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Hostage

Retired

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• Netanyahu gives genocidal bible story to Obama
  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 5:44 pm

    It’s funny though that you an Anti Zionist would continuously wave and claim to be true part of a conspiracy theory (a silly one) by the the most right wing settlers and their supporters that there are in Israel (i mean really Kiryat Arba). And do it just because what they claim in your eyes helps your cause and ideology.

    It's ironic that your tag team has experienced such a dearth of published sources which support your Zionist ideology;-)

    I'm simply repeating the fact that some Jews resorted to a using a blood libel against the victims to help excuse a Purim massacre of some Gentiles. That fact was amply demonstrated by the uncontested statements published by Lehmann, Simons, & Haggai Segal that were repeated in mainstream Israeli media outlets, like the Jerusalem Post.

    Everyone knows that the state of Israel has published blue-ribbon commission reports which allege that there might have been a conspiracy to smuggle weapons along with items of food and humanitarian aid. The IDF used that as an excuse to launch deadly attacks on ships that everyone (now) knows were carrying harmless cargoes. link to turkel-committee.gov.il

    Justice Shamgar was an Irgun terrorist who was captured and deported by the British. I have no doubt that he is an extremist who would include doubtful evidence of an Arab conspiracy in a confidential section of a report about an incident involving illegal settlers.

    Even the Wikipedia article notes Shamgar and the report were criticized on that score:
    8.8a "Those in charge of security at the Tomb were given no intelligence reports that an attack by a Jew against Moslem worshipers could be expected, particularly since intelligence reports warned of the opposite: an attack by Hamas. Therefore, there was concern about an attack by Arabs against Jews."[31]

    Critics of the commission have suggested that Shamgar's judicial record has "consistently displayed his leniency toward the settlers, including those convicted of crimes against the Palestinians, but especially toward the soldiers who had fired at the Palestinians."[32]

    link to en.wikipedia.org

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 4:17 pm

    I guess this is his MO makes him look credible so people don’t call
    his BS to often.

    Correct. My MO is to quote third-party verifiable published sources and let readers decide for themselves. Your MO is to tag team with a name caller and deploy ad hominem, innuendo, and genetic fallacies. But none of you can find any published source that challenges these citations or quotations I supplied, despite the fact they've been out there for nearly two decades. Once again, the silence from the opposition is pretty deafening and speaks louder than whatever you're saying on this particular subject.

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 3:56 pm

    Again, tertiary sources who are totally biased are not considered credible by anyone, least of all in academia. Gimme a break.

    Your link didn't indicate that Lehmann was a tertiary source. He said that he visted Kiryat Arba and had obtained his own copy of the report:
    

    The details and facts the Goldsteins documented reflected some of the findings in the 338 page Shamgar Commission Report of which I obtained a copy, but they have not been widely published in Israel because of the obvious leftist-inspired censorship that has been imposed on many of its findings. Thus, on Page 77 the Report confirms that Goldstein treated and healed an Arab terrorist in October 1990. If this had been publicized, the world press, including Time magazine, could not have claimed that Goldstein hated Arabs and refused to treat them.

    You still haven't provided any information to challenge the accuracy of the quoted material he supplied that would stand up in an academic environment, much less here at Mondoweiss.

    An article you haven’t furnished, other than as a citation of multiple biased tertiary sources.

    Even someone with your rudimentary intelligence can independently verify the contents of a Jerusalem Post article, given the date and page number, which I've already supplied. Do your own homework.

    You’ve not cited anything worth discrediting,

    Your entire argument is based upon ad hominem and genetic fallacies that wouldn't be accepted in an academic setting, at the Jerusalem Post, or here at Mondoweiss. Even an extremist or a settler can accurately quote a report that he has obtained and read for himself. We are dealing with independent secondary sources who have published articles with identical views.

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 3:23 pm

    I know very few people who interpret the Megillah as an instruction to massacre one’s enemies.

    Same here, but the ones that do include high ranking Israeli government officials like Danny Danon and members of the Rabbinate, e.g. link to richardsilverstein.com

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 3:06 pm

    Excuse me for laughing. Let me know when the ICC prosecutes their first Palestinian terrorist.

    He who laughs last, laughs best. For example, Côte d’Ivoire lodged, via a note verbale, a declaration dated 18 April 2003 accepting the exercise of the jurisdiction of the Court under Article 12, paragraph 3. link to icc-cpi.int

    On February 22, 2012 the Pre-Trial Chamber issued its third authorization decision permitting the Prosecutor to proceed with an independent investigation of events in the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire on the basis of the old 2003 Declaration. The legal community is already grumbling for an explanation as to why the Prosecutor hasn't obtained a determination from the Pre-Trial Chamber on the situation in Palestine, e.g. link to humanrightsdoctorate.blogspot.com

    Here is the draft resolution that the state of Palestine co-sponsored calling for the Goldstone report to be forwarded to the ICC. link to un.org

    Here is a link, which includes the petitions from various Israeli and Zionist Lobbying groups that have asked the Prosecutor not to take the case. Most were based upon the (now moot) argument that Palestine is not recognized as a state by the UN or any of its specialized agencies - like UNESCO. Note that the exhibit from the Arab League included several treaties between ICC member states on extradition for acts of terrorism and diplomatic immunity with the third state of Palestine. The Court is required to honor those treaties in accordance with Article 98 of the Rome Statute. All UNESCO member states are invited to become parties to the Vienna Conventions on the Law of Treaties and Diplomatic Relations. Most scholars agree that a state, for the purposes of Article 98, must also be considered a state for the purposes of Article 12(3).
    link to icc-cpi.int

    In the August 2011 annual report before the UNESCO vote, the Prosecutor advised
    

    The Palestinian National Authority requested the right to be heard on the fulfilment of the statutory requirements for opening an investigation, including on the issue as to whether Palestine qualifies as a “State” for the purpose of article 12, paragraph 3, of the Statute. The Office considered that a fair process required that the Palestinian National Authority as well as other interested parties have the opportunity to be heard. The Office therefore ensured due process to all parties involved. Representatives of the Palestinian National Authority presented arguments by oral and written submissions. The final public briefing will be presented soon.

    link to unispal.un.org

    He subsequently made public statements to the effect that his office was following events related to the Palestinian UN bid and would react accordingly. link to thestar.com

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 1:30 pm

    If AIPAC is both Esther and Mordechai, are you suggesting, perchance, that when we glimpse The Dersch we be thinking new Esther?

    Well there were two Mordechais. Dersh undoubtedly represents the original "ticking bomb" that made it so urgent for Haman/Mordechai Vanunu to act.

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 1:13 pm

    It is up to you to provide a complete citation for what seems to be an outright lie.

    I have supplied verbatim quotes from an eye witness, Haggai Segal, who had read the report. His article was printed by the publishers and editors of the Jerusalem Post and backed-up by another eye witness Chaim Simons.

    So far, you hasbrats have produced zero evidence that these two and the JPost were publishing an "outright lie" about the unpublished portions of the confidential state report. I'm only replying because it's so much fun to watch a tag team this big squirm and bluster about disreputable settler nut cases;-)

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 12:55 pm

    You originally presented a quote, claiming it was taken from the Shamgar report – which you now admit is a lie.

    I originally cited Dr Lehmann, who supplied a verbatim quote from the Shamgar report. I don't admit that he was lying. It is you hasbrats that keep implying that he is, but you've failed to producing any compelling evidence.

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 12:51 pm

    Chaim Simmons, like the others you’ve cited, is linked to Kiryat Arba, and has an obvious interest in claiming that a confidential part of the report which no one can see backs up the beliefs of Kiryat Arba residents.

    Do you have evidence that Lehmann is linked to Kiryat Arba? Link please.

    Hophmi, your request is like asking for a link to the classified material Sandy Berger tried to steal from the National Archives and Records Administration. Once again, you'll just have to go to the Israeli State Archives and ask for access to whatever is available to the public like everyone else.

    In the meantime, the rest of us here at Mondoweiss are free to discuss things that have been reported by multiple sources - without any rebuttals - including an article printed by the publishers and editors of the Jerusalem Post.

    Chaim Simons has published his correspondence with the Israeli State Archives and Justice Shamgar and he has personally accessed the material in question - and the silence from his critics regarding the citation in question is deafening.

    It's obvious that neither you nor the Hasbara brotherhood can produce a published secondary or primary source from Google that so much as challenges the quotes and citations in any of the articles that I've cited. According to the Internet Archive, some of them have been online for nearly a decade now.

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 12:22 pm

    One cannot say the same for the many Hamas terror attacks that have taken place over the last two decades, which have had mainstream Palestinian support.

    Correction: Judge Goldstone's report cited Hamas rocket and missile attacks as examples of terrorism that are subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

    The Government of Palestine had already accepted the jurisdiction of the Court - for the purpose of identifying, prosecuting and judging the authors and accomplices of acts committed on the territory of Palestine since 1 July 2002 - without any exceptions or reservations. -- See Declaration of the Palestinian National Authority recognizing the Jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court,  executed for the Government of Palestine by Ali Khashan, Minister of Justice, January 21, 2009. link to uclalawforum.com

    So it's actually Israel that is shreying about terrorism everywhere, except where it really counts.

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 11:44 am

    Israel does not worry about Iran because of Haman. Israel worries about Iran because Iranian leaders constantly talk of Israel as “a cancer” and so on, and because Iran is led by a bunch of religious fanatics. . . . . If modern Iranians die, it will be because their leaders have made bad choices.

    I think it's really AIPAC and Bibi who you should blame:
    Haaretz poll: Most of the public opposes an Israeli strike on Iran
    link to haaretz.com

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 11:15 am

    Not good enough. Provide a direct link to a primary source (Hebrew is fine), not some claim made in some article by an extremist. Otherwise, there is little reason to believe you on this point.

    Please see the multiple comments with links to Dr. Simon's A STUDY OF THE FINDINGS OF THE SHAMGAR COMMISSION, Gaining access to the archival material.

    The full report was confidential and individuals had to request access to study it in the State Archive facility. I appreciate that the hasbara brotherhood would like to invent a new rule which says that we can't discuss reports here at MW that have been printed by the publishers and editors of the Jerusalem Post, but we both know that's nonsense.
    link to chaimsimons.net

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 11:04 am

    Get the readers a link to the full report and substantiate your claims.

    I've already given the readers a link which explained that the full report was considered confidential, and that members of the public had to request access to study it in the State Archives facility. So the request for a link was rhetorical you dummy. link to chaimsimons.net

    Somehow it’s hard for me to believe that you would consider anything he says as truth under any other circumstances.

    LOL! You must be joking. Justice Meir Shamgar was the Attorney General who authored 'The Observance of International Law in the Administered Territories' , 1 Israel YB HR (1971) p. 262. It was one of the first attempts to rationalize the flagrantly illegal annexation of Jerusalem and the settlements in the Golan, Sinai, Gaza, and places in the West Bank - like Kiryat Araba. Why should anyone believe he didn't include a blood libel in one of the confidential chapters of his report? He was a much bigger nut case than the other people you are complaining about.

    Please drop the stick and step away from the dead horse, unless you can supply a published rebuttal from an independent source.

    Somehow you've managed to use every ad homenim and genetic fallacy in the book, but you haven't supplied a single published article or reliable source which challenges the veracity of the reports published in the Jerusalem Post, Arutz Sheva, and on Lehmann's and Simon's websites. So you are asking us to believe these are false reports that got past the editors at the JPost - and that they have somehow gone completely unchallenged, even by the Israeli government, for more than a decade. Naturally, we just have to take your word for all that.

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 10:21 am

    I call bullshit. No such thing was written in the Shamgar report.
    link to mfa.gov.il

    You illiterate hasbrats are really fun to watch. You supplied a link to an MFA website which explicitly states that it is only supplies extracts: a translation of the introduction of the report, the conclusions from chapters 8, and the recommendations from Chapter 9. So it can't be used to disprove independent reports about the contents of the other chapters of the full commission report.

    Let's read the Arutz Sheva article again. It is quoting the Jerusalem Post article that informed its readers about the remarks in question and said they were from the heretofore uncited portions of the blue-ribbon panel report in 1994. The Israel National News article said:
    

    Rabbi Dr. Simons also refers to Haggai Segal's article, entitled "A Failure to Inform", which appeared in the Israeli newspaper Jerusalem Post on July 11, 1994. Segal wrote about the Commission's findings, pointing out facts that the media conveniently ignored. Segal wrote, "The public doesn't know that the Commission charged a key witness from the Wakf [Islamic Trust] with giving false testimony, expressed an understanding of the motivations of the Jews in Hebron, indirectly rebuked Yitzchak Rabin, and even mentioned the purchase of the Cave of the Patriarchs by Abraham from a local merchant.... [The Commission considered that] 'the release of the terrorists [over 1000 in May 1985] raised tension between the Jewish residents and the Arab population of the area.' Oddly, we didn't hear this quote on the radio. And, wonder of wonders: It didn't appear in the press. For some reason, but apparently not by chance, the media have failed to mention the astounding statistics for Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] collected by the Commission [regarding the countless attacks by Arabs against Jews].... An additional section, as yet uncited, verifies the claim of the residents of Kiryat Arba that Goldstein acted fearing a massacre from the other side.... Not even one reporter quoted the Commission's sensational recommendation that the Intifada be crushed."

    FYI, the unclassified portions of the report were not published. Dr. Simons relates that he was given quite a run-around before he was finally allowed to study the contents in the State Archives facility. Try reading the material in this link:
    *A Study Of The Findings Of The Shamgar Commission
    Gaining access to the archival material
    link to chaimsimons.net

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 9:46 am

    Yes, unfortunately Bibi skipped the lessons from the Pedagogic Center of the Jewish Agency for Israel. The Jewish-Zionist educators actually do point out that Esther's Hebrew name was Hadassah (Myrtle), and that her Persian name ""ester" (Esther) was known as the goddess of fertility in practically the entire ancient world of the Fertile Crescent (Babylon, Akkadia, Mesopotamia, Assyria, Syria, Phoenicia and the Land of Israel)." JAFI goes on to explain: "The name Mordecai is actually a variation of the name of the city god of Babylon; this being only one of the many written forms of the name "Marduk" in Cuneiform."

    link to web.archive.org

    FYI, In much the same way that the Bible explained that Sarah was Abraham's niece, the Talmud informs us that Esther was actually her uncle Mordechai's wife when he married her off to the King of Persia.

    link to web.archive.org

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 8:29 am

    P.S. Dr. Simmons quoted Haggai Segal's article, entitled "A failure to inform" which appeared in the Jerusalem Post on July 11, 1994, page 6.

    So where the quote comes from is no great mystery. Ciao!

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 8:11 am

    So where the quote came from is still a mystery. . . . Undermines your own credibility

    B.S. OlegR, you've provided a link to an MFA website that only provides extracts - the introduction from chapter one and the conclusions from chapters eight and nine of the blue ribbon panel report. There is no link there to the full Hebrew text of the report.

    I've provided readers with two citations to the Shamgar Commission’s report from individuals with earned PhDs who are both fluent in Hebrew. The independent articles by Manfred Lehmann and Chaim Simmons both say that the blue ribbon panel's report verified the claim of the residents of Kiryat Arba that Goldstein was acting to head off a massacre.

