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Hostage

Retired

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• Senate challenge to Obama on refugees came from Israel
  • Hostage June 2, 2012 at 8:51 pm

    Excuse me, moderators, but wasn’t giladg’s comment above an example of Nakba denial which is supposedly prohibited on this site?

    Mondoweiss certainly has a similar comment policy that would prohibit anyone else from making allegations like the one giladg made about the magnitude of the Holocaust.

• 'Do you feel more Arab or more American?': Two women's story of being detained and interrogated at Ben Gurion
  • Hostage June 17, 2012 at 7:15 am

    @Hostage Last chance. Please cite to the exact page in Shapira’s book which details Jew on Arab terror during the 1920′s.

    LOL! As I said in the first place, “The Arab Problem” starts on page 40; "Tel Hai as a Defensive Myth" on page 98; the fact that it was all just a propaganda device, on page 130; Jabotinsky's public demand in 1923 that Arabs be subjugated by force and Jewish colonization carried out behind an Iron Wall of bayonets is at page 158 and footnote material on page 390;

    In "Violence as a Political Method the Emergence of an Extreme Right" on page 194, she notes that Uri Greenburg, Abba Ahimeir, and Yehoshua Yeivin left the Labor Movement in 1928 and were advocating the use of violence against the Arabs for political purposes as the preferred method of action around the time of the 1929 riots. She writes:
    

    Whoever searches for new components in that ideology will be disappointed. Virtually all the basic ideas that the three preached could be found in the teachings of earlier Zionist thinkers. Ahimir believed the spiritual roots of Betar lay in modern Hebrew literature from Y.L. Gordon, Bialik, Berdichevsky, and Tchernichovsky to Zalman Shneour and Yaakov Cahan.
    . . .
    In the first editorial to appear in the paper of Betar in Palestine, Tel Hai, he [Ahimeir] wrote: "Tel Hai . . . shall remove the fig leaf from the vegetarian opinions of Buberism and Borochovism, revealing them in all of their nakedness." In one brief sentence he made short shrift of Brit Shalom and the Left, labeling them cowardly pacifists. As I have mentioned there were only a few Pacifists in Palestine; but the adherents of the Labor movement cherished a certain respect for them, mixed with a drop of compassion.
    ...
    He rejected the concept of pacifism, regarding it as an expression of a psychological constitution unsuitable for mentally healthy people. "Among us there is far too much expression of an ostentatious humanism and vegetarianism." He praised the fostering of a cult of militarism, compared Tel Hai to Thermopylae, and made Trumpeldor into a symbol of military virtues, and a promoter of their advancement. Ahimeir viewed militarism and aggressiveness as manifestations of national vitality, the healthy (one of his most popular adjectives) antithesis to the delicate and tender vegetarians, always concerned about ethical considerations and plagued by other inhibitions that had no place in the new Hebrew Nation.

    She goes on to explain that he actually invented the pedagogical strategy of dredging-up "The murder of a Jew in Bethlehem, attacks on the soil of Eretz Israel" as methods of indoctrinating youth. You know, the same nonsensical view of the terrorist colonizers as victims that he propagated after the 1929 chauvinist military parade to the Wailing Wall. It worked as expected and triggered the violence that Ahimeir and his associates have capitalized upon ever since for propaganda purposes. Your link to the nationalist crap fest about Hebron is just the latest example of living perpetually in the past and dwelling on the same old manufactured conflicts. It claims that without Hebron, there can be no Jewish State, but offers no satisfactory explanation other than the author's militancy and egotistical pride.

  • Hostage June 16, 2012 at 1:15 pm

    I said, “these Zionists”, referring to haHashomer and the Legionnaries, and YOU go off topic and out of our 1920′s time frame by introducing the Irgun and Lehi, which were founded in 1931 and 1940 respectively .

    LOL! your desperation is showing.
    *Jabotinsky and Trumpeldor were both Russian interlopers and co-founders of the Jewish Legion.
    *Jabotinsky openly trained Jews in warfare and was arrested for possession of illegal weapons and blamed for the 1920 Palestine riots. He was given 15 years in prison, but was granted amnesty.
    *Jabotinsky is specifically mentioned in Anita Shapira's account of the development of the Tel Hai Myth of Defense.
    *Jabotinsky founded B'rith Trumpeldor (Betar)
    *Jabotinsky was a member of the Zionist Organization Executive. That organization ran wholely-owned subsidiaries that were chartered colonial trusts long before 1920. Jabotinsky wrote the Iron Wall in 1923 about the on-going Colonization of Palestine link to jewishvirtuallibrary.org
    *The Irgun and Lehi were self-confessed terror organizations. Jabotinsky was the leader of the Irgun until he died in 1940. For example, J. Bowyer Bell cites a meeting in Alexandria in July 1937 between Jabotinsky and Irgun commander Col. Robert Bitker and chief of staff Moshe Rosenberg. Ze'ev listened, while the two explained the need for indiscriminate retaliation attacks, like the bombing of the Azur coffee house outside Tel Aviv, due to the difficulty of limiting operations to only the "guilty". See Terror Out of Zion, pages 35-36.

    So I'm not changing the subject when I mention the fact that Zionist Colonialism and Terrorism are not mutually exclusive categories. Russian interlopers like Jabotinsky and Trumpeldor were "up to their eyes" in colonial terrorism in 1920.

  • Hostage June 15, 2012 at 9:17 pm

    Wait. Were these Zionists ‘colonial aggressors’ or ‘ terrorists’? Make up your mind.

    The Irgun and Lehi were both colonists and self-proclaimed terrorists. those are not mutually exclusive categories.

    Regardless, you called the Legionnaires ‘interlopers’, but in truth, . . . So who were Hostage’s ‘interlopers’ than?

    I provided you with a link to a New York Times article which illustrates that Edmond Rothschild and the JNF assisted demobilized Legionaries in settling on the land, rather than returning to their countries of origin.

    Most of the Jews in Ottoman Asia prior to the war were not natives or Ottoman citizens. They were protégés of one of the western consulates who used the capitulations to circumvent the prohibition against Jewish immigration to Palestine. --See Ruth Kark, American consuls in the Holy Land, 1832-1914, Wayne State University Press, 1994

    Trumpeldor was in that category. He was just a Russian interloper who was neither a native of Palestine nor a legal Ottoman subject. But keep on dissimulating and trying to change the subject.

  • Hostage June 15, 2012 at 11:30 am

    There goes Hostage trying to bury the truth in an avalanche of distracting material. . . . At least Citizen, not a Zionist, by any stretch, is trying to stay on topic

    I cite and quote material and provide a link that you can use to confirm what I've said. That's how I expose the truth. If that distracts from your irrelevant myths and hasbara, so be it.

    Citizen's first response to you cited one of my comments from another thread and said that it had already answered your question. I had also cited Anita Shapira's book in this thread, "Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force 1881-1948. It detailed the use of threats and force against Arab civilians throughout that period to influence their policies toward Zionist colonization and displacement from their lands. That's the very definition of terrorism.

    In my last comment I only cited and quoted four reliable sources to confirm what Shapira had already explained. The territory in question at Tel Hai was neither under British nor French mandate. It was not part of Palestine on 1 March 1920 at all. On the 8th of March, the Syrian General Congress declared it was part of the Kingdom of Syria. FYI, on 6 January 1920 the Emir Faisal of Hedjaz had initialed an agreement with French Prime Minister Clemenceau which acknowledged "the right of Syrians to unite to govern themselves as an independent nation" But the Arabs knew they were being betrayed by their war time Allies. See Timothy J. Paris, "Britain, the Hashemites and Arab Rule, 1920-1925", Routledge, 2003, page 64. link to books.google.com

    So let's review
    1) the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement recognized the competence and the discretion of the Arabs to fix the definite boundaries of Palestine. The Balfour memo confirms that fact.
    2) The Memo on Commitments to King Husein reveald that the British and French advisors were not supposed to have executive powers in the Arab States under the terms of an agreement reached with Sykes and Picot.
    3) The Sykes-Picot Treaty required the French and British to consult the Arabs regarding the government of Palestine.
    4) The Faisal-Clemenceau agreement acknowledged "the right of Syrians to unite to govern themselves as an independent nation".
    5) The “Aide-memoire in regard to the occupation of Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia pending the decision in regard to Mandates, 13 September 1919″ defined Palestine strictly on the basis of the territory actually occupied by the British Army after its withdrawal from the Arab OETA.
    6) Shapira wrote that the Zionists and the Legionaries intended to occupy and annex the sources of the Jordan River in Galilee to the Jewish motherland.

  • Hostage June 15, 2012 at 3:25 am

    Did they really?Not according to the contemporary Chaim Weizman. . . See Stein, Land Question

    *Weizmann was another Russian who had just signed a treaty with the Arabs recognizing their legal competence to establish the definite boundaries between "the Arab State" and Palestine. Balfour also lamented that fact:

    “In our promises with regard to the frontiers of the new Arab States we do not seem to have been more fortunate than in our promises about their independence. In 1915 it was the Sharif of Mecca to whom the task of delimitation was to have been confided, nor were any restrictions placed upon his discretion in this matter, except certain reservations intended to protect French interests in Western Syria and Cilicia.

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

    Declassified documents have long since revealed that both the British and French violated their agreements regarding Palestine and Arab independence. The Sharif Hussein was only willing to accept Syke’s and Picot’s proposal regarding foreign advisors, subject to the understanding that they were to have no executive powers whatsoever. As far as Hussein was concerned, both the British and French had agreed to the renunciation of the ideas of annexation, permanent occupation, or suzerainty over any part of Syria, Lebanon, or Palestine. See pdf file page 9 of 21 in:
    Former Reference: GT 6185
    Title: British Commitments to King Husein.
    Author: Political Intelligence Department, Foreign Office
    Date November 1918
    Catalogue reference CAB 24/68
    link to nationalarchives.gov.uk
    *The 3rd paragraph of the Sykes-Picot Agreement required the allies to consult with the Sharif of Mecca on the form of government in the brown area of international administration in Palestine.

    The boundaries of Palestine were established on a provisional basis in an “Aide-memoire in regard to the occupation of Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia pending the decision in regard to Mandates, 13 September 1919″. It was handed by Mr. Lloyd George to M. Clemenceau and placed before the Versailles Peace Conference. It divided the territory between the British, French, and Arab administered OETAs on the basis of the principles of the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Sykes-Picot lines - and it specifically mentioned "the Arab State". The memo is available in the FRUS and in J. C. Hurewitz collection.

    Palestine was strictly defined as the area actually occupied by the British Army, not the demobilized Legionaries.

  • Hostage June 14, 2012 at 11:23 am

    Hostage deluged us with ‘links to nowhere’.

    No, I gave you an example of armed Jews using terror tactics against the indigenous Arab civilian population in order to acquire and annex their territory to the "Jewish motherland". The Ottoman Land Code permitted Ottoman subjects to purchase and register land, not Edmund Rothschild or the Legionaries. The registered owner was entitled to usufruct, but not entitled to evict or threaten the tenured Arab cultivators. Those details are omitted from the myth of defense that Israel created to justify the colonial aggression perpetrated by the HaShomer and demobilized Legionaries.

  • Hostage June 12, 2012 at 9:04 pm

    Hostage. You were supposed to say Zionist interloper. Zionist, not Jewish interloper. . . .What happened to your political correctness tonight? You almost sound just like a bigot.

    What happened to your knowledge of Jewish history? I just reminded you about a little of it. You either didn't know or had forgotten that renegade demobilized Jewish Legionaries and members of the French armed forces had violated the rights of Arab cultivators long before the international mandates were even granted, and that Arabs had been killed by Jewish Legionaries during the fighting in Galilee. Here are a few relevant facts for you:

    Many religious Jews, like Rav Kook, supported and visited the new secular settlements in Galilee prior to the mandate era. He wrote that these new secular settlements would become holy and that they were the fulfillment of the vision of the prophet Ezekiel. For Kook and his followers, "Judaism" based on the commandments was a sine qua non for "Jewish national life" in the homeland. Kook was appointed Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem in 1919 and Chief Rabbi of Palestine in 1921.
    *http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/10941#.T9fauN2wV2I
    *http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/History/Modern+History/Centenary+of+Zionism/Zionist+Philosophies.htm
    *http://www.ravkooktorah.org/timeline.htm

    The "Zionist" Organization had zero legal standing in either Ottoman Asia or Arabia, so it submitted that the international community of states should "recognise the historic title of the Jewish people to Palestine and the right of the Jews to reconstitute in Palestine their National Home. In pursuit of that objective Dr. Weizmann and the Emir Faisal of Hedjaz concluded an agreement, which among other things, required that "Arab and Jewish duly accredited agents shall be established and maintained in their respective territories."
    *http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS1919Parisv04&isize=M&submit=Go+to+page&page=163
    *http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/5BFF833964EDB9BF85256CED00673D1F

    The name of the organization responsible for committing the acts of military aggression against the Arab people in this 1920s myth of defense was "The Jewish Legion".
    *http://books.google.com/books?id=UDR6o4JMzlsC&lpg=PA96&dq=&pg=PA96#v=onepage&q&f=false

    The demobilized Jewish Legionaries from the United States, Canada, and England expressed a desire to stay on in Palestine, provided that they could settle on some land. There was no international mandate for them to do that, but they were aided by Baron Rothschild and the authorities of "The Jewish National Fund", one of the Jewish duly accredited agents in Palestine.
    *Aids Jewish Legionaires; Baron Rothschild to Provide Land for Them in Palestine. New York Times July 19th, 1919 link to query.nytimes.com

    The name of the organization that glorified Trumpeldor's death for its own propaganda purposes was "The Jewish Agency for Palestine, nowadays known as "The Jewish Agency for Israel", another of the Jewish duly accredited agents in Palestine.
    *http://www.jewishagency.org/JewishAgency/English/Jewish+Education/Compelling+Content/Eye+on+Israel/Gallery+of+People+%28Biographies%29/Trumpeldor+Joseph.htm

    Berit Trumpeldor (Betar) was originally founded in Latvia by a group young students and workers who declared themselves a "part of the Jewish Legion to be established in Eretz Israel" on the basis of the ideology of Vladimir Jabotinsky's "legionism" and the ideals of personal pioneering and defense exemplified in Joseph Trumpeldor's life and death. Their goal was to create "a Jewish State on both sides of the Jordan River".
    link to jewishvirtuallibrary.org

    The Zionists were quite obviously self-proclaimed Jews and they quickly established themselves as the only "Jewish duly accredited agents" for the territory of Palestine.
    *See the Jewish Agency, "Memorandum on the Development of the Jewish National Home", 1924, submitted by the Jewish Agency for Palestine to the Secretary General of the League of Nations for the Information of the Permanent Mandates Commission, London, October 1924 (cited in Mutaz M. Qafisheh, The International Law Foundations of Palestinian Nationality, BRILL, 2008, page 231 and UN Reference documents on Palestine, A/296/Add.1 of 1 May 1947). link to books.google.com

  • Hostage June 11, 2012 at 4:40 pm with 31 replies

    @Hostage Cop out.

    @ proudzionist777: sour grapes.

    I've already given you citations to the applicable Ottoman Land Code which protected the rights of the cultivators on any lands purchased by Edmund Rothschild. On 1 Mach 1920 there were no mandates, High Commissioners, or revised British or French land ordinances. link to mondoweiss.net

    Trumpeldor was just another Russian terrorist and Jewish interloper as of 1 March 1920. The French military officials who were encroaching on Arab lands, despite their assurances about Arab independence, were interlopers too. The Arabs that clashed with these foreigners died defending their farmland and their country, but Trumpeldor did not. The Principle Allied Powers had not reached any decisions regarding the mandates in Ottoman Asia, much less the details concerning the future boundaries of the Jewish national home.

  • Hostage June 11, 2012 at 10:31 am

    First, your question was already answered in detail on this blog by Hostage

    The same could be said for the book cite that I provided to proudzionist777 written by Israel Prize winning historian Anita Shapira, "Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force 1881-1948". For example, she deconstructs the Tel Hai Myth and notes that there's no particular reason for Israelis to feel proud about the clash that the HaShomer initiated with the local Arabs or the deaths of Trumpeldor and his cohorts. She notes that the territory contained most of the sources of the Jordan river and was of interest to the Zionist, but wasn't actually part of Palestine or the British sphere of influence at the time. The official Zionist Commission to Palestine washed its hands of the entire matter and the informal leaders of the Yishuv couldn't decide among themselves whether or not to assist the Jewish militants in their fight against the neighboring Arab villages. See "Tel Hai as a Defensive Myth" pages 98-109.

