Cameron drinks the Kool-Aid

Big Al

unfortunately the crazy conspiracy people are starting to make more sense than the rubbish we are fed.Ww3 wil be an attack on israel and mass weapons released in defence/attack.

Truthtriumphs

It needs to be re-iterated again and again, that League of Nations document, the Mandate for Palestine, ratified in 1922, forms the legal basis for the State of Israel's legitimacy in all the land West of the Jordan, which covers just some 23% of the area of Palestine.
I have been writing it for years here, on this blog.

We can expect the usual deniers of history to argue that no Jewish state was ever intended, in their wicked agenda of de-legitimising the Jewish state, and implicitly, the Jewish people.

Never mind Cameron---it's what we have come to expect, but the good news is the way in which Netanyahu was received in Congress, which gave him standing ovations throughout the speech.
His tour de force was greeted with great warmth, even adulation.
America still stands by Israel.

Mindermast

Perfidious Albion!

Okey

The British government, like many others, believe that they can ignore and flout international law where it favours Israel, simply because they believe that Israel is powerless to resist their illegal acts.

Israel needs to demonstrate to these governments that it is not entirely bereft of means by which to retaliate in ways which will cause significant pain to the aggressor governments.
"If you will it, it is no dream."

Hysteria

The voice of reason has lost. We will have to face a total collapse before a strong leader (or maybe leaders) gets us out of this mess. Israel may be gone before we realise what we have lost.

GaryL

They don't need to throw out the definition of antisemitism. They could just declare themselves as proudly antisemitic, and that antisemitism is a noble moral cause. That would allow them to use the EUMC definitions as a policy guide.

Fran

Spot on, Melanie. This government is now forcing us to

- fund the brainwashing of Palestinian Children

- fund overt Arab anti-semitism of the vilest kind which is there for all to see on the internet

- welcome Hamas, a named terrorist organisation, to the region.

Cameron's double-think-speak is truly on an Orwellian scale.

wolf terner

Britain has never forgiven the Jews for driving them out of Palestine Mandate lands, hangind brit soldiers in retaliation for hanging Jews in Acre prison, shooting down 5 experienced spitfire pilots flying for egypt in the '48 war. Come to think of it, Britain's downward spiral on the world stage has a direct correlation with its double-dealing against the jews in palestine begining with the end of WWI. As the double dealing went up Britain's world position has spiralled downwarde.

clivel

Ironically the mantra that the Jews control the media is easily disproved by the almost complete abandonment of Israel by politicians who should know better.
At least here in Canada we have a leader with balls, unlike that spineless excuse for a Prime Minister you have to make do with in the UK.

VEBott

And the Arabs whose parents lived on the land in question, what are they entitled to, Melanie? Anything at all?

Are they all to be given the right to vote for the government of the state created on that land? Are the state and quasi-state institutions in that land to operate for the equal benefit of all who are born there? Or is there some part of the land where only Jewish natives can become citizens? Everybody knows the answers.

Bizarrely, those who remained within the arbitrary armistice lines acquired citizenship rights and those who were elsewhere within the land in question did not.

Even more bizarrely, Jews born across the armistice lines now qualify for citizenship but Arabs whose families have lived there in some cases for centuries do not.

Fair enough, if that's what it takes to build and maintain an ethnic majority, but spare us the frenzied indignation about legalisms when what we have is an exercise in realpolitik.

For all that, you're quite right about the absurdities of the UCU position and of all disproportionate condemnation of Israel.

TomTom

Cameron and Hague are glove-puppets and always have been....they are serving some purpose but not the one they were elected for

Another Joshua

This story makes one shudder, as it reveals the duplicitous nature of British political thinking in the ME. The same article quotes a PM spokesperson stating that the JNF was one out of an undisclosed number of charities that Cameron was no longer to support, but said nothing about the "other" charities. All to show as if some kind of balance was applied when taking the decision what charities to abandon for "time constraints". The JNF just took up a bit too much of his time then. British fair play at its risible worst.

"Unwavering" support for Israel indeed!

Roger Angove

Of course Cameron is influenced by 'Muslim demographics in the UK' - why else did he elevate the unelected (because unelectable) loud-mouth Warsi to the Lords and the Cabinet

Gershon

@VEBott

The granting of Israeli citizenship to the children born in the disputed territories only to those whose parents have Israeli citizenship is perfectly logical. Children born to Israelis living in Melbourne, Los Angeles or London are also granted Israeli citizenship. Likewise, children born to British citizens living outside the UK are also granted British citizenship (for example, the daughter of HM Ambassador to Israel, who was born recently in Tel Aviv).

Please promise that if we don't let you get your way, that you won't "thcream and thcream 'till you're thick".

Andy Gill

The UCU is a trades union which should be working to protect its members interests.

Instead it has been hi-jacked by a cabal of anti-semites, using the union's resources to further a fascist program directed at Jews and Israel.

GaryL

"It needs to be re-iterated again and again, that League of Nations document, the Mandate for Palestine, ratified in 1922, forms the legal basis for the State of Israel's legitimacy in all the land West of the Jordan,"

I disagree with this being the basis of Israel's legitimacy. The mandate was a legal instruction to Britain to assist with establishing the state for Jews, and defined the territory. Israel's legitimacy rests exclusively on its own declaration of sovereignty, its success in upholding its sovereignty, and partly on the acceptance by a number of sovereign states and international organisations.

Tas Walker

Have a look at the graph on this page "Religions % of Total Pop" (http://www.operationworld.org/unki), which will give a clue to what is happening to the UK. The N in the graph is mainly the Left.

Matt

It is better if Israel go with the PRC and then they will get the blowback from a failure of the peace process and not the US/UK/EU etc. Let the PRC fight the war on terror, let them have all the Arabs saying the PRC protect Israel and allow occupation etc, etc.

Joshua

I am not in the least surprised by Cameron's betrayal. To be betrayed by the countries of their birth is the eternal fate of the Jews in the Diaspora. In large part that is why Israel. Thus, Herzl writes:

"We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted us. In vain are we loyal patriots, sometimes superloyal; in vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens; in vain do we strive to enhance the fame of our native lands in the arts and sciences, or her wealth by trade and commerce"

What Britain is in the process of doing is gaining the Muslims at the price of the Jews. Whether that is a good deal I am not objective enough to say. Nevertheless, that is the bargain Britain has made. It is the bargain with which she will have to live.

Neil Turner

Simple question to those who consider that Israel is "occupying" the so-called West Bank:

"Which foreign state is Israel occupying ?" There never was a State of Palestine. It had no Capital city, no currency, no Government, no Borders. BTW, to those of you who think the answer is Jordon, you should know that they have rescinded any interest

PS Melanie: shorter sentences please !

Jerry

VEBott wrote, "And the Arabs whose parents lived on the land in question, what are they entitled to, Melanie? Anything at all?"

Palestinians are entitled to nothing at all if the arrangements disembowel Jewish rights. If they want something, let them give something: "End of Conflict", "Right of Return", Jerusalem, and apartheid Palestine. If they owe nothing, they are owed nothing.

VEBott does not know anything about Israel or the Palestinian circumstances. Palestinians, without voting right, have more freedom than any other single Arab population. They have peace, the right to raise their families without government interference, low tax rates, land ownership, the right to travel within Judea and Samaria, Jordan and the world, access to medical services and education, roads, and profits from their businesses.

They cannot be given national self-governance, or control of water or borders without disenfranchising the Jews. So sorry! They will have to earn it. When they can live like Canada and America, such arrangements can be considered, but would probably be irrelevant when that situation finally arises.

Stephen Rothbart

I will never vote again for the Tories while Cameron is their leader. Much as I despise the Labour party, and even their Jewish leader is an anti-Zionist, this is the last straw for me.

I will just have to vote for UKIP now evn if it is a waste of a vote.

But the Tories. Never, while the man who dismissed the British war effort in 1940 by re-writing history so he could get is nose up Obama's backside, is in charge of it.

Clegg and Cameron deserve each other. Hopefully they will bring this government down as quickly as possible.

Michael Kalmanovitz

Lobby your MP to support EDM 1677, tabled by MPs Sir Gerald Kaufman & Jeremy Corbyn:

That this House welcomes the Stop the Jewish National Fund (JNF) Campaign launched on 30 March 2011 by the Palestinian Boycott National Committee, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and others to inform the public about the JNF - Karen Kayemet L'Yisrael, its ongoing illegal expropriation of Palestinian land, concealing of destroyed Palestinian villages beneath parks and forests, and prevention of refugees from returning to their homes; notes that the JNF's constitution is explicitly discriminatory by stating that land and property will never be rented, leased or sold to non-Jews; further notes that the UN rejected the JNF USA's application for consultative status with the Economic and Social Council on the ground that it violates the principles of the UN Charter on Human Rights; regrets that the Prime Ministeris a JNF honorary patron; and believes that there is just cause to consider revocation of the JNF's charitable status in the UK.

tiki

I love the comments Melanie Philips & others are making, but it's futile. Legalizing and voting for a State for an Arab tribe,(for there is not/never has been a 'Palestinian People, Religion,(home)Land, History or anything else). This whole 'farce is nothing more than the continuation of the intense & irrational hatred for Jews that has been around forever. It's not about the 'love of Palestinians but 'hatred for the Jews. The Anti Semites of this world UNite, for they see their momentum and chance to finish the job, and have found their common ground....Legality & Rights for an Arab tribe, calling themselves Palestinians.
The Arabs have found their
natural helpers to accomplish their goal. The world has grasped the value of cooperation to establish their dream.....a world without Jews & Israel and than......, there will be Peace.

Adam

What on earth is Kool-Aid? Is it some kind of drink. Is it an Americanism?.

I wish Melanie would not use so many Americanisms and write in clear English so those of us not immersed in US speech patterns could understand what is being said.

Joshua

"so those of us not immersed in US speech patterns could understand what is being said."

Google is your friend:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid

Stephen Rothbart

VE Bott, despite the allegations of apartheid thrown at Israel by the ignorant and the ignoble, there is only one apartheid entity in the Middle East, and it is Islamic.

Jews have mostly been ethnically cleansed from all Middle Eastern states, and now the Arabs are working on the Christian populations.

When you comment on the rights of a stateless Muslim community to be asborbed legally into a society that they hate with all their hearts, you talk rubbish, I am afraid to say.

It would be lovely to "teach the world to sing in Peace and harmony" as the old song went, but as you can see, right across Islamic cultures around the world, whether it is in Arabia, Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and many former Soviet States that end in ...stan, there is little evidence of that song ever catching on.

More likely they can more easily identify with Sinatra's "I did it my way."

The concept then of granting citizenship to a people that have been taught, since birth, to hate and destroy Jewish life in the Middle East is just unnrealistic. It would be like someone injecting a cancer cell into their body to cure flu.

Yes, many Palestinian Arabs are not like that and probably could live in peace, after a time, with their Jewish neighbours, but they are led by people who could never countenance such a situation, so it could never work.

As has been argued tirelessly, there are many situations, even as recently as following on from the last War, that saw millions of people displaced from their homes and communities.

Eventualy they found somwehere else to settle and re-start their lives.

That the world and the Palestinian Arabs think that they alone deserve something special just for them, is part of the problem.

They have been encouraged and indulged to do so. So they have never moved on with their lives.

People like Bob Geldof have said that too much aid in Africa makes a people indolent and idle, and in the end harms their chances of survival.

This is also true of the Palestinian Arabs. They have received billions of dollars of aid over the years and much of this has been syphoned off by their leaders to enrich their bank accounts and buy weapons , drugs and power to keep them as the peoples' leaders.

Do you really think these leaders want to give up their gravy train?

There are many factors contributing to the Arab/Israeli conflict.

Solving the land issue in an "equitable" way will not remove the reasons for the conflict, just start it up again on a different level.

Sadly David Cameron and Obama are so far off the pace, so ignorant of their history, they will never understand this and so will continue to make morally indefensible decisions.

C.d.G.

Once again, people of Europe votes for a conservative government, and gets a progressive and liberal and p.c. one! It happens all the time, and everywhere. Folks understand what's going on better than their politicians, but they are still betrayed by them! Who knows: maybe, if a half-witted National Socialist party was to go elected right now, in 2011, somewhere in Europe, somehow it would turn fastly in a dumb, half-witted bunch of politically correctness!! There's no limit to human stupidity, but this kind of self-inflicted wounds is just typical of a fading world.

I love the UK

What's in it for Dave to support Israel? Few votes there I think. What to do with the middle east problem?

Steve

Joshua, is correct when he states that Britain is gaining Muslims at the expense of Jews.

I regularly attend a Synagogue well over 100 years old and whose community is pushing 200 years old near London's Edgware Road and I was practically ordered to take my Kippah off on the street by a Synagogue 'Security Advisor' as I was informed 'we are outnumbered round here'. Someone else said it should be taken out 'out of respect' (to the Arabs!!!).

Talk about fear and appeasement! I was informed also that it was for 'your safety'. Safety from what? The Arabs are the peaceful guys aern't they?

Stewie

First, be thankful of Obama's stance, it marks him out and makes it more likely that he will not achieve a second term. All supporters of Israel and of Secular Democracy alike should rally against him.
Second, Israel should be ever so thankful that, with the help of others, they developed a nuclear and thermonuclear capability. No matter *what* dissenters like Cameron might say, and this was obviously a put up job via Obama, Israel will *never* cease to exist. It will always have the capability to exterminate any Arab country which attacks it. But NOW is the time to deal with Iran, do not delay, do not go soft, or the next war against the Arabs, which will be won regardless, could cost a million Israeli lives, the whole population of Tel Aviv. I have no doubt that a second Holocaust is the goal of the Islamists.

VEBott

Gershon you have heard of petitio principii? Proving a conclusion by restating the premise? At least GaryL eschews sophistry. The question is why only Jews can be citizens of the whole territory mentioned in 1922. To answer that by saying it's because they are Jews doesn't really get us any further. The real answer is that, if it were not so, the demographics would threaten the Jewish character of the state.

@ Jerry

“Palestinians are entitled to nothing at all if the arrangements disembowel Jewish rights. If they owe nothing, they are owed nothing.”

So, in the context of Melanie's claims about the 1922 resolution, their rights are conditional on those of the Jews, but not vice-versa? Where they and their parents and grandparents were born means nothing of itself, but the ethnicity of the Jewish population does?

I would prefer a frank admission that the land is held by right of conquest than this would-be legalistic pettyfogging, which conveniently obscures the fact that the 1922 resolution stipulated the requirement that the “ rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced.”

If that resolution really were the source of Israel's legitimacy and claim to the land, on both sides of the Green Line, then the Jews would have failed to meet its terms and would thus have forfeited possession.

The well-established rights enjoyed by Israeli Arabs are irrelevant to the issue of why Arabs born in all parts of the 1922 territory do not become Israeli citizens when that territory comes under Israeli administration. That should be the case if Israeli control were a repossession and not an annexation.

VEBott

When you comment on the rights of a stateless Muslim community to be asborbed legally into a society that they hate with all their hearts, you talk rubbish, I am afraid to say.