    FYI both Dr. Simmons and Arutz Sheva were relying on verbatim quotes taken from an article by Haggai Segal published in the Jerusalem Post entitled “A failure to inform”. Please note the quotation marks in the bolded section below and STFU about my credibility:
    

    A few months later, a Report of the findings of this Commission numbering over 300 pages was published.[106] It was naturally published in Hebrew, the official language of Israel, but since Hebrew is a language which does not rank high in the number of speakers on the face of the earth, the Israel Foreign Ministry excerpted several chapters of this Report in English, for the benefit of the world.[107] This translation was also sent, together with “Steps taken by the Israeli authorities in the aftermath of killings,” to the United Nations “as a matter of courtesy.”[108]

    Soon after publication of the Report, an article by Haggai Segal entitled “A failure to inform” appeared in the “Jerusalem Post” pointing out facts which the press conveniently omitted to report. He wrote: “The public doesn’t know that the commission charged a key witness from the Wakf with giving false testimony, expressed an understanding of the motivations of the Jews in Hebron, indirectly rebuked Yitzchak Rabin, and even mentioned the purchase of the Cave of the Patriarchs by Abraham from a local merchant.... [The Commission considered that] ‘the release of the terrorists [over 1000 in May 1985] raised tension between the Jewish residents and the Arab population of the area.’ Oddly, we didn’t hear this quote on the radio. And, wonder of wonders: it didn’t appear in the press. For some reason, but apparently not by chance, the media have failed to mention the astounding statistics for Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] collected by the commission [regarding the countless attacks by Arabs against Jews] ... An additional section, as yet uncited, verifies the claim of the residents of Kiryat Arba that Goldstein acted fearing a massacre from the other side .... Not even one reporter quoted the commission’s sensational recommendation that the intifada be crushed.”[109]

    link to chaimsimons.net

    Come on Hostage that’s evidence, be serious. You got this one wrong , let it go and move on

    Why don't you provide a link to the whole report of the Commission or provide a citation to a reliable source which says the articles from Lehmann, Simmons, Arutz Sheva, or the Jerusalem Post misrepresented the contents in question? The readers can independently verify everything that I've written about, but that isn't the case with your claims that imply Dr. Lehmann was lying. That doesn't help your credibility.

  • Hostage March 7, 2012 at 8:55 pm

    HOW was the Purim story used as classic propaganda and blood libels?

    The Scroll of Esther (3:1) identifies Haman as the descendent of Agag, King of Amalek. So he was a subject of the mitzvah to kill Amalek. Nowadays Orthodox Rabbis usually invoke the commandment to justify killing just about any perceived enemy of the Jewish people. Here is a recent example from an Israeli Orthodox family magazine that was highlighted at Tikun Olam:
    

    It will be interesting to see whether they leave the assembly of the Amalekites [Palestinians] in extermination camps to others, or whether they will declare that wiping out Amalek is no longer relevant. Only time will tell…

    link to richardsilverstein.com

  • Hostage March 7, 2012 at 8:24 pm

    P.S. Here is a verbatim quote from the Arutz Sheva Israel National News article that I cited above:
    

    Oddly, we didn't hear this quote on the radio. And, wonder of wonders: It didn't appear in the press. For some reason, but apparently not by chance, the media have failed to mention the astounding statistics for Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] collected by the Commission [regarding the countless attacks by Arabs against Jews].... An additional section, as yet uncited, verifies the claim of the residents of Kiryat Arba that Goldstein acted fearing a massacre from the other side.... Not even one reporter quoted the Commission's sensational recommendation that the Intifada be crushed."

  • Hostage March 7, 2012 at 7:43 pm

    The point for this whole charade is to make sure Iran gets more and more
    political and diplomatic pressure to cease their nuclear program.

    I thought it was to deflect attention from the hundreds of nuclear warheads that the bellicose Israelis already possess and the fact that Israel refuses to put any of its facilities under the IAEA inspection regime or sign-on to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

  • Hostage March 7, 2012 at 6:09 pm

    Ah and here on mondoweiss where you appear to routinely use it in arguments. Damaging to your credibility Hostage.

    LOL! I'm aware that the MFA published sanitized excerpts, as the Arutz Sheva reported "The Shamgar Commission's Report was only published in Hebrew, but to help facilitate the international media's reporting on it, the Israeli Foreign Ministry translated selected excerpts." link to israelnationalnews.com

    You also must know that I actually did provide a link to the relevant quote from the Shamgar Commission’s report in the earlier comment that you mentioned. link to mondoweiss.net

    It came from an article on the website of the late Dead Sea Scroll Scholar and President of Lehmann Trading Corporation, Manfred Lehmann, not from some settler nut case. Here is his biography and obituary: link to manfredlehmann.com

    Dr. Lehmann was fluent in Hebrew and frequently testified before Congressional committees here in the US. He is a reliable enough source of information on the quote he supplied from the blue-ribbon report in his article at this link:
    link to manfredlehmann.com

  • Hostage March 7, 2012 at 3:10 pm

    Perhaps you would have been happier if Haman triumphed and the Jews assimilated into the Persian empire of the time.

    There are plenty of scholars who think that the Pharisees (Farsi?) were assimilated to Persian religious customs. They propose that when Cyrus allowed them to returned from the exile, they simply incorporated their favorite Persian doctrines, to the extent that they could, when they were redacting the ancient scriptures.

    Its pretty hard not to notice the similarities between the religious obsessions of ancient Iranian and Iraqis with female impurity, e.g. link to books.google.com

    After all, in the Iron Age the Jewish prophetess Deborah was supposedly judging all of Israel. You'd never know that from listening to the Hardei idiots that spit on little girls or set-up sex segregated streets and buses. The same goes for the ideas about racial purity and intermarriage. The Princes of the Tribe of Judah (Boaz?) were singled out as prime offenders.

    The writings of Josephus with regard to Vespasian indicate that the ancient Jews did not limit the interpretation of the divine succession (the scepter departing Judah, Genesis 49:10) to the sons of David or the Israelites alone, e.g. link to mondoweiss.net

    So some viewed Cyrus, the Maccabees, Vespasian, and Bar Kokhba as Messiahs that would usher in an age of religious reforms or changes. It is possible that the Book of Ruth was originally intended as anti-Judean propaganda and that it was countered by the subsequent introduction of the non-biblical doctrine of conversion. It certainly is at odds with the practices attributed to Ezra and Nehemiah.

  • Hostage March 7, 2012 at 1:48 pm with 23 replies

    The Purim story was used for centuries in classic antisemitic propaganda
    and blood libels.

    LOL! The blue-ribbon Shamgar Commission's report on its investigation of the Purim massacre in Hebron employed a blood libel. The report claimed that Dr. Goldstein's act was not an unprovoked act of violence, but a pre-emptive strike against a looming Arab pogrom of the Jewish population of Hebron. It failed to demonstrate that any of the victims were connected with any conspiracy, but nonetheless concluded:
    

    “The investigation verifies the claim of the residents of Kiryat Arba that Goldstein acted to forestall a massacre.”

    Most Gentiles today have never heard of Purim; much less the nutcases and politicians who invoke it on a routine basis to admonish us to rise up and destroy the latest pseudo-Amalek.

    In any event, there's no danger of blood libel in the case of notorious warmongers like Netanyahu. To be perfectly honest, the big surprise is that he hasn't already started a world war by sending-in Mossad agents with stolen US passports to assassinate Ahmadinejad.

    So long as Israelis are behaving irrationally en mass we certainly have a responsibility to call attention to their aberrant behavior, e.g.:
    *Sheikh Jarrah Jews praise Baruch Goldstein on Purim
    *White Shirts in Jerusalem cry ‘Butcher the Arabs’

• A Palestinian student asks, 'Can I go on Birthright?'
  • Hostage March 9, 2012 at 12:45 pm

    I am alive today because my forefathers on my mother’s side left Vilnius and emigrated to Jerusalem, now Israel, two hundred years ago.

    Plenty of Jews from all over Lithuania emigrated to the United States instead. BTW, most other countries still do not recognize Jerusalem as being a city located in Israel.

  • Hostage March 9, 2012 at 12:24 pm

    I fail to see how Massada or Israeli archaeology have anything to do with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

    According to the accounts of both the Jewish Sages of the Talmud (e.g.) and the Jewish historian Josephus the efforts of the Zealots (Sacarii or Biryonim) who ended up defending Massada were responsible for Jerusalem being plowed like a field, the Temple being burned and leveled, and the Jews being exiled from the land. link to halakhah.com

    Nowadays the Zionists have stood history on its head and made heroes out of those same bigoted, malevolent, jackasses.

    "Biblical archeology" has always been a somewhat unscientific exercise based upon a priori assumptions, but the State of Israel's Antiquities Authority, the Knesset, and the Eldad association are using it as a tourist gimmick which promotes the Judaization of Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem in order to turn them into private parks.

  • Hostage March 9, 2012 at 11:25 am

    ‘Israel promotes and conducts itself as a religion-supremacist “Jewish state”.’ No, that is a lie.

    MKs debate protection of 'equality' in future constitution - Haaretz

    Religious and secular MKs participating in a meeting of the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee:

    "There cannot be a constitution in a Jewish and democratic state if it does not defend the unequal values of Judaism - and they are unequal," MK Yitzhak Levy (NRP) said. "Equality in fact will close the rabbinical courts," a contingency he was not prepared to allow for. "If you want equality in the constitution, it must be limited. We cannot write off the entire Jewish aspect of the country because, in the end, Judaism will be nothing more than eating a donut during Hanukkah."

    MK Moshe Gafni (United Torah Judaism) said he was in favor of a constitution, on principle, but only on condition that equality is carefully defined.

    "I am among those who want a constitution," MK Gafni said: "[But] we must decide what the word 'equality' entails. [Does it relate to] marriage and divorce? Yeshiva students? Laws of kashrut?" He said that if equality means the cancellation of those things, then it would "cancel the idea of Israel as a Jewish state."

    Toward the end of the hearing, Levy suggested the clause on equality read simply, "Love thy neighbor."

    "I cannot commit to that," Beilin replied, while Gafni jokingly agreed to the proposal on condition that the clause be waived with regard to Knesset members.

    "I'm sorry to spoil to party," Levy told them: "But if there's no constitution and no equality, then that's a good option."

    link to haaretz.com

    The PLO formally recognized the State of Israel in the exchange of letters of 9 September 1993 between Mr. Yasser Arafat, President of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Mr. Yitzhak Rabin, lsraeli Prime Minister. See the observation of the International Court of Justice in that connection in paragraph 118 of the 2004 Advisory Opinion. Nonetheless, the Netanyahu government has attempted, through the good offices of the United States, to get the Middle East Quartet to adopt recognition of Israel as a "Jewish state" as one of the terms of reference for resuming negotiations. link to jpost.com

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 1:20 pm

    “Jewish is not a nationality. It is a religious designation”
    I am an atheist. A Jewish atheist. The founders of Israel were non-religious as well.

    Actually I've commented elsewhere that there were three major responses to the European Enlightenment: the Haskalah; the rise of Jewish Religious Orthodoxy; and the rise of Zionist-Nationalism. Speaking in very general terms, Israel was founded by the latter two groups and opposed by the former.

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 11:34 am

    Yes the debate about the need of a constitution is ongoing so far the religious parties has effectively blocked all attempts at legislation of a formal constitution.
    BTW this has nothing to do with the Israeli Arabs.

    LOL! Here is an article which explains that the lack of a constitution has everything to do with denial of equality to Israel's non-Jewish citizens:
    "MKs debate protection of 'equality' in future constitution", link to haaretz.com

    You cited the wrong Wikipedia articles. Here are portions of other Wikipedia articles which explain that the situation has everything to do with Israel's religious and ethnic minority populations:
    link to en.wikipedia.org
    link to en.wikipedia.org

    FYI, during the Eichmann trial Hannah Arendt wrote that Israeli officials agreed outside the courtroom upon the undesirability of a written constitution in which the basis of the many racially discriminatory laws would embarrassingly have to be spelled out. -- See Eichmann in Jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil, Penguin, 1992, page 7

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 8:55 am

    Jerusalem and Israel appear in almost every religious and traditional Jewish text.

    Except of course for the Torah, which doesn't contain a single explicit reference to Jerusalem.

• Hasbarapocalypse at Ynet: 'Zionism will only cease being demonized when the West stops demonizing colonialism'
  • Hostage March 7, 2012 at 9:28 am

    Neocolonialism is everywhere. Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan.

    You don't really have authentic colonialism without population transfer or colonists. In any event, the Zionists will have to get the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity repealed, because it criminalized all of the practices necessary for colonialism to occur (not to mention the 4th Geneva Convention, the Rome Statute, & etc.):

    Crimes against humanity whether committed in time of war or in time of peace as they are defined in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, Nürnberg, . . eviction by armed attack or occupation and inhuman acts resulting from the policy of apartheid, and the crime of genocide, . . even if such acts do not constitute a violation of the domestic law of the country in which they were committed.

• 'New Yorker' defends Rosenberg (and use of term 'Israel firster')
  • Hostage March 9, 2012 at 8:49 am

    There’s nothing faux liberal Zionist about Dershowitz

    LOL! The liberal establishment wouldn't touch the reprobate Professor with a barge pole. He destroyed his liberal and legal credentials when he started advocating Court-ordered torture. See The Case for Torture Warrants, by Alan M. Dershowitz, 2002 and get yourself some clue: link to alandershowitz.com

    Like a lot of stuff, this suffers from the unbearable smug self-righteousness that is the reason MJ and others like him can gain little real traction in the organized Jewish community.

    So maybe you can explain why there is a freaked-out "emergency committee" of out-of-power pro-Israel Jewish neocons running around desperately shreying about the dangers inherent in the published opinions of the Media Matters Action Network regarding Israel? BTW, the folks out here in fly-over country are fed-up with Bibi Netanyahu and the organized Jewish community's campaign to start another war and screw them at the gas pump. There isn't anyway my neighbors are signing-on for a war against Iran and they are tired of their members of Congress ignoring the parade of military commanders, like Generals Petraus and Mattis, who have spoken out about the I-P albatross around our neck:

    Commander's Posture Statement
    Statement of U.S. Marine Corps Gen. James N. Mattis, U.S. Central Command commander, before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 1, 2011, about the posture of U.S. Central Command link to centcom.mil

    • Middle East Peace: Lack of progress in achieving comprehensive Middle East peace affects U.S. and CENTCOM security interests in the region. It is one of many issues that is exploited by our adversaries in the region and is used as a recruiting tool for extremist groups. The lack of progress also creates friction with regional partners and creates political challenges for advancing our interests by marginalizing moderate voices in the region. As Secretary Gates noted in July 2010, “the lack of progress in the peace process has provided political ammunition to our adversaries in the Middle East and in the region, and…progress in this arena will enable us not only to perhaps get others to support the peace process, but also support us in our efforts to try and impose effective sanctions against Iran.” In December 2010, Secretary Clinton observed “the conflict between Israel and Palestine and between Israel and its Arab neighbors is a source of tension and an obstacle to prosperity and opportunity for all of the people in the region.” By contrast, substantive progress on Middle East peace would improve CENTCOM’s opportunities to work with our regional partners and support multilateral security efforts. Speaking about the need for Middle East peace at the Manama Dialogue in December 2010, King Abdullah of Jordan observed “Our region will not enjoy security and stability unless we solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and Arabs and Israelis find peace. The stakes are high. As a solution continues to elude us, faith in negotiations, as the only path to peace and justice, is eroding. And if hope is killed, radical forces will prevail. The region will sink into more vicious warfare and instability…threatening security far beyond the borders of the Middle East.”

• Netanyahu says, You also refused to bomb Auschwitz
  • Hostage March 9, 2012 at 5:35 pm

    I assumed that he was going for “Baha’i” but wasn’t sure how to spell it.

    It's a transliteration of بهائی So its no big deal.

  • Hostage March 8, 2012 at 4:08 pm

    “Sic” is not a fancy way of writing “(sp?)”.

    I thought that he was implying that it isn't correct to pigeon-hole people as being Bahi.

  • Hostage March 7, 2012 at 10:46 am

    LOL, what were they going to do? Kill them twice?

    I'm pretty certain Netanboohoo would have produced a pair of letters complaining that the Allies bombed and killed the Jews at Auschwitz if the occasion had called for such a thing. This is all pretty shameless political theater.