  • Hostage June 10, 2012 at 12:43 pm

    Some people think they can get over by just dumping ‘too much information’ on a thread ( hoping nobody takes the time to read it all), and than moving on.

    Most ordinary readers grasped the situation after the first pass through the CNN article. Let's try this again. The CNN article about Mairead Maguire says;
    *"An Israeli court will hold a deportation hearing Friday"
    The article also explains that Maguire
    *"was refused entry into Israel on Tuesday";
    *"was detained this week when she tried to visit the Jewish state and the Palestinian territories."
    link to articles.cnn.com

    Here's another article on the Fly-In which says that:
    *Some activists refused to talk to investigators and only presented their passports;
    *Four activists from Germany and Holland were released and permitted to enter Israel after they pledged not to participate in violent protest activities;
    *a number of 'fly-in' activists succeeded in entering Israel and participated demonstrations at the Qalandiya checkpoint and in East Jerusalem.
    *120 foreign activists were still being held at detention facilities; and
    *"Immigration and Population Authority officials told Haaretz on Saturday evening that all foreign pro-Palestinian 'fly-in' activists who were refused entry into Israel over the past few days would be deported back to their home countries within 48 hours."
    link to haaretz.com

    Both the US State Department, and the Government of Israel described the procedure used against the flotilla members captured at sea as arrest and deportation.
    link to travel.state.gov
    link to israelemb.org

    You and Fredblogs have both vapor locked while delivering explanations about these articles. They indicate that non-residents have been arrested and given deportation hearings and that some activist have even been allowed entry to the country after they pledged that they were non-violent. Nobody here has been talking about cases of people who were denied visas at a consulate; or cases of people who were not detained or agreed to leave a country voluntarily.

  • Hostage June 10, 2012 at 4:06 am

    According to the United States Embassy, there is a distinction between denied entry and deportation.

    @ pudzionista I've mentioned several times that these women were 1) denied entry, 2) detained, and 3) deported.

    The forms mentioned in the section on denial of entry that you cited can be issued to persons who have never been removed from the United States against their will. For example, people who apply for a visa at a US Consulate overseas can be denied entry if they don't have an affidavit of support, previous employment in the US, or enough funds to pay for their stay:

    8 USC § 1182 Inadmissible Aliens
    (a) Classes of aliens ineligible for visas or admission
    Except as otherwise provided in this chapter, aliens who are inadmissible under the following paragraphs are ineligible to receive visas and ineligible to be admitted to the United States:
    (4) Public charge
    (A) In general
    Any alien who, in the opinion of the consular officer at the time of application for a visa, or in the opinion of the Attorney General at the time of application for admission or adjustment of status, is likely at any time to become a public charge is inadmissible.
    link to law.cornell.edu

    Israel denied entry to travelers on the Fly-In by placing their names on a no-fly list, but it also denied entry, detained, and deported the travelers who arrived at Ben Gurion with plans to visit the West Bank.

  • Hostage June 10, 2012 at 3:17 am

    @Hostage . . . Unless you can prove otherwise with something more than a conclusory statement, I continue to believe that the young women were denied entry, and not deported.

    Pudzionclown nobody cares what you wish to believe. The readers can make up their own minds based upon the facts. This is just the continuation of Israel's announced policy of denying entry, detaining, and deport people it believes are Palestinian solidarity activists:
    

    Israel begins deporting ‘fly-in’ activists
    July 10, 2011
    JERUSALEM (JTA) -- Israel began deporting pro-Palestinian protesters who flew into Ben Gurion International Airport to attend protests and activities in the West Bank.

    Some 118 protesters arrived over the weekend at Israel's airport. As many as 200 protesters had been prevented from boarding planes to Israel on July 8 by airport authorities in Paris, Berlin, Geneva and other cities who used lists of potential protesters compiled by Israeli police from social media sites.

    link to jta.org

  • Hostage June 10, 2012 at 3:03 am

    That ‘nice Nobel Prize Laureate from Ireland’ was denied entry to Israel because she willfully violated a 10 year travel ban to Israel
    @proudzionist777
    CNN, the US State Department, and the Government of Israel described the procedure used against the flotilla members as arrest and deportation.
    link to travel.state.gov.
    link to israelemb.org

  • Hostage June 7, 2012 at 12:42 am

    I don’t know if these young ladies can be considered deportees. They were in transit in BG Airport, and hadn’t been residents in the State, temporary or otherwise.

    I'll add that to the long list of other topics you're not sure about. Deportation is the removal or expulsion of undesirable aliens from a country. Residency isn't necessarily a relevant factor. For example, the nice Nobel Prize Laureate from Ireland, who is mentioned in the CNN article that I cited earlier, was denied entry to Israel, detained, and given a deportation hearing despite the fact that she was merely "in transit".

    BTW, as you well know, the Mandatory Administration deported whole groups of people because of their political beliefs i.e., the Bolshevik leaning
    Poale Zion Smol and the Templars, to name a few.

    The Mandatory government had collective punishment laws, concentration camps, employed torture, and summary executions. It did a lot of other things that were subsequently prohibited under international law too. Those prohibitions apply to all of us, not just Israel.

    Deportation doesn't apply to the citizens of a country, unless they're denaturalized first, like John Demjanjuk. That is still permitted in cases where: 1) the original naturalization was obtained through falsification or concealment; 2) the naturalized person is a member of a subversive organization; or 3) a dishonorable military discharge is given to a naturalized immigrant who initially enter the country to serve in the military.

    The Germans were at war with Great Britain, so the Templars were treated as enemy aliens during that conflict. There were a number of subversive Zionist groups, like the Irgun, who declared war on the Mandatory government. Deportation or forced exile of indigenous Jews and Arabs would not be considered legal by today's standards.

  • Hostage June 6, 2012 at 7:31 am

    Please tell us all the terror attacks perpetrated by Jews against Arabs in 1920′s Palestine.

    I've posted on the topic in the past, e.g. link to mondoweiss.net

    You could also pick-up a book by Israel Prize winner Anita Shapira, "Land and Power: The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948 and start reading about your fractured fairy tale and the origins of your misplaced sense of righteousness and hereditary entitlement. "The Arab Problem" starts on page 40 after a preliminary overview of the thoughts of the early leaders of the movement.

  • Hostage June 6, 2012 at 12:37 am

    Hostage. Why do you presume Mr. Chaikin, zt’l, was a ‘would be terrorist’. . . .I’m begging you.

    pudzionist that remark was sarcasm. The performance of our consulate staff in years gone by was superior in every respect to the job they are doing protecting travelers today in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv:
    *Back then, our citizens were sprung from jails, despite the fact that they were accused of crimes, like carrying an illegal firearm. The ladies that you deported in these stories were advocates of justice and peace who did nothing wrong.
    *Back then, our consulate would not permit our allies to deport our citizens on the basis of race or religion. Today your Interior officials, like Eli Yishai, display their racism openly and publicly as if it's a badge of honor.

  • Hostage June 5, 2012 at 12:17 pm

    my original point was that Zionist and many at the UN who helped create Israel more than likely knew that Palestinians forced, threatened, some killed…off their lands would reject this agreement from the beginning.

    Of course. That's why the General Assembly proposed an arbitrated "settlement". It hoped to avert further acts of violence and bloodshed and asked the Security Council to consent to the plan envisioned in the settlement and treat any attempt to alter it by force as an act of aggression.

    The Arabs and Jews had already been killing one another for a long, long, time before the UN was asked to recommend a solution. The leaders on both sides had advised that further negotiation was a waste of time and that the only reasonable course of action was to impose a solution on the other party by force. In this case everyone admitted the UN was competent to terminate the mandate and impose solutions on the other parties.

    Courts enter summary judgments to enforce arbitrated settlements everyday, whether the parties are complying with the terms or not. The Security Council refused to do that in the Palestine case on Charter grounds. In subsequent disputes involving mandate era boundaries, the Security Council intervened and imposed a solution and no such objections were raised, e.g. Iraq-Kuwait.

    Its a mistaken view under the circumstances to think that the General Assembly's proposal was the primary source of the problem. The main problem was that both sides intended to use force to overturn any settlement that was not to their complete satisfaction and the Security Council was hopelessly divided and could not take effective action as a result.

  • Hostage June 4, 2012 at 9:21 pm

    Like I said, “ugly Americans” think that being an American means they don’t have to obey the laws and rules of other countries.

    Fred you keep engaging in defamation per se. There's zero evidence that any of these ladies violated any of the municipal laws of Israel, or that they made false statements about the purpose of their visits. The government of Israel denies that it has an official policy of denial of entry or permission to pass through its border entries to the members of the ISM movement.

  • Hostage June 4, 2012 at 9:12 pm

    They weren’t kept out because they were Arabs, or because their friends were Arabs. They were kept out because they were anti-Israel activists. What’s more, they were prominent enough that a friend suggested they try to cover up their activities so they couldn’t be found out by googling them.

    Look, Naomi Klein and Phil Weiss are a lot more prominent. Googling them would reveal that before their trips they had been outspoken supporters of the BDS and Palestinian Solidarity Movements; the Goldstone Report; the Right of Return and Single State Solution; and made comparisons of the situation in Israel and the West Bank to South African apartheid. J-Street went so far as to petition the DoJ to conduct criminal investigations of US charities that finance the illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. All of these people were allowed to pass through Israe's border entry points.

    FYI, the government of Israel denies that it has a policy of denying entry to members of the ISM movement.

  • Hostage June 4, 2012 at 8:57 pm

    Like I said, “ugly Americans” think that being an American means they don’t have to obey the laws and rules of other countries.

    The problem, of course, is that you keep suggesting that these young ladies violated some municipal law of Israel. You've also claimed that their answers about the purpose of their visit were dishonest.

    For its own part, the government of Israel lets members of the ISM movement pass though its border entries. It officially denies that it has any policy of denial of entry to people associated with the ISM. So most of your comments here are examples of defamation per se.

  • Hostage June 4, 2012 at 8:16 pm

    Another anti-Israel activist. Nice little story here about his visit with Arafat

    LOL! A delegation of American Christians passed through Israeli checkpoints to visit the President of an entity that had been created by the government of Israel and the PLO.

    FYI, the PA has always been funded by an Ad Hoc Liaison Committee that was created in 1993, the Ad Hoc Committee on Assistance to the Palestinians (AHLC). It is chaired by Norway and co-sponsored by the EU and the US. There are 17 member countries and some invited bilateral donor countries, including Israel.

  • Hostage June 4, 2012 at 10:08 am

    Oh, and the women who were denied entry to Israel have not been deprived of their “right to hold opinions, the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion”. They just haven’t been allowed into Israel.

    Reality check: Al Aqsa Mosque isn't located in Israel and the vast majority of worshipers there are already supporters of BDS and the ISM. The Israeli authorities certainly do routinely violate the right of Palestinian Muslims and Christians to movement and access necessary to make religious pilgrimages to their Holy Sites in Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, and Nazareth. They also routinely interfere with the rights of Muslims and Christians from other countries when they wish to visit those sites. This episode is a graphic example of that very thing. These practices have been highlighted and condemned by the ICJ and the Human rights treaty bodies.

    FYI, a couple of seconds on Mondoweiss or Google would have also revealed that Naomi Klein gave a talk at the Friends School in Ramallah supporting the BDS movement against Israel and talked about the same subject during a visit to Bil’in too.
    *http://mondoweiss.net/2009/06/i-think-this-is-the-most-emotional-event-ive-ever-done-naomi-klein-in-ramallah.html
    *http://mondoweiss.net/2009/06/naomi-klein-talks-boycott-in-bilin.html

    Here's a recent article in which Phil compares the situation in the West Bank to apartheid and discusses his trip to Israel and the Nablus area.
    *http://mondoweiss.net/2012/02/fear-and-apartheid-in-the-west-bank.html

    J-Street doesn't support BDS or ISM, but here's a JPost article which reported on the J-Street call for the Justice Department to conduct criminal investigations of US charities which financially support illegal Israeli settlements. They still manage to routinely enter Israel and even sponsor trips for visiting Congressional delegations:
    *http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=181755
    *http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/06/06/3088033/netanyahu-wont-meet-with-visiting-congressional-delegation

    I could go on, but the readers can see what's really going on here.

  • Hostage June 4, 2012 at 12:02 am

    Why shouldn’t Israel ban a woman who has lived in enemy Arab countries?

    (Pilpul Alert) Because that would also apply to hundreds of thousands of the citizens of Israel who came to Palestine under the auspices of the Jewish Agency and the Mossad Le'aliyah bet. It would also apply to the displaced Jews of Arab Palestine (1948) and the Israeli settlers who lived in the Enemy Entity (Gaza) or the State of Palestine. Never ask a question unless you already know the answer.

  • Hostage June 3, 2012 at 11:32 pm with 4 replies

    OK, mystery solved. Anti-Israel essay. Googleable. SJP president.

    The linked blog article suggests that its okay to deny entry to and deport members of Students for Justice and Peace in Palestine because they've compared conditions in Palestine to South African apartheid and have spoken out against pro-Israel speakers visiting their schools. The author also attempts to discredit Deir Yassin remembrance days "to mark what Palestinians have claimed was a massacre of Palestinians in 1948", despite the fact that the massacre was verified at the time by the Jewish Agency and the International Red Cross. Yitzhak Levi, "Nine Measures", published by Maarachot, the Israel Defense Army Press, Tel Aviv, 1986 confirmed details of the massacre. Extracts, like "Deir Yassin:Levitza's Account" were translated by Ami Isseroff and are available online. link to web.archive.org

    In any event, Pro-Israel speakers aren't being deported from the US, because Articles 18 and 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights prevent state parties from interfering with the right to hold opinions, the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. Israel and the USA are both participating states. link to www2.ohchr.org

    The attitude of the blog operator does help to explain why Israel has denied entry to South Africans, like Judge John Dugard and Bishop Desmond Tutu when they were on mission to Israel for the UN. The CERD Panels of Experts are democratically elected by the 175 State Parties to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. They have been periodically voicing their concerns about apparent violations of the prohibition of racial segregation and apartheid in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory for nearly two decades. So have the elected representatives of the Palestinian people. In the 2004 Wall case, the Justices pointed out in paragraph 129 that Israel was violating longstanding international guarantees regarding the right of freedom of movement and transit to the Holy sites on both sides of the Green Line.

    So, denying people access to Al Aqsa or Jewish sites because they are "Arabs" or because they support justice and peace for Palestinians is just another graphic example of Israel's disregard for international norms.

    P.S. if Google keeps putting israelmatsav in the first few pages of your search results, that only proves that they've got you pegged and have personalized the results. That doesn't necessarily apply to the rest of us here (thank God).

  • Hostage June 3, 2012 at 7:46 pm

    Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Just because she was an Arab and turned away doesn’t mean it was because she was an Arab that she was turned away.

    No, long before I ever heard of these particular young ladies I knew, a priori, that a wide variety of legal scholars serving in treaty monitoring bodies had examined the facts and concluded that Israel routinely behaves in this illegal fashion. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

    I had repeatedly mentioned those findings and the absurdity of the situation with respect to our latest US Consular travel advisories on Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza beforehand too, e.g.:
    *http://mondoweiss.net/2012/03/hundreds-of-soccer-fans-crowd-jerusalem-mall-death-to-arabs.html#comment-436990

    Those legal conclusions have repeatedly cited the prohibition of apartheid contained in article 3 of the ICERD convention and systematic violations of the human rights of freedom of movement, and access in territory controlled by Israeli authorities. These travel-related problems invariably involve people that Israel considers to be persons of "Arab nationality", "Palestinians", or human rights rapporteurs and officials on mission for the UN.

    I was already familiar with the conclusions of top jurists and expert fact finding missions that it has killed Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Egyptians, and other "Arabs" for speaking out or demonstrating against its occupation of their lands and its systematic violation of their human rights. I know that it has detained and questioned other Arabs and its own citizens for "the serious crime" of simply visiting the other Arab States that were brought-up during Najwa's detention and questioning.