It would be lovely to "teach the world to sing in Peace and harmony" as the old song went

For heaven's sake, Rothbart, I'm not suggesting anything of the sort. I'm pointing out the hypocrisy of invoking the terms of the 1922 mandate one-sidedly, not advocating the dissolution of the Jewish state in a sea of Muslim fanatics.

TonyV

"Ah yes â“ that terrible weapon of mass destruction, the sapling."

Well, a sapling planted on my Dad's land and tended by his neighbours is pretty bloody rude, no?

It's the settlements stupid.

Deal with that and the boil is lanced.

John L

I totally support your position Melanie. But as a private citizen who is not normally involved in politics, one feels so helpless about how to make a stand against this evil trend. Perhaps you could write a blog with some suggestions as to how we can help Israels cause; who to write to/email etc.

Stephen Rothbart

VE Bott. Then what are you advocating? Only one side has consistently rejected the idea of partition and has undertaken wars to achieve their aims of a Jew free Palestine.

If oil and water do not mix, why try to find a formula that tries to find a way to defy science?

Muslims that accept Jews and a Jewish state and the Jews themselves are the "water" and those that don't or cannot are "oil" and they should stick with the oil.

There are plenty of Arab states that could accommodate them, so why try to force themselves onto a people they have nothing in common with and who they revile daily?

It is no good rejecting a Jewish homeland, then attacking it, and then demanding their rights to the land they lost through rejection and war, and by never signing a peace treaty or even recognising their enemy's right to exist.

Germany went to war with Europe and then with Soviet Russia.

It resulted in a peace treaty, disarmament and the division of their country to where one half of the country could not meet with the other. For over 40 years!

What I am saying is there are consequences for actions.

We know what the actions of the Arab world was to the creation of a Jewish homeland, and now they know the consequences.

And speaking of Germany, the last time a nation declared independence and was recognized by a EU member state (Germany), it led to a civil war, ethnic cleansing and war crimes.

Cameron should be careful what he wishes for in ditching Israel.

And will he send the RAF's remaining Sopwith Camel and a repaired Spitfire into battle to protect civilian casualties when war breaks out over a Palestinian statehood run by Iranian proxies?

Hoggy

I must contradict many of the comments about Obama and Cameron "hating Israel". To say so is simplistic and naive. The West has a joint common interest in maintaining the Middle East oil supply. Also, through the mechanism of Petrodollars the ME regimes have a very significant slice of our Investment and Equity marketplaces. What are we to do? we must Treat with the Arab nations.
There is a conversation to be had about the madness of handing them those oil resources, but it is a historical discussion starting over 100 years ago, and not outstandingly useful. What would be *much* more useful and currently relevant would be freezing and sequestration of the total overseas assets of the Sauds, Iranians et all, on the grounds of Religious Dictatorship. To be returned to the Democratic Secular Republics of each Arab nation as it is formed. Based on an agreed oil price and supply naturally.

JOHN ROOSEVELT

Bevin will be dancing round in his box with joy.

Well, let's see how smart Cameron turns out to be. I suspect God will pay debts without words...as always.

GaryL

VEBott quoted -
conveniently obscures the fact that the 1922 resolution stipulated the requirement that the “ rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced.”

Everyone seems to ignore the companion qualification - "or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

Read the Balfour Declaration again, think clearly about who it is directed to. It was Britain's declaration of its own intentions, included in the Mandate instructions to Britain. It contains no instructions for Jews in Palestine. Britain did nothing to ensure that any country complied with the final clause - "the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

So where does that leave the two companion clauses from nearly a century ago, when the relevant bound party, Britain, has no part in it any more, and the latter clause has been ignored by all the states surrounding Palestine.

Israel was established by the Jews living there, with prior approval granted a quarter century earlier. Mandate instructions to Britain and the later recommendation by the UN assisted in part, but neither of those created Israel. The supplementary clause in the Balfour Declaration was not addressed to Jews, and as one part has been consistently ignored, there is no basis to call for compliance with the other part. Even so, Israel has upheld the first part far better than any neighboring state has attempted to uphold the second part.

Gershon

@VEBott

Have you heard of answering what was written? I never mentioned Jews, only Israelis. Please explain to me exactly why you think that children born in the territory of the original 1922 Palestine mandate, but outside the current territory of the state of Israel should be given Israeli citizenship if their parents are not Israeli citizens.

Herzen

1. is highly questionable at best (as has been spelled out in detail by more than one contributor, with only one attempt on this blog at a rebuttal which relied entirely on the advocacy of one Howard Grief, which proved flimsy).
2. is correct about Article 80 and, because 1. above is highly questionable, is highly questionable about everything else.
3. is not an argument Israel's friends would advise it to pursue, given that Israel is built on land acquired by military conquest.
4.-6. considered as an official hasbara rationalisation confirms that Israel negotiates in bad faith (unless it is happy, of course, to withdraw from the settlements if the border is drawn, as it agreed it would in belatedly accepting 242, around the Green Line. (Recall that the UN has no authority to grant land to anyone; that 242 emphasized "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war"; affirmed that peace would require the withdrawal of Israel from territories occupied; acknowledged the right of states to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries..."The" was absent from the English draft, according to those who drafted it, to allow the parties to agree between them any minor land swaps they deemed necessary for secure borders. Only the parties together could agree. The UN had no authority for example to require anyone to grant Israel any land beyond the Green Line against their wishes.) To say that Oslo required the parties to negotiate borders adds nothing to 242. To say that the fact that Oslo required territories to retain their current status until final agreement thereby allows Israel to carry on (or accelerate) settlement building is disingenuous, especially if Israel is now claiming that the territories on which settlements have been built cannot be given up because they have settlements built on them (in other words, if it used settlement building to preempt negotiation). To say that Oslo did not expressly prohibit Israeli settlement building does not render settlement building within the spirit of the agreement. It rather confirms Israeli bad faith: they knew the PLO was not signing up to an Israeli land grab, but they knew that the absence of an express prohibition would allow them to claim that a land grab was consistent with what the PLO signed.

This whole argument for Israel's negotiating position is shabby, not to say threadbare.

VEBott

@ Stephen Rothblatt, GaryL

What I'm suggesting is exactly what GaryL said, that Israel's legitimacy rests exclusively on its own declaration of sovereignty, its success in upholding its sovereignty, and partly on the acceptance by a number of sovereign states and international organisations.

The question that was answered neither by GaryL nor by the State's founders in the declaration of independence is 'legitimacy within what boundaries'.

Let the Israeli diplomats go through the silly motions if they have to, but honest supporters of Israel talking amongst themselves don't have to pretend that there's some legalistic justification for Israel's annexation of territory that the UN intended for the Arabs in 1948. This issue comes down to whose side you're on. Life's like that. As the late great Isaiah Berlin pointed out, sometimes there isn't even a choice of the lesser of two evils.

What I'd like to see is a bit less humiliation of the Arabs at the checkpoints, a curb on settler arrogance, an end to the kind of collective punishment that disfigured British rule over 60 years ago, no more dead western peace activists. In the longer term, I fear Sharon was right; Israel will eventually have to drive the Palestinian civilians of the occupied territories across the Jordan, and the next war will probably provide the pretext for doing so. The chance for making peace, real peace based on some mutual trust, was lost long ago.

So we can all admire Melanie's verbal acrobatics, but let's not confuse pirouettes in the air with the grim reality of dispossessing people of the land their grandfathers considered their homeland.

VEBott

@Gershon

You're still begging the question, which is why the non-Jewish people in the 'disputed' territories aren't Israelis. Sheeesh!

Stephen Rothbart

VE Bott, when was the last time you went through Gatwick airport?

Arriving from Prague some months ago at around midnight, three plane loads of European passengers including me with my British passport had to wait in line for nearly an hour to go through passport control.

And why? Because back in the days when Leila Khaled a Palestinian, highjacked an El Al airplane leaving London, botched it and was caught and brought back to justice by the UK authorities and then let go when the Palestinians highjacked more planes to use as leverage, a new game was created.

Highjacking planes, which led to more Arab highjacking, bombing and finally the Twin Towers experience.

Did a Swiss businessman do it, or a French Nun? For that matter a Zionst Brit like me?

No, but we had to go through this humiliating charade even though we were EU members trying to get back into our own country.

But even before that, the Czech security was going though my bag, checking my PC, making me take off shoes and belt and jackets, and in some airports you have to show yourself naked on camera to complete strnagers as you go through some x ray machine.

So boo hoo for the humiliation that Palestinians get at border crossings into Israel.

If they did not partake in bombing cafes, schools and buses and behaved a bit like human beings, there would be no need to subject Palestinians to this procedure.

If their leaders did not celebrate these violent acts by naming streets and buildings after these odious men and women who carried out this procedure, then perhaps I would be more sympathetic, but they do and so I don't!

And finally, imagine yourself as an Israeli, going abroad from Israel.

No train, or nice autobahn on which to drive to a neighbouring country.

The only way out is by ship or by plane.

Have you ever tried going out or coming in to an Israeli airport Mr. Bott?

Does not matter of you hold an Israeli passport or not.

Security is tight and the procedure invasive.

And veeeery long.

Please don't try to make me weep for the humiliation at border crossing for Palestinians.

They and their likeminded buddies brought all this on themselves.

Sadly they also brought it on you and me too.

And please, don't any one metion the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. No one is going through security at hotels, yet.

And it was over 60 years ago.

And it was British Army HQ.

Jerome

Excellent article. My only objection is that there's nothing wrong with organic agriculture or veganism, and no necessary connection to anti-Israel views. Veganism is a matter of logic and common morality: most people would agree unnecessary suffering is wrong and that the meat, dairy and egg industries cause much suffering, and even mainstream dieticians agree that we don't need to consume these things; therefore, it is good to be vegan. Pesticides are environmentally harmful and unnecessary (organic agriculture, contrary to popular belief, does not result in lower yields), so organic ag should be supported. Anti-Israel politics, on the other hand, is completely divorced from logic and basic morality, as you so eloquently demonstrate in your writings.

Augustus

VEBott - "but let's not confuse pirouettes in the air with the grim reality of dispossessing people of the land their grandfathers considered their homeland."

What grim reality? The land that became Israel in 1948 wasn't just colonized by Jews, but just as much by people from countries such as Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan. And about whose land are we talking
anyway? Not Palestinians 'grandfathers' land, because 'Palestinians' only became an entity sixteen years after Israel was founded by a devious creation of the PLO in 1964. No, that land was land that had belonged to the Turkish rulers for 400 years
until they were defeated by the allies in WW1. So dispossession is a lie. The Arabs, remember, refused to accept their own state in 1948, offered to them by the UN. Then again in 2000 when it was offered by Clinton and Barak. And when the PLO did get going in 1964, why didn't they make any noises about wanting the West Bank and Gaza
to be liberated then? That's because, when their covenant was written those places were
being occupied by Jordan and Egypt, so they
had no need to consider them 'occupied'. How about that for 'grim reality'!

Raymond in DC

TonyV writes, "It's the settlements stupid.
Deal with that and the boil is lanced."

How many settlements does Israel maintain in Gaza? NONE. How many IDF soldiers or Israeli civilians remain in Gaza? ONE - captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. How many projectiles have Gazan militants fired at Israeli civilians since Israel abandoned its settlements? Roughly 5,000.

How many times must your thesis be disproved before you find another meme?

C.Gee

VEBott:

“What I'd like to see is a bit less humiliation of the Arabs at the checkpoints, a curb on settler arrogance, an end to the kind of collective punishment that disfigured British rule over 60 years ago, no more dead western peace activists.”

That’s good. Shows a sensible approach to inter-personal, face-to-face dealings. “Be nice” is valid. I presume you would also like to see a bit less suicide-bombing, and no more dead diners and bus passengers and decapitated-by-hand infants?

“So we can all admire Melanie's verbal acrobatics, but let's not confuse pirouettes in the air with the grim reality of dispossessing people of the land their grandfathers considered their homeland.”

That’s good. Hard-hatted Zionism. Dispossession was a bad business, but what’s done is done, and it may have to be done again.

But why make the job of dispossession more grim than it was or need be? Why not carry through the no-nonsense approach to quash the sentimental fantasy about grand-dad’s “homeland”? The grand-daddy your refer to didn’t have a “homeland”, he had a home: property and affiliations with a town or a village. Other grandpas, Jewish ones, were similarly dispossessed. It is, indeed, grim to be exiled and have property confiscated, to give up a settled life, a business, neighbors, routine, familiarity, community. Sympathy for the real physical and emotional difficulties of refugees leaving a locality is sufficient to establish your humanity. It does not make you more sympathetic if you pay lip-service to the fantasy - imputed to the refugees by the west who cooked up Arab nationalism for its own purposes - that their plight was made more excruciating because they considered that they were also leaving a national homeland. The “soil” of Palestine was not precious to the Arabs, no matter how attached they were to their individual olive groves. No Chopins they, carrying a jarful of national soil. They carried house keys. The (recently) Iraqi jurisdiction holding sway over Mesopotamia was not part of the identity of the Jews of Baghdad. Many carried pieces of paper legitimizing the confiscation of their property. Only some comforted themselves that they could, after a thousand years, “return” to the “promised land” of the Israelites.

Do you, like Benny Morris, shoulder substanceless self-blame in order to appear extra tough?

Steve from Seattle

Thank you for articulating the problem is such a thorough manner. This should be required reading for all who need to be educated about the Israel-Palestinian conflict in the UK, EU, and US.

warlord

Never mind, the British government will soon be far too busy dealing with the financial collapse of Southern Europe to do anything else.

Mr Tagalog

Dear Ms Phillips

I am confused by this statement:

"1.The legal basis for the establishment of the State of Israel was the resolution unanimously adopted by the League of Nations in 1922, affirming the establishment of a national home for the Jewish People in the historical area of the Land of Israel."

The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry of 1946 expressly found that the Mandate did not provide a legal basis for a Jewish state. It stated expressly that:

"The Committee heard the Jewish case, presented at full length and with voluminous written evidence, in three series of public hearings-in Washington by the American Zionists, in London by the British Zionists, and finally and most massively by the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem. The basic policy advocated was always the same, the socalled Biltmore Program of 1942, with the additional demand that 100,000 certificates for immigration into Palestine should be issued immediately to relieve the distress in Europe. This policy can be summed up in three points: (1) that the Mandatory should hand over control of immigration to the Jewish Agency; (I) that it should abolish restrictions on the sale of land; and (3) that it should proclaim as its ultimate aim the establishment of a Jewish State as soon as a Jewish majority has been achieved. It should be noted that the demand for a Jewish State goes beyond the obligations of either the Balfour Declaration or the Mandate, and was expressly disowned by the Chairman of the Jewish Agency as late 1932."

Israel does not need to refer back to the Mandate for its right to exist today. Israel does exist - that's a fact and one recognised by international law.

What you are trying to argue is that harking back to the Mandate provides a legal basis to ignore the '1967 borders'. But that really doesn't wash as a legal argument. The Mandate was always subject to revision. For example, following the 1922 Transjordan Memorandum, the area east of the Jordan river became exempt from the Mandate provisions concerning the Jewish National Home.

