Submitted by reader Karl Huttenbauer, Berlin: The Palestinian National Covenant was first promulgated in 1964 (when the West Bank was under Hashemite rule) wherein Article 2 “defines Palestine as an indivisible territorial unit within the boundaries it had during the British Mandate 1920 including Trans-Jordan” ( East Bank). In plain words – Jordan is Palestine (first entity)! Since the removal of Jews from the Gaza Strip this purely Arab [Hamas] (second entity) could be transformed into a seperate, thriving City State (of Singapore or Hong Kong type – an idea bad-mouthed by Khaled Mashal on ‘Al-Jazeera’. On the West Bank
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Read More +Hat tip to Ocean Guy for a comprehensive account of British perfidy in 1948: According to the editor of Emperor’s Clothes, in 1948 the Arab armies fought for genocide, not National Liberation, and it was not the Jews but Arab leaders who were agents of imperial Britain. It certainly suggests that their protégés are not fighting for National Liberation today. The memorandum from the May 8, 1948 issue of The Nation contradicts widely held views about the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, including those put forward in today’s Nation magazine. Just for starters, the memorandum proves the falsity of the
Read More +Israel’s Proclamation of Independence
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Provisional Government of Israel Official Gazette: Number 1; Tel Aviv, 5 Iyar 5708, 14.5. 1948 Page 1 The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books. After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and
Read More +From Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs: One may legitimately support or challenge Israeli settlements in the disputed territories, but they are not illegal, and they have neither the size, the population, nor the placement to seriously impact upon the future status of the disputed territories and their Palestinian population centers. The outbreak of the Al Aqsa Intifada in the fall of 2000 began to erode the orthodoxy that settlements were driving Palestinian anger and blocking peace. New York Times foreign affairs analyst Thomas L. Friedman wrote in October 2000: “This war is sick but it has exposed some basic truths.”
Read More +The Arab League and a Vatican official, Michel (Michael) Sabbah, separately but simultaneously, are campaigning for Israel to divide Jerusalem. The PA recently asked the Pope to help make the capital part of a new state. The Roman Catholic papal representative in Israel, Nazareth native Michael Sabbah told reporters, “This [partition] wall must not exist. One day it will not exist. The Palestinian people should regain their liberty and land with a state and a capital and the Israeli people should have security.” Sabbah’s statements are in opposition to previous Vatican statements, which have suggested that Jerusalem be established as
Read More +The UN General Assembly is a political body. It is not a global legislature that creates international law through its resolutions. Thus its designation of the whole of the West Bank as “Palestinian” must be seen as a political act and not as a legal determination. The UN did not attempt to resolve the dilemma of how the West Bank could be defined as occupied “Palestinian” territory when its status as occupied territory presumably derived from Israel’s seizure of the area from Jordan, and a Palestinian state had never previously existed there, or anywhere. Since 1967 this territory has been
Read More +The San Remo Resolution
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Folks, the areas of Judea and Samaria and the area of the Gaza Strip have been held by Israel since the Six Day War, a war started by Arabs. Judea, Samaria and the area of the Gaza Strip are territories that belonged to no recognized sovereign power before 1967, and therefore the correct way to describe the situation in the territories in legal terms is that all of Palestine is Jewish by virtue of Mandate (“The Jewish Right to Live in Western Palestine: The Irrelevancy of ‘Belligerent Occupation’ and the 4th Geneva Convention,” Think-Israel, May-June 2005, supra n. 5, http://www.think-israel.org/shifftan.belligerentoccupation.html).
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