Majority of USAC candidates sign joint ethics statement

There are numerous groups (Arab, Muslim, Christian) bringing students and young people to view only the Palestinian side. The fact that only Jewish groups are singled out as being somehow an “ethics violation” is racist. But, unfortunately, racism against Jews is somehow politically acceptably in some circles.

Everett Benson (or may I call you Allan?)

To answer your “arguments” in full would require a very lengthy essay. Hence, I will be as brief as possible.

Sigh, classic hasbara, attack the messenger. To state the obvious, your argument is not
with me. It is with the various sources and individuals I have quoted. I suggest you contact and initiate a debate with the UN Security Council regarding its several resolutions (cited and quoted in my previous posting) declaring Israel’s occupation of all Palestinian and other Arab lands it seized in June 1967 to be illegal, as well as the International Court of
Justice, which ruled Israel’s occupations to be in violation of the UN Charter.

While you’re at it, you should also correspond and raise your objections with Alon
Liel, Israel’s ambassador in Pretoria from 1992 to 1994, as well as the European Union, the US State Department, Israel’s Supreme Court, and Israeli journalist, Bradley Burston. Some advice, however: Contrary to what you believe, there is no special provision in
hard won international law that enables Israel to violate it with impunity.

You state “As is well-known, and as is explicitly stated in them, the Geneva Conventions only apply between states…” Utter nonsense, as the UNSC makes abundantly clear in its resolutions I have quoted in my previous posting, Israel is in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. (And as the IJC ruled in 2004, Israel’s occupation is in violation of the UN Charter.) . If Israel actually believes it is not in violation of international law, it should take the issue to the International Court of Justice. Israel has not and will not do so because it knows it would be laughed out of court.

BTW, as a firm indication as to how Israel would fare if it took the matter to the IJC, in an opinion presented to the U.S. Congress on 21 April 1978, regarding the legal status of Israeli settlements, the Legal Adviser of the State Department declared that “the
civilian settlements in the territories occupied by Israel do not appear to be consistent with limits on Israel’s authority as belligerent occupant in that they do not seem intended to be of limited duration or established to provide orderly government of the territories and, though some may serve incidental security purposes, they do not appear to be required to meet military needs during the occupation.”

The contention by Israel and its supporters that “the principles of belligerent occupation, including Article 49, paragraph 6 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, may not apply to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip because Jordan and Egypt were not the respective legitimate sovereigns of these territories” is without foundation.

As the Legal Adviser of the Department of State advised the Congress, in its opinion
“…those principles [of belligerent occupation] appear applicable whether or not Jordan and Egypt possessed legitimate sovereign rights in respect of those territories. Protecting
the reversionary interest of an ousted sovereign is not their sole or essential purpose; the paramount purposes are protecting the civilian population of an occupied territory and reserving permanent territorial changes, if any, until settlement of the conflict.”

In conclusion, the Legal Adviser of the Department of State declared: “While Israel may undertake, in the occupied territories, actions necessary to meet its military needs and to provide for orderly government during the occupation, for the reasons indicated above the
establishment of the civilian settlements in those territories is inconsistent with international law [i.e., the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention.]”

Further underscoring the illegality of the settlements, Part 2, Article 8, section B, paragraph viii of the Rome Statue of the International Court (1998) defines “the transfer directly or indirectly by the Occupying power of parts of its own civilian population into
the territory it occupies” as a War Crime, indictable by the International Criminal Court.

For your further edification, in the summer of 1967, “[t]he legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked [by Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol] whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land. In a memo marked ‘Top Secret,’ Meron wrote unequivocally: ‘My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.’” (New York Times, 10 March 2006)

BTW, I forgot to note in my previous posting that Israel’s 1980 annexation of East Jerusalem was unanimously rejected by the UNSC in Resolutions 476 and 478 and its 1981 annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights was unanimously declared “null and void” by the UNSC in Resolution 497.

I can’t believe you are actually using the “Myths & Facts” as a source.

To wit:

Washington Jewish Week, Dec. 6/07:
“Myths & Facts originated as an American Israel Public Affairs Committee publication decades ago and was updated by Mitchell Bard, executive director of the Chevy Chase-based American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, in recent years.

“M.J. Rosenberg, who edited Myths & Facts when he worked at AIPAC in the 1980s, was surprised to hear it was being used in a college class.

” ‘It’s not a textbook,’ said Rosenberg, now the policy director at the Israel Policy Forum. ‘It’s counter-propaganda’ that is ‘not designed to show both sides…’

“Rosenberg said it was ‘hard to believe’ the book would be used in any college class other than one studying propaganda.’”

