David Singer: Palestine Wallows With Sweden In Ikea La-La-Land

Here's the latest article by Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer.

He writes:

Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom’s announcement on 30 October that Sweden has recognised the State of Palestine elicited a response from Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman that will surely go down as one of the most memorable diplomatic quotes of 2014:

"It is too bad that the government of Sweden has chosen to adopt the measure that does a lot of damage and has no benefits. Sweden must understand that relations in the Middle East are much more complicated than self-assembly furniture at Ikea"

Ms Wallstrom’s reasons for justifying Sweden’s incredible decision were:

“The Government considers that the international law criteria for the recognition of the State of Palestine have been satisfied. 

There is a territory, albeit with non-defined borders. There is also a population. And there is a government with the capacity for internal and external control…. 

The Government's assessment that the international law criteria have been fulfilled is shared by international law experts, including Professor Ove Bring, Professor Said Mahmoudi and Professor Pål Wrange, who recently wrote an opinion piece on this subject in Dagens Nyheter (20 October).”

It seems inconceivable that Professor Bring, Professor Mahmoudi and Professor Wrange could have reached the conclusions attributed to them by Ms Wallstroms.

Hopefully someone conversant in the Swedish language might be kind enough to post a translation in English to verify what they actually wrote.

Certainly Ms Wallstrom’s assertion that the international criteria for recognition of the State of Palestine have been satisfied – are rebutted by the clear terms of Article 1 the Montevideo Convention 1934 – which expressly provide:

“The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: 

a) a permanent population; 

b) a defined territory;

 c) government; and 

d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.”

 Failure to even mention that there must be a permanent population before Sweden can possibly begin the diplomatic process of recognising the State of Palestine indicates the incredulity that Ms Wallstrom’s announcement has produced.

 Sweden is sending a clear signal that masks an underlying  and sinister racist and apartheid attitude – that Jews presently living in the West Bank have no right to expect to continue living there as part of the State of Palestine’s permanent population.

 The fact that Jews have lived, died and been buried in the West Bank since Biblical times with the exception of a 19 year period between 1948-1967 seems to be strangely absent from Sweden’s current thinking.

The fact that international law – Article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the UN Charter – authorises and legalises close settlement by Jews on West Bank land – including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes – while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced – seems to have passed under Sweden’s radar and that of the panel of its international law experts.

 Equally as incredible is the fact that Sweden considers that the legal requirements for a State can be met in an undefined area with non-defined boundaries.

 Effective control of territory is required – boundaries are not and have never been a necessary legal pre-requisite. 

 Sweden is of course entitled to do whatever it likes in pursuit of its perceived national interests – no matter how inept and incompetent its decisions might be.

 However having apparently done so on its total misconception and misinterpretation of international law surely should give Sweden cause for second thought.

 Ironically any such reconsideration now has its own problems in international law – since Article 6 of the Montevideo Convention further provides:

“The recognition of a state merely signifies that the state which recognizes it accepts the personality of the other with all the rights and duties determined by international law. Recognition is unconditional and irrevocable.”

Among Sweden’s well-known exports are the “do-it yourself” furniture and home product construction kits emanating from Ikea – which proudly states on its website:

“We want to have a positive impact on people and the planet.”

If the Swedish Government thought its decision to recognise the State of Palestine would have a similar effect – then it has been gravely mistaken. 

How Sweden builds relations with the State of Palestine - whilst missing pieces integral to its construction prevent it becoming a functioning entity Sweden can conduct meaningful diplomatic relations with - remains to be seen.

Perhaps Sweden should have heeded another successful Swedish export – Abba - whose “Waterloo” lyrics will surely resonate to Sweden’s future embarrassment: 

“My, my, at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender

Oh yeah, and I have met my destiny in quite a similar way
The history book on the shelf
Is always repeating itself”

Ignoring history by attempting to unilaterally recognize a second Arab State in former Palestine for the first time ever in recorded history – in addition to Jordan – whilst 

    the PLO Covenant  

    the Hamas Charter and 

    the declared intentions of the Islamic State

 oppose that solution – is a certain recipe for disaster.

 Ms Wallstrom further declared:

 “In 2009 EU Member States reiterated their readiness to recognise a Palestinian State, when appropriate. We are now ready to lead the way. “

EU member States tempted to follow Sweden into this political quagmire based on a reading of international law lacking any credibility whatsoever will only exacerbate the Arab-Jewish conflict – not resolve it.  

Sweden has now become stuck with a fictitious and non-existent State of Palestine wallowing in an Ikea la-la-land.


Update: See David Singer's important Epilogue to this article here

Northern Plights - Swedish Antisemitism and the Swedish Left

Some years ago, an Australian Jewish academic of my acquaintance, employed at a university somewhere in what is frequently dubbed "Eurabia", returned to his homeland for a visit.  During an interview with a reporter from the local Jewish newspaper he mentioned his conviction, based on the European experience, that unrestricted Muslim immigration into Australia would not bode well for Australia's Jews.  Imagine his surprise when he returned to his university and found that a small group of Aussie Jews, taking umbrage at his "Islamophobia", had contacted both the head of his department and the university's vice-chancellor in an apparent effort to get him sacked.  I guess that's the totalitarian hard left for you!

