security Council. The UK version of 242 was not exclusive, and called for a just settlement of “the refugee problem.” Just four days after the United Kingdom submission, the Soviet Union’s U.N. delegation submitted their own draft Resolution 242 to the Security Council [S/8253] restricting the “just settlement” only to “Palestinian refugees” [Para. 3 (c)].
On Wednesday, November 22, 1967, the Security Council gathered for its 1382nd meeting in New York at which time, the United Kingdom’s draft of Resolution 242 was voted on and unanimously approved. Immediately after the UK’s version of 242 was adopted, the Soviet delegation advised the Security Council, that “it will not insist, at the present stage of our consideration of the situation in the Near East, on a vote on the draft Resolution submitted by the Soviet Union” which would have limited 242 to Palestinian refugees only.3
Thus the attempt by the Soviets to restrict the “just settlement of the refugee problem” merely to “Palestinian refugees” was not successful. The international community adoption of the UK’s inclusive version signaled a desire for 242 to seek a just solution for all – including Jewish refugees - arising from the Middle East conflict.
Moreover, Justice Arthur J. Goldberg, the US Ambassador to the United Nations who was seminally involved in drafting the unanimously adopted Resolution, told The Chicago Tribune that the Soviet version of Resolution 242 was “not even-handed.” He later pointed out that:
“The Resolution addresses the objective of ‘achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem.’ This language presumably refers both to Arab and Jewish refugees, for about an equal number of each abandoned their homes as a result of the several wars…”
2 Security Council Official Records - November 22, 1967 - S/PV.1382 - Paragraph 67

3 Security Council Official Records - November 22, 1967 - S/PV.1382 - Paragraph 117
4 Transcript, Arthur J. Goldberg Oral History Interview I, 3/23/83, by Ted Gittinger; Lyndon B. Johnson Library. March 23, 1983; Pg I-10
5 “Russia stalls UN Action on Middle East.” The Chicago Tribune. November 21, 1967 pg. B9 11
With respect to Multilateral Initiatives, the Madrid Conference, first convened in October 1991, launched historic, direct negotiations between Israel and many of her Arab neighbors.
In his opening remarks at a conference convened to launch the multilateral process held in Moscow in January 1992, then-U.S. secretary of state James

6 Baker made no distinction between Palestinian refugees and Jewish refugees in articulating the mandate of the Refugee Working Group as follows: “The refugee group will consider practical ways of improving the lot of people throughout the region who have been displaced from their homes.”

7 Similarly, the Roadmap to Middle East peace currently being advanced by the Quartet (the U.N., EU, U.S., and Russia also refers in Phase III to an “agreed, just, fair and realistic solution to the refugee issue”, language applicable both to Palestinian and Jewish refugees.
All Bilateral Arab-Israeli Agreements allow for a case to be made that Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians have affirmed that a comprehensive solution to the Middle East conflict will require a “just settlement” of the “refugee problem” that will include recognition of the rights and claims of all Middle East refugees:
• Israel – Egypt Agreements
The Camp David Framework for Peace in the Middle East of 1978 (the “Camp David Accords”) includes, in paragraph A(1)(f), a commitment by Egypt and Israel to “work with each other and with other interested parties to establish agreed procedures for a prompt, just and permanent resolution of the implementation of the refugee problem.”
Article 8 of the Israel – Egypt Peace Treaty of 1979 provides that the “Parties agree to establish a claims commission for the mutual settlement of all financial claims.” Those claims include those of former Jewish refugees displaced from Egypt.
• Israel – Jordan Peace Treaty, 1994
Article 8 of the Israel – Jordan Peace Treaty, entitled “Refugees and Displaced Persons” recognizes, in paragraph 1, “the massive human problems caused to both Parties by the conflict in the Middle East”. Reference to massive human problems in a broad manner suggests that the plight of all refugees of “the conflict in the Middle East” includes Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
• Israeli-Palestinian Agreements, 1993-
Almost every reference to the refugee issue in Israeli-Palestinian agreements, talks about “refugees”, without qualifying which refugee community is at issue, including the Declaration of Principles of 13 September 1993 {Article V (3)}, and the Interim Agreement 6 Goldberg, Arthur J., “Resolution 242: After 20 Years.” The Middle East: Islamic Law and Peace (U.S. Resolution 242: Origin,
Meaning and Significance.) National Committee on American Foreign Policy; April 2002. (Originally written by Arthur J. Goldberg for the American Foreign Policy Interests on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary in 1988.)
7 Remarks by Secretary of State James A. Baker, III before the Organizational Meeting for Multilateral Negotiations on the Middle East, House of Unions, Moscow, January 28, 1992.

of September 1995 {Articles XXXI (5)}, both of which refer to “refugees” as a subject for permanent status negotiations, without qualifications.
Recognition by Political Leaders of the rights of Jewish refugees from Arab countries
include:
• After ‘Camp David II’, U.S. President Bill Clinton recognized the rights of Jews
displaced from Arab countries in a July 27th, 2000 interview on Israeli Television when he stated:
Israel is full of people, Jewish people, who lived in predominantly Arab countries who came to Israel because they were made refugees in their own land”.
• Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, after successfully brokering the Camp David Accords and the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, stated in a press conference on Oct. 27, 1977:
“Palestinians have rights… obviously there are Jewish refugees…they have
the same rights as others do.”
• Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin stated, in a June 3rd, 2005 interview with the Canadian Jewish News which he later reaffirmed in a July 14, 2005 letter:
“A refugee is a refugee and that the situation of Jewish refugees from Arab lands must be recognized. All refugees deserve our consideration as they have lost both physical property and historical connections.”
The Report argues for redress as a matter of international law. Jews from Arab countries are entitled to invoke the right to redress because of the injustices inflicted upon them that caused their displacement.
The report refers to the remedies available to assert the right to redress. The remedies considered include the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations Convention on the Status of Refugees, a compensation fund established under an Arab-Israeli comprehensive settlement, and possibly, litigation in the courts of the countries where Jews displaced from Arab countries are now found.
 Transcript released by The White House Office of the Press Secretary, “Interview of the President by Israeli Television”; The Roosevelt Room; July 27, 2000; 5:42 P.M. EDT

I) WHY NOW?
A) From UN Partition Plan (1947) to Annapolis Peace Summit (2007): Rectifying an Historical Injustice 60 years Later By the Honorable Irwin Cotler
In 1987, I co-chaired with the late Justice Arthur Goldberg of the Supreme Court of the United States, then U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., a tribunal on Justice for Jewish Refugees from Arab countries. One of the witnesses that came before our Tribunal lamented, “Why now?” “Why was this happening forty years later?”
Today, twenty years after that Tribunal, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947, and the Annapolis Peace Conference, this lament is even more pronounced.
Indeed, the question is not so much why are we talking about justice for Jewish refugees from Arab countries sixty years later, but why has this concern not been on the international justice agenda at all?
Why has justice for Jewish refugees not only been delayed, but why has it been denied all these years?
Why has the issue been absent, not only from the international justice agenda, but why has it also been absent all these years from the Middle East peace agenda?
Why is it that as we approach the Annapolis peace conference on the Middle East – now scheduled for Nov. 29 2007 – there is mention only of Palestinian refugees, but no mention of Jewish refugees, though there are two victim populations arising from this conflict?
Why is it that the U.N. is preparing, yet again, to commemorate the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People – on the 60th anniversary of the U.N. Partition Resolution of 1947 – but will ignore, yet again, the plight of Jewish refugees on that commemorative occasion?
Why have Jewish refugees from Arab countries been expunged from the Middle East narrative?
Indeed, why is this narrative so distorted – and inverted – such that the original 1947 U.N. Partition Resolution is held out as one where Palestinian-Arab refugees are identified as the victim population – and they were – but no reference is made to the fact that Jewish refugees were also a victim population; and that Arab governments - and the League of Arab States - were responsible for both Palestinian and Jewish victim refugee populations as set forth in this Report?
What does it take, then, to rectify this historical injustice, this exercise in historical Middle East revisionism?

Let there be no doubt about it: where there is no remembrance, there is no truth; where there is no truth, there will be no justice; where there is no justice, there will be no reconciliation; and where there is no reconciliation, there will be no peace.
Accordingly, this chapter will be organized around two themes. First, ‘why now?’ What factors have mandated the publication of this report; and second, what are the principles that underpin the pursuit of justice for Jewish refugees from Arab countries, and what is the case for rights and redress?
B) Why Now? What Factors Motivate the Publication of this Report?
There are a number of compelling, indeed urgent, moral and juridical considerations whose convergence warrants the publication of this Report.
First, there is the importance of rectifying the distorted historical narrative of Middle East refugees, and redressing the painful and pernicious delay and denial of justice for Jewish refugees these past sixty years. In particular, Jewish refugees from Arab countries must be restored to the Middle East narrative from which they have been expunged and eclipsed.
Indeed, this exclusion is not only historical but also contemporary; there is an ongoing failure to include the plight of Jewish refugees in any narrative of the Middle East conflict, in any discussion of the Middle East peace process, and in any decision-making at the multi-lateral level, such as in the United Nations.
Second, there is the importance of the right to memory and the duty of remembrance of Jewish refugees; the importance for the refugees themselves of bearing witness; and the importance of hearing and documenting this witness testimony and ongoing narrative, particularly given the increasing willingness of witnesses to come forward some sixty years later to recount the experiences that they themselves have sometimes repressed.
Indeed, the raison d’être for the establishment of this group – Justice for Jewish Refugees from Arab Counties – and the publication of this report on “The Case for Rights and Redress” is the principle of zachor – of remembrance – of having peoples’ stories and testimonies both acknowledged and respected, and their experiences validated and understood.
Third, there is the need to lay bare the truth, to counter the Middle East revisionism and distortion, to expose the cover-up of the historical narrative; and to combat the corruption of truth that inhibits understanding and prevents validation of a victim population, their history, their experience, and their pain.
Indeed, this report exposes not only the massive human rights violations that Jewish refugees from Arab countries have experienced, but documents - for the first time - the state-sanctioned character of these violations, including Nuremberg-like laws that resulted in denationalization, forced expulsions, illegal sequestration of property, and the like, the whole as set forth more fully in Chapter 5 of this report.

Fourth, this Report not only details this pattern of state-sanctioned repression of Jews throughout Arab countries, but uncovers, for the first time, evidence of an international criminal conspiracy by the League of Arab States to persecute its own Jewish populations, as set forth more fully in Chapter 2 of this report.
Fifth, there are important developments in international human rights and humanitarian law, where more has happened in the last 15 years than in the previous sixty, which now underpin a right of redress for victim populations, and which apply specifically to the case of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
Sixth, there is now panoply of remedies to implement the right of redress in international law.
These are not limited to compensation or indemnification of a victim population, but include such components as the right of memory, the duty of remembrance, the search for truth, access to justice, state-responsibility for wrongs inflicted, and the like.
Seventh, the whole question of refugees – and refugee claims – has now emerged at the
forefront of the peace process, be it as a subject matter of the bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, or as a subject of the forthcoming Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, or as in every narrative of discussions on the Israeli-Palestinian and Middle East peace process. Yet in each and all instances, the reference is only to Palestinian refugees, thereby cleansing Jewish refugees from the Middle East peace process narrative.
Eighth, there is the particular pernicious and prejudicial role of the United Nations, which has systemically excluded the narrative of Jewish refugees from Arab countries from any U.N. narrative on the Middle East, either by exclusively identifying only Palestinian refugees as the sole victim population of the Middle East conflict, or by asserting only Palestinian rights of redress while ignoring those of Jewish refugees.
C) Foundational Principles for Rights and Redress Each of the foundational principles for rights and redress correspond to – and respond to – the above exigencies that mandated this report.
The first principle is fidelity to justice and the rule of law, to correct the historical record and redress misrepresentations of fact and law.
Second, there is the important principle of the right of memory and the duty of remembrance – of remembering and respecting the narrative and experience of the victim population. In this instance, it is remembering the victim population of the “forgotten exodus” of 856,000 Jews from ten Arab countries, of which only some 8,000 remain today, an astonishing statistic.
Yet, this is not just a matter of abstract principles or statistics. Behind each statistic is a name, an identity, a family, a member of a community. Each person is a universe; each person deserves to be remembered; each deserves to have his or her voice acknowledged and affirmed; each deserves to have his or her voice – his or her testimony – his or her truth – be part of the historical narrative.

There is a third, and related, principle – an important and integral component of memory and remembrance – and that is the search for truth, the antidote to Middle East historical revisionism in the matter of refugees.
The expunging of the “forgotten exodus” from the Middle East narrative is bad enough, but it ignores – or covers up – that it was a forced exodus, indeed, a forced expulsion of these Jews from Arab countries. Moreover, this forced expulsion - as documented in this Report – did not happen par hazard; rather, it was the result of state-orchestrated, state-sanctioned patterns of oppression, including threats, harassments, beatings, and pogroms targeting the Jewish population as described more fully in this report.
More importantly, yet rarely addressed and appreciated – if indeed even known – is the enactment in the Arab countries of Nuremberg-type laws against their Jewish population, and which, for example, decreed that: Jews were the enemies of the state in which they lived; Jews were to be denied or to forfeit their citizenship; Jewish property was to be sequestered; assets belonging to Jews were to be seized and their bank accounts blocked – the whole with a view to make their lives and those of their communities untenable. These Nuremberg-like laws therefore constituted not only a legal system of state-sanctioned discrimination, but they served as the basis for state-sanctioned expulsion.
Fourth, there is a dramatic and hitherto unknown evidentiary finding, namely, that these massive human rights violations were not events that occurred coincidently or haphazardly; nor were they the result only of state-sanctioned patterns of repression in each of the Arab countries, though this would be bad enough; rather, as the evidence discloses, they were the result of an international criminal conspiracy by the League of Arab States to target and persecute the Jewish populations in their respective countries.
In a word, there is clear evidence that points to a shared pattern of criminal conduct amongst a number of Arab regimes to coerce Jews to leave or to treat them as non-Jews if they remained.
The evidence included, as set forth more fully in the report: (a) Statements made by delegates of Arab countries at the U.N. during the debate on the Partition Resolution, representing a pattern of ominously similar threats made against Jews in Arab countries; (b) newspaper reports from that period; and (c) strikingly similar legislation and discriminatory decrees, enacted by numerous Arab governments in violation of the fundamental rights and freedoms of Jewish residents in Arab countries.
The sheer volume of such state-sanctioned discriminatory measures, replicated in so many Arab countries and instituted in such a parallel fashion, reveals a common pattern of repressive measures – indeed collusion - against Jews by Arab governments.
Moreover, lest there be any doubt about it, this Report reproduces a recently discovered document – the Draft Law of the Political Committee of the Arab League - where the plan to persecute Jews in Arab countries is set out in chilling detail. Indeed, in light of this Report, it is not possible to argue that Arab states, when enacting legislation against their Jewish minorities, simply acted in coincidental parallel fashion.
The Draft Law has seven simple provisions. The first requires registration of Jews and classifies them all as "members of the Jewish minority state of Palestine," i.e. that they are citizens of an enemy state, Israel. The second requires freezing of Jewish bank accounts and use of the funds from those accounts to finance the wars of Arab states against the Jewish state.
The third states "only Jews who are subjects of foreign countries will be considered as neutrals." That is to say, Jews who are subjects of an Arab country are to be considered as hostile enemies.
The fifth clause provides for internment of active Zionists, those who support the right of Israel to exist. Their financial resources will be confiscated.
The fourth and sixth provisions state that any Jewish person who meets certain criteria is "free to act as he likes." Subject to two qualifications: that each Jewish person must prove that their activities are anti-Zionist and in active opposition to the right of self-determination of the Jewish people; and they must declare their readiness to join Arab armies, which were at war with Israel. In other words, only a Jew willing to kill other Jews is "free to act as he likes."
The final clause says that even if Jews meet these “criteria” they still have to register as Jews and will have their bank accounts frozen. These provisions make a mockery of the alleged exception that some Jews would have freedom of action. In reality, under the Draft Law, no Jew is free to act as he or she likes.
D) An Ominous Discovery: The Comparison between the State-Sanctioned Patterns of Repression in Arab Countries and the Draft Law of the League of Arab States
The pattern of repressive behavior against Jews in each of the Arab countries is disturbing enough, but what makes the repressive behavior so ominous, and the conspiracy so evident, is the comparison between the repressive measures adopted in early 1948 in each of the Arab League member states, and the corresponding blueprint of the Draft Law.
First, the Draft Law imposes denationalization - "all Jewish citizens of (name of country) will be considered as members of the Jewish minority State of Palestine." Shortly thereafter, as this Report documents, a massive denationalization began in each of the member states.
Second, the Draft Law requires the freezing of Jewish bank accounts, and Jewish bank accounts subsequently frozen by law.
Third, the Draft Law calls for the diversion of the funds of frozen Jewish bank accounts, in order to finance the Arab wars against Israel. This is exactly what happened, as enshrined in law, in country after country in the region.
Fourth, the Draft Law requires internment and confiscation of property of "active Zionists."
What follows is that “Zionism” then became a criminal offence throughout the region - in some cases even punishable by death - while the reports of Jewish property confiscation became widespread in country after country.
In brief, the Draft Law was a prediction of what was to happen to Jews in the Arab countries.
It became a blueprint, in country after country, for the laws that were eventually to be enacted 18 in these countries against Jews, for the actions that devastated the Jewish communities in Arab lands; and for the forced exodus that was to follow.
I have elaborated more on this fourth principle because of its particular ominous character; that these massive human rights violations in Arab countries against the Jewish populations were not only the result of state-sanctioned patterns of oppression – including Nuremberg-type laws – which occurred par hazard, in parallel fashion, in each of the Arab countries; but as the above evidence discloses, they were the result of a collusion between Arab states – a blue-print embodied in the Draft Law of the League of Arab States – to persecute its Jewish nationals. I will now continue with the recitation of the foundational principles underlying the case for rights and redress, and the imperative, for rectifying this historical injustice.
The fifth principle, then, is that of the right to justice and corresponding right to redress. Simply put victims of such massive human rights violations – particularly such as the Jewish victims of such state-sanctioned patterns of repression – have a right to justice and redress for those human rights violations, as sanctioned in international human rights and humanitarian law.
Indeed, the remedies developed under international human rights and humanitarian law for victim populations – and therefore for the Jews from Arab countries – include, but are not limited to: the right to memory and the duty of remembrance; access to justice including the right to know the truth about these violations; and the right to reparations, which should be proportionate to the gravity of the violations and the harm suffered by the victim group.
The Sixth principle, also anchored in basic principles of international humanitarian law, is that of State Responsibility for such massive human rights violations. Simply put, the states responsible for these violations have a duty to make redress. Evidence of such state-sanctioned wrongs not only creates rights of redress, but establishes a duty on the part of the violating states to make redress. Moreover, as this Report demonstrates, these wrongs against Jewish victim groups were not only committed by individual states for which each bears responsibility, but the wrong was inflicted by the League of Arab States as a whole, resulting from their international criminal conspiracy as above demonstrated in the comparison of the Draft Law with the laws of the individual Arab countries.
Accordingly, the Arab League as a distinct entity, as well as each of its individual members separately, must commit to access to justice for Jewish refugees, to reparations for the harms suffered by the victim populations, and to access to the factual information required concerning the violations of the wrongs so inflicted against them.
Seventh, there is the related principle of unjust enrichment. Not only was property forcibly sequestered, not only were assets seized, not only were bank accounts blocked, but in effect, the Arab countries have had the benefit from this type of illegal action for all these years. There is a case to be made of continuing unjust enrichment, as the law puts it, which needs to be redressed.
Eighth is the importance of the principle of reconciliation. In the case studies of major conflicts in which state-sanctioned violations have been perpetrated against victim populations, the basic principles of victim rights – the right to memory, the duty of remembrance, the pursuit of truth, the right to justice and redress, the duty of accountability, and the duty of State Responsibility - have all been demonstrated to be prerequisites to reconciliations between peoples as well as between states.
Accordingly, the integrity of the Middle East peace process requires an acknowledgement of the truth and justice that underpin the conflict – particularly as it pertains to the Jewish refugee population. Not only has this been ignored in terms of the Jewish victim population, but it has been utterly excluded from any narrative of justice, accountability, and peace.
None of this is intended to argue against the Palestinian right of redress nor intended to diminish the suffering of the Palestinian population, nor their plight, nor their victimization.
Rather, the point is that the rights to redress of Jewish refugees from Arab countries are at least as compelling as those of the Palestinians; yet, Jewish rights have been historically ignored and excluded from any consideration, and continuing this distorted policy and practice would be to perpetuate a historic injustice.
The time has come, therefore, to rectify this historical injustice by restoring the plight and truth and justice of Jewish refugees from Arab countries to the Middle East narrative from which they have been expunged and eclipsed.
Simply put, any narrative on the Middle East that does not include justice for Jewish refugees is a case study in Middle East revisionism. It is an assault on truth, memory and justice. Rights for Jewish refugees from Arab countries have to be part of any narrative – any peace process – any decision-making - if that narrative or peace process or decision-making is going to have integrity, credibility, and legitimacy.
In particular, the United Nations must bear express responsibility for this distorted narrative. Indeed, the U.N. is a case study in Middle East revisionism. Since 1947, there have been 842 resolutions adopted by the U.N. General Assembly that have dealt with the Arab-Israeli conflict.
There have been 126 resolutions that have specifically dealt with the Palestinian refugee plight.
In none of these U.N. Resolutions on the Middle East is there any reference to, nor any expression of concern for, the plight of the 856,000 Jews living in, or having been displaced from, Arab countries.
As well, numerous U.N. agencies and organizations were involved in a variety of efforts, or others were specifically created, to provide protection, relief, and assistance to Palestinian refugees. Again, no such attention and assistance were forthcoming from these U.N. agencies for Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
Moreover, since 1947, billions of dollars have been spent by the international community - by the U.N. and its affiliated entities and member states - to provide relief and assistance to Palestinian refugees. During that same period, notwithstanding requests by international Jewish relief organizations, no such international financial support was ever provided to ameliorate the plight of Jewish refugees.
Finally, on this point and principle, dozens of resolutions were passed by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in relation to the Middle East, including resolutions specifically concerning Palestinian refugees. Not one resolution ever dealt with Jewish refugees from Arab countries.