    The German concentration camps weren't much different from the ones established during the Spanish civil war, or by the British in Palestine. People died slowly as a result of starvation, torture, slave labor, overcrowding, lack of medical care and disease. Any Allied bombing would have killed many of the internees and it would have given the Germans an excuse to execute the remaining prisoners who posed a flight risk. See for example, the American "dead zones" that were established around US concentration camps during our own Philippine–American War link to en.wikipedia.org

    So yes, the German's could have responded with more summary executions or by imposing worse conditions that would have killed-off the prisoners engaged in slave labor more quickly. Bombing crematoriums used to destroy evidence of war crimes really shouldn't have been a war time priority and the gas chambers and concentration camps were hardly the only methods of mass extermination employed against the Jews during the war. Netanyahu was simply playing the blame game of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

• 'We are you and you are us,' Netanyahu says-- but Obama thumbs him with talk of Palestinians and diplomacy
  • Hostage March 5, 2012 at 8:55 pm

    It seems to me that Netanyahu has already gained something significant for this confrontation with the President.

    Obama was already shamelessly repeating Netayahu's talking points about Israel's right to defend itself during last year's Middle East and AIPAC addresses:
    

    As for security, every state has the right to self-defense, and Israel must be able to defend itself -– by itself -– against any threat.

    May 19th, 2011, link to nytimes.com

    As I recall, he regurgitated the same sort of crap again during the opening address to the UN General Assembly last September too. Afterward Bibi said that security cooperation was Obama's badge of honor. In any event, the rest of the points in Obama's speech were cut'n pasted from the MFA website. link to ynetnews.com

• Ahmed Moor in WaPo: Harvard One State conference 'informed by the uncontroversial view that all people are created equal'
  • Hostage March 6, 2012 at 3:32 pm

    The Hashemite material is over-exploited.

    Yes there were a bunch of guys born in Poland or Russia running a "state within the state" in Palestine who complained about the plans for Transjordan's independence in 1946. They claimed that a naturalized Hashemite Arab citizen of Transjordan, living in Arabia, was somehow a foreigner and that the terms of Article 5 of the Palestine mandate prohibited the British from placing Transjordan under the control of a foreign power.
    link to jpress.org.il

    Needless to say the Zionist's ran around shreying the party line that Transjordan was an indivisible part of the British mandate for Palestine, but nobody bought that argument. In any event, they quickly switched stories and falsely claimed it was one of the five Arab states that invaded the territory of Israel.

    FYI, the tomb of Hashim ibn Abd al-Manaf, Muhammad's grandfather is located in Gaza. He was King Abdullah's ancestor and the patriarch of all the Hashemites, including Arafat and the Mufti.

  • Hostage March 6, 2012 at 3:02 pm

    /The Hashemite material is over-exploited. Palestine and Transjordan were part of a joint mandate. /

    Yes, but the joint mandate contained two separate constitutions for the states of Palestine and Transjordan. For example "State lands and waste lands" in Transjordan were not subject to close settlement by Jews at any time and they were not included in the Jewish national home "in Palestine" mentioned in the Balfour Declaration, San Remo resolution, or Churchill White Paper of 1922.

    The joint mandate that I'm really referring to there is a separate resolution of the Council of the League of Nations adopted in 1932. It outlined the legal requirements for terminating the various mandate regimes. I've noted elsewhere that the 10 proposed mandates resulted in 15 mandated states. The Council ruled that all of the territory in the joint mandates of Syria-Lebanon and Palestine-Transjordan respectively had to be emancipated simultaneously. That didn't effect the status of the separate states or their separate constitutions. See The General Principles Governing the Termination of a Mandate, Luther Harris Evans, The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Oct., 1932), pp. 735-758
    Stable URL: link to jstor.org

    The President of the UN Security Council cited that requirement in 1946 when he asked for the postponement of the membership application of Transjordan. He explained that the country was part of a joint mandate with Palestine that had not been legally terminated yet. No one suggested that Transjordan was part of Palestine or that the two countries were part of a union. See --Minutes of the 57th Session of the Security Council, S/PV.57 pages 100-101 (pdf file pgs 3-4 of 52)
    link to doc.un.org

  • Hostage March 6, 2012 at 1:46 pm

    Legal status yes, autonomous to a large degree, sure
    but saying it was independent in any way resembling our ideas of
    independence i think is wrong.(And certainly nothing to do with
    Arab independence) By that logic you can say that PA is an independent state.

    Several UN member states, including Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, East Timor, Namibia, and the Baltic States have also been occupied for extremely long periods of time by foreign military forces. The majority of other existing states have recognized the PA as the government of an independent state that is being occupied by Israel. See for example the recent UNESCO vote. States don't cease to exist simply because they are occupied by a foreign power or their existence is challenged by a hostile neighboring state.

    In fact, the Council of the League of Nations adopted a resolution which excluded the ability to maintain political independence and territorial integrity under the threat of foreign aggression from the definition of "the ability to stand alone" it employed to terminate a mandate regime and recognize the independence of a mandated state. See The General Principles Governing the Termination of a Mandate, Luther Harris Evans, The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Oct., 1932), pp. 735-758 Stable URL: link to jstor.org

    The Ottoman's had a military Empire that was organized into military provinces. Joseph Mary Nagle Jeffries, "Palestine: The Reality", Longmans 1939, reprinted by Hyperion Press, 1975, explains that Palestine was part of the Arab homeland called "Bilad al Arab" or "Arabistan" (page 4). The 'Arabistan Ordusu', or the Provincial Ottoman Army for Arabia, was originally headquartered at Damascus, and was put in charge of Cilicia, Syria, Mount Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and the southern Arabian Peninsula. See also Stanford J. Shaw, Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Cambridge University Press, 1977, page 85; Caesar E. Farah, The Politics of Interventionism in Ottoman Lebanon, 1830-1861, I.B.Tauris, 2000, page 417.

    The Sharif of Mecca issued a unilateral Declaration of the Independence of Arabia (“Arabistan” in Turkish) on June 27, 1916. That declaration was solicited and acknowledged by the other Allied and Associated Powers. See “International law documents”, by the Naval War College (U.S.), 1917, page 17 or International law studies, Volume 73, by Naval War College (U.S.), 1918, Proclamation of the Sherif of Mecca

    Balfour himself had personally circulated the detailed memorandum and maps I cited above to the Eastern Committee of the War Cabinet on December 5, 1918 which said that Great Britain had pledged to the Sharif of Mecca that Palestine itself would be Arab and independent. See the reference to the attendees and the distribution of E.C. 2201 in “E.C. 41st Minutes” (CAB 27/24, C372213 ). During the first portion of the meeting on the subject of Syria Lord Curzon, the Chairman, said:
    “First, as regards the facts of the case. The various pledges are given in the Foreign Office paper* [E.C. 2201] which has been circulated, and I need only refer to them in the briefest possible words. In their bearing on Syria they are the following: First there was the letter to King Hussein from Sir Henry McMahon of the 24th October 1915, in which we gave him the assurance that the Hedjaz, the red area which we commonly call Mesopotamia, the brown area or Palestine, the Acre-Haifa enclave, the big Arab areas (A) and (B), and the whole of the Arabian peninsula down to Aden should be Arab and independent.” (E.C. 41st minutes, for 5 December 1918, page 6).
    …
    In the second half of the meeting on the subject of Palestine he said:

    “The Palestine position is this. If we deal with our commitments, there is first the general pledge to Hussein in October 1915, under which Palestine was included in the areas as to which Great Britain pledged itself that they should be Arab and independent in the future . . . the United Kingdom and France – Italy subsequently agreeing – committed themselves to an international administration of Palestine in consultation with Russia, who was an ally at that time . . . A new feature was brought into the case in November 1917, when Mr Balfour, with the authority of the War Cabinet, issued his famous declaration to the Zionists that Palestine ‘should be the national home of the Jewish people, but that nothing should be done – and this, of course, was a most important proviso – to prejudice the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. Those, as far as I know, are the only actual engagements into which we entered with regard to Palestine.” (E.C. 41st minutes, for 5 December 1918, page 16)
    E.C. 2201 contained two documents:
    Former Reference: GT 6506A
    Title: Maps illustrating the Settlement of Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula.
    Author: Political Intelligence Department, Foreign Office
    Date 21 November 1918
    Catalogue reference CAB 24/72
    link to nationalarchives.gov.uk
    Former Reference: GT 6506

    Title: The Settlement of Turkey and the Arablan Peninsula.
    Author: Political Intelligence Department, Foreign Office
    Date 21 November 1918
    Catalogue reference CAB 24/72
    link to nationalarchives.gov.uk

    Balfour’s memo from the Paris Peace Conference made it perfectly clear that the UK was betraying the Arabs and had no intention of honoring any of the agreements regarding their independence. He also mentions the French territorial interests in Syria; Palestine; and Mesopotamia as three completely different geographical areas. So Palestine was never the subject of the territorial reservations contained in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence. In any event, Transjordan was east, not west, of the line drawn from Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Allepo. So it was excluded by definition from McMahon's proposed reservation:

    They [Sykes and Picot] started from the view that France had ancient interests and aspirations in Western Syria; that Britain had obvious claims in Baghdad and Southern Mesopotamia; that Palestine had a unique historic position; and that if these three areas were to be separately controlled, it was obviously expedient that none of the vast and vague territory lying between them [i.e. Transjordan], which had no national organisation, should be under any other foreign influences.

    See Nº. 242. Memorandum by Mr. Balfour (Paris) respecting Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia' [132187/2117/44A] link to scribd.com

  • Hostage March 6, 2012 at 12:59 pm

    That makes it sound that the League of Nations was a rubber stamp for
    the resolutions of the Allied Powers (in this case UK / France)
    does it not?

    Not exactly. In many cases the Allied Powers (States) had entered into existing treaty agreements that were deposited with the Secretary-General of the League in accordance with the terms of the Covenant. One of the functions of the League and the Permanent Court of International Justice was to arbitrate or settle disputes over the interpretation of those international instruments.

    The Allied Powers were responsible for drafting the instruments and administering the new mandated states, because the principles of international law in the early 20th Century did not recognize the legal personality of international organizations like the League, only other States. The decision to ratify mandates through the League was adopted by the Allied States, not the League itself.

    I provided you with a citation from the FRUS which explained that the draft mandate instruments were modified by the Council of the League in several instances. The 10 mandates proposed at Versailles eventually resulted in the creation of 15 states, based upon the recommendations of the Council of the League of Nations. FYI, some of the territory subject to the Armistice of Mudros, like the Hatay Province of Syria, was not detached from Turkey by either the Treaties of Sèvres or Lausanne. So it didn't become part of one of the new mandated states. The Allies didn't need to obtain a rubber stamp for their decision in that regard from the League of Nations.

    Membership in the Council of the League included several States that weren't principle Allied Powers or States that had participated in the San Remo Conference. The Council's decisions on the subject of mandates were only adopted on the basis of unanimity.

    The first international organization that had the necessary legal capacity for for the exercise of its functions and the fulfilment of its purposes was the United Nations. See Article 104 of the Charter. link to yale.edu

    The UN could pursue legal claims, conclude international agreements on its own behalf; directly administer territories under trust; and adopt legal opinions different from those of its member states, which they were nonetheless bound to respect. So it had its own international legal personality. See the decision in Reparation for Injuries Suffered in the Service of the United Nations link to icj-cij.org

    The states that subsequently created other international organizations followed that example. For example, Articles 1-4 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court established the independent international legal personality of the Court separate from its member states or the UN organization. link to untreaty.un.org

  • Hostage March 5, 2012 at 10:11 pm

    Just because the British allowed it a different level of autonomy
    then they did to the rest of the Mandate does not imply that it can be
    seen as something external to it.It’s not.

    Correction, the League of Nations exempted Transjordan from the terms of the Palestine Mandate, not Great Britain. The League was acting in accordance with the terms of a Memorandum that was annexed to the Council resolution that approved the joint "A" mandates for Palestine and Transjordan. See the full text here link to archive.org

    According to the terms of the San Remo resolution, Palestine was to have whatever boundaries the Allied Powers chose to confer upon it and none of the draft mandate instruments were valid until they were submitted to the Council of the League of Nations for approval. link to cfr.org

    The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) contains the official documentary record of major foreign policy decisions taken by the post-World War I Peace Conferences. The Papers relating to the foreign relations of the United States, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919 Volume XIII, Annotations to the treaty of peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany, signed at Versailles, June 28, 1919 explains:

    “The mandates under which the various territories have been administered were submitted by the mandatory governments to the Council of the League of Nations in accordance with paragraph 8 of article 22. The terms were reviewed by the Council, in some cases revised on its recommendation, and finally approved by it. The following table gives the pertinent data for each territory:
    “A” Mandates
    *Palestine
    *Trans-Jordan
    *Syria and Lebanon’
    link to digicoll.library.wisc.edu

    So Transjordan was always governed as a separate state under the terms of a separate international instrument. The fact that it was a separate foreign state for the purposes of article 15 of the Palestine Citizenship Order and the Palestine mandate was affirmed by the High Court of Justice of Palestine. See Hersh Lauterpacht (editor), "States as international persons", in "International Law Reports", Cambridge University Press, 1994, page 17

  • Hostage March 5, 2012 at 9:44 pm

    The idea that the land belongs to the native population and that the natives
    have right’s by being the natives is a relatively new idea that as far as i can tell
    emerged recently in the post colonial era ( i may be wrong about it so feel free to correct me)

    The Fourteen Points enumerated by President Wilson included, in part, the principle that: "XII. The Turkish portion of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development". link to wwi.lib.byu.edu

    the Inter-American Reciprocal Assistance and Solidarity (Act of Chapultepec) noted that: "The American states have been incorporating in their international law, since 1890, by means of conventions, resolutions and declarations, the following principles:
    a) The proscription of territorial conquest and the non-recognition of all acquisitions made by force (First International Conference of American States, 1890); link to avalon.law.yale.edu

    The principle was definitely adopted as a norm of international law by the US Government and the League of Nations as part of the Stimson Doctrine and the findings of the Lytton Commission regarding the Mukden Incident and Japan’s seizure of Manchuria.

    That norm was reflected in the UN Charter adopted on 26 June 1945. For example, the ICJ noted:
    85. The Court first recalls that, pursuant to Article 2, paragraph 4, of
    the United Nations Charter:
    "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of'any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations."
    On 24 October 1970, the General Assembly adopted resolution 2625
    (XXV), entitled "Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning
    Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States" [in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations] (hereinafter "resolution 2625 (XXV)"), in which it emphasized that "No territorial acquisition resulting from the threat or use of force shall be recognized as legal." As the Court stated in its Judgment in the case concerning Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America), the principles as to the use of force incorporated in the Charter reflect customary international law (see I. C. J. Reports 1986, pp. 98-101, paras. 187- 190); the same is true of its corollary entailing the illegality of territorial acquisition resulting from the threat or use of force. See link to icj-cij.org

    Said you: "Judging the morality or the legality of the British actions towards their colonial conquests (or anyone else) in the early 1900 century by today’s standards (Let’s say international law to save us time) is incorrect."

    Palestine wasn't a British colony. The UK High Court of Justice ruled that Palestine was a separate foreign state when Mr Ketter [aka Kletter] was arrested and deported to Palestine: In any event, by reason of such Palestinian naturalization, he secured a passport to visit England to carry on his legal studies. The plaintiff's pursuit of citizenship led him into difficulty there with the British Government, when he unsuccessfully contended that he was a British subject, and not an alien, and therefore was not required to leave England pursuant to an order made respecting him as a Palestinian citizen. This case, King v. Ketter is reported in Law Reports, 1 King's Bench Division, 1940, at page 787. See the cite in Kletter v Dulles. link to dc.findacase.com

    In any event, I've been citing examples of contemporary international law from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

  • Hostage March 5, 2012 at 7:46 pm

    That’s an interesting interpretation on your part, or is this classification in some official document?

