"Military Occupation is Clearly Permitted Under International Law Following an Aggressive Attack by a Neighbouring State" (video)

'[S]ettlements have nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Before the June 1967 Six Day War, there were no such things as "settlements." Palestinians were trying to destroy and displace Israel anyhow. The core problem is not, and never was, "settlements," but the right of Israel (or any non-Muslim nation) to exist inside any borders in that part of the world.
If you take a stand that is based on a lie, then that stand cannot succeed. If you try to oppose anti-Semitism but pretend it is the same thing as "Islamophobia," then the structure on which you have made your stand will totter and all your aspirations will fail. If you try to make a stand based on the idea that settlement construction rather than the intransigence of the Palestinians to the existence of a Jewish state is what is holding up a peace deal, then facts will keep on intruding.'

So writes the indefatigable Douglas Murray in an article for the admirable Gatestone Institute here, mindful of the key role that Arab intransigence and bloody-minded negativism has had in creating the present imbroglio, and that Israel is more sinned against than sinning.

A similar message is contained in this Prager University talk by Professor Alan Dershowitz.  It is not a brand new video, having first appeared in 2015, but in the light of current events it's worth another whirl.

See also here

And French oleh Jean Vercors, whom regular readers of this blog may recall, writes indignantly:

'Who are the real settlers?

There are real settlers who live on land colonized, stolen, won in wars of aggression....

Today, they ... vote for anti-Jewish resolutions by dozens every year by turning a blind eye to mass killings in Syria, Iraq in Sudan, forgetting that thousands of Christians are massacred during deafening silence - theirs.

What a moral decay for those whose ears are deaf and their brains tight to denounce their indifference to humanitarian tragedies and their appetite never satisfied for the construction of homes in Judea and Samaria.

Diplomats at the UN, you voted an ignoble anti-Israeli resolution that takes the Jews out of the old city of Jerusalem, you accuse the Jews from Judea of ​​colonizing their own ancestral lands, to hide the fact that you live on land colonized and stolen lands.

The presence of Israel in Judea and Samaria which you call the West Bank is not an occupation; the Israeli settlements are legal under international law.

·       Do not read the Treaty of San Remo of 25 April 1920: it contradicts you.

·       Do not read the Resolution 80 of the Charter of the United Nations, unofficially known as the "Jewish clause", which preserves intact the rights granted to Jews by the British Mandate over Palestine even after the expiry of the said mandate on 14 May 1948 .

·       Mute your ears: this Resolution 80 forbids the United Nations to create a Palestinian state.

·       Turn off your computers to avoid reading this: no part of Palestine concerned by the British Mandate was given for the creation of a 23rd Arab State.

·       Establishing a State on lands attributed to Jews is illegal under Article 80 of the Charter of the United Nations and goes beyond the legal authority of the United Nations itself.

·       Forget your Security Council Resolution 242 of 22 November 1967: it requires that the borders be decided between the parties in peace negotiations.

The UN and the EU do not accept that a Jew may own land.

In all European history, the Jews had no right to be peasants; they had to be able to be expelled easily. That is why they are found in the financial and small craft sectors. The mentalities have not changed.

Living in Judea, its historic and ancestral land from which its name comes, poses an unsustainable problem for Europeans, but they have no problem with the 1.5 million Arabs living in Israel.

The UN is an indifferent or impotent criminal organization, which amounts to the same thing, to prevent the genocides in Syria, Sudan, Iraq, Rwanda and annexations of territories in Ukraine, the Crimea and the China Sea.

The antisemite is constantly inventing new forms and finding new forums. It is a mutant metastasis, against Islam which is a genetically unmodifiable cancer.

The United Nations does not solve the problems of the world, it creates them.

Band of thugs!'

(Jean Vercors: more, in French, here)

"Perverting International Law": David Singer's sequel on Sweden & Palestinian statehood

The following text is a sequel to Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer's article on Sweden's recognition of a Palestinian State (see the penultimate post on this blog here).

David Singer, who describes it as an Epilogue to that article, writes:

I have now been supplied with an English translation of the opinion piece written by three law professors on 20 October upon which Sweden's Foreign Minister relied when claiming that the international law criteria for the recognition of the State of Palestine had been satisfied.

