By Daniel Horowitz
Tuesday, December 27, 2016
Here we go again with the U.N. peddling the biggest
geo-political hoax of all time — that Israel’s control over Judea and Samaria
is illegal, that it belongs to a distinct Arab people called “Palestinians,”
and that the source of Islamist mayhem across the globe is a smattering of
Jewish homes being built in their ancestral land. Land, which by the way, is
virtually invisible on a map compared to the mass of land controlled by Islam.
While Islamic jihadists are blowing up every corner of
the world, what is “the international community” focused on? Yup, those pesky
little Jewish homes built in their ancestral home on a parcel of land not even
visible on the map. The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution before the
Christmas weekend that “reaffirms that the establishment by Israel of
settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East
Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under
international law.”
Obama instructed the U.S. ambassador to the United
Nations to abstain from vetoing that resolution, an unprecedented step given
our history of vetoing anti-Israel resolutions. Worse, it appears that Obama
was likely the ringleader behind the resolution because, according to Israeli
sources, Vice President Joe Biden convinced Ukraine to support the resolution,
a move that shocked Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
The notion that there is any moral equivalence between
Jews building homes in their homeland that they won back in a defensive war
(after it was illegally occupied by Jordan) and brutal terrorists illegally
occupying land that was never given to them, is reprehensible. But first, a
brief history lesson …
The only binding resolution of international law, a
resolution which has never been countermanded to this very day, is the July
1922 Mandate for Palestine. Adopted by the League of Nations, that resolution
recognized the “historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and
to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” It
called for the creation of a Jewish national homeland anywhere west of the
Jordan River.
Once the League of Nations was disbanded and the United
Nations formed in its stead, the international community agreed to maintain all
agreements and not “alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or
any peoples or the terms of existing international
instruments to which Members of the United Nations may respectively be
parties.” [Article 80, UN Charter, emphasis added] This provision wasn’t
inserted by accident; it was known as “the Jewish People’s clause” at the time
it was adopted in 1945 in order to enshrine the 1922 Mandate into international
law.
The Mandate for Palestine adopted by the League of
Nations was the last legally binding document delineating regional borders. In
Article 5 of the Mandate it explicitly states “The Mandatory shall be
responsible for seeing that no Palestine
territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control
of the Government of any foreign Power.”
The Palestine Mandate (and Iraq) was given to Britain to
serve as a temporary trustee based on the resolution between the four principle
Allied Powers in April 1920 at the San Remo Conference in Italy, which was
signed by 51 nations. It was at that conference where the world powers adopted
the 1917 Balfour Declaration (which originally allocated the eastern part of
the Mandate for a Jewish state as well) creating a Jewish state. This same
conference that created the Jewish state west of the Jordan River also created
Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq as Arab states.
The legality of the 1922 Mandate was adopted that same
year by the U.S. Congress in H.J. Res. 360 and signed by President Warren
Harding. The newly created Arab country of Jordan attacked Israel in 1948
seeking to annihilate its inhabitants and illegally occupied Judea and Samaria
until 1967. That year, Israel won back the territory originally allocated for a
Jewish State as part of the 1922 League of Nations agreement.
There is no such thing as “’pre-67 borders.” They were
merely 1949 armistice lines between Israel and neighboring countries after they
launched an illegal war of extermination. It has nothing to do with the notion
of a unique Arab “Palestinian” entity west of the Jordan River. There was never
any internationally recognized legal sovereign occupying Judea and Samaria from
the time the British Empire fell until 1967. Jordan’s occupation of the area
west of the Jordan River was never recognized. To the extent there is an Arab
Palestinian state it is the modern state of Jordan, which already sucked up 77%
of the original Mandate of Palestine allocated for a Jewish State under the
first plan of the Balfour Declaration.
Although the U.N. has bloviated time and again about
Israel “withdrawing” from the region, those are merely recommendations and
political arguments. They are not legal
arguments because once that land was allocated for the Jewish state by the binding
charter of the U.N., it cannot be rescinded without Israel’s consent any more
than Florida can be taken away from the U.S. and be returned to Spain without
our consent.
Until fairly recently, even the Left was forced to admit
this legal and historical reality. During an interview with Matt Lauer on
October 1, 1997, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright reluctantly
admitted that although she was unhappy about recent construction in Judea, it
was indeed legal:
SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: I wasn't happy.
We had had a conversation, and I felt that going forward with those kinds of
buildings was not helpful. It is not in any way not part of what they can do,
but they shouldn't do it.
MR. LAUER: It's legal.
SECRETARY ALBRIGHT: It's legal. But
I think that, in this kind of an atmosphere, it's very important not to take
actions that are viewed by the other side as creating more difficulties.
Unfortunately, over the past generation the geo-political
elites and the media has repeated the lie about an Arab “Palestinian state” and
“illegal Israeli settlements” so many times that it has become true in the
minds of so many people. It’s a classic strategy domestic liberals employ when
they conflate political arguments with legal arguments. In many respects, this
is the biggest global fake news story of our time.
The reality is that Arab squatters living in that region
have no legal right to a state in that land, much less a right to murder Jews
who build homes in the rightful territory of their state duly adopted by
international law. But even those who subscribed to this nonsense over the past
few decades must wake up and smell the Jihad. The fact that Jihad has spread to
every corner of the world, including in the West itself, should demonstrate
incontrovertibly that the source of the problem is not a few homes built in the
Samarian hills by Jews. The problem is global Islamic supremacism.
It was heartening to see Donald Trump release a statement
opposing the U.N. resolution and threaten their funding. But he needs to take
it a step further and end the entire policy of promoting a second Palestinian
State (the first being Jordan) altogether. Pursuit of an Arab “Palestinian”
state has been one of the most wrongheaded failed policies in modern history
and it’s time for the Republican Party to formally abandon it forever.
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