In perhaps the most egregious demonstration of U.N. injustice, the U.N. Council on Human Rights – the successor to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights – adopted 11 resolutions of condemnation in 2006-7, its first year of operation; all 11 resolutions of condemnation were passed against one member-state of the international community, namely Israel. Not one resolution of condemnation was adopted against any of the other 191 member states of the international community.
Moreover, while Israel was being singled out for differential and discriminatory treatment, the major human rights violators – such as Iran and Sudan - were enjoying exculpatory immunity.
Indeed, this report is not arguing that the UN should not have dealt with the issue of Palestinian refugees. That is part of the issue of truth, justice and reconciliation. But for the U.N. to deal only with the issue of Palestinian refugees - and not to have addressed at all - in any of its resolutions or deliberations, the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries, is not only a matter of a distorted narrative, but is a fundamental injustice in and of itself.
If one looks at UN involvement in the matter of “a just resolution of the refugee problem,” the exclusion of Jewish refugees raises serious questions about the integrity of the United Nations role in the Quartet, or the peace process as a whole. For it is inconceivable and unjust for a U.N. narrative of the Middle East not to make any reference to the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab countries and their rights to redress.
E) Proposals to Rectify the Historical Injustice In the matter of the United Nations and in the interests of justice and equity, U.N. General Assembly resolutions must include reference to Jewish refugees as well as to Palestinian and Arab refugees. Further, the forthcoming International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People should acknowledge the reality of Jewish refugees. The U.N. Security Council, acting on principle and precedent, should establish an international compensation fund to indemnify Jewish, as well as Palestinian Arab refugees. The U.N. Human Rights Council should address the matter of Jewish refugees from Arab countries as part of its deliberations.
Indeed, there are other parallel initiatives that need to be taken to rectify this historical injustice which has expunged and eclipsed Jewish refugees from any narrative or decision-making on the Middle East. First, the United States – in concert with the Quartet – should include the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries on the agenda of the forthcoming Annapolis Peace Conference, together with that of Palestinian Arab refugees.
Second, the bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations – which one hopes will presage a just and lasting peace – should include Jewish refugees as well as Palestinian refugees in a joiner of discussion.
Third, each of the Arab states – and this is particularly important for an authentic process of reconciliation – would have to acknowledge their role and responsibility in the perpetration of human rights violations against their respective Jewish nationals.
Fourth, the Arab League, the successor body to the League of Arab States, should also acknowledge its role and responsibility in the drafting and endorsement of its blueprint for the 21 perpetration of human rights violations against Jewish nationals, and the consequent expulsion of Jewish refugees, effectively the “forced exodus”.
Fifth, the Arab League initiative should incorporate the question of Jewish refugees from Arab countries as part of its narrative for an Israeli-Arab peace, just as the Israeli narrative now incorporates the issue of Palestinian refugees in its vision of an Israeli-Arab peace.
And finally, the whole question of the plight of Palestinian refugees – and their just treatment – might better be served by bringing them within the general United Nations refugee system, rather than the separate system for Palestinian refugees, which has nurtured their plight rather than facilitated its resolution.

Conclusion
As we approach the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Partition Resolution of 1947, a fair-minded Middle East narrative, founded on the principles of truth and justice - and one that would lead to reconciliation and peace - would have to acknowledge a basic truth: that both Palestinian-Arab refugees and Jewish refugees from Arab countries were the joint victims of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and in particular, the joint victims of the Arab war against Israel in 1947 and 1948.
Indeed, the historical pattern of the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab conflict can be summed up under the rubric of “double rejectionism”. Both the Arab leadership and the Palestinian leadership in 1947 were prepared to forgo the establishment of a Palestinian state if that meant countenancing a Jewish state in any borders. Simply put, if the Arab leadership had accepted the U.N. Partition Resolution of 1947, there would have been no refugees - either Arab or Jewish. Fast forward to Camp David and the Taba negotiations in the year 2000, and the same “double rejectionism” remains.
Moreover, if one looks at the historical narrative in terms of remembrance, of truth, of justice, and of reconciliation, one cannot ignore the fact that not only is there this “double rejectionism,” but that this is also related to a double aggression. Not only was there a rejection of a Palestinian state if that meant countenancing an Israeli state in any borders in 1947, but a war was launched
by the Arab states against Israel to eclipse the nascent state in 1947.
Similarly, on a second front, and at the same time, a state-sanctioned repression campaign against the Jews was launched in Arab countries as part of this pattern of state-sanctioned human rights violations and aggression both internationally and domestically.
Accordingly, what we are addressing here are foundational principles of memory and remembrance, of truth and justice, of reconciliation and peace, not only on a normative level, but as foundational principles now enshrined in international human rights and humanitarian law.
International law now obliges us to recognize and respect the narrative of victims of human rights violations, and therefore also obliges us to respect justice for Jewish refugees from Arab countries and their case for rights and redress. Only in this fashion can there be movement from remembrance to truth, from truth to justice, from justice to reconciliation, and from reconciliation to peace - between and among all peoples and states in the region.

Obama’s Anti-Israel Jihad

Posted By Robert Spencer On April 6, 2010 @ 12:00 am 

Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor of The Australian, recently wrote that “Barack Obama’s anti-Israel jihad is one of the most irresponsible policy lurches by any modern American president.” This is true not solely because Israel has been a reliable and loyal American ally, and is the only free society in the Middle East. Obama’s animus toward Israel and bullying of our longtime ally is irresponsible because the President is simultaneously ignoring the steep rise in jihad activity by Muslims in the U.S. and U.S-born Muslims since he took office.

“Jihad is becoming as American as apple pie and as British as afternoon tea” – so said the American-born Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaqi recently. Al-Awlaqi, who was in contact with Nidal Hasan, the jihadist who murdered thirteen Americans at Fort Hood in November 2009, and with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the jihadist who tried to bring down an airplane as it landed in Detroit on Christmas day, had plenty of reason to claim that “jihad is becoming as American as apple pie”: evidence of U.S. Muslims engaging in terrorism grows every day.

Last week a Chicago-based Muslim, David Headley, a.k.a. Daood Gilani, pled guilty to going on a reconnaissance mission to find targets for the devastating 2008 jihad attacks in Mumbai, in which over 150 people were murdered. Gilani also participated in a plot to bomb a newspaper in Denmark that published cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. Also last week, Sharif Mobley, a Muslim from New Jersey, was arrested in Yemen over his ties to Al-Qaeda and his murder of a guard in an escape attempt.

The week before that, two American Muslim women, both of whom are converts to Islam, were arrested for their involvement in a plot to murder the Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks for his cartoon of the Muslim prophet Muhammad as a dog. One has since been released, although her mother and stepfather have voiced concerns about how she is teaching her six-year-old son to hate Christians and believe that Muslims must wage war against them.

And last month, a Muslim from Queens, New York, Najibullah Zazi, pled guilty to leading a jihad plot to set off a bomb in the New York subway system. An Islamic cleric, Ahmad Afzali, pled guilty to tipping off Zazi that law enforcement officials had been asking about him, and then lying to them about having done so.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani government has charged five Muslims from Virginia with terrorism after they entered Pakistan and tried to join up with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban there in order to fight against American troops in Afghanistan. Initially the five tried to avoid being charged by explaining that they had come to Pakistan to engage in Islamic jihad, and that Islamic jihad was not illegal in Pakistan.

An undetermined number of Somali Muslims have gone from their new homes in Minneapolis back to Somalia in order to wage jihad in an al-Qaeda-linked group. Bryant Neal “Ibrahim” Vinas, a convert to Islam from Long Island, has been charged with participating in an attack on an American military base in Afghanistan and, in 2009, giving information about the New York City subway system to Al-Qaeda operatives. Another American Muslim convert, Abdulhakim Muhammad (formerly Carlos Bledsoe), murdered Private William Long and gravely wounded Private Quinton Ezeagwula outside the Army-Navy Career Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, in June 2009. Muhammad explained that the shooting was “a jihadi attack.”

And in August 2009, Daniel “Seifullah” Boyd, yet another convert to Islam, and six other Muslims in North Carolina were arrested and charged with “conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and conspiring to murder, kidnap, maim and injure persons abroad.” On a surveillance audiotape Boyd proclaims: “I love jihad.”

What is Barack Obama doing about all this? Not much besides pressure Israel. The World Tribune reported Thursday that “the administration of President Barack Obama has refused to approve any of Israel’s military requests since it entered office in January 2009. The Pentagon did not announce any weapons contracts to Israel over the last 14 months.”

Does he think that bullying Israel will end the jihad against the United States?

Or does he just not care?


US Mil. Analyst: Obama is the First Anti-Israeli President
by Hillel Fendel - Arutz Sheva

Lt.-Col. (ret.) Ralph Peters, military analyst and author of a book on Middle East politics, says Obama apparently has a chip on his shoulder against Israel – and it’s not “helpful to our civilization.”

Peters, who wrote “Endless War: Middle Eastern Islam vs. Western Civilization,” was asked to explain why he felt American-Israeli friendship appears to have been derailed so dramatically. “The answer is two words,” he said. “President Obama.”

“Obama’s treatment of [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu [during their recent meeting in Washington] was disgraceful and shameful,” Peters told FoxNews. “We treat our enemies with greater courtesy! In addition, it was counter-productive – because this vendetta on the part of the White House against Israel - all it does is encourage the Palestinians and their Arab backers to make ever wilder demands that Israel cannot possibly fulfill. This is not a peace process; this is something about a chip on the President’s shoulder.”

Peters says that Obama’s approach is “absolutely” a departure from past American policy. “It all started with Obama’s Cairo speech,” he said, “where Obama attempted to appease radical Muslims in the Middle East, cold-shouldered Israel, and raised Palestinian expectations that he’d take care of Israel and that the Palestinians would get their revenge. Secondly, in the past, under Presidents Clinton and Bush, there were face-to-face negotiations; the Palestinians were offered one deal after another, and it was always – always! - the Palestinians who walked away.”

Obama Refuses to Recognize the Basic Equation

The American animosity towards Israel “is not about housing in Jerusalem or anything else,” Peters emphasized. “We need to back up and get a little wide-angle picture and recognize the fundamental issue in play here: Israel wants to live in peace with its neighbors, and its neighbors want Israel destroyed. The President refuses to understand that.”

“It’s become a credo of the left-wing that Israel is always the oppressor,” Peters continued, “and that the Palestinian terrorists are freedom fighters, etc. … Obama’s mother is extremely left, his university chums are on the left, he spent 20 years with the Rev. Wright – all of their doctrines say that the Palestinians are wonderful and that the Israelis are basically Nazis... I think that the President has gotten that by osmosis… This is our first anti-Israeli President; it’s bewildering and astonishing.”

Peters said that Israel is not perfect: “This is not a question of giving in to everything that Israel wants; Israel screws up too. But [American policy must] be a balanced approach that takes into account that Israel, for all its many faults is the only rule of law, democracy and respecter of human rights in the entire Middle East; they are part of our civilization. To turn away from Israel as we are doing is not going to help our diplomacy;

Pilar Rahola has published several books in Spanish and Catalan and is a columnist in La Vanguardia, Spain; La Nación, Argentina; and Diario de América, USA. Rahola appears frequently on television and has taken part in several university lectures. >From 1987 to 1990, she was director of the Catalan publishing house Pòrtic, and as a journalist, she covered the Eritrean-Ethiopian War, the Balkan Wars, the Gulf War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. As a politician, Rahola was the only member of the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya in the Spanish Congress of Deputies in 5th and 6th Spanish legislatures. She also served as vice-mayor of Barcelona. Rahola also participated in several committees of investigation, especially those related to political corruption such as the comisión Roldán. In 1996, she left Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya to join Àngel Colom and Joan Laporta in a new political group, the “Partit per la Independència”, but after this failed, she concentrated on journalism and writing. Her areas of interest include women’s rights, international human rights, and animal rights. In recent years she has attracted controversy in Spain for her critical support of Israel and Zionism.

Candidly Speaking: Down from the fence

By ISI LEIBLER
14/04/2010 23:27

The WJC head has done his people a service by openly challenging Obama.

 

 

 

World Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder should be applauded for calling on the Obama administration to end the antagonism and one-sided pressure it has been applying against Israel.

The call was in an open letter to President Barack Obama published today as a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Jerusalem Post. By this act, Lauder broke the curtain of silence, self-imposed by most of the American Jewish establishment since Obama’s exploitation of an untimely announcement by a mid-level municipal Israeli authority about construction in an exclusively Jewish east Jerusalem neighborhood as a pretext to launch ferocious attacks on Israel.

The notable exception was ADL head Abe Foxman, a Holocaust child survivor, who from the outset emerged as a lone mainstream Jewish voice remonstrating against the bias and harsh treatment. Recently, he even proposed a protest march on Washington.

The overall response from other Jewish agencies was disappointingly muted, and seemed to have been based on the delusion that US-Israel relations would somehow improve of their own accord.

The opening presentation at the AIPAC conference by the new president, Lee Rosenberg, did convey concern and urged that differences not be aired publicly. But there was a reluctance to openly confront the Obama administration’s discriminatory behavior.

The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, specifically created to act as the voice of American Jews in relation to Israel, was extraordinarily passive despite the fact that its executive vice president, Malcolm Hoenlein, is certainly no dove.

As for nonestablishment leaders, there were indeed loud rumblings from independent Jewish personalities, including prominent supporters of the Democratic Party who had voted for Obama in the mistaken belief that he would adhere to his electoral undertakings. Thus, Alan Dershowitz wrote an explicit warning of the dangers of the US following the path of the disastrous appeasement blunders of Munich; Marty Peretz, editor of The New Republic, fiercely castigated Obama.

Leading Democrat and former New York mayor Ed Koch did not mince words. He accused Obama of demeaning and slandering Israel and being willing to throw the Jewish state under a bus in order to pursue his pro-Arab agenda. He confessed that he rued the day he voted for a president who was willing to betray and abandon Israel.

And needless to say, there were protests from the political Right – the Zionist Organization of America and the Jewish Republican Coalition. There were also anguished calls from many Jews at the grassroots level.

It has always been committed Jews who have stood at the forefront of political action in such situations.

IN THIS context, though perhaps belated, Lauder’s public criticism is important. It will undoubtedly unleash a storm of castigation, but will hopefully draw attention to the gravity of the situation, which many supporters of Israel were hitherto unwilling to confront, and oblige Jewish organizations and agencies sitting on the sidelines to take a stand.

If the recent American Jewish Committee poll is an indicator, many American Jews are confused by repeated affirmations of the “unshakeable alliance,” and simply unaware of the extent of the growing rift between Israel and the Obama administration. This is exemplified by the contradiction that 75 percent of those polled affirm that the primary goal of the Arabs is the destruction of Israel rather than the return of territories, yet many continue supporting the Obama administration.

Lauder’s call will thus hopefully enable a growing proportion of the 78% of Jews who voted for Obama to appreciate the extent to which he has betrayed his electoral undertakings and is apparently willing to sacrifice Israel’s security to appease the Arabs.

Lauder was previously closely associated with Binyamin Netanyahu, and his critics undoubtedly will accuse him of acting as his instrument. I know for a fact that this is untrue. He acted as a proud American and leader of world Jewry.

Lauder is a formidable global businessman with considerable investments in Israel and a major philanthropist. He was appointed ambassador to Austria by president Ronald Reagan, and is renowned for establishing the Ronald Lauder Foundation, which funds the revival of Judaism and Jewish culture in Central and Eastern Europe after the Cold War. Prior to being elected president of the WJC, Lauder also served as chairman of the Presidents Conference.

The WJC under Lauder’s helm has hitherto been largely dormant. But by taking this new initiative he is thrusting the global Jewish body into the limelight and taking a position that may in the long term prove to be of importance, not only to the American-Israel relationship but also for the American Jewish community’s image of itself.

It will balance the policy failures of some of his predecessors, one of whom, Rabbi Stephen Wise, headed the WJC during World War ll and compromised an otherwise impressive leadership record by being cowed by president Franklin Roosevelt into remaining silent over the failure of the Allies to take action to try to stop the Holocaust.

Edgar Bronfman, Lauder’s predecessor, despite major contributions to the welfare of the Jewish people, made the crucial error of claiming to know better than the Israelis what was good for them. In August 2003 he precipitated a major storm, in which I personally intervened, by calling on president George W. Bush to pressure prime minister Ariel Sharon. In doing so, Bronfman anticipated the emergence of J Street.

IF LAUDER sticks to his guns, he will emerge as a Jewish leader who was prepared to stand up and be counted in the face of his president’s wretched behavior towards the Jewish state. There will be shrieks from some of Obama’s supporters and intensified efforts to intimidate American Jews. The Israel bashers will accuse Lauder of harboring dual loyalties and placing the interests of Israel ahead of those of the US. The despicable distorted spins insinuating that Israel is endangering American troops will be reiterated. The Arabs, enemies of Israel and all anti-Semites will combine efforts to undermine and slander all Americans who support the Jewish state.

However, Lauder can take heart from the considerable support for Israel which prevails among the American people, as exemplified in the bipartisan resolution favoring Israel carried by more than three quarters of the House and only a few days ago by a similar majority in the Senate.

This is an historic time. There are real dangers threatening the Jewish state, and the role of the US will be crucial for our welfare.

An open letter in itself is no substitute for people power to counter the Obama administration’s present course of appeasement. But it may provide a rallying cry to rouse American Jews and friends of Israel to speak up and remind their president that breaching his electoral undertakings concerning Israel is not only shamefully immoral, but also undermines US global interests in this volatile region, where Israel stands alone in the name of democratic freedom.

Freeze of Jewish construction in Judea & Samaria is based on a series of erroneous assumptions: 

1.  A Freeze will not soften – but will intensify - President Obama's criticism of "settlements" in particular and Israeli policy in general. For instance, Prime Minister Netanyahu's June 14, 2009 Two-State-Solution-speech triggered exacerbated pressure by Obama. Moreover, Netanyahu's willingness to exchange hundreds of Palestinian terrorists for Gilad Shalit was followed by US pressure to release more terrorists.

2. A Freeze will not moderate – but will whet the appetite of - the PLO (Abu Mazen) or Hamas (Haniye'); it will radicalize their demands and fuel their terrorism. Former Prime Minister Barak's sweeping concessions, offered to Arafat and Abu Mazen in October 2000, were greeted by the PLO-engineered Second Intifada'. Furthermore, Prime Minister Olmert's unprecedented offer of concessions (including the return of some 1948 refugees) was rebuffed by Abu Mazen. 

 

3.  A Freeze re-entrenches the misperception of Jewish presence in Judea & Samaria as a/the obstacle to peace. It diverts attention and resources from the crucial threat to peace: Abu Mazen-engineered hate education - the manufacturing line of terrorists - and Arab rejection of the existence – and not just the size – of the Jewish State.

 

4.  A Freeze and the adherence to Presidential dictate will not transform the White House position on Iran-related matters. Besides, a Freeze and the adherence to Presidential dictate do not constitute a prerequisite to maintaining constructive strategic relations with the USA (e.g. supply of critical military systems and crucial strategic cooperation). In fact, a Freeze and a serial submission to Presidential pressure – just like any other form of retreat - erode Israel's strategic posture in Washington and in the Middle East. Such an attitude ignores the role and power of Congress – especially when it comes to the Jewish State - at the dire expense of Israel's national security.