As I suspected when I wrote my article – the three professors do not maintain that those international criteria have been satisfied.
 
They never could have – if they were to retain any shred of professional credibility.

Sweden's Foreign Minister has some answering to do in explaining why she tried to hide behind the opinions of these three law professors who never said what she claimed.

The three professors indeed argue that those criteria have been replaced by a new controversial and questionable principle they call the "legality principle" to justify the right of Sweden to recognise the State of Palestine under international law.

The three professors' espousal of the applicability of the "legality principle" is not worth the paper it is written on, since it fails to consider Article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine and Article 80 of the United Nations Charter.

UN General Assembly Resolutions they mention to support their claim have no legal binding effect and the 2004 decision of the International Court of Justice is similarly an advisory non- binding opinion only.

Justice El-Araby (now ironically Secretary General of the Arab League) warned his fellow judges: 

"The international legal status of the Palestinian Territory (paras. 70-71 of the Advisory Opinion), in my view, merits more comprehensive treatment. A historical survey is relevant to the question posed by the General Assembly, for it serves as the background to understanding the legal status of the Palestinian Territory on the one hand and underlines the special and continuing responsibility of the General Assembly on the other. This may appear as academic, without relevance to the present events. The present is however determined by the accumulation of past events and no reasonable and fair concern for the future can possibly disregard a firm grasp of past events. In particular, when on more than one occasion, the rule of law was consistently side-stepped. The point of departure, or one can say in legal jargon, the critical date, is the League of Nations Mandate which was entrusted to Great Britain."

The three professors are trying to sweep the 1922 League of Nations Mandate (and the 1920 San Remo Conference and the Treaty of Sevres that led to the Mandate ) under the carpet
– as well as the 1937 Peel Commission Report and the 1947 UN Partition proposals.

There is a myriad of international law legally sanctioning the right of the Jewish People to reconstitute the Jewish National Home in what is today called the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.

Sweden can do as it likes – as I stated in my article – but perverting international law on the way should be exposed at every opportunity.

Trying to hide behind the veil of "international law" to justify Sweden's decision without fully examining the facts and the applicable law is disgraceful.

An International Law Specialist Talks About Israel and Palestine including Settlements (video)

The highly articulate Kiev-born American professor Eugene Kontorovich, a specialist in constitutional and international law at Northwestern University, who intends to make aliya this year, talks for almost an hour with Rabbi Marc Golub (his remarks regarding Settlements are particularly novel and interesting):

For today's sinister appearance of a Nazi flag flying in a Palestinian town see here

Snippets Of Stone: "Occupied Territory" & misuse of the Fourth Geneva Convention

Born in Leeds, Yorkshire, to immigrant parents from Lithuania, Julius Stone (1907-85), proved a brilliant scholar, graduating from Oxford with first-class honours in jurisprudence, and later becoming a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at Harvard.  Subsequently, he became an academic in New Zealand, where he was president of the League of Nations Union, and afterwards (1942-72), following a controversy in which antisemitism played its dismal part, Challis Professor of Jurisprudence and International Law at the University of Sydney.

A proud Jew and a staunch supporter of Israel, Stone vigorously combated, during the 1940s, the anti-Zionist stance of Australia's first native-born Governor-General, another proud Jew and brilliant scholar, Sir Isaac Isaacs (1855-1948), who, believing that advocacy of a Jewish State was disloyal to Britain, attacked "political Zionism" in the columns of the Sydney-based Hebrew Standard.  Stone's main counter-blast against Sir Isaac, a typical "Briton [Australians in those days were regarded as overseas Britons, and most referred to Britain as "Home"] of the Mosaic persuasion," was contained in his 1944 pamphlet "Stand Up and Be Counted!" An Open Letter to the Right Honourable Sir Isaac Isaacs ... on the Occasional of the Twenty-Sixth Anniversary of the Jewish National Home , which brought upon him opprobrium from Jews of Isaacs's ilk – whose influence in a demographically changing Australian Jewish community was, though, on the wane – and conferred on him hero-status in the eyes of others.  His pro-Zionist arguments influenced Aussie politician  Dr H. V. Evatt (1894-1965), who as I described here played a pivotal role in ensuring support at the United Nations for the creation of Israel.

