Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 30

 The charge that Israel “illegally occupies Palestinian territory” has no basis in international law

 

When it comes to international law, the key principle for Israel’s critics seems to be – to paraphrase Louis XIV – “It is illegal because I wish it.” Why is the endlessly recurring charge of “illegal occupation” so significant?

 

Multiple Arab states didn’t merely unleash their military might against Israel on the day of her birth in May 1948; in parallel, they initiated a propaganda war that continues to this day. Nothing unusual in that, it happens in all conflicts. But here’s a strange thing about this disinformation campaign: few, beyond the direct participants, are aware of its existence. Instead, large swathes of the world have swallowed the malign accusations hurled at Israel as though they were gospel truth. 

 

An example is the phrase “Occupied Palestinian Territories” – a politicised statement with no basis in reality [blog 29]. Its purpose is to disadvantage Israel diplomatically by nullifying any Israeli claim to even a centimetre of the disputed territories thus pre-empting the negotiations that the UK and many other countries keep reminding us, without irony, must take place. 

 

But Israel’s enemies have been disappointed by the impact of their cynical efforts to rewrite history. It hasn’t been as profound as they’d hoped. While many observers have been taken in by the lies and Israel’s reputation has been smeared, the country still exists, indeed is thriving. 

 

So the critics have gone further and deployed a new argument – that Israel’s “occupation of Palestinian land” is not merely wrong but illegal. They claim that her current (and therefore future) presence there is an unequivocal violation of international law. While calling the disputed land “Occupied Palestinian Territories” puts Israel on the defensive in any negotiations, defining them as “illegally occupied” renders negotiations redundant. It brands Israel a criminal state and no civilised country negotiates with criminals. And it effectively endorses the Palestinian rejection of territorial compromise or peace negotiations. If unchallenged, the current impasse would become permanent and any hope for peace would evaporate.

 

So much for the motivation underlying the charge of illegality. But is there any juridical validity to it? 

 

To answer that question requires us to dig deeper into the position of international law regarding occupation and how they relate to Israel’s entry into and administration of the territories. 

 

Robbie Sabel, an international law professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, [1] writes: “The West Bank has not been incorporated into Israel, and therefore those areas of the West Bank not part of the Palestinian Authority are administered by Israel in accordance with the international rules on administering occupied territory. This is a crucial point: though the term has negative connotations, occupation is legal in times of armed conflict. There’s even a technical term for it – belligerent occupancy – that incurs responsibilities on the occupying power.”

 

According to legal scholar Eyal Benvenisti [2], “The regime known as belligerent occupation refers to a situation where the forces of one or more States exercise effective control over a territory of another State without the latter State’s volition.” Because the disputed territories were void of sovereignty, Israel has rejected the term on de jure grounds since these territories were never part of another state, and in any case “effective control” over most of their residents was ceded to the Palestinian Authority in 1995. Nevertheless, Israel has always accepted her de facto responsibilities as an occupier under international humanitarian law. That position has, of course, failed to satisfy her adversaries.

The International Court of Justice, in its advisory opinion (not a judgement) in 2004 on the Legal Consequences of “The Wall,” refrained from characterizing the Israeli occupation as illegal. And former ICJ President, Rosalyn Higgins [3], has stated that “there is nothing in either the [UN] Charter or general international law which leads one to suppose that military occupation pending a peace treaty is illegal.”

            

The United Nations is frequently cited as the final arbiter of international law and the repository of all moral authority in international affairs. This view is based on a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the organisation (as opposed to its Charter). 

 

The UN General Assembly is a political tool of its constituent members. It has been implacably hostile to Israel for decades and is in thrall to the wishes of the Arab League that bullies and cajoles member states with economic and political threats and inducements. It has often issued hate-filled, irrational statements (such as ‘Zionism is a form of racism’ from 1975 to 1991). But pronouncements of the UN General Assembly neither constitute international law, nor acquire the force of international law by constant repetition. 

 

As for the Security Council, only Chapter VII resolutions are legally binding – and the SC had never passed one in relation to Israel. With rare exceptions, it has relied on one key resolution to try to end the conflict, namely the famous resolution 242 of 1967 that Israel accepted and the entire Arab world rejected [blog 28].

 

International law is determined, first and foremost, by mutually agreed undertakings incorporated into multinational treaties and conventions. Two groups of 20th century treaties are especially relevant to the status of the disputed territories.

First, the 1919 Paris peace conference (and related summits) established, in a series of declarations, the right of Jews to revive their national home under the terms of the Palestine Mandate that included (even in its truncated form after the creation of Transjordan in 1922 under article 25) all of the territory west of the Jordan River, including what is today often designated ‘the West Bank’ and ‘East Jerusalem.’ 

International lawyer Cynthia Day Wallace [4] summarised the legal position thus: “The primary foundations in international law for the claim based on “historic rights” or “historic title” of the Jewish people in respect of Palestine are the San Remo decisions of April 1920, the Mandate for Palestine of July 1922, approved by the Council of the League of Nations and bearing the signatures of that international treaty by the Principal Allied Powers in July 1922, and the Covenant of the League of Nations itself (Art. 22). The rights thereby granted to the Jewish people (with the exception of the provisions of Article 25 of the Mandate, relating to Transjordan) were aimed at the establishment of a Jewish national home throughout Palestine. These rights have never been rescinded.” 

Second, the 1993-95 Oslo Accords (that are conceptually linked to UNSC Resolution 242 ) have the status of an international treaty that is legally binding on all the participants. The Declaration of Principles described the Israeli-Palestinian consensus, backed by the international community, on the nature of the new arrangements. These included the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in Area A (parts of the West Bank and all of Gaza), bringing 98% of the Palestinian population under PA control, and Area C where around 80% of Judea and Samaria’s Israeli citizens live. The term “occupation” – legal or otherwise – is nowhere to be found in those agreements.

The Oslo Accords created a post-occupation reality that was accepted by the parties as a transitional stage towards a final status agreement that would end the conflict. In other words, following Oslo the state of belligerent occupancy – such as it was – came to an end. That status was affirmed in 2013, in a case brought by the PLO against a company connected to the light railway in Jerusalem. The French Court of Appeal in Versailles [5] ruled that the “occupation was not illegal.”

 

"Pro-Palestinian" activists, including those associated with the politicidal BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement, who weaponise international law to attack Israel, claim they are simply seeking to uphold the law. We know this to be disingenuous for two reasons. 