    Of course. The ICJ advised in the "Status of South West Africa case" that League of Nations Mandates were international legal instruments that were partly international treaties and partly state constitutions that were issued in the form of resolutions of the Council of the League of Nations. See link to icj-cij.org

    The Treaty of Lausanne contained protocols regarding the responsibilities of the new states that acquired the territories detached from Turkey with respect to citizenship, payment of debts, and succession in interest to state archives, and state properties. The Treaty required that any disputes be submitted to binding arbitration for a final determination. In 1925 Great Britain and France settled a dispute with the foreign bondholders over the distribution of shares in the Ottoman public debt among the sucessor states. They claimed that Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Syria were separate Mandated States that were the true successors in interest - and an Arbiter appointed by the Council of the League of Nations agreed. The Permanent Court of International Justice also decided a case in 1925 which held that Palestine, not Great Britain was the successor state responsible for honoring the Ottoman concessions with friendly Allied states. You can read about the various international and national court decisions regarding the Mandated States here:
    link to mondoweiss.net

  • Hostage March 5, 2012 at 7:17 pm

    Come on annie we are not talking about palestine an amorphic entity that never had any legal status.

    Of course it had a legal status. Jerusalem was the capital of an independent Mutasarrifyya/Sanjak of Kudus (aka Palestine).

    The Western powers had operated their own consular courts under the terms of the capitulations in the Jerusalem (aka Palestine) jurisdiction west of the Jordan river for at least a hundred years. They called the country Palestine and its Pasha the Governor of Palestine. The territory on the east of the Jordan river was part of the Vilayet of Syria (aka Damascus). The Mandate always maintained them as separate legal jurisdictions and states too. The notion that the British gave Arabians part of Arabia is without merit. You can read more about that here:
    link to mondoweiss.net

    You can argue till you are blue in the face but the facts remain.
    If you are still not convinced try looking at the maps of that period.

    The official British maps used by the War Cabinet didn't include Transjordan in Palestine. In any event, both districts were included in the area of Arab independence that Great Britain had pledged to respect in agreements with the Sharif of Mecca. See
    Former Reference: GT 6506A
    Title: Maps illustrating the Settlement of Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula.
    Author: Political Intelligence Department, Foreign Office
    Date 21 November 1918
    Catalogue reference CAB 24/72
    link to nationalarchives.gov.uk
    *Former Reference: GT 6506
    Title: The Settlement of Turkey and the Arablan Peninsula.
    Author: Political Intelligence Department, Foreign Office
    Date 21 November 1918
    Catalogue reference CAB 24/72
    link to nationalarchives.gov.uk

• Responding to commenters on recent bannings
  • Hostage March 7, 2012 at 11:39 am

    I take David Green seriously — I think he’s a serious apologist for the Israel lobby and for all the havoc and damage it has inflicted and continues to inflict on American society.

    No, but it appears he has wholeheartedly embraced some simplistic Marxist totalizing theories. I certainly agree with Chomsky's more nuanced positions about the role of the US government and our military-industrial sector in creating and prolonging the problem, but our foreign policy in the Middle East doesn't serve American or Western capital interests worth a damn.

  • Hostage March 7, 2012 at 11:27 am

    However, there’s isn’t a shred of evidence that USFP would be significantly different without it. That seems to be the assumption at Mondoweiss, and I think it’s misguided.

    The Foreign Relations of the United States provides the documentary record of major US foreign policy decisions. It is punctuated by correspondence and recorded conversations with Zionist lobbyists, including Brandeis, Weizmann, Wise, Silver, Epstein, Shertok, Goldmann, et al. The record is also very clear that these Zionist agents routinely got what they were requesting, despite strenuous opposition from the top officials in the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the CIA.

    If you don't think there's ample evidence that US foreign policy would have been significantly different without that considerable outside influence, then you're either not very well informed or blinded by your own political agenda.

  • Hostage March 7, 2012 at 10:58 am

    Serious scholars of Western anti-Semitism place the Holocaust within a long series of anti-Semitic episodes (including many pogroms and mass deportations) extending across several *millennia* (not centuries) and long preceding the founding of Christianity.

    There was no scholarly interest in anti-Semitism until the mid-19th Century. Even then, the works that were produced were polemical and non-factual in nature and based upon common fallacies. She Hannah Arendt's commentary on the situation here: link to mondoweiss.net

  • Hostage March 6, 2012 at 8:32 pm

    Are you suggesting the Boxheim Documents as treated in Socialist history are a hoax?

    No, I don't think so. The documents contained wholesale plans for dealing with various opponents of the Nazis as well as plans for starving and interning the Jews. Here is a snippet from the JTA archives of the era: "Jews to Be Starved out if Hitlerists Come to Power: Boxheim Documents Were Authentic Official Statement." Jewish Telegraphic Agency 25 Apr 1932:
    

    An official statement has been issued here to-day declaring that the recent police search in the Hitlerist headquarters at Munich has provided documentary proof that, not-withstanding the denials made at the time by Hitler and the other leaders of the Nazi Party, the so-called Boxheim documents were authentic and that the Nazi Party leaders had given their approval to the plans laid down in them for dealing with the Jews, who were to be starved out by being refused food cards, when the Hitlerist regime cane into power and made it impossible for food to be obtained other than by food-cards.

    link to archive.jta.org

    The report in the FRUS about the internment camps also noted that the Boxheim plans dealt with both Jews and others:
    

    About a week ago it was reported in the press that the body of Dr. Schaeffer, a former Nazi, who was responsible for the disclosure of the notorious Boxheim documents which revealed the ruthless measures which the Nazis were planning against Jews and political opponents upon their accession to power (see despatch No. 1312 of December 1, 1931 51 ), was found on a railroad track near Frankfort. Dr. Schaeffer was apparently shot by former party colleagues who then threw his body from a bridge to the railroad tracks, about fifty feet below.

    link to digicoll.library.wisc.edu

  • Hostage March 6, 2012 at 5:18 pm

    Arendt would probably have been banned here right alongside Blankfort. Thanks, Phil and Adam!

    That may be true, but Hannah Ardent was vilified and banned by the very audience that Phil and Adam are trying to engage. The finer points and nuances of Arendt's dissertations are completely lost on the knuckle-walking bigots on both sides of the debate. So there's merit to the idea of avoiding long polarizing debates about that period of history and simply letting readers investigate her works in order to draw their own conclusions.

  • Hostage March 6, 2012 at 4:59 pm

    I don’t really share the wish to widen the core discussion beyond issues raised by Zionism. The proposition I want to discuss (with reasonable people) is the Zionist proposition that Jewish people have special rights in Palestine.

    I already comment at other websites that are devoted to specific topics, including genocide studies, international law, international organization, and history. Many of the discussions here at MW about Zionism or the elements of Jewish and Palestinian identity would be off-topic or hard to pigeon-hole at most of those other websites.

    I'm not upset by decisions adopted by the website operators here, or elsewhere, to devote their bandwidth to articles or comments about a limited or shared area of interest. But I'm put-off by the "we know it when we see it" rule used to ban Blankfort, because most of us didn't see anti-Semites or Holocaust deniers joining in the discussion with Prof Slater. I accept the notion that they did arrive and overloaded the moderators and that Phil and Adam don't want to open that can of worms.

    Meanwhile eee seems to have been replaced in the twinkling of an eye by others equally horrifying, Blankfort not.

    Anonymous trolls reciting the MFA and Hasbara Fellowship's talking points aren't very hard to find. People like Blankfort who have devoted decades to study, interviews, analysis, writing, and activism can't be so easily replaced.

  • Hostage March 5, 2012 at 11:25 pm

    In revisionist “history” however, it becomes important, because it frames Nazi anti-Jewish policies as part of a “war” between Germany and “International Jewry” – actually started by the Jews!

    I've pointed out elsewhere that two years before this boycott vs boycott activity in 1933, the “Boxheim Document” was published. It revealed the Nazi plans to intern and starve the Jews to death.
    link to time.com

    By the time the boycott debate of 1933 got rolling, various sources reported to the US government that there were already between 10,000 and 100,000 persons detained in German concentration camps. There were many reports of persons gunned down or murdered trying to flee or escape. link to digicoll.library.wisc.edu

    So the war with International Jewry was already beyond the planning stages before the rally at Madison Square Garden ever happened.

  • Hostage March 5, 2012 at 5:28 pm

    Like this bit of inheritance?

    Yes. Dr. Baruch Goldstein, the perpetrator of the massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs, was a direct descendant of the Baal HaTanya, Shneur Zalman of Liadi. So it appears that the hostile attitude toward non-Jews found in the Tanya was definitely part of Goldstein's "inheritance". The failedmessiah website is a testament to the fact that, in many ways, modern Jewish orthodox thinking can be viewed as a conscious rejection of Enlightenment era values.

  • Hostage March 5, 2012 at 2:43 pm

    Hostage–What would you say about someone like Meron Benvenisti, who in his book “Sacred Landscapes” makes a distinction between the motives behind Plan Dalet and what happened in the second half of the 1948 war.

    The crimes described in the Nuremberg Charter applied to any civilian population of an occupied territory. They resulted in criminal liability regardless of the motives involved. What I would say (if anything) would depend upon whether that someone is a troll who means to pardon serious crimes committed against Palestinians and/or preserve Israel's freedom to commit similar offenses in the future on the grounds of "security" or "necessity".

    Plan Dalet undoubtedly violated the provisions of the customary laws reflected in the Nuremberg Charter against planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression. It was based upon three previous plans to occupy Palestine after the British withdrawal and subdue the Arab civilian population. The plans were not solely defensive in nature, since they called for unprovoked attacks on Arab villages and supply lines; expulsion of the lawful Arab inhabitants if they exercised their own inherent right to self-defense; establishment of a "defensive system" on high ground and transportation arteries inside the proposed Arab state and Corpus Separatum; and freedom to pursue military activity from Jewish watchtower and stockade settlements located beyond the boundaries proposed for the Jewish State: e.g.:

    2. Ensuring freedom of military and economic activity within the borders of the [Hebrew] state and in Jewish settlements outside its borders by occupying and controlling important high-ground positions on a number of transportation arteries.
    ...
    4. Mounting operations against enemy population centers located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories:
    Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.

    Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.
    
    link to jewishvirtuallibrary.org

    I would argue with Benvenisti that the activities under item 4 above were exactly the sort of orders approved by General Jodl. By teletype of 28th October, 1944, Jodl ordered the evacuation of all persons in Northern Norway and the burning of their houses so they could not help the Russians.
    link to avalon.law.yale.edu

    At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial he was charged with approving orders that violated the rules of war. He was found guilty and hanged.

    A good rule of thumb is that it is probably not legal to treat Palestinians in ways that would be considered criminal if they happened to be Norwegian or Jewish.

  • Hostage March 5, 2012 at 12:52 pm

    Can you offer a working definition of Nakba denial?

    The Holocaust denial laws in Europe reflect the definition contained in the EU Framework Decision on Racism and Xenophobia. It criminalized forms of conduct that publicly condone, deny, or grossly trivialize crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined in the Statute of the International Criminal Court (Articles 6, 7 and 8) and the customary crimes against any civilian population defined in Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

    We have trolls here who deliberately engage in incitement and routinely trivialize, deny, or condone very well documented War Plans (Avner through Dalet); the resulting massacres; and involuntary population transfers carried-out by the Jewish militias in 1948. Those were serious crimes as defined by well established customary law reflected in both the Rome Statute and the Nuremberg Charter.

    Can you think of any specific remarks that should have been scrapped for Nakba denial, after the policy change, but weren’t?

    Surely, here is an example:
    link to mondoweiss.net

    Robert Werdine kept insisting that the Haganah did not participate in the crimes against humanity and war crimes committed against the village of Deir Yassin, even after I pointed out that a) the official IDF account states that the Haganah District Commander violated assurances contained in a non-aggression pact with the village when he authorized the unprovoked attack; b) the Haganah had no right to occupy the village, which was located beyond the borders of the proposed Jewish state, in the Corpus Seoparatum; and c) the Haganah forces were accessories to the conspiracy and the massacre because they provided deadly crossfire that killed some of the Arab inhabitants who had taken up defensive positions.
    link to mondoweiss.net

    Simply having a coordinated plan of attack, like Plan Dalet, or the plan to occupy Deir Yassin in violation of agreements or assurances, was a crime as defined in Article 6 of the Nuremberg Charter, i.e. planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;

    The actions of the Haganah district commander and those who assisted in the illegal attack on Deir Yassin were also crimes under this provision of Article 6 of the Nuremberg Charter:
    Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.
    link to avalon.law.yale.edu

    In 2004, the ICJ determined that Israel had violated a number of its binding obligations under international law, including many offenses that constitute grave breaches and war crimes under the terms of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Those included house demolitions and expropriations of property that have displaced the Palestinian population and the establishment of illegal Israeli settlements.

    Werdine and other regular commenters dismiss the idea that those are serious crimes or that they are part of a multi-pronged on-going pogrom against the Palestinian people.

  • Hostage March 4, 2012 at 9:49 pm

    HOSTAGE- Your comment provides support for Israel Shahak’s interpretation of events in “Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years.”

    No, that would be an echo chamber, since my opinions have been informed by the facts and thoughts presented in the works of Jewish intellectuals like Hannah Arendt, Israel Shahak, Yoram Dinstein, and a host of other writers.

    Arendt certainly thought that Judaism and dislike of Gentiles was an antecedent of 19th Century Antisemitism - and she outlined that thesis as a preliminary to a discussion about the origins of totalitarianism (typified by Nazism and Stalinism). I respect the fact that Phil and Adam want to steer clear of the nut cases who want to blame the victims of the Holocaust, but see no harm in pointing readers to the works of Arendt and Shahak.

    The Palestinians are obviously facing both political and religious persecution. The Jewish Haskalah is reflected in Israeli Academia, but it has always been poorly represented in the governing coalitions of Israel, thanks in large measure to opposition from the left and right wing Zionist-Nationalists and the Religious Orthodox parties operating under the auspices of their Status Quo Agreement. In "Eichmann in Jerusalem", Arendt noted that the secular majority was in agreement with either the Zionist or Religious camps regarding the desirability of imposing discriminatory rabbinical laws.

    For example, the "Israel Yearbook on Human Rights", edited by Dinstein, noted that the so-called “Womens Equal Rights Law” of 1951 specifically excluded marriage, divorce, and other personal status laws from its guarantees of "equality" on religious grounds. He noted that the exclusion of equality for women in the Framework Law laid the ground rules for the subsequent subordination of legal equality to religious values in the entire Israeli legal system. Every subsequent attempt to adopt a real bill of rights has foundered on the requirement to pay deference to Jewish religious institutions and parties over the principle of human rights and equality. See the “Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, Volume 25; Volume 1995”, pages 210-212.

    Anti-Zionism alone can't address the Jewish rejection of Enlightenment era values. The rise of Jewish Religious Orthodoxy plays an integral role in the new Fascism on display in Israel and the longing for the "Good Old Days" of the ethnocentric 2nd Jewish Commonwealth.

  • Hostage March 4, 2012 at 6:17 pm

    I think this is true, Hannah Arendt warned about it, and part of the reason I plant my flag in Jewish turf is to prove that my community may be as idiotic as others, but there are many Jews who are working against the cultish thinking. (If you are going to go after religious communities for their mistakes, Jews aren’t the only group that will face judgments)

    The Jewish community had three primary reactions to the Christian Enlightenment in Europe. They were "The Haskalah", or Jewish Enlightenment (represented by individuals like Arendt), the rise of Religious Orthodoxy, and the rise Zionist Nationalism.