Neither the Balfour Declaration nor the Mandate make any reference to the "historical area of the Land of Israel" or "Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem".

I am not seeking to comment on the rights and wrongs of the situation, which are many and various on all sides, just seeking to understand where your legal thinking comes from because to my mind it isn't very compelling as regards the Mandate.

VEBott

@ Cgee

A literate post here, at last.

Yes, I'd like to see a lot fewer dead kids in Eretz Israel, C Gee. Numerically, most of them have tended to be Arabs, so far.

Why didn't the Arabs of mandate Palestine have a homeland, according to you? It's not a concept that requires statehood, or even property deeds going back centuries, all it needs is an identification with a landscape, a pattern of business (the pilgrim trade), a particular way of making coffee, a kind of orange juice, a snack. You're denying something real by atomising them. Arab nationalism is something else, another debate we could have another time, but although the elite families of what was greater Syria intermarried freely, for most Arabs, personal dignity derived from status within a more local network of families in both Mandate and Ottoman Palestine. That's more than just a village mentality, even if it has very little to do with modern nationhood.

In any case, what's done is done. Be it as revolutionaries or as servants of God, the Palestinians were and are the bearers of the great burden of Arab and Islamic cultural humiliation, something Herzl didn't really take into account. The Palestinian 'revolution', the ascendency of the PLO bureaucracy and the Palestinian peasants' claim to be linked to the cause of the Arabs in general was an important stage in the development of their identity, and one which might have afforded an opportunity for peace. Now that the Palestinians define themselves as martyrs on the sharp edged frontier of the Dar al-Harb, now that the Christian and Communist Arabs have all gone, it's over.

Benny Morris remains the best historian of how the Palestinian diaspora came about, I think. I don't see what toughness has to do with it either way. Pragmatism and authenticity is what I'm after.

@ Augustus
Just not worth answering, I'm afraid. Legalese, formalism and an inability to walk in another man's shoes.

@Stephen Rothbart

Yes Stephen, I flew El Al to Israel several times, back in the days when only El Al required you to arrive early, even if you were Israeli. Tel Aviv airport with its wonderful sign, now no longer there, 'It's no miracle if you want it'. Gatwick today is far worse (once was enough). But if you're going to compare that to what some bored Jewish kid with a Moroccan background and an IDF M4 will impose on a Palestinian family that just happens to irritates him, you don't understand how corrupting power can be.

It would be silly for me to ask you to feel sorry for Palestinians if you've never known any. I do suggest you make the effort sometime. I've known ex-members of Etzel and of Black September to sit around the same table and talk amicably. They both had grandmothers. Journalists from the two sides often hung out together. As you can imagine, it (once) made what was going on in Eretz Israel easier to understand, although since the Russians arrived and the Arabs went mad, I guess it's a different world.

Just make one or two Palestinian friends. It'll help you see the colours of Israel in an different light.

La Cumparsita

Cameron & Co have such a feeble excuse - time constarints indeed. How much time does it take to have your name of a letterhead as a patron? I'd like to see the JNF refuting the slurs against them.

David Guy

That the British Government sees anything Israeli past the 1948 armistice lines (why keep calling it 1967?) is not news. What is worrying is they see anything within those lines as doubtful.

According to the British Embassy in Israel. website (http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/global-issues/mena/middle-east-peace-process1/)
‘Although we accept DE FACTO Israeli control of West Jerusalem, we consider East Jerusalem to be occupied territory’.

What does this mean other than an indication that after pushing Israel back to 1967, they intend to push it back to 1947?

Arius

The UK is busy cutting its ties to not only its own history, but to Western Civilization.

GaryL

VEBott - "What I'd like to see is a bit less humiliation of the Arabs at the checkpoints, a curb on settler arrogance, an end to the kind of collective punishment that disfigured British rule over 60 years ago, no more dead western peace activists."

I'd also like to see a return to the status pre-1993, when the Oslo Accords exhumed Arafat. Back when the Green Line was almost ignored, Israelis sat with Arabs in cafes in Ramallah, thousands of Palestinians worked with Israels and were educated to international standards in schools and universities installed by Israel. The state of play today is the result of placing Arafat at the centre of the deal.

Derek BLADES

Melanie writes that “The legal basis for the establishment of the State of Israel was the resolution unanimously adopted by the League of Nations in 1922, affirming the establishment of a national home for the Jewish People in the historical area of the Land of Israel. This included the areas of Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem, and close Jewish settlement throughout.”
I am puzzled. Does anyone seriously believe that a League of Nations’ resolution dating back 90 years has any bearing whatsoever on the dispute between Israel and dispossessed Palestinians in 2011? In 1920 it was considered right and proper that colonial powers should dish out bits of the Middle East to their friends and allies without regard for those living there. Even if it could be shown that the League of Nations’ resolution is still legally valid in some sense, none of the interested parties now pay the smallest attention to League of Nations’ resolutions that were passed in colonial era that ended sixty years ago.
Another source of puzzlement for me is the issue of countries having a “legal basis” to exist. Recognition by the United Nations confers the right to levy taxes, defend borders and maintain internal order. UN recognition is all the proof we need that a country really does exist. Israel exists in that sense and that is the end of the matter. Asking whether it has a legal right to be a country is a nonsense question and so requires no answer.
The history of Palestine before the founding of Israel is both interesting and hotly disputed. But it has no conceivable relevance to the issue at hand, namely how to reconcile the competing territorial claims of Israelis and Palestinians.

R. Boland

The fact that Israel is "The Jewish State" is irrelevant to many of us in secular Britain. We cherish our right to criticise the actions of the Government of Israel. Such notions as religious denomination or race have nothing to do with it.

Stephen Rothbart

VE Bott, wow! "Moroccan background?" Racial profiling?

But seriously, I know many Arab people, Saudi and Lebanese and Libyans that I have met with in London and elsewhere.

I have even discussed the Middle East problems with them. We get on fine, agree to disagree and never once did any of them try to kill me for my views, nor I theirs.

I also met Palestinian Christian Arabs who viscerally hated their Muslim fellow Palestinians, and we know that the Lebanese, Syrian and Jordanian Hashemites have no intention of allowing Palestinian Arabs the same "dubious" rights and equalities that they have in their own societies, and Jordanians in particular do not want Palestinian Arabs back into Jordan as they belong to a different tribe, even though the same tribes are also in Jordan.

So, do I feel compassion for the Palestinians? Yes, up to a point. I think circumstances were not kind to them and many of them made bad choices for which their children and their childrens' children are now suffering.

Does that excuse their anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, terrorism and their ability to choose Hamas as a role model for their society?

No.

Now let us (using your expression) walk in the shoes of the Isreali Jew.

Descendants of European Jewry persecuted for thousands of years by the Gentiles in whose society the were forced to live, descendants from pogroms in Russia and the Pale of Settlement, and for the Sabra Jews, also persecuted by the Arabs among whom they have lived for many centuries.

Rejected by the Arab nations when the UN reconized their national home in Palestine, left by Britain, France and the US to fend for themselves when the Arab armies descended on them in 1948.

Attacked again and again over the decades, first by Egypt, Jordan Lebanon and Syria, and then by Egypt and Syria and then by Iranian proxies and finally by suicide bombers walking into shops, wedding parties and cafes.

Do you think the Israeli Moroccan wants to be sitting in a border post going through a family's belonings to check whether they are carrying explosives?

Do you think he might want to get on with his real job, sit on a beach, chat up a girl, or heaven forbid in your precious Palestine - a boy?

Given the boorish behaviour of frontier guards I have gone through in the US, the UK, Serbia, Hungary, Italy etc., I think your highlighting the Palestinain plight is another example of selective compassion.

At Gatwick, the mistake of a security officer or passport control official in dealing with the kinds of people arriving from European destinations will have practically zero consequences. The Islamic terrorists have no need to come into the UK to blow us all up. Their people are already here!

On Israeli/Palestinian border crossings, a mistake can be lethal and immediate.

How can you not understand the difference?

GaryL

Derek Blades - "The history of Palestine before the founding of Israel is both interesting and hotly disputed. But it has no conceivable relevance to the issue at hand, namely how to reconcile the competing territorial claims of Israelis and Palestinians."

It's just another of the local territorial civil wars left over from the post-WW1 dismembership of the grand old empires. Czechs & Slovaks have resolved their dissatisfaction with the post-WW1 arrangement. The Balkans has finally settled down. Lebanon went through its internal demographic re-balance. Iraq might end up as a federation of three semi-autonomous provinces. None of those had to suffer from decades of being used as pawns in international power brawls.

I'm in favour of the "everyone else butt out" soulution.

Truthtriumphs

R. Boland
June 1st, 2011 12:58pm

"The fact that Israel is "The Jewish State" is irrelevant to many of us in secular Britain. We cherish our right to criticise the actions of the Government of Israel. Such notions as religious denomination or race have nothing to do with it".

Agreed, but with two provisos:--
1)That Israel is not singled
out for criticism amongst all the nations of the world.
2)That the standards/conditions/impositions you demand/impose upon Israel, are those that you would accept for your own country under similar circumstances.

As Tony Blair said a year ago, "Do not apply rules to the government of Israel that you would never dream of applying to your own government, or your own country".
He also stressed the fact that de-legitimisation of Israel often masquerades as criticism.
He said that the latter is valid, whilst the former is not.

C.Gee

“Pragmatism and authenticity is what I'm after.” Really?

You say: “Why didn't the Arabs of mandate Palestine have a homeland, according to you? It's not a concept that requires statehood, or even property deeds going back centuries, all it needs is an identification with a landscape, a pattern of business (the pilgrim trade), a particular way of making coffee, a kind of orange juice, a snack. You're denying something real by atomising them.”

Identification with a landscape can be cultivated elsewhere; a business may be started elsewhere; coffee pots are portable and replaceable, no orange juice ever tastes as good as the juice Mom squeezed; and snacks? shmacks. Of course daily satisfactions are real. Regret is real. Nostalgia is real. Destitution is real. Defeat is real. But most refugees, or displaced or exchanged populations are expected to move on with their new lives. That is pragmatism. The romance invented by Middle East Studies academics, Arab bosses and political leftists of Naqba suffering - what you refer to as the “great Arab and Islamic cultural humiliation” - is not authentic. That great romance is locking real Arabs into a small, sordid reality. Why does the west collude in it?

“The Palestinian 'revolution', the ascendency of the PLO bureaucracy and the Palestinian peasants' claim to be linked to the cause of the Arabs in general was an important stage in the development of their identity, and one which might have afforded an opportunity for peace.”

The Palestinian “revolution” came into existence with the ascendancy of the PLO as the “sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”. Before that, the “revolution” was merely insurgency against the British and violence against the Jews. The identity of the people as a Palestinian people came by virtue of the selection of thugs to act in their name. That identity is not authentic. Recognition of the PLO thugs doomed peace in a ‘peace process’ that institutionalized inauthenticity, in the name, ironically of pragmatism. The same pragmatism is calling for engagement with Hamas. Hamas, it is true, is authentically Islamist, but that authenticity is denied by the left, who see Hamas becoming pragmatic (are they not offering a long-term ceasefire?).

“Now that the Palestinians define themselves as martyrs on the sharp edged frontier of the Dar al-Harb, now that the Christian and Communist Arabs have all gone, it's over.”

Christianity (most of the sects in the “Holy Land”), communism and Islam are authentically supersessionist and supremacist ideologies with respect to both Judaism and Zionism. It is the convergence of Christian, Marxist and Islamic dogma that is inauthenticating the Jewish state. Several wars were lost against Israel, so the continued ideological and physical battering of it is not pragmatic, but the self-authenticating actions of fanatics.

“Benny Morris remains the best historian of how the Palestinian diaspora came about, I think. I don't see what toughness has to do with it either way.”

“Palestinian diaspora” does not have the ring of authenticity Another borrowing from the history of the Jews.

Morris, when his distortions of the record were exposed, decided Israel did not have a national policy of ethnic cleansing, but that during the war the authorities had to be pragmatic in clearing Arabs from the theatre of war. Many of the Arabs landed up in areas under Arab control. Morris now takes a very hard line on the practical necessity to keep a hostile population out of Israel. Toughness has everything to do with war, and fighting it pragmatically. Israel’s toughness is authentic. War is authentic. It is the projection of Arab weakness that is inauthentic, the pretense that the Arabs are not fighting a war because they are losing it.

And on the subject of personal relationships with Palestinians: citing the fact of friendship with individual Palestinians does not authenticate your opinion that Israel’s actions are excessively brutal, any more than Norman Finkelstein’s references to his camp-survivor mother authenticates his Holocaust denial - the claim that Jews fabricated their victimhood.

As revealed on these threads, your “authenticity” consists of validating the ideological, phony, artificial and sentimental on the Arab side, and your “pragmatism” consists of recommending policies for Israel that would do the same.

In short, the pragmatism and authenticity you manifest are quite recognizable as appeasement and pretense, Still, it affords some amusement to see you proudly poncing about in the Emperor’s cast-offs.

Truthtriumphs

Mr Tagalog
May 31st, 2011 6:56pm
Dear Ms Phillips

I am confused by this statement:

"1.The legal basis for the establishment of the State of Israel was the resolution unanimously adopted by the League of Nations in 1922, affirming the establishment of a national home for the Jewish People in the historical area of the Land of Israel."

The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry of 1946 expressly found that the Mandate did not provide a legal basis for a Jewish state."

The Anglo-American Committee's findings had no effect on international law.
It was simply a committee formed to deal with the problem of the Jewish refugees post WW11.
The conclusions it came to were simply opinions, with no force in international law.
It is clear that the British component of this committee tried to put obstacles in the way of Jewish immigration, and, in effect,recommended the continuation of the infamous White Paper,a policy which resulted in many more Jews ending up in the German death factories, than otherwise would have occurred.

To be pedantic, the legal basis of the Jewish state rests on the decisions made in the San Remo conference, on April 25th. 1920. That was the moment of the Jewish 'Magna Carta'.
The San Remo Resolution forms the basis of the Middle East as we know it today.
The Mandate for Palestine document incorporated the San Remo Resolution into it, and was unanimously voted for by the 51 members of the league.

I hope that clears up your confusion.

Derek BLADES

GaryL

You write that you are ".. in favour of the "everyone else butt out" soulution."

Yes that might be a good idea. But in practice the West gives massive, financial, military and diplomatic support to Israel. And given the power of the Israeli lobbies in the United States and elsewhere that is not going to end any time soon.

"Butts out" makes sense when the playing field is approximately level. Under present circumstances it is cynical irresponsibility.

Mr Tagalog

@Truthtriumphs

Your trying to draw a distinction that lacks a difference. The Anglo-American Committee was well aware of San Remo and its incorporation into the Mandate. That's the whole point - the Committee was saying that the Mandate including San Remo did not provide a legal jusificiation for Palestine to be a solely Jewish state.