I'll be blogging in the very near future about the current situation in Australia, but today I want to focus on the plight of Swedish Jewry, about which perhaps not enough is known outside Scandinavia.  I base most of my information on a briefing paper authored by Mikael Tossaveinen, issued by the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University, and on the excellent blog Sweden Israel and the Jews, from which I took the accompanying photograph.  The blog http://www.swedenisrael.blogspot.com/ is essential reading for anyone wishing to gain an insight into just how viciously hostile towards Israel, and ambivalent towards Jews,  the Swedish left - government ministers, politicians, clergy, trades unionists, academics, journalists - has become.

You may recall that about a year ago a leftwing Swedish newspaper, Aftonbladet, shamefully published an article which alleged that the IDF was killing Palestinians and harvesting their organs; the article, whose title translated into English was "They plunder the organs of our sons", was essentially the medieval blood libel wrapped in a modern cloak.  Its author, an extreme radical and anti-Zionist propagandist, was duplicitously described by the paper as a "journalist".   In that same year, there was a dramatic increase - up 57% on 2008 - of antisemitic incidents in Sweden, although it's well-known that many incidents go unreported, so that this is only the tip of the iceberg.

It's also well-known - despite the attempts, some of them farcical, of the mainly oh-so-politically-correct Swedish press to disguise the fact - that most antisemitic incidents are overwhelmingly the work of members of the large Muslim community that has grown in Sweden over the past generation, especially in the southern city of Malmo (total population perhaps as high as 300,000), where a fifth of inhabitants are Muslim.  In 2007, for Sweden's National Day, 6 June, marked each year as an official holiday, it was decided by officialdom - in a nod to Muslim numbers - to hold  celebrations at the mosque.  Hence this photo of ethnic Swedes in their national costume performing traditional Swedish folk dances in a bemusedly incongruous setting. 
Hence, too, the frequent use of Arabic rather than Swedish music that has come to mark the day.

As in certain other European cities, the Jews of Malmo, whose community was founded in the late nineteenth-century, feel intimidated by this large - and aggressive - Muslim presence.  With good reason, for physical threats and sometimes actual violence lie in wait for those sufficiently courageous - or foolhardy, depending on your viewpoint -  to appear in public wearing kippot or other symbols of Jewishness.  The local Chabad rabbi, easily identifiable, has been victimised innumerable times - there was even an attempt to run him over. 

During Operation Cast Lead, the tiny Jewish community, less than 800-strong (its numbers have since fallen further owing to emigration), held a "peace rally" in Malmo's main public square.  Despite that description of the event they were surrounded by a surging hate-filled mob of Muslims and ethnic Swedish leftists.  This mob clashed with police and hurled bottles and firecrackers at the Jews, who were eventually, for their safety, shunted into an alley by police.  Not long afterwards, two Israeli tennis players in Malmo for the Davis Cup were forced into playing their match in private - with no spectators - as a mob of the same elements, similarly armed with missiles, attempted to storm police barricades and invade the court.  One of them, Andy Ram, described the experience to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as "distressing and disgusting ... the first time I have come across such a demonstration and felt the hatred towards Israelis".

The attitude of Malmo's Social Democratic mayor, Ilmar Reepalu, to the plight of his city's Jews has been exceedingly obnoxious - and instructive, reflecting as it does the attitude of so much of the political left (and not only in Sweden) towards Jews and Israel.  Reluctant to implicate the Muslim community, he has attempted to shift the blame to right-wingers, and has also dismissively stated with regard to the flight of Jews out of Malmo owing to the intolerable situation there that if the city's Jews choose to settle in Israel, that's not Malmo's concern.  A reporter, whose paper had run a series of articles on the threats, "Hitler" taunts, and harassment experienced by Malmo's Jews from members of the Muslim community, asked Reepalu for a statement.  Far from condemning the Muslim behaviour in unequivocal terms and expressing sympathy for the Jews, Reepalu declared "We accept neither Zionism nor antisemitism", describing them both as unacceptable supremacist ideologies, and observed that the Jews had brought their troubles on themselves by supporting Israel and that it was incumbent upon them to prevent antisemitism by distancing themselves from Israel.  Subsequently, he claimed to have been misrepresented by the reporter - but the reporter had wisely taped his words - so he claimed to have been set up by the "Israeli lobby" instead.

Predictably, therefore - yet of course no less outrageously for that - when, very recently, following a bomb threat, the Malmo synagogue (a beautiful Moorish structure dating to 1903) was attacked by an explosive device that blew out windows, Reepalu refused to comment.