    I knew that Israel had kept its entire Arab population under martial law for nearly two decades, during which time its Border Police murdered hundreds of Arabs in travel and access incidents that some of its own Courts had labeled crimes against humanity and discussed as "black flag" incidents involving manifestly illegal orders to kill from senior state officials:
    

    The distinguishing mark of a ‘manifestly unlawful order’ should fly like a black flag ... Not formal unlawfulness, hidden or half-hidden, nor unlawfulness discernible only by the eyes of legal experts, is important here, but ... unlawfulness piercing the eye and revolting the heart, be the eye not blind nor the heart stony and corrupt—that is the measure of ‘manifest unlawfulness’ required to release a soldier from the duty of obedience (Chief Military Prosecutor v. Melinki (1958), 13 Pesakim Mehoziim 90, cited in Israel (A.G.) v. Adolf Eichmann (1961), 36 I.L.R. 18 at 256 (Israel, District Court of Jerusalem)).

    So we are not discussing things that are only discernible to the legal experts anymore. We are talking about things that anyone finds revolting except for those who have been blinded or corrupted by Zionism.

  • Hostage June 3, 2012 at 3:35 am

    The whole exercise is an illustration of the point made by the late Tony Judt. In many respects Israeli society is an anachronism. It's still functioning on the level of the 19th Century failed Ottoman state and it is dragging the rest of us down to its level.

    The Ottoman's have vanished from the scene. Modern-day Turkey only recognizes civil marriage, while Israel desperately re-jiggers the millet system in order to cling to its racist doctrines. It wastes its vital resources and energy on finding ways to humiliate others like these US citizens. That need to humiliate others extends to fellow Jews, i.e. See Haaretz "For first time, Israel to recognize Reform and Conservative rabbis: State to support salaries of non-Orthodox rabbis; 'rabbis of non-Orthodox communities' will not have authority over religious and halakhic matters. Financing will be the responsibility of the Culture and Sports Ministry and not the Religious Services Ministry." link to haaretz.com

    Lord Curzon noted that the text of the British Mandate engaged in semantics to conceal the presence of the Arab majority: "Even the poor Arabs are only allowed to look through the keyhole as a non-Jewish community." Here is the latest example these Rabbis aren't even "Jewish" community leaders:
    

    In negotiations held out of court, the state agreed to recognize the non-Orthodox rabbis, but refused to recognize their rabbinates. The State offered to call them "community leaders." About three weeks ago, the panel of judges led by Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein requested the intervention of Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, who agreed to recognize the terminology "rabbi of a non-Orthodox community."

    The State held that the deal on Reform and Conservative rabbis will not be made via the religious council and will not be done via direct employment by the local authorities, rather via financial assistance. The Reform movement agreed to this. Financing will be the responsibility of the Culture and Sports Ministry and not the Religious Services Ministry.

    In sports terms, it looks like they accepted a bribe to throw the fight.

    The Russell Tribunal noted the similarity of the Oslo Accords to the old system of Capitulations and the fact that the world has moved-on from colonialism and that sort of national exceptionalism. After 110 years of waiting, the status of our Palestinian equals, and fellow human beings, can't be more humiliation and apartheid pending pie-in-the-sky negotiations:
    

    Certain provisions of the Interim Agreement, expressing the Israeli positions, are clearly violations of international law. The recognition of the Palestinian competence in "the Occupied Territories", despite recognised territorial integrity, is undermined in several clauses. The Palestinian Authority can only exert jurisdiction by attribution. Israel continues to exert competence which has not been expressly transferred, thus in breach of the international law of decolonisation accepted by the United Nations. Moreover, the Israeli citizens residing in Palestine do not fall within Palestinian jurisdiction. This recalls the distressing "capitulations" that certain European states imposed on defeated states in the 19th century. This provision is all the more contrary to contemporary international law because it contains the germ of conflict and domination since all the Israeli colonies are not dismantled. From this point of view, by not putting any clear end to colonisation and by not accepting Palestinian jurisdiction on the Israeli residents, Israel violates an essential element of the Palestinian peoples' right to self-determination violates by preventing it from availing of all its land and by placing its citizens above Palestinian law.

    -- link to bdsmovement.net

  • Hostage June 3, 2012 at 1:57 am

    Well, the ones who lie to Israeli officials about the purpose of their visit are guilty of perjury and conspiracy to commit perjury (or whatever the equivalent charge is for lying to customs agents) to evade security procedures when entering Israel.

    The article doesn't say they were lying about the purpose of their visit. Having emails with the words "West Bank", "Israel", "Palestine", or "International Solidarity Movement" isn't evidence of perjury either. The US Consular Service travel advisory notes that:
    

    Demonstrations and Civil Unrest: U.S. citizens are advised to avoid demonstrations. Demonstrations or altercations can occur spontaneously, and all demonstrations have the potential to become violent without warning. If such disturbances occur, U.S. citizen visitors should leave the area immediately. U.S. citizens have been seriously injured in demonstrations that have turned violent. In Jerusalem's Old City, where exit routes are limited, U.S. citizen visitors should seek safe haven inside a shop or restaurant until the incident is over. Demonstrations can be particularly dangerous in areas such as checkpoints, settlements, military areas, and major thoroughfares where protesters are likely to encounter Israeli security forces. Within Israel, U.S. citizens should be aware that demonstrations in predominantly Arab areas and confrontations between Arab and Jewish residents in ethnically mixed towns can occur with little or no advance warning.

    ISM supports demonstrations and you can updates needed to avoid them by email at: palsolidarity-subscribe@googlegroups.com

  • Hostage June 3, 2012 at 12:17 am

    Would deluded fools such as he consider the US non-racist if for some unfathomable reason it decided to only allow immigration of Christians, wherever in the world they might come from, and decide to dispossess, expel, treat as second class citizens with fewer rights, all non-Christians?

    (sarcasim) The incident involving the Quaker lady from Missouri at Ben Gurion airport proves that Quakers can't rely on others. They need the safe haven that only the Quaker State can provide. The Mason-Dixon line is unacceptable and indefensible. It violates the right of the Quaker people to self-determination. The Quakers accepted the British partition proposal and ended their 17 year dispute over the borders of the Quaker State and the international status of Philadelphia. But the land for peace formula didn't satisfy the Papist forces in Maryland or the forces of the Church of England in Virginia. They eventually attacked Gettysburg and would have driven all of the Quakers into the Harbor at Philadelphia if their plans had been successful. The West Virginians are an invented people. The borders of partition cannot be for us the final borders. We are entitled to decide our borders according to our defense needs.(/sarcasm)

  • Hostage June 2, 2012 at 11:38 pm with 18 replies

    Which may lead to innocent people being mistaken for ISM people.

    There's no danger of you being mistaken for a clever troll. Can you provide a link to an official source which says that ISM people are guilty of something?

  • Hostage June 2, 2012 at 5:28 pm

    If only we could get close to that original agreement that they all knew the Palestinians would reject then.

    The United States didn't reject it and consular protections were explicitly covered. Let's review that together. Our Jerusalem Consular staff flatly refused to allow the deportation of US citizens on the basis of race or religion during the Ottoman era. The US government asserted its right to exercise in personam jurisdiction under the Capitulations:

    Though Jews belonging to other nationalities have been expelled from Jerusalem and Palestine, no American citizen has been expelled during my connection with this consulate. In all communications with the local authorities I have invariably and decidedly held the position that I could in no wise consent, much less render aid to expel from Palestine citizens of the United States who are Jews; that a fundamental principle of our Government was involved, which positively forbids any ‘discrimination made for or against American citizens on account of their race or religion.

    --link to digicoll.library.wisc.edu

    FYI, in personam jurisdiction allows Israeli citizens to take their country's laws and immunities with them whenever they decide to settle in the occupied Palestinian territories.

    Article 28 of the Treaty of Lausanne abolished the Capitulations in Turkey.

    Article 8 of the Palestine Mandate (and the Anglo-American Palestine Mandate Convention) provided that US rights and immunities under the Ottoman era Capitulations in Palestine would only be suspended during the term of the mandate, but would immediately be re-established in their entirety at the expiration of the mandate. link to avalon.law.yale.edu

    The United States refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the British Courts of Palestine after the San Remo Conference in April 1920, because the terms of the draft Mandate and the Anglo-American Convention had not been ratified. Here is an example of our Consular staff in action during that period on behalf of a would-be Jewish terrorist:
    

    SIR: I have the honor to state that on or about August 3, 1921, the Palestine police arrested at the town of Ludd, Palestine, an American citizen named Abraham Chaikin. Mr. Chaikin was charged with carrying a revolver contrary to local law and was tried and sentenced by the District Governor at Ramleh to imprisonment for thirty days.

    In accordance with standing instructions this Consulate demanded a week later when informed of the occurrence that Mr. Chaikin be turned over to it for trial in the American Consular Court in accordance with the Capitulations.

    -- link to digicoll.library.wisc.edu

    Under the existing treaties the US had the right to operate its own consular courts separate from Great Britain's courts in Palestine.
    link to digicoll.library.wisc.edu

    When Great Britain proposed to grant independence to Transjordan in 1946, the US government reserved its right to automatically resume its rights under the Capitulations in the future in line with its own policy considerations:
    

    6. The United States would automatically resume the right to exercise the capitulatory privileges formerly conceded by the Ottoman Government, upon termination of the Mandate, under Article 8 thereof. The United States would be extremely reluctant to resume these capitulatory rights, however, since such a retrogressive step would be contrary to the spirit of our present policy.

    link to digicoll.library.wisc.edu

    UN General Assembly Resolution 181(II) terminated the Palestine Mandate, which triggered the provisions of Article 8 thereof. The General Assembly implicitly acknowledged that states had the automatic right to immediately re-establish their rights and immunities under the Capitulations:
    

    PART IV Capitulations

    States whose nationals have in the past enjoyed in Palestine the privileges and immunities of foreigners, including the benefits of consular jurisdiction and protection, as formerly enjoyed by capitulation or usage in the Ottoman Empire, are invited to renounce any right pertaining to them to the reestablishment of such privileges and immunities in the proposed Arab and Jewish States and the City of Jerusalem.

    link to yale.edu
    link to digicoll.library.wisc.edu

    Because it disputes the legal status of those territories, Israel claims the right to ignore the prohibition against transferring portions of its own population into the occupied territory and asserts the right to retain in personam jurisdiction over its citizens in Palestine and Jerusalem. The US certainly has adequate ground for disputing that status and retaining the rights and immunities of its citizens in Israel, Palestine, and Jerusalem.

• US Embassy to American in trouble in Israel: 'You're not Jewish? Then we can't do anything to help you'
  • Hostage June 8, 2012 at 2:21 am

    I believe Archbishop Tutu was denied entry at one time

    Yes, the UN Human Rights Council appointed him and Professor Christine Chinkin (lately of Goldstone Mission fame) to conduct a High Level Fact Finding Mission on the IDF shelling in Beit Hanun, Gaza Strip, which killed 19 Palestinian civilians. Israel always denies entry to anyone on mission from the UN with a mandate to conduct a fact finding and report on any human rights violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
    link to electronicintifada.net
    link to infosud.org

    The ever pleasant Abe Foxman and the ADL went into blitz mode and defamed the UN, Tutu, and Chinkin for trying to conduct a "Kangaroo Court". link to haaretz.com

  • Hostage June 8, 2012 at 1:43 am

    Serving U.S. Citizens in Jerusalem, . . . . which will not assist Jewish Americans!

    LOL! Okay which is it gonna be? The link you supplied says "Serving U.S. Citizens in Jerusalem" and nothing at all to support the claim that it won't assist Jewish Americans.

    The current Consul General, Daniel Rubinstein, happens to be a Jewish American diplomat. His service area is exclusively geographical and it includes, wait for it, Serving American Citizens in Jerusalem!
    *http://jerusalem.usconsulate.gov/con_gen.html
    *http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/daniel_rubenstein.html

    FYI, there is every indication that he is a useless tool of oppression when it comes to helping Palestinians. See: "U.S.: We will stop aid to Palestinians if UN bid proceeds -- U.S. Consul General in Jerusalem, Daniel Rubinstein, tells chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat U.S. 'will take punitive measures' against Palestinian Authority if it seeks to upgrade position at UN General Assembly.
    link to haaretz.com

  • Hostage June 4, 2012 at 7:24 pm

    Deportation does not equal denial of entry. . . . As for the deportation hearing for Maguire

    The article specifically says she was denied entry and detained. So in this case deportation was the next step in the process that began with denial of entry.

  • Hostage June 4, 2012 at 11:23 am with 3 replies

    Hostage has posted an uncited list of obligations for the U.S. Embassy for a U.S. Citizen facing deportation. Does anyone have a cite for a list of obligations for a U.S. citizen being denied initial entry to a country?

    Emergency Assistance to U.S. Citizens Abroad includes arrest, detention, crime victimization, disappearance, and death.
    link to travel.state.gov

    Here is one of the many available citations that contains a summary of services provided: link to studentsabroad.state.gov

    More importantly I gave you a citation to an article about a Court date being set for a deportation hearing in a case involving someone who was initially denied entry and detained:
    

    An Israeli court will hold a deportation hearing Friday for an Irish Nobel Peace Prize winner, who was detained this week when she tried to visit the Jewish state and the Palestinian territories.

    Mairead Maguire was refused entry into Israel on Tuesday as she arrived with a delegation of other high-level women's rights activists from around the world, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said.

    Maguire, along with fellow Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams and founders of the Nobel Women's Initiative, was set to lead a delegation to Israel and the Palestinian territory over the next seven days. The delegation planned to travel to Jerusalem, Haifa, Nazareth, Ramallah, Hebron and Bil'in to learn from and highlight the work of female peace builders.

    -- link to articles.cnn.com

    So there is no prohibition in the local law against obtaining a list of lawyers from the US Consulate, obtaining emergency loans, etc., and petitioning the Court for a deportation hearing. Drop the stick and step away from the dead horse.

  • Hostage June 4, 2012 at 10:52 am

    These entry denials weren’t done on the basis of race. Since as it turns out, neither this woman nor the others banned as described in the other thread were banned because they were Arabs. They were banned because they are members of anti-Israel organizations.

    Please remember that Naomi Klein and Phil Weiss have both visited Israel and the West Bank; compared conditions they witnessed there to South African Apartheid; supported the findings of the Goldstone report; and support the BDS movement.

  • Hostage June 4, 2012 at 12:42 am

    What exactly would you have had the embassy do, that was actually in their power and could have lead to a different outcome? For a random American, you know we have 300 million of them right?

    You've asked that stupid question twice now and its already been answered. They can lodge a protest over the "Arab vs American" line of questioning, they can provide a list of lawyers, they can arrange for loans, Arrange for medical care, and arrange for food under programs that are authorized by US statute. The likelihood that the US Consulate was busy servicing 300 million detainees is extremely remote.

    The fact remains that there are Courts in Israel that have entertained petitions from people who were denied entry and facing deportation, e.g. Deportation hearing set for Nobel laureate in Israel link to articles.cnn.com

  • Hostage June 4, 2012 at 12:30 am

    Got a cite for any of that? Also something that says that being denied entry into a country is the same as being deported after having gained entrance.

    Fred here is the standard State Department boiler plate. Please note that it does not say "There's nothing we can do for you.":
    

    Assistance in Case of Arrest or Incarceration

    American citizens are subject to local laws, which may differ significantly from those in the U.S. Consular officers can provide a list of attorneys and information about judicial procedures, notify relatives if requested, and forward requests for money and other aid to relatives and friends. U.S. embassies can also arrange for medical care and provide loans to destitute prisoners through the Emergency Medical/Dietary Assistance (EMDA-I) program. Consular officers will sometimes attend the trial and monitor the treatment of prisoners and protest abuse. Consular officers cannot demand the release of a U.S. citizen or represent a U.S. citizen at trial, give legal advice, pay legal fees, or represent a prisoner in court.

  • Hostage June 3, 2012 at 9:14 pm

    Then you have A) not done your homework about what border security can and can’t do to you when you are traveling

    Fred you seem to be claiming that our federal border officials aren't creatures of the US Constitution or that our US State Department Consular officials can waive their legal obligations to a citizen based upon some sort of religious test.

    In fact the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of Justice’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have all been respondents in lawsuits about these very same questions. Spokesmen advise that CBP strictly prohibits profiling on the basis of race or religion in determining whether individuals are admissible into the United States, e.g. link to cnsnews.com

    The agencies claim that they strictly observe the prohibitions against stops, detention, or questioning on the basis of race or religion in line with Court decisions like United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, 422 U.S. 873, 878 (1975), United States v Montero-Camargo U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (2000), and the guidance contained in the DOJs Guidance Regarding The Use of Race By Federal Law Enforcement Agencies. link to justice.gov

    In short: what you've been defending here is actually illegal under our domestic laws and Constitution.