The San Remo resolution simply resolves "in favour of the establishment IN Palestine OF A national home for the Jewish people". It very clearly does not say "the establishment OF Palestine AS THE national home for the Jewish people".

john

How I long for the Argentinians to take to their flotillas and take back Las Malvinas. Surely the Pink Service and the toothless RAF and the Dunbartonshire Police Force will surely not bare their gums in fury? Will they? Will Obama like it, even if it's a "special relationship" friend who engages in such re-active aggression? What right does the UK have in Las Malvinas, anyway? None, that I can see. Slaughter the sheep and bring back the settlers.

VEBott

@CGee

So what you're arguing, CGee, is that if the residents of Devon and Cornwall, say, were displaced by the French, any yearning they or their children might entertain for the West Country would be mostly fictitious and sentimental? The refugees should just get on with adapting to their new circumstances in Yorkshire, any British irredentism would be irrational, drystone, shmystone, what the hell's a hedgerow and what's wrong with chip butties and ManCity anyway ?

I certainly agree that the West should have put a lot more pressure on the Arab host countries to offer the Palestinian refugees real integration. If those Cornishmen in Yorkshire had been sitting in camps all these years, and treated with contempt by the locals, I think their nostalgia for their homeland might be a lot more acute and their kids might still be speaking with a southern accent.

When I spoke of Arab and Islamic humiliation,I meant a process first identified back in the 19th century by thinkers like Jamal al-Afghani. The Naqba is just the latest instalment. On the role of the PLO in turning a displaced peasantry into an aspirant nation, we have no disagreement, although I doubt you recognize that it wasn't just Arafat who was a master of missing opportunities at the time, any more than you feel that land for peace was ever a desirable option, whoever led the Palestinians. Palestinian intransigeance is very convenient for Israeli expansionists. Finally, there is nothing inauthentic about the process by which a leadership made a nation for itself, any more that there is something inauthentic about the way the English discovered their Englishness in Tudor times.

Christian supercessionism and the Bund's battle against Leninism and Zionism are not really what I had in mind. It's true that the idea of the Jews as a chosen people does not sit well with more recent conceptions, or with the views of the greatest Jewish contributors to Western thought, for that matter, but I fail to see the relevance, unless you are postulating Israel as a haven for pre-Hellenistic thought. The Palestinians' loss of their non-Muslim businessmen, activists and thinkers is a tragedy for them; it condemns them to a mediaeval cast of mind. I hope that the light help up against that darkness is not simply to say that Israel is the fulfilment of God's promise.

Please don't be silly. Diaspora is the normal academic term for scattered communities. It's used by various Israeli scholars, amongst others, to refer to non Jewish and non-Palestinian communities throughout the world.

I have never advocated compromise with Hamas. Statements like 'war is authentic' make you sound like Heidegger on a particularly bad day. Hamas is at war with Israel, but that doesn't mean that Israel, with its massive preponderance of force, can escape condemnation if it indefinitely penalises Gaza's entire civilian population. Such condemnation has undesirable consequences.

As far as I know, Morris' work has not been 'exposed' by any serious professional historian. It remains essential reading. I had not, until recently, been particularly aware of his political evolution. Mine is entirely personal, the result of disillusionment, age, and coming to terms with the issue of choosing sides and what it implies. I am pleased to discover that I'm treading in distinguished footsteps.

It's disappointing that your post, which started promisingly, so rapidly descended into rhetoric. I suppose it goes with the territory, this being Melanie's Blog.

aem

Truthtriumphs

"To be pedantic, the legal basis of the Jewish state rests on the decisions made in the San Remo conference, on April 25th. 1920. That was the moment of the Jewish 'Magna Carta'.
The San Remo Resolution forms the basis of the Middle East as we know it today.
The Mandate for Palestine document incorporated the San Remo Resolution into it, and was unanimously voted for by the 51 members of the league."

I know you prudently sloped away yet again the other day from discussion of this very point, but, just to remind you, you have not yet once in all the times you have repeated this tendentious (mis)interpretation of San Remo etc. - not once - explained why anyone not already a Zionist should believe it contrary to all evidence. San Remo and the Mandate for Palestine did not provide any legal basis for a Jewish state. You think otherwise. Tell us why.

Minnie Ovens

Mr Cameron is so much like Mr Bush both in background and in education.
Both come from privileged backgrounds. Both achieved good degrees, with much "discussion" as to how and both declared war on an Arab State with no idea as to the consequences.
In defence of George Bush, at least he flew fighter interceptors in the National Guard, and had some experience in the real world.
In defence of David Cameron, his family, Eton and Oxford instilled in him that it was his right to rule and he could therefore achieve this in a quintessentially upper middle class way. Lie about everything but do it with an aura of superiority and languidness.
Why cannot I get away from this feeling that both of them, however, are not too bright?

C.Gee

Mr. Tagalog:

Aha. Someone else who could benefit from reading “The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law,” by Howard Grief.

There are significant legal differences between the declarations of San Remo Conference and the report of a Committee of Inquiry, and TruthTriumphs is correct to make the distinction. One is an instrument of international law, the other is a policy recommendation. The British and the Americans had no legal authority to abrogate the rights given to the Jewish people under San Remo (and other instruments), not by any agreement between the two of them, and certainly not by the conclusory findings of a joint committee of inquiry.

The interpretation of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jews” to mean the “establishment of a Jewish non-national home in part of Palestine” is the essence of the British dodge to renege on its obligations under the Mandate. All thoroughly analyzed by Grief.

This interpretation depends on seeing “clearly” what the original words did not say: “the establishment OF Palestine AS THE national home for the Jewish people”. Once one is looking for what the words did not say, why limit yourself? Why not say the words “very clearly did not say ‘the establishment over the whole of Palestine of a state for the Jewish nation’? On the other hand, the words clearly did not say “the establishment somewhere in Palestine of a non-national home for the Jews and nation-states for Arabic-speaking gentiles”.

And, finally, “the establishment IN Palestine of A national home” means exactly the same as “the establishment OF Palestine as THE national home for the Jews, except that the former is better English, because “establishment” pertains to “home”, which has yet to be built, more exactly than to the plot of land in which the home is to be built. In either case, Palestine - the whole of it - is being created and designated geo-politically as the location of a Jewish national polity. As there was no other Jewish polity located anywhere, “A” Jewish national home is correct English usage.

What was clearly intended was the establishment AS Palestine OF A Jewish state. Alternatively, what was clearly intended was the establishment OF Palestine AS A Jewish state.

Whisky when you’re sick makes you well. Whisky makes you sick when you’re well.

Herzen

We have here a selection of C. Gee's favourites.

We have Article One of the Charter for those who profit from aggression: Victims get over it - as applied at the entrance to the reservations (and as would have been applied in Russia as the Nazis helped the citizens from their homes and across the Urals).

Then we have the fortuitous invention of preconditions: The people living in Palestine are not such as to be allowed a say in their own government, because they are people but not A People. Only A People can call itself A Nation, and only A Nation has a right to a say in its future. They are merely people. So they lived in some Hobbesian squalor? Well, no. They lived in a society that evolved over centuries in town and country. But a society is not enough to allow its members a say in their own government - a society, of however long standing, is not A Nation, you see. Whereas...

Then there is the grand-sounding vacuous abstraction: here we have Christianity, and Marxism, and Islam, ganging up in supersessionism(!). Sounds ever so educated...means bugger all.

Israel was possible only with the help of Christian Zionists. Israel was possible only by expelling Muslims. Marxists...(I'm not sure what Marxists have to do with anything).

charles soper

Bravo Melanie for stating with bold courage what others wimp away from saying for fear of the scorpions' sting. A thousand blessings on you for shedding light on this foundational issue.

Truthtriumphs

Mr Tagalog
June 2nd, 2011 10:19am
@Truthtriumphs

"Your trying to draw a distinction that lacks a difference. The Anglo-American Committee was well aware of San Remo and its incorporation into the Mandate. That's the whole point - the Committee was saying that the Mandate including San Remo did not provide a legal jusificiation for Palestine to be a solely Jewish state."

Simple answer---estoppel.
The committee had no power to change the Mandate.
In view of the fact that 50% of the Committee, ie.the British component, was hostile to the idea of Jews in Palestine, its conclusion was no surprise.

"The San Remo resolution simply resolves "in favour of the establishment IN Palestine OF A national home for the Jewish people. It very clearly does not say "the establishment OF Palestine AS THE national home for the Jewish people".

Verbal acrobatics beloved of the anti-semite.
I recall that the Mandate document clearly calls for the 'RE establishment', rather than 'establishment', of the Jewish national homeland.
Indeed, at San Remo the Principal Allied Powers delineated the borders of the future Jewish homeland to , based on the historical borders during the Temple periods, as researched by the biblical scholar, George Adam Smith.

As a matter of interest, do you apply the same criteria to the establishment of the countries of Syria, Iraq, Trans-Jordan and lebanon, also born at San Remo, in the question of Arab self-determination, as you do to the Jewish state?
If not, why not?

Truthtriumphs

aem. June 2nd.

"just to remind you, you have not yet once in all the times you have repeated this tendentious (mis)interpretation of San Remo etc. - not once - explained why anyone not already a Zionist should believe it contrary to all evidence. San Remo and the Mandate for Palestine did not provide any legal basis for a Jewish state. You think otherwise. Tell us why."

Perhaps it's beholden on you to tell us why not.
San Remo laid the foundation for Jewish sovereignty in the area of the defeated Ottoman Empire called Palestine, and equally for Arab sovereignty in the areas of Mesopotamia (Iraq)and Syria (to become Syria and lebanon).
You cannot have it both ways...either the self determination was intended for both Jews and Arabs, or neither....which is it, in your reading?

And why did Balfour retort to the Arabs, when they complained, that they had received the 'lion's share', and the Jews were just given a 'niche'?

Augustus

Israel bashers a'plenty on this site. But who cares? Its success by every standard of measure is a rebuke to the failed and rogue states, mostly Muslim countries, which surround it. A diamond in a sea of mud!

Mr Tagalog

@Truthtriumphs

Good God - are you seriously suggesting that asserting and defending the rights of each of Jewish Israel and Arab Palestine to exist as separate, secure and sovereign states on the 1949 armistice lines is an anti-semitic position? Is your position that anyone who disgrees with the proposition that San Remo, the League Mandate etc granted the whole of Palestine as an exclusively Jewish state is an anti-semite? If it is then frankly that's mad - such a proposition is one that the Israeli Supreme Court itself would be very unlikely to endorse.

As to verbal gymnastics, well that's the way the law and works. The meaning of words is the lifeblood of legal interpretation. Words matter. Even Sokolow himself in his history of Zionism said that "The 'Jewish State' was never part of the Zionist programme." Do you regard Sokolow as an anti-semite?

And what in your schema are we to make of the provisions of the mandate, San Remo etc that "that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine"? Surely the logical conclusion of your argument when taken together with these protections is a one state solution in which people of Jewish faith would be a minority. I know there are some Israelis who support that view but there aren't many of them and Nethanyahu certainly isnt one of them.

Mr Tagalog

@C.Gee

I am well aware of Howard Grief's book and his analysis. In return I would refer you to Kattan's From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891-1949 and Quigley's The Statehood of Palestine: International Law in the Middle East Conflict. Grief's analysis relies upon the word 'nation' meaning 'state'. Even in our own UK we can see the fallacy of that - the Welsh are a nation with a 'national home' in Wales but it is not itself a sovereign state (although that does not mean that it could not become one).

UNSCOP specifically addressed this issue in its report:

"The notion of the National Home, which derived from the formulation of Zionist aspirations in the 1897 Basle program has provoked many discussions concerning its meaning, scope and legal character, especially since it has no known legal connotation and there are no precedents in international law for its interpretation. It was used in the Balfour Declaration and in the Mandate, both of which promised the establishment of a "Jewish National Home" without, however, defining its meaning. The conclusion seems to be inescapable that the vagueness in the wording of both instruments was intentional. The fact that the term "National Home" was employed, instead of the word "State" or "Commonwealth" would indicate that the intention was to place a restrictive construction on the National Home scheme from its very inception."

You are right that the Anglo-American Committee had no legal authority to change the Mandate. I was not suggesting that it did. What the Committee did was to express its view as to what the Mandate meant. And the Committee (which incidentally made its recommendations unanimously) was absolutely NOT hostile to Jews in Plaestine - after all if recommended the immediate admission of 100,000 Jewish refugees from Europe into Palestine, that facilities be put in place to ensure Jewish migration and that the 1940 Land Act (which banned Jews from purchasing land in most of Palestine) be rescinded.

As to “the establishment IN Palestine of A national home” meaning exactly the same as “the establishment OF Palestine as THE national home for the Jews, well clearly they do not mean the same thing unless you wish them to. If you were a junior attorney and drafted a contract so sloppily you would cost your employers a fortune in negligence settlements.

Look, we all know what this game is about. This is not about supposed anti-semites denying the right of Israel to exist. Israel does exist. That's a fact and it is recognised under interntional law; long may that remain the case. There is no need to hark back to San Remo to justify Israel's existence today. What you and Truthtriumphs are trying to do is to create spurious justification for Israel to be sovereign in parts of the West Bank. The reality is that this issue only arises because of the 1967 war. If that war had not occurred and the West Bank was still controlled by Jordan or was in some way independent, would Israel today be using such arguments to try to establish a right to establish settlements on the banks of the Jordan? Of course it wouldn't. The vexed issue of Jerusalem aside, this is a second tier of frankly pretty poor legal argument as regards the West Bank because the first tier (that of sovereignty by virtue of 'defensive' conquest) has had to be dropped because of its repugnance to the entire world. As Kafka-esque nonsense it is only matched by those Palestinians who say that the starting point should be the 1947 UN Partition Plan (which has a theoretical legal validity to it given that the relevant resolution has legal effect in international law).

aem

Truthtriumphs
June 3rd, 2011 12:36am
You must know from previous exchanges with various others that this does not work as a response.

San Remo and the Mandates established a number of states, including a state of Palestine, in which was to be established a "Jewish National Home" not a Jewish sovereign state. Nothing in the wording of Balfour, San Remo, or the Mandate Treaty justifies the interpretation you put on them, and you have offered no explanation of why we should accept your interpretation.

aem

C. Gee,

"You can make your home in Palestine," say the Great Powers.

"You can make Palestine your home," I take them to mean.

"...No, you misunderstand the meaning. Neither of them in their normal acceptation. The Great Powers are speaking English but not English as she is spoke. They clearly mean Palestine, all of it, will be my home. So you, current inhabitants of Palestine, clear out. The Great Powers have told me I can establish my home in Palestine. Which means you can't."

Contorting the English language, as in your account of the Mandate Treaty (as in the disquisitions on "the" in discussions of Resolution 242) cannot get you very far. Treaties and international agreements are to be interpreted as using words in their normal acceptation unless explicitly defined otherwise.

Similarly, you do not tell us (again) how "national home" morphs into "sovereign state".

aem

Mr Tagalog
June 3rd, 2011 11:39am
You clearly state the counter-arguments to C. Gee.

One ambiguity: "...those Palestinians who say that the starting point should be the 1947 UN Partition Plan (which has a theoretical legal validity to it given that the relevant resolution has legal effect in international law)."

Are you saying that the recommendation for partition has legal effect? If so, what do you mean by "legal effect"? You will gather that I think such an interpretation wrong (the UN has no power to grant territory to anyone).