    It's sort of ironic that you mention Hannah Arendt in connection with banning commentators or going after religious communities. She went after Zionist Nazi collaborators and the racialists in both the Zionist Nationalist and Orthodox Jewish Religious movements. Those two groups still present an almost insurmountable problem to achieving peace in Palestine under either a one state or two state solution. The desire of religious Jews to restore their sovereignty over the entire land, the Temple Mount, and all of the inhabitants is an inseparable part of the our modern-day problems.

    As a result of her criticisms, Arendt was vilified and banned in Israel. Her books ridiculed the similarities between sacrosanct rabbinical laws and Hitler's Nuremberg laws (Eichmann in Jerusalem); and she claimed that Judaism had become a closed system of thought that was hostile to Gentiles and a direct antecedent to the rise of Antisemitism in middle of the 19th Century (Preface of later versions of "The Origins of Totalitarianism"). I've commented about her views on those subjects in the past:
    *http://mondoweiss.net/2011/08/reut-institute-the-boycott-law-helps-israels-critics-and-alienates-american-jews.html#comment-345852
    *http://mondoweiss.net/2012/02/hasbara-pennbds-wrap-up-pro-israel-students-are-ignorant.html/comment-page-1#comment-424700
    *http://mondoweiss.net/2012/02/hasbara-pennbds-wrap-up-pro-israel-students-are-ignorant.html/comment-page-1#comment-424817

    Objectionable Jewish religious beliefs and practices are not a genetic disorder that gets passed-on automagically to the next generation - despite a lot of shreying about the supposed Hardei demographic threat. I think that we still have a duty to go after the religious culture of violence or hatred against Gentiles, women, children, and even other Jews. You can't ignore the role played by the religious right, here in the US or Israel. They are actively prolonging the I/P conflict and "Strangling the soul" of our societies e.g.:
    *'Israelis should stand up to haredim' link to ynetnews.com
    *'MK Eichler: Reform Jews anti-Semites' ("He must have not yet decided who he hates more – Arabs, Reform Jews or women.") link to ynetnews.com

    I've commented on the struggle over the history and other textbooks employed by the Education Ministry in the State of Israel. There are many explicit distinctions between Jews and Gentiles in the Torah and Talmud. Those distinctions are employed by the religious parties to justify the political oppression of others living in the State of Israel and the Occupied territories.

    Archeology has confirmed the biblical accounts that Gentiles, who entered the Jerusalem Temple, were subject to summary execution. That's a fundamental characteristic of authentic ceremonial Judaism that many Zionists today implicitly yearn to restore. Here's a picture of one of the markers that were placed in the outer court of the Temple platform during the 2nd Commonwealth era warning all Gentiles not to enter the area on penalty of death. link to orion.it.luc.edu

    Palestinians are already being killed in clashes with the Jewish forces that police the supposed location of the Temple Mount. That situation is only going to deteriorate if Moshe Feiglin, Ateret Cohanim, et al establish a 3rd Sanctuary there in line with the precept of restoring authentic Judaism. That situation is an integral part of the conflict which has nothing to do with capitalism or colonialism - and it transcends either the one state or two state solution. link to jewishisrael.org

    Unfortunately, the modern-day non-Orthodox sects of Judaism, which initially rejected the divine origin of those segregationist beliefs and practices, have abandoned their principled enlightenment era objections to nationhood and have endorsed de facto separatism as part of a pragmatic Zionist-Nationalist program for restoring a Jewish nation or governing a Jewish State of Israel. The major Jewish organizations routinely cite antisemitism and the Holocaust to justify the necessity for a restored, segregated Jewish state or justify it on ancient religious grounds.

    Many Jews deliberately avoid honest discussions about the racist elements inherent in the various streams of Judaism by shreying about Holocaust denial and antisemitism. At the same time leading Torah Sages in Israel routinely claim that the nations hate Israel because of "our inheritance", while conveniently ignoring the fact that inheritance consists in large measure of an ancient racial code that purports to govern nearly every aspect of a Gentile inhabitant's life within the expansively defined boundaries of Eretz Israel on a non-democratic basis. That same code engenders separation from Gentiles in other lands. Some of the most influential Jewish Sages and/or State rabbinate authorities plainly teach that Gentiles only exist to serve the Jews, e.g. link to jpost.com

    No amount of Jewish racial provocation could ever justify the crime of genocide or the Holocaust, because two wrongs don't make a right. That's also why neither "necessity" nor "yearning for Zion" can't be employed by Jewish Nationalists or Jewish religious authorities to excuse the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people. The backlash that Arendt warned about was based upon both Zionism and the closed system of thought employed by practitioners of Judaism.

• Israeli government sending 100 Israelis abroad to 'defend the state' during Israel Apartheid Week
  • Hostage February 22, 2012 at 7:51 am

    Does somebody have a problem with this??
    Free speech is a wonderful thing.

    Since you brought it up, I see no reason why activists shouldn't object when agents of a foreign government are deployed to commit acts that may constitute crimes or incitement in accordance with the terms of the relevant international conventions, i.e.:
    

    International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, G.A. res. 3068 (XXVIII)), 28 U.N. GAOR Supp. (No. 30) at 75, U.N. Doc. A/9030 (1974), 1015 U.N.T.S. 243, entered into force July 18, 1976.
    ...
    Article III

    International criminal responsibility shall apply, irrespective of the motive involved, to individuals, members of organizations and institutions and representatives of the State, whether residing in the territory of the State in which the acts are perpetrated or in some other State, whenever they:

    (a) Commit, participate in, directly incite or conspire in the commission of the acts mentioned in article II of the present Convention;

    (b) Directly abet, encourage or co-operate in the commission of the crime of apartheid.

    Agents of Israel can also be required to register and provide additional disclosures when they disseminate political propaganda in the United States, e.g. Meese v. Keene, 481 U.S. 465 (1987) link to supreme.justia.com

    There are many other examples of limitations placed upon the free speech of the agents of a foreign government. Under U.S. law, foreign corporations, individuals and governments have been prohibited from providing funds for national elections since 1966. Although the Supreme Court has ruled that campaign donations are a form of speech, it upheld the ban on foreign contributions earlier this year in Bluman v. FEC. link to supremecourt.gov

• The end of the 'two-state solution' is the beginning of a more just future
  • Hostage February 21, 2012 at 2:10 am

    Let us know when Jews living in Palestine or Palestinians living in Israel can join the PLO, as whites could join the ANC. Or when a ‘Freedom Charter’ style document that addresses the aspirations of both sides is adopted and accepted.
    Seriously.

    Security Council resolution 1860 endorsed the Egyptian efforts to negotiate a reconciliation between Hamas and the PA, although the US abstained. Israel downplayed the importance of negotiations with the PA, because it did not govern Gaza or speak for all of the Palestinian people. The reconciliation agreement calls for Hamas to join the PLO. Let us know when Hamas is no longer designated as an enemy entity by the State of Israel. Seriously.

  • Hostage February 21, 2012 at 1:51 am

    Halper had me until he started shreying about Fayyad building "something". The objection to recognizing and dealing with Palestinians on an equal legal footing has always been that there is only a government in exile or one presiding over nothing. I suppose he thinks publishing a plan to end the Israeli occupation or filing a criminal complaint against Israelis with the ICC Prosecutor are just some more examples of collaboration.

    Fayyad endorsed the existing PLO platform of a real state based upon 1967 borders in accordance with: the requirements of international legitimacy; the applicable UN resolutions, including 194(III), 242(1967), & 338(1973); and international law. That plan called for belated recognition of Palestine's borders and UN membership in line with Phase II of the Quartet Road Map as affirmed in Security Council resolution 1397 (2002). It has been available for several years from the PA website and the Permanent Observer's UN website.

    Haaretz, AFP, and others have reported on Fayyad’s refusal of proposals for an economic peace without ending the occupation or a real state:

    But Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad has rejected Netanyahu’s proposals for an economic solution to the Middle East conflict.
    Fayyad, a former International Monetary Fund economist, said the conflict was a political one that required a political solution.
    “I am interested not in redefining the occupation but in ending the occupation,” he said in an interview published by the Israeli daily Haaretz on Tuesday.

    link to google.com
    The prime minister of the Palestinian Authority tells Al Jazeera why Palestine is ready for statehood.
    link to aljazeera.com

    I agree that the status quo of a single apartheid state is the likely outcome of the US and Israel vetoing the plan for two stares that they both paid lip service to for so long. But why waste your time and space blaming the victims and putting words in their mouths that they've never uttered?

• The Jab'a accident and the infrastructure of occupation
  • Hostage February 17, 2012 at 10:22 am with 1 replies

    Satisfaction that “only Palestinians” were the victims and slogans such as “Death to Arabs, why do we help them?” were posted on the Facebook pages of Netanyahu, Wallah and the Israel Police.

    There is plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that, if Netanyahu had been a Presbyterian, someone would have already demanded that Mark Zuckerberg remove those pages.

• BDS interview fallout: Finkelstein 'showed his own fear of the paradigm shift in discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict'
  • Hostage February 21, 2012 at 2:59 pm

    Hostage, I believe the headline here was sarcastic (Soviet archives show Stalin behind Israel Apartheid Week), he does have a tendency to use parody when criticizing the hardcore ideologues.

    I understand that NF was being sarcastic, but the headline he substituted for the original one, really only pokes fun at the supposed chain of direct historical and political connections that were outlined by Catherine Chatterley. The views I'm talking about are usually expressed with a great deal of subtlety. For example, by labeling the situation in the occupied territories apartheid, while denying that the situation in Israel constitutes apartheid too. That was implicit in the claims he made in the Barat interview. NF punted on the issue of apartheid or prohibited forms of segregation within the borders of the State of Israel and the possibility of enforcing the existing international laws and treaties on that particular subject. In the interview, he went so far as to claim that international law doesn't apply to minority rights in Israel.

    Israel will never recognize the establishment and maintenance of Jewish-only communities; the forced displacement of the Bedouins; and overt discrimination in the areas of land, housing, education, and family unification as human rights abuses if the solidarity movement and human rights organizations were to adopt NF's approach to the treatment of minorities within the state's recognized boundaries.

    Keep in mind that Judge Goldstone described the illegal discrimination in the occupied territories as a direct result of the application of Israel's two-tiered municipal legal system which provides superior rights and privileges to persons of Jewish descendancy.

  • Hostage February 21, 2012 at 1:31 pm

    I didn’t say no Arab state was established I said the other state was not established, take a look. I meant a state called Palestine

    The UN resolution didn't prescribe the names of the proposed states. It simply referred to them as the Arab state and the Jewish state.

    FYI, Abdullah was already the King of one state, Transjordan, when the Jericho Congress named him the King of Arab Palestine (as well). That was in December of 1948. See for example the Palestine Post 14 December 1948 page 1 link to jpress.org.il

    The King installed a civil administration and issued a proclamation which provided for the continued application of the laws that were applicable in Palestine on the eve of the termination of the Mandate. King Abdullah was vested with all the powers that were enjoyed by the King of England, his ministers and the High Commissioner of Palestine by the Palestine Order-in-Council, 1922. See Raja Shehadeh, "From Occupation to Interim Accords", Kluwer Law International, 1997, pp. 77–78. The Order-in-Council and many of the ordinances referred to the state as Palestine and dealt with subjects of nationality, state lands, & etc.

    The joint Kingdom was established and renamed to reflect the new official status on 24 January 1949. See the entry for Transjordan in the Encyclopedia of the United Nations and international agreements, Volume 4 link to books.google.com

    BTW, Palestine and Transjordan had both been officially recognized as states under the terms of the post-WWI treaties and the final decisions that had been handed down in a pair of international court cases in 1925. They were also recognized as state parties in several international treaties deposited with the Secretary of the League of Nations. When the UN refused to implement its partition plan by force, Israel was formed by its own unilateral act of secession. The government of Israel said that it was in no sense a successor of the former government of Palestine. See D.P. O'Connell author "The Law of State Succession", Volume V of the Cambridge Studies in International and Comparative Law, 1956, Hersh Lauterpacht editor, pages 10-11, and 178; and CApp 41/49 Simshon Palestine Portland Cement Factory LTD. v. Attorney-General (1950)
    link to elyon1.court.gov.il

    A request for recognition, that was submitted to the United States, said that Israel had been established as an independent republic within the boundaries of the UN resolution of 29 November 1947. So it was not the formal successor and did not occupy all of the territory of Palestine.

    Ernest A. Gross, a senior U.S. State Department legal adviser, authored a memorandum for Under Secretary of State Lovett at the request of the President's Counsel, Clark Clifford and the representative of the Provisional Government of Israel, Elihu Epstein. See for example John Snetsinger, "Truman, the Jewish vote, and the creation of Israel", Hoover Press, 1974 & Richard Holbrooke and Clark Clifford, President Truman's Decision to Recognize Israel via the JCPA website. The memo was titled ''Recognition of New States and Governments in Palestine'', dated 11 May 1948. Gross said that:
    

    "The law of nations recognizes an inherent right of people lacking the agencies and institutions of social and political control to organize a state and operate a government."

    The memo is contained in the Foreign Relations of the United States 1948, volume 5, part 2, and starts on page 960. It is cited by Stefan Talmon, in "Recognition of Governments in International Law", Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, page 36

    Israel recognized the legal competence of the new joint entity, Jordan, to negotiate the final borders when it signed the Armistice Agreement on 3 April 1949.

  • Hostage February 21, 2012 at 12:58 am with 3 replies

    This is whre I don’t follow NF and I find him incoherent.

    So what? I find Ali Abunimah and Omar Barghouti incoherent. I still number them among the goods guys and simply agree to disagree with them on many issues. NF is saying that enforcing international law will result in a better outcome than sticking with the status quo of relying on political negotiations, Israeli Apartheid week, and BDS. There is no strong public opposition to enforcing international law.

    Which only reinforce the idea that placing one’s faith in international law is futile, which again undermines NF’s argument.

    Some of the Palestinian population groups have their own unique status under various international conventions on armed conflicts or refugees. For example, the humanitarian provisions of the Geneva Conventions may not apply to many of the Palestinian citizens of Israel and Jordan, or some of the refugees living outside the occupied territories. For 60 years Palestinians have been placing their faith in force majure, armed resistance, terrorism, and non-violent resistance. During that time, the Palestinians acquiesced in the deliberate strategy of keeping them and their case out of the international courts. It has been the strategy of waiting for a negotiated political settlement, without the added leverage of enforcing the existing international laws, that has proven to be futile.

    So the left wing is silly for not sticknig religiously to the law, but just as silly for limiting it’s position to the law.

    If you're going to utilize pilpul then it would be more accurate to describe NF as saying that a) the left is silly for saying that the 2ss is dead, because it will require the disruption and expense of resettling 600,000 Jewish settlers; while b) the 1ss will occur naturally, because it only entails the expense and disruption caused by resettling 6,000,000 Palestinian refugees; and c) the Jewish settlers have the option of pulling-up stakes and moving to Israel when the IDF leaves, but the Palestinian refugees still need the consent of the Israeli public and that's not ever going to happen.

    FYI, NF said he supports both the enforcement of international law and a BDS movement - based upon clearly defined and realistic goals.

    I disagree with some of NF's positions, e.g. with respect to equating political Zionism with racism., i.e. link to normanfinkelstein.com

    I think that political Zionism is a form of racism. At the same time, I agree with NF's, criticism that Syria, Saudi Arabia, et al are in no position to co-sponsor UN resolutions on the subject without inviting charges of hypocrisy over their role in prolonging the conflict for reasons that mirror those of political Zionism. He is correct when he describes the problem of IAW and BDS rhetoric which:
    

    is left open enough to incorporate: (1) critics of Israel who still support a two-state solution; (2) those who support the dismantling of the current Jewish State and its replacement with a single (highly theoretical) secular democratic state; and (3) those who support the destruction of Israel by any means necessary. All three camps are included amongst supporters of IAW and the BDS campaign, and therefore the lines are often blurred between harsh criticism of the state of Israel, outright condemnation of its continued existence, and calls for its eradication. This is a serious problem, and one that appears to be designed quite consciously by IAW and the BDS movement.