  • Hostage June 3, 2012 at 4:18 pm

    Laws, rights, treaties, international agreements, duties of the US Government to its citizens, etc., etc. . . . What have any of these things got to do with Israel?

    Our government is a creature of the Constitution. It can't do anything overseas that's prohibited by that document. If it claims the power and authority to murder civilians far away from any battlefield overseas, you can be sure that some lawyer in the DoJ has advised it has the Constitutional power and authority to do that at home. It views the international community of states as a collection of similarly empowered entities.

    So the United States has reached a new low point in its international relations and its respect for the fundamental rights of its own citizens. It has followed bad advice about waging the amorphous "war on terror", the use of drones against civilians, & refusal to accept international adjudication from the likes of Bolton, Yoo, and Koh. That behavior has tended to destroy the international order and organizations that are intended to solve problems peacefully inside the framework of law and human rights, not wars. In fact, our elected leaders and courts almost pride themselves on their defiance of international institutions and their ability to game the system to achieve short-term goals and objectives. All of that comes at a tremendous cost to the rest of us.

    In the past, leaders in our own and other governments had spent the better part of a century trying to build-up a framework of international law. It placed emphasis on arbitration, and adjudication, not endless negotiations accompanied by the intermittent use of force. In fact, they sought to outlaw war and placed severe restrictions and prohibitions on the unilateral use of force and warfare starting with the 1899 Hague Convention for the pacific settlement of international disputes, the Hague Conventions of 1907 on the Laws and Customs of War, the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols, and the all of the UN Covenants and Conventions on Human Rights. If respect for peaceful settlement of disputes, human rights, and humanitarian law threatens our "sovereignty", what does that say about the purpose of sovereignty, and ultimately about us?

    The US is increasingly isolated and wasting its political capital trying to prop-up a few rogue states and defending perpetual wars. Glorifying Zionist wars, colonialism, and apartheid is just a symptom of the underlying problem of lawlessness and immorality in our own society. When governments deny the fundamental rights of others, they invariably end up destroying the fundamental rights of everyone.

  • Hostage June 2, 2012 at 2:11 pm

    “The person is in no danger. The person is in no danger and doesn’t have the right to stay in the country that is deporting them anyway." . . . You can never say that about israel.

    That goes double for turning over accused terrorists to the US. The European Court of Human Rights has prohibited deportations in the past because of the genuine risk they would be tortured or receive the death penalty.

  • Hostage June 2, 2012 at 2:02 pm

    >> … deportation is the prerogative of the state.

    In international law it always takes at least two to Tango, the sending and the receiving state.

    If you plan on using rights of transit, remember that the EU placed an absolute ban on deportations or "renditions" of accused terrorists to the United States or other countries that practice torture. So your actual mileage may vary when you try to exercise that "prerogative". link to icon.oxfordjournals.org

  • Hostage June 2, 2012 at 1:43 pm

    Let’s deport some Palestinian refugees back to their home country.

    Might as well. Although the Jews complain that the US closed it doors to refugees during the Holocaust, it actually admitted tens of thousands of refugees. The group the US has persecuted the most in that regard are the Palestinians. Our government freely admits that it normally does not admit them into our country and that it is only willing to accept one or two thousand that it displaced during the war in Iraq. link to ipsnews.net

  • Hostage June 2, 2012 at 1:03 pm

    It was well within the legitimate rights of the Germans to deport a U.S. citizen to the U.S.

    LOL! Always reliving the golden age of Fascism eh Friedblogs? I seem to recall that the Nuremberg Charter (and the hangman's noose) curtailed the boundless discretion of the Germans to deport civilians on the basis of race or religion. Those prohibitions were codified in the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

  • Hostage June 2, 2012 at 12:35 pm

    “Help, I’m being put on a plane in 10 minutes to be deported back to my home country”.

    You're kidding right? When the Consular Section is advised that an American has been arrested or detained for deportation, a consular officer is required to visit the American Citizen as soon as possible; provides information regarding the foreign legal system and a list of attorneys; and offers other assistance such as contacting family or friends on the prisoner's behalf; arranges transfer of private funds for delivery to American prisoners, arranges dietary food supplements and/or medical care through a U.S. Government loan. All of those activities are prescribed by the US Code on Foreign Relations.

    The State of Israel purports to reserve the right to treat US citizens or nationals as "Palestinian" if their parents or grandparents ever lived in the West Bank or Gaza. If Israel is going to treat our citizens as "stateless" or worse still, as "citizens of an enemy power", then a determination and deportation to the "home country" would require a hearing in a regular court in accordance with the minimum protections contained in Article 3 and 6 of the 4th Geneva Convention. Even if a Palestinian-American civilian were accused of being a "Palestinian terrorist", they would still be a "protected person" once they are in the territory of a party to the armed conflict. The US supplies Israel with billions in military aid, so our citizens are not really subjects of an enemy or neutral power for GC IV purposes.

    In any event, Israel and the United States are both signatories of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations link to treaties.un.org

    Article 36 of that treaty permits the US Consul to arrange for legal representation of citizens who have been arrested or detained for any reason, including deportation proceedings. The international courts have ruled that the provisions of Article 36 create an enforceable individual right.

  • Hostage June 2, 2012 at 11:12 am

    Sovereign immunity would probably apply.

    They say that all politics is local. The 11th Amendment does prevent Israel from suing Pennsylvania in federal court, but the Religious Society of Friends would never respond by expelling Jews from the Quaker State in the first place.

    FYI, the Congressional authorization to use necessary military force against terror organizations linked to the attacks on September 11, 2001 might be applicable to the Mossad or Urban Moving System, but blaming the Society of Friends would cross too many red lines in the Bible Belt during an election year. For example, the Friends were among the earliest settlers here in "Bloody Kansas". They have descendants, meeting houses, camp grounds, and three university campuses scattered around the state. AIPAC couldn't get Romney elected to the post of dog catcher in this red state if he or his Israeli friends were ever perceived to be hostile to the Methodists, Presbyterians, AND the Quakers too.

    The natives here already support BDS (Boeing Defense, Space, and Security). But Boeing has announced that the Boeing Defense, Space & Security (BDS) facility in Wichita is closing down after 60 years of operation due to cuts in domestic spending programs. link to boeing.mediaroom.com

    The move is required in order for Boeing to stay competitive with US taxpayer-subsidized Israeli firms, like Rafael Advanced Defense Systems that are allowed to bid on DoD contracts. Congress has increased support for Rafael's Iron Dome system. So Israeli total military aid will be 4 billion this year instead of the projected 3.1 billion. Believe me, AIPAC's candidates won't be enjoying "sovereign immunity" at the ballot boxes here in Kansas.

  • Hostage June 2, 2012 at 2:20 am

    You’d be wrong. The U.S. embassy (assuming that this story is even true) was asking about religion, not race.

    Sorry, but treating the pacifists in The Religious Society of Friends like enemy terrorists is crossing a red line, even for the suck-ups in our US State Department.

    Besides, the US Consular advisories have long-since warned travelers that the Israeli authorities may consider US citizens born in the United States as "Palestinian" - without regard to any religion - so long as one of their parents or grandparents were either born in or lived in the West Bank or Gaza. That rule has never been applied to the descendants of a Palestinian Jew or an Israeli settler. So it is undoubtedly a case of ethnic or racial discrimination.

  • Hostage June 2, 2012 at 12:19 am

    “Jews of any race are welcome in Israel” unless they’re black, unless they’re Norman Finkelstein . . .

    . . . or Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, (Double Jeopardy! Round‎/Daily Double: Who are Phil and Adam?), et. al.

  • Hostage June 1, 2012 at 7:13 pm

    There is no right to be in a country of which you are not a citizen

    *The General Assembly has used that same rationale to demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the IDF from the occupied Arab territories.
    --General Assembly Resolution ES-9/1 link to un.org
    --General Assembly resolution 39/146 link to un.org

    *Our Jerusalem Consular staff hasn't always been so gutless in cases where the local authorities have attempted to deport US citizens:
    

    Though Jews belonging to other nationalities have been expelled from Jerusalem and Palestine, no American citizen has been expelled during my connection with this consulate. In all communications with the local authorities I have invariably and decidedly held the position that I could in no wise consent, much less render aid to expel from Palestine citizens of the United States who are Jews; that a fundamental principle of our Government was involved, which positively forbids any ‘discrimination made for or against American citizens on account of their race or religion.

    --http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=goto&id=FRUS.FRUS188889v01p2&isize=M&submit=Go+to+page&page=1560

    *Jewish members of Congress have introduced legislation that would permit Israeli terrorists to infiltrate the United States and alter the character and demographic balance of our "Quaker State" without obtaining a visa. link to vosizneias.com

• Once she joined 'Women in Black' and opposed aid to Israel. And then-- she ran for Congress and went to AIPAC
  • Hostage June 4, 2012 at 12:19 am

    Explaining his opposition to "H.R. 4133, the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012: Rep. Ron Paul told his fellow lawmakers:

    “This bill states that it is the policy of the United States to ‘reaffirm the enduring commitment of the United States to the security of the State of Israel as a Jewish state,’” said the congressman. “However, according to our Constitution the policy of the United States government should be to protect the security of the United States, not to guarantee the religious, ethnic, or cultural composition of a foreign country. In fact, our own Constitution prohibits the establishment of any particular religion in the US.”

    See 'It will lead to war' - Ron Paul fights to end military aid for Israel link to rt.com

  • Hostage June 1, 2012 at 8:18 pm

    The solution is simple – when an AIPAC candidate runs just spell out for the people in that district all the money we give to Israel that could be spend here at home.

    AIPAC is a 501(c)(4) organization. So it really can't publicly endorse its own list of candidates, although you'd think that is the organization's primary function. The promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office. However, a section 501(c)(4) social welfare organization may engage in some political activities, so long as that is not its primary activity. However, any expenditure it makes for political activities may be subject to tax under section 527(f). For further information regarding political and lobbying activities of section 501(c) organizations, see Election Year Issues, Political Campaign and Lobbying Activities of IRC 501(c)(4), (c)(5), and (c)(6) Organizations, and Revenue Ruling 2004-6. --http://www.irs.gov/charities/nonprofits/article/0,,id=96178,00.html

  • Hostage June 1, 2012 at 8:04 pm with 1 replies

    The solution is simple – when an AIPAC candidate runs just spell out for the people in that district all the money we give to Israel that could be spend here at home.

    AIPAC is a 501(c)(4) organization. So it really can't publicly endorse its own list of candidates. The promotion of social welfare does not include direct or indirect participation or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office. However, a section 501(c)(4) social welfare organization may engage in some political activities, so long as that is not its primary activity. However, any expenditure it makes for political activities may be subject to tax under section 527(f). For further information regarding political and lobbying activities of section 501(c) organizations, see Election Year Issues, Political Campaign and Lobbying Activities of IRC 501(c)(4), (c)(5), and (c)(6) Organizations, and Revenue Ruling 2004-6. --http://www.irs.gov/charities/nonprofits/article/0,,id=96178,00.html

• AP investigates the 'Made in Israel' label
  • Hostage May 31, 2012 at 11:37 pm

    “Since the products of the settlements are made under Israeli regulations and standards, they are ‘made in Israel.’”

    "Israel" only retained personal jurisdiction over its citizens in the occupied Palestinian territories. That means there's no uniform enforcement or application of Israeli labor and industrial laws in the occupied territories.

    Nothing is stopping the producers or manufacturers from putting all of the applicable conformance testing marks from the Standards Institution of Israel (SII), UL, CSA, TÜV, & etc. on their products. But that has nothing to do with Country of Origin Marking.

    Our own Treasury Department directives prohibit labeling products from the West Bank and Gaza as made in Israel:

    [B]y letter dated October 24, 1994, the Department of State advised the Department of the Treasury that, in view of certain developments, principally the Israeli-PLO Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements (signed on September 13, 1993), the primary purpose of 19 U.S.C. 1304 would be best served if goods produced in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were permitted to be marked ‘‘West Bank’’ or ‘‘Gaza Strip.’’
    Accordingly, as Customs has previously relied upon advice received from the Department of State in making determinations regarding the ‘‘country of origin’’ of a good for marking purposes, Customs notified the public in T.D. 95–25 that, unless excepted from marking, goods produced in the West Bank or Gaza Strip shall be marked as ‘‘West Bank,’’ ‘‘Gaza,’’ or ‘‘Gaza Strip.’’ The T.D. further stated that the country of origin markings of such goods shall not contain the words ‘‘Israel,’’ ‘‘Made in Israel,’’ ‘‘Occupied Territories-Israel,’’ or words of similar meaning.
    ...
    By letter dated January 13, 1997, the Department of State advised the Department of the Treasury that the Palestinian Authority has asked that the U.S. accept the country of origin marking ‘‘West Bank/Gaza’’ so as to reaffirm the territorial unity of the two areas. The Department of State further advised that it considers the West Bank and Gaza Strip to be one area for political, economic, legal and other purposes.

    62 FR 12269 - Country of Origin Marking of Products From the West Bank and Gaza link to gpo.gov

    He said there were other cases of contestable labeling, including by the Palestinians who label products from parts of the West Bank governed by the Palestinian Authority as "Made in Palestine." There is formally no state of Palestine, he noted.

    Nonsense the State of Palestine was declared in 1988 and has been formally recognized by about 130 countries which can demand that products be labeled with Palestine as the country of origin.

    Statehood was never a final status issue of the Oslo Accords or Quartet Road map. In fact the Interim Agreement of 1995, which is the major post-Oslo agreement, specifies that neither party shall be deemed “to have renounced or waived any of its existing rights, claims or positions” (Art. 31-6). So the Palestinians position on statehood was preserved.

• 'NYT' chronicles underground passage from Egypt to Gaza
  • Hostage June 1, 2012 at 10:22 pm

    did not change the Agreement on Movement which requires all goods entering Gaza to go through the Kerem Shalom Crossing.

    Reminder: The 2005 AMA allowed Gaza to operate and enlarge its sea port. It also guaranteed there would be no interference with the sea port from the IDF.

  • Hostage June 1, 2012 at 1:58 pm with 1 replies

    Egypt is allowing Palestinian Airlines flights between Marka Air Base, Jordan and El Arish, Egypt. link to haaretz.com

    So people still have to queue-up and request permission to leave Gaza through the Rafah crossing in order to get on a flight.

  • Hostage June 1, 2012 at 11:57 am

    I assure you, I’m far better informed than most people on this site, though I choose to remain anonymous – as do many others.

    Well then you ought to know that the ICRC and UNRWA have labeled the closure collective punishment, which is a war crime. The humanitarian watchdogs noted that delivery of humanitarian aid alone won't solve the problem because the closure and Cast Lead have destroyed the local economy and infrastructure. So the ICRC and UNRWa have demanded that Israel relax the blockade and lift the closure.

    UNRWA and the Arab Network for Humanitarian Information report that nothing has fundamentally changed about that situation since 2010:

    *The U.N. official responsible for Palestinian refugees said Tuesday that Israel has been too slow to relax its blockade of Gaza, which has devastated the isolated economy and failed to achieve its security goals.
    link to abcnews.go.com
    *Egypt: International delegations denied access into Gaza: Mubarak’s ruling mindset perpetuated; the ruling Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) succumbs to Israeli and Western dictates.
    link to anhri.net

    It's obvious that Israel's blockade and the closure of Gaza are still a form of collective punishment that Israel uses to choke off the local economy and the people from the outside world in order to humiliate the people of Gaza and those who attempt to provide them with humanitarian aid.

    *AIPAC and Israel continue to attack US funding for UNRWA refugees in living in Gaza through propaganda and draft legislation;
    *The IDF is still violating the unilateral withdrawal agreement and the 2005 agreement on movement and access with regard to the operation of the Gaza port. It does that to prevent deliveries of humanitarian aid and the conduct of normal commerce through imports and exports; to punish the local fishing fleet; and to harm the local economy. It is doing the same things with the land crossings to prevent exports to the West Bank and the rest of the world, and to slow down deliveries of products and humanitarian aid shipments in violation of Security Council resolution 1860 (2009).