As I understand it, Israel's territory was acquired in much the same way as was what is now called the occupied territories (and this is not altered by the fact of recognition by other states). Surely the reason the Palestinians are not insisting on this in negotiations is purely pragmatic - as you say, and as they recognise (and have for some time), Israel exists now like any other state and has acquired rights on its citizens' behalf like any other state.

Truthtriumphs

Mr.Tagalog. June 3rd.@ 11.30 am

"Look, we all know what this game is about. This is not about supposed anti-semites denying the right of Israel to exist".

Sorry, but it is, no matter how you dress it up.

"Israel does exist. That's a fact and it is recognised under interntional law; long may that remain the case. There is no need to hark back to San Remo to justify Israel's existence today. What you and Truthtriumphs are trying to do is to create spurious justification for Israel to be sovereign in parts of the West Bank. The reality is that this issue only arises because of the 1967 war.."

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Does Article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine document call for the 'close settlement of Jews' on all the land West of the Jordan river, or does it not?
Does the same document say it is the obligation of the world powers to help settle the Jews there, or does it not?

Again, it was San Remo that established the ME as we know it today.
If you are denying sovereignty to the Jewish people in their homeland, Israel, then, by extrapolation, the same denial must be extended to the sovereignty of Syria, Jordan and lebanon.
If you don't agree, then you have some explaining to do.

Mr Tagalog

@Truthtriumphs

How is any of this about denying the right of Israel to exist? You really do have to explain how you can sensibly get to that position when international law clearly recognises Israel. Otherwise the accusation is nothing but a gratuitous ad hominem rhetorical device to try to avoid rationally engaging with the argument.

As to the rest, well you're playing bait and switch - ignoring the legitimate question about what on earth "safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion" is all about in your schema and instead raising abstract irrelevancies about Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, all of which are recognised under modern international law in the exactly same way as Israel.

Howard Grief's arguments, which you are essentially parroting, are certainly ingenious. But they are deeply flawed. For example, his analysis of Balfour, San Remo etc relies upon the word 'home' having been used in the Basle Programme. But the word 'home' isn't used at all in the Basle Programme because the Basle Programme was written in German and not English! His analysis is therefore mistaken in the same way as Biblical analysis that mixes up comparisons of Greek, Latin and English versions of the Bible.

Instead of reading the words on the page, Grief has to ascribe them overly strained meanings and to justify this he relies largely upon hearsay and parol evidence - e.g. reports of what people were apparently told, sometimes before and sometimes after the event, over dinner etc.

And of course he relies upon almost everyone else involved being wrong or having made some terrible blunder; Sokolow was apparently wrong for using the word 'home' instead of 'state' in his Balfour draft (even though Sokolow himself said that he never meant to mean 'state' in the first place!); Meir Shamgar, the IDF's Advocate General in the 1960s ,was wrong because he stipulated that the IDF must regard Gaza and the West Bank as 'occupied territories' and accordingly apply the Hague Regulations; and of course most notably the Israeli Supreme Court is wrong because on countless occaisons it hs held that Gaza and the West Bank are not part of Israel and are under 'belligerent occupation' by Israel (e.g. the Gaza withdrawal case).

Grief is a lone voice and that is so for a reason - because he's just plain wrong. Or do you regard Sokolow, Shamgar and the members of the Israeli Supreme Court as part of an anti-semitic conspiracy?

aem

Truthtriumphs

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Does Article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine document call for the 'close settlement of Jews' on all the land West of the Jordan river, or does it not?"

a little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing. And so is wilful ignorance.

No, the Mandate does not call for close settlement of all the land west of the Jordan.

I'm surprised that you think, against all reason, that it does.

C.Gee

Herzen, June 2, 7:41p.m.:

I think your comment was what the caring community calls a “cry for help”.

I recommend you seek advice from professionals: Howard Grief, Professors Kedourie and Karsh. At the very least they will cure you of your fear of abstractions.

There are many sound explicators of religious and ideological dogma. Supersessionism, totalitarianism, Marxism, and much, much more. Once you start to understand these concepts, you will find discussion of Middle Eastern politics so much easier - and fun! One step at a time, and do not be afraid to ask if there is anything you don’t understand.

Don’t worry too much about the tribe/society/nation/self-determination/state thing. Every human being is part of the family of man.

The important thing is that you have shown a willingness to admit to confusion and error in public, which shows you are ready to start along the road to recovery.

The Duke of Clarence

An interesting exchange of views on this thread. Very learned!

A couple of questions for those of us less well informed:

- I am unclear why the San Remo resolutions have any legal effect. Could someone explain this please?

- Why bother referring to San Remo at all when the Palestine Mandate says the same thing? The advantage of the Mandate itself is that has the imprimatur of the League. Other than being two years earlier what is so special about San Remo vs the Palestine Mandate?

- If the assertion that San Remo/the Palestine Mandate intended an indisoluble Jewish Palestine, what was intended to happen to the non-Jews living there? As I understand it their rights were protected? And what should happen to those Arabs today? Maybe I am being naive but surely there are only two alternatives: they are either expelled or they have protected civil rights in which event, given what I understand to be the respective poplulation sizes, the Arabs would be in the majority and would be able to elect an Arab government?

- Is MrTagalog correct that Melanie Phillips' legal analysis is not shared by the Israeli Supreme Court? That would be quite surprising to me if it were true.

Sorry if these seem like naive questions but would very much appreciate some elucidation on these points.

Augustus

If the Palestinians are the indigenous people of the land of Israel, surely the UNRWA could have come up with a better definition of a Palestinian refugee then any non-Jew whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948? I mean come on, a year and eleven months? Jews have to give up a 2000 year old dream and a 4000 year old connection and they couldn't even give them a round number? Why not two years? One more month shouldn't be much of a challenge if they had been living there for ages. I would go back to 1930 or earlier to demonstrate my superiority over the Zionist Jews. But the Palestinians do no such thing. Instead they prefer to be modest. Which is weird at first, until you realize their options are limited because they rely on a mechanism where a Jew moving from Egypt to Palestine turns into a foreign occupier whereas a Muslim doing the same thing turns into a native.

It is hard to understand why people get so upset over the Palestinian refugees who had to move no more then 20 or 30 miles, many of them staying within the borders of Palestine. Especially when you consider the context in which this event occurred. Europe was still largely destroyed, there were 50 million war dead and six million dead Jews, 30 million refugees and hundreds of thousands of deeply traumatized Holocaust survivors who had nowhere to go except Israel. There was famine in Jerusalem during the Arab siege, there was the invasion by six Arab armies, the loss of Jerusalem and hundreds of thousands of Arab Jewish refugees who had to flee to Israel. Contrast that with a few hundred thousand Palestinians who had to move from one region to another quite similar region and it doesn't really seem to be something to get overly upset about. But stangely enough this inconvenience has been turned into the greatest tragedy of our times. Soon, a flotilla will go to Gaza in order to break a blockade that doesn't exist, to bring aid to a people that doesn't need help, while being supported by people who call themselves peace activists but are eager for a fight. Well, I suppose if you have a peace process which leads to war it is OK to have peace activists who want to shed blood. Still, for all those people who have been comparing Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto I have a question: Did 400.000 Jews die in Warsaw of obesity? Because the people in Gaza have one of the highest obesity levels in the world and I don't really associate that with starvation.

Everybody says Israel should talk to Hamas. It doesn't matter Hamas doesn't want to negotiate with Israel, is only willing to accept a temporary truce, and remains dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Israel must talk to Hamas. OK fine, but why then all the efforts over the years to force Israel to accept the PLO as 'sole representative of the Palestinian people'? Over 100 countries, the UN and the Arab League have recognized the PLO as such. The PLO, not Hamas, has observer status in the UN. Plus, what's the point in negotiating with the PLO as 'sole representative of the Palestinian people' if one day suddenly there appears another group with whom the Israeli's need to hold whole new separate negotiations? Can't Israel do the same? Send one delegation representing the state of Israel, and then send another negotiating team also representing the state of Israel but with totally different opinions, strategies and goals. Then again what's the point? Why negotiate? Remember Rabin with his letters from Yasser Arafat at the beginning of the Oslo accords? The Israeli prime minister only agreed to negotiate with the PLO after he received a letter from Arafat who promised never ever to resort to violence again and to settle each difference peacefully at the negotiating table. It is a shame Yigal Amir murdered Yitschak Rabin because I would really like to know what Rabin would have made of these promises today.

I found an old newspaper from the first of June 1948. Its crumbling yellow front page reports that the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem has been set on fire and the UN requested ceasefire was rejected by the Arab League. The Arabs felt they were winning. Meanwhile there was no word from the Israeli government in Tel Aviv. Maybe their lines of communications were cut or maybe they were stunned at the loss of Jerusalem. Or maybe they were too busy preparing whatever needed to be done in order to reverse the situation. After all, this was the first time in thousands of years that Jews, when presented with a calamity, could actually do something about it. And they did, the silence did not last very long. An arms deal with Czechoslovakia was struck, and soon the Jewish state could provide its soldiers with guns ánd bullets.
But the fact is that the war of 1948 did not have a forgone conclusion. That moment of quiet could have easily turned into an eternity of silence. Which is why it is no wonder Palestinians demand a second chance.

aem

C.Gee
June 3rd, 2011 7:05pm
Grief, Kedourie, Karsh...Karsh?

Marxism, totalitarianism, supersessionism... all irrelevant, but used here to house any amount of cattle manure to hurl at those who dare question The Cause.

Don't worry your pretty little head about self-determination or who decides who counts as a Nation and who decides what a Nation is allowed to do or get away with - leave it all to the professionals like Karsh...Karsh? and those who benefit behind this obscuring cloud of ink...

This explains so much about the "mentality" of the busy workers in hasbarawood...and not in a good way!

As Truthtriumphs warned, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing; similarly, a little, a very little, education can produce delusions of superior intelligence, which can be put to use in the service of The Cause - every ideology has such apologists willing to swallow and regurgitate any amount of self-serving nonsense, and Zionism is clearly no different.

Karsh!

Supersessionism!

aem

C. Gee

As an aside, I notice that you were willing on an earlier thread to intervene in a conversation to be snotty and condescending even while admitting you didn't have a clue what the conversation was about. You noticed the phrase Strong Horse. You knew you didn't like one of those engaged in the conversation. So you thought you would wade in.

You have displayed quite an array of dishonest tactics thse last few days.

C.Gee

Mr. Tagalog:

Howard Grief, you say, “is a lone voice and that is so for a reason - because he's just plain wrong.” You claim that Grief, to make his case, must “rely on being wrong” each of the members of the choir arrayed against him. Look at that, you scoff, Grief has to say S. was wrong, Israeli high court justices are wrong, this lawyer, that politician, that committee - everybody - is wrong. But while this parade of his adversaries may support the view that Grief is a lone voice, it does not establish his error. In fact, you are arguing that Grief is wrong because he is a lone voice, not that he is a lone voice because he is wrong. But what must a lone voice do to argue a case against a chorus? How can he argue against the consensus unless by showing how each significant contributor to it is wrong? And for that purpose he must bring in “parole” evidence, hearsay, animus against Jews, overlooked legal documents, misunderstandings, unintentional errors, mis-statements of fact etc. How many unison voices make an argument correct? A majority? A super-majority? Majority of whom? How many unison voices get to dismiss the case arguing that the consensus is wrong? Why is it necessary to place the consensus position that Jews are not entitled to a state in Palestine beyond dispute?

How do you square this consensus that the Jews had no international legal rights to statehood with what you claim is international law’s acceptance of Israel’s existence? You should indeed address aem’s “one ambiguity”. The logic of your reading of the Palestine instruments would place the existence of Israel - which came about through war - in legal jeopardy, putting you at odds with what you insist is Israel’s right to exist - on a par with the rights of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq - in international law. In fact, Israel’s existence is not accepted on a par with any other states under international law. Israel’s de jure status is challenged in every resolution which acknowledges Arab Palestinian self-determination, and every declaration (no matter if by Israeli jurists) that determines or assumes Israel “occupies” territory whether the legal sovereign is designated “Palestine” or left unstated to be determined later. The Oslo accords themselves perpetuated the de jure ambiguity of Israel by requiring Israel to negotiate to establish her borders with a corporate body representing a population who had neither de facto nor de jure sovereignty over any territory in Palestine.

When I asked Herzen - who also prefers the chorus to the lone voice - why he continued to argue against Israel’s legitimacy, in the face of his acceptance of Israel’s right to exist, he said that Israel’s acknowledgement of illegitimacy may change Israeli policy with respect to the peace negotiations. He declined to say why or how the Herzen Rationale might work. Are you, like Herzen, here to make Israel and her supporters see the error that is Israel, with a view to shaming Israel into establishing IN Palestine ANOTHER Arab state at war with it?

If the Herzen Rationale does not apply to you, then I have further questions: If you know that the other side has arguments and you know those arguments, with what do you hope or expect to be answered? A completely new point? Hitherto uncovered facts that will change everything? Is your question simply an invitation to dance? Or do you assume that anyone taking the view that Jewish sovereign rights over Palestine trump Arab rights has not read, or understood, or even come across, or is simply too bigoted to address, the arguments on the other side? Do you think that dropping a particular quasi-technical analysis on a portion of one document, backed by parole evidence from select individuals, will - this time - suddenly change minds? ( Aha! So that’s it! the “establishment IN Palestine OF A national home for the Jewish people” means the settlement of a few Jews with some sort of autonomy, religious perhaps, or municipal, depending on majority gentile national rights in Palestine because gentiles are a majority.)

What rules of legal interpretation permit a finding that language is “deliberately ambiguous”? And what rules of ambiguity resolution then apply? “Plain meaning” rules would seem to be inapplicable if the intention of the drafters is to be ambiguous. When a (political) body comes to the “inescapable” conclusion that the language of legal instruments was “deliberately” ambiguous, does that conclusion provide it with the authority to decide for itself how to resolve the ambiguity? Does that mean the body should go back to how the ambiguous language was chosen to see what terms were deliberately rejected, why, and in what way the ambiguous terms were a compromise? Or does it mean that the body can assume that deliberate ambiguity shows the intention by the drafters to allow any interpretation of the drafter’s intentions? When UNSCOP stated: “The fact that the term "National Home" was employed, instead of the word "State" or "Commonwealth" ”, what theory of interpretation permitted it to say that the non-use of such terms “would indicate that the intention was to place a restrictive construction on the National Home scheme from its very inception?" Would the absence of the terms, “self-governing religious institutions”, “municipal authorities”, “ghettoes”, not have indicated the intention to place a non-restrictive construction on the National Home scheme from its very inception?