 

Is Jewish construction in Judea & Samaria an/the obstacle to peace?

1.  In September 2005, Israel uprooted 25 Jewish communities from Gaza and Samaria.  Gaza became Judenrein.  It paved the road to the meteoric rise of Hamas, and induced more smuggling, manufacturing and launching of missiles at Jewish communities in Southern Israel.

2.  President Obama defines Jewish presence in Judea & Samaria as a root cause of Arab hostility toward the Israel.  However, Jewish communities were first established in Judea and Samaria after the Six Day War of 1967, long after the 1956 and 1948 wars, the 1949-1967 campaign of Arab terrorism, the 1964 establishment of the PLO, the 1929 slaughter of the Hebron Jewish community and the 1929 expulsion of the Gaza Jewish community, the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s slaughter of the Jewish community of Gush Etzion, etc. 

3.  President Obama considers the 300,000 Jews (17%), who reside among Judea and Samaria's 1.5 million Arabs, an obstacle to peace.  Why would he, then, view the 1.4 million Arabs (20%), who reside among pre-1967 Israel's 6 million Jews, as an example of peaceful coexistence?!

 

4.  Obama urges the uprooting of Jewish communities from Judea and Samaria, in order to supposedly advance peace and human rights.  Would he, therefore, urge the uprooting of Arab communities from pre-1967 Israel?!

 

5.  Since Obama tolerates Arab opposition to Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria would he tolerate Jewish opposition to Arab presence in pre-1967 Israel?!  While any attempt by Jews to reside in Palestinian Authority-controlled areas would trigger a lynching attempt, Arabs have peacefully resided within pre-1967 Israel. Doesn't such a reality highlight the nature of Arab intentions and the real obstacle to peace?! 

 

6. Obama pressures Israel to freeze Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria, in order to avoid unilateral creation of facts on the ground.  Shouldn't Obama demand a similar freeze of Arab construction in Judea and Samaria, which is 30 times larger than Jewish construction?! Doesn't the absence of a balanced approach, by Obama, prejudge of the outcome of negotiation?!

 

7.  The 1950-67 Jordanian occupation of Judea and Samaria was recognized only by Britain and Pakistan. The most recent internationally-recognized sovereign over Judea and Samaria was the League of Nations-authorized 1922 British Mandate, which defined Judea and Samaria as part of the Jewish National Home, the cradle of Jewish history.  Article 6 of the Mandate indicates the right of Jews to settle in Judea and Samaria. Judge Stephen M. Schwebel, former President of the International Court of Justice, determined that Israel's presence in Judea and Samaria was rooted in self-defense and therefore did not constitute "occupation."  Eugene Rostow, former Dean of Yale Law School and former Undersecretary of State and co-author of UN Security Council Resolution 242, asserted that 242 entitled Jews to settle in Judea and Samaria. The Oslo Accord and its derivatives do not prohibit "settlements." Moreover, Israel has constrained construction to state-owned – and not private – land, avoiding expulsion of Arabs landowners.

 

 

Freeze of Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria is not a peace-enhancer; it is an appeasement-enhancer.

The Enemy Within

David Shalom- Wednesday 8th Aug 2007


The late Rehavam Ze'evi (H.y.d.) wrote in the Hebrew-language Moledet party publication, some 14 years ago, about the menacing phenomenon of the Israeli left-winger, whose daily betrayals embitter the lives of us all. If left unchallenged, he will literally bring us all down together. As it was then, it is more so today.


The Israeli Left remains the single greatest threat to the Jewish people in their homeland. It can be argued that their actions, inactions, their spin and media manipulation, have caused more damage to Israel than those of the PLO and Hamas. It must be remembered that it was the Left that imported these terrorists to our shores through the treacherous Oslo Accords. Their goals, couched in the falsely deluding language of peace and liberalism, are inimical to those very ideals. In fact, their true path lies in the destruction of a sovereign Jewish state in the Land of Israel. It is imperative that we understand the left-wing phenomenon we face in order to decelerate the forces pushing Israel to self-destruct.


The Left, which today calls itself post-Zionist, is in fact pre-Zionist, their psychosis having its roots in centuries of ghettoised ideas and an exile-like mentality. For the Left, the irrational hatred of the Arabs or their anti-Semitic friends in Europe is justified. Leftists tell themselves that it is not that Israel is the victim of Islamic fascism, rather, the Arabs are the aggrieved party; if only we bribe them or scapegoat our brothers in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, then all will be alright. This world-view is similar to the pre-Zionist thinking that murderous Cossacks or Polish mobs could be bought off, and that if only we appease them a little, then we can avert another pogrom. The leftist subconscious believes that the centuries of anti-Semitism are not based on jealousy, on religious fervour, on scape-goating of a stateless minority, but rather have some justification. They see the Jewish people as to blame for being the victims of such racist assaults.


In Lebanon, the Left tied Israel's hands and did not let the army fight properly and achieve the necessary goals. It did so out of a false belief that if we do not use the necessary and acceptable norms of self-defence in war, then the world would lavish us with praise. They remain ready to betray our kidnapped soldiers rather than occupy any corner of southern Lebanon or Gaza. They wish to cower behind the ghetto wall, hoping all will be okay. They will continue to allow Hizbullah to rearm and prepare for the next war.


The Left's psychosis sees Israel as a mighty power that is totally to blame and the Arabs as the underdogs, who need to be helped to achieve their false dream of peace. That tiny Israel is surrounded by 300 million petrol-rich Arabs is, of course, irrelevant to the Left. It is also less troublesome to those living in the "Tel Aviv bubble" to view the Israelis as a strong power that needs to compromise, than as a nation that needs to be on constant guard and that must fight. In their imagination, they forget the Islamic hordes at our gates, whose millions, brainwashed by incessant propaganda, are eager to push us into the sea.


The Syrian regime wants peace, the Left-controlled media cries, yet how convenient it is to ignore the daily threats from the neurotic optician in Damascus; all we must do, they say, is surrender our Golan to the Baathist regime and all will be fine. The fact that territorially vast Syria started two wars against us in 1948 and 1967, when the Golan was under their occupation, is ignored by the leftist narrative. To suggest that the victor, who was attacked and defended itself in three successive wars, should reward the aggressor is symptomatic of their lack of any basic national dignity. While they crave to be Americans - at least in terms of plastic shallow Hollywood subculture - they would not dream of emulating American self-respect.


The Israeli Left is ignorant of the Arabs they pretend to so love. For the most part, they do not speak Arabic, they have not read the Koran, they are unaware of Islamic history, and are ignorant and patronizing towards the Jews from the Arab lands. They are uninformed of the history, culture and experiences of these Jews, who comprise nearly 50% of Israelis today. Indeed, in their sublime arrogance, the leftists call these Jews Mizrahiim - "Easterners" - but the fact is that the Jews of Egypt, Morocco and Algieria, etc. came from more western lands than the impoverished ghettoes of the Ukraine and Poland. The complete silence for over 50 years by the left-wing establishment in demanding basic compensation from the Arab world for the annihilation of Arab Jewry, for the theft of their lands and property is part of their betrayal. To the Left, only Arabs have rights in this region.


The recent appointment of a virulently anti-Zionist Arab clerk, Raadi Sfori, to the directorate of the Jewish National Fund is an interesting example. Sfori, who was chosen by the Meretz faction, could not even bring himself to say that he would hold loyal to the ideals of the organisation he is now supposed to direct. The Land of Israel was laid barren for hundreds of years, during the dark periods of Arab and later Islamic occupation. Thanks to the JNF and Zionist efforts over the last 120 years, the desert is now green again. That Sfori was chosen by the Meretz faction, though, is not surprising, his goals being identical with those of Yossi Beilin and his subversive party, which would destroy the Jewish state from within.


One must first acknowledge that the leftist leaders are aware of the ramifications of their disastrous policies and continue to support them. They will not let the public see them for what they are - failures, at best, or traitors, at worst. The war in Lebanon in 2006 is a direct result of Ehud Barak's surrender of land to Hizbullah and Syria. Barak and his Labour party, which has served in every coalition government since, cannot admit their recklessness. They cannot admit that Oslo was a calamity, that it increased terror six-fold and that the expulsion of the Israelis from Gush Katif has brought about a Taliban statelet in Gaza.


It is abundantly clear that the priority of the national camp must be to bring this terrible government down as soon as possible. Only by initiating a de-programming of the nation from the Oslo myths can we move forward. This will require a struggle against the extreme Left that controls the mainstream media. Democratisation will entail ending the left-wing hegemony of the courts and reclaiming the powers meant for the people's elected representatives. A first step will require trials for the Oslo criminals. A tribunal should be tasked with punishing those who have betrayed the nation over the dark period since 1992. It should seek to investigate the funding sources of subversive organisations such as Peace Now, the Geneva cabal and the Peres Centre. Only severe punishments will serve as a warning to future generations and right the wrongs of national betrayal. 

Too Often Likud Has Turned Left.

MK Tzipi Hotovely said at an emergency meeting held on Wednesday evening opposing the Prime Minister's announcement of a freeze on Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria,  "We're the real voice of the Likud. And a freeze is not the Likud's way."
"Too many times the Likud has turned left and I ask the ministers who swore allegiance to the public regarding further settlement in Yesha - what happened? The cabinet's decision to separate between Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria  is a strategic mistake that brought international protests last week on construction in a Jerusalem neighbourhood at the heart of the Israeli consensus. The Israeli people not only understand that withdrawal does not promote peace; they know it endangers the citizens of Israel.  The government should not make gestures to the Palestinians, the Palestinians are the ones who should show a willingness for peace gestures."
Head of the Samaria Regional Council, Gershon Mesika, said in response to the freeze on construction in Judea and Samaria  that "Netanyahu deceived Israeli voters and must resign& I'm ashamed that the Likud chairman has supported a policy that stands in direct contradiction of the platform under which he was elected. He is thereby choking the settlement enterprise in a way even the most extreme left-wing governments have not done."
Following the cabinet decision to freeze construction in Judea and Samaria  , Jewish Leadership Head, Moshe Feiglin, said: "Anyone who supports this move proves he has not learned anything from the crime of the expulsion from Gush Katif. I urge everyone to whom Israel and the future of the state are important to them, to join the Likud in order to replace Netanyahu with a leader that has a God".  
PS: Jordanian law prohibits Jews from living in Jordan. In 1954, Jordan passed a law conferring citizenship to all former residents of Palestine  - except Jewish ones. Civil Law No. 6 that governed the West Bank under Jordanian occupation, stated: "Any man will be a Jordan subject if he is not Jewish." (It is time, for the sake of the survival of the Jewish state, to adopt a similar law: "Any person within Eretz-Israel will be an Israeli subject if he/she is not Arab or Muslim.")
Food for Thought. by Steven Shamrak
Through the history of humanity the only people who have been systematically abused, persecuted and even exterminated by many host countries of different religious and ethnic background are Jews! In the past Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and now Iran  and Syria do not allow Jews to leave hostile and hazardous environments. Even the Spanish Inquisition was not so cruel!  
It will be Never Enough! The Palestinian Authority recently immediately dismissed Israel's offer to stop Jewish construction in Judea/Samaria for 10 months. PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas released a statement saying that the freeze in Judea and Samaria was inadequate because it did not include Jerusalem.  (Have they ever stopped terror against Jews? Have they recognized the right of Israel to exist? Israel  must end this 'peace process' charade! Arab terrorists want it all - Israel without Jews!)
Sanctions Against Jews are Racist. A Legal Forum for  Israel said in reaction to the planned Israeli government restrictions on Jewish construction in Yesha that the move reminds the group of darker periods in the history of the Jewish people. "The Israeli government's policy of racial discrimination is wrong, ugly and contrary to both simple morality and the law& this is a mortal blow to the fundamental rights of the residents of Judea and  Samaria,  This is blow to their property rights, to human dignity, their liberty and more." said Nachie Eyal. The group also reminded the Prime Minister that the retreat from Gaza led to the establishment of an Islamic regime there, as well as to the Second Lebanese War and the Cast Lead operation.
That is What the War Crime Noise all About!  Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Hamad told reporters that the Goldstone report, which was endorsed recently by the United Nations General Assembly, will prevent Israel from launching any more military operations in Gaza. Hamad is also working out an agreement with other armed groups not to fire any more rockets at  Israel. "We are not preventing the resistance by any means," Hamad said "However, we are making sure that every move is coordinated through agreement between the groups." (Through diplomatic manoeuvring, with the help of international Israel-bashers, Hamas and Fatah are hoping to paralyse Israel 's will for self-defence.)
Quote of the Week: The Arabic name for Jerusalem is "el-KuDS" (or Al-Quds) , which is abbreviation for another Arabic name used for Jerusalem until the last century, "bet el-maKDeS".  Under the Arab rule, in the 10th century Jerusalem  was always called "bet el maKDeS". The name "BeT el-MaKDeS" is a translation of the Aramaic and Hebrew "BeiT ha-MiKDaSH", which means Temple.  But Islam has no Temple, only the Jews did." - by Rabbi Joseph Katz.
Peace - The Arab Way. The new Lebanese government formed by Prime Minister Saad Hariri will officially endorse the Hizbullah terrorist organization and grant legitimacy to its attacks on Israel.
Austria is Still Ugly anti-Semitism.  Young female athletes from Israel's fencing team swept top medals at a 28-nation European tournament held in Austria - but the organizers intentionally did not play the recording of the Israeli national anthem, and the Israeli winners had to sing the anthem on their own. (Germany has repented its sins of the past, but Austria, as many other countries, has never admitted the enormous part it had played in the Holocaust and still remains profoundly anti-Semitic!)  
Revival of Zionism in the IDF? Combat soldiers in the Nachshon battalion raised an anti-expulsion banner, "Nachshon also does not expel Jews", on the roof of their base shortly after security forces destroyed two nearby Jewish homes and expelled the families living there. Similar protest action at a swearing-in ceremony last month at the Western Wall resulted in two soldiers being sentenced to 20 days in a military jail and thrown out of combat service.

Red Cross Helps Arab Land-Grab. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), attempting to help Arabs in Samaria  to take over a plot of land bordering the Tapuach Junction checkpoint.
Jewish Contribution to the World: A new portable electrochemical battery developed at Haifa's Technion offers users thousands of hours of power for their hearing aids, sensors and, eventually, cellphones, laptop computers and even electric cars. The battery, developed by Professor Yair Ein-Eli of the Technion's materials engineering department, is based on silicon as a fuel that reverts to its original sand.  
Another Islamic Export to Israel.  A joint team of Border Patrol and IDF forces prevented 40 kilograms of cocaine from being smuggled into Israel two residents of Egypt. (Islamic rockets are fired into Israel from Gaza and heroin is smuggled from  Lebanon.)
Scavengers of Israeli Political Left. Meretz faction head MK Ilan Gilon predicts that within two years a new socialist party will arise in Israel  to take advantage of the infighting currently plaguing the once dominant Labor party.

Iran: Nuclear by Numbers

President Barack Obama recently warned that time is "running out" for Iran  to join international negotiations over its nuclear program. The Islamic Republic, the world's leading state-sponsor of terror <http://www.theisraelproject.org/site/c.hsJPK0PIJpH/b.2060919/k.753D/Iran_Leading_State_Sponsor_of_Terror.htm> , has been deceiving the international community about its nuclear activities for almost a decade.
* 5,412: Centrifuges Iran is operating for uranium enrichment as of February 2009. Another 125 have been installed but are not currently being used.
* 2.75 kilograms (6.1 lbs): Amount of low-enriched uranium (LEU) Iran was reportedly producing daily as of June 5, 2009. At this rate,  Iran would have enough weapons-grade uranium to create two nuclear weapons by February 2010. If all reported 7,052 centrifuges were used, the weapons could be developed as early as mid-December 2009.
* 4: UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions calling for Iran to halt its uranium enrichment program which Iran is currently defying: UNSC resolutions 1696, 1737, 1747 and 1803.
* 3,000: Number of centrifuges IAEA inspectors confirmed the once-secret Qom nuclear facility is capable of housing; enough to produce material for nuclear weapons but unsuitable for the production of fuel for civilian purposes.
Approximately 6 Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey, would also pursue nuclear technology if Iran  s nuclear program continues to develop, initiating a Middle East arms race and destabilizing the entire region. (Nothing had stopped the US  administration from fabricating 'evidence' against Saddam Hussein's regime in order to wage an illegal war against Iraq. Why is the overwhelming data against Iran's nuclear intentions not compelling enough? Why has the United States been restraining  Israel's right for self-defence?)

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Questions and Answers with Moshe Feiglin

What is your message to the Israeli public?

I think that we must make the Jewish identity of our state our first priority.

A theocratic state?

Not at all. Israel must be a state that affords its citizens the liberty to express who they really are. I actually oppose religious parties and religious legislation.

So what kind of state are you referring to?

Israel should be a state in which every child in the educational system studies Jewish identity for one hour daily. Our children should know our history, our land, the Bible and the prayer book. Whether or not they choose to pray from the prayer book is their choice (or that of their parents). But at least they should be familiar with the glorious history and culture that informs who they are today.

And what will you do about the Arabs?

Our problems with the Arabs are a reflection of the problems between the Jews. The Left is fanatically anxious to 'solve' the Arab problem so that they will stop reminding them that they are Jews. They erroneously think that if the Arabs no longer hate the Jews, they will also be free of their Jewishness. This psychosis has accompanied the Jewish people for generations. The Arabs have subconsciously identified the obsessive need of Israel's leftist leaders for their recognition. This is a tremendous psychological asset that they use to manipulate us. That is why there will be no peace with the Arabs until we make peace with ourselves.

So you are saying that there is no peace because we try to escape our Jewish identity?

Right. As soon as we free ourselves of our identity crisis, we will have peace with our neighbors.

And what should we do in the meantime?

We must concentrate on the Jews. Israel should give every honorably discharged soldier who wants to get married free land on which to build his home in the Negev, Galilee, Golan, Judea or Samaria. If you travel today along Wadi Ara or the Negev, you will plainly see that the state has de facto provided every new Arab couple with free land.

Secondly, Israel must give its citizens as much freedom of choice as possible. Every citizen should be able to obtain a broadcasting license and to broadcast on both radio and television to his heart's desire (within the confines of Israel's security needs and common morality, of course). Supreme Court justices should be elected by our elected representatives and undergo a Knesset hearing, as is done in America. Israel should have district elections so that our Knesset members would have to answer to their own constituency.

When Israel comes down on the side of liberty and true democracy, it will be free of the identity crisis of the 'enlightened elites' that has been plaguing us ever since the state was born. Israel will be a Jewish state for the Jewish people. At that point we will be able to deal with the challenges facing us – and triumph.

What is your stand on economy?

In a Jewish country the economy should be based on a triangle whose base is capitalism (the right of purchase) and whose right and left sides are faith and lovingkindness. I abhor populist socialism that essentially demands equal distribution of poverty. I believe that the state does not have the right to rob one of his possessions, and it must interfere with the economy as little as possible.

To deal with poverty we must hold district elections and develop community organizations. In doing so we will restore personal responsibility to our citizens and develop the Jewish values of loving kindness and mutual responsibility. The centralized welfare policies currently in effect in Israel have gone bankrupt long ago, and we all feel it. We must develop the traditional Jewish community structure (that the State of Israel essentially destroyed), and in this way erase the phenomenon of hungry children and forgotten elderly.

What is your security strategy?

My security platform is based first and foremost on the justice of our cause. As soon as we lost our feeling of justice, we brought terror and additional security threats upon ourselves. Once, my reserve army unit was able to keep order in all of Shechem. Today, all the elite units put together cannot do so, because we do not believe that we are right.

I believe that true Jewish leadership can significantly reduce the amount of forces needed for security because we will once again make our enemies feel threatened. Israel’s security policy must be aggressive (as when Begin attacked Iraq’s nuclear reactor), and not a policy of defensive walls, separation fences, bullet proof vehicles and Arrow missiles.

We must strive for a standing army that is strictly voluntary. If there is a threat to our country, we must attack and not leave existential dangers for the coming generations because we feared to deal with them.



 

1. Education: A daily hour of Jewish history and identity for all Jewish children

 

2. Society: Return to family values

 

3. Security: A Jewish Agenda without the Oslo illusion

 

4. Justice: Reform of the court system

 

5. Arabs: Zero Tolerance for Arab disloyalty


Some articles from English-language Israeli newspapers:
-The Feiglin Revolution (published in Ha’artez, one of the most prestigious and left wing newspapers in Israel.  Although usually extremely hostile to Feiglin, this article is remarkably in depth and relatively balanced).
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1050367.html

-Feiglin: State should demand loyalty of Arab citizens (published in Yediot Achronot)
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3636401,00.html

This is a commentary on the article of. the Yoav Shamir film Defamation, in the Jewish Journal of Nov. 20-29.