  • Hostage May 31, 2012 at 10:09 pm

    We’ve been over this before. Through the Israeli agreements with Egypt and the PA, Israel insisted on controlling all border points, even the one from Egypt. No goods, only pedestrians are allowed through the Rafah crossing from Egypt, and Israel still maintains the final say on who is allowed through, All goods from Egypt must go through the Israeli crossing at Kerem Shalom.

    That's not correct, but certainly agree that's how it works. The 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access specifically provided for the export of goods through the Rafah crossing.
    See the summary on page 2 of 6 link to ochaopt.org

    In addition the negotiators announced they had achieved an agreement on facilitating the movement of people and goods within the Palestinian Territories and on opening an international crossing on the Gaza-Egypt border that will put the Palestinians in control of the entry and exit of people.

    Nothing in the agreement with the PA would prevent goods from Egypt from arriving at the Gaza Seaport:
    

    Construction of a seaport can commence. The GoI will undertake to assure donors that it will not interfere with operation of the port.

    The parties agreed that:
    

    The passages will operate continuously. On an urgent basis, Israel will permit the export of all agricultural products from Gaza during this 2005 harvest season.

    The new and additional scanner will be installed and fully operational by December 31. At that time, the number of export trucks per day to be processed through Karni will reach 150, and 400 by end-2006. A common management system will be adopted by both parties.

    In addition to the number of trucks above, Israel will permit export of agricultural produce from Gaza and will facilitate its speedy exit and onward movement so that quality and freshness can be maintained. Israel will ensure the continued opportunity to export.

    -- link to consilium.europa.eu

    In addition the Security Council ordered that unrestricted flow of humanitarian aid throughout Gaza be resumed on the "continuous" basis stipulated by the 2005 AMA.
    link to un.org

    The 3rd party implementation procedure contained in the 2005 agreement only requires Egypt to operate its side of the border in accordance with international standards, in accordance with Palestinian law and subject to the terms of the agreement. The agreement does not say that Israel has any final say in how the border operates: "Israel has no effective physical control of the crossing which is controlled by Hamas on one side and the Egyptian authorities on the other" -- H.C.J. 7761/08, Bur'i v. Defense Minister, Respondents ' reply dated September 22, 2008, para. 6

  • Hostage May 31, 2012 at 3:04 am

    And note: the source for that earlier NYT report were… the tunnel operators themselves.

    Actually it was just one man. He only said it "seemed" like Israel knew which tunnels were operated by Hamas and which ones are operated by local businesses.

• Alterman says BDS shares Ahmadinejad's agenda, and Hezbollah's too
  • Hostage June 1, 2012 at 11:06 pm

    Oh, and here’s an article exposing The Israel Project’s secret hasbara handbook: link to richardsilverstein.com

    They probably kept it secret to avoid getting a take down notice from the original copyright owners or to avoid looking clueless. After all, they paid Lutz to regurgitate hasbara talking points that they could have obtained by simply subscribing to a free Hasbara Fellowship RSS feed. This crap was probably already taking up valuable space on their badly infected hard drives.

  • Hostage June 1, 2012 at 10:14 pm

    re:Mordechai Vanunu A traitor who was arrested by unusual means.

    RE: Fredblogs a lousy guy with an even lousier memory. The law in these parts limits treason to actually waging war against your own state and giving aid and comfort to its enemies. Revealing that a psychotic state with a Samson complex possesses nukes is neither an aid nor a comfort to anyone - and its hardly an act of war.

  • Hostage June 1, 2012 at 10:04 pm

    The Israelis enforced a legitimate blockade in full accord with international law. The passengers committed an act of war (though not an act of terrorism) against Israel by attacking the soldiers.

    Hardly, it's a violation of international law to attack vessels outside the published coordinates of a blockade zone. The most favorable "findings" expressed in any "inquiry" report by a committee established without the necessary legal mandate to conduct a proper criminal investigation noted:
    

    "Israel’s decision to board the vessels with such substantial force at a great distance from the blockade zone and with no final warning immediately prior to the boarding was excessive and unreasonable"
    ...
    "The loss of life and injuries resulting from the use of force by Israeli forces during the take-over of the Mavi Marmara was unacceptable. Nine passengers were killed and many others seriously wounded by Israeli forces. No satisfactory explanation has been provided to the Panel by Israel for any of the nine deaths. Forensic evidence showing that most of the deceased were shot multiple times, including in the back, or at close range has not been adequately accounted for in the material presented by Israel.

    There was significant mistreatment of passengers by Israeli authorities after the take-over of the vessels had been completed through until their deportation."
    ...
    "The vessels were in international waters, 72 nautical miles from the coast and 64 nautical miles (approximately 5 hours sailing) from the blockade zone at the time of the attack.

    In the S.S. Lotus case, the World Court decided, that the first and foremost restriction imposed by international law upon a State is that – failing the existence of a permissive rule to the contrary – it may not exercise its power in any form against the territory of another State, which includes vessels and aircraft. FYI, Turkey was the state party which prevailed in the case. See the S.S. “Lotus” (France v. Turkey), PCIJ Series A, No. 10, at p. 18 (1927) link to icj-cij.org

    The MV Mavi Marmara was flagged in Comoros, a State Party to the Rome Statute. That means the ICC automatically has complementary jurisdiction under the terms of Article 12 of the Statute in the event that the responsible states fail to investigate the or prosecute the deaths for which no adequate explanation has been provided:
    

    Article 12
    Preconditions to the exercise of jurisdiction

    1. A State which becomes a Party to this Statute thereby accepts the jurisdiction of the Court with respect to the crimes referred to in article 5. [(a) The crime of genocide; (b) Crimes against humanity; (c) War crimes; (d) The crime of aggression]

    2. In the case of article 13, paragraph (a) or (c), the Court may exercise its jurisdiction if one or more of the following States are Parties to this Statute or have accepted the jurisdiction of the Court in accordance with paragraph 3:

    (a) The State on the territory of which the conduct in question occurred or, if the crime was committed on board a vessel or aircraft, the State of registration of that vessel or aircraft;

    -- link to untreaty.un.org

    Comoros is also one of the members of the League of Arab States which referred a report on the situation in Gaza, including the blockade, to the Office of the ICC Prosecutor. link to web.archive.org

    The official inquiry conducted by the UN human rights mandate holder determined that the blockade was illegal. That inquiry was headed-up by a former Justice of ICC. -- link to www2.ohchr.org

    The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights also determined that the blockade is illegal. She also is a former Justice of the ICC Appeals Chamber who noted that:
    

    In so far as it constitutes collective punishment of all persons in Gaza, including the civilian population, the blockade is itself a violation of international humanitarian law.

    --http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/71266F7CD47BBDEA85257615004D8635

  • Hostage June 1, 2012 at 1:37 pm

    “Israel does not kidnap anyone (not since Eichman anyway). They arrest people. Sometimes they capture enemy combatants. Neither of those is kidnapping.’

    LOL! Of course the Mossad subsequently kidnapped Mordecai Vanunu. FYI: when you 1) "arrest" a protected civilian in the occupied Palestinian or Lebanese territories; and 2) transfer them to facility, like 1391 in Israel, where they are held for years without any charges; that is an illegal deportation under the terms of Article49(6) of the 4th Geneva Convention.

    Whenever you arrest and transport someone from the territory of one of the lucky states that Israel hasn't occupied so far, and you don't allow them legal representation or an extradition hearing, it's considered a case of "enforced disappearance". The latest example of that involved the abduction of Dirar Abu Seesi from the Ukraine by the Mossad. You might need to bone up on the 4th Geneva Convention and the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. Nobody calls it kidnapping anymore when the perpetrators are agents of a state.

  • Hostage June 1, 2012 at 12:46 pm

    They do treat them like humans. The Palestinians like enemy humans and the Israeli Arabs like citizen humans.

    The responsible treaty monitoring bodies have repeatedly pointed out a long list of inhuman practices that Israel directs toward its "Arab" citizens, which constitute the crime of apartheid. Anat Kamm and Uri Blau revealed that the IDF actually treats enemy civilians as if they are combatants in violation of Supreme Court decisions on the subject. For example, when Egyptians attacked and killed some Israelis near Eilat, Defense Minister Barak granted himself carte blanche to arbitrarily murder some uninvolved civilians in Gaza.

    Perhaps you can explain why Israel destroys its "Arab citizen's" existing communal settlements, including the ones located within the known boundaries of their ancestral lands or why it has never built new Arab communal settlements for general public use on state-owned or other land since the day the Jewish state came into existence? During that same period Israel has built hundreds of Jewish communal settlements on Israel's state lands and on state-owned and private lands in Palestine. While all of that was happening, Israeli officials were frantically shreying about the Arab demographic threat and Arab encroachment on state lands. Why aren't all of Israel's "human citizens" allowed to build new communal settlements or to use its state lands on a non-discriminatory basis?

  • Hostage June 1, 2012 at 1:30 am

    Uri blau should have stayed in europe.

    Mordechai Vanunu followed that advice, but found out too late that he was still a sitting duck.

• Fear, the African refugees and the cost of maintaining Israel as a Jewish state
  • Hostage May 30, 2012 at 8:30 pm

    I would guess that the Jewish community legal construct was probably by ‘mutual’ demand in a lot of cases.

    I'm certain that non-believers were not beating down any doors to demand the privilege of paying taxes into the religious community's coffers, the right to recognize Orthodox national leaders, or the obligation to comply with the rulings of rabbinical courts. I know I've never felt the urge to do any of those things;-)

  • Hostage May 30, 2012 at 1:15 pm

    This goes right to the heart of all arguments about the “Jewish Community”. Apparently the “Jewish Community” is not actually of Jewish construction, it is a condition imposed on Jews.

    Yes, in Europe the "Jewish community" was usually a legal construct that was part of the laws on residency or minorities. Jewish communities not only had a right to police and govern themselves as autonomous entities, they had an obligation to do so. In Germany, Jewish neighborhoods were governed by codes of residence, aka: Judenstättigkeit. Shofar Volume 15, 1996, page 65 noted that in the 1744 Judenstättigkeit of Hessen-Kassel, 842 Jewish families lived in 177 communities, for the most part (148 communities) in small groups of up to merely five families. Jewish communities in the new states, like Poland, that were established after WWI, retained the right to operate their own autonomous minority schools and religious institutions, which helped preserve their common culture, language, or heritage.

  • Hostage May 30, 2012 at 12:52 pm

    What does ‘secular’ mean here? Not quite the same as ‘atheist’, as far as I can see.

    I don't know about Mike or Danaa, but I was talking about secularity in the ordinary sense of someone or something separate or apart from religion. "Jew" or "Jewishness" are terms with meanings that contradict or oppose one another - similar to the way the word "cleave" can either mean to split away from something, or to adhere to something. Jewish secularity included people who held opposing views, like those who believe in Zionist particularity and others who believe in a universality of the human condition and experience that transcends the framework of race, religion, or nationality.

    There have been groups of Jewish intellectuals who developed philosophies based upon both of those schools of thought. So while "Jewishness" might conjure-up the idea of narrow-minded nationalism or particularism, to many of us Jewishness represents universalism too. It can be a philosophy that applies to everyone - outside the categories of race, nationalism, or statism. See for example the long discussion about that in Avner Dinur, "Jewish-German-Universal: Judaism in the thought of Hannah Arendt and Hans Jonas" link to hsf.bgu.ac.il

    I simply noted that the orthodox and the atheist could share one of the common Jewish languages, elements of culture, or personal family ties within a Jewish community. People tend to generalize when they are discussing the roles played by religion, racial theory, or national particularism in public life. Many simply assume that the public sphere should be a place outside of those categories. If your point of departure is the impropriety of those factors intruding or trespassing on the public domain, then you should ask yourself how or when religion, race, or nationality became solely private matters in the first place and whether the various efforts to make them private have ever really succeeded.

    Religious people are still exercising considerable control of the public domain whether we like to admit it or not. If you're familiar with the unsuccessful efforts to adopt constitutional amendments guaranteeing equal rights for women or homosexuals; efforts to overturn "Blue Laws"; reform immigration laws; or repeal prohibitions on gambling, then you know that many times the opposition comes from religious groups that are determined to impose a religious status quo on the public.

    In the past, Jews had the obligation and the right to govern and police themselves. Jewish communities could compel those of a non-religious persuasion to pay taxes into their community coffers. They could command that Jews respect the authority of government-recognized heads of the Jewish "nation," and that they abide by the legal judgments of the rabbinate. Even after the so-called Enlightenment, there were measures like the ones I linked to above in Romania that dealt in a sweeping fashion with all non-Christian Jews as members of an alien race, nationality, or religion. In egalitarian France, the gentiles threw-off the authority of their Church, but turned around and convened a "Great Sanhedrin" based upon the idea that certain Jewish notables spoke on behalf of communities and still governed them under a hierarchy of ecclesiastical councils or tribunals with judicial powers that answered to the central authorities in Paris.

    There are still orthodox Jews today who consider anyone with a Jewish mother as someone who has an obligation to observe the Halakhah - whether they like it or not. That's fairly evident to anyone who wants Bar-Ilan Street or King George and Shmuel HaNagid streets in Jerusalem, or HaShomer Street in Bnei Brak open to vehicular traffic on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. See for example Horev - vs -The Minister of Transport. There are disputes here in the US between Jewish sectarians over the need for Eruvs & etc.

    I could ramble-on but there are the two extremes within the Jewish community and every shade of gray in between.

  • Hostage May 28, 2012 at 9:56 pm

    How can a secular Jew feel chosen?

    For starters, some Orthodox authorities hold that secular Jews have the same duties to observe the Halachah as any other Jew and that they are subject to the same punishments whenever the authorities have sufficient temporal powers to impose them. Other religious Jews believed in toleration and mutual support of others who suffer persecution on the basis of a shared race, language, customs, traditions, and family ties.

    Religion had nothing to do with the racial theories of Arthur de Gobineau, Social Darwinism, or the nationality laws that were based upon the concept that humans are divided into several mutually incompatible races. Even in cases where religion was a factor, non-Christian Jews were expelled from towns and villages, positions in government, & etc.

    The social movement founded to implement minority rights treaties worked to protect the use of the Yiddish language or aspects of Yiddish culture common to atheist and devout Jews alike and the right to operate schools and other institutions that served "Jewish communities". In Greco-Bulgarian Communities (Opinion No. 17) and Minority Schools in Albania (Opinion A/B 64) the Permanent Court of International Justice provided a standard legal definition of a “community” in which religion was only one factor. That legal definition applied to Jewish and other national minority communities of the day. It is:
    

    ” … a group of persons living in a given country or locality, having a race, religion, language and traditions of their own and united by this identity of race, religion, language and traditions in a sentiment of solidarity, with a view to preserving their traditions, maintaining their form of worship, ensuring the instruction and upbringing of their children in accordance with the spirit and traditions of their race and rendering mutual assistance to each other.”

    Those legal principles are a relevant part of the public law of Europe today. See for example the report on “Minority Rights in Albania”, by the Albanian Helsinki Committee, September 1999.

  • Hostage May 28, 2012 at 5:36 pm with 11 replies

    Why do I read so little here on Mondoweiss about this naked contradiction: the very notion of the secular Jew?

    Because there are so many secular Jews commenting here. Members of Jewish communities became the objects of the national and international public laws of Europe during the Enlightenment. "Jew" was a non-Christian civil status that affected the right of naturalization, residency, and employment. It was assigned regardless of one's faith in Judaism or Atheism to keep members of a non-Christian alien minority group outside the scope of the laws that applied to the privileged mainstream national ethnic groups, i.e. "aliens of the Christian persuasion alone can obtain naturalization." -- See for example Dr. E. Schwarzfeld, The Situation Of The Jews In Roumania Since The Treaty Of Berlin (1878) link to bjpa.org

    Even today, the European acquis communautaire does not set rules on secularism, but it does protect any cultural, linguistic and religious identity of a national minority. The history of Europe, or "Christendom", has legated several official models of state and church relations that continue to exist to this very day. So there are similar naked contradictions: the very notion of secular citizens or nationals of states and principalities that are still officially Christian.