    The answer is to point-out their shortcomings too, not to avoid the subject altogether. Many of us do support organizations, like AI, HRW, & others with a view to addressing global human rights issues and criticize the positions taken by the BDS leadership.

  • Hostage February 20, 2012 at 11:01 pm with 1 replies

    If one is worried about being labeled a hypocrite, it pretty much precludes advocating for any cause at all – see discussion of R2P, foreign intervention, etc.

    There haven't been any really good examples of R2P to date, especially in the context of R2P Palestine. Frank Barat, who interviewed NF, edited and co-authored a book with Ilan Pappe and Noam Chomsky, Gaza in Crisis. Chomsky wrote a chapter which contains an appropriate illustration of the doubtful pedigree of R2P:
    

    Gareth Evans signed a treaty with his Indonesian counterpart Ali Alatas granting Australia rights to the substantial oil reserves in “the Indonesian Province of East Timor.” The Indonesia-Australia Timor Gap Treaty, which offered not a crumb to the people whose oil was being stolen, “is the only legal agreement anywhere in the world that effectively recognises Indonesia’s right to rule East Timor,” the Australian press reported. Asked about his willingness to recognize the Indonesian conquest and to rob the sole resource of the conquered territory, which had been subjected to near-genocidal slaughter by the Indonesian invader with the strong support of Australia (along with the United States, the United Kingdom, and some others), Evans explained that “there is no binding legal obligation not to recognise the acquisition of territory that was acquired by force,” adding that “the world is a pretty unfair place, littered with examples of acquisition by force.” It should, then, be unproblematic for Israel to follow suit in Gaza. A few years later, Evans became the leading figure in the campaign to introduce the concept “responsibility to protect”—known as R2P—into international law. R2P is intended to establish an international obligation to protect populations from grave crimes. Evans is the author of a major book on the subject and was co-chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which issued what is considered the basic document on R2P.

    -- ibid pages 208-209

    Here’s Mouin Rabbani addressing this issue, in the first video, starting at around 1:27:00 :
    Rabbani says the core of any resolution has to be unambiguous Israeli recognition of the right of return and acknowledgment of its role in causing and perpetuating the refugee problem. Only then, he goes on to say, can there be a negotiated settlement of the refugee question that even the refugees can accept. So if I'm hearing him correctly, he wants Israel to acknowledge the moral principle underlying the universal right of return, while negotiating something less than that, i.e. a mea culpa + an agreed-upon negotiated settlement.

    Now you’re confusing me. Are you saying that UNSC res 194 and 242, or any other requirement of IL are not necessarily to be construed as applying the RoR to descendants of the refugees, and only to the refugees themselves? Has this issue ever been clarified?

    No. Israel played a role in adopting the principle that refugee status was passed to the descendants of Jewish refugees until their plight was resolved. It has always preferred to treat the legal issues related to Palestinian refugees as if they are merely political questions. That tactic has been successful, so Israel has no interest in challenging the status quo in international court. OTOH, the Palestinians haven't had access to the international court and a decision like the one in the ECHR case would be a disaster for them. The Geneva Convention and resolution 194(III) didn't envision a long-term occupation or conflict. So, the status of descendants were not specifically mentioned. The passage of time and the arrival of new generations does not work in favor of the Palestinians. So yes, there is a window of opportunity that is closing.

    One of the roles of the General Assembly is to promote the progressive codification of international law. The UN doesn't make international law, but it can state the consensus position of experts on a particular subject in a draft treaty and open it for signature. That makes it a matter of conventional law that is only binding on the parties to the agreement. When a treaty has been universally ratified, or there is no significant evidence of contrary state practice, then the UN can declare that the convention reflects customary practice that it considers binding upon non-signatories and signatories alike.

    The draft UN Refugee Convention of 1950 was the work of an Ad Hoc Committee on displaced or stateless persons and refugees. The Committee was comprised of representatives of Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Israel, Poland, Turkey, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Venezuela. The Committee agreed that children and the immediate family of a refugee should also be considered as refugees. See pdf page 40 of 66 link to un.org

    The consensus position on the "Principle of unity of the family" was incorporated in the UN Convention and applies to all refugee programs operated under UN auspices. The treaty entered into force with 19 signatories and there were eventually 145 state parties including Israel. Needless to say there is little or no evidence of contrary state practice.

  • Hostage February 20, 2012 at 9:07 pm

    Rashid Khalidi’s The Iron Cage chapters “A Failure of Leadership” and “The Revolt, 1948 and Afterwards”.

    If he doesn't mention de jure recognition of the union between Arab Palestine and Transjordan by the US, UK, France, the USSR, and other UN member states, then who cares?

    King Abdullah had received hundreds of petitions from Palestinian notables requesting protection upon the withdrawal of the British forces. Eugene Rogan says that those petitions, from nearly every town and village in Palestine, are preserved in "The Hashemite Documents: The Papers of Abdullah bin al-Husayn, volume V: Palestine 1948 (Amman 1995)". See Chapter 5, Jordan and 1948, in "The war for Palestine: rewriting the history of 1948", By Eugene L. Rogan, and Avi Shlaim, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

    The fact is that the majority of Palestinians preferred to have Abdullah as their head of state over either Ben Gurion or the Mufti. They formally preserved their rights to their own state under any final settlement of the Palestine question in the text of the Act of Union and in the Arab League compromise on the issue. Half the seats in the lower house of the Jordanian Parliament were reserved for Palestinians.

    Do you know how stupid it sounds when you say there was no Arab State established in Palestine? That's exactly what the Jericho Congress was convened to accomplish. It declared Abdullah King of Arab Palestine and he certainly wasn't French. Transjordan was turned down for membership in the UN in 1946 because some members of the Security Council said it was still part of the Palestine Mandate, which had not been legally terminated. The General Assembly Ad Hoc Committee entertained requests to include some of Transjordan's territory in the Jewish state. Despite those facts, many commentators pretend that Abdullah was strictly a foreigner interloper with no vested interest in the Palestine mandate.

    Electronic Intifada founder, Ali Abunimah's own father was a member of the Jordaian UN delegation. So we need to drop the nonsensical B.S. about betrayal and bad advice. The Palestinians had their own elected representatives, held appointed public offices, and helped establish and govern the state which controlled the vast majority of the territory of the former mandate on both sides of the Jordan river.

  • Hostage February 18, 2012 at 9:33 am with 9 replies

    Since ND’s claim that the public will see BDS activists as hypocrites is based on his argument that they ARE in fact hypocrites, and they aren’t, then his “practical” argument falls flat.

    No, Finkelstein is not only telling you that the Israeli public views the goals of the BDS movement as hypocritical, but that even if international law guaranteed the right of return for 6 million refugees and their descendants, there's no public or international support for a population transfer that large ever happening.

    FYI, the General Assembly simply delegated responsibility for identifying and registering the Palestine and other refugees to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), or the UN Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC) and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Those organs made the determination that all refugee communities have their refugee status passed through the generations while their plight remains unresolved. That determination is not grounded on any requirement of international law. In all likelihood Israel would challenge that in the ICJ as ultra vires to the powers and functions of the General Assembly if Palestinians ever attempted to enforce the right of return.

    Furthermore, by using the language of IL, the framers of the call have intentionally opened the movement to people who may disagree with them of matters of substance.

    International law doesn't matter if the courts dismiss your case and refuse to grant you a remedy. The European Court of Human Rights adopted decisions striking down claims based upon the right of return to occupied areas of northern Cyprus due to the passage of time and the arrival of new generations. The Court instructed the victims to present their claims to the compensation commissions of the illegal occupying power. The ruling was grounded in the ipse dixit of the court, not in the language of international law. The Greek Cypriot victims did not have anything analogous to UN General Assembly resolutions 181(II) and 194(III) by way of support, but they did have the Geneva Conventions (which the ECHR ignored). The decision is final and can't be appealed. See the discussions on Demopoulos and Others v. Turkey et al, decision of 1 March 2010, -- ECHR 2010 here:
    *http://humanrightsdoctorate.blogspot.com/2010/03/property-tribunal-in-northern-cyprus-is.html
    *http://korbelsecurity.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/european-court-of-human-rights-on-right-of-return-for-refugees/

    Finkelstein is telling you that he is no longer willing to waste his time on left wing silliness that isn't ever going to happen. If the poor Palestinians have to sit around somewhere "Waiting for Godot", then they really ought to be enjoying the hospitality of their own new Palestinian State. International law doesn't require the neighboring states to grant the UN or Israel an unconditional right to violate their territorial integrity in order to operate a bunch of large refugee camps.

  • Hostage February 18, 2012 at 7:21 am

    Untrue. The other state did not exist at the time Israel became a state and in a sense turned down its opportunity to become a state at the time, thanks in part to some bad counsel from those who promised to fight on its behalf.

    The only bad advice was buying into hasbara myths. The US granted de jure recognition to Israel and the new state of Jordan on the very same day.

    The other state was formed by a union between the Arab territories of the former Palestine mandate, Arab Palestine and Transjordan after they had gained their independence. The new entity, Jordan, was recognized by many countries before it became a full member state of the United Nations. The union between Palestine and Jordan was dissolved by mutual consent in 1988 when Palestine declared its independence from the Hashemite Kingdom.

    You can read the full details about US recognition of Jordanian sovereignty over the West Bank and recognition by France, the UK, and the Soviet Union in the comment here: link to mondoweiss.net

  • Hostage February 17, 2012 at 10:50 am

    Chris Green goes on to offer a good critique of the BDS movement by calling attention to the things NF tried to highlight in the interview.

• Israeli apartheid is never fit to print in the 'Times', only in 'Haaretz'
  • Hostage February 17, 2012 at 7:16 pm

    can’t a person ever have a bad day around here!

    I wasn't scolding you. I was commenting on the Kafkaesque situation. The government of Palestine is boycotting Israeli settlements, industrial zones, & etc. and the University is a closed zone to Palestinian-Palestinians, but not Israeli-Palestinians. There is an Israeli law against Israeli-Palestinians who would like to speak out about boycotting the university. Nations are spatial entities, because people and their domiciles are not abstractions. In this case we have two of them and two governments that still claim to be nation-states that exercise personal jurisdiction over all of their citizens.

    We're still demanding equal rights, in part, because the two states haven't disappeared.

  • Hostage February 17, 2012 at 10:06 am

    I am sorry, I misunderstood. I hope you forgive.

    Your questions weren't out of line given the context. So, no harm done in the first place. Internet chat is a second language for me too;-)

    P.S. Even if the university wasn't a closed zone the government of Palestine has a boycott going on against the settlements. Israeli-Palestinians can't support that boycott openly. So there are still two opposing jurisdictions.

  • Hostage February 17, 2012 at 7:56 am

    that’s slightly mean hostage, no? What’s your point? To show that there is a basic truth to the hasbara line that “Arab Israelis” ultimately would prefer to stay in Israel? Since it’s much better there than in any other Arab state?

    None of the above. My point was that the two states have not disappeared, or else Palestinian-Palestinians would have the same second class rights as Israeli-Palestinians. States as persons of international law are always composed of a government and a permanent population. So I usually roll my eyes when someone says there's only one State between the Jordan and the Mediterranean because it simply isn't true. There's one state systematically dominating another state with the intent of maintaining that regime of domination.

    Earlier reports from Haaretz had explained this wasn't a move that extended Israel's normal municipal jurisdiction:
    

    The decision was vehemently opposed by the Council for Higher Education, which oversees all colleges and universities inside the Green Line. But because the Ariel University Center of Samaria is located in the West Bank, it is subordinate to a different, parallel, body, the Council for Higher Education in Judea and Samaria - which, like all Israeli institutions in the West Bank, is formally subordinate to the Israel Defense Forces' GOC Central Command

    link to haaretz.com

  • Hostage February 17, 2012 at 5:24 am with 7 replies

    whose fault is it that 2 states has disappeared?

    Oh they haven't. 500 Israeli Arab students attended Ariel in 2010. It's just a closed zone to Palestinians.

• Norman Finkelstein slams the BDS movement calling it 'a cult'
  • Hostage February 18, 2012 at 2:42 am

    During the negotiation on the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Arab states initiated an addition to the text in order to render it applicable to Israel’s settlement policy. This was indicative of the international community’s acknowledgment that the original 1949 Geneva Convention language was simply not relevant to Israel’s settlements.

    The UN, the EU, and the other High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions had advised Israel on numerous occasions about the flagrant illegality of its annexations, deportations, and settlements. Those universal condemnations were strong evidence of agreed-upon state practice. So, to no one's particular surprise, the offenses were added along with dozens of others under the heading "Other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict, within the established framework of international law".

    Baker spouts this nonsense in the Op-Eds. Like Charlie Sheen, he is always "winning", except in Court, at the Reconvened Geneva Conferences, or at the Rome Diplomatic Conference when it actually matters.

  • Hostage February 17, 2012 at 11:29 pm

    did you mean “places no emphasis on dialogue about international law outside of the courtroom” or “places so much emphasis on dialogue about international law outside of the courtroom.”

    “places so much emphasis on dialogue about international law outside of the courtroom.”

    “the resolution reflected the emergence of a broad ‘line’ from the jostling and mutual struggle of the powers involved and because the US, as the dominant party framing the legislation, wanted a very wide space for manouevre on Israel’s part. Israel has had that space, and made ample use of it.“?

    That's a hasbara talking point that was first deployed by Abba Eban to distract attention from the inadmissibility clause. That reflected a non-derogable customary norm of international law and the UN Charter which the Security Council is bound to unconditionally respect. It can't adopt a position which creates a loophole for Israel to do something that is legally prohibited (without exception) simply by omitting the definite article from a sentence in one of the multilingual versions of a resolution. The cabinet ministers who wrote the resolution repudiated that idea decades ago, but Israel never changed the script. I've written about the resolution at length here:
    link to mondoweiss.net

    No he’s pissed because BDS constantly cites international law, but does nothing to move the issue out of UN political forums and into the Courthouse

    NF said that all he wants to do is enforce existing international law. The Security Council is a political organ that doesn't enforce the laws. It has always turned that job over to ad hoc and permanent international tribunals.

    The movement can't just mobilize because no one has enforced a judgment and talk itself to death about rights and remedies and not bring political pressure to bear on prosecutors when the opportunity presents itself. Economic and academic sanctions are good, but the pursuit of appropriate penal sanctions should also be a priority of the movement.

  • Hostage February 17, 2012 at 9:35 pm

    I think part of that could be about the idea that recognition could preclude the PLO, which speaks for ALL Palestinian people, whereas the PA only speaks for those in the Occupied Terrotories.

    The PLO doesn't actually have any legal standing to represent the Israeli-Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel in the UN organization. That's one of the points that Finkelstein was trying to clear-up. The leaders of the BDS movement are the source of the bogus idea that UN recognition of Palestine would change the role of the PLO. NF explained that under international law Israel is a state, like every other member State of the United Nations, with the same rights and obligations. In his email to lareineblanche he explained that the terms for settling the conflict have been set forth in multiple forums, ranging from the U.N. General Assembly to the International Court of Justice to the positions of human rights organizations. The status of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel never comes up for an obvious reason.

    *The 1988 PLO Declaration of the State of Palestine implicitly recognized Israel by mentioning that resolution 181(II) had partitioned Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish State and that it continued to be the source of international legitimacy which guarantees the rights to sovereignty and national independence. link to unispal.un.org
    *In an exchange of letters on 9 September 1993 between Yasser Arafat,
    President of the PLO and Yitzhak Rabin, lsraeli Prime Minister, the President
    of the PL0 recognized "the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security" and various other commitments that preclude it from interfering in matters falling within the domestic jurisdiction of another state.