It amazes me how Yoav Shamir, the film's author, director or whatever, can, as an Israeli who should know of the 100-year his­tory (not merely the 60-year history) of Arab violence against the Jews, could make such statements as "The Holocaust has been ex­ploited for use as an idealogical weapon by Israel."  And further, "Most of the time we are upset about being the center of atten­tion - - - asking why are people always picking on Israel?  We are always the ones most affecting it.  And we are the ones paying the price for it."  So?  What about the repeated anti-Jewish acts by various governments and societies over the last few thousand years?  Was that our fault also, Shamir?

Shamir is an absolute ignoramous.  To start with, he should not take seriously the award and compliments he got for his film from the left-wing judges of the Tribeca Film Festival.  In fact, a major reason that Israeli films receive effusive reviews is be­cause virtually every Israeli film is,anti-Israel and pro-Arab. Likewise, the lefties in the U. S. are"anti U. S. (and anti-Israel) and pro-Arab terrorist.  As to Shamir, we just have to look at his prior film, "Checkpoint".  That devoted itself to the impact of Israeli checkpoints on the lives of Palestinian Arabs.  Can you just imagine a Jewish filmmaker (or any filmmaker) having made a movie at the time we were fighting Hitler, that chose to make us feel guilty about the effect bombing Germany had on the Germans? Perhaps a shrink might help to disabuse Shamir of the problems he has dealing with his Jewish blood.

Can you imagine this Israeli Jew being so concerned about the diaspora Jews' "unwarranted meddling in Israeli policy". Since he is a lefty we know that he is not referring to such meddling by his fellow leftists, who are the real meddlers in this regard.  (The other meddler is, of course, the U. S. State Dept., except, they do not merely meddle, which is bad enough; they dictate, which is pretty chutzpahdik.)  The Americans For Peace Now, for example, are a perfect example of leftist meddling. And they meddle against the wishes of the Israeli majority.  And the gall of this Israeli Jew who complains because there are Jews in the diaspora who look upon the very real life possibility that Israel is an "insurance policy" against the rise of another Hitler. How can he not be aware that even the U. S. refused to take in Jews fleeing Hitler and because of this wound up being murdered by the Nazis.  And where does Shamir come off with his complaints when it is a fact that Israel is the recipient of humongous phil­anthropy and political support from Jews in the diaspora.

And can you imagine, he admits that he deliberately omitted from his film the risks to Israeli existence from Iran as well as "the entire Arab world".  Of course, had he done so it would have blown his whol pro-Arab terrorist, anti-Jewish premise right out of the water.

December 3, 2009                         Leon Perlsweig

Eugene Blum

172 Preston E, Boca Raton, FL 33434

Eddy Hartenstein, Publisher & CEO                                 

Los Angeles Times

202 West 1^st Street, Los Angeles CA   90012

April 2, 2010

Dear Mr. Hartenstein,

There has been a considerable controversy over the Los Angeles Opera's approaching Richard Wagner "Celebration," resulting in a promise by festival promoters to examine of the full depths of Wagner's anti-Semitism/Racism/Arynism and its effect on later generations, as leaders of the German Third Reich verified.

The controversy has engulfed the LA County Board of Supervisors, the LA Opera and its general director, Placido Domingo.

While the topic of Wagner's anti-Semitism has been touched on, neither side in the controversy has basically scratched the surface with regard to the full extent of Wagner's anti-Semitism and racism toward blacks and Asians, whom he calls "man's lower races" in his "Christendom and Herodom" and compares them to the animals he thinks they most resemble.

The basic issue of Wagner's rabid racism is too important to be ignored.

With that in mind, the attached Los Angeles Festival To Honor 'Fountainhead of Nazi Ideology' is being submitted for the Los Angeles Times' perusal and publication to correct this lack of examination of Wagner's racism and to avoid the strong possibility of the county's humiliating embarrassment and ridicule.

Cordially,

Eugne Blum

Geneblum@aol.com

bcc                                                                       Geneblum@aol.com

 

 

Los Angeles Festival To Honor Fountainhead of Nazi Ideology

by Eugene Blum

Has the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors opened a Pandora's Box in approving a Los Angeles city wide festival for the spring of 2010, honoring the controversial 19th century composer Richard Wagner and his "Ring Cycle" with a bilious dictate that Art constitutes a human development superior to history, law and morality?

Addressing the Board, LA County Supervisor Mike Antonovich charged: "To specifically honor and glorify the man whose music and racist anti-Semitic writings inspired Hitler and became the de facto soundtrack for the Holocaust in a countywide festival is an affront to those who have suffered or have been impacted by the horrors of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist Worker Party." [The Nazi Party in its English translation].

Historically, one need not look too deeply to encounter the incalculable influence Wagner had on Hitler. In a letter to Wagner's son, Siegfried, Hitler wrote that Wagner "forged the spiritual sword we now wield,"

Hitler's principal ideologist and chief propagandist aside from Josef Goebbels was Alfred Rosenberg, who identified Wagner of one of the four fountainheads of Nazi ideology, while others such as Pulitzer Prize winning US historian Peter Viereck identified Wagner as the single most important fountainhead of the movement.

Wagner's virulent three-decade attack began long before Hitler and Rosenberg were born. It included his 'Judaism in Music,' assailing all Jews, to his 'Know Thyself,' where he put forth his threateningly familiar "Great Solution," .. ."Germany Awake" and "there no longer will be any Jews."

His widely circulated personal journal, the "Bayreuther Blatter," was a publication that featured material sometimes more poisonous than the most pathological effusions of the infamous Julius Streicher in the Nazi era's "Der Sturmer."

Oddly enough Germany itself was not a hot bed of anti-Semitism during Wagner's most ardent racist years. His obsessive concern with his concept of a non-German, Jewish corruption of the Teutonic spirit was rejected by most eminent figures of the day, and ridiculed by the press, political notables and the royalty, including Bavarian King Ludwig II; while German princes steadily strove to establish racial and religious equality.

Especially intolerable to Wagner was Ludwig's solicitude for his Jewish subjects

 

and his visits to synagogues in his kingdom as had been the custom of his father before him.

Wagner's remaining years were dedicated to the promotion of his racial theories and especially the promotion of an Aryan philosophy long before Hitler. Jews became not the only, but the most prominent group of his campaign. He pictured Blacks and Orientals as the offspring of animals he thought they most resembled while depicting Germans in his 1881 Know Thyself and Christendom and Herodom as direct descendants of an almighty God. Wagner goes on to call the Jews "former cannibals" and urges his nation not to mistake the assumption that the human species is destined to attain any degree of equality. Wagner writes that such equality is unimaginable in any but the most horrifying picture.

Any to attempt to romanticize Wagner by covering up his racism in order to preserve a love for his music must be considered a travesty of culture at its very worst.

Anti-Semitism in Germany varied in degrees with time, locality and circumstances. During most of the nineteenth century it flourished in the Church and among some scholars, but not among Wagner's fellow musicians, nor amongst upper class patrons of the arts whose support he strove to enlist.

Beyond Wagner's tolerance was Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's granting equal rights to the Jews under the constitution of the North German Confederation, to be followed four years hence by his granting the same rights under the constitution of the newly formed German Reich.

With an overwhelming trail of evidence showing Hitler, Rosenberg and other party leaders acknowledged Wagner's role as a leading fountainhead of Nazi ideology, Antonovich still did not call for a cancellation of the festival but asked that the Festival be reworked to honor the works of other composers such as Mozart, Puccini, Verdi, Schubert, Schumann; and Wagner's first Jewish victims, German composers Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer. And above all, to include a lecturer the caliber of author and scholar Paul Lawrence Rose to deliver a factual, historical and unbiased review in Wagner's own words.

While Wagner was castigating Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer in his anti-Semitic attacks, Mendelssohn was a frequent guest of Goethe, Schopenhauer and Hegel, and the idol of British society, playing duets with German born Prince Albert at Buckingham Palace while Queen Victoria sang accompaniment, and requested by the monarchs of both Prussia and Saxony to organize royal music academies and honored for his compositions.

Similarly, Meyerbeer was honored by the kings and queens of Europe, admired by its composers, scholars and critics, while France, England and The Netherlands bestowed upon him memberships in the Legion of Honor, the Royal Academy and the Order of the Oak Crown respectively.

Do LA county's citizens really favor burying the Holocaust along with its victims by this honoring of Wagner fostered on them by the LA opera and a proportionally modest segment of the county's population, a group who crave above all to pay homage to Richard Wagner and his works as is done at the temple he built for himself in Bayreuth which is visited by Wagner enthusiasts with the same hungering enthusiasm as Presley fans making pilgrimages to Memphis here in our own country?

Why the citizens of Los Angeles and its opera would want to dedicate a festival and pay costly homage to this virulent racist and anti-Semite with the nation looking on is indeed difficult to fathom.

 

BASED On Declassified Israeli Documents & Personal Diaries

It is worth emphasizing that the "Jewish state" was founded on the basis of an ancient Biblical map, and to this date the "Jewish state" still refuses to declare its borders in favor of future expansion. There is nothing like this Biblical map to send shivers among Arabs and Muslims, since its borders spans the occupied West Bank (including occupied East Jerusalem), occupied Gaza Strip, southern Lebanon, the western parts of Jordan, and southern Syria including the occupied Golan Heights. 

“The preservation of the Jews is really one of the most signal and illustrious acts of divine Providence… and what but a supernatural power could have preserved them in such a manner as none other nation upon earth hath been preserved.  Nor is the providence of God less remarkable in the destruction of their enemies, than in their preservation… We see that the great empires, which in their turn subdued and oppressed the people of God, are all come to ruin… And if such hath been the fatal end of the enemies and oppressors of the Jews, let it serve as a warning to all those, who at any time or upon any occasion are for raising a clamor and persecution against them.”

Israeli response to Media bias

 

Even those who aren't particularly sympathetic to Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, could get a good measure of satisfaction from this interview with

British Television during the retaliation against Hamas' shelling of Israel.

The interviewer asked him: "How come so many more Palestinians have been killed in this conflict than Israelis?" (A nasty question if there ever was one!)

          Netanyahu: "Are you sure that you want to start asking in that direction?"

Interviewer: (Falling into the trap) Why not?

 

Netanyahu: "Because in World War II more Germans were killed than British and Americans combined, but there is no doubt in anyone's mind that the war was caused by Germany's aggression.

And in response to the German blitz on London, the British wiped out the entire city of Dresden, burning to death more German civilians than the number of people killed in Hiroshima.

Moreover, I could remind you that in 1944, when the R.A.F. tried to bomb the Gestapo Headquarters in Copenhagen, some of the bombs missed their target and fell on a Danish children's hospital, killing 83 little children. Perhaps you have another question?"

Apparently, Benjamin Netanyahu gave an interview and was asked about Israel's occupation of Arab lands.

His response was, "It's our land". The reporter (CNN or the like) was stunned -

read below "It's our land..." It's important information since we don't get fair and accurate reporting from the media and facts tend to get lost in the jumble of daily events.

 

"Crash Course on the Arab Israeli Conflict."

The Qur'an 17:104 - states the land belongs to the Jewish people

Here are overlooked facts in the current & past Middle East situation.

These were compiled by a Christian university professor:

BRIEF FACTS ON THE ISRAELI CONFLICT TODAY... (It takes just 1.5 minutes to read!)

It makes sense and it's not slanted. Jew and non-Jew -- it doesn't matter.

1. Nationhood and Jerusalem.

Israel became a nation in 1312 BCE, Two thousand years before the rise of Islam.

 

2. Arab refugees in Israel began identifying themselves as part of a Palestinian

people in 1967, two decades after the establishment of the modern State of

Israel.

 

3. Since the Jewish conquest in 1272 BCE, the Jews have had dominion over the

land for one thousand years with a continuous presence in the land for the past 3,300 years.

 

4. The only Arab dominion since the conquest in 635 CE lasted no more than 22 years.

5. For over 3,300 years, Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital. Jerusalem has

never been the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity. Even when the Jordanians

occupied Jerusalem, they never sought to make it their capital, and Arab leaders

did not come to visit.

 

6. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in Tanach, the Jewish Holy scriptures.

Jerusalem is not mentioned once in the Koran.

 

7. King David founded the city of Jerusalem. Mohammed never came to Jerusalem.

8. Jews pray facing Jerusalem. Muslims pray with their backs toward Jerusalem.

9. Arab and Jewish Refugees: in 1948 the Arab refugees were encouraged to leave

Israel by Arab leaders promising to purge the land of Jews Sixty-eight percent

left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier.

 

10 The Jewish refugees were forced to flee from Arab lands due to Arab

brutality, persecution and pogroms.

11. The number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 is estimated to be

around 630,000. The number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands is estimated to be

the same.

12. Arab refugees were INTENTIONALLY not absorbed or integrated into the Arab

lands to which they fled, despite the vast Arab territory. Out of the 100,000,000 refugees since World War II, theirs is the only refugee group in the

world that has never been absorbed or integrated into their own people's lands.

Jewish refugees were completely absorbed into Israel, a country no larger than

the state of New Jersey ...

 

13. The Arab-Israeli Conflict: the Arabs are represented by eight separate

nations, not including the Palestinians. There is only one Jewish nation. The

Arab nations initiated all five wars and lost. Israel defended itself each time

and won.

 

14. The PLO's Charter still calls for the destruction of the State of Israel.

Israel has given the Palestinians most of the West Bank land, autonomy under the

Palestinian Authority, and has supplied them.

 

15. Under Jordanian rule, Jewish holy sites were desecrated and the Jews were

denied access to places of worship. Under Israeli rule, all Muslim and Christian

sites have been preserved and made accessible to people of all faiths.

16. The UN Record on Israel and the Arabs: of the 175 Security Council

resolutions passed before 1990, 97 were directed against Israel.

17. Of the 690 General Assembly resolutions voted on before 1990, 429 were

directed against Israel.

 

18. The UN was silent while 58 Jerusalem Synagogues were destroyed by the

Jordanians.

19. The UN was silent while the Jordanians systematically desecrated the ancient

Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.

 

20. The UN was silent while the Jordanians enforced an apartheid-like a policy

of preventing Jews from visiting the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.

These are incredible times. We have to ask what our role should be. What will

we tell our grandchildren about what we did when there was a turning point in

Jewish destiny, an opportunity to make a difference?

START NOW- Send this to 18 other people you know and ask them to send it to

eighteen others, Jew and non-Jew--it doesn't really matter.

 

 

The Jewish Agenda: 5 Points of Principle

 

Anti Semitism on Campus-Deja Vu

by Prof. Steven Plaut

Follow Israel opinion on and .

A Norwegian university recently joined others who try boycotting Israel's academics while supporting Islamofascists. On the anniversary of Kristallnacht, this is a reminder of what academics did as the Nazis rose to power.

 

Campus political extremism today is shocking.  Large numbers of university professors and administrators advocate positions that combine support for totalitarian Islamofascism and its terrorists with deep hatred of Israel and anti-Americanism. How did this come about in the twenty-first century?  Actually, the roots go back to 1930.

Some of the worst political extremism in academic history took the form of enthusiastic support on American campuses for Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.  This is a disgraceful chapter in American academic history and one largely unknown.  Its story is the topic of a new book, “The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower,” by Stephen H. Norwood (Cambridge University Press, 2009).  The author is a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and holds a PhD from Columbia University (of all places.  The book is already flaming controversies and debate.

Norwood’s study shows that that the appeasement, support for totalitarian aggression and
The Chomsky’s, Cole’s, Beinin’s et al of today could easily fit into the campus atmosphere of the 1930's.


terror,  academic bigotry, and anti-Semitism that today fill so many American universities were predominant forces on many campuses in the 1930s.  The Chomsky’s, Cole’s, Beinin’s et al of today could easily fit into the campus atmosphere of the time.

He sums up the situation at American universities in the 1930s thus:

“American universities maintained amicable relations with the Third Reich, sending their students to study at Nazified universities while welcoming Nazi exchange students to their own campuses....  America’s most distinguished university presidents willfully crossed the Atlantic in ships flying the swastika flag, openly defying the anti-Nazi boycott, to the benefit of the Third Reich’s economy.  By warmly receiving Nazi diplomats and propagandists on campus, they helped Nazi Germany present itself to the American public as a civilized nation, unfairly maligned in the press.” 

Norwood’s book is a must read, but also a sad and uncomfortable read. He also details the reactions of America’s professors and universities to the rise of Hitler.  The responses on American campuses ranged from complete indifference and refusal to join in campaigns against Nazi Germany to widespread support for German Nazism, including for German atrocities committed against Jews.   

Starting in 1933 anti-Hitler mass protests were being held throughout the United States.  Americans of all creeds joined in.  So did labor unions, political parties, and others.  Perhaps the most memorable anti-Nazi sign from the marches was that of the Undertakers Union, “We want Hitler!”  American streets were filled with anti-Nazi protests every week.  College and university presidents and administrators  did not take part. They did not convene protest meetings against Nazi anti-Semitism on the campuses, nor did they urge their students and faculty members to attend the nationwide mass rallies held on March 27, 1933.”

Some leading German Jewish scientists and professors managed to make it to the United States.  The most famous was of course Albert Einstein.  Some American schools went out of their way to hire these refugees.  Harvard and Yale (which has a Hebrew slogan on its official coat of arms) did not.  Harvard refused to hire refugees even when the Rockefeller Foundation offered to cover half their salaries.

Some academics condemned those calling for a boycott of Germany in response to the
Academics condemned those calling for a boycott of Germany in response to the atrocities committed on Kristallnacht.
atrocities committed on Kristallnacht.  They insisted it would be “hypocritical” on the part of those protesting the boycott of German Jews by Nazis to call for a boycott of Nazi Germany.  This is worth noting because one hears the exact same claim today when those who call for boycotts of anti-Israel academics are similarly denounced and accused of exhibiting “hypocrisy.” 

Many of the faculty members at Harvard were openly anti-Semitic, including Harvard’s president James Bryant Conant.  Later, after the war, Conant served as US Ambassador to Germany and worked feverishly to get Nazi war criminals paroled .

Harvard went out of its way to host and celebrate Nazi leaders.  The high Nazi official Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstaungl was invited as the Harvard commencement speaker in 1934.  The wealthy Hanfstaungel had been one of Hitler’s most important backers, insisted that “the Jews must be crushed,” and describing Jews as “the vampire sucking German blood.”   He openly advocated the mass arrest or worse of German Jews. 

In 1935 the German consul in Boston was invited by Harvard to lay a wreath with a swastika on it in the campus chapel.  Nazi officials were invited to Harvard’s tercentenary celebrations in 1936, held intentionally on the Jewish High Holidays as a slap in the face of Jewish faculty and students.  A mock student debate held in 1936 was presided over by Harvard professors as judges.  They acquitted Hitler of most of the mock charges and declared that German persecution of Jews was simply irrelevant.  

Yale was only marginally less friendly to the Nazis than Harvard.  Yale and Harvard presidents welcomed a delegation of Italian fascists to both campuses in October of 1934.  The student newspapers at both schools warmly approved.  

Some MIT professors came out vocally in support of Hitler and Nazi Germany, including mechanical engineering professor Wilhelm Spannhake.  His son Ernst was a student at the time at MIT; the son insisted that the Nazis had committed no atrocities at all.

Professor Thomas Chalmers of the history department at Boston University publicly demanded a “hands off “ policy regarding Hitler and opposed American denunciations of Nazi Germany.  After the war the University of Chicago hired one of the leaders of the Romanian genocidal fascist organization “Iron Guard” as a faculty member.

Norwood’s own alma mater, Columbia University, collaberated with Nazi Germany in many ways.  Months after Germany started book burning, Columbia’s President Nicholas Murray Butler went out of his way to welcome Nazi Germany’s ambassador to the US for a lecture circuit at the school, and praised the Nazi emotionally as a gentleman and a representative of “a friendly people”.  

A Columbia Dean named Thomas Alexander praised Hitler’s Nazism sycophantically and
There are frightening similarities between what has been happening in American campuses since the early 1990s and what transpired in the 1930s.
visited Germany himself.  He especially approved of the Nazi policy of forced sterilizations. 

The “Seven Sisters,” as the seven elite women’s colleges in America were called, were unwilling to take any anti-Nazi stand. Collaboration with the Nazis continued at some campuses after  Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland.  The oppression of women in Nazi Germany made no more impression upon them than the oppression of women in Islamic societies does on today’s campus extremists and feminists.