  • Hostage May 28, 2012 at 4:37 pm with 1 replies

    I distinctly recall some concerns that Palestinians had about demographic changes

    That included the resident Palestinian Jews. They were subjugated and treated like second-class humans - especially by the Ashkenazi Jews and Zionists after they wrestled control away from the leadership of the old Yishuv:
    

    One peculiar phase of the case is that large numbers of the resident Jews share in this dislike to the coming here of more Jews. This is explained by the fact that it tends to the increase in price of all articles of living, adds little or nothing to the wealth of the city, and reduces the proportion of the charitable aid sent here by their wealthy co-religionists from abroad.

    link to digicoll.library.wisc.edu

    A two-state solution that does not include the right of return of the Palestinian refugees is not only an unjust solution that would leave Palestinians with a non-viable, non-contiguous, so called state but it would leave Israelis trapped in their ethnocracy.

    True enough, but in the interim, Jews are livin' large with all of the legal benefits of "statehood" and UN membership - except for those pesky contiguous borders. Why don't we go ahead and give the Palestinians those same temporary benefits and status while we're waiting for a final settlement to magically happen? For decades the Israelis have been crowing about their ability to commit crimes against the Palestinian people that are prohibited in cases involving the inhabitants of another state.

• Netanyahu govt to impose fines on mayors of cities that employ migrant workers
  • Hostage May 28, 2012 at 7:59 pm

    Were they operating under a law, put in place by the Native Palestinians, to govern their own land and their own society? Or where they taking advantage of the then-current foreign control of Palestine which stripped self-governance from the Palestinian people?

    Neither, even Rothschild had to use a Turkish citizen, like Efraim Krause, as an agent to make the land purchases and registrations. Foreign ownership by the National Fund or the Palestine Land Development Company and foreign colonization by their societies were practices that violated the law. That's why the Ottoman officials refused to register the land they obtained in the valley of Jezreel.

  • Hostage May 28, 2012 at 7:57 am

    is an Israeli contractor still the proposed builder or did the U.S. government give the contract to someone else?

    The Government scrapped the idea after they wasted a billion on 53 miles of fence built by Boeing. link to reuters.com

  • Hostage May 28, 2012 at 1:45 am with 2 replies

    Certainly, the United States would not employ these tactics to keep illegal migrant workers from Mexico from obtaining gainful employment in the U.S.,

    My best friends growing up in Kansas were named Vierya, Jasso, Delgado, Rodriguez, and Reulas. Every time some dumb son of a bitch politician opens his mouth and spews racist fear mongering crap about the "Mexicans", they can forget about getting elected in the district where I live.

    BTW, people who have to live in a country where drug war deaths over five years total 50,000 - thanks in small part to the ATF's Fast and Furious gun trafficking scandal - just might be legitimate refugees.

    P.S. the government scaled back its fence project and in places it's just a picket fence:

    The law instructed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to secure about one-third of the 1,950-mile border between US and Mexico with 700 miles of double-layered fencing – and additionally through cameras, motion sensors, and other types of barriers – by the end of the year to stem illegal immigration.
    ...
    The DHS scaled back its ambitions early on, trimming its end-of-2008 target down to 300 miles of vehicle barrier and 370 miles of pedestrian barrier.

    As of February, 302 miles of barrier have been constructed mostly on federal land in Arizona, New Mexico, and California, and slightly over half of this has been built under the new law.

    Just $200 million will have been spent by June, according to Lloyd Easterling, the border patrol public information officer.

    Only a fraction of the new barriers resemble anything like the images of formidable fencing – the Berlin Wall or the bleak monolith that divides Israel and the West Bank – envisioned by the initial proposal. Most of the new fencing is not a double wall, but a combination of regular vehicle blocks and pedestrian barriers that range from metal mesh and chain link to traditional picket fences. link to csmonitor.com

  • Hostage May 27, 2012 at 6:49 pm

    I can’t imagine Ukraine getting away with fining any company that employs Jews.

    Introductory note
    by the Office of the
    United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
    (UNHCR)

    The Convention further stipulates that, subject to specific exceptions, refugees should not be penalized for their illegal entry or stay. This recognizes that the seeking of asylum can require refugees to breach immigration rules. Prohibited penalties might include being charged with immigration or criminal offences relating to the seeking of asylum, or being arbitrarily detained purely on the basis of seeking asylum. Importantly, the Convention contains various safeguards against the expulsion of refugees. The principle of non-refoulement is so fundamental that no reservations or derogations may be made to it. It provides that no one shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee against his or her will, in any manner whatsoever, to a territory where he or she fears threats to life or freedom.
    ...

    Chapter III : Gainful Employment
    Article 17
    wage-earning employment
    1. The Contracting State shall accord to refugees lawfully staying in their territory the most favourable treatment accorded to nationals of a foreign country in the same circumstances, as regards the right to engage in wage earning employment. --Text of the 1951 Refugee Convention and 1967 Protocol

• Israel lobby's favorite senator tries to erase Palestinian refugee status for millions
  • Hostage May 30, 2012 at 1:29 pm

    “…it is proof of exactly nothing.”

    Palestinian nationality is based in international law found in Article 30 of the Treaty of Lausanne, not the municipal laws of Israel. So to be perfectly honest, when Israel seceded from Palestine its new laws prove exactly nothing about the status of refugees. The same thing applies to US congressional appropriations bills.

  • Hostage May 27, 2012 at 2:55 am

    Rogin also reports that US policy is in line with UNRWA’s practice of granting refugee status to descendants.

    Well of course, Article III of the Apartheid Convention applies to individuals and members of organizations (AIPAC/WINEP) whether residing in the territory of the State in which the acts are perpetrated or in some other State. The acts include the adoption of measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country, including the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, & etc.

    This measure is designed to do all of those things. Kirk may enjoy congressional immunity at home, but try explaining that to the other UN member states that he's attempting to stiff with the tab for Israel's policy of grand apartheid. What do they get in return for going along with this nonsense?

    2 of my children were born overseas while I was serving in the US military and they inherited my nationality. That's exactly how Article 1 of the 1951 Refugee Convention works too, on the basis of the refugee's country of nationality. My children are middle aged now and have children of their own. Their nationality got passed along in-turn by operation of law without the need for any personal intervention. Article 1 of the 1951 Convention does not concern itself with how the family ends up outside their country of nationality, only that they are unable to return or fearful of doing so. If my family had somehow been prevented from returning to our homes and properties in the US years ago by a measure like this, would Sen. Kirk accept a settlement that ignored our nationality and the content and intent of the Refugee Convention? You could certainly claim that my children and grandchildren had no right of return, because only my wife and I were personally displaced from our country of former residence, but the convention doesn't stipulate that a refugee's descendants must be personally displaced in order to acquire their parents status or nationality.

    Article 35 of the 4th Geneva Convention reflects customary international law:
    

    "All protected persons who may desire to leave the territory at the outset of, or during a conflict, shall be entitled to do so".

    The only exception is an occupied territory, where enemy civilians of military age may be prevented from leaving. Palestinians in that category are Israeli citizens today. Many of them were internally displaced and martial law was used to prevent them from returning to their homes. There are schemes to strip them of their acquired nationality and citizenship too. At what point do we stop pretending this isn't a criminal conspiracy to commit the crime of apartheid against the Palestinian people?

• Saving Illinois from Senator Kirk
  • Hostage May 26, 2012 at 6:45 am

    “The CFI member then argued that Palestine never existed and couldn’t have ever existed “because the letter ‘P’ is not part of the Arabic language”. ”

    That's a non-sequitur, they called it Filistin. But there is a distinct possibility that Senator Kirk no longer exists. He suffered a serious stroke in January (no doubt caused by too many AIPAC mind melds). I hear he is still in a rehab facility: See Photo, update on Senator Mark Kirk recovery link to abclocal.go.com

• US to differentiate between 'personally displaced' Palestinian refugees and their descendants
  • Hostage May 31, 2012 at 8:59 pm

    “We feel under the obligation to make our position unmistakably clear. As far as the Jewish people are concerned, they have accepted the decision. of the United Nations. We regard it as binding, and we are resolved to move forward in the spirit of that decision.

    Rabbi Silver was the representative of the Jewish Agency who said that the Jewish people only supported ten of the eleven recommendations unanimously adopted by UNSCOP. The exception was Recommendation VI on "Jewish Displaced Persons". He said the 12th recommendation adopted by the UNSCOP majority, i.e. that the international community could not use Palestine to solve the question of World Jewry, was "unintelligible". See the the UN Yearbook 31 December 1948

    He also deployed the special Jewish Agency version of Acceptance™ with modifications and reservations. The FRUS reports that:
    

    Rabbi Silver deemed the minority report unacceptable; nor did the majority report satisfy the Jewish people because of the limited area of the proposed Jewish state and the exclusion of Jerusalem from that state. Nevertheless, the Agency was willing to accept the majority report since it made possible the immediate reestablishment of the Jewish State. This acceptance was made subject to further discussion of constitutional and territorial provisions (pages 15-17).

    --link to digicoll.library.wisc.edu

    The General Assembly resolution stipulated that provisions to establish the Economic Union of Palestine and provide for other matters of common interest should be put into effect by the Palestine Commission acting on their behalf on 1 April 1948 - whether or not both of the Provisional Councils of Government had formally entered into the undertaking.

    At a subsequent meeting of the Security Council on 19 March 1948 Rabbi Silver mischaracterized a discussion about that particular provision of the plan to claim that the resolution the Jewish Agency had "accepted™" did not require the establishment of an Arab State at all:
    

    The statement that the plan proposed by the General Assembly is an integral plan which cannot succeed unless each of its parts can be carried out is incorrect. This conception was never part of the plan. Indeed, it is contrary to the statement made by the representative of the United States during the second session of the General Assembly. The setting up of one State was not made conditional upon the setting up of the other State. Mr. Herschel Johnson, representing the United States delegation, speaking in a sub-committee of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question on 28 October 1947, stated, in discussing this very matter in connection with economic union: "The element of mutuality would not necessarily be a factor, as the document might be signed by one party only."

    -- See the extract from Rabbi Silver's remarks at the MFA web site link to mfa.gov.il

    Rabbi Silver brushed aside the requirement that the Commission implement the plan of Economic Union. It called for redistribution of revenues from the Jewish state that were essential to the viability of the Arab state. He explained that the Jewish Agency did not consider it essential to the Jewish state. He once again deployed the special Jewish Agency understanding of the terms "acceptance™" and "integral™" and ignored the fact that the overwhelming majority of the General Assembly had adopted a plan for the establishment of a Corpus Separatum. That plan fulfilled the obligation contained in Article 28 of the Palestine Mandate that a regime of perpetual international safeguards for Jerusalem and the Holy sites be established when the mandate was terminated. He claimed that Jewish cooperation with the setting up of the Corpus Separatum would be conditional and based upon the establishment of the Jewish state:
    

    The Agency does not consider the principles of the proposed economic union essential to the economic life of Palestine as a whole or to creation of the Jewish State. The Agency considers that economic union should not be an obstacle to the creation of the Jewish State.

    The representatives of the Jewish Agency stated that the Jews would co-operate in the administration of Jerusalem by the United Nations considered however, as part of the partition plan, but that United Nations administration of Jerusalem apart from the plan would create a serious obstacle to such co-operation.

    See the verbatim minutes of the 271st meeting of the Security Council, 19 March 1948 link to un.org

  • Hostage May 31, 2012 at 6:18 pm

    Are you serious? Of course they did. Jerusalem was attacked for example. That is how Jordan attained part of it.

    You know perfectly well that Jerusalem was not part of the Jewish State under the UN plan of partition.

    But you might not know that the Hashemites have a secured interest in the government of Jerusalem. The British government made several declarations and came to agreements with the Muslim inhabitants of its India colony, the Sharif of Mecca and the Arab Sheikhs, and the Muslim notables of Egypt and the Sudan regarding the absolute immunity of the Muslim Holy Sites and Waqfs.

    *The 3rd paragraph of the Sykes-Picot Agreement required the Allies to consult with the Sharif of Mecca on the form of government in the brown area of international administration in Palestine.

    *The Muslim Holy Places in Hebron and Jerusalem had been completely excluded from the territory of the brown, “International Enclave”, shown on the map attached to the Sykes-Picot Agreement in accordance with the Government of India’s Proclamation No. 4 to the Arab and Indian Sheikhs and the Sharif of Mecca. The remainder of Palestine was included in the area pledged for Arab Independence. See for example paragraph 4 (c) on pp 4 (pdf page 5) and paragraph 6 (a), (d), & (e) on pp 8-9 (pdf page 9-10) CAB 24/72, “The Settlement of Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula” (Former Reference: GT 6506) , 21 November 1918 and the collection of small and large detailed maps of Palestine in CAB 24/72 “Maps illustrating the Settlement of Turkey and the Arabian Peninsula”, (Former Reference: GT 6506A) 21 November 1918.
    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

    The boundaries of Palestine were established in an "Aide-memoire in regard to the occupation of Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia pending the decision in regard to Mandates, 13 September 1919". It was handed by Mr. Lloyd George to M. Clemenceau and placed before the Versailles Peace Conference. It divided the territory between the British, French, and Arab administered OETAs on the basis of the principles of the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Sykes-Picot lines. The Sykes-Picot agreement granted the Sharif of Mecca a special position in determining the form of government in Palestine and excluded the Muslim holy places from zone of international The memo is available in the FRUS and in J. C. Hurewitz collection.

    The "existing rights" of the Muslim community and the immunity of their Holy Places and wafqs were preserved by the San Remo resolution; Article 13 of the Palestine Mandate; and an entire Chapter of the UN Partition Plan.

    The government of Jordan called attention to the fact that the Commission appointed by the Council of the League of Nations had determined that the Wailing Wall and pavement in front of it were constituted a Muslim Waqf by Afdal, the son of Saladin, in about the year 1193 A.D. and were under the sole proprietorship of the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine. King Abdullah appointed a Palestinian citizen of Jordan to the position of Grand Mufti, Hussam al-Din Jarallah. He had served on the Supreme Council throughout the Mandate era. In fact he had received more votes than Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni in the election to the post of Grand Mufti, but British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel had intervened and overturned the results of the election.
    *See (3) The Ownership of the Wall and of its Surroundings
    link to unispal.un.org
    *See Philip Mattar, The Mufti of Jerusalem: Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni and the Palestinian National Movement, Columbia University Press, 1988, page 25.

    *President Johnson obtained King Hussein's consent to the terms of resolution 242 by guaranteeing that Jordan would retain its special position in Jerusalem and that the bulk of the West Bank territory would be returned to the Arabs. For example, Secretary Rusk stressed to the Government of Israel that no settlement with Jordan would be accepted by the world community unless it gave Jordan some special position in the Old City of Jerusalem. The US also assumed Jordan would receive the bulk of the West Bank as that was regarded as Jordanian territory.
    See:
    Foreign Relations of the United States Volume XIX, Arab-Israeli Crisis and War, 1967, Documents 411, 506, 513, 515, and 521.

  • Hostage May 31, 2012 at 3:33 pm

    “No, they attacked Israeli forces based in Palestine. The forces were stationed around the settlements.” . . . I’m sorry, in what way does your statement differ from what I wrote? The Jewish forces were generally within the settlements when they were attacked by Arab armies, and the settlements were in both Palestine and Israel proper.

    Resolution 181(II) established "Israel proper" and "Palestine proper" under the guises of a Jewish and Arab state. It only authorized the authorities in each state to raise militias from their own inhabitants for internal security purposes and to prevent frontier clashes. The militias were specifically excluded from the general grant of transit through the territories of the two states contained in the partition plan. The use of Jewish militias to launch offensives against Arab villages in Israel proper, or to link-up with and supply watchtower and stockade military bases in the Arab state was illegal. So was the use of probes and attacks across the border as outlined in Plan Dalet to deny Arab authorities access to their own State's territory for use as bases for their own militia.

    Once Israel refused to agree to a cease fire and began conducting massacres in Arab villages that had been allocated to the Jewish State, the members of the Security Council viewed it as an aggressor. That view was only reinforced when its forces conducted military operations from settlements in territory allocated to the Arab State. The fact that Israel expelled the Arab inhabitants of the Syrian and Egyptian DMZs after the Armistice Agreements were concluded is a strong indication that those villages did need protection.

  • Hostage May 31, 2012 at 2:49 pm

    I’m sorry, “temporary citizenship?” Where does anything regarding this event mention “temporary citizenship?

    The 1950 Act of Union between the two banks stipulated that it did not prejudice any final settlement of the question of Palestine. Some people interpret that to mean the arrangement was provisional or temporary. But Transjordan itself was one of the two states established within the boundaries of the Palestine mandate. Its legal status depended upon reaching a final settlement of the question of Palestine too.