There are many principles of legal interpretation. One is that an interpretation of any clause in an instrument that preserves the purpose of the entire instrument (and the instrument’s drafting in relation to contemporaneous instruments may be brought to bear on this issue) is to be preferred to one which defeats or contradicts its purpose. The purpose of the Mandate was to give the Jews national (necessarily political) rights (or why use the word “national”?) over territory (or why use the word “home”?) i.e. a nation-state (by definition sovereign). The purposes of the Mandates of Syria and Iraq were to establish nation-states. To interpret “National Home” as intending “nation-state” (albeit not immediately) does less harm to the purpose of the Mandate, than an interpretation of it as meaning some degree of autonomy to be determined later, contingent upon Arab rights. That contingency is based upon the interpretation of another clause protecting gentile civil and religious rights, as meaning the protection of political rights (which existed at the time in connection with religious institutions) and the further interpretation of political rights as Arab national political rights equal to (actually bigger than, a lot bigger, due to relative population numbers) those of the Jews. That interpretation results in defeating the purpose of the Mandate because it demands contradictory and incompatible obligations which render performance impossible. That interpretation converts the Mandate into a a carte blanche for the British to act as political expediency dictated.That interpretation makes the Mandate as a binding instrument of international law for the benefit of the Jews into a nullity from its inception.

If, however, the Mandate was merely a political carte blanche for the British, and if it therefore did not create Jewish rights to Palestine (or any part of it), by the same token it did not create sovereign Arab rights to Palestine. The Jews, nevertheless, established a state. The Arabs did not. Even if a theory of ethnogenesis of Arab Palestinians were to be concocted out of genetic affinities, linguistics, tribal culture, and liberation ideology, that does not provide a legal basis for defining the borders of an Arab Palestinian sovereign state. Even if such a case could be made, there would be no means to implement it without war.

The Arabs have waged war and lost. The Arabs in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon are still at war. At some point, the pro-Palestinian faction on these pages will drop the hypocrisy of criminalizing Israel and openly support Hamas, Iran, Syria and their amassing of the wherewithal finally to secure a victory over Israel.

Herzen

aem
Yes, C. Gee is annoying (as witness his latest wilful distortion of what I have said to him).

However, that is neither here nor there.

This is a propaganda site. The blogger wants to propagate a particular defence of Israel and all its works.

The point of commenting ought to be, I suggest, not simply to vent emotion by saying the equivalent of boo! or hurray! to what the blogger says. It ought to be to assess the arguments, either to strengthen them or to show why they fail.

C. Gee is the best this site has to offer in the way of defence of the sometimes bizarre assertions of the blogger. He is idolized (cf the particularly touching/comic adoration of John Roosevelt). Yet, time and again, when the discussion becomes too difficult, he subsides into name-calling and effortful sarcasm or insists we simply accept the authority of his guru, Grief (or now, alarmingly, Efraim Karsh).

This refusal or inability to sustain debate beyond his comfort level renders the whole exercise in the end futile.

I have tried many times, each time to no avail. Perhaps Mr. Tagalog will fair better, although C. Gee's latest, wearyingly "clever" response to him does not bode well - it illustrates all the failings you clearly find so annoying.

Thomas

C.Gee
June 4th, 2011 5:11pm
This has to be dishonest. It cannot simply be innocent error. You have been told several times why this casuistry fails. You have been told why the documents with legal force do not bear the interpretation you wish to force on them. You have declined to contest what you have been told. You simply repeat again the casuistry which has been shown to fail.

You ask why Mr. Tagalog should go through the arguments again and invite you finally to defend your assertions - perhaps in on the heroic assumption that your assertions are supported by better arguments than you have yet provided. If they are not, then your assertions are revealed as wilful distortions which no amount of technical jargon, of estoppels and paroles, can rescue.

When the best on offer is this we are justified in drawing conclusions.

aem

C. Gee

"The purpose of the Mandate was to give the Jews national (necessarily political) rights (or why use the word “national”?) over territory (or why use the word “home”?) i.e. a nation-state (by definition sovereign)."

Can we take this to be (at last) your explanation of how "national home" morphs into "sovereign state"? And, if so, will you now have the good grace to admit defeat and retire?

Another question, would the US government have been recognising the Sioux nation's national rights to a sovereign state when forcing them into their reservation? - they were a nation and were being given territory, so "necessarily" and "by definition"...

Is the Welsh national home "necessarily" a sovereign state? - it is national and it is a national home, so "necessarily" and "by definition"...

When finally you are betrayed (by your need to dazzle your enemy with the ingenuity of your paroles) into trying to give your positive account rather than simply sneering at everyone else, you unfortunately reveal the paucity of reasoning, the scant evidence, that can be presented in justification of the Zionist supersessionism.

MrTagalog

@CGee

"How do you square this consensus that the Jews had no international legal rights to statehood with what you claim is international law’s acceptance of Israel’s existence?"

Firstly, I have not said that the Jews had no international legal rights to statehood. They were clearly given a claim in the statehood of Palestine. The argument is what that claim was. A claim alongside the Arabs of the area or a claim in substitution, and at the expense of, those Arabs?

But that argument is a sterile irrelevance now, as moribund and irrelevant as the old argument between the Czechs and the Slovaks as to whether their now-dissolved country should be Èeskoslovensko without a hyphen or Èesko‑Slovensko with a hyphen.

It is quite simple: the General Assembly in 1947 recognised the right of Israel to exist in 1947. That may have been a 'recommendatory' resolution but it is impossible to argue that it is not now binding as regards the rights of Israel to exist.

Certainly the Palestinians cannot argue that it is not so binding. Whilst the Palestinian Declaration of Independence of 1988 regrettably failed to directly and specifically acknowledge Israel's existence, it did state that "it is this Resolution [i.e. resolution 181] that still provides those conditions of international legitimacy that ensure the right of the Palestinian Arab people to sovereignty".

By so referring to resolution 181 the Palestinians were acknowledging a divided Palestine notwithstanding any questions about whether their declaration otherwise purported to refer to the whole Mandate territory or not.

By Howard Grief's own beloved estoppel mechanism, neither Israel nor Palestine can or should deny the right of the other to exist as they have both at one time or another accepted resolution 181.

This does not of course mean that the 181 borders apply. We only need to look at the multitude of binding Security Council resolutions (such as 242 itself) to see that the 181 borders are defunct and irrelevant and that the borders can only be the 1948 armistice lines.

But you do not need to take my word for this. This is the essence and clear message of the majority opinion in the ICJ ruling on the security barrier. See for example Professor De Waart's article in the Leiden Journal of International Law number 18 of 2005. He of course focuses on the Palestinian side of it but there are obviously two sides to the 181 coin. If Palestine has a right to sovereignty under 181, so does Israel.

There is therefore no need to blather on about San Remo etc to establish Israel's right to exist. The only aim of such such mutterings can be to justify territorial aggrandisement beyond the armistice lines. If that is for the purposes of establishing a negotiating position for sovereignty over the Western Wall then I have sympathy with the motive (even if I have no truck with the intellectual falsehoods it requires). But as to the rest of the West Bank? Sorry but no. Why don't you go the whole hog and demand half of Jordan while you're at it, after all did not Jabotinsky say that Palestine is a land whose "chief geographical feature" is that "the Jordan River does not delineate its frontiers but flows through its center"?

One final point. The arbiters of what the law is are the judges. One of the few things that the judges of the ICJ and the Israeli Supreme Court agree on is that (excepting Jerusalem) the West Bank is not and never has been Israeli.

C.Gee

aem
June 4th, 2011 10:49am :

Do you know to whom Thomas was referring with “said journalist”.
I have been unable to come by that name honestly or dishonestly.
I should like to read his Strong Horse theory.

“You knew you didn't like one of those engaged in the conversation.”
Are you referring to your Thomas?
I most emphatically do not dislike him. And I should like to meet his Australian friend.

Thomas:

“This has to be dishonest. It cannot simply be innocent error. You have been told several times why this casuistry fails. You have been told why the documents with legal force do not bear the interpretation you wish to force on them.”

Not only have I been told, I’ve been told off.

I do not know what thought process carries you through to judgement, how you weigh evidence, how you decide between competing arguments, what makes an argument a clincher. Based on the above thought process and judgement, I gather that you think as you are told to, possibly by Quigley.

Based upon the quoted demonstration of your thought process, I see that the discussion needs now to focus on the question: “Self-delusion: an honest belief?”

By the way, please tell me the name of “said journalist”.

aem
June 4th, 2011 10:45am

“Karsh!....Supersessionism!” (Why not “Marx!”?)

I see you are illustrating the praxis from your own book, “Palestinian Studies for Dummies.” Chapter Nine: Single Word Ripostes.
“When confronted by reactionary false consciousness, do not engage in bourgeois dialectics. Instead, choose amongst the following:1.Refer to Appendix A: list of insults. “Landlord” is almost always appropriate as the archetype of the dishonest, exploitative property owner, but “Dishonest” alone is always useful. 2. If the ethnogenesis (see Chapter Seven, and Glossary) of Palestine is compared to that of Israel, “Nation!” says it all. 3. Select a word from the reactionary’s own mouth and convert it, by use of an exclamation point (!), into an insult. This is a particularly effective way to challenge reactionary authority. It is a revolutionary act of icon-smashing. Its sub-text is: action! not words!” The Tigers of Wrath are Wiser than the Horses of Instruction.”

Speaking of which, it behooves me to tell you the reason I should like the name of the Strong Horse Theory journalist is that I am working on a book too: “How to Ride.”

Herzen:

The Father of the triunity.

“The point of commenting ought to be, I suggest,...to assess the arguments, either to strengthen them or to show why they fail.”

Or, to show annoyance with me.

Flattered as I am, may I suggest that you return to trying to strengthen the argument for Arab Palestinian statehood? It is quite true, I did feel uncomfortable with the theory of self-determination you concocted out of Majority! Marxism! Being There! Being Arab! Jewish Theft! Zionist Minority! European Foreigners! Plight! and “honestly” did not think it was worth pursuing at the time, as it seemed to have gone about as far as it could go. (It hit the Wall, so to speak, which is the answer in reality to Arab “self-determination”.) I did say as much.

Adam B.

C.Gee

Thomas has tried this "you've been told" line before, along with "this can't be an innocent mistake" ruse.

Meanwhile, he persistently fails to provide reasoned argument, and casually dismisses substantive argument or rational discussion (see his response to the points made in Dr MacEoin's letter on a previous blog) without offering a single refutation.

He really has no right to get on his high horse - he hasn't earned it.

Derek BLADES

The Duke of Clarence courteously posed some good questions about the legal status of Israel. None of the full-time legal pedants from this blog has bothered to answer, so here goes. My answers are in brackets and I should warn the Duke that they rely on a common-sense interpretation of history and not on legal shysterism.

- I am unclear why the San Remo resolutions have any legal effect. Could someone explain this please?
(San Remao has no legal effect. It was a discussion among France, Britain, Italy and Japan about which countries should get which bits of the Ottoman Empire. Only the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine has any legal character.)

- Why bother referring to San Remo at all when the Palestine Mandate says the same thing? The advantage of the Mandate itself is that has the imprimatur of the League. Other than being two years earlier what is so special about San Remo vs the Palestine Mandate?
(San Remo did not “say” anything. It was a discussion among the WW1 victorious powers -minus the United States. What makes San Remo special for Zionists is that some of the things alleged to have been said there could be interpreted as implying a more favourable status for Jews in Palestine than that specified in the Balfour Declaration. But as you say, the Mandate is what matters and that was based on the Balfour Declaration and nothing more. What may or may not have been said in San Remo during coffee breaks or over dinner is irrelevant.)

- If the assertion that San Remo/the Palestine Mandate intended an indissoluble Jewish Palestine, what was intended to happen to the non-Jews living there? As I understand it their rights were protected? And what should happen to those Arabs today? Maybe I am being naive but surely there are only two alternatives: they are either expelled or they have protected civil rights in which event, given what I understand to be the respective population sizes, the Arabs would be in the majority and would be able to elect an Arab government?
(The Palestine Mandate required Britain to give effect to the Balfour Declaration. In principle the rights of the Arabs would be protected. They were not and Britain failed in its Mandatory duty. Israel opted for the first alternative you mention and expelled enough Arabs to ensure a Jewish majority in the new state of Israel.)

- Is MrTagalog correct that Melanie Phillips' legal analysis is not shared by the Israeli Supreme Court? That would be quite surprising to me if it were true.
(Mr Tagalog is quite correct. Both the Israeli Supreme court and the International Court of Justice agree on the status of the occupied territories. They are not part of Israel.)

Augustus

Derek Blades - Perhaps the Duke should simply have looked up Howard Grief:

"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."

Anyway, following the League Council's ratification, and it's recognition of the Jewish Agency as the public body responsible for co-operating with the Mandate's administration 'as may effect the establishment of the Jewish National Home', the Jews faced two obstacles during the inter-war years: Arab immigration from other Arab countries was rife, and British restrictions on Jewish immigration was imposed, and this was due entirely to strong Arab opposition both from inside Palestine and from the surrounding Arab countries. It's certainly not a question of
'expelling' Arabs, as you suggest, but considering the smallness of the Jewish territory compared to the vastness of the territories populated by the Arabs, together with the hatred towards the Jewish settlers boosted by their leaders, it is small wonder that Zionist leaders rejected a bi-national
state in Palestine.

Derek BLADES

@ Augustus

You quote Howard Grief as asserting that "the whole country of Palestine and the Land of Israel belong exclusively to the Jewish people under international law."

That is just one of the reasons why Grief is generally regarded as bonkers. The Duke of Clarence will do better trusting my narrative..

For the record, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United Nations side with me rather than Mr. Grief. Ever feel lonely out there Augustus?

C.Gee

Mr. Tagalog:

“Firstly, I have not said that the Jews had no international legal rights to statehood. They were clearly given a claim in the statehood of Palestine. The argument is what that claim was. A claim alongside the Arabs of the area or a claim in substitution, and at the expense of, those Arabs?”

What is the legal meaning of a right to “a claim in the statehood of Palestine”. “In the statehood of Palestine” is a puzzler. Statehood is sovereignty. So if “a claim in the statehood of Palestine” means a “claim in the sovereignty of Palestine,” there is only one way two competing sovereignties can live “alongside” each other: partition of the region of Palestine into two, with a population exchange (de facto the case). The idea of federation of the Jewish State with Arab States (with federal power necessarily being in the hands of the Arabs) was also put forward. Otherwise, in a unitary state, one claim to sovereignty must be subordinated to the other. Is there a constitutional answer? The right of the minority to certain offices in government (see Lebanon)? Certain large settlements - towns - given local autonomy? The Jews, of course, would have to be the subordinated sovereignty. It would seem that “National Home” is reduced to meaning, if Jews are lucky, a Jew as a cabinet minister and the ability, say, to turn a Jewish enclave into an eruv. If they are unlucky - well, it’s deja vu all over again. Faisal, as I am sure you know, offered what could be termed the “Welsh” or the “reservation” option to the Jews. Space made for the Jews to be Jews in, tolerance of their religious practices, encouragement of their business activities, but under the rule of Faisal. A return to their status under Ottoman law. Promises, promises. No sovereignty, no ability to make the law, to become a self-governing polity. We have, in reverse, the objections put up by the Palestinians to living under Jewish State jurisdiction - with this difference: there are Arab citizens of Israel who are entitled to vote - which is a valid political realization of a “claim in the statehood of Palestine”.