False symmetry, the condemnation of fascism together with condemning Western democracies, is not the innovation of the past decade’s campus campaign to defend Islamic terror.  In the 1930s academics and university presidents signed statements that protested German behavior but at the same time gave it legitimacy.  For example, in one attempt at “even-handedness,” a petition claimed that “minorities are suppressed and discriminated against to some degree in every land.” 

All of the above sound familiar?  It does to Norwood, who says he sees frightening similarities between what has been happening in American campuses since the early 1990s and what transpired in the 1930s.

---

 

THE ANTI-ISRAEL ISRAELI FILM "DEFAMATION"



End the Unjust Arab Occupation of Jewish Land
 

Iran: Nuclear by Numbers
 

President Barack Obama recently warned that time is "running out" for Iran  to join international negotiations over its nuclear program. The Islamic Republic, the world's leading state-sponsor of terror <http://www.theisraelproject.org/site/c.hsJPK0PIJpH/b.2060919/k.753D/Iran_Leading_State_Sponsor_of_Terror.htm> , has been deceiving the international community about its nuclear activities for almost a decade.
* 5,412: Centrifuges Iran is operating for uranium enrichment as of February 2009. Another 125 have been installed but are not currently being used.
* 2.75 kilograms (6.1 lbs): Amount of low-enriched uranium (LEU) Iran was reportedly producing daily as of June 5, 2009. At this rate,  Iran would have enough weapons-grade uranium to create two nuclear weapons by February 2010. If all reported 7,052 centrifuges were used, the weapons could be developed as early as mid-December 2009.
* 4: UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions calling for Iran to halt its uranium enrichment program which Iran is currently defying: UNSC resolutions 1696, 1737, 1747 and 1803.
* 3,000: Number of centrifuges IAEA inspectors confirmed the once-secret Qom nuclear facility is capable of housing; enough to produce material for nuclear weapons but unsuitable for the production of fuel for civilian purposes.
Approximately 6 Muslim countries, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey, would also pursue nuclear technology if Iran  s nuclear program continues to develop, initiating a Middle East arms race and destabilizing the entire region. (Nothing had stopped the US  administration from fabricating 'evidence' against Saddam Hussein's regime in order to wage an illegal war against Iraq. Why is the overwhelming data against Iran's nuclear intentions not compelling enough? Why has the United States been restraining  Israel's right for self-defence?)

Greater Israel

APPEASEMENT: ISRAEL'S MARCH OF FOLLY

Dr. Irving Kett

Three classic examples of appeasement have had a tremendous impact upon the World and especially upon the Jewish People. These are the Munich Pact of 1938, the Camp David Accords of 1978, and the Oslo Agreement of 1993. There are several fundamental problems with appeasement besides the loss of national dignity. Perhaps the latter could be tolerated. However, not only does it not result in peace but the end product is war under the most advantageous conditions for the aggressor.

The three agreements have the following commonalities:

1. They all involve the transfer of strategic territories from democratic states to dictatorships.

2. The agreements are made under duress in which the dictatorial entities promise to mend their brutish ways and enter into an era of peaceful, cooperative coexistence with their democratic neighbors.

In each case we shall examine the assumptions made by the democratic powers in ceding land in the hope of peace and the resultant realities. There are a number of ways to evaluate history. One is that of the Spanish philosopher, George Santayana, "A nation that does not learn the lessons of its history is destined to relive it." The former prime minister of Israel, Shimon Peres, during the 1996 election campaign stated that he emphatically repudiates history, "I have become totally tired of history because I feel history is a long misunderstanding. The past interests me like last year's snow. There is nothing to learn from history."

I belong to the Santayana school. It is from this perspective that the three major historical events will be examined.

I. The Munich Pact between France, Germany, Great Britain and Italy - September 1938.

A. Background to the situation: on March 9, 1935 Germany announced that she is scrapping the Versailles Treaty and in the following year, on March 7, 1936 Hitler remilitarized the Rhine region; on March 12, 1938 Germany marched her troops into Austria and annexed that country - anschluss.

B. Soon after the Nazi anschluss with Austria, the Germans in that part of Bohemia that bordered on Germany and Austria began organizing an intifada against the Czechoslovak Republic. Hitler claimed that he could not permit his Germans to be persecuted and threatened to invade Czechoslovakia. The latter had a defense pact with France who in turn was allies with Great Britain. The Czechs were admonished by their western allies to make every effort to accommodate the demands of the Sudeten Germans for autonomy. It was all to no avail. In September 1938 the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Neville Chamberlain, flew three times to see Hitler to plead for peace. Hitler solemnly vowed that the Sudetenland was absolutely Germany's last territorial claim in Europe and that he has no further interest in Czechoslovakia. On September 30, 1938 at 2 A.M. the Munich Pact was signed by France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy. Czechoslovakia was given ten days to evacuate the Sudetenland, beginning on October 1st. Note that the victim was not even present at the conferences that sealed her fate. Great Britain sternly chastised the president, Eduard Benes, for objecting to the decisions taken at Munich. Prime Minister Chamberlain solemnly promised to defend what remained of Czechoslovakia after Poland and Hungary proceeded to also seize parts of the now helpless country. Within six months the government of Great Britain conveniently reneged on that promise.

Soon after the Munich Pact was signed, Gertrude Stein, a born in Pennsylvania to assimilated Jewish parents, was part of the large American expatriate community living in Paris. A minor radical writer of the time, Gertrude Stein visioned herself being an important literary figure. She was so elated with the Munich Pact that she circulated a petition which she sent to Norway urging that Hitler be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. To no ones surprise most of the signatures were like minded Jews. Upon reflection though, perhaps Gertrude Stein was not so far off the mark. Since Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain were equally deserving of the Prize in 1939.

When people focus solely upon blessings of peace and the horrors of war, regardless of circumstances, they may well arrive at disastrous decisions. In the December 15, 1938 edition of the LONDON TIMES, a sincere peacenik of that era wrote the following excerpt: " The warmongers (Winston Churchill and others, those who would make war against another country without having counted the costs, ought to be impeached and either shot or hanged... There has never been a prime minister in the history of England who in nine months achieved such agreements as those Mr. Chamberlain has made with Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Hitler in Munich."

Almost half the Jews of Israel and probably the overwhelming majority of the Jews of the United States are like that peacenik in 1938 and like Gertrude Stein and her idealistic Jewish cohorts. The question that every Jew today needs to face and that is do they want a similar fate to destroy Israel and that remnant of the Jewish People that miraculously survived the Holocaust?

C. Military situation before the Munich Pact - the Czechoslovakian Army consisted of 40 of the best trained and equipped divisions in Europe, behind an elaborate system of fortifications facing Germany, built with French assistance. Behind the Czech Army was the famous Skoda Arms Works. Unbeknown to the West, the German General Staff was of the opinion that their army was ready to fight the combined forces of the Czechs in the East and France and Great Britain in the West. They were prepared to depose Hitler to prevent a war at that time.

D. What did France and Great Britain expect to achieve by sacrificing Czechoslovakia? - "Peace in our time!" to quote a joyous Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich to a deliriously happy welcoming crowd that greeted him at the London airport. On March 10, 1939 the British Home Secretary addressed an enthusiastic peace-loving British audience that a new Five-Year Peace Plan had been devised that would lead to a "Golden Age." Just four days later on March 14th Germany seized the remainder of Czechoslovakia. Without its fortifications and the strategic terrain of the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia was helpless. While this act exploded Western optimism with regards to Hitler's intentions, the allies made no move to save the Czechs. Oh, yes the British gave President Benes and his family sanctuary in their country. In April 1939 the British finally began rearming and preparing for war, just about four months before the outbreak of World War II. The Munich Pact gave the German military a whole additional year in which to prepare and they no longer needed to concern themselves with the once formidable Czech Army on their eastern flank. France did nothing. The rest is history.

II. The Camp David Accords of September 5, 1978

A. What were Israel's expectations for the huge sacrifice in handing the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt based on the promises written into the Accords and guaranteed by the United States?

1. Full diplomatic recognition and an end to the constant threats of war.

2. Friendly economic, cultural, and scientific relations.

3. An end to the Egyptian participation in the Arab boycott of Israel.

4. An educational process terminating the customary Egyptian demonizing of Israel and everything Jewish.

5. As the most important Arab country, Egypt would use its influence to encourage the development of peaceful relations between the other Arab states and Israel.

6. 38 Annexes to the Accords were signed by all three parties, detailing how this intensive normalization process would take place. Not all have even been published to date. The United States is a full participant and guarantor to all the provisions of the Camp David Accords.

B. What did Israel actually surrender in relinquishing the Sinai Peninsula?

1. An area three times the size of Israel, including Gaza, Judea, Samaria, and the Golan Heights, with the best possible defensive barrier , the Suez Canal, and a 150 kilometer wide buffer against an Egyptian invasion.

2. Nine air bases, including two among the most strategically located, Eitam in the north and Etzion in the south near Eilat. In the fall of 1979 I was serving in Israel as a colonel in the U.S. Army. The Chief of Operations of the U.S. Air Force came on a visit and I was his escorting officer. We traveled around the Sinai Peninsula in an Israeli Air Force helicopter. He voiced absolute surprise that any country would give up the military bases in the Sinai. He went on to say that in his opinion the Israelis are "absolutely stupid to surrender the military advantages in retaining the Sinai Peninsula and especially the air bases at Eitam and Etzion."

3. The vitally important naval base at Ophera at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. Several months before the Sinai Accords were signed, General Moshe Dayan stated that it is more important for Israel to keep possession of the Ophera naval base than to have a peace treaty with Egypt.

4. Because of the small size of Israel, many of her most important training areas were relocated to the Sinai Peninsula. This was especially true for her armor and artillery training as well as for the air force. Considering the size and sophistication of Israel's armed forces today, the training areas available in the Negev are inadequate.

5. The oil wells of the Sinai made Israel independent of importing petroleum. With the continued Israeli development of the petroleum resources of the Sinai, Israel had the potential of becoming a minor oil exporting nation. At the time of Israel's relinquishing of the oil wells in 1980, they were earning approximately three billion dollars a year. In addition the Sinai probably has other valuable exploitable minerals.

6. In the ten years after the Six Day War, Israelis developed some impressive settlements in the Sinai Peninsula in a stark desert area that was practically devoid of habitation except for a few thousand impoverished bedouins. These included Ophera, Taba, Nahal Yam, and particularly Yamit, the spectacularly successful farming community near the Eitam IAF base in the northeast corner of the peninsula.

7. In all Israel relinquished something like eleven billion dollars in infrastructure investments.

8. The cost of the redeployment from the Sinai was about eight billion dollars. The money was loaned to Israel by the United States and it is currently being repaid at 10% interest per annum. A similar amount of money owed by Egypt was forgiven by the United States in 1991, at the time of the Gulf War.

9. The Sinai Peninsula was seized from Egypt in a desperate war for survival in June of 1967 in which Egypt was blatantly the aggressor. Furthermore the Sinai Peninsula was never considered a part of Egypt.

C. What did Israel actually receive in compensation for relinquishing the Sinai Peninsula?

1. A prolonged armistice with an exchange of ambassadors.

2. In direct violation of the accords, Egypt has been in the forefront of efforts to foment hostility toward Israel in Africa, the Arab world, and at the United Nations.

3. Egypt never permitted her citizens to participate in commerce, tourism or cultural and scientific exchanges with Israel.

4. Egypt has not only failed to carry out most of the positive clauses of the Camp David Accords but for the past fifteen years has waged a relentless propaganda campaign against Israel and Jews in its government controlled media reminiscent of the Nazi era in Germany. Caricatures of Jews from Hitler's times are constantly being reprinted.

5. Egyptian military threats against Israel resumed in 1987 when the Defense Minister, General Abu Ghazzala stated the Egypt's "principal and sole enemy" was Israel and that together with Syria she would achieve a crushing victory over the Jewish state. On January 23, 1995 General Amin al-Huweidi, the former Minister of War and of MILITARY Intelligence declared, "War is inevitable--- The efforts and the agreements which are now taking place are not building peace; they are agreements leading to war."

6. As a result of the Camp David Accords, Egypt was able to enter into a far-reaching alliance with the United States. Egypt is today the principal U.S. ally in the Middle East with a war machine now based upon U.S. equipment and doctrine. Egypt is presently manufacturing the main U.S. Army battle tank in her own factories.

III. The Oslo Agreement of 1993

A. What were Israel's expectations in exchanging "Land for Peace?"

1. End of Israeli rule and conflict with the Arabs of Gaza, Judea, and Samaria.

2. That Yasser Arafat will vigorously pursue the struggle against Arab terrorism originating in his territory and extradite murderers of Jews to Israel in compliance with the Oslo Agreement.

3. Lead to a normalization of relations with the Arab world. 4. Israeli security will be enhanced by a more peaceful Middle East and that Israel will be accepted by most of the Arab states.

5. In order to placate world pressure and especially from the United States to satisfy Arab demands.

6. Those provisions of the PLO Charter that calls for the destruction of Israel will be revoked.

7. Arabs who cooperated with Israel will not be harmed and will be accepted into Arab society.

B. Benefits the Arabs received from the Oslo Agreement to date.

1. Approximately 95% of the Arabs in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria as well as all their cities are no longer under Israeli control.

2. An electrical infrastructure, built by Israel at a cost of approximately one billion dollars, was handed over to Arafat's Palestine Authority, gratis.

3. They have their own governmental structure, with a significant military establishment under the guise of a police force.

4. The Western nations have given the Palestine Authority generous financial assistance. Israel has provided Arafat with both money and weapons.

C. The Palestine Authority's violations of the Oslo Agreements

1. After almost five years it has still not carried our its pledge to rescind the anti-Israel provisions of the PLO Charter that calls for the destruction of Israel.

2. It has not cooperated in the prevention of terrorism against Israel nor extradited murderers as required.

3. Yasser Arafat has conducted a murderous campaign against Arabs who cooperated with Israel and ordered the death of any Arab even suspected of selling land to Jews.

4. The Palestine Authority raucously demands that Israel comply not merely with the provisions of the Oslo Agreement but with their expectations even when not called for. As an alternative they threaten violence.

5. Contrary to specific provisions in the Agreement, incitement against Israel has never abated. Arab educators, academicians, and intellectuals remain in the forefront of this antisemitic hatred. The same holds true in the two other Arab countries which have signed peace treaties with Israel, Jordan and Egypt, with the latter probably the most extreme.

D. How has Israel fared under the Oslo Agreement?

1. More Jews have been killed by Arab terrorists since Oslo than in the previous 45 years of Israel's existence.

2. The most violent terrorist acts generally accompany progress in the so-called "peace process."

a. The February 1996 bus bombings in Jerusalem occurred soon after The government of Prime Minister Shimon Peres transferred control of the Arab cities in Judea and Samaria to the Palestine Authority.

b. The terrorist outrages at the Mahane Yehuda Market and the Ben Yehuda Pedestrian Mall took place with the handing over of most of Hebron to Yasser Arafat.

3. While Arabs from everywhere are safe to walk, work, visit, get medical care, etc. in any Israeli city, a Jew going to the PA controlled areas almost assuredly forfeits his or her life.

4. During the Arab rioting against Israel in September 1996, the Palestine Security forces not only did not try to control the stone throwers but they turned their Israeli provided weapons on the IDF soldiers, killing 16 in clear violation of the Oslo Agreement.

5. There has been no significant thawing in the collective Arab/Moslem attitude of intense hostility toward Israel or toward Jews in general.

Until now I have offered, what I believe are irrefutable facts regarding both the Camp David and Oslo Agreements. In conclusion I shall offer my opinions.

1. Once Israel completed the three-year phased withdrawal fro the Sinai Peninsula in April 1982, it became obvious that all that Israel could expect is a very cold peace which would last at Egypt's convenience. The fundamental reason was offered by King Hassan of Morocco. In 1984 he reported a conversation with Hosni Mubarak that the Treaty was no longer of interest to Egypt since, "Cairo had obtained from it what it could." There was never any question of the United States pressuring its now most important ally in the Middle East to abide by its commitments.

2. Anwar Sadat was assassinated in September 1981. What was his background this great man of peace who secured all of his demands at Camp David?

a. During World War II he was an officer in the Egyptian Army and was imprisoned by the British as a spy for the commander of the Nazi forces in North Africa, Erwin Rommel.

b. As the editor of the most influential newspaper in Egypt in 1953 he wrote an article to the effect that his only complaint against Hitler is that he did not wipe our all the Jews who he characterized as the "world malignant evil."

c. In an interview in "New York Times" reported on October 19, 1980 Sadat summarized the Camp David Accords as follows, "Poor Menachem Begin has problems.... I already got back 90% of the Sinai plus the oil fields and what has he got in return? A piece of paper."

3. While the so-called "Peace Camp" in Israel led by Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin, and the post-Zionist intellectuals trumpet "the new Middle East" of brotherly love and grandiose delusions of economic prosperity for all its inhabitants, all indications point to the Arabs being quite satisfied with the old Middle East. If there is anything new in the Middle East, it is the introduction by the Arabs of new, more dangerous weapon systems, all aimed at Israel.

4. I do agree with those who point to the Camp David Accords as the model for agreements that Israel may arrive at with the Arabs during the "land for peace" process, including Oslo. The results of the Camp David Accords are a clear indication of Arab intentions toward Israel and what the Jews can expect by returning to the indefensible boundaries of 1967.

5. The very existence of Israel is an affront to the Arabs and to the entire Moslem world. Peace with the Arabs can only be maintained by a balance of power, comparable to that which existed between the United States and Russia during the decades of the Cold War. Peace was assured between those two superpowers through a balance of nuclear terror. The appeasers in the United States advocated succumbing to the constant brandishing of the USSR with the motto, "better red than dead." Fortunately there were wiser leaders and a sufficiently patriotic public in the United States from the time of President Harry Truman through Ronald Reagan. Eventually the ruthless communist dictatorship succumbed and the forces of freedom prevailed. Israel is in a similar situation vis-a-vis the Moslem World.

6. Soon after the Six Day War in June 1956 the many facades of Jewish self-hatred manifested itself as a campaign for peace. Unfortunately for Israel self-hatred is a disease with which Arabs and Moslems are not afflicted. They are firm in the belief that the whole truth is on their side and that justice demands that the entire Zionist entity must be destroyed.

7. The root cause of Israel's problems as regard security or even existence are not the Arabs but the Jews who even in the Jewish State repudiate their own heritage and believe that their salvation lies in their own incredulous utopian fantasies. The immoral self-loathing of these self-haters is unique among ethnic groups and the source of the greatest danger to Jewish survival.

8. What about solutions to Israel's dilemma?

a. Until the Arab world undergoes a massive societal change, the most plausible peace that Israel can hope to achieve is based upon a balance of power which means that the Jews of Israel must remain strong and determined to defend their country. Military strength may be defined as a multiplica- tion factor equal to firepower x mobility x terrain. Contrary to the conventional wisdom espoused in certain devious circles, critical terrain and maneuver area in- creases in importance with advances in military technology.

b. There are no quick remedies to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Those who "demand peace now" are like spoiled little children who insist upon instant gratification irrespective of the consequences which happens to be national suicide in the case of Israel. The latter is regarded as a cancer in the Arab midst and may be tolerated at best for lack of ability to destroy her, but never accepted or legitimized. Therefore, the Jews of Israel will only enjoy peace by remaining stronger than the combined Arab forces and project a clear message to the Arab World that the Jews of Israel are physically and emotionally united in the determination to defend their country. Motivated by such a commitment, Israel's security situation is far from hopeless but at the slightest sign of weakness it is fraught with danger.

Appeasement whets the appetite of the aggressor and results in war not peace under the most disadvantageous conditions. Winston Churchill, Great Britain's brilliant wartime prime minister analyzed how World War II might have been avoided, "....how the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous. We shall see how the counsels of prudence and restraint may become the prime agents of mortal danger; how the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life may be found to lead to the bull's eye to disaster."

===========

Dr. Irving Kett, is a Colonel U.S. Army (Retired) is presently Professor of civil Engineering at California State University in Los Angeles. Kett writes frequently on Israeli military and strategic affairs. - Past away on December 30, 2013 - a great loss to Israel and his friends.

Political Analysis and Commentary on Israeli and Jewish Affairs   "For Zion's sake I shall not hold my peace, And for Jerusalem's sake I shall not rest."