  • Hostage February 17, 2012 at 8:53 pm

    I wish there was a way for non-state actors who are not officials of PA – and therefore not subject to immediate persecution – to pursue a case.

    That is already possible, but I don't believe it has happened yet. The Court is a new institution. Relative to other courts, these are still the early days.

    Anyone can refer crimes that are subject to the jurisdiction of the Court to the Prosecutor in-line with Article 15 of the Statute. The Prosecutor can then initiate investigations on his/her own initiative. The only legal hurdles in this case have been the challenges to the validity of the State of Palestine's declaration which accepted the jurisdiction of the Court for all the crimes that have been reported so far. In principle, there should be no need for Palestine to join the ICC as a state party, especially after the UNESCO vote. The Article 12(3) procedure it employed in 2009 applies to situations involving a State which is not a signatory of the Rome statute. Palestine supplied documentary evidence of recognition of its statehood from 69 other states at the time it supplied the declaration. Every state can exercise universal jurisdiction, so the UNESCO vote and the 69 bilateral agreements establish that Palestine is a state which can transfer jurisdiction to the Court.

    Palestinian civil society organizations could be mobilizing right now to get the ICC to start investigating the 300+ reports it received concerning the situation in Gaza from the Arab League, AI, HRW, and etc. The ICJ advisory opinion used the same language employed by the Geneva Convention and Rome Statute regarding the transfer or facilitation, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies and the prohibition against internal displacement or deportation. So obtaining permission to investigate and prosecute cases involving officials who are facilitating the illegal settlements from the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber should be a slam dunk.

  • Hostage February 17, 2012 at 6:57 pm

    It explains why Israel does not simply reject the terrain of the law, but rather insists on forcefully prosecuting its case and remaining a member of the relevant bodies.

    So the author doesn't appear to be aware that Dr. Alan Baker of the MFA submitted a written pleading and that both he and Israel were no-shows for oral arguments and the decision in the ICJ Wall case.

    Israel loves to dialogue with everyone, except where it counts, inside a courtroom. So it's inexplicable to me why BDS places so emphasis on dialogue about international law outside of the courtroom.

    Or, perhaps more urgently, it explains why the legal consensus to which Finkelstein refers was actually built on a series of ambiguities. UN Resolution 242, in which the US and European powers were important negotiating parties, deliberately adopted a certain terminological inexactitude as regards what constituted occupied territory;

    All 15 ICJ Justices rejected the Israeli propaganda talking points about ambiguity and noted that resolution 242 cites the unambiguous prohibitions against the acquisition of territory by war and the corollary from the UN Charter against the use of force in the conduct of international relations. They all said the territory captured in 1967 is occupied territory; that the Geneva Conventions apply there; and that Israel had established settlements in violation of international law.

    But construing the law as a consistent body of doctrine allows Finkelstein to belabour BDS for choosing to cite international law in its propaganda without explicitly endorsing the ongoing existence of Israel.

    No he's pissed because BDS constantly cites international law, but does nothing to move the issue out of UN political forums and into the Courthouse. Throwing shoes at pictures of Abbas to get him to refer the Goldstone report to the UN HRC is mental masturbation if you don't follow-up by throwing shoes at his picture to get the President of the State of Palestine to submit it to the International Criminal Court where it really belongs. All of this BDS shreying about international law rings a little hollow

    The US refused to ratify the Covenant of the League of Nations and managed to codify Henry Cabot Lodge's reservations when the UN Charter was being drafted. The failure of the political organs of the UN to enforce international law is no surprise, but that is one of the reasons the International Criminal Court was established as an independent organization outside of the UN. Bitching about legal hurdles to enforcing international criminal law that no longer exist, doesn't reflect particularly profound thinking.

    Nothing is standing between the Palestinians and a remedy in the International Criminal Court, except their own disinterest.

  • Hostage February 17, 2012 at 9:51 am

    Hostage, When NF says that a 1ss is a violation of international law, what law is he referring to?

    Provide a link or cite and I'll look and see. I've never heard NF frame it that way. Right at the moment, international law happens to call for a two state solution because the parties concerned - Egypt, Jordan, the PLO, and Israel - accepted 242 as the framework for a series of related international agreements. That framework is reflected in the Mitchell report findings and the Quartet Road Map for the 2ss. The terms of reference contained in those agreements have been endorsed by the UN Security Council and ICJ. So that decision is binding on all of the member states (but not non-members or non-state actors).

    The Road Map and 242 could be abandoned in a heartbeat if the Palestinians, Jordan, and Egypt agree that Israel has violated the terms of reference contained in their respective agreements and demand a 1ss instead. That wouldn't be against international law, but it will probably never happen because it would seriously undermine the idea that Israel is an occupying power. You see, it wouldn't necessarily be against international law if Israel said okay to the 1ss and still refused to give the residents of the PA territory citizenship and the right to vote in Israel's national elections. After all, even the US nationals of American Samoa don't have citizenship yet. It would be incorrect to assume that, just because the 2ss is supposedly dead, Israel will have no other options short of granting the Palestinians citizenship. Alan Baker and Alan Dershowitz haven't been trained to think like that.

    Becasue as I see it, there is no Palestinian state

    The UNESCO vote disposed of any doubts on that score within the UN organization. Palestine is an occupied state, just like Iraq under Bremmer or Afghanistan under NATO.

  • Hostage February 17, 2012 at 4:48 am

    And that is one reason BDS is the one and only means to put pressure on israel.

    Well you might have had me up to that point, but the ICC is not a political organ of the UN. Settlements are a violation of Article 8 of its Statute and the responsible Israel officials announce new settlements with great fanfare. So, there's really no need to resort to technicalities to obtain an arrest warrant.

    I don't imagine that the EU would refuse to arrest the unlovable bunch that's running things in Israel at the moment. At a minimum, the ICC could put the fear of God into officials when they are making travel plans to any of the 120 member states and cause them to waste even more of their rapidly diminishing political capital.

  • Hostage February 17, 2012 at 4:26 am

    I think the problem lies with NF’s specific arguments and the tone (mockery and dismissal) with which they are delivered. I don’t think his position (as expressed in this interview) coincides with yours at all.

    I agree he was being sarcastic and that he was obviously upset. He is certainly more familiar with the positions and political in-fighting among other activists than I am.

    I disagree completely with the idea that international law says nothing about minority rights in Palestine or Israel and have commented ad nauseum on that at MW. I don't expect that the international community will make that a priority. The best way to bring attention to the problem is to present the findings of fact from the 2004 ICJ opinion to the ICC and ask that the responsible Israel officials be prosecuted for the crime of apartheid. Regardless of the outcome, that would focus the attention of Israelis on making some much needed changes at home.

  • Hostage February 17, 2012 at 4:14 am

    He is criticising BDS for being hypocritical within the context of what it is trying to accomplish, not for failing to propose a rights-based solution. I think he completely misconstrues the goals of the movement and the motivation behind them.

    It's not just what Abunimah and Barghouti have discussed beyond BDS. There is no public political consensus in the US or EU for the solutions proposed in Part II of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) document on the Durban Review Conference, Geneva, 20 – 24 April 2009. link to bdsmovement.net

    And yeah, after reading about regime change there, I noticed there was no clear proposal for its successor, just the usual boilerplate about the exercise of the inalienable rights of Palestinians. That's not going to be any comfort to the Jewish public. There's lots of talk about holding Israelis criminally responsible for their actions, but no mention of equal treatment for Palestinians who've committed serious crimes. I also wonder why we don't discuss those proposals during events like PennBDS and simply say ‘we want to abolish Israel and this is our strategy for doing it’?

    I still think you guys are blaming the messenger. He was telling Frank Barat about the objections that he hears to the BDS movement at all of his lectures. He was not expressing his own views, he was talking about the Israeli public perception of BDS, so of course he sounded like Dershowitz - and of course you're never going to sell them on the goodness of the idea of regime change.

  • Hostage February 17, 2012 at 2:49 am with 15 replies

    I sincerely hope he lives to regret saying all this because it’s OBVIOUS he is boiling with resentment throughout this video.

    The guy who actually won the Presidency of Palestine with 60 percent of the popular vote explained that he wants recognition from the UN so that he can make the case for Palestine a legal matter, not just an on-going political debate. link to nytimes.com

    The leader of the opposing political faction agreed with that strategy in the face of strong opposition from one of his largest financial supporters, Iran's Ayatollah Khameini. See Hamas Leader, Meshaal, Praises Abbas' UN Bid for Statehood. link to richardsilverstein.com

    My opinion is that none of the leaders of the BDS movement have ever been elected and that the UN bid is the will of the Palestinian people until proven otherwise.

    Ali Abunimah and Omar Barghouti do not support the efforts to obtain recognition of Palestinian statehood from the UN so that Palestinians can pursue their own criminal complaints without having to depend on the good offices of the useless UN Human Rights Council and a bunch of impotent NGOs. Do you hope that they live to regret saying all of that?

    The operators of this website have written a book about the Goldstone report. They have also published articles from Omar Barghouti warning about the dangers of the Palestinian Statehood bid in the UN. Any State can refer information available from public sources relevant to the commission of a crime on its own territory to the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC for investigation. That means Palestine can include the entire Goldstone report in its own complaint without bothering with the UN Security Council. You won't read about that anywhere but in my off-topic comments here.

    To the best of my knowledge, there haven't been any articles here which explained that the Palestine Authority referred the situation in Gaza to the International Criminal Court for action in January 2009 - long before anyone had heard of Judge Goldstone. That complaint remains under seal, but the results of the Arab League's own independent investigation are publicly available. The Arab League report was also handed over to the ICC Prosecutor before the Goldstone report was ever finalized.

    Notwithstanding their prompt actions, there have been plenty of articles discrediting the efforts of the Palestinian Authority and the Arab League and accusing them of collaborating with the Israelis. Omar Barghouti has written articles elsewhere calling for the PA to be be disbanded, and responsibility for the territory handed back to the jackals in the IDF simply because the PA delayed a symbolic vote in the Human Rights Council on the Goldstone report. link to counterpunch.org

    The statements that we hear from the leaders of the BDS movement echo the sentiments of former Israeli UN Ambassador Dore Gold when he claimed that the PA had no right to file a criminal case against Israel:
    *There has never been a State of Palestine. It is a sham, a farce, and a waste of time.
    *There is really only one existing entity in actual practice that has the right to transfer jurisdiction over the West Bank and Gaza to the ICC - Israel.

    The BDS movement was founded to end Israeli legal impunity in 2005. It's manifesto enumerated a list of historical wrongs and complained about the passage of time without a remedy. In the case of the ICJ Advisory Opinion the passage of a single year was sufficient to demand mobilization. That was seven years ago, and its time for the BDS movement to admit that there has been nothing but record growth in the settlements and increased acts of violence committed by the settlers and the IDF since it came into existence. Its time to mobilize support for Palestine to join the ICC and pursue criminal claims against the Israeli officials responsible for the settlements.

  • Hostage February 17, 2012 at 12:47 am with 6 replies

    Finkelstein treats the goals of BDS as if they were a peace plan. They are not.

    Actually, it was the interviewer who asked Finkelstein about his book with Rabbani and asked him how he would resolve the conflict? Finkelstein responded by telling him that if you wanted to design a mass movement to do that you can't go beyond what the public is ready to accept. If you are saying that isn't the goal of BDS, then you are saying the same thing he did and talking past one another a bit.

  • Hostage February 16, 2012 at 9:42 pm

    Why is he suddenly reluctant to raise issues he doesn’t think will fly. Has that ever stopped him?

    I don't think he is shying away from expressing his opinion, he complained that others are doing that in several instances during the interview. At many points he was not expressing his own views, just playing the devil's advocate and presenting the standard objections that are raised by the public in Israel and other countries and saying that represents the current consensus we have to deal with.

    For example, Zionists always do object that they will never agree to the return of millions of refugees, because it would destroy the Jewish character of their society. I'm an anti-Zionist, so I've always responded that the justification for a Jewish state in Palestine is no more compelling to me than the justification for a German one in the Sudetenland. Neither Chomsky nor Finkelstein accept Israel as The Jewish State, but Israelis and many in the rest of the world do. We've got a statute on the books here in the US that requires Hamas to accept that.

    Some people in the BDS movement are reluctant to be honest and admit that they want to abolish the Zionist regime in Israel. It certainly isn't necessary to resolve the refugee problem before the military occupation and closure of the West Bank and Gaza can be brought to an end and a State in Palestine can be acknowledged and allowed to join the international community on an equal footing. But some people have taken an all or nothing approach to solving their pet problems and resist any interim steps toward a final settlement. There's an old Gallager joke that pointed out that "They called our ancestors settlers, because of all the things they were willing to settle for." Many refugees might be willing to move to the West Bank or Gaza, instead of Israel, if we don't prevent them from freely making that decision. People who want to solve the problems faced by Israeli Palestinians beat around the bush when a Zionist says equal rights and a just settlement will destroy the Jewish character of their state. That's what Finkelstein was getting angry about at one point:
    

    “You think you’re fooling anybody? You think you’re so clever?… You shouldn’t reach a broad public because you’re dishonest… At least be honest what you want — ‘we want to abolish Israel and this is our strategy for doing it’.”

    The South African BDS movement did that. They labeled apartheid as racism and a crime. The leadership openly admitted that apartheid could not be the basis of any decent society and that it had to be abolished. If you tried to resurrect the defunct UN resolution which equated Zionism with racism or a crime, a proverbial "hockey match" would breakout, because there's no public consensus for that position. The UN actually is addressing discriminatory legislation in Israel and equal rights for Palestinian Israelis, but it isn't the most urgent priority. Finkelstein is a political scientist and he was describing that situation and getting exasperated because a settlement of some of these problems is readily available by simply applying existing international law and measures that are supported by a broad consensus.

    The video is still available at link to vimeo.com

  • Hostage February 16, 2012 at 8:17 am

    it was indeed ex post facto.

    You are certainly correct that the Allied crimes you mentioned should not have gone unpunished. However the crimes in question were contained in pre-existing prohibitions of customary law. They were given new names and denominations, but were not applied ex-post facto.

    There was pre-existing state practice for the establishment of special tribunals or trials in the regular courts for murder and other war crimes. For example, after the US Civil War Champ Ferguson and Henry Wirz had been tried and hanged
    *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champ_Ferguson#Trial_and_hanging .
    *http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/wirz/wirz.htm

    The Hague Conventions had been adopted and labeled at the time as a codification of the laws and customs of war. It was an existing practice under international law to demand the prosecution of individuals, including government officials, who wage wars in violation of international treaties or violated the laws and customs of warfare. See for example the public arraignment of the German Emperor and others, for a supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties. in Articles 227-228 of the Treaty of Versailles, Penalties.
    *http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Articles_227_-_230

    The Allies had issued a number of public declarations and warnings to the Axis Powers. See for example "Allied declarations condemning German atrocities in occupied territories; proposal for the creation of a United Nations commission for the investigation of war crimes," pp. 45-71 in the Foreign relations of the Untied States diplomatic papers, 1942. link to digicoll.library.wisc.edu
    The papers contain the negotiations leading to:
    The Allied Declaration on the German Government's determination to exterminate the Jewish people
    *http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1942v01&isize=M&submit=Go+to+page&page=68
    *http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1943v01&isize=M&submit=Go+to+page&page=413

    The Allied Declarations Condemning German Atrocities In Occupied Territories
    *http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1941v01&isize=M&submit=Go+to+page&page=445

  • Hostage February 16, 2012 at 4:32 am

    What do YOU mean he ‘grew up’ Hostage? Are you partially agreeing with the troll?