The “right to exist” of a state is not a term of international law. There is de facto or de jure recognition of a state in international law. The UN has no authority to create a “right” for a state to exist. It may authorize putting in place the institutional machinery (referenda, elections, a government) by which legally to incorporate a collective as a state. It has provided legal tests for statehood readiness, which it can declare to have been met. It can declare a nation-state as a voting member of the United Nations. Individual states may withhold recognition, or give partial recognition.

The ramifications of Resolution 181 are not “simple”, nor do they concern rights to exist.

Israel’s right to exist was not recognized by the PLO in its acceptance of Resolution 181 decades after 181 became legally irrelevant. The legal meaning of the PLO’s “acceptance”, and whether it has any legal significance at all, is subject to legal debate. But if it has significance for the PLO, it is not in its recognition of Israel’s right to exist. The PLO would be horrified at that reading. In its acceptance of Resolutions 181 and 242 in the “Declaration of Palestinian Independence” in November 1988, the PLO created the constitutional instrument of Palestinian statehood. Arab Palestine existed, thenceforward, as the Arab State authorized by Resolution 181, with the PLO as its government, located within the partition borders, and by the operation of 242, that Arab State was de facto recognized as the sovereignty to whom its “occupied” (1967) territory must be returned. Significantly, acceptance of Resolution 242, authorized the PLO “resistance” against the “occupation” of the Arabs State’s territory between the armistice lines and 1967 lines. Terrorism against Israel was constitutionally enshrined for the Arab State simultaneously with acceptance of the “two-state solution”.

“The Declaration [of Palestinian Independence, November 15, 1988] contains an overt acceptance that “the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, of 1947, which partitioned Palestine into two states […] provides the legal basis for the right of the Palestinian Arab people to national sovereignty and independence.” The PLO's recognition of Resolution 181, along with their acknowledgment (in the same session of the PNC) of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 as the basis for negotiating a
settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, signaled the Palestinians’ formal acceptance of a two-state solution.” http://www.plomission.us/uploads/Historic%20Compromise%20FAQs.pdf

The formal acceptance of a two-state solution is de facto recognition of Israel as the entity with which to negotiate borders and to make war upon as the occupying enemy. That is the extent of it. And as for the Jewish Agency’s acceptance of 181 - before the declaration of the state of Israel - it does not bind Israel to an acceptance of Arab Palestine’s “right to exist”. What the Jews accepted, provisionally, and under duress and in desperation to bring in Jewish survivors of the world war, were the borders of a Jewish State.

Here’s Howard Grief: [ for many the many reasons he earlier explains - including the lack of authority of the UN to partition Palestine ] “the Jewish Agency’s initial approval of the Partition Plan, which was then reiterated in Israel’s Proclamation of Independence, was stripped of all meaning and left without any legal force. That meant that the doctrine of estoppel applied neither to the State of Israel nor to the Jewish Agency, who were released from any obligation they may arguably have had to abide by the territorial provisions of the Partition Plan.”

For Zionists, then, Resolution 181 is a dead letter. For the Palestinians, it is their retroactively established foundational legal grant of sovereignty. For Zionists, the grant of sovereignty to the Jews came with the instruments listed by Howard Grief, including the San Remo Declaration. That is why Zionists like to “blather” on about it. We blather on about it not to argue that Israel has a “right to exist”, but to argue that the Jewish people have superior legal rights to sovereignty over the whole of Palestine. Yes, that means not only over half of Jordan - but the whole of it. We do that not in the expectation of taking Jordan, but in the hope of putting backbone into Israeli policies to safe-guard what remains of Jewish sovereignty so that Israel will continue to exist.

Finally, as I am sure you know, there is no judge or judgment without jurisdiction. What constitutes final authority for dispositive judgments is the subject of a great deal of legal blather, in which the ICJ’s advisory opinions serve as foot-notes.

C.Gee

Adam B:

Chinggis Khan in Zonjin Boldog comes to mind.

C.Gee

The Duke of Clarence:

Better to drown in a butt of Malmsey that be led by Derek BLADES to any other conclusion.

Truthtriumphs

Drek Blades @ June 5th.

"Israel opted for the first alternative you mention and expelled enough Arabs to ensure a Jewish majority in the new state of Israel."

That is a pernicious lie, which has been refuted by every serious historian of the subject.
It is a lie of the same order as that of David Irving and his Holocaust denial.
It is a crude lie, designed to instill hatred of the Jewish people in those who are ignorant of the facts that led up to the re-creation of the Jewish state.
Interesting, that the extraordinary events that we are witnessing now in the Arab world, particularly the brutal repression of the Syrians people by the dictatorship there, and the torture and demise of mere children that is the hallmark of that regime, seem to leave you unmoved.
The only thing that titillates and motivates you, is the demonisation of the Jewish people under the thin veneer of concern for the Arabs and Palestinians.
What have you ever done to improve their lives by one jot?
We all know the answer to that one.

Truthtriumphs

The Duke of Clarence
June 3rd, 2011 8:09pm

"An interesting exchange of views on this thread. Very learned!

A couple of questions for those of us less well informed:

- I am unclear why the San Remo resolutions have any legal effect. Could someone explain this please?

- Why bother referring to San Remo at all when the Palestine Mandate says the same thing? The advantage of the Mandate itself is that has the imprimatur of the League. Other than being two years earlier what is so special about San Remo vs the Palestine Mandate?"

This will help you.
It's what the propagandists on this site---aem, Herzen, Blades inter alia, don't want you to hear.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWWvKsrb8u8&feature=related

aelle

In all the historical debate over the Terms and intent of The Balfour Declaration, the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, the discussions at San Remo, Sevres and I know not where else, I am surprised to find no mention of The British White Paper of 1922, otherwise known as The Churchill White Paper. Issued prior to the Mandate this statement of British policy attempted to clarify conflicting interpretations that were being made of the critical,well-known but somewhat enigmatic eighteen words at the core of Balfour's declaration :
" His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people...".

The White Paper spells out that the terms of the Balfour Declaration "...do not contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded "in Palestine".

It continues to say that "the status of all citizens of Palestine in the eyes of the law shall be Palestinian".

It further refers to the
"unfounded fears" of some of the Jewish population of Palestine in relation to the British committment to implementing the Declaration and states unequivocally that British policy on the issue is
" not susceptible of change".

The well-intentioned, if ultimately unattainable British vision of a single Palestinian State encompassing both a 'home' for the resident and immigrating Jewish population and the existing population of Muslim and Christian Arabs and others was destined to founder amidst mutual antipathy,intolerance,mistrust and violence.

Only a few years later the Peel Commission recognised that Partition and the creation of separate Jewish and Arab States was the most realistic solution to developments in the region.
The United Nations at the end of World War II came to the same conclusion.

That the politicians and those from the international community with an interest in the peace and stability of the region have not assented to the inescapable logic of this course of action has been and continues to be a disaster for the long-suffering ordinary Arabs and Israelis of the former Palestine.

History shows that the British and the French were at each others throats for centuries, that we fought two deadly World Wars against Germany in the last century, but only the nihilists look forward to Armageddon.

Western statesmen of goodwill are entitled - obligated even, to work towards a resolution of conflict, whatever it takes. And clearly the principal players in the area have to demonstrate integrity,flexibility and sincerity in reaching a permanent peaceful solution.

The cynics,sceptics and paranoid warmongers, like the poor of whom Jesus spoke,will ,sadly, always be with us, and on both sides of whatever lines are finally drawn.

The truth is these people have nothing to offer the world but the same old depressing cycle of violence and hatred.

If you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem.

C.Gee

aelle:

The “White Paper” is so well known that it commonly referred to the “infamous White Paper”.

“If you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem.”

That old saw is a pretty good summary of the WP. The Jews, being the problem, could not be allowed a part in its solution.

Which is a shame, because had there not been a WP, the Jewish State of Palestine might have been an alternative to the later “final” solution of the Jewish problem.

Augustus

aem - The Churchill White Paper of June 3rd
1922 also made a concrete pledge to the Jews
that "it is essential that it should know that it is in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance. That is the reason why it is necessary that the existence of a Jewish National Home in Palestine should be internationally guaranteed, and that it should be formally recognized to rest upon ancient historic connection."

And the means whereby the Zionist community
could take advantage of this pledge came only a few weeks later, in July 1922, as a result of Article 4 of the League of Nations
Mandate, ratified by the Council, which endorsed an 'appropriate Jewish agency' i.e.
The Jewish Agency, operating in the interests of the Jewish population of Palestine "as may effect the establishment
of the Jewish National Home".

No deception there then. That came later!

Drakken

Aelle,

Sorry but the reality versus your wishful thinking gets people killed because the more you try to appease the arabs the more they are going to take, it is as simple as that. The reason your PM is not siding with Israel is that the non-natives are threating to terrorize Britain. Now you are seeing the rise of EDL because the establishment refuses to see the damage they have wrought. The govts of the west are truely afraid of the upcoming events about to be unleashed. So it is a very simple choice, you either side with the west ie Israel or side with the very folks that will kill you.

Augustus

Sorry, my post of 6/6, 6.42pm is addressed to aelle, not aem.
Sorry for that!

Truthtriumphs

Augustus
June 6th, 2011 8:16pm

"Sorry, my post of 6/6, 6.42pm is addressed to aelle, not aem.
Sorry for that!"

Apology unnecessary, they are one and the same.

aelle

Augustus,

You are quite right to point out that the Churchill White Paper underlined the logical inference of the Balfour Declaration that those Jewish people who chose to participate in the establishment of a
'national home' 'in Palestine' should be considered to be there as of right, and that their presence should be
'internationally guaranteed' and 'formally recognised to rest upon ancient historic connection'.

I am not sure that, either now or at any time in the ninety odd years since the British first took the step of encouraging the Jewish re-population of Palestine, has the British government or reasonable British public opinion deviated one iota from this humane and morally defensible position.

The Zionist movement had of course a momentum of its own in the 19th century, and it is futile to speculate on what outcome there might have been had the British not sought and obtained a mandate to administer Palestine and encourage the establishment there of a Jewish home.

In the White Paper the British government also welcomed the expression from the Zionist Congress held at Carlsbad in September 1921 of
" the determination of the Jewish people to live with the Arab people on terms of unity and mutual respect, and together with them to make the common home into a flourishing community,the upbuilding of which may assure to each of its peoples an undisturbed national development."

" Unity and mutual respect "-
" Undisturbed national development "

Not exactly how the West Bank looks today, is it?

The British, sucked into a deadly maelstrom of resentment, provocation, hatred and violence tried for a while to contain the situation, often wrong-headedly, caught in an escalating spiral of death and destruction, and finally became the pig in the middle for the murderers from both sides.
Whether they deserve to be further labelled and libelled as deceivers is another issue.
I would have thought it enough that hundreds of British lives were lost in an episode that has seen the creation of the Jewish State of Israel and may finally see at long last the creation of an Arab State of Palestine.

Since nothing short of this outcome can ever stand a chance of establishing peace in the area it is difficult to see the logic of resisting such developments.

aelle

Drakken

Your vision of the Middle East as a kind of Desolation Row with everybody shouting 'Which Side Are You On?' is profoundly depressing.
As is the insistence by you and those who think like you that
" Nobody is escaping from Desolation Row."

There has to be someone who can hear more than Cinderella sweeping up the broken glass.

The Duke of Clarence

@truthtriumphs

"This will help you.
It's what the propagandists on this site---aem, Herzen, Blades inter alia, don't want you to hear.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWWvKsrb8u8&feature=related"

Unfortunately this just seems to repeat the assertions without actually answering the questions. It doesn't say for example why San Remo has any legal effect at all.

aelle

Beyond the chance adoption of screen names commencing with the first two vowels I have to disappoint Truthharrumphs and reveal that aelle and aem are to the best of my knowledge unrelated.
It is of course well known that Truthharrumphs, Augustus, the capital Mr Roosevelt, Adam B et al are cover names for the same Mossad operative.
Mr Rothbart, on the other hand, appears to have both a brain and a heart.
Finally Mr Blades, who I was rather hoping to bump into in the Rue Cler the other day - I have this vision of him as a haut fonctionnaire at UNESCO - is, it has to be said, a national treasure and the sort of fellow who was first out of the trenches in WWI.

Truthtriumphs

aelle
June 7th, 2011 12:07pm

"Beyond the chance adoption of screen names commencing with the first two vowels I have to disappoint Truthharrumphs and reveal that aelle and aem are to the best of my knowledge unrelated."

Methinks not.
The similarities are too obvious.... same condescension, same pomposity, same arrogance, same use of arcane language, designed to give impression of superior knowledge and same barely concealed detestation of Jewish success, creativity, ingenuity, and, above all, resilience, against all the odds

Truthtriumphs

The Duke of Clarence

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWWvKsrb8u8&feature=related"

"Unfortunately this just seems to repeat the assertions without actually answering the questions. It doesn't say for example why San Remo has any legal effect at all."

You didn't pay attention.
The San Remo Resolution was adopted by the league,and incorporated into the legally binding Mandate for Palestine document in 1922.
As Grief explained, the resolution was incorporated into the Treaty of Sevres, later that year, but it was never formally ratified, hence the Mandate document.

aelle

Truthharrumphs

If it were not so discourteous I might be tempted to suggest you have a very bad case of paranoia,but then you would probably object that the accusation was part of an antisemitic conspiracy.

I have to wonder whether you ever met and planted an idea in the mind of one William Norman Ewer, God rest his soul.

Thomas

Adam B.
June 4th, 2011 11:30pm
I will tell you again.

Every point you found so impressive in the letter has been answered again and again here. Every time each point comes up again, you pretend it has not been addressed - yet you treat each repetition of each point by the blogger or by such as this letter-writer as a blinding revelation.

As for C. Gee, he failed to read a convesation yet felt able to butt in. If he had read the conversation, he would have had the information he sought, which might have enabled him to make a contribution.

Thomas

"For Zionists, the grant of sovereignty to the Jews came with the instruments listed by Howard Grief, including the San Remo Declaration."

Precisely.

And this is how C. Gee gets from National Home to Sovereign State:

"The purpose of the Mandate was to give the Jews national (necessarily political) rights (or why use the word “national”?) over territory (or why use the word “home”?) i.e. a nation-state (by definition sovereign)."

By C. Gee's admission, this is what the Zionist case comes down to - and what is it? casuistry and the abuse of the terms "necessarily" and "by definition".

Balfour did not promise a sovereign state. The Mandate did not promise a sovereign state - those who drafted it explicitly denied that it promised a sovereign state.

Hence the need for casuistry and the abuse of "necessarily" and "by definition".

This is what the Zionist case comes down to.

(As a comment on Mr. Grief: among the "instruments" he cites are an unwritten alleged agreement between Clemenceau and Lloyd George (which appears to have been simply an agreement that Britian would be Mandate Power in Palestine) and a "Smuts Resolution", which was in fact simply a memo written by Smuts containing a draft proposal submitted to HMG prior to the FO's drafting of the system of Mandates.)

(At the same time that Balfour was allegedly promising the Zionists a sovereign state - in fact, only a National Home -, HMG was also promising Turkey continued sovereignty over Palestine if it would abandon its alliance with the Central Powers. - And this was the promise incorporated into San Remo explicitly not as the promise of a state. The more you look at it, the more tenuous and attenuated it becomes.)