 

First, in international law, as in all law, there are always two sides to a question. If this were not the case, there would be little need for legal solutions. The arguments concerning the disputed territories are complex and primarily political in nature; international law cannot be invoked to resolve them with finality. 

 

Second, anti-Israel lawfare is overwhelmingly focused on alleged Israeli lawbreaking rather than with the numerous other territorial disputes, many of which are on a far larger scale than the Israeli-Palestinian one [6]. The obsessive, strident and discriminatory condemnations of Israel’s putative criminality tell us far more about the accusers rather than the defendant. 

 

Louis XIV was a controversial monarch but he left us a few memorable aphorisms. My personal favourite is: “Do not assess the justice of a claim by the vigour with which it is pressed.” 

 

Next time someone buttonholes you with dogmatic claims of Israel’s “illegal occupation,” you might wish to recall the Sun King’s wise advice.

 

1. Sabel R. International Legal Issues of the Arab-Israeli Conflict: An Israeli Lawyer’s Position. Journal of East Asia and International Law 2010, 3(2):8-8: 10.14330/jeail.2010.3.2.08

2. Benvenisti E. Occupation, belligerent. Oxford Public International Law. https://opil.ouplaw.com/view/10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/law-9780199231690-e35

3. Higgins R. The Place of International Law in the Settlement of Disputes by the Security Council. American Journal of International Law 1970, vol. 64, 1-15.

4. Wallace CD (2011). Foundations of the International Legal Rights of the Jewish People and the State of Israel: Implications for the Current Debate: Executive Summary. European Coalition for Israel.  https://www.ec4i.org/book-by-dr-cynthia-day-wallace/

5. Jean-Patrick Grumberg J-P (2017). Israel is the legal occupant of the West Bank, says the Court of Appeal of Versailles. Dreuz. Info. https://www.dreuz.info/2017/01/israel-is-the-legal-occupant-of-the-west-bank-says-the-court-of-appeal-of-versailles-france-124054.html

6.  Kontorovich E (2017). Unsettled: a global study of settlements in occupied territories.

https://academic.oup.com/jla/article/9/2/285/4716923

 

 

 

Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 29

The phrase “Occupied Palestinian Territories” is an anti-Israel slogan designed to pre-empt negotiations

As an epidemiologist, I’ve been monitoring Israel’s response to the Covid pandemic. When I checked the UK government’s travel advice website, I encountered this heading: information on travelling to Israel and The Occupied Palestinian Territories [1]. That distracted me from the coronavirus and propelled me in the direction of another contagious disease: wilful misinformation.
            All branches of the UK government seem to follow a similar nomenclature. The Home Office says: The West Bank and Gaza have been ‘occupied’ by Israel since 1967. They are collectively known as the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs).
            The UK is widely considered to be pro-Israel (reflected in the possibly ironic quote marks?) yet in describing the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza in this way, they (like most other countries and the UN) ignore Israeli protestations that the term is politicised, biased and prejudicial to peace. Who is right?
            Let’s examine each of the three words comprising the OPT* in turn. 

 “Occupied?”

After the War of Independence ended in March 1949, a series of ceasefire lines were established at the Rhodes Conference [1]. These originated from a meeting in November 1948 when two commanders, Israel’s Moshe Dayan and Jordan’s Abdullah el-Tell, agreed on boundaries drawn with a green wax pencil on a map to indicate Israeli-controlled areas; Jordanian-controlled areas were marked in red. In time, the armistice line between Israel and its Arab neighbours came to be known as The Green Line. 

            This was never viewed – even by the UN – as an international border. The Arab world didn’t recognise it (nor were willing to accept a Jewish state behind any borders) and nor did the wider international community that viewed it as a temporary staging post on the road to peace talks (that the Arab states tragically refused to contemplate). So when Israel crossed the Green Line into the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, she neither crossed an international border nor took control of the sovereign territory of another state. In other words, Israel’s “occupation” didn’t meet, on prima facie grounds, the legal criteria set out in the Hague and Geneva conventions. Nevertheless, Israel accepted the de facto humanitarian responsibilities of an occupying power under the conventions and fulfilled that role with considerable (though rarely acknowledged) success until 1995 [see blog 6].

Even if the term “occupation” is deemed to apply to the period 1967-1993, that status ended with the internationally endorsed Oslo Accords (1993-95) when Israel’s authority over 98% of the Palestinian population living in the West Bank and Gaza was transferred to the newly created Palestinian Authority (PA) – note the name. The Accords made no mention of a continuing occupation. That should have put paid to the matter. Yet the widespread assertion that the Israeli occupation continues as though Oslo never happened is false. It also displays a breathtaking double standard. 

            Consider a case in which both the UK and US were closely involved. Iraq was occupied by the Coalition forces from early 2003 until June 2004 when all authority other than security was handed to the Iraqis. At that point, Coalition forces remained in Iraq but the country was no longer deemed occupied. “If handing over authority to a Coalition-appointed interim government ended the occupation of Iraq, would the same not hold true for the establishment of the Palestinian Authority?” asks Israeli lawyer Avinoam Sharon [2]. A fair question. 

            In the absence of a final peace agreement between Israel and the PA, there are unresolved competing claims to the same territory. The Oslo Accords recognised that and specified that the outstanding differences (including about borders) must be settled by direct negotiations between the parties. Until that endpoint is reached, the areas in question are clearly disputed rather than occupied. Reflecting this, and notwithstanding the UN’s (and most countries’) insistence on deploying either the OPT or “Palestine” descriptor, all key UN resolutions have called for the status of these territories to be resolved peacefully, a demand that only one party (Israel) has consistently respected by seeking a Palestinian negotiating partner and offering (in, for example, 2000, 2001 and 2008) generous terms – including full Palestinian sovereignty – in the process.

 

“Palestinian”?

In 1922, 78% of the British Mandate was hived off from the Jewish National Home (that had been provisionally delineated by the international community in 1920 at San Remo) and handed to the Hashemite dynasty of Mecca. They have ruled over what was effectively a Palestinian Arab state, comprising all the Mandate territory east of the Jordan river, ever since. Today that state is known as Jordan. Of the remaining 22% of Mandatory territory, still more land was offered to the Palestine Arabs in 1947 by the UN partition resolution 181, but their leaders violently rejected that offer, unlike the Jewish leadership who accepted it. Consequently, that resolution – that would have created a second Palestinian Arab state alongside Israel – was never implemented. 