    I was referring to the fact that Finkelstein is no longer a Maoist. Judging from the rest of Hophmi's comments, I doubt that's what he had in mind.

  • Hostage February 16, 2012 at 4:19 am

    You side-stepped the issue

    That Chomsky offered sound advice, but someone got insulted by his bluntness. Big whoop. Look, symbolic victories can be accurately described as "feel good", but ineffective accomplishments in many cases. Why are you still flooding the comment threads about that?

    Unlike the South African BDS movement, the Palestinian BDS movement is pursuing zero formal sanctions against Israel, while defying its legal authorities in staging flotillas or similar demonstrations. So yes, you could say it resembles the anti-establishment or anti-war demonstrators who occasionally broke windows in some respects.

    I support the demonstrations and flotillas too, but that doesn't mean that I think they are the best way to address the problem.

  • Hostage February 16, 2012 at 3:43 am

    The problem is the US standing in the way of Israel being subjected to the law.

    That was true enough, before the Vienna Formula was adopted to get around the objections from permanent members of the Security Council and before the ICC was deliberately created outside the UN framework to get around those same objections. The US can no longer prevent the ICC from considering petitions from Palestine like any other state or prevent Interpol and ICC member states from issuing arrest warrants at the request of the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber.

  • Hostage February 16, 2012 at 3:15 am

    I was not aware the BDS did that.
    Who the hell ‘are’ the leaders of the BDS?
    There are obviously some foxes(or stupids) in the hen house.

    Omar Barghouti wrote an article right here at Mondoweiss which contained factual errors about the contents of the UN application. It was never updated or corrected even after some of the errors were acknowledged by Barghouti in the comments section. He claimed the PLO was too invaluable to be replaced by the State of Palestine: "While our inalienable rights cannot be voided or extinguished by this or any other "diplomatic" maneuver, our ability to struggle for these rights in international forums will be severely damaged if the PLO is replaced by this imaginary "State of Palestine" at the UN." link to mondoweiss.net

    Abbas, the Chairman of the PLO, hand carried the application for membership in the UN. Omar Barghouti wrote a series of articles which claimed the plan for ending the occupation and establishing the state was not approved by the PLO and that the PA did not have have the PLO's permission to go to the UN for recognition. In fact it had been approved by the PLO Executive and posted on the PLO UN Mission website for over two years.

    Ali Abunimah and/or Omar Barghouti contributed these gems:
    Palestinian analysts continue to debate, oppose PA "statehood" bid
    *http://electronicintifada.net/blog/ali-abunimah/palestinian-analysts-continue-debate-oppose-pa-statehood-bid
    *A Formal Funeral for the Two-State Solution
    How the PA’s Statehood Bid Sidelines Palestinians
    link to foreignaffairs.com
    Recognising Palestine?
    The efforts of the Palestinian Authority to push for statehood are nothing more than an elaborate farce
    *link to aljazeera.com
    How Palestinian Authority’s UN “statehood” bid endangers Palestinian rights
    *link to electronicintifada.net

    I frankly don't hear a word these guys say anymore after the first insincere reference to international law or rights and remedies.

  • Hostage February 16, 2012 at 2:03 am

    I want this madness to stop

    Immediately after Operation Cast Lead the Justice Minister and Foreign Minister of Palestine filed a criminal complain with the International Court and said this madness must stop. The Prosecutor's office received 300+ communications from the public reporting serious crimes committed in Palestine from other groups. So far as I can tell, the unelected BDS leadership said a) there is no State of Palestine; b) these Palestinian government officials don't represent anyone; and c) all of this is a waste of time and a farce.

  • Hostage February 16, 2012 at 1:36 am

    But how and who will put Israel in the dock? And then enforce the legal remedies?

    Prior to the UNESCO vote, there had been a "knock down drag-out" battle going on to prevent the ICC Prosecutor from opening an investigation based upon the Palestinians complaint. The last straw man standing in the way was the Palestine wasn't eligible to become a member of the ICC and deposit an accession with the Secretary General because it wasn't officially recognized as a State by the UN or any of its agencies. It was argued that for the same reason it could not make a declaration as a non-member State either. The UNESCO vote eliminated that objection.

    I expected the hundreds of Palestinian civil society organizations that mobilized the BDS movement in the first place to inundate the Prosecutor's office with demands for prosecutions, and reports of additional crimes in accordance with Article 15 of the Statute. But the silence has been deafening. These people originally mobilized in 2005 because the ICJ advisory opinion had not been enforced. Now it looks like they are opposed to enforcing those same judgments.

  • Hostage February 16, 2012 at 1:17 am

    hostage, i meant defining borders they would presently accept. referencing something defined 40 years ago, if they won’t agree to it today, is not what i meant.

    Israel doesn't have to accept them. I've noted elsewhere the Credentials Committee of the UN and the General Assembly started calling them borders several years ago and formally put the government of Israel on notice that their credentials did not apply to the area beyond those borders. The International Court agreed and said the Palestinians were entitled to the their territory and their own State.

    If you put the question of the current extent of the ICC's jurisdiction to the Pre-Trial Chamber, the answer would be all of Palestine beyond the Green Line. Israel is not included because it's not a member state. The crimes committed by Israelis on the territory of Palestine are a completely different matter because of the Article 12(3) Declaration supplied by the Government of Palestine in 2009. Those crimes can result in arrest warrants and prosecutions without the State of Israel's consent. Norman is pointing out that international consensus.

  • Hostage February 16, 2012 at 12:54 am

    here is a very interesting quote from Int’l Relations theorist, Hedley Bull, the father of Rationalism:

    That comment is somewhat out of date. The UN was not setup to serve as a world government, but one of its tasks was to promote the progressive codification of international law. It facilitated the establishment of an international criminal court in 2002. It does have a legislative body that can amend its portion of the international criminal code and determine its own jurisdiction "whereby the law can be altered by consent". Unlike the UN none of the members has a veto.

  • Hostage February 16, 2012 at 12:42 am

    When one country with 5% of global population consumes 25% of the world’s annual input of raw materials (which itself is 40% higher than the capacity of the world to sustain itself long term) and this is accepted as right, international law is a joke.

    International law is simply the collection of agreed upon rules that states have adopted to govern their mutual relations. If you think there should be laws about that fine, but there already are existing ones against illegal settlements, murder, and the like, that could be enforced. The BDS movement supposedly mobilized in 2005 because the ICJ advisory opinion wasn't being enforced. Maybe you haven't noticed, but nowadays the BDS movement leadership is mobilizing to prevent that from happening.

  • Hostage February 16, 2012 at 12:07 am

    What I find troubling about Finkelstein’s arguments is actually what he doesnt say.

    I find what BDS activist don't say very troubling. They claimed in 2005 that they were mobilizing because no one was enforcing the ICJ advisory opinion. The leadership started writing Op-eds and books claiming the two state solution was already dead and only use the ICJ opinion as a straw man. Can you point to any BDS movement participants in these efforts to get the ICC to enforce international law and stop the violations mentioned by the ICJ? link to goo.gl

    Don't you find that a little odd? After all that is a debate about legal rights and remedies for the victims of Israeli oppression and apartheid.

  • Hostage February 15, 2012 at 11:55 pm with 2 replies

    Yeah Hophmi Norman grew up. But he still wants to enforce international law and get Israel out of East Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria. That would still make your head explode, so why don't you just keep quiet?

  • Hostage February 15, 2012 at 11:24 pm

    then what alternative does he provide or suggest? This is NF’s weak area.

    *In 2005 the BDS movement mobilized because the PLO and the UN hadn't enforced the ICJ advisory opinion.

    *In 2009 the PA filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court and accepted its jurisdiction over any crimes, including the construction of the Wall, settlements, and Cast Lead, that had been committed on its territory since July 2002.

    *Former Israeli Ambassador Dore Gold; the Israel Lobby, and the Christian Zionist organizations sprang into action and sent communications that said Palestine was not a State - despite written recognition from 69 other countries - and that it could not legally grant jurisdiction to the Court. They said that the fact it wasn't a member state of the UN or any of it's specialized agencies cast serious doubt on its statehood.

    *The ICC Prosecutor opened a public debate and opposing views were provided by the League of Arab States, Prof John Quigley, Prof Alain Pellet and group of other distinguished scholars, and Prof Michael Kearney of Al Haq. None of the many other legal scholars who are normally associated with the BDS movement participated. See Summary of submissions on whether the declaration lodged by the Palestinian National Authority meets statutory requirements link to goo.gl

    *So now that the State of Palestine has been admitted to a UN specialized agency, Norm is naturally wondering why the BDS movement is still missing in action and hostile to moblizing efforts to enforce the ICJ advisory opinion in the ICC?

  • Hostage February 15, 2012 at 10:46 pm

    I think Fink is stuck because he knows the Jews need a place of their own while they have totally destroyed the possibility of the Palestinians having the same.

    No, I think he's tired of wasting his time with people who won't define their goals or admit their true agendas. There are four likely possibilities: a) more of the same apartheid, b) a 2ss, c) a 1ss, d) war.

    The US and Israel have already voted. They are going to give us more of the same apartheid. When the Palestinian leadership tried to change the status quo by publishing a plan for statehood, filing a complaint with the International Criminal Court, and joining the UN, the leaders of the BDS movement rejected the idea and offered a number of patently absurd excuses, chief among which were the farfetched ideas that:
    *The Chairman of the PLO and the PLO Executive, who approved the PA plan, were acting without the permission of the PLO (which declared the State of Palestine in the first place and tried to join the UN and its agencies back in 1989). The BDS movement (which has no legal mandate) claimed the PA and PLO needed a fresh mandate from the voters before they could demand an end to the occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian State.
    *That becoming a UN member state would harm the bang-up job the PLO has been doing for the last 40 years representing all of the Palestinians living in refugee camps.

    So that's another vote for more of the same. The leaders of the BDS movement know that the ICJ advised that the Palestinian people are entitled to all of their territory and their State and that the settlements are illegal. Therefore, the claim that UN recognition of the State of Palestine is tantamount to recognition of a Bantustan is simply propaganda. The UN has declared the settlement blocks to be illegal - and as a consequence - they would automatically fall within the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction. The Government of Palestine has already granted the Court jurisdiction over any crimes committed on the territory of Palestine after July of 2002. See Declaration of the Palestinian National Authority recognizing the Jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court,  executed for the Government of Palestine by Ali Khashan, Minister of Justice, January 21, 2009. link to uclalawforum.com

    Here is what one of the Jewish ICJ Justices said about the international consensus on the illegal wall and settlements back in 2004:
    

    This is not difficult – from Security Council resolution 242 (1967) through to Security Council resolution 1515 (2003), the key underlying requirements have remained the same – that Israel is entitled to exist, to be recognized, and to security, and that the Palestinian people are entitled to their territory, to exercise self-determination, and to have their own State.

    The Court also noted that Palestinians had been displaced in violation of Article 49(6) of the Geneva Convention. Those individuals have a guaranteed right to repatriation. With that ruling in hand, their State government can now pursue a remedy through the International Criminal Court on their behalf.

    So why is the BDS movement condemning the move, instead of endorsing the UN bid and demanding action on the criminal complaint the government of Palestine that was lodged with the International Criminal Court in 2009? Bear in mind that the leadership claims in the articles below that it had to mobilize in 2005, because the PLO and the international community didn't enforce the ICJ opinion.
    *A Formal Funeral for the Two-State Solution
    How the PA's Statehood Bid Sidelines Palestinians
    link to foreignaffairs.com
    Recognising Palestine?
    The efforts of the Palestinian Authority to push for statehood are nothing more than an elaborate farce
    *http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/04/2011413152522296883.html
    How Palestinian Authority’s UN "statehood" bid endangers Palestinian rights
    *http://electronicintifada.net/blog/ali-abunimah/how-palestinian-authoritys-un-statehood-bid-endangers-palestinian-rights

    Fink is pissed because its obvious that folks, like Ali Abunimah, are actively undermining the individual rights of Palestinians who've voted in favor of the PLO demand for their own state in the occupied territories for the last 40 years. His actions are manifestly at odds with the claim of some in the BDS movement that we doen't take sides in the 1ss v 2ss debate.

  • Hostage February 15, 2012 at 9:00 pm

    Is taking land from one (private) person and giving it to another (private) person solely on the basis of religion / ethnicity a legitimate exercise of state power? Is the UN giving sanction to this sort action? Do you approve?

    No I don't approve and neither did the UN. That's why the PCC was directed to establish registries of Palestinian property that had been confiscated. In 1947, expropriation for public purposes did not include economic development or redistribution schemes. The US Supreme Court caused a firestorm of controversy with its decision in Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005), which is an instance of something like that. link to en.wikipedia.org

    You'd have no trouble finding examples of Israeli officials shreying about Bedouin citizens encroaching on "state lands" that they've inhabited long before Israel came into existence. For example, FM Liebermann sent "Green patrols" and crop dusters with defoliants out to destroy Bedouin crops when he was the National Infrastructures Minister. link to haaretz.com

    In any event, the UN plan required the new states to treat Bedouins or other minorities as citizens with equal rights to enjoy quiet possession of their lands. They also should have an equal right to the use of any state land or use of state facilities located on lands expropriated for "public purposes".

  • Hostage February 15, 2012 at 8:20 pm

    No, I get it – you and David Green, and in the past Max Ajl(sp) and Keith and a whole host of others are knee-jerk defenders of Chomsky.

    I actually sided with Jeff Blankfort and ridiculed Max Ajl:
    I think Max Ajl details these influences quite ably on his website,

    I replied: "There’s an old Latin proverb that explained “to each his own is beautiful”. I’d rather not waste my time on simplistic Marxist totalizing theories that pretend to explain the whole of social reality."
    link to mondoweiss.net
    Like Blankfort, I've also been puzzled by activists, including Finkelstein, who downplay the role of Zionism in the motivations of the neocons who started the Iraq war:
    This is an important moment because it epitomizes the refusal of intelligent, prominent liberal American Jews to acknowledge the role of the Israel lobby (let alone dime out their crazy cousins, the neocons).

    To which I replied: "Yes, there are several examples that come to mind of intelligent Jews with a Marxist background who are happy to condemn the neocons for being evil greedy “capitalists”, yet make the bizarre excuse that Zionists like Richard Perle and Eliot Abrams have long since abandoned their Jewish roots."
    link to mondoweiss.net

    I think your caricatures of Chomsky's actual positions are similarly incorrect. But, by all means, don't let the facts get in your way.

  • Hostage February 15, 2012 at 7:49 pm

    Im sorry Hostage, was that supposed to make me change my mind about Finkelstein and his claims that the US (and its euro lackey’s) will adopt the law in regards to Palestine?

    Yes, the states that voted for Palestinian membership in UNESCO included Austria, France, and Spain who are each European lackeys. They were all aware that UNESCO's members have a standing invitation to become a State party to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, and that the Rome Statute is open to membership by all States. The members of the EU are also members of the International Criminal Court too. Those states would automatically be off limits to any Israeli officials if the ICC Pre-trial Chamber issues an arrest warrant. Israeli government officials have been publicly announcing tenders for thousands of units in illegal settlements for so long that they've forgotten that is a grave breach and a war crime under the terms of the Rome Statute.

    The thing that troubles me is when activists who run around talking a good game about Israel's violations of international law and the need for equal rights and remedies, buy-in to Ali Abunimah's propaganda. He knows perfectly well that the ICC would have criminal jurisdiction over any Israeli crime committed on the whole of the occupied Palestinian territory, not just the Bantustans. Yet he still has the gall to write Op-Eds opposing the UN statehood bid. link to aljazeera.com

    I'm sorry too, his real agenda is pretty obvious and it has nothing to do with stopping the violence or protecting the rights of the people living under occupation.

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