Regarding your shocking reference to Joan Peters’ long since utterly debunked “From Time Immemorial…,” I quote the following experts:

Dr. Yehoshua Porath, one of Israel’s leading demographic historians, called Peters’ book a “forgery… [that] was almost universally dismissed [in Israel] as sheer rubbish except maybe as a propaganda weapon.”(New York Times, Nov.28, 1985)

Rabbi Arthur Herzberg, vice-president of the WJC, agreed: “I think that she’s cooked the statistics…. The scholarship is phony and tendentious. I do not believe that she has read the Arabic sources that she quotes.”(ibid)

To again quote Professor Porath: “The precise demographic history of modern Palestine cannot be summed up briefly, but its main features are clear enough and they are very different from the fanciful description Ms. Peters gives…. [S]he has apparently searched through documents for any statement to the effect that Arabs entered Palestine. But even if we put together all the cases she cites, one cannot escape the conclusion that most of the growth of the Palestinian Arab community resulted from a process of natural increase.” (“Mrs. Peters’ Palestine” New York Review of Books, 16 January 1986.)

As for Alan Dershowitz, spare me. He’s become a laughing stock.

Re your absurd and utterly meaningless assertion that “[t}here never has been an Arab state of ‘Palestine’ at any time in history.”

When the Muslim Arabs arrived in Palestine (and liberated its Jewish population from Byzantine Christian oppression) they retained the administrative organization of the
territory of Palestine as it had been under the Romans and the Byzantines and
referred to it as Filastin (no p’s in Arabic.)

By 1850, only 4% of Palestine’s population was Jewish and In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte found only 3,000 Jews. Indeed, prior to the 20th century and due primarily to their conversion to Christianity and Islam, there had been hardly any Jews in Palestine since about 1100 AD.

“Palestine” has been used for several centuries to refer to the geographical area south of Sidon and north of the Sinai. There are medieval Muslim coins from a mint in that area with “Filastin” (Palestine) written on them.

European tourist books of the nineteenth century refer to “Palestine,” as did Theodor Herzl in his correspondence, the Balfour Declaration and the British League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. Needless to say, the vast majorty of Palestine’s inhabitants were Arabs.
BTW, Palestine’s native Arab Jews who comprised 10% of the total Jewish population in 1948, were vehemently opposed to Zionism.

For the record, there were no nation-states until the 19th century. There was no “Italy” before 1860. Venice was Austrian, Genoa French. There was no “Germany” before 1870.

Of course, regardless of what the region between the River and Sea was referred to as throughout history, the most important fact is that its native Arab inhabitants and their
ancestors have lived there for millennia.

To quote the renowned historian/anthropologist and “Holy Land” specialist, Professor Ilene
Beatty: “When we speak of ‘Palestinians’ or of the ‘Arab population [of Palestine]’, we must bear in mind their Canaanite origin. This is important because their legal right to the country stems…from the fact that the Canaanites were first, which gives them priority; their descendants have continued to live there, which gives them continuity; and (except for the
800,000 dispossessed refugees [of 1948 along with the additional hundreds of thousands expelled afterwards before and after 1967] they are still living there, which gives them present possession. Thus we see that on purely statistical grounds they have a proven legal right to their own land.” (“Arab and Jew in the Land of Canaan,” 1957)

Conspicuous by its absence in your reference to UNSC Resolution 242, is any mention of its Preamble, which in accordance with the UN Charter (binding on all UN members) and governing all that follows in the resolution, “[emphasizes”] the inadmissibility of the acquistion of territory by war….” (BTW, for what it’s worth, Israel’s Declaration of Independence states that Israel will be “faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.”)

As to your assertion that Israel is not bound to withdraw from the lands it seized during the 1967 war, apart from noting the obvious fact that the UNSC cannot pass a resolution that violates the UN Charter, both the late Abba Eban and Moishe Dayan disagree with you.

As then Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban revealed at the time, he understood full well that Resolution 242 calls for Israel’s complete withdrawal: “The words ‘in the recent conflict’ convert the principle of eliminating occupation into a mathematically precise formula for restoring the June 4 Map.” During negotiations to determine Resolution 242’s wording, Abba Eban failed in an attempt to delete the phrase “in the recent conflict.” (Comment by Foreign Minister of Israel and Telegram 3164, UK Mission in New York to Foreign Office, 12 Nov 1967. FO961/24 )

Moshe Dayan also realized that Resolution 242 calls for full withdrawal: “it means withdrawal to the 4 June [1967] boundaries….” (Daniel Dishon (ed.), Middle East Record, v. 4, 1968 , Jerusalem: 1973)

Your assertion that the 1967 war was won by Israel “in the course of a war of existential self-defense by Israel in response to aggressive war actions by its neighbours” is also without foundation.

To wit:
Prime Minister Eshkol: “The Egyptian layout in the Sinai and the general military buildup there testified to a military defensive Egyptian set-up, south of Israel.”

Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Minister without portfolio in Eshkol’s cabinet, while addressing Israel’s National Defence College on 8 August 1982: “In June, 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” (New York Times, 21 August 1982)

Meir Amit, chief of Israel’s Mossad: “Egypt was not ready for a war and Nasser did not want a war.”

Israeli Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin: “I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions which he sent into Sinai on 14 May would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.”

General Haim Bar-Lev, Rabin`s predecessor as chief of staff: “We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the Six Days War, and we had never thought of such a possibility.”