An eminent figure in his field, Stone penned numerous works including several specifically pertaining to Jewry and to Israel, such as The Eichmann Trial and the Rule of Law (1961), Soviet Jewry (1965), Self-Determination and the Palestinian Arabs (1970), and Israel and Palestine: An Assault on the Law of Nations (1981).
   

A champion of Israel to the end, Stone denied that the "settlements" violate international law:

"Irony would...be pushed to the absurdity of claiming that Article 49(6), designed to prevent repetition of Nazi-type genocidal policies of rendering Nazi metropolitan territories judenrein, has now come to mean that...the West Bank...must be made judenrein and must be so maintained, if necessary by the use of force by the government of Israel against its own inhabitants. Common sense as well as correct historical and functional context excludes so tyrannical a reading of Article 49(6) [of the Fourth Geneva Convention"

As Eli E. Hertz wrote yesterday, in a piece entitled "Inappropriate Use of the Fourth Geneva Convention."

"The language of Article 49 was crafted in the wake of World War II and the Nazi occupation – an occupation that led to a war of aggression in which Nazi Germany attacked its neighbors with impunity, committing a host of atrocities against civilian populations, including deportation and displacement of local populations in occupied Europe. Millions were sent to forced labor camps and those of particular ethnic origin, most notably the Jews, were sent to their deaths in the gas chambers. The drafters of Article 49 were concerned with preventing future genocide against humanity.

Critics and enemies of Israel, including members of the UN and organs such as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) have come to use the Geneva Convention as a weapon against Israel, even when statements by authoritative analysts, scholars and drafters of the document contradict everything said by those who distort history for politically motivated reasons.

It is common knowledge that from its birth, Israel follows customarily international humanitarian law without being told or forced to do so by outside authorities....

The term “occupied territory,” which appears in the Fourth Geneva Convention, originated as a result of the Nazi occupation of Europe. Though it has become common parlance to describe the West Bank and Gaza as “occupied territories,” there is no legal basis for using this term in connection to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Professor Julius Stone, a leading authority on the Law of Nations, categorically rejected the use of the term “occupied territory” to describe the territories controlled by Israel on the following counts:

(1) Article 49 relates to the invasion of sovereign states and is inapplicable because the West Bank did not and does not belong to any other state.

(2) The drafting history of Article 49 [Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War] – that is, preventing “genocidal objectives” must be taken into account. Those conditions do not exist in Israel’s case.

(3) Settlement of Jews in the West Bank is voluntary and does not displace local inhabitants. Moreover, Stone asserted: that “no serious dilution (much less extinction) of native populations” [exits]; rather “a dramatic improvement in the economic situation of the [local Palestinian] inhabitants since 1967 [has occurred].”....

Arab opposition to Jewish settlements is based on the last paragraph of Article 49. The “Occupying Power” may not “Deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

One can hardly believe this baseless ICJ assertion that Israel, the only free and democratic country in the Middle East, used “deportation” and “forced transfer” of its own population into “occupied territories.” ....

Article 2 of the Fourth Geneva Convention applies only to conflicts that “arise between two or more high Contracting Parties,” which is not the case at hand, as Israel is the only High Contracting Party (or state) in this conflict, and Jordan never was. Thus, the Fourth Geneva Convention is inapplicable!

Professor Julius Stone, one of the twentieth century leading authorities on the Law of Nations touches on the applicability of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention, writing on the subject in 1980:

"That because of the ex iniuria principle [unjust acts cannot create law], Jordan never had nor now has any legal title in the West Bank, nor does any other state even claim such title. Article 49 seems thus simply not applicable. Even if it were, it may be added that the facts of recent voluntary settlements seem not to be caught by the intent of Article 49 which is rather directed at the forced transfer of the belligerent's inhabitants to the occupied territory, or the displacement of the local inhabitants, for other than security reasons"....'

Read all of Eli Hertz's synopsis, which cites authorities who concur with Stone, here

Hertz's piece should be required reading for the BBC, with its infuriatingly unexplained mantra that frequently tells its readers of website reports:

"The settlements are considered illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this".