STRATEGIC CHALLENGES IN THE MIDDLE EAST By Dr. Irving Kett (published in The Maccabean - 2001) The distinguished U.S. naval strategist, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, originated the term Middle East in 1902. It designates the vast region between the western border of Pakistan to the western border of Egypt and the countries south of the former Soviet Union. Admiral Thayer used the term to designate a strategic concept for the land bridge connecting the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. The area includes all of the Arab world with the exception of the Mahgreb, that is the northern part of Africa, save Egypt. The region is the cradle of the three major religions of the Western World namely, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Three of its cities, Bethlehem, Mecca, and Jerusalem, are respectively the spiritual centers for each of the three faiths. The northern tier states of the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey, while devoutly Moslem, are not populated by Arabs. Although only a small part of the billion or so Moslems live in the Middle East, Mecca is the focus of their intense beliefs. Geography and an essential natural resource, namely petroleum, constitute the strategic importance of the Middle East. The struggle for key geostrategic elements of the Middle East is recorded in the history of the region from the time of the Trojan War for control of the Dardanelles down to the present day conflict between nations within the region and those from outside. This was also the situation during the cold war between the United States and Russia. Under the parched, arid lands of the Middle East are located the largest single known oil reserves in the world. The focus of the United States strategic interests in that area stems from these basic factors, oil and the critically important waterways of the region. Petroleum is today the single most valuable commodity in world commerce; an indispensable item in time of peace and of critical strategic importance in time of war. Energy: A Vital Commodity The universal demand for energy is expected to double each decade to satisfy economic expansion and burgeoning populations. The single largest source of energy is derived from petroleum. The principle consumers for the foreseeable future will be the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. The United States with six percent of the world\'s population consumes approximately thirty percent of the annual output of the world\'s natural resources. As its domestic production of petroleum continues to decline, the demand in the United States continues to rise. The U.S. still supplies almost fifty percent of its petroleum requirements of 19.6 million barrels per day (mb/d) from domestic production, although that percentage is constantly decreasing. Western Europe and especially Japan, are almost totally dependent upon imported oil, principally from the Middle East. The politically strong environmental movement in the U.S. is preventing the exploitation of other large potential domestic oil resources situated on the California Coast and the northern slope of Alaska. At the same time it has also prevented any shift toward the more extensive utilization of nuclear power for the generation of electricity as is being done in some of the other advanced industrial nations. For example, France produces close to 90% of its electrical energy from nuclear reactors. That source of power is less than 10% in the United States, despite its having been a pioneer in nuclear technology. The emergence of the Middle East as the world\'s leading oil producing region has only occurred during the last half century. The first significant discovery of petroleum took place in Iran in 1908. Of the proven crude oil reserves in the world today about two-thirds are in the Middle East. Despite the daily pro- duction of about 23 million barrels a day, the quantity of known reserves in the Middle East continues to rise because of active exploration. It is estimated that one-third of the known natural gas reserves are also located in the Gulf Coast States. The present and future dependence of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan upon imports is a matter of paramount significance. Oil from the Middle East also supplies United States military forces throughout the Eastern Hemisphere. The disruption of petroleum supplies from the Middle East in 1973, as a result of the Yom Kippur War, when Israel was attacked by Syria and Egypt, caused serious economic problems for the industrial nations of the world. Aside from strategic considerations, the United States has a huge economic investment in the Middle East petroleum industry. In 1960 the major oil producing countries, led by the Middle East producers, formed the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) which wields tremendous economic and political power. Another Middle East factor that must be considered is the strident nationalism that pervades the region. This is characterized by extreme hostility to the United States as well as Western culture and presence in general. In the last few decades Islam has become a powerful and very aggressive expansionist force throughout much of the world. With regards to the rising demand for energy, the low priority currently placed upon developing alternate energy sources is a matter of great concern. Not only is there an element of unreliability with respect to the unrestricted flow of Middle East oil, but it is a non-replenishing commodity. There is only a finite amount available in the world. Each day mankind is burning up this resource, which has taken nature millions of years to produce. Probably no nation has acted with greater irresponsibility in this matter than the United States. Consider the production of electricity. In the United States most of it is generated from fossil fuels such as petroleum. While France and other nations, particularly Japan, are increasingly turning to nuclear energy, the United States has not built a nuclear generating plant in over twenty years and there is none contemplated. This would appear to be a very short-sighted approach to a critical problem. An assured supply of energy is of vital interest to the United States not only in time of war, but also in time of peace. Petroleum is a fungible commodity. Since the 1991 Gulf War, U.S. imports from the Persian Gulf region have decreased. The reverse is true with respect to Western Europe and the Far East. As the demand for petroleum increases, the two most promising sources for further production are both located in the same region of the world, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Basin. Of these two, the Persian Gulf is the most important. It is estimated that within ten years the Persian Gulf States will supply one half of the total world oil requirement, exporting about 45 mb/d. Since most of the increased production must undoubtedly come from the Persian Gulf region, the percentage of United States imports from the Middle East will also rise. In other words there is no visible alternative to greater dependency upon Persian Gulf oil in the foreseeable future. Petroleum and natural gas there are plentiful and easily extracted at relatively low cost. This reality has a powerful impact on political decisions affecting the Middle East by all of the major democracies, including the United States. It is ironic that the most likely competitor of the Persian Gulf oil exporting nations is the Moslem region right next door, the Caspian Basin. While the latter may possess huge reserves, estimated as high as 200 billion barrels of petroleum and 279 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, the problems attendant to the development of these fields and the distribution of the products are presently still far from solution. The increasing dependence upon petroleum from the Persian Gulf entails serious geopolitical risks. The paramount consideration, however, remains the rising demand for energy. As the sole superpower, the burden of these risks falls upon the United States. The Middle East and Strategic Waterways The Mediterranean Sea together with the Turkish Straits and the Suez Canal have for many years been among the most important waterways in the world. The latter entrances and exits in the Eastern Mediterranean have been focal points of conflict throughout history. In the 19th Century the European powers struggled with Turkey for control over the Straits which are actually three distinct but connected bodies of water, the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles. In 1915 Great Britain suffered a crushing defeat in the Gallipoli Campaign for control over the vital Straits between the Black and the Mediterranean Seas. The Suez Canal was completed in 1869 and it immediately became a target for international diplomacy. When Gamal Abdul Nasser, the dictator of Egypt, seized the Suez Canal in 1956, it precipitated a crisis that brought the major powers to the brink of another world war. As a result of the Six Day War between Israel and the Arabs, the Canal was closed for over seven years. Even though the Suez is again open for shipping, the Canal has not regained its former prominence because of the development of supertankers for the transport of petroleum products that are too large to transit the Suez Canal. They navigate instead around the Cape of Good Hope. In World War II the Mediterranean Sea was a fierce battleground whose outcome greatly influenced the course of the conflict. During the Cold War years after WW II, both the United States and Russia invested large naval forces in that Sea. The powerful U.S. Sixth Fleet is still in the Eastern Mediterranean. Despite the continued importance of the Middle East waterways discussed in the above paragraphs, by far the most critical Middle East waterways today are the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz. Through these waterways pass the vast petroleum exports of the Middle East. For that reason the United States has kept a significant naval force on station in the Persian Gulf since the Gulf War and will probably maintain that presence for the foreseeable future. The Persian Gulf has serious potential for conflict that could threaten Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf oil supply. For some years Iraq and Iran have posed a significant military threat to each other, to the entire Gulf Region, and coincidentally both are very hostile to the United States as well as to Israel. The Middle East Battleground Conflict in this strategic area continuously poses a danger to world peace and to U.S. interests. While the region is criss-crossed with intense internecine strife, the most continuous danger of war is the Arab/Israel dispute that has been festering for over fifty years and between Jews and Arabs for a hundred years. Since 1948 these two contestants have fought five major wars, each at a heightened level of intensity and sophistication. Actually the Middle East conflict that resulted in the greatest loss of life and destruction was between two Moslem countries, Iraq and Iran, which lasted from 1980 to 1988. An objective analysis of the needs of the nations directly involved, as well as that of the United States, clearly indicates the urgent need for a lasting peace. Aside from those between Israel and the Arabs, the Middle East remains embroiled in intense intraregional rivalries, where direct threats to vital United States interests are involved. In the 1990/91 Gulf War, the U.S. was forced to mobilize an expeditionary force of over half a million troops in order to protect the uninterrupted supply of petroleum from the Gulf region from Iraqi aggression. At the present time the situation is further exacerbated by the introduction of non-conventional weaponry, i.e., atomic, bacteriological, and chemical. A looming crisis which may soon erupt concerns the development of these weapons by Iraq and Iran which poses a direct challenge to the United States. The strategic importance, coupled with a history of almost continuous crisis, requires the United States to consider the Middle East as a crucial factor in formulating worldwide economic and military strategy. After the Six Day War of 1967, the seeming U.S. support for Israel was a major consideration in the Arab turn to Russia for military support. To cope with the Middle East dilemma, several conflicting alternatives have been postulated by U.S. foreign policy makers. These have ranged from maximum support for Israel to counterbalance the combined power of the hostile Arab/Moslem states to the virtual abandonment of Israel in order to curry favor with the Moslem world and assure the vital supply of oil. While U.S. policy over the years has vacillated between these two extremes, neither one ever gained sufficient currency to completely dominate the other. The abandonment of Israel may become a more imperative option, however, if the latter permits itself to be further weakened by the process of appeasement. In such an event only direct U.S. military involvement could possibly save a truncated Israel from destruction. It is realistic to imagine that such a move, involving loss of American lives, would be very unpopular with the U.S. public. The continued pressure upon Israel by successive U.S. administrations to satisfy Arab territorial demands would appear to be a gambit fraught with danger for the Jews of Israel as well as for the frequently espoused U.S. moral commitment to Israel\'s survival. The destruction of Israel stemming from such long standing U.S. policy and the lack of an adequate military response at time of crisis would seriously undermine the credibility of the United States in the international arena. It would, however, be quixotic to deny the obvious truism that the United States has vital interests in the world and even in the Middle East that far transcend not only the security of Israel but the very survival of Israel. Since the demise of the USSR, it is questionable whether Israel is still the important strategic asset of the United States in the Middle East. Prior to the Camp David Accords in 1978, Israel was a significant regional power. Shorn of the Sinai Peninsula and further reduced by the Oslo Accords of 1993 and threatened with the additional loss of the Golan Heights, the continued viability of Israel as a defensible nation is in question. In the past twenty years, therefore, the United States has begun focusing upon Egypt rather than Israel as its most important strategic asset in the Eastern Mediterranean. Armed Conflict in the New Middle East Two approaches exist today concerning tactics that need to be employed in the battlefield. One emphasizes high-tech weapons, including high performance manned aircraft and drones, missiles, c3 communication, electronic sensors, and instantaneous computerized battle information; the other places greater importance upon well trained, highly motivated troops, operating in small, mobile units, and prepared to engage the enemy at close quarters with appropriate light infantry weapons. Indications are that determined enemy forces of the latter type, employing deadly and protracted terrorist and guerilla tactics, are what the U.S. would probably face if it permits itself again to become involved in Middle East conflicts. Examples of the apparent effective use of high performance weaponry that avoids the risk of significant casualties were the Gulf War and the recent conflict in Kosovo, where the latest technology in weaponry was employed to overcome enemy resistance. One may well point out, however, that Saddam Hussein is still in power in Iraq, and that little damage was inflicted on Serbian military assets in the 1999 Kosovo conflict. Had the Serbs persevered a bit longer, the United States would probably have been forced to employ substantial ground forces. The overall efficacy of high performance weaponry as a single dimension tool is still very much open to question. The obvious failure of high-tech weaponry to impose one\'s will upon a determined enemy was certainly the U.S. experience in the traumatic defeat suffered in Viet-Nam. More recently the evidence was reinforced by the humiliating withdrawal of the supposedly powewrful Israeli Army from Lebanon in the face of only a few hundred determined guerrillas, to say nothing of the manner in which U.S. forces turned tail, after licking its wounds in Lebanon and Somalia. No foreseeable enemy in the Middle East will attempt to engage U.S. forces on the basis of matching tank for tank, aircraft for aircraft, artillery piece for artillery piece, or even soldiers trained in the hubris of the most modern weaponry. This does not mean that a dedicated force as we have seen to exist in this region, willing to take casualties, fighting a cunning guerilla/terrorist type of war and able to blend in with the local population may not in the end prevail. That enemy will probably consist of highly dispersed, mobile forces, well equipped for its harassing mission, supported by large civilian populations, and again one must emphasize, not afraid to accept death in order to gain its objectives. In such an environment, infantry will again regain its historic role as the queen of battle. Conclusion The strategic importance of the vast petroleum reserves in the Middle East, along with its vital sea lanes, requires the United States to consider this region carefully in formulating its foreign policy decisions. These considerations must be coupled with an awareness of the continuous proclivity for violence and fierce hatred of Western culture that is endemic among the people living in the Middle East. Probably the most visible and persistent flash point will continue to be the Arab/Israel dispute, despite repeated attempts to paper over the deep-seated conflict with agreements and peace treaties. The enmity that exists combines the most explosive mix of extreme nationalism and religious fundamentalism. As opposed to Israel, all of the Arab states are governed by dictatorships, manifesting varying degrees of repression and brutality toward their own people. The United States must eschew permitting itself to become too deeply involved in this intractable dilemma. Possibly the best policy for the United States to follow in the 21st Century Middle East, except where its direct vital interests are immediately concerned, would be one of gradual disengagement and benign neglect. If a solution to the problems is to be found, it will have to be formulated and implemented solely by the indigenous population and governments. With respect to wars in the 21st Century, the major task of all U.S. governments should be to avoid involvement in the terrible destruction inherent in modern weaponry and tactics, and to protect their nation from international terrorism emanating from the Middle East. Terrorism, together with widespread unconventional guerilla-type warfare, may become the hallmark for future conflict. This is in contradiction to the notion that since high-technology weapons exist, that the wars in the 21st Century will necessarily be waged with them. While the history of the present century will probably record many bloody conflicts, possibly very few outcomes, if any, will be determined by the massive utilization of the most advanced weaponry. One of the greatest challenges facing U.S. military professionals in the 21st Century will be to refute the myth that the United States can wage successful push-button wars that will make combat effective, quick, clean, and bloodless, at least insofar as American forces are concerned. � BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. "Area Handbook for Israel", U.S. Dept. of the Army, 1970. 2. "Area Handbook for Saudi Arabia", U.S. Dept. of the Army, 1970. 3. "API Reports", American Petroleum Institute, Fall 2000. 4. "A Proposed Solution to the Arab-Israeli Conflict", Kett, Irving, LTC, U.S. Army War College, 1974. 5. "Command Decisions", Office of the Chief of Military History, U.S. Army, 1960. 6. "Strategic Geography and the Changing Middle East", Kemp, Geoffrey, Harkavy, Robert E., Brookings Institution Press, 1997. 7. "The Middle East in World Affairs", Lenczowski, George, 3rd Edition, Cornell University Press, 1962 8. "United States Military Posture", Moorer, Thomas H. Admiral, USN, Testimony before U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, 1975. 9. www.energy.gov Irving Kett Colonel, U.S. Army, Retired

Political Analysis and Commentary on Israeli and Jewish Affairs   "For Zion's sake I shall not hold my peace, And for Jerusalem's sake I shall not rest."