General Matetiyahu Peled, Chief of Logistical Command during the war and one of 12 members of Israel`s General Staff: “All those stories about the huge danger we were facing because of our small territorial size, an argument expounded once the war was over, have never been considered in our calculations. While we proceeded towards the full mobilization of our forces, no person in his right mind could believe that all this force was necessary to our ‘defence’ against the Egyptian threat. This force was to crush once and for all the Egyptians at the military level and their Soviet masters at the political level. To pretend that the Egyptian forces concentrated on our borders were capable of threatening Israel`s existence does not only insult the intelligence of any person capable of analyzing this kind of situation, but is primarily an insult to the Israeli army.”

Mordechai Bentov, an Israeli cabinet minister at the time: “All this story about the danger of extermination [of Israel in June 1967] has been a complete invention and has
been blown up a posteriori to justify the annexation of Arab territory.”

Robert McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defence: “Three separate intelligence groups had looked carefully into the matter [and] it was our best judgment that a UAR [Egyptian] attack was not imminent.”

On May 26, while in Washington, Abba Eban was informed by President Johnson that “…even after instructing his ‘experts to assume all the facts that the Israelis had given them to be true’, it was still ‘their unanimous view that there is no Egyptian intention to make an imminent attack.”

Regarding your senseless reference to the San Remo Conference, I remind you that the League of Nations British Mandate for Palestine was a Class A Mandate, i.e., Palestine was to be administered by Britain AS A WHOLE until its citizens were able to assume democratic self-rule.

By incorporating the 1917 Balfour Declaration (illegal in 1917 as Palestine was a province of the Ottoman Empire) the mandate did facilitate Jewish immigration to “secure the establishment of the Jewish National Home” (i.e., the Balfour Declaration does not refer to a “homeland”), but it did not call for the creation of a sovereign Jewish state or homeland in Palestine or any form of partition.

This was made very clear in the Churchill Memorandum (1 July 1922) regarding the British Mandate: “[T]he status of all citizens of Palestine in the eyes of the law shall be Palestinian, and it has never been intended that they, or any section of them, should possess any other juridical status.”

Furthermore – as it would repeatedly reaffirm (as approved by the Council of the League of Nations) during its mandatory administration of Palestine – the British government declared: “His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State.” (Command Paper, 1922) (You now know why Britain abstained on the Nov. 29/47 UNGA vote regarding Res. 181, the Partition Plan.)

For what should be obvious reasons, The 1947 Partition Plan (recommendatory only, in violation of the British Mandate, never adopted by the UNSC, grossly unfair to the native Palestinians) certainly DID NOT grant the proposed state for Jews title over those lands Israel invaded and occuped in June 1967.

I am familiar with The 2011 poll conducted by Pechter Middle East Polls regarding Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem. However, a much more informative survey of what East Jerusalem Palestinians want in the event of a permanent settlement of the conflict was also conducted. It can be found at http://www.pcpsr.org/

Some of its findings: 75% of the Arab residents of East Jerusalem want it to be an open city with equal access for Muslims, Christians and Jews.

An overwhelmi­ng majority (79%) prefers Palestinia­n or internatio­nal sovereignt­y over East Jerusalem; 7% prefer it to be Islamic or Arab, and a small minority not exceeding 6% prefers Israeli sovereignt­y. A little less than two thirds prefer to have Palestinia­n citizenshi­p and a quarter prefers to have Israeli citizenshi­p. However, most importantly, the determinin­g factor regarding preferred citizenship is an overwhelmi­ng desire on the part of Palestinia­ns to live in their current East Jerusalem neighbourho­ods regardless of which country (Israel or Palestine) has sovereignt­y.

In short, whether living east or west of the “green line” Palestinians prefer to live on their ancestral lands alongside their relatives. This should hardly be surprising.

Re: “A public opinion poll conducted by the Arab Center for Applied Social Research in November 2007 found that more than 70% of Israeli Arabs are opposed to any proposal to annex towns and villages in the triangle area to the Palestinian Authority in exchange for the annexation of the settlements to Israel.” What this finding really states is that in accordance and in brother/sisterhood with their fellow Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem (including its illegally extended boundaries), Palestinians living east of the “green line” unsurprisingly do not want Israel to annex illegal settlements
in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

BTW, describing Israel as an “apartheid” state by those who truly know apartheid is hardly new.

To wit:

Hendrik Verwoerd, then prime minister of South Africa and the architect of South Africa’s apartheid policies, 1961: “The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.” (Rand Daily Mail, November 23, 1961)

Jacobus Johannes Fouché, South African Minister of Defence during the apartheid era, compared the two states and said that Israel also practiced apartheid. (Gideon Shimoni (1980). Jews and Z!onism: The South African Experience 1910-1967. Cape Town: Oxford UP. pp. 310–336. ISBN 0195701798.)

Enough said. You’ve had your say and I’ve had mine.

I consider this exchange finished. and will govern myself accordingly.
Bye bye.