No wonder C. Gee relies so heavily on heavy sarcasm, estoppels and paroles, and abuse, to make his sophistry appear less flimsy.

Augustus

Thomas - You must have a very vague understanding of political evolution if your repeated attempts at deligitimizing Israel's foundational authority to govern itself is anything to go by. In 1921, when
T.E.Lawrence was negotiating with Arab leaders he concluded an agreement with Hussein's eldest son, Emir Feisal, under which, in return for Arab sovereignty in Baghdad, Amman and Damascus, Feisal agreed to abandon all claims of his father to Palestine. So therefore the Jewish National Home could but have no lesser claim to its envisaged future sovereignty than that which had now been accepted by the prominent Arabs of the region. Because, once the various thrones had been allocated the Jewish National Home in Western Palestine (under British control)
could only become in time a Jewish sovereign state. All your pontificating about what Balfour did or didn't say or mean in 1917 is frankly absurd and a preposterous attempt at revisionism of an accepted evolutionary fact.

Another Joshua

@Thomas

I read your comments (and Herzen's) which go through contortions to arrive at an unfinished point: San Remo and the mandate did not mean a Jewish State.

But you don't make out a clear argument at all that it should mean anything else? And if it did mean something else (AT THE TIME), what could it have possibly have meant? How would such an idea have worked?
And on and on.
Don't go through all the memos and disagreements of opinion by Curzon et al and just deal with the terms that any ordinary person can make of what was written.

You see, I believe what happened since those key decisions were taken, different interests came into play. Those interests correspond with concurrent events that prompted a volte face change and outlook, particularly by members of the Colonial Office, who started to see Palestine, not so much as something the Jews should have, but something to be held onto to serve their own Empire . At the time of San Remo, it was clearly an intention for ALL Jews, that is 14 million of them, should be allowed to settle in Palestine.It was not at all clear, at the time how many would arrive.

Today's discussion however is based on something much more dubious. Trying to argue Jews are not a nation, A home could not have meant country or state and both these points are argued in isolation to all other points to make a case that Israel, ultimately has no right to be. Those clever clogg Zionist conned everyone and deprived the "true" owners of th"their" land, disregarding all land purchases by Jews before.

If all fails in argument , you go on to question the rights of the British and French (and others)to have agreed on the division of the Ottoman Empire in the first place, disregarding the inhabitants and Arab national rights, but only with regard to the Palestine Mandate. But they didn't disregard the Arabs did they? They created other Mandates just for them and not for Jews and those non-Jews under the Palestine Mandate were not forgotten either as they are mentioned too.

That's really what your comments are all about isn't it? The very thought that Palestine would be "reconstitud" ie a recognition of Jewish ownership from the past does not fit in with your future conception of what Israel should become - another "secular" (read mainly Arab) country.

Well Thomas, I have news for you. It has not worked out that way, nor will it. The current legal rights to the land are well made out by Grief (and not only Grief)and until the parties agree on new territorial boundaries, the old ones remain, whether both sides like it or not.

Thomas

"As to the meaning of the words 'national home', to which the Zionists attach so much importance, (the Foreign Secretary) understood it to mean some form of British, American, or other protectorate, under which full facilities would be given to Jews to work out their own salvation, and to build up, by means of education, agriculture, and industry, a real centre of national culture and focus of national life. It did not necessarily involve the early establishment of an independent Jewish State, which was a matter of gradual development in accordance with the ordinary laws of political evolution."

This is Balfour's own gloss on his Declaration. The Declaration was the nearest the Zionists got to the promise they sought. Thereafter, according to them, it was all betrayal and perfidy.

Yet there is nothing about rights to territory. No "necessarily" (except "not necessarily the early establishment" of a state)and no "by definition". A protectorate only. If a state is to eventuate, it will be by the "ordinary laws of political evolution". (In case you hadn't noticed, there is no such thing as a law of political evolution.) Who hearing the like from a politician would take it to be the clear promise of a state? - The "promise of a state" is spin by those who want it to mean that. At most, he is hinting that HMG will not stand in the way of the Zionists. Yet even this is hedged with guarantees to the population of Palestine.

Even in the document the Zionists insist was a promise of a state, and in the minutes of the cabinet meeting at which the promise was allegedly endorsed by HMG, there is no promise of a state. And this is the document whose incorporation into the Mandate Treaty is said to give legal foundation to a Jewish State. It doesn't. And the signatories to the treaty said as much.

Yet still the Zionists insist that the Declaration, San Remo, and the Mandate Treaty give legal form to a clear promise of a Jewish State. As with so much else in the propaganda, this is simply false.

Thomas

Augustus
June 7th, 2011 4:52pm
I think you will find that you are simply wrong about what Feisal did and did not agree to.

Drakken

aelle
Unfortunately you are not seeing the reality on the ground, it is not someone shouting which side your on that matters, but what you are willing to do other that have an acedemic excercise in futility that will matter. The new troubles ahead are inevitable, the question is, where are you going to stand?

Truthtriumphs

aelle
June 7th, 2011 2:23pm
Truthharrumphs

"If it were not so discourteous I might be tempted to suggest you have a very bad case of paranoia,but then you would probably object that the accusation was part of an antisemitic conspiracy".

Still waiting for your explanation as to why you describe the Hampstead Garden Suburb, "occupied territory".
You are uncharacteristically reticent on that point. Why?

If that wasn't an antisemitic jibe, what was it?

C.Gee

“No wonder C. Gee relies so heavily on heavy sarcasm, estoppels and paroles, and abuse, to make his sophistry appear less flimsy.”

Dear Thomas,

Thank you for having me to your party.

I had a lovely time. I didn’t know it was “black tie”, so it was nice of you to let me in wearing my heavy overalls. They were not intended to cause offense.

The pony ride was great fun. It was nice of you to bend the rules and let me ride, especially as I didn’t know “black tie” meant “bring hard riding hat”.

Hide-and-Seek was exciting. Different rules from the usual ones. You know the best hiding places in your house. Thank you for suggesting the wood-shed for me to hide in. No-one found me.

I got to take off a lot of wrapping in Pass-the-Parcel. I am sorry you didn’t like the prize you snatched at the last second, but prizes are always small in P-the-P. I hope you didn’t cut your foot stomping it.

Hunt-the-Thimble was a good idea. You kept saying “warmer”, but I never did find it. It’s probably still there where you put it, somewhere in the library. It was nice of you to let me play. I hadn’t realized that it was only for guests who knew the secret password. I was late because I waited in the wood-shed for quite a long time.

Pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey was a wheeze! You won, right on my arse! It didn’t smart. My overalls stopped the pin from drawing blood.

The tea looked scrumptious. I quite understand that the dining room is the one place where formal dress must be insisted upon. You are quite the stickler! Thank you for the sandwich you told me to eat in the kitchen.

Thank you for inviting me to your b-b-q, but I’m afraid my Hawaiian shirt and parasol are at the cleaners, together with my heavy suits, summer suits and all my sport gear. I have to see a man about a horse every day for the foreseeable future. In the evenings I play whack-a-mole over at Melanie’s place. Maybe I’ll see you there sometime.

Your friend,
C. “Smart-Arse” Gee

aem

C. Gee,
You are of course quite right that I should not have been reduced by your chutzpah to squawks of incredulity.

In fairness, citing Efraim Karsh as an authority is like calling Alan Dershowitz honest.

Concocting a conspiracy whose members include Christians, Marxists, Muslims, Nazis, recalls the worst of conspiracy theorists who sees dark forces wherever their wishes are thwarted, or, in this instance, where they get their wish but aren't greeted with unbridled joy, acquiescence and admiration.

All the accusations directed at everyone and anyone, all the abstractions, all the casuistry and insults, all are brought to bear to try to disguise the fact that this is really very simple: the Zionist project was a straightforward land grab, aided by great powers, but with no justification other than that the Zionists wanted the land and had the military and diplomatic power to get it. Nothing more complicated than that. No need to invoke dark powers to explain why the inhabitants resisted. No great conspiracy against the Zionists because they are Jewish. No legally-binding promise to the Zionists that makes their grab okay, no mystical right from God or ancient history.

Trouble is, when it is stripped of bogus complexity and the swirling clouds of conspiracy and melodrama lift, the solution is all too evident - partial restitution and compromise.

P.S. Your letter to Thomas is hilarious.

It would have been as easy for you to find the reference to the American journalist as to provide on request the quotes from Grief you so depend upon. A little hint: anyone of moderate inteliigence would have found that Penny had provided the reference.

Derek BLADES

Tuttitrumps asked aelle this question:

"Still waiting for your explanation as to why you describe the Hampstead Garden Suburb, "occupied territory". You are uncharacteristically reticent on that point. Why? If that wasn't an antisemitic jibe, what was it?"

It was a joke silly - quite a good one for anyone with an ounce of commonsense.

PS are you sure aelle wrote it?

aem

A footnote for C. Gee on Strong Horses and such stereotyping. In the mid-90s, Zawahiri persuaded Bin Laden that al qaeda should focus on provoking America's "cowboy mentality".

And, by the way, I just noticed that you made good use of the exclamatory! manner in your comments to Herzen (again, hilarious). Your exclamations make clear he gave several good reasons to think the people of Palestine had a right to self-determination; and you could provide no reply so decided the debate had gone as far as it could (not for the first time - you are in practice as "prudent" as Truthtriumphs).

C.Gee

Well, aem, you last apercu proves the adage that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

aem

C.Gee
June 8th, 2011 8:10pm
"I have to think of a jibe to get off replying while still feeling superior...and it has to include horses...nope, can't think of one...just use this old one on its way to the knackers yard (oh, I'm so witty, I amaze myself)"

aem

..horses.. take to water...gift horse...gee-gees...knacker's yard...come on, losing credibility here...

aem

"... did not think it was worth pursuing at the time, as it seemed to have gone about as far as it could go...Phew that'll have to do ...again."

aelle

Drakken

If you are driving a well protected armoured vehicle at high speed across the desert towards a huddle of miserable looking camels you have a choice:
Keep straight on with foot hard down and intone -' an accident is inevitable '
or perhaps slow down, change direction a bit, go round them rather than through them.
The result of the first course of action is a lot of dead camels and the risk of writing off the armoured vehicle.
The alternative option? No dead camels and no damage to the motor.
At the end of the day it's always the high speed driver who makes the critical decisions, and the camels will keep right on spitting at you either way. It's in their nature. They always thought they owned the desert anyway. That's why they've got the hump.

As for where I stand - in the words of an old gospel song -
I,m Standing in the Safety Zone,
always assuming there is one.

Derek BLADES

"Now Cameron has threatened that Britain may support a move [recognition of Palestine] which will once again make a mockery of legality by tearing up international agreements and binding UN resolutions."

Ms Phillips chutzpah is breath-taking. Israel has been "tearing up international agreements and binding UN resolutions" since its foundation. If the UK does indeed vote to recognise a Palestinian state with the 1967 borders it will be precisely because Israel refuses to recognise international law and ICJ rulings.

Cameron understands that this may be a last chance to stop Israel's land theft leading, inevitably, to the disastrous one-state solution.

Augustus

They call him 'Abu Ali' (the exalted father). 66 years ago he killed himself after he had covered the whole of Europe with an insane war of destruction. In the Arabic countries of the Middle East, however, he is honoured by many, including
terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. But in Germany and elsewhere he is known by another name: Adolf Hitler. With Egyptians
who raise their hands in the Hitler salute,
with Syrians who draw Swastikas, and with Palestinians who shout 'Heil Hitler', have the Nazis truly succeeded in that which the allies managed to prevent in Europe? Was it
Hitler, perhaps, who kick-started the radicalism which we are now experiencing in the world? How can the Palestinian politics of today still be influenced by historical
Nazi anti-Semitism?

"Your only hope of salvation is the destruction of the Jews, before they destroy
you", blared from the radio. It was the evening of 7th July, 1942. World War Two was
raging and the Nazi propaganda machine was in full swing. But this radio broadcast was not aimed at the German people. It wasn't even broadcast to Germany. It was being broadcast on 'The Voice of Free Arabia', in Arabic, and could be received from Syria to Saudi Arabia, from Egypt to Morocco. Produced and transmitted by the German Reich's Ministry of Propaganda. So could all the terror and violence in Israel and Gaza be a direct consequence of such 70 year-old broadcasts? The American historian,
Jeffrey Herf says it could. He has listened to 6,000 hours of such broadcasts which are in the National Archives in College Park,
Maryland. They were transmitted between the autumn of 1939 until March 1945 and monitored by the British Secret Service. They included Arabian music, news items, and readings from the Koran, with frequent interuption of hate messages against the Jews. But did they accomplish their goal?
Not at first, it seems. It's difficult to imagine now, but until the 1930s, Jews and Arabs lived generally peacefully together in the ME. When Hitler first came to power
Palestine and the Holy City of Jerusalem were under British control. But As Nazi anti-Semitism grew more virulent, more and more Jews made their way to the Holy Land.
Cultural differences weren't really a problem until the Islamic leader and Grand Mufti, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, created a pact with Hitler. His aim was to persuade Britain to drive the Jews out of Palestine.
"Arabs are the natural friends of Germany
because they have a common enemy", he said.
Al-Husseini became the vocal leader and the voice of Free Arabia. He underlined his messages of persecution with quotations from
the Koran. "Truly, you will discover that Jews are, of all the peoples, the greatest
enemy of all believers." A call for wholesale genocide was to follow. And that
destructive seed now blossoms in the whole of the ME.

Peter

A good argument, Melanie, but the effect is weakened not strengthened by intemperate asides.

Drakken

aelle
I find your camel and armoured vehicle very amusing and I say that is why we have crash bumbers for them. Too simple, soon there will be no so called safety zone. The arabs will never ever give the jews any peace, you can take that to the bank. When they start creating havoc in your country the only people you will be rely on is your own tribe. I leave you with this, give the arabs an inch they will demand the proverbial mile. So please keep dreaming moonbeams and sing a lot of kumbaya.

michael moodie

Melanie, Hold it a second....my grandfather never used expressions like "Judeophobic".. doesn't this risk over-dramatising an admittedly difficult situation ??

Michael M.

Sue Harvey

A wonderful example of cognitive dissonance. History rewritten.

Caer Urfa

More deaths than at first broadcast ,now 26 and over 300 injured! Egypt's rulers certainly know how to control Christian reactions to the destruction of a church! Imagine what would have ensued had the Coptic Christians retaliated by burning down a mosque!As I said before,the thin end of a very big Islamic wedge that will open all doors in the north African Moslem states to the the creeping cancer that is Wahabi fundamentalism! The downhill slide towards east/west conflict is slowly beginning to accelerate! The gradual increase of fundamentalist influence and it's abhorrence to the state of Israel will usher in the sort of brinkmanship that will inevitably result in a face saving conflict as Islam tries to eradicate what it considers an anathema in the land of Palestine.

Maurice Raynor

What a disaster.
We had all better wake up have we not learned anything these last 100 years and before?