STRATEGIC CHALLENGES IN THE MIDDLE EAST By Dr. Irving Kett (published in The Maccabean - 2001) The distinguished U.S. naval strategist, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, originated the term Middle East in 1902. It designates the vast region between the western border of Pakistan to the western border of Egypt and the countries south of the former Soviet Union. Admiral Thayer used the term to designate a strategic concept for the land bridge connecting the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. The area includes all of the Arab world with the exception of the Mahgreb, that is the northern part of Africa, save Egypt. The region is the cradle of the three major religions of the Western World namely, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Three of its cities, Bethlehem, Mecca, and Jerusalem, are respectively the spiritual centers for each of the three faiths. The northern tier states of the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey, while devoutly Moslem, are not populated by Arabs. Although only a small part of the billion or so Moslems live in the Middle East, Mecca is the focus of their intense beliefs. Geography and an essential natural resource, namely petroleum, constitute the strategic importance of the Middle East. The struggle for key geostrategic elements of the Middle East is recorded in the history of the region from the time of the Trojan War for control of the Dardanelles down to the present day conflict between nations within the region and those from outside. This was also the situation during the cold war between the United States and Russia. Under the parched, arid lands of the Middle East are located the largest single known oil reserves in the world. The focus of the United States strategic interests in that area stems from these basic factors, oil and the critically important waterways of the region. Petroleum is today the single most valuable commodity in world commerce; an indispensable item in time of peace and of critical strategic importance in time of war. Energy: A Vital Commodity The universal demand for energy is expected to double each decade to satisfy economic expansion and burgeoning populations. The single largest source of energy is derived from petroleum. The principle consumers for the foreseeable future will be the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. The United States with six percent of the world\'s population consumes approximately thirty percent of the annual output of the world\'s natural resources. As its domestic production of petroleum continues to decline, the demand in the United States continues to rise. The U.S. still supplies almost fifty percent of its petroleum requirements of 19.6 million barrels per day (mb/d) from domestic production, although that percentage is constantly decreasing. Western Europe and especially Japan, are almost totally dependent upon imported oil, principally from the Middle East. The politically strong environmental movement in the U.S. is preventing the exploitation of other large potential domestic oil resources situated on the California Coast and the northern slope of Alaska. At the same time it has also prevented any shift toward the more extensive utilization of nuclear power for the generation of electricity as is being done in some of the other advanced industrial nations. For example, France produces close to 90% of its electrical energy from nuclear reactors. That source of power is less than 10% in the United States, despite its having been a pioneer in nuclear technology. The emergence of the Middle East as the world\'s leading oil producing region has only occurred during the last half century. The first significant discovery of petroleum took place in Iran in 1908. Of the proven crude oil reserves in the world today about two-thirds are in the Middle East. Despite the daily pro- duction of about 23 million barrels a day, the quantity of known reserves in the Middle East continues to rise because of active exploration. It is estimated that one-third of the known natural gas reserves are also located in the Gulf Coast States. The present and future dependence of the United States, Western Europe, and Japan upon imports is a matter of paramount significance. Oil from the Middle East also supplies United States military forces throughout the Eastern Hemisphere. The disruption of petroleum supplies from the Middle East in 1973, as a result of the Yom Kippur War, when Israel was attacked by Syria and Egypt, caused serious economic problems for the industrial nations of the world. Aside from strategic considerations, the United States has a huge economic investment in the Middle East petroleum industry. In 1960 the major oil producing countries, led by the Middle East producers, formed the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) which wields tremendous economic and political power. Another Middle East factor that must be considered is the strident nationalism that pervades the region. This is characterized by extreme hostility to the United States as well as Western culture and presence in general. In the last few decades Islam has become a powerful and very aggressive expansionist force throughout much of the world. With regards to the rising demand for energy, the low priority currently placed upon developing alternate energy sources is a matter of great concern. Not only is there an element of unreliability with respect to the unrestricted flow of Middle East oil, but it is a non-replenishing commodity. There is only a finite amount available in the world. Each day mankind is burning up this resource, which has taken nature millions of years to produce. Probably no nation has acted with greater irresponsibility in this matter than the United States. Consider the production of electricity. In the United States most of it is generated from fossil fuels such as petroleum. While France and other nations, particularly Japan, are increasingly turning to nuclear energy, the United States has not built a nuclear generating plant in over twenty years and there is none contemplated. This would appear to be a very short-sighted approach to a critical problem. An assured supply of energy is of vital interest to the United States not only in time of war, but also in time of peace. Petroleum is a fungible commodity. Since the 1991 Gulf War, U.S. imports from the Persian Gulf region have decreased. The reverse is true with respect to Western Europe and the Far East. As the demand for petroleum increases, the two most promising sources for further production are both located in the same region of the world, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Basin. Of these two, the Persian Gulf is the most important. It is estimated that within ten years the Persian Gulf States will supply one half of the total world oil requirement, exporting about 45 mb/d. Since most of the increased production must undoubtedly come from the Persian Gulf region, the percentage of United States imports from the Middle East will also rise. In other words there is no visible alternative to greater dependency upon Persian Gulf oil in the foreseeable future. Petroleum and natural gas there are plentiful and easily extracted at relatively low cost. This reality has a powerful impact on political decisions affecting the Middle East by all of the major democracies, including the United States. It is ironic that the most likely competitor of the Persian Gulf oil exporting nations is the Moslem region right next door, the Caspian Basin. While the latter may possess huge reserves, estimated as high as 200 billion barrels of petroleum and 279 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, the problems attendant to the development of these fields and the distribution of the products are presently still far from solution. The increasing dependence upon petroleum from the Persian Gulf entails serious geopolitical risks. The paramount consideration, however, remains the rising demand for energy. As the sole superpower, the burden of these risks falls upon the United States. The Middle East and Strategic Waterways The Mediterranean Sea together with the Turkish Straits and the Suez Canal have for many years been among the most important waterways in the world. The latter entrances and exits in the Eastern Mediterranean have been focal points of conflict throughout history. In the 19th Century the European powers struggled with Turkey for control over the Straits which are actually three distinct but connected bodies of water, the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, and the Dardanelles. In 1915 Great Britain suffered a crushing defeat in the Gallipoli Campaign for control over the vital Straits between the Black and the Mediterranean Seas. The Suez Canal was completed in 1869 and it immediately became a target for international diplomacy. When Gamal Abdul Nasser, the dictator of Egypt, seized the Suez Canal in 1956, it precipitated a crisis that brought the major powers to the brink of another world war. As a result of the Six Day War between Israel and the Arabs, the Canal was closed for over seven years. Even though the Suez is again open for shipping, the Canal has not regained its former prominence because of the development of supertankers for the transport of petroleum products that are too large to transit the Suez Canal. They navigate instead around the Cape of Good Hope. In World War II the Mediterranean Sea was a fierce battleground whose outcome greatly influenced the course of the conflict. During the Cold War years after WW II, both the United States and Russia invested large naval forces in that Sea. The powerful U.S. Sixth Fleet is still in the Eastern Mediterranean. Despite the continued importance of the Middle East waterways discussed in the above paragraphs, by far the most critical Middle East waterways today are the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz. Through these waterways pass the vast petroleum exports of the Middle East. For that reason the United States has kept a significant naval force on station in the Persian Gulf since the Gulf War and will probably maintain that presence for the foreseeable future. The Persian Gulf has serious potential for conflict that could threaten Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf oil supply. For some years Iraq and Iran have posed a significant military threat to each other, to the entire Gulf Region, and coincidentally both are very hostile to the United States as well as to Israel. The Middle East Battleground Conflict in this strategic area continuously poses a danger to world peace and to U.S. interests. While the region is criss-crossed with intense internecine strife, the most continuous danger of war is the Arab/Israel dispute that has been festering for over fifty years and between Jews and Arabs for a hundred years. Since 1948 these two contestants have fought five major wars, each at a heightened level of intensity and sophistication. Actually the Middle East conflict that resulted in the greatest loss of life and destruction was between two Moslem countries, Iraq and Iran, which lasted from 1980 to 1988. An objective analysis of the needs of the nations directly involved, as well as that of the United States, clearly indicates the urgent need for a lasting peace. Aside from those between Israel and the Arabs, the Middle East remains embroiled in intense intraregional rivalries, where direct threats to vital United States interests are involved. In the 1990/91 Gulf War, the U.S. was forced to mobilize an expeditionary force of over half a million troops in order to protect the uninterrupted supply of petroleum from the Gulf region from Iraqi aggression. At the present time the situation is further exacerbated by the introduction of non-conventional weaponry, i.e., atomic, bacteriological, and chemical. A looming crisis which may soon erupt concerns the development of these weapons by Iraq and Iran which poses a direct challenge to the United States. The strategic importance, coupled with a history of almost continuous crisis, requires the United States to consider the Middle East as a crucial factor in formulating worldwide economic and military strategy. After the Six Day War of 1967, the seeming U.S. support for Israel was a major consideration in the Arab turn to Russia for military support. To cope with the Middle East dilemma, several conflicting alternatives have been postulated by U.S. foreign policy makers. These have ranged from maximum support for Israel to counterbalance the combined power of the hostile Arab/Moslem states to the virtual abandonment of Israel in order to curry favor with the Moslem world and assure the vital supply of oil. While U.S. policy over the years has vacillated between these two extremes, neither one ever gained sufficient currency to completely dominate the other. The abandonment of Israel may become a more imperative option, however, if the latter permits itself to be further weakened by the process of appeasement. In such an event only direct U.S. military involvement could possibly save a truncated Israel from destruction. It is realistic to imagine that such a move, involving loss of American lives, would be very unpopular with the U.S. public. The continued pressure upon Israel by successive U.S. administrations to satisfy Arab territorial demands would appear to be a gambit fraught with danger for the Jews of Israel as well as for the frequently espoused U.S. moral commitment to Israel\'s survival. The destruction of Israel stemming from such long standing U.S. policy and the lack of an adequate military response at time of crisis would seriously undermine the credibility of the United States in the international arena. It would, however, be quixotic to deny the obvious truism that the United States has vital interests in the world and even in the Middle East that far transcend not only the security of Israel but the very survival of Israel. Since the demise of the USSR, it is questionable whether Israel is still the important strategic asset of the United States in the Middle East. Prior to the Camp David Accords in 1978, Israel was a significant regional power. Shorn of the Sinai Peninsula and further reduced by the Oslo Accords of 1993 and threatened with the additional loss of the Golan Heights, the continued viability of Israel as a defensible nation is in question. In the past twenty years, therefore, the United States has begun focusing upon Egypt rather than Israel as its most important strategic asset in the Eastern Mediterranean. Armed Conflict in the New Middle East Two approaches exist today concerning tactics that need to be employed in the battlefield. One emphasizes high-tech weapons, including high performance manned aircraft and drones, missiles, c3 communication, electronic sensors, and instantaneous computerized battle information; the other places greater importance upon well trained, highly motivated troops, operating in small, mobile units, and prepared to engage the enemy at close quarters with appropriate light infantry weapons. Indications are that determined enemy forces of the latter type, employing deadly and protracted terrorist and guerilla tactics, are what the U.S. would probably face if it permits itself again to become involved in Middle East conflicts. Examples of the apparent effective use of high performance weaponry that avoids the risk of significant casualties were the Gulf War and the recent conflict in Kosovo, where the latest technology in weaponry was employed to overcome enemy resistance. One may well point out, however, that Saddam Hussein is still in power in Iraq, and that little damage was inflicted on Serbian military assets in the 1999 Kosovo conflict. Had the Serbs persevered a bit longer, the United States would probably have been forced to employ substantial ground forces. The overall efficacy of high performance weaponry as a single dimension tool is still very much open to question. The obvious failure of high-tech weaponry to impose one\'s will upon a determined enemy was certainly the U.S. experience in the traumatic defeat suffered in Viet-Nam. More recently the evidence was reinforced by the humiliating withdrawal of the supposedly powewrful Israeli Army from Lebanon in the face of only a few hundred determined guerrillas, to say nothing of the manner in which U.S. forces turned tail, after licking its wounds in Lebanon and Somalia. No foreseeable enemy in the Middle East will attempt to engage U.S. forces on the basis of matching tank for tank, aircraft for aircraft, artillery piece for artillery piece, or even soldiers trained in the hubris of the most modern weaponry. This does not mean that a dedicated force as we have seen to exist in this region, willing to take casualties, fighting a cunning guerilla/terrorist type of war and able to blend in with the local population may not in the end prevail. That enemy will probably consist of highly dispersed, mobile forces, well equipped for its harassing mission, supported by large civilian populations, and again one must emphasize, not afraid to accept death in order to gain its objectives. In such an environment, infantry will again regain its historic role as the queen of battle. Conclusion The strategic importance of the vast petroleum reserves in the Middle East, along with its vital sea lanes, requires the United States to consider this region carefully in formulating its foreign policy decisions. These considerations must be coupled with an awareness of the continuous proclivity for violence and fierce hatred of Western culture that is endemic among the people living in the Middle East. Probably the most visible and persistent flash point will continue to be the Arab/Israel dispute, despite repeated attempts to paper over the deep-seated conflict with agreements and peace treaties. The enmity that exists combines the most explosive mix of extreme nationalism and religious fundamentalism. As opposed to Israel, all of the Arab states are governed by dictatorships, manifesting varying degrees of repression and brutality toward their own people. The United States must eschew permitting itself to become too deeply involved in this intractable dilemma. Possibly the best policy for the United States to follow in the 21st Century Middle East, except where its direct vital interests are immediately concerned, would be one of gradual disengagement and benign neglect. If a solution to the problems is to be found, it will have to be formulated and implemented solely by the indigenous population and governments. With respect to wars in the 21st Century, the major task of all U.S. governments should be to avoid involvement in the terrible destruction inherent in modern weaponry and tactics, and to protect their nation from international terrorism emanating from the Middle East. Terrorism, together with widespread unconventional guerilla-type warfare, may become the hallmark for future conflict. This is in contradiction to the notion that since high-technology weapons exist, that the wars in the 21st Century will necessarily be waged with them. While the history of the present century will probably record many bloody conflicts, possibly very few outcomes, if any, will be determined by the massive utilization of the most advanced weaponry. One of the greatest challenges facing U.S. military professionals in the 21st Century will be to refute the myth that the United States can wage successful push-button wars that will make combat effective, quick, clean, and bloodless, at least insofar as American forces are concerned. � BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. "Area Handbook for Israel", U.S. Dept. of the Army, 1970. 2. "Area Handbook for Saudi Arabia", U.S. Dept. of the Army, 1970. 3. "API Reports", American Petroleum Institute, Fall 2000. 4. "A Proposed Solution to the Arab-Israeli Conflict", Kett, Irving, LTC, U.S. Army War College, 1974. 5. "Command Decisions", Office of the Chief of Military History, U.S. Army, 1960. 6. "Strategic Geography and the Changing Middle East", Kemp, Geoffrey, Harkavy, Robert E., Brookings Institution Press, 1997. 7. "The Middle East in World Affairs", Lenczowski, George, 3rd Edition, Cornell University Press, 1962 8. "United States Military Posture", Moorer, Thomas H. Admiral, USN, Testimony before U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, 1975. 9. www.energy.gov Irving Kett Colonel, U.S. Army, Retired

What a delusion and irony - Mahmoud Abbas the murdering terrorist of innocent civilians and creator of fiction and delusion.

Arab-Palestinian Authority Chairman Abbas financed the Abu Daoud/Black September terror cell to murder 11 Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972. He has a warrant for his arrest in Germany and a murder conviction in Italy with life in prison. Abbas the head of the Arab-Palestinian Authority is also the master mind of the Achille Lauro, on 11 October 1985 they thru a wheelchair bound Jew in to the ocean to die. There is a reward on his head by the United States. This is the person you want to make peace with - how delusional can people be.

LEGAL RIGHTS AND TITLE OF SOVEREIGNTY OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE TO THE LAND OF ISRAEL AND PALESTINE UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

by Howard Grief

   

The objective of this paper is to set down in a brief, yet clear and precise manner the legal rights and title of sovereignty of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and Palestine under international law. These rights originated in the global political and legal settlement, conceived during World War I and carried into execution in the post-war years between 1919 and 1923. Insofar as the Ottoman Turkish Empire was concerned, the settlement embraced the claims of the Zionist Organization, the Arab National movement, the Kurds, the Assyrians and the Armenians.

As part of the settlement in which the Arabs received most of the lands formerly under Turkish sovereignty in the Middle East, the whole of Palestine, on both sides of the Jordan, was reserved exclusively for the Jewish people as their national home and future independent state.

Under the terms of the settlement that were made by the Principal Allied Powers consisting of Britain, France, Italy and Japan, there would be no annexation of the conquered Turkish territories by any of the Powers, as had been planned in the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 9 and 16, 1916. Instead, these territories, including the peoples for whom they were designated, would be placed under the Mandates System and administered by an advanced nation until they were ready to stand by themselves. The Mandates System was established and governed by Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, contained in the Treaty of Versailles and all the other peace treaties made with the Central Powers - Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey. The Covenant was the idea of US President Woodrow Wilson and contained in it his program of Fourteen Points of January 8, 1918, while Article 22 which established the Mandates System, was largely the work of Jan Christiaan Smuts who formulated the details in a memorandum that became known as the Smuts Resolution, officially endorsed by the Council of Ten on January 30, 1919, in which Palestine as envisaged in the Balfour Declaration was named as one of the mandated states to be created. The official creation of the country took place at the San Remo Peace Conference where the Balfour Declaration was adopted by the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers as the basis for the future administration of Palestine which would henceforth be recognized as the Jewish National Home.

The moment of birth of Jewish legal rights and title of sovereignty thus took place at the same time Palestine was created a mandated state, since it was created for no other reason than to reconstitute the ancient Jewish state of Judea in fulfillment of the Balfour Declaration and the general provisions of Article 22 of the League Covenant. This meant that Palestine from the start was legally a Jewish state in theory that was to be guided towards independence by a Mandatory or Trustee, also acting as Tutor, and who would take the necessary political, administrative and economic measures to establish the Jewish National Home. The chief means for accomplishing this was by encouraging large-scale Jewish immigration to Palestine, which would eventually result in making Palestine an independent Jewish state, not only legally but also in the demographic and cultural senses.

The details for the planned independent Jewish state were set forth in three basic documents, which may be termed the founding documents of mandated Palestine and the modern Jewish state of Israel that arose from it. These were the San Remo Resolution of April 25, 1920, the Mandate for Palestine conferred on Britain by the Principal Allied Powers and confirmed by the League of Nations on July 24, 1922, and the Franco-British Boundary Convention of December 23, 1920. These founding documents were supplemented by the Anglo-American Convention of December 3, 1924 respecting the Mandate for Palestine. It is of supreme importance to remember always that these documents were the source or well-spring of Jewish legal rights and title of sovereignty over Palestine and the Land of Israel under international law, because of the near-universal but completely false belief that it was the United Nations General Assembly Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947 that brought the State of Israel into existence. In fact, the UN resolution was an illegal abrogation of Jewish legal rights and title of sovereignty to the whole of Palestine and the Land of Israel, rather than an affirmation of such rights or progenitor of them.

The San Remo Resolution converted the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917 from a mere statement of British policy expressing sympathy with the goal of the Zionist movement to create a Jewish state into a binding act of international law that required specific fulfillment by Britain of this object in active cooperation with the Jewish people. Under the Balfour Declaration as originally issued by the British government, the latter only promised to use their best endeavors to facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. But under the San Remo Resolution of April 24-25, 1920, the Principal Allied Powers as a cohesive group charged the British government with the responsibility or legal obligation of putting into effect the Balfour Declaration. A legal onus was thus placed on Britain to ensure that the Jewish National Home would be duly established. This onus the British Government willingly accepted because at the time the Balfour Declaration was issued and adopted at the San Remo Peace Conference, Palestine was considered a valuable strategic asset and communications center, and so a vital necessity for protecting far-flung British imperial interests extending from Egypt to India. Britain was fearful of having any major country or power other than itself, especially France or Germany, positioned alongside the Suez Canal.

The term "Jewish National Home" was defined to mean a state by the British government at the Cabinet session which approved the Balfour Declaration on October 31, 1917. That was also the meaning originally given to this phrase by the program committee which drafted the Basel Program at the first Zionist Congress in August 1897 and by Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist Organization. The word "home" as used in the Balfour Declaration and subsequently in the San Remo Resolution was simply the euphemism for a state originally adopted by the Zionist Organization when the territory of Palestine was subject to the rule of the Ottoman Empire, so as not to arouse the sharp opposition of the Sultan and his government to the Zionist aim, which involved a potential loss of this territory by the Empire. There was no doubt in the minds of the authors of the Basel Program and the Balfour Declaration regarding the true meaning of this word, a meaning reinforced by the addition of the adjective "national" to "home". However, as a result of not using the word "state" directly and proclaiming that meaning openly or even attempting to hide its true meaning when it was first used to denote the aim of Zionism, ammunition was provided to those who sought to prevent the emergence of a Jewish state or who saw the Home only in cultural terms.

The phrase "in Palestine", another expression found in the Balfour Declaration that generated much controversy, referred to the whole country, including both Cisjordan and Transjordan. It was absurd to imagine that this phrase could be used to indicate that only a part of Palestine was reserved for the future Jewish National Home, since both were created simultaneously and used interchangeably, with the term "Palestine" pointing out the geographical location of the future independent Jewish state. Had "Palestine" meant a partitioned country with certain areas of it set aside for Jews and others for Arabs, that intention would have been stated explicitly at the time the Balfour Declaration was drafted and approved and later adopted by the Principal Allied Powers. No such allusion was ever made in the prolonged discussions that took place in fashioning the Declaration and ensuring it international approval.

There is therefore no juridical or factual basis for asserting that the phrase "in Palestine" limited the establishment of the Jewish National Home to only a part of the country. On the contrary, Palestine and the Jewish National Home were synonymous terms, as is evidenced by the use of the same phrase in the second half of the Balfour Declaration which refers to the existing non-Jewish communities "in Palestine", clearly indicating the whole country. Similar evidence exists in the preamble and terms of the Mandate Charter.

The San Remo Resolution on Palestine combined the Balfour Declaration with Article 22 of the League Covenant. This meant that the general provisions of Article 22 applied to the Jewish people exclusively, who would set up their home and state in Palestine. There was no intention to apply Article 22 to the Arabs of the country, as was mistakenly concluded by the Palestine Royal Commission which relied on that article of the Covenant as the legal basis to justify the partition of Palestine, apart from the other reasons it gave. The proof of the applicability of Article 22 to the Jewish people, including not only those in Palestine at the time, but those who were expected to arrive in large numbers in the future, is found in the Smuts Resolution, which became Article 22 of the Covenant. It specifically names Palestine as one of the countries to which this article would apply. There was no doubt that when Palestine was named in the context of Article 22, it was linked exclusively to the Jewish National Home, as set down in the Balfour Declaration, a fact everyone was aware of at the time, including the representatives of the Arab national movement, as evidenced by the agreement between Emir Feisal and Dr. Chaim Weizmann dated January 3, 1919 as well as an important letter sent by the Emir to future US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter dated March 3, 1919. In that letter, Feisal characterized as "moderate and proper" the Zionist proposals presented by Nahum Sokolow and Weizmann to the Council of Ten at the Paris Peace Conference on February 27, 1919, which called for the development of Palestine into a Jewish commonwealth with extensive boundaries. The argument later made by Arab leaders that the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate for Palestine were incompatible with Article 22 of the Covenant is totally undermined by the fact that the Smuts Resolution - the precursor of Article 22 - specifically included Palestine within its legal framework.

The San Remo Resolution on Palestine became Article 95 of the Treaty of Sevres which was intended to end the war with Turkey, but though this treaty was never ratified by the Turkish National Government of Kemal Ataturk, the Resolution retained its validity as an independent act of international law when it was inserted into the Preamble of the Mandate for Palestine and confirmed by 52 states. The San Remo Resolution is the base document upon which the Mandate was constructed and to which it had to conform. It is therefore the pre-eminent foundation document of the State of Israel and the crowning achievement of pre-state Zionism. It has been accurately described as the Magna Carta of the Jewish people. It is the best proof that the whole country of Palestine and the Land of Israel belong exclusively to the Jewish people under international law.

The Mandate for Palestine implemented both the Balfour Declaration and Article 22 of the League Covenant, i.e. the San Remo Resolution. All four of these acts were building blocks in the legal structure that was created for the purpose of bringing about the establishment of an independent Jewish state. The Balfour Declaration in essence stated the principle or object of a Jewish state. The San Remo Resolution gave it the stamp of international law. The Mandate furnished all the details and means for the realization of the Jewish state. As noted, Britain's chief obligation as Mandatory, Trustee and Tutor was the creation of the appropriate political, administrative and economic conditions to secure the Jewish state. All 28 articles of the Mandate were directed to this objective, including those articles that did not specifically mention the Jewish National Home. The Mandate created a right of return for the Jewish people to Palestine and the right to establish settlements on the land throughout the country in order to create the envisaged Jewish state.

In conferring the Mandate for Palestine on Britain, a contractual bond was created between the Principal Allied Powers and Britain, the former as Mandator and the latter as Mandatory. The Principal Allied Powers designated the Council of the League of Nations as the supervisor of the Mandatory to ensure that all the terms of the Mandate Charter would be strictly observed. The Mandate was drawn up in the form of a Decision of the League Council confirming the Mandate rather than making it part of a treaty with Turkey signed by the High Contracting Parties, as originally contemplated. To ensure compliance with the Mandate, the Mandatory had to submit an annual report to the League Council reporting on all its activities and the measures taken during the preceding year to realize the purpose of the Mandate and for the fulfillment of its obligations. This also created a contractual relationship between the League of Nations and Britain.

The first drafts of the Mandate for Palestine were formulated by the Zionist Organization and were presented to the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The content, style and mold of the Mandate was thus determined by the Zionist Organization. The British Peace Delegation at the Conference produced a draft of their own and the two then cooperated in formulating a joint draft. This cooperation which took place while Arthur James Balfour was Foreign Minister came to an end only after Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary who replaced Balfour on October 24, 1919, took personal charge of the Mandate drafting process in March 1920. He shut out the Zionist Organization from further direct participation in the actual drafting, but the Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, was kept informed of new changes made in the Draft Mandate and allowed to comment on them. The changes engineered by Curzon watered down the obvious Jewish character of the Mandate, but did not succeed in suppressing its aim - the creation of a Jewish state. The participation of the Zionist Organization in the Mandate drafting process confirmed the fact that the Jewish people were the exclusive beneficiary of the national rights enshrined in the Mandate. No Arab party was ever consulted regarding its views on the terms of the Mandate prior to the submission of this instrument to the League Council for confirmation, on December 6, 1920. By contrast, the civil and religious rights of all existing religious communities in Palestine, whether Moslem or Christian, were safeguarded, as well as the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion. The rights of Arabs, whether as individuals or as members of religious communities, but not as a nation, were therefore legally assured. In addition, no prejudice was to be caused to their financial and economic position by the expected growth of the Jewish population.