            In 1948, Jordanian forces illegally entered the eastern section of the Mandate and within a couple of years annexed eastern Jerusalem along with a district known for millennia as Judea and Samaria (that Jordan promptly renamed “the West Bank”) but that land grab was never recognised internationally. (Incidentally, the Jordanians renounced all claims to the area, excluding the Islamic holy sites, in 1988). Simultaneously, Egypt entered Gaza but didn’t annexe it, merely keeping it under military rule until Israel won control of the Strip in 1967. 

            If the land Israel “occupied” in 1967 wasn’t Jordanian or Egyptian, what was it? It certainly wasn’t Palestinian as no such entity as Palestine existed, nor was it regarded as such by the UN. The phrase “occupied Palestinian territory” was never mentioned, even as a whisper, when Jordan and Egypt ruled the areas from 1948 to 1967, nor did it appear in UN resolutions referring to the Six Day War, but was conjured out of thin air only some years after Israel became the controlling power. 

            

“Territories”?

Today Israel exerts control of about 60% of the West Bank, the so-called Oslo Area C; this contains a small minority of the West Bank Palestinian population but a large majority of the (mainly, but not exclusively, Jewish) Israelis (“settlers”) living there.

            The great majority of West Bank Palestinians live in Area A, ruled by the PA (where, incidentally, not a single Jew is permitted to reside). Area A originally included Gaza but it has been ruled by Hamas since 2007, who snatched the Strip from PA control in a bloody coup. Despite a full Israeli withdrawal in 2005, the PA, UN and others claim Gaza remains “Israeli occupied” on two specious grounds: first, that Israel controls Gaza border crossing points, and second, that Israel runs everyday life in the Strip indirectly through an “invisible hand” or “remote control.” The first doesn’t bear scrutiny as the Egyptian military also controls a border with Gaza yet that country is never said to occupy the Strip, while the second is a form of magical thinking that should have no place in international relations. Neither of these criteria for occupation has ever been applied elsewhere. At most, therefore, the term “occupation” should apply to one territory (the West Bank) not two. 

To summarise the evidence relating to the so-called “Occupied Palestinian Territories”:

            1. Prior to 1967, no sovereign Palestine entity existed anywhere, ever, and no amount of historical revisionism can change this reality. When Israel gained the West Bank and Gaza in the Six Day War, she found herself administering real estate that was devoid of sovereignty. Nobody called these areas “occupied Palestinian territories” in the period 1948 to 1967. The phrase was invented after 1967 to smear Israel. 

            2. Even if an Israeli occupation, either in the full or partial meaning of the term, existed post-1967, it unequivocally ended in 1995 with the Oslo Accords that made no reference to continuing occupation.

            3. Following Israel’s withdrawal of all her remaining troops and civilians from Gaza in 2005, one territory (the West Bank including parts of Jerusalem) rather than two remained at issue, in Oslo terms, between Israel and the Palestinians pending a final status agreement. 

The continued and repeated use of the phrase “Occupied Palestinian Territories” (or the even more contentious term “Palestine”) is thus not only devoid of evidential logic but also cynically pre-empts the negotiated disposition of these territories between the parties, as demanded by Oslo (and the earlier Security Council resolutions 242 and 338), to the disadvantage of Israel. That seriously undermines Israeli trust in the Oslo process and is thus an obstacle to peace. 

            All of the arguments presented here are based on verifiable information that is in the public domain. Yet most of the world is determined to avoid engaging with them. Why is Israel subjected to uniquely stringent – and often fictional – historical, political and legal standards by the international community? 

            On my next trip, I may take a look at Morocco. Wait – doesn’t Morocco occupy Western Sahara despite this having been deplored by the UN [3] since 1977? Isn’t Western Sahara one of the UN-designated “non-self-governing territories” (of which Britain still holds over a dozen) whose future is supposed to be settled by negotiations? Let’s see what the UK Foreign Office [4] says: Western Sahara is a disputed territory and the UK regards its status as undetermined. 

            I rest my case. 

                  

1. UK Government (2022). Foreign Travel Advice, Israel https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/israel

2. Sharon A. Why Is Israel’s Presence in the Territories Still Called “Occupation”? Jerusalem, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2009 https://studylib.net/doc/13465055/why-is-israel’s-presence-in-the-territories-still-called-...

3. UN General Assembly Resolution 34/37, 1977 https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/A_RES_34_37.pdf

4. UK Government (2022). Foreign Travel Advice, Morocco https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/western-sahara#Political-situation

 

*A note on terminology 

In this and succeeding blogs, I am conscious of entering a terminological minefield. Language is often weaponised to discredit political opponents: for example, right wingers talk of “Judea and Samaria” or “Greater Israel” while left wingers talk of “the West Bank” or “Palestine.” Because I use language pragmatically, leftists dismiss me as a right-wing reactionary while rightists damn me as a pie-in-the-sky liberal. They are both wrong. As a committed moderate, I subscribe to neither of these warring tribes and avoid linguistic shouting matches. My concern is solely to analyse the evidence. I express no political preference for any of the options available to Israeli politicians – that is a matter for them and their electorate.

 Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 28

 

How a missing three-letter word in 1967 saved Israel from disaster 

“Words have more power than atom bombs,” said the wordily-named Pearl Strachan Hurd. Israelis have long recognised the wisdom of that quote.

            Immediately after the Six Day War of June 1967, Israelis were euphoric. For the second time in a generation, they had defeated far larger military forces without the help of foreigners (apart from the relatively small diaspora Jewish community). Their country had emerged unscathed from another near-death experience. What happened next would determine the future course of the conflict.

            A hastily convened UN Security Council was split along the usual Cold War lines. At British instigation, the famous resolution 242 was drafted. While emphasising the somewhat malleable and ambiguous judicial principle of “the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by force,” it pointedly refrained from demanding a total Israeli withdrawal but instead called on Israel to withdraw “from territories” she had occupied in the conflict. 

            Seldom has so much political controversy been generated by a subtle point of grammar. In the original English version, the exclusion of the word “the” before “territories” obviated the need for Israel to withdraw from all the territories she had taken. Had that word been inserted, it would have consigned Israelis back to the vulnerable 1949 ceasefire lines – “the Auschwitz Lines” as Abba Eban called them, recalling the abyss into which Israel peered on the eve of the Six Day War. The French version, by contrast, had (probably deliberately) mistranslated from the original English to include the lethal “the” – thereby disadvantaging Israel via a linguistic ruse.