    The PCIJ and a League of Nations Court of Arbitration had ruled in 1925 that Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq were states under mandate to Great Britain and France. Their status was governed in accordance with the treaties between the Allied and Central powers that ended WWI and the terms and conditions imposed by the Council of the League of Nations.

    When Transjordan applied for membership in the UN in 1946, the Jewish Agency and several members of the Security Council claimed that it was an integral part of the Palestine Mandate which had not yet been legally terminated. The Council of the League of Nations had established the formal requirements regarding the termination of a mandate regime in 1932. The Council required that all of the territories subject to a mandate regime be emancipated at one and the same time.

    The Jewish Agency and their allies on the Security Council asked that any UN decision on Transjordan's international status be delayed until the UN could address "the status of the Palestine Mandate as a whole". The frontier between Palestine and Transjordan was subsequently treated as an interstate boundary (i.e. not an international boundary) during the deliberations by the UN. After the mandate itself was terminated by the General Assembly, the emancipated Arab inhabitants took steps to maintain the status quo ante in-line with the recommendations of the UN Mediator on a final settlement of the "Palestine Question".

    Folke Bernadotte had proposed that a union be established between the former Arab territories of the mandate under UN auspices. The General Assembly decided that it no longer had any authority to impose such a solution on the inhabitants of an emancipated territory without their consent. When the UN failed to take any action, the inhabitants took the necessary steps themselves. The final settlement between Israel and Jordan contains a reservation that safeguards the status of all the territory that came under the control of the Israeli military in 1967.

    Accepting citizenship in a successor state by operation of law does not alter the status of a refugee who is still internally displaced or who finds him or her self outside their former country of habitual residence. That's especially true in situations where the successor government cannot offer the refugees protection against persecution if they were to return to their former homes in accordance with the applicable UN General Assembly resolutions that govern their final disposition.

    You can play Three Card Monty all that you'd like, or engage in semantics with the various meanings of the term "Jordan" over time, but the former Transjordan isn't Palestine. At times it has been part of the Palestine mandate or part of one of the mandated State of Palestine's legal successors in interest. The UN determined that refugees from the former Palestine that were exiled by the new government of the State of Israel did not loose their Palestine refugee status by accepting citizenship in Jordan, since it was Palestine's successor in interest.

  • Hostage May 31, 2012 at 12:42 pm

    Clearly Jordan had no right to annex any land taken by force, which EJ obviously qualifies as.

    You keep talking about the joint entity Jordan as if it were merely Transjordan. There never was a political entity named "Jordan" prior to January 1949. Jordan always included the inhabitants of Arab Palestine in accordance with the resolutions of the Palestinian Arab Congress held at Jericho in December of 1948. Unlike Israel, "Jordan" was created by Palestinian and Transjordanian bodies that represented the majority of the population. The King retained the laws that had been in effect during the mandate era until a Jordanian national plebiscite was conducted and the newly elected representatives of the joint government adopted the Act of Union in 1950. Volume 2 of the US State Department's Digest of International Law, M. Whiteman (ed), pages 1163-1168 outlines all of the steps taken, starting with the Jericho Congress and ending with the Act of Union as a textbook example of how sovereignty over territory is acquired through a legal act of annexation brought about as a result of the will of the two peoples.

    Those same steps were outlined in the written and oral submissions of the State of Jordan to the ICJ during the course of the Wall case in 2003-4.
    link to icj-cij.org

    The Court's legal analysis of the status of the Palestinian territory included a determination that it was part of the territory of Jordan, a High Contracting party to the Geneva Conventions in 1967. There was no finding that Jordan had been established illegally or that portions of its population had been illegally implanted in the territory.

    The Court determined that Israel captured Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem and held them in a state of belligerent occupation. It noted the 1988 declaration of independence from Jordan, but held that nothing had subsequently changed the status of the occupied Palestinian territory since 1967 and that Israel had illegally transferred portions of its own population into the territory in violation of its obligations under Article 49(6) of the Geneva Conventions. See paragraphs 70-134 link to icj-cij.org

  • Hostage May 31, 2012 at 2:44 am

    Since when do UN rulings determine the legality of anything?

    Article 13 of the UN Charter provides that one of the functions of the General Assembly is to promote the progressive codification of international law.

    The General Assembly was the first international body to define and declare that genocide is an international crime. It also directed that a treaty be drafted and opened for signature by its member states, e.g. link to un.org

    The General Assembly was also the first international body to declare that apartheid is a crime against humanity. It also directed that a treaty be drafted and opened for signature by its member states. link to un.org

    The General Assembly ordered that a treaty be drafted on "The Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity" and opened it for signature by its member states. link to un.org

    I could go on, but you get the idea. 90 percent of the Post-WWII international conventions on international crimes were written and promulgated as annexes to General Assembly resolutions.

    The International Court of Justice has ruled in several contentious and advisory cases that the organs of the United Nations are competent to make legal determinations within the scope of their Charter functions and in fulfillment of their Charter purposes. The Security Council has adopted criminal statutes and created a number of ad hoc international criminal tribunals which function as its subsidiary organs to prosecute crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, & etc.

    The ICJ is the primary judicial organ of the United Nations and it can also determine that situations are illegal:

    That an illegal situation is not to be recognized or assisted by third parties is self-evident, requiring no invocation of the uncertain concept of "erga omnes". It follows from a finding of an unlawful situation by the Security Council, in accordance with Articles 24 and 25 of the Charter entails "decisions [that] are consequently binding on all States Members of the United Nations, which are thus under obligation to accept and carry them out" (Legal Consequences for States of the Continued Presence of South Africa in Namibia (South West Africa) notwithstanding Security Council Resolution 276 (1970, Advisory Opinion, I. C. J. Reports 1971, p. 53, para. 115).The obligation upon United Nations Members not to recognize South Africa's illegal presence in Namibia, and not to lend support or assistance, relied in no way whatever on "'rga omnes". Rather, the Court emphasized that "A binding determination made by a competent organ of the United Nations to the effect that a situation is
    illegal cannot remain without consequence." (Ibid, para. 117.) The Court had already found in a contentious case that its determination of an illegal act "entails a legal consequence, namely that of putting an end to an illegal situation" (Haya de la Torre, Judgment, I.C.J. Reports 1951, p. 82). Although in the present case it is the Court, rather than a United Nations organ acting under Articles 24 and 25, that has found the illegality; and although it is found in the context of an advisory opinion rather than in a contentious case, the Court's position as the principal judicial organ of the United Nations suggests that the legal consequence for a finding that an act or situation is illegal is the same.

    -- Judge Roslyn Cohen Higgins, Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory link to icj-cij.org

  • Hostage May 30, 2012 at 8:20 pm

    A country cannot declare independence whilst under occupation in part or in total

    In 1973 the General Assembly condemned all Governments which do not recognize the right to self-determination and independence of peoples, notably the peoples of Africa still under colonial domination and the Palestinian people.

    The League of Nations had long since adopted the policy that the ability to stand alone did not include the capacity to repel aggression committed by another 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

    In fact the Allied governments-in-exile made a regular habit of declaring their independence. Professor L.C. Green pointed-out the examples of the Polish and Czech National Committees during WWI in an article about the [then] anticipated unilateral declaration of independence of the State of Palestine. See the text in the last paragraph on page 135 and the first paragraph on page 136. link to books.google.com

    The General Assembly and the majority of UN member States (104) acknowledged the 1988 Declaration of the State of Palestine and 93 extended formal recognition.

  • Hostage May 30, 2012 at 7:38 pm

    They’re different Chapters

    The General Assembly terminated the mandate and emancipated the Palestinian people in response to demands from the individual Arab States, the Mandatory Government, the Jewish Agency, and the Arab Higher Committee.

    The General Assembly specifically applied the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial peoples to the people of Palestine and created a subordinate UN organ to monitor the Palestinian people and assist them in the exercise of their inalienable right of self-determination and sovereignty over the natural resources of their territory. On 30 November 1973 it reaffirmed the applicability of the granting of independence to colonial peoples and said it:
    

    "Condemns all Governments which do not recognize the right to self-determination and independence of peoples, notably the peoples of Africa still under colonial domination and the Palestinian people;

    -- See GA resolution 3070 (XXVIII)

    Not military occupation

    The General Assembly is entrusted with secondary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security and has held more emergency special sessions on the Israeli-Arab conflict than any other issue. The General Assembly demanded that Israel immediately and unconditionally withdraw its armed forces from all of the Arab occupied territories. It also determined that any military occupation that violates the provisions of the UN Charter constitutes the crime of aggression. The General Assembly subsequently determined that Israel's continued occupation of the Arab territories captured in 1967 violates the terms of the UN Charter and satisfies the UN's Definition of Aggression.
    *General Assembly Resolution ES-9/1 link to un.org
    *General Assembly resolution 39/146 link to un.org

  • Hostage May 30, 2012 at 6:38 pm

    “Can you cite any UNSC resolution condemning any Arab UN Member State for invading or attacking ‘Jewish’ land or Israeli territory?” . . . Aren’t you proving his point here? Why isn’t there any resolution?

    The United States Representative at the United Nations (Austin) to
    the Secretary of State
    SECRET US URGENT NEW YORK, May 9, 1948-6: 43 p. m.:
    Parodi called meeting of British, Belgian, American, French representatives last night to discuss situation regarding truce and possible action which SC may be called to take following May 15. Hare and I attended. Parodi said time fast running out and essential to make up minds now regarding certain problems.

    He said that as of May 15 we would be faced by declarations two states of Palestine coupled with entrance of Abdullah. Regarding latter two ideas are current. The first is that if Abdullah moved beyond own frontier it might constitute an"act of aggression". The second idea was that if he entered on invitation of Arab population of Palestine his act might not constitute aggression. Parodi said he was inclined to second theory and thought conclusion to that effect would avoid endless argument.
    -- Foreign relations of the United States, 1948. The Near East, South Asia, and Africa, page 946

    Memorandum by the Director of the Office of United Nations
    Affairs (Rusk) to the Under Secretary of State (Lovett)
    SECRET [WASHINGTON,] May 4, 1948:

    "The Jews will be the actual aggressors against the Arabs. However, the Jews will claim that they are merely defending the boundaries of a state which were traced by the UN and approved, at least in principle, by two-thirds of the UN membership. The question which will confront the Security Council in scarcely ten days' time will be whether Jewish armed attack on Arab communities in Palestine is legitimate or whether it constitutes such a threat to international peace and security as to call for coercive measures by the Security Council. The situation may be made more difficult and less clear-cut if, as is probable, Arab armies from outside Palestine cross the frontier to aid their disorganized and demoralized brethren who will be the objects of Jewish attack. In the event of such Arab outside aid the Jews will come running to the Security Council with the claim that their state is the object of armed aggression and will use every means to obscure the fact that it is their own armed aggression against the Arabs inside Palestine which is the cause of Arab counter-attack.

    The internal memo was published in the Foreign relations of the United States, 1948. The Near East, South Asia, and Africa , Volume V, Part 2, page 848

    Analysis of the memos is contained in "The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951", William Roger Louis, Oxford University Press, 1984, ISBN: 0198229607, page 545; Zionism and the Palestinians, Simha Flapan, Croom Helm, 1979, ISBN: 0856644994, Page 336; and Fallen pillars: U.S. policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945, Donald Neff, 2nd Edition, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995, ISBN: 0887282598, page 65.

  • Hostage May 30, 2012 at 6:07 pm

    Haha. No it wasn’t. By all means, show me.

    Resolution 181(II) contained precise steps to handle the transfer of sovereignty, including the subsections under section "C. Declaration", including:
    *Chapter 1: Holy Places, Religious Buildings and Sites
    *Chapter 2: Religious and Minority Rights
    *Chapter 3: Citizenship, International Conventions and Financial Obligations.
    *Chapter 4: Miscellaneous Provisions

    The new states were required to grant citizenship, not only to the citizens of Palestine, but any non-citizens who had established residency in the territory of either the Arab or Jewish states during the mandate era. FYI, that included about 200,000 of the Jews living there according to the Survey of Palestine that had been performed for the Anglo-American Commission in 1946.

    According to customary international law, when a state is dissolved and new states are established, “the population follows the change of sovereignty in matters of nationality.” See Ian Brownlie, “The Relations of Nationality in Public International Law,” The British Year Book of International Law, 1963, p. 220.

    The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People submitted a report on Israel’s continuing legal obligations to the Security Council that said:

    19. In this respect, it was pointed out that Israel was under binding obligation to permit the return of all the Palestinian refugees displaced as a result of the hostilities of 1948 and 1967. This obligation flowed from the unreserved agreement by Israel to honour its commitments under the Charter of the United Nations, and from its specific undertaking, when applying for membership of the United Nations, to implement General Assembly resolutions 181 (II) of 29 November 1947, safeguarding the rights of the Palestinian Arabs inside Israel, and 194 (III) of 11 December 1948, concerning the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes or to choose compensation for their property. This undertaking was also clearly reflected in General Assembly resolution 273 (III).

  • Hostage May 30, 2012 at 5:28 pm

    Shingo, you’re using a book published in 2004 that relies on data from 1997 to try and refute new studies using techniques that are far more precise than the ones you are citing.

    In fact the study you're citing contains zero test results on genetic samples taken from ancient Khazar remains or modern-day people who self-identify themselves as descendants of the Khazars. How does this method achieve any precision at all?

  • Hostage May 30, 2012 at 5:16 pm

    “Shlomo Sand has already reveled that the whole people’s old thing was invented in the 1800s, as a means of resuscitating what was otherwise a dying religion.” And his research has since been debunked.

    Not by the study that you cited. It mentions the Khazars, but it simply assumes that they were not a people of Middle Eastern origin. It provides no evidence from any genetic sampling to support that conclusion. Furthermore, it cites Hammer's estimates of up to 12.5% cumulative local Y-chromosome admixture and speculates that 1) it might have included the Khazars and 2) that Hammer's figure is probably an underestimate. If you use an a priori assumption that isn't based genetic evidence, then it should at least be grounded in some historical source regarding Khazar origins.

    None of the literature that they cite in connection with the Khazars contains a genetic study of the origins of that people:
    *B. Weinryb
    A History of the Jews in Poland
    Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia (1973)
    *P. Wexler
    Two-Tiered Relexification in Yiddish: Jews, Sorbs, Khazars, and the Kiev-Polessian Dialect
    Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, New York (2002)
    *A. Koestler
    The Thirteenth Tribe
    Random House, New York (1976)

    Some of that literature does cite historical and linguistic sources which report that the inhabitants of the Caucasus area and more specifically the Khazar people, like the Carthaginians, were descendants of the Canaanites. Some of the inhabitants of the region claimed to be members of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Travelers reported people living in the region had made those claims about themselves.

    One of the studies cited notes that people who self-identify as Ashkenazi Jews are genetically distinct and can be identified as people of possible Middle Eastern origin:
    *A.C. Need, D. Kasperaviciute, E.T. Cirulli, D.B. Goldstein
    A genome-wide genetic signature of Jewish ancestry perfectly separates individuals with and without full Jewish ancestry in a large random sample of European Americans
    Genome Biol., 10 (2009), p. R7

    How do we know that wouldn't also be true of the Khazars, who self-identified as a people of Middle Eastern origin? The Rabbinical Authorities of the State of Israel make people of known Jewish descent undergo conversion. How do we know that didn't happen to the Khazars? You obviously can't determine a person's religious beliefs from a DNA test or that sort of thing wouldn't be necessary.

  • Hostage May 30, 2012 at 1:39 pm with 1 replies

    All refugees, by definition are stateless. Once a refugee becomes a citizen of a state they lose their status as a “refugee.”

    That's totally incorrect. Refugees are simply persons who find themselves outside their country of nationality who can no longer rely on their own governments for protection. That's why the refugee convention and protocol are completely separate from the UN Conventions on Statelessness.

    The 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol
    *http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49da0e466.html
    UN Conventions on Statelessness
    *http://www.unhcr.org/pages/4a2535c3d.html

    Try reading article 1 of the Refugee Convention. Refugees remain eligible for UN benefits until their status is resolved in accordance with the applicable resolutions of the General Assembly. That will not change as a result of a Senate request for a statistical report.

  • Hostage May 29, 2012 at 3:33 am

    Lots of Governors in America have the right to make life or death decisions (commute someone’s death sentence). None of that makes something an independent country.