It was originally intended that the Mandate Charter would delineate the boundaries of Palestine, but that proved to be a lengthy process involving negotiations with France over the northern and northeastern borders of Palestine with Syria. It was therefore decided to fix these boundaries in a separate treaty, which was done in the Franco-British Boundary Convention of December 23, 1920. The borders were based on a formula first put forth by the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George when he met his French counterpart, Georges Clemenceau, in London on December 1, 1918 and defined Palestine as extending from the ancient towns of Dan to Beersheba. This definition was immediately accepted by Clemenceau, which meant that Palestine would have the borders that included all areas of the country settled by the Twelve Tribes of Israel during the First Temple Period, embracing historic Palestine both east and west of the Jordan River. The very words "from Dan to Beersheba" implied that the whole of Jewish Palestine would be reconstituted as a Jewish state. Though the San Remo Resolution did not specifically delineate the borders of Palestine, it was understood by the Principal Allied Powers that this formula would be the criterion to be used in delineating them. However, when the actual boundary negotiations began after the San Remo Peace Conference, the French illegally and stubbornly insisted on following the defunct Sykes-Picot line for the northern border of Palestine, accompanied by Gallic outbursts of anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist sentiments, though they agreed to extend this border to include the Galilee but not any of the water sources from the Litani valley and the land adjoining it. As a result, some parts of historic Palestine in the north and northeast were illegally excluded from the Jewish National Home. The 1920 Boundary Convention was amended by another British-French Agreement respecting the boundary line between Syria and Palestine dated February 3, 1922, which took effect on March 10, 1923. It illegally removed the portion of the Golan that had previously been included in Palestine in the 1920 Convention, in exchange for placing the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) wholly within the bounds of the Jewish National Home, and made other small territorial adjustments. The British and French negotiators had no legal right to remove or exclude any "Palestine territory" from the limits of Palestine, but could only ensure that all such territory was included. The exchange of "Palestine territory" for other "Palestine territory" between Britain and France was therefore prohibited as a violation of the Lloyd George formula accepted at the San Remo Peace Conference.

The 1920 Convention also included Transjordan in the area of the Jewish National Home, but a surprise last-minute intervention by the US government unnecessarily delayed the confirmation of the pending Mandate. This gave an unexpected opportunity to Winston Churchill, the new Colonial Secretary placed in charge of the affairs of Palestine, to change the character of the Mandate: first, by having a new article inserted (Article 25) which allowed for the provisional administrative separation of Transjordan from Cisjordan; second, by redefining the Jewish National Home to mean not an eventual independent Jewish state but limited to a cultural or spiritual center for the Jewish people. These radical changes were officially introduced in the Churchill White Paper of June 3, 1922 and led directly to the sabotage of the Mandate. Thereafter, the British never departed from the false interpretation they gave to the Jewish National Home which ended all hope of achieving the envisaged Jewish state under their auspices.

The question of which state, nation or entity held sovereignty over a mandated territory sparked great debate throughout the Mandate period, and no definitive answer was ever given. That is extremely surprising because the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919 and ratified on January 10, 1920, stated flatly in Article 22 that the states which formerly governed those territories which were subsequently administered by a Mandatory had lost their sovereignty as a consequence of World War I. That meant that Germany no longer had sovereignty over its former colonies in Africa and the Pacific, while Turkey no longer had sovereignty over its possessions in the Middle East, prior to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The date when the change of sovereignty occurred could only have been on January 30, 1919, the date when it was irrevocably decided by the Council of Ten in adopting the Smuts Resolution, that none of the ex-German and ex-Turkish territories would be returned to their former owners. These territories were then placed in the collective hands of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers for their disposition. In the case of Palestine, that decision was made in favor of the Jewish people at the session of the San Remo Peace Conference that took place on April 24, 1920 when the Balfour Declaration was adopted as the reason for creating and administering the new country of Palestine that, until then, had had no official existence. Inasmuch as the Balfour Declaration was made in favor of the Jewish people, it was the latter upon whom de jure sovereignty was devolved over all of Palestine. However, during the Mandate period, the British government and not the Jewish people exercised the attributes of sovereignty, while sovereignty in the purely theoretical or nominal sense (i.e. de jure sovereignty) remained vested in the Jewish people. This state of affairs was reflected in the Mandate Charter where the components of the title of sovereignty of the Jewish people over Palestine are specifically mentioned in the first three recitals of the Preamble, namely, Article 22, the Balfour Declaration and the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine. These three components of the title of sovereignty were the grounds for reconstituting the Jewish National Home in Palestine as specifically stated in the third recital of the Preamble. On the other hand, since the Jewish people were under the tutelage of Great Britain during the Mandate Period, it was the latter which exercised the attributes of Jewish sovereignty over Palestine, as confirmed by Article 1 of the Mandate, which placed full powers of legislation and of administration in the hands of the Mandatory, save as they may be limited by the terms of the Mandate.

This situation continued so long as the Mandate was in force and the Jewish people living in Palestine were not able to stand alone and hence not able to exercise the sovereignty awarded them by the Principal Allied Powers under international law.

The decisive moment of change came on May 14, 1948 when the representatives of the Jewish people in Palestine and of the Zionist Organization proclaimed the independence of a Jewish state whose military forces held only a small portion of the territory originally allocated for the Jewish National Home. The rest of the country was in the illegal possession of neighboring Arab states who had no sovereign rights over the areas they illegally occupied, that were historically a part of Palestine and the Land of Israel and were not meant for Arab independence or the creation of another Arab state. It is for this reason that Israel, which inherited the sovereign rights of the Jewish people over Palestine, has the legal right to keep all the lands it liberated in the Six Day War that were either included in the Jewish National Home during the time of the Mandate or formed integral parts of the Land of Israel that were illegally detached from the Jewish National Home when the boundaries of Palestine were fixed in 1920 and 1923. For the same reason, Israel cannot be accused by anyone of "occupying" lands under international law that were clearly part of the Jewish National Home or the Land of Israel. Thus the whole debate today that centers on the question of whether Israel must return "occupied territories" to their alleged Arab owners in order to obtain peace is one of the greatest falsehoods of international law and diplomacy.

The most amazing development concerning the question of sovereignty over Palestine is that the State of Israel, when it finally had an opportunity to exercise its sovereignty over all of the country west of the Jordan, after being victorious in the Six Day War of June 5-10, 1967, did not do so - except in the case of Jerusalem. The Knesset did, however, pass an amendment to the Law and Administration Ordinance of 1948, adding Section 11B, which allowed for that possibility and was premised on the idea that Israel possessed such sovereignty. Israel did not even enforce the existing law on sovereignty passed by the Ben Gurion government in September 1948, known as the Area of Jurisdiction and Powers Ordinance, which required it to incorporate immediately any area of the Land of Israel which the Minister of Defense had defined by proclamation as being held by the Defense Army of Israel.

Israel's legal rights and title of sovereignty over all of the Land of Israel - specifically in regard to Judea, Samaria and Gaza - suffered a severe setback when the Government of Prime Minister Menahem Begin approved the Camp David Framework Agreement for Peace in the Middle East, under which it was proposed that negotiations would take place to determine the "final status" of those territories. The phrase "final status" was a synonym for the word "sovereignty". It was inexcusable that neither Begin nor his legal advisers, including Aharon Barak, the future President of the Israel Supreme Court, knew that sovereignty had already been vested in the Jewish people and hence the State of Israel many years before, at the San Remo Peace Conference. The situation became much worse, reaching the level of treason when the Government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Declaration of Principles (DOP) with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and agreed to give it about 90% or more of Judea and Samaria and most of Gaza over a five-year transitional period in order to "achieve a just, lasting and comprehensive peaceful settlement and historic reconciliation through the agreed political process" with the Arabs of Palestine. The illegal surrender of territory to the "Palestinian Authority" originally called the "Council" in Article IV of the DOP was hidden by the use of the word "jurisdiction" instead of "sovereignty" in that article. Further dissimulation was shown by the sanitized reference to "redeployment of Israeli military forces in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip" to disguise the illegal act of transferring parts of the Jewish National Home to the PLO. A spade was not called a spade.

To understand why even the State of Israel does not believe in its own title of sovereignty over what are wrongfully termed "occupied territories" even by leading politicians and jurists in Israel, it is necessary to locate the causes in the Mandate period:

1.     The non-ratification of the Treaty of Sevres of August 10, 1920 with Turkey which contained the San Remo Resolution on Palestine and the non-inclusion of this Resolution in the Treaty of Lausanne of July 24, 1923. This gave the wrong impression that the legal status of Palestine as a whole was never settled definitively as being the Jewish National Home under international law and that Turkey did not lose its sovereignty until the signing of this latter treaty.

2.     The non-enforcement of most of the terms of the Mandate within Palestine itself, according to their true intent and meaning, by both the British government and the British-administered judiciary which servilely served the former to the point of misfeasance.

3.     The deliberate misinterpretation of the meaning of the Mandate by the British government to include obligations of equal weight which it supposedly had undertaken in favor of the Arabs of Palestine, when in actual fact no such obligations ever existed, particularly the obligation to develop self-governing institutions for their benefit, which - on the contrary - were meant for the Jewish National Home.

4.     The issuance of several White Papers beginning with the Churchill White Paper of June 3, 1922 and culminating with the Malcolm MacDonald White Paper of May 17, 1939, whose effect was to nullify the fundamental terms of the Mandate and prevent a Jewish state covering the whole of Palestine from ever coming into being during the British administration of the country. What the British essentially did in governing Palestine was to implement their false interpretations of the Mandate rather than its plain language and meaning. This turned the Mandate Charter upside down and made its aim of a Jewish state unrealizable.

5.     The illegal introduction of Article 25 into the Mandate Charter that after its application on September 16, 1922 led to the dislocation of Transjordan from the Jewish National Home and also had a deleterious influence on the administration of Cisjordan by encouraging the false idea that Arab national rights existed not only in the severed part of the Jewish National Home across the Jordan, but in the remaining part as well.

The end result of British sabotage, misinterpretation, distortion and outright denial of what the Mandate stood for was that Jewish legal rights and title of sovereignty over the whole of Palestine as originally envisaged in the San Remo Resolution and the Mandate became so blurred, obfuscated and confused by the time the Mandate ended that it was no longer understood or held to be true. Not even the legal experts of the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the Zionist Organization asserted Jewish sovereignty over the whole country in any official paper or memorandum submitted to the British government or to the League of Nations.

The mutilation of the Mandate Charter was continued by the United Nations when this new world organization considered the question of Palestine. On August 31, 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) proposed an illegal partition plan which recognized Arab national rights in western Palestine, specifically in the areas of western Galilee, Judea, Samaria, the southern coastal plain from Ashdod to the Egyptian frontier and a portion of the western Negev including Beersheba and what became Eilat. It apparently did not occur to the members of the Committee representing 11 states headed by Swedish Chief Justice Emil Sandstrom, that the UN did not have the legal authority to partition the country in favor of the Arabs of Palestine who were not the national beneficiary of the Mandate entitled to self-determination. The trampling of the legal rights of the Jewish people to the whole of Palestine by the United Nations was in clear violation of the Mandate which forbade partition and also Article 80 of the UN Charter which, in effect, prevented the alteration of Jewish rights granted under the Mandate whether or not a trusteeship was set up to replace it, which could only be done by a prior agreement made by the states directly concerned. The illegal partition plan, with some territorial modifications made in the original majority plan presented by UNSCOP, was then approved by the General Assembly on November 29, 1947 as Resolution 181 (II). The Jewish Agency for Palestine, recoiling from the loss of six million Jews in the Holocaust and trying to salvage something from British misrule of Palestine, accepted this illegal Resolution. By doing so, it lent credence to the false idea that Palestine belonged to both Arabs and Jews, which was an idea foreign to the San Remo Resolution, the Mandate and the Franco-British Boundary Convention of December 23, 1920. The Jewish Agency should have relied on these three documents exclusively in declaring the Jewish state over all of Palestine, even if it was unable to control all areas of the country, following the example of what was done in Syria and Lebanon during World War II.

Another facet of the story that concerned the illegal denial of Jewish legal rights and title of sovereignty over Palestine was the attitude adopted by the United States government towards the infamous British White Paper of May 17, 1939. The United States agreed to the British administration of Palestine pursuant to the Mandate when it signed and ratified the Anglo-American Convention of December 3, 1924. This imposed a solemn obligation on the US government to protest any British violation of this treaty, which had repeated every word, jot and tittle of the Mandate Charter in the preamble of the Convention, regardless of whether the violation affected American rights or those of the Jewish people. Yet when the White Paper was issued in the year of 1939, the US government did not lift a finger to point out the blaring illegalities contained in the new statement of British policy that smashed to smithereens the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate, and brought immense joy to the Arab side. It accepted the incredible British contention that changes in the terms of the Mandate effected by the White Paper did not require American consent because no US rights or those of its nationals were impaired, an argument that was demonstrably false. This US passivity in the face of British perfidy, which was strongly denounced by the venerable David Lloyd George and even by Winston Churchill who had himself contributed to the betrayal of the Jewish people and their rights to Palestine, allowed the British government to get away with the highest violation of international law at the very moment when the Jewish people were about to suffer the greatest catastrophe in their history. There can be no doubt that the Holocaust could have largely been prevented or its effects greatly mitigated had the terms of the Mandate been duly implemented to allow for a massive influx of Jews to their national home.

American inaction against the British government was particularly unforgivable in view of the fact that the articles of the Mandate were a part of American domestic law and the US was the only state which could have forced the British to repudiate the malevolent White Paper and restore the right of the Jews of Europe to gain refuge in their homeland.

Both the Mandate and the Anglo-American Convention have ceased to exist. However, all the rights of the Jewish people that derive from the Mandate remain in full force. This is the consequence of the principle of acquired legal rights which, as applied to the Jewish people, means that the rights they acquired or were recognized as belonging to them when Palestine was legally created as the Jewish National Home are not affected by the termination of the treaty or the acts of international law which were the source of those rights. This principle already existed when the Anglo-American Convention came to an end simultaneously with the termination of the Mandate for Palestine on May 14-15, 1948. It has since been codified in Article 70(1)(b) of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. This principle of international law would apply even if one of the parties to the treaty failed to perform the obligations imposed on it, as was the case with the British government in regard to the Mandate for Palestine.

The reverse side of the principle of acquired legal rights is the doctrine of estoppel which is also of great importance in preserving Jewish national rights. This doctrine prohibits any state from denying what it previously admitted or recognized in a treaty or other international agreement. In the Convention of 1924, the United States recognized all the rights granted to the Jewish people under the Mandate, in particular the right of Jewish settlement anywhere in Palestine or the Land of Israel. Therefore the US government is legally estopped today from denying the right of Jews in Israel to establish settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, which have been approved by the government of Israel. In addition, the United States is also debarred from protesting the establishment of these settlements because they are based on a right which became embedded in US domestic law after the 1924 Convention was ratified by the US Senate and proclaimed by President Calvin Coolidge on December 5, 1925. This convention has terminated, but not the rights granted under it to the Jewish people. The American policy opposing Jewish settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza is a fit subject for judicial review in US courts because it violates Jewish legal rights formerly recognized by the United States and which still remain part of its domestic law. A legal action to overturn this policy if it was to be adjudicated might also put an end to the American initiative to promote a so-called "Palestinian" state which would abrogate the existing right of Jewish settlement in all areas of the Land of Israel that fall under its illegal rule.

The gravest threat to Jewish legal rights and title of sovereignty over the Land of Israel still comes from the same source that has always fought the return of the Jews to their homeland, namely, the medley of Arabic-speaking Gentiles who inhabit the land alongside the Jews. They no longer call themselves Arabs or Syrians, but "Palestinians". This has resulted in a switch of national identity. The Palestinians used to be the Jews during the Mandate Period, but the Arabs adopted the name after the Jews of Palestine established the State of Israel and began to be called Israelis. The use of the name "Palestinians" for Arabs did not take general hold until 1969 when the United Nations recognized the existence of this supposed new nation, and began passing resolutions thereafter affirming its legitimate and inalienable rights to Palestine. The whole idea that such a nation exists is the greatest hoax of the 20th century and continues unabated into the 21st century. This hoax is easily exposed by the fact that the "Palestinians" possess no distinctive history, language or culture, and are not essentially different in the ethnological sense from the Arabs living in the neighboring countries of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq. The very name of the supposed nation is non-Arabic in origin and derives from Hebrew root letters. The Arabs of Palestine have no connection or relationship to the ancient Philistines from whom they have taken their new name.

It is a matter of the greatest irony and astonishment that the so-called Palestinian nation has received its greatest boost from Israel itself when it allowed a "Palestinian" administration to be set up in the areas of Judea, Samaria and Gaza under the leadership of Yasser Arafat.

The situation in which the Arabs of Palestine and the Land of Israel claim the same legal rights as the Jewish people violates the authentic international law that was created by the San Remo Resolution, the Mandate and the 1920 Franco-British Convention. It is part of the worldwide folly that has occurred since 1969 when the "Palestinian people" were first accorded international recognition, that authentic international law has been replaced by an ersatz international law composed of illegal UN Resolutions. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907 are acts of genuine international law, but they have no direct application or relevance to the legal status of Judea, Samaria and Gaza which are integral territories of the Jewish National Home and the Land of Israel under the sovereignty of the State of Israel. These acts would apply only to the Arab occupation of Jewish territories, as occurred between 1948 and 1967, and not to the case of Israeli rule over the Jewish homeland. The hoax of the Palestinian people and their alleged rights to the Land of Israel as well as the farce that results from citing pseudo-international law to support their fabricated case must be exposed and brought to an end.

The Arabs of the Land of Israel have ignited a terrorist war against Israel to recover what they consider to be their occupied homeland. Their aim is a fantasy based on a gross myth and lie that can never be satisfied, since that would mean the conversion of the Land of Israel into an Arab country. It is up to the government of Israel to take the necessary steps to remedy what has become an intolerable situation that threatens the Jewish people with the loss of their immutable rights to their one and only homeland.

 
Howard Grief was born in Montreal, Canada and made aliyah in 1989. He served as a legal advisor to Professor Yuval Ne'eman at the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure in matters of international law pertaining to the Land of Israel and Jewish rights thereto. He is a Jerusalem-based attorney and notary, as well as a specialist in Israeli constitutional law. In October 1993, he wrote the first of several articles denouncing the illegal agreements Israel made with the PLO that appeared in the pages of Nativ and elsewhere. He is the founder and director of the Office for Israeli Constitutional Law.

This article was published in "Nativ Online", February 2004 #2. 
(http://www.acpr.org.il/ENGLISH-NATIV/02-issue/grief-2.htm) It is ArielCenter for Policy Research (ACPR) Policy Paper #147.

No Jew or Jewish government has the right to evict Jews from their historical land in Greater Israel. “Israel, including Judea and Samaria, and the land east of the Jordan River has been the land of the Jewish people since time immemorial, over 30 centuries. Judea means Land of the Jews. Never in the history of the world has there been an autonomous state in the area that was not Jewish.” There has never been a Nation known as Arab Palestine. The Arabs received over five million sq. mi. of territory, but that was not enough. Violating international law and treaty the British allocated over three quarters of Jewish allocated land to the Arabs as the new Arab state of Jordan. Now the Arabs want more; they will not stop until they have all of Israel without the Jews. The Arab countries expelled over a million Jewish families and confiscated all their assets including businesses, homes and over 75,000 sq. mi. of Jewish owned land for over 25 centuries. No Jews are allowed to live in Jordan or in the West Bank area controlled by the Arab Palestinian Authority – Now you see it is the Arabs who are committing ethnic cleansing, just like they cleansed over a million Jewish families from Arab countries and now they are cleansing the millions of Christians and others.

The Oslo Accord is null and void as Abbas stated in the summer of 2015 at the U.N.

You; the Arabs have murdered the Jews and others and now you want to inherit them?

 

In view of past history of persecution; Israel and the Jews have an obsolete obligation to defend themselves at all costs. NEVER AGAIN. It must be in action not just words. No capitulation to the bias world.

 

The Land Question in Palestine aka The Land of Israel, Arab deception and hate, 1917-1945