            Arthur Goldberg, the US ambassador to the UN and a key drafter of Resolution 242 commented: “The notable omissions in language used to refer to withdrawal are the words ‘the,’ ‘all,’ and the ‘June 5, 1967 lines.’ I refer to the English text of the resolution. The French and Soviet texts differ from the English in this respect, but the English text was voted on by the Security Council, and thus it is determinative. In other words, there is lacking a declaration requiring Israel to withdraw from the (or all the) territories occupied by it on and after June 5, 1967.”

            This was not diplomatic sophistry [1]. The removal of that three-letter word from the final draft of the resolution – despite repeated attempts to insert it – was a diplomatic coup for Israel, and an especially impressive one given that the co-drafters, the UK Foreign Secretary George Brown and his UN Ambassador Lord Caradon, had hardly figured among Israel’s strongest supporters in the past. 

Resolution 242 was eventually passed on 22 November 1967. Israel immediately accepted the resolution while the Arab League rejected it outright, reiterating their knee-jerk rebuff to Israeli peace overtures in August 1967 at Khartoum known as the Three Nos: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. (To be fair, Egypt and Jordan grudgingly agreed to “consult” with the UN about its implementation but their insistence on reading it as if the definite article were included – as well as their demand for the return of hundreds of thousands of Arab refugees to Israel – ensured that the consultation would go nowhere as the resolution they “accepted” was a fictitious one). 

Thereafter, a deadlock ensued that has lasted decades. Israel’s insistence on retaining at least a sliver of territory to act as a buffer against potential further armed aggression from her neighbours proved amply justified. As former Israeli Labour politician Einat Wilf [2] has written: “The humiliating defeat of five Arab armies in 1967, and the loss of the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula in a short span of six days, did nothing to change the basic Arab mythology of the temporary nature of Israel. While the western world was establishing the formula of ‘land for peace’, the Arab world clarified its rejection of it.”

The two key achievements of the Six Day War, from Israel’s perspective, were  formidable: first, the Jewish state had survived another onslaught from multiple Arab armies whose declared goal was her annihilation, and second, the post-war prioritisation of her security concerns – in particular her protestation that the 1949 armistice lines were indefensible – was formally acknowledged by an otherwise indifferent (or hostile) international community. A full, unconditional and immediate withdrawal of Israel troops from Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, as demanded by all of her adversaries, was off the table for the time being. Israelis had some breathing space, and it was Israel’s erstwhile nemesis, the British government, that had played a major role in granting it to them via the Security Council. 

Let’s dispose of the myth that, regardless of resolution 242, Israel had a legal and moral obligation to return all of the captured territory. As every educated teenager knows, there is nothing unusual in territory acquired in a defensive war being ceded by the vanquished to the victors – the Second World War saw precisely that geo-political process unfold on a large scale after 1945 [3]. Israel, as so often, was subjected to different standards. Again and again, the Arab League thundered its demand that Israel relinquish every centimetre of occupied territory as a precondition for negotiation, and the international community, fearful of the economic power wielded by the Arab oil cartel OPEC, cravenly capitulated.

All who lived through the latter decades of the twentieth century will recall how frequently Israel was accused of “intransigence.” The historical record proves the baselessness of that charge. Despite the fact that Israel had won a war of survival against her far more powerful neighbours, and despite the diplomatic cover afforded by resolution 242, successive Israeli governments have proved astonishingly magnanimous in victory, to a degree unprecedented in the annals of warfare. 

When Anwar Sadat broke ranks with his rejectionist Arab allies, Israel returned to Egypt the entire Sinai peninsula, at a stroke relinquishing 90 percent of all the territory she had occupied in the 1967 war; the ensuing “cold peace” was a consequence of the Egyptian refusal to implement all the clauses of normalisation they had agreed with the Israelis. 

Nevertheless, further Israeli withdrawals followed, from the northern West Bank and all of Gaza – the former as part of the peace treaty with Jordan in 1994, and the latter in a courageous but failed experiment in 2005 to enable the residents of Gaza to rule themselves without threatening their Israeli neighbours. These high-risk redeployments of the IDF involved the evacuation of thousands of Jewish settlers, often in the face of hostile Israeli public opinion, giving the lie to the claim that Israeli settlements are an intractable obstacle to peace. 

Israel offered further withdrawals to the Syrians (who rejected them all) and, above all, to the Palestinians. A territorial compromise with Syria has become a remote prospect given the way that country’s totalitarian leaders have reduced their country to a blood-soaked disaster zone. The offer to the Palestinians remains on the table – yet Palestinian leaders, despite their commitment under the Oslo Accords of 1993-95 to negotiate a final peace agreement, have rejected it five times since the turn of the millennium alone (in 2000, 2001, 2008, 2014, 2016 and 2020). These failed initiatives were variations on the same theme in which Israel would allocate up to an eye-watering 96% of the West Bank to Palestinian sovereignty, along with land swaps for the remainder.

            The outcome of the Six Day War cannot be deemed responsible for the absence of peace. On the contrary, Israel’s extraordinary largesse would have been impossible in the absence of the 1967 victory and the strengthened bargaining position that the captured territories handed Israeli negotiators. But a bargain can only be struck if both sides are willing to compromise. Israel was always willing to place her security at risk by trading “land for peace” and Egypt and Jordan belatedly accepted (and benefited) from that formula. Arafat and Abbas, for reasons best known to themselves, repeatedly declined it. 

            It was the Arab League’s infamous Three Nos – not Israel’s triumph – that crushed the hopes for peace raised by the Six Say War. To this triple negative, the Palestinian leadership added a fourth, one that has underpinned all Arab rejectionism for a century – no acceptance of Jewish sovereignty behind any borders. It reflects the stance of Palestinian leader Amin Husseini in the 1920s and it remains the watchword of the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas in the 2020s. 

            Words matter. If a three-letter word saved Israel in 1967, the Arab leaders’ devotion to a two-letter word has betrayed their own people for over a century. That’s all anyone trying to make sense of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and all the pain it has caused, needs to know: no more, no less. Just “no.” 

 

1. Lövy A. Resolution 242 doesn't mean what people think it means – opinion. Jerusalem Post, 23 November 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/resolution-242-doesnt-mean-what-people-think-it-means-opinion-686795

2. Wilf E. Fathom 2017. As long as the Arab world views Israel as a temporary aberration to be conquered, Israel will stand fast. 

https://fathomjournal.org/1967-as-long-as-the-arab-world-views-israel-as-a-temporary-aberration-to-be-conquered-israel-will-stand-fast/

3. Europe after World War 2 (1949). Diercke International Atlas. 

https://www.diercke.com/content/europe-after-world-war-two-1949-978-3-14-100790-9-36-4-0

 Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 27

 

Israel’s victory in 1967 averted a near-certain second Jewish genocide in the twentieth century

 

Older readers may recall how popular Israel was in the West in the early years of the state when it looked as though she would be swept away in a tsunami of Arab hostility – the Israeli David confronting the Arab Goliath. Since June 1967, the roles have reversed; the Palestinians are now the hapless David defiantly facing Israel, the overbearing Goliath. 

    It has become fashionable to decry the Six Day War as a disaster for Israel, the root cause of all the country’s troubles since – including a seemingly endless occupation, a controversial settlement policy, and unremitting terrorism. But all of these political, military and moral headaches pale into insignificance next to the disaster that loomed on the eve of that war and that most Israelis believe would have materialised had it been lost. Perhaps if Israel had just resisted the urge to strike pre-emptively, the troublesome sequelae of the Six Day War might have been avoided and Israel would have been left in peace? Yes, a kind of peace probably would have ensued. The peace of the grave. A mass one. 

    So Sorry We Won is the ironic title of a book by late Israeli satirist Ephraim Kishon [1]. It expresses Israelis’ frustration with their fair-weather friends’ two-faced attitude – praising “plucky little Israel” for standing up to the vastly greater enemy forces that surrounded them and then, in the blink of an eye, branding the victorious country as the aggressor. Today, that irony has been all but lost in the minds of Israel’s critics – including a small but vocal minority of Israelis – who have come to regard that “cursed victory” as the cause of most of the problems the country has faced ever since [2]. 

    But what was the alternative – to lose the war? As in 1948, an Israeli defeat in 1967 would have risked a second Jewish genocide within a generation. Israelis are often reprimanded for expressing such fears – merely “Arab rhetoric” they’re told by Middle Eastern experts who are quick to accuse the Jewish state of overreacting by resorting to military responses prematurely. 

    Israeli fears of another Shoah were far from imaginary. The Arab-Nazi connection began with the mutual admiration of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Third Reich in the 1930s and was cemented by Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini’s wartime pact with Hitler [3]. According to German political scientist Mathias Kuntzel [4], “Arab leaders adopted the texts, images, and tactics of European antisemitism.” The cauldron of hate surrounding Zionism and Israel became Nazified. The unequivocal Arab intention in 1948 was to crush the Zionist enemy mercilessly, including “driving the Jews into the sea” – a euphemism for ethnic cleansing and massacre. Historian Benny Morris [5] has amply documented the evidence: when Arab forces had the (rare) opportunity either to take prisoners or to commit atrocities, they mostly opted for the latter.    

    That annihilationist impulse was freely expressed in the run-up to the Six Day War [6]. After the peremptory withdrawal of the UN Emergency Force, the Egyptian Voice of the Arabs radio station proclaimed on 18 May 1967: “We shall exercise patience no more. The sole method we shall apply against Israel is total war, which will result in the extermination of Zionist existence.” Syrian Defense Minister Assad rallied his troops on 20 May: “The time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation.”  On 26 May, President Nasser declared: “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.” Ahmad Shukeiri, Yasser Arafat’s predecessor as PLO chairman, announced on 1^st June: “We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors – if there are any – the boats are ready to deport them.”  In case that sounded too humane, he clarified the intention: “In the event of a conflagration, no Jews whatsoever will survive."      

    These bloodcurdling threats were accompanied by the mobilisation of Arab forces numbering almost half a million troops, more than 2,800 tanks, and 800 aircraft; Israel had only 50,000 troops (expanded to 100,000 by reservists), 300 aircraft and 800 tanks. When Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, cutting off the supply of oil to Israel from Iran, he provided an unequivocal casus belli. Israel launched a devastating pre-emptive strike and defeated all her enemies within a week thereby saving the country from calamity. Although mass graves had been prepared in Tel Aviv’s municipal parks, only 20 civilians were killed out of a population of 2.7 million. Israel’s military casualties, however, were high — 777 dead and 2,586 wounded. The Arab death toll was 15,000 Egyptians, 2,500 Syrians, and 800 Jordanians. 

    What about the allegation that Israel habitually overreacts? Between 1949 and 1967, more than 450 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks emanating from neighbouring countries – that alone would have legitimised the launching of a defensive war. But Israel strove hard (with rare exceptions such as the 1956 Sinai campaign) to maintain calm and display restraint in the face of outrageous provocation in the hope that the Arab world would eventually reconcile itself to the Jewish state’s existence. 

    Following the Six Day War, Israel’s declared policy was “everything is negotiable.” By the end of the war, Israel had more than tripled the size of the area she controlled, from 8,000 to 26,000 square miles. (More than 90% of that territory was the Sinai Peninsula, all of which was returned to Egypt, after the evacuation of 7,000 Israeli settlers, following the peace treaty in 1978). 

    By contrast, the Arab League repeated ad nauseam their diplomatic posture – no peace, no recognition, no negotiations. In November 1967, when the UN Security Council passed resolution 242 that called for a partial withdrawal of Israeli forces in exchange for secure and recognised borders, Israel accepted it without hesitation while the Arabs, with equal alacrity, repeated their Three Nos. They followed that up with their 1973 Yom Kippur war and rejected UNSC resolution 338 that re-iterated 242. 

    How did the international community respond to these events? Before June 1967, the world was sympathetic to the tiny state facing the possibility of destruction at the hands of an array of dangerous enemies who openly proclaimed their intention to commit mass murder. The Holocaust was fresh in humanity’s collective memory and the prospect of the Jewish people, whom the world had abandoned, undergoing another catastrophe weighed heavily on all people of conscience. But when Jews took up arms to defend themselves and prevailed – that was a different story. The empathy evaporated within days and eight years later the UN General Assembly branded Zionism a form of racism. 

    Why did this happen? The usual answer is that Israel won the Six Day War so decisively that the underdogs emerged as top dogs. Israel transformed herself  into a regional superpower lording over the Palestinians, the new underdogs. Simple as that. But is it?  

    Commentators who insist that the outcome of the Six Day War justifies the Palestinian complaint that Israel occupies Palestinian land need reminding of an inconvenient truth. The Palestine Liberation Organisation was founded three years before that conflict with the explicit aim of liberating Israel from the clutches of the evil Zionists. 

    The West Bank (as the Jordanians had renamed Judea and Samaria in 1950) was not, at that point, in Israeli but Arab hands. It had been envisioned as a Palestinian Arab state by the UN’s partition plan in 1947, an offer that had been violently rejected by the Arabs and accepted by the Jews. Jordan then invaded the territory in 1948, in a failed attempt to prevent Israel’s birth, and annexed it two years later. Yet no Arab leaders accused the Hashemite Kingdom of “illegally occupying Palestinian territory” – that charge would be exclusively reserved for Israel after she took control of it following renewed Jordanian aggression 1967. 

    Perhaps it was the establishment of settlements in the West Bank that soured international opinion towards Israel? That’s a plausible theory – except that the finger-wagging started within days of the 1967 victory and long before the first settlement had been thought of. Gelber [7] describes Israel’s precipitate decline in world opinion. A mere two weeks after the war, prime minister Eshkol called a crisis meeting in a futile attempt to halt it. 

    So if the Palestinian issue is a red herring, what really happened? 

    The answer may reside in the dark recesses of the collective global psyche. The Jews – those same homeless wanderers who had been kicked from pillar to post for centuries – had done something unforgiveable: they had revived their state, had defended it against more powerful aggressors and had won an overwhelming victory. That outcome hadn’t been in the script of the world’s morality play. As Dana Horn [8] puts it, people love dead Jews; the living ones they find more challenging. 

    The 1967 Six Day War indisputably left bitter-sweet legacy. But the overwhelming majority of Israelis (and Jews worldwide) at the time experienced a single, unambiguous emotion – relief. That sense of having escaped a terrible disaster was almost tangible. The teenage Jewish state had dodged a bullet. Or rather several million bullets. That should have been a cause for worldwide celebration. It wasn’t. 

    Let me pose three questions to those who view the Six Day War and its aftermath as an abject Israeli failure. Faced with potential politicide and genocide, what should Israel have done – surrendered and appealed to Arab leaders for mercy? Relinquished, immediately and unconditionally, all the territory she had acquired in self-defence, in the hope of receiving a loving embrace from her neighbours and supportive editorials from the New York Times? 

    Or did Israel do what any country would have done and defended her citizens from threatened annihilation, restricted the unfettered access of terrorists to her population centres, and sought to bolster her negotiating position in the event that her hitherto recalcitrant, murderous enemies would finally seek a negotiated peace?            

    No prizes for correct answers.

 

1. Kishon, E. So Sorry We Won. Maariv Library, 1968 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31850521-so-sorry-we-won

2. Bregman, A. Cursed Victory: A History of Israel and the Occupied Territories. London, Penguin Books, 2014

 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cursed-Victory-History-Occupied-Territories/dp/0713997753

3. Haykin A. Not Just The Mufti - the real extension of the Palestinian-Nazi collaboration.  https://adin1664.medium.com/not-just-the-mufti-the-real-extension-of-the-palestinian-nazi-collaboration-67e6340b6773

4. Kuntzel, M. 1967: Nasser’s antisemitic war against Israel. Fathom, Spring 1967

 https://fathomjournal.org/1967-nassers-antisemitic-war-against-israel/#_edn20

5. Morris B. 1948. A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2008

6. Comay N. Arabs Speak Freely. Wiltshire, Cromwell Press, 2005

7. Gelber Y. From underdog to occupier: Israel’s tarnished image. Israel Affairs Volume 27 Number 1 February 2021, pp7-26 

8. Horn D. People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. London, Norton & Co, 2021

Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 26

 

The struggle of the Jews to defend their homeland has become the longest war in history  

 

Tiglath-Pileser III – now there’s a name to conjure with. The Neo-Assyrian monarch bears the dubious distinction of embarking on the very first conquest of Israel in the 8^th century BCE i.e. some 2,800 years ago [1].

    By my reckoning, that invasion, and the mass deportations that followed in its wake, marked the start of the conflict between Israel and her neighbours, thereby making it by far the longest war in history. (Coming way behind in second place is the 781-year Iberian Religious War, or Reconquista, between the Catholic Spanish Empire and the Moors living in today’s Morocco and Algeria). 

    Here’s a list of the imperial forces that imposed their rule on the Jewish homeland: Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Seleucids, Romans, Byzantines, Sassanids, Arabs, Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Seljuks, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Ottomans and British. So that you don’t have to, I’ve counted them – 17. That’s a minimum figure as the Babylonians and Arabs each invaded at least twice and Napoleon had a brief ill-fated shot at it too. 

    For around the latter two millennia of homelessness, Jewish efforts to preserve and then regain sovereignty were ineffectual and disheartening. Religious Jews prayed fervently for the Messiah to no avail. Secular Jews focused on community building and integration into their host societies. All of these efforts floundered in the face of persecution, apathy and assimilation. Until the arrival on the scene of a dapper young journalist called Theodor Herzl in the late 19^th century. 

    Herzl electrified the Jewish world with his revolutionary proposal that the Jewish people return to Zion to establish a fully-fledged modern state. Not all Jews were ready for his radicalism but these refuseniks were largely silenced within a few decades by the growing virulence of antisemitism in Europe – the pogroms and massacres in the east and National Socialism in the west. Self-determination turned out to be the only answer to the existential question posed by the Holocaust. 

    Historians tend to view the British Mandate (1920-48) as the crucible within which the conflict between the Zionists and their neighbours was brewed. In their struggle to recreate their National Home, as promised by the League of Nations and enshrined in the British Mandate, the Jews found themselves waging a trilateral war against both the Arabs and the British. 

    The British decision, in January 1947, to relinquish the Mandate led to the UN partition resolution a few months later and to Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948. Jewish rejoicing was short-lived as their reborn state was confronted by a formidable array of Arab militias and armies bent on reversing the tide of history. Israel’s war of independence cost her dearly in human treasure that she could ill afford but the primary aim – survival – had been achieved. The Rhodes armistice agreement in 1949 was supposed to lead to peace. The Arab states, smarting from defeat at the hands of the ragtag Jewish forces, had other ideas and regarded the ceasefire deal as buying time as they prepared for the “second round.” 

    The 1956 Sinai Campaign (Operation Kadesh) – known as the Suez Crisis in the West, for whom it was a last-gasp projection of fading imperial power – was Israel’s response to escalating Egyptian aggression [2]. Indeed Israel was the only one of the three partner countries that had a legitimate claim to self-defence against attacks on its citizens; Britain and France were simply protecting a colonial-era asset, the Suez Canal. Israel’s actions were legally justified on three grounds – Nasser’s repeated declarations of his intent to destroy the Jewish state (with the help, hardly coincidentally, of former Nazi scientists and engineers), his support for cross-border terrorist attacks on Israel, and his closure of both the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Eilat to Israeli shipping. 

    The 1967 Six Day War was provoked by Nasser’s closing (again) the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and expelling the UN peacekeeping force from the Sinai. The Arab media were instantly filled with predictions of the impending destruction of the loathsome “Zionist entity” and the massacre of its Jewish inhabitants [2]. When Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against the Egyptian and Syrian air bases, Jordan’s King Hussein joined the fray despite Israel’s frantic pleas that he should desist. Many commentators identify that war as the crucial milestone in the conflict that entrenched the opposing parties in their current irreconcilable positions (a misleadingly simplistic analysis to which I will return in a future blog). 

   Following that spectacular victory, Israel’s euphoria soon morphed into a complacency that President Sadat exploited in launching the 1973 Yom Kippur war in which the Egyptians attempted to reclaim territory lost in 1967. In the days before the shooting started, the US warned Israel not to repeat a pre-emptive attack of the kind she had employed in 1967. Israel obliged, was nearly overrun by the enemy, and suffered horrendous casualties for her pains. 

    Probably the most controversial episode in Israel’s military history was the 1982 Peace for Galilee campaign that turned into the nightmarish First Lebanon War. The Israeli media dubbed it a “war of choice” though it followed years of Katyusha rocket attacks and gruesome terrorist atrocities perpetrated by the PLO. Again Israel prevailed and the PLO was expelled from Southern Lebanon. 

    Despairing of ever defeating Israel militarily, Arafat and his allies now focused their efforts almost exclusively on terrorism. The two “intifadas” of 1987-94 and 2000-2005 exacted a dreadful price on both sides and achieved nothing for the PLO but that didn’t deter the Iranian proxy militia Hezbollah from mounting renewed attacks on northern Israel in 2006 thereby triggering the Second Lebanon War. When that too failed, the Iranians gave the green light to Hamas, Gaza’s totalitarian rulers since 2007, to test Israel’s southern flank by launching intermittent waves of rocket attacks aimed indiscriminately at civilians over the subsequent 15 years. Whenever Israel responded, as any other country would do, she was yet again hypocritically condemned by the international community for protecting her citizens. 

    Just War Theory posits that there are circumstances in which war is acceptable and even necessary. From St Augustine in the fourth century to the UN Charter in the twentieth, theologians, philosophers and diplomats have sought to define the conditions under which war is justifiable. First and foremost of these is the principle of defending one’s country against an aggressor. Despite its long record of antipathy towards Israel, the UN [3] itself offers legitimacy for Israel’s military record. Here is article 51 of its charter: Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of collective or individual self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations. 

    The legal right of Israel to self-defence is beyond doubt. Israelis have always set the bar for war high for themselves while their critics, true to their discriminatory tradition, set it – for Israel alone – virtually beyond reach. Why does the world tolerate this double standard? An even more important question is too rarely asked: what motivates and sustains the enduring belligerence of Israel’s enemies? The answer is depressingly banal: their violent rejection of the Jewish right to self-determination. 

    This statement from the Friends of Israel Initiative [4] neatly summarises Israel’s predicament: 

“Unlike any other country in the world, Israel has not had to endure wars between periods of peace but has experienced periods of limited quiet during a long war against it with no end in sight...The conflict is neither rational nor logical: rather than benefit those who attack Israel, it works against their own interests as well as Israel’s. Israel’s enemies have never won an armed conflict against Israel and know that they cannot ever win such a conflict, yet they continue their aggression.”     

    Acknowledging reality, Egypt and Jordan memorably bucked that trend – and have recently been joined by a handful of others via the Abraham Accords – but this conciliatory approach has been more than offset by an Islamist Iran and its extremist proxies who ceaselessly strive to exploit weaknesses in Israel’s protective armour. Not wishing to be outflanked by these jihadist actors, even the “moderate” Palestinian leadership has resolutely eschewed genuine peace-making. 

    King Tiglath-Pileser III couldn’t have known what he was starting all those aeons ago, or that his attempt to liquidate the Jewish state would be emulated down the generations by other Middle Eastern leaders from Haj Amin al-Husseini, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hafez al-Assad and Yasser Arafat in the 20^th century to Mahmoud Abbas, Ismail Haniya, Hassan Nasrallah and Ali Khamenei in the 21st. 

    That’s why this problem seems insoluble, though in reality the solution is, and always has been, at hand. We patiently await the arrival of more Middle Eastern statesmen in the mould of President Sadat and King Hussein – starting with a Palestinian leader willing to reciprocate repeated Israeli offers to negotiate a just peace. Until that happens, the war against the Jews looks likely to enter its fourth millennium.

1. Gordis D. Israel. A Concise History of a Nation Reborn. New York, Harper Collins, 2016, p36.

2. Shapira A. Israel: A History. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2014.

3. United Nations Charter, Chapter VII Article 51. https://legal.un.org/repertory/art51.shtml

4. Friends of Israel Initiative 2017. Why The Allen Plan Is Detrimental to Israel’s Future Security.  http://www.friendsofisraelinitiative.org/contents/uploads/papers/pdf/Why%20the%20Allen%20Plan%20is%20Detrimental%20for%20Israel’s%20Future%20Security%204.0%20(2).pdf

 Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 25

 

Israel doesn’t exist because of the Holocaust – the Holocaust occurred because Israel didn’t exist

 

President Barack Obama [1], addressing an Egyptian audience, said this in 2009:  

“The aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and antisemitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.” 

        At first sight, that looks an uncontroversial statement. Yet Obama provoked widespread Jewish criticism because of its underlying implication (intended or not) that the world gifted Israel to the Jews as a guilt-offering for the Holocaust. Distinguished musician Daniel Barenboim went further, drawing a direct line between Nazism and the modern plight of the Palestinians: “Without the Holocaust there never would have been a partition of Palestine, there would have been no al-Nakba, 1967 war, and occupation.” [2] This echoes his friend, Edward Said, who asserted that the Palestinians were “the victims of the victims” [3] – a phrase that rolls nicely off the tongue but bears a tenuous link, at best, to reality. 

        Similar pronouncements have been made by many commentators and politicians including US Democratic congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. This line of thinking leads ultimately to the grotesque antisemitic conspiracy theory – most notoriously expressed by former London mayor Ken Livingstone – that the Zionist movement and the Nazis were (and remain) ideological bedfellows. 

        The allegedly causal connection between the European Jewish calamity and the creation of Israel is not merely false; in reality, according to Israeli scholar Eviatar Friesel [4], the Holocaust seriously damaged the prospects for Jewish statehood:

“There was a point of contact and influence between the Holocaust and the creation of the Jewish state. It was, however, exactly the reverse of what is commonly assumed: the destruction of European Jewry almost rendered the birth of Israel impossible…Zionism was essentially a product of European Jewry, especially East European Jewry. Ironically, that sector of the Jewish people was almost completely annihilated in the Holocaust.”

        There was, of course, a relationship between the Holocaust and Israel’s rebirth but conflating chronology with causality is misleading. Some sympathy for the Jewish plight may have been generated in diplomatic circles by the haunting images that emerged from the death camps at their liberation in 1945. But the sequence of events linking the Holocaust to Israel was the inverse of the narrative apparently favoured by Obama, Barenboim and Said. To understand it, we have to rewind history to the early years of the 20^th century. 

        The UN partition resolution of 1947 was the end-point of a torturous historical process initiated towards the end of the First World War when US President Wilson touted the principle of self-determination of all peoples, including the Jews. Every November, around the anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration that promised British support for a Jewish national home, antiZionists demand an apology from the UK government. That hasn’t been granted, and rightly so, but the highlighting of British culpability for an avoidable catastrophe is inadvertently appropriate since an apology is indeed merited – to the Jewish people. That Declaration, and its international endorsement, should have been the salvation of the Jews but wasn’t. As a result of Britain’s perfidy, trapped European Jewry had nowhere to find refuge from the Nazi predator. Countless innocent lives might have been saved had the doors of Mandatory Palestine remained open to Jewish immigration rather than slammed shut during those years of persecution and mass murder. (Unlike the Jews, to whom self-determination had been promised but not delivered, the Arabs were granted several sovereign states almost immediately following the Declaration starting with Churchill’s carving out of Transjordan from most of Mandatory Palestine). 

        This was the tragedy of the Palestine Mandate; its near-total repudiation, via a succession of British white papers in response to Arab violence, not only violated the expressed wishes of the League of Nations, but deprived millions of Jews of the opportunity to escape from the Third Reich’s killing fields. In The Revolt, Menachem Begin [5] asserted that Britain was complicit in the Holocaust by reneging on the Mandate: 

“An entire nation – six million men, women and children, sank into an abyss, in a planned campaign of annihilation which lasted five whole years, because the Germans decided to destroy it, and the British – and others – decided not to rescue it.”

        Former Israeli ambassador to the UK Mark Regev [6] supports Begin’s view:

“Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem from 1921, president of the Supreme Muslim Council from 1922 and president of the Arab Higher Committee from 1936, was the pivotal figure in the Palestinian national movement and his views were no secret…Husseini, along with fellow Arab Palestinian nationalists, conducted a successful campaign to pressure the British to keep the gates of Mandatory Palestine all but closed to European Jews fleeing the Nazis, and in so doing, sealed their fate… Husseini knew of the ‘Final Solution’ and supported the genocide.” 

        The trashing of the Mandate remains a troubling issue to this day. The acknowledgement of Zionism by the major powers after the Great War was, after all, a humanitarian response to antisemitism. But the failure to implement the Balfour Declaration, given its incorporation into international law via the San Remo conference and subsequent treaties, represents a profound moral failure on the part of the international community that inexplicably declined to enforce its own decisions or to call the recalcitrant Mandatory government to account. 

        The prime responsibility for the obscenity of the Final Solution lies with the German nation, who have sought to atone. Others too must shoulder a degree of blame but few have shown signs of doing so. No Arab leader has yet had the courage to admit the disastrous impact, on both Jews and Arabs, of Husseini’s collaboration with Hitler and his Nazification of Arab antiZionism. 

        As for the UK, what can one say? Even self-proclaimed “pro-Israel” British governments have remained silent on the UK’s shameful Mandate record and continue to support the institutionally antisemitic UNRWA as well as the Holocaust-denying, violence-inciting Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. As if that were an insufficient rubbing of salt in Jewish wounds, the UK works with the EU in seeking to revive the near-moribund nuclear deal that was designed to appease Islamo-fascist Iran. Is it any wonder that British Jews remain sceptical of public UK denunciations of antisemitism while government ministers indulge in recurrent, ritualistic and hypocritical condemnation of Israel in the UN? Constant references to “occupation of Palestinian land” and “illegal settlements,” invariably delivered in insufferably sanctimonious tones, cut no ice when far more egregious examples of such policies are pursued by Russia, China, Turkey, India and Morocco. Only tiny, democratic Israel, that for decades has striven to achieve equitable peace treaties with her neighbours, including the Palestinians, is singled out for opprobrium. With friends like these…

        Then there is the contemporary international community. The modern heirs of Hitler are aided and abetted by their apologists in the Arab League, the Islamic Conference, the UN, prominent NGOs, and an army of academics, journalists and politicians. All are determined to pursue their hate-filled war against the Jewish people, hiding behind a transparent facade of “criticism of Israel.” They would, if granted their wish, reduce Jews once more to a position of impotent vulnerability to the annihilationist aspirations of their enemies. 

        There can be no equivocation on this point and no room for post-modernist relativism – either you are opposed to genocide and in favour of peaceful coexistence or you are not. Which side are you on? That’s the question that today’s architects of “even-handed” policy-making in the UK Foreign Office, the US State Department, the EU and the UN must answer satisfactorily. 

        Anything less would be an act of global moral cowardice comparable to the Mandate-era betrayal of the Jewish people who suffered an agonising and avoidable fate as a result of the UK’s shredding of Arthur Balfour’s well-intentioned but ultimately empty promise. 

 

1. Text of Barack Obama speech 2009 

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html

2. Barenboim D. Germany Is Repaying Its post-Holocaust Debts to Israel - but not to the Palestinians. Haaretz 8 June 2017

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/germany-not-repaying-post-holocaust-debts-to-palestinians-1.5481259

3. Said, E. “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims. Social Text no 1, Duke University Press, 1979 

https://doi.org/10.2307/466405

4. Friesel E. The Holocaust: Factor in the Birth of Israel? Shoah Resource Centre, The International School for Holocaust Studies [undated]. 

https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203575.pdf

5. Begin M. The revolt. New York, Tolmitch E-books (electronic copyright 2013), 1952 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolt-Menachem-Begin-ebook/dp/B00HXJ5N9E/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&coliid=I3SW5ZALUNF4IZ&colid=37RDG3Y7SJOR5&qid=&sr=

6. Regev M. Jerusalem Post, 11 November 2021. The Palestinians must acknowledge their role in the Holocaust.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-palestinians-must-acknowledge-their-role-in-the-holocaust-opinion-684753