    I wasn't talking about independence, the Ottoman Empire itself was no longer independent, once the foreign bondholders took over and operated its tax collection system and its inhabitants were placed under the protection of European public international law. See for example paragraph 20 on page 7 of International Law: Achievements and Prospects link to books.google.com

    The Permanent Court of International Justice and a Court of Arbitration established by the League of Nations both ruled in 1925 that Palestine was one of the Allied successor States of the Ottoman Empire, despite the fact that it was under British tutelage. Since you brought-up the subject, Palestine had been provisionally recognized as an independent nation under the terms of Article 22(4) of the Covenant of the League of Nations. That entered into force in January of 1920. Palestine assumed responsibility for it's share of the Ottoman debt, plus interest, as one of the successor States, effective 1 March 1920 in accordance with the terms of Article 245 of the Treaty of Sevres and Article 52 of the Treaty of Lausanne. Those dates were several years prior to the visit of the Delegation to London in June of 1922. The Delegation quite obviously was engaged with the British Government in foreign relations on behalf of the Arab People of Palestine. See the ICJ advisory opinion on the legal significance of Article 22(4) of the Covenant at paragraph 70 on pdf page 63 of 139. FYI, the current Governor of Texas has not been recognized as the leader of an independent nation, provisional or otherwise. link to icj-cij.org

    The Ottoman's had a multinational Empire and Palestine was one of the many countries that were incorporated in it. Turkey had to agree to a clear relinquishment of sovereignty once again in the Treaty of Berlin when the Holy sites and communities in Palestine were placed under international protection. See paragraph 129, page 109 of the ICJ opinion. The suzerainty of Turkey was still recognized, but the foreign powers began dealing with the local governors directly and entered into treaties and trade agreements.

    Sp why would I accept your lame argument, when the readers can see for themselves that Palestine 1) had a Governor that engaged in foreign relations with the United States and other powers; 2) had its own representatives in the Ottoman Parliament; 3) was included in State Department requests for country reports; 4) US Counsels included it in enumerated lists of countries they visited in the region along side Italy, Greece, Syria, Turkey, and Cyprus; 5) held its own Palestinian Arab Congress in 1919; and 6) had leaders who conducted foreign relations on with the British Government and League of Nations in the name of "the Arab People of Palestine"?

  • Hostage May 28, 2012 at 8:26 pm

    Despite all your cut and pasted info, nothing in there makes Palestine a country.

    It certainly does. The country we are talking about was part of an Empire composed of other administrative districts that were considered countries too, including Romania, Serbia, Kuwait, Syria, etc. Palestine had a defined population that was represented in the central government, a defined territory that was closed to Jewish immigration, and a local government that engaged in foreign relations and trade relations with a number of western consuls. The people who called it a country exercised civil and criminal jurisdiction. that fulfills all of the definitions of a state.

    I've visited Austin "in Texas" that doesn't make Texas a country

    Texas fulfills the definition of a state too. It still retains sovereign immunity except in areas, like foreign relations, that have been delegated to the federal government. See for example Alden v Maine or Medellín or Avena v. Texas
    *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alden_v._Maine
    *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medell%C3%ADn_v._Texas

  • Hostage May 28, 2012 at 8:13 pm

    If someone were to say about the Jews the lies he tells about the Palestinians, that person would be banned in a minute.

    I don't see any difference between a confederation of tribes and clans governed by Torah in the era of Judges, Priests, and Levites and a confederation of tribes and clans governed by Sharia in the era of Sheikhs, Emirs, and Imams. Why would families in Asia choose to govern themselves through a Westphalian State bureaucracy when their own system of government had been successfully used for centuries and was adequate for their own purposes.

  • Hostage May 28, 2012 at 3:48 pm

    Ok, doesn’t make them a separate people then. Still Americans.

    The Ottoman governors had the power the make life or death decisions within their jurisdictions. On at least one occasion, the Governor of Palestine demanded that the western consuls expel their Jewish subjects from Palestine. So it was treated as a formal jurisdiction:
    

    Though Jews belonging to other nationalities have been expelled from Jerusalem and Palestine, no American citizen has been expelled during my connection with this consulate. In all communications with the local authorities I have invariably and decidedly held the position that I could in no wise consent, much less render aid to expel from Palestine citizens of the United States who are Jews; that a fundamental principle of our Government was involved, which positively forbids any 'discrimination made for or against American citizens on account of their race or religion.

    In this connection, I herewith inclose copy with translation of a communication received from his excellency Raouf Pasha, governor of Jerusalem and Palestine, dated September 10 last, a copy of which was transmitted by me to the Department of State at Washington, with my dispatch No. 26, dated September 28, 1887. This was followed by a verbal message from the governor informing me that of the ten consuls in Jerusalem I was the only one who had not assented and promised to render aid in carrying out this decree (iradeh) regarding the expulsion of the Jews. To this I simply affirmed my former declaration, informing the governor that I had made the matter the subject of a special dispatch to our Government and awaited the decision.

    As my dispatch to the Department (No. 26, above referred to) inclosing the copy of the governors letter was, as usual, transmitted through the consulate-general, I did not consider it necessary to otherwise inform Mr. Pringle regarding the matter, especially as the local Turkish authorities were tacitly consenting to await the decision of our Department of State, and their relations with me, both personally and as the representative of our Government, have always been of the most friendly and conciliatory character.

    I may add that when the verbal message of the governor was delivered to me the chancellor of the British consulate was present in this consulate, and expressed his surprise at my friendship for the Jews. When I took the occasion to ask him what the action of the British consulate was in such cases, he replied they invariably rendered the required aid to the Ottoman authorities in carrying out the decree, as did the other consulates.
    ...
    One peculiar phase of the case is that large numbers of the resident Jews share in this dislike to the coming here of more Jews. This is explained by the fact that it tends to the increase in price of all articles of living, adds little or nothing to the wealth of the city, and reduces the proportion of the charitable aid sent here by their wealthy co-religionists from abroad.

    You will at once perceive, therefore, that the position I have taken, and that I am obliged to take, is a thankless one, exposing me on one side to the disapproval of the Ottoman Government, and on the other to the animosity of many of the resident Jews, not to take into the account the feeling on the subject entertained by the representatives of the various foreign governments.

    -- link to digicoll.library.wisc.edu

    FYI, the actual text of Basle Program of the First Zionist Congress did NOT use the term "Eretz Israel", it used the term "Palistina". link to upload.wikimedia.org

    So the 19th century Jews certainly knew where Palestine was located. The documentary record proves that they repeatedly asked the US Consuls in Palestine and Constantinople for help in immigrating to Palestine. For example, The Ottoman Sultan had issued a firman that encouraged the establishment of large Jewish settlements in Syria, but it prohibited Oriental and European Jews from settling in Palestine. Palestine was marked on the maps of the era. The first Jewish Aliya was carried-out in violation of that prohibition on mass Jewish immigration. In 1882, the American Consul summed up an immigration request from a group of Romanian Jews living in the Ottoman Empire this way:

    In conclusion, there is nothing to prevent all the Israelites on the earth from settling in Asiatic Turkey. They shall not settle in Palestine-’that is the only prohibition.

  • Hostage May 28, 2012 at 2:10 pm

    Consuls in the region of Palestine. Not the country.

    The Sanjak was an independent administrative district of the Ottoman Empire that functioned as a state.

    In addition, the United States operated its own Consular Courts there under the system of capitulations. They exercised civil and criminal territorial jurisdiction over US citizens living in the country from Consulates in cities, including Jerusalem, Haifa, Acre, and Jaffa. --See Ruth Kark, American consuls in the Holy Land, 1832-1914, Wayne State University Press, 1994

    By the late 19th Century, the Consuls in "Jerusalem, Palestine" submitted Daily, Annual, and Special reports on the Trade and Commerce of the Country of Palestine to the US Bureau of Foreign Commerce, e.g.:
    

    "Fruit Culture in Palestine Report By Consul Merrill of Jerusalem"

    In answer to the circular from the Department of State dated December 4 1883 respecting fruit culture in this country, I have the honor to make the following report on the culture of olives, oranges, grapes, and figs in Palestine:" . . . & etc.

    -- Consul report for 1884.

    Here is an extract from a regional report which mentions the responsible local authorities of the countries visited, including Palestine:
    

    Commerce Of The East And Of North Africa And The Share Of The United States Therein Report of Minister Noyes Of Paris

    I have the honor to report that in compliance with instructions contained in State Department dispatch No 178 of date August 29 1879 I left France on tbe 16th day of October last and returned on the 27th day of February 1880 I should have arrived in Paris at least three weeks earlier but for unavoidable delays occasioned by severe and almost unprecedented storms on the Mediterranean Sea which interrupted the various steamship lines During my absence I visited Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Rome, Naples, and Brindisi in Italy; the islands of Corfu, and Syra, the Piraeus and Athens in Greece; Mytelene, Constantinople, Smyrna, Rhodes, and Cyprus; Beyrout and Damascus in Syria; Jaffa and Jerusalem and the neighboring places of interest and importance in Palestine; Alexandria, Cairo and the other principal points for several hundred miles up the Nile . . .
    . . . At all the points visited by me I conferred freely with the diplomatic and consular representatives of the United States wherever such were to be found regarding the subject matter of my special mission consulted many private persons of business capacity and prominence in commercial affairs and had many interviews with the responsible local authorities of the several countries. Among the latter may be mentioned the leading members of the Sultan's government at Constantinople, the governors general at Beyrout, Damascus, and the Lebanon district in Syria, the governor general of Palestine at Jerusalem, . . .

    --Commercial relations of the United States: Reports (Nos. 1, 2, and 3) 1880 By United States Bureau of Foreign Commerce link to books.google.com

    Here is an extract from a monthly report:
    

    Jaffa Jerusalem Railroad Report By Consul Merrill of Jerusalem

    I have the honor to report that the formal opening of the Jaffa and Jerusalem Railroad occurred on the 26th of September, on which date the company that had contracted to construct the road gave it over into the hands of the company which owns it. The event was celebrated on the part of the Mohammedans by an address from an imam one of their priests of high rank in Jerusalem . . . it was celebrated by a dinner given in the evening under tents at the Jerusalem station Djelal Pasha aide de camp to the Sultan was present from Constantinople to represent the Sultan in the opening exercises M. Collas the president of the road and several eminent engineers from Paris were also present likewise the governor of Jerusalem and Palestine together with the civil and military authorities and the members of the diplomatic and consular corps.

    -- Monthly consular and trade reports, Volume 41, Issues 148-151
    By United States. Bureau of Manufactures, United States Bureau of Foreign Commerce (1854-1903)., United States. Dept. of Commerce and Labor Bureau of Statistics link to books.google.com

  • Hostage May 28, 2012 at 4:58 am

    re:Ethiopian Jews . . . That is a religious matter, not a matter of whether they are part of our people. The fact that they were rescued from Ethiopia at all shows that the Israelis consider them part of the Jewish people.

    The fact that State funded Haredi schools have refused to enroll them in religious schools that are required as part of their conversion process illustrates that some Israelis don't view them as true Jews. link to jpost.com

    FYI, Cush was one of the the sons of Ham, i.e. Cush, Mizraim, Put, and Canaan. The Supreme Court of Israel has ruled that there is no nation of Israel separate from the Jewish people. If you are making the Ethiopians convert and calling them Cushi, then its both a racial and a religious matter:
    

    A Bnei Brak resident barred a 13 year old Ethiopian teen from going into the mikveh recenty, claiming the boy was a "stinking kushi" (a derogatory Hebrew term for black people). He then hit the boy, his brother and his aunt.

    -- link to failedmessiah.typepad.com

    Also, I don’t think a reform conversion is considered valid in Israel (I could be wrong).

    That's because the state's Orthodox religious authorities teach that Reform rabbis are another people. In response to the Neeman Commission on conversion, certain Orthodox leaders gave voice to their opinion on the subject. Rabbi Andrew Sacks in the Jerusalem Post reports:

    Rabbi Yisrael Eichler, a spokesperson in the Haredi world, wrote that “Reform Rabbis are further from Judaism than Christians and Muslims and that they should be considered as filthy, lying, shekotzim who are criminals, who brought about the holocaust on the Jewish people.”
    Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said, “Reform Jews should be vomited up…and thrown out of the country.”

  • Hostage May 28, 2012 at 3:06 am

    The Palestinians have self-identified as a people for about 45 years now. Before that they considered themselves Arabs, southern Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians, citizens of the Ottoman Empire, etc.

    There are 21 other countries that call themselves "Arab", so let's not dissimulate. Calling yourself an Arab from Palestine still counts as a unique national identity distinct from the other Arab peoples. The Mutasarrifyya or Sanjak of Jerusalem was an independent district with it's own Governor and representatives in the Ottoman Parliament, e.g. Yussef Diya'uddin Al-Khalidi (1829-1907), and Ruhi Khalidi (1864-1913). link to jewishvirtuallibrary.org

    The United States has posted Consuls to the country of Palestine ever since the early 19th century and treated it as a formal jurisdiction. For example, the US Government addressed the Ottoman Pasha as “his excellency Raouf Pasha Governor of Jerusalem and Palestine”. link to digicoll.library.wisc.edu

    According to the Gale Encyclopedia of the Mideast & North Africa entry under the heading "Palestinian Arab Congresses"

    The first Palestinian Arab Congress (al-Muʾtamar al-Arabi al-Filastini) met in Jerusalem from 27 January to 9 February 1919. link to answers.com

    The leadership actually called themselves "the Arab People of Palestine" in their dealings with the British and the League of Nations from the very beginning. See Correspondence with the Palestine Arab Delegation and the Zionist Organisation, Presented To Parliament By Command Of His Majesty, June, 1922. --http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/48A7E5584EE1403485256CD8006C3FBE

  • Hostage May 28, 2012 at 2:32 am

    Of course the nation included converts, where do you think Abraham came from. The first Convert. Or Ruth (one of the matriarchs and a convert).

    The scriptures do not say that Abraham became a "Jew" or that Adam was born circumcised. There is no rabbinical process of conversion between Naomi and Ruth and nothing of the kind was mentioned in the scriptures. Boaz told the witnesses that he was acquiring a Moabitess for his wife. He didn't say that Ruth had become a Jew or an Israelite:
    

    And also, Ruth the Moabitess, Mahlon's wife, have I acquired for myself for a wife, to preserve the name of the deceased on his heritage, so that the name of the deceased not be obliterated from his brethren and from the gate of his place, you are witnesses today." -- Ruth 4:10

    Who are you to say it didn’t include converts?

    I was quoting a Mishnah found in Bikkurim, Chapter 1 of the Soncino Edition of the Babylonian Talmud:
    

    Mishnah 4. These bring [bikkurim] but do not make the recital: the Proselyte, since he cannot say: "which the lord hath sworn to our Fathers, to give unto us." If his mother was an Israelite, then he both brings bikkurim and recites the declaration. When he prays privately, He shall say: "O God of the fathers of Israel"; but when he is in the Synagogue, he should say: "The God of your fathers", but if his mother was an Israelite woman, he says: "The God of our fathers".

    -- link to halakhah.com

  • Hostage May 27, 2012 at 11:50 pm

    P.S. The topic of the possible abuse of the principles of international law by international organizations comes-up more and more frequently. Actions that have been questioned include: the legality of the Palestine Partition Plan; the violation of the right of self defense by the Security Council's arms embargo on Bosnia; and possible human rights violations committed by UN organs when they exercise the powers of a state government (e.g. the United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo (‘UNMIK’).

    The Security Council imposed an arms embargo on Palestine in 1948 that had a much greater impact on the Arabs than the Jews. The General Assembly delegated supervisory powers of government to its own Palestine Commission. So Palestine during the transition period is an interesting example of how "emancipation" shouldn't be handled.

    Here is a link to a talk about the UNMIK delivered by one of the members of the UN Mission to Gaza, Prof Christine Chinkin. link to chathamhouse.org

  • Hostage May 27, 2012 at 6:04 pm

    To my mind the UN has put it in as close as one can get in lay man’s language in Chapt XI, with no mention of ‘nation’

    That Chapter is like the senescent provisions of the US Constitution regarding the practice of slavery. After the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Peoples, the trusteeship system was phased-out and shutdown. There is no possibility that the UN will ever again appoint a state to govern another people's territory. In the modern era, Kosovo and East Timor were administered by the UN Organization directly, and even that situation led to charges that the UN had violated the basic human rights of the inhabitants and the content and intent of the